The woman named Betsy DeVos.
She’s got billions, but Trump’s now her boss.
Her penchant for gaffes
Always good for a laugh.
She was born soaking in stupid sauce.
The human gaffe machine strikes again! And just think: it was counted a “victory” when her nomination was jammed through the Senate. It’s right up there with “winning at trade.”
In his developer days, Trump used to leak details of his personal and business dealings to the press using personas such as “John Barron” and “John Miller.” As a candidate for President, he profited mightily from disclosures from WikiLeaks. As President, however, he is outraged by leaks within his administration, and he is determined to stamp them out. Will he succeed?
Leaks are inevitable when: (a) you run as a chaos candidate, but have no idea how to bring about change; (b) you don’t fill the positions within your government; (c) your administration is ideologically incoherent; and (d) no one knows who is in charge on a day-to-day basis. And so, the leaks are likely to continue regardless of his efforts to stamp them out unless or until (probably the latter) the new administration develops a sense of direction.
There is no doubt about it: the movie of which “La La Land” reminds me the most is “An American in Paris.” I’m sure the concept behind the film was to find an undiscovered niche by creating an unfashionably retro vision of American life–think of a Beach Boys records made in 2016. The result of the election, however, put the movie in a completely new, and more compelling, context.
Everything about “La La Land” is a counterpoint to Trump’s “American carnage” speech. Set in a carefully edited and timeless version of the bluest of blue states (no crime or skyscrapers allowed), the movie practically screams that the American dream is, if difficult to attain, most definitely alive and well. It is bright, sunny, and soulful–not the ash heap of Trump’s fevered imagination.
Ironies in this exist at several levels. Hollywood movies are made by “rootless cosmopolitans,” but they are loved no less by red Americans. There is no red American Hollywood any more than there is a red American Broadway. Intellectual property is one of our greatest exports, so protecting it has for years been one of the principal objectives of our trade negotiators; the Trump Administration, regardless of its opinions of Hollywood, will be driven to do the same if it really wants to “win at trade”. And what is one of our other principal exports? Agricultural products from red America. It all fits together; red and blue culture have common elements, and both sides lose from a trade war.
OSCARS SO CHAOTIC! THANK GOD I DON’T RUN MY GOVERNMENT THAT WAY!
I’ve got those dirty, lowdown, West Bank blues.
You have to be aware of it; it’s all over the news.
Sometimes you think you’re winning, but it turns out that you lose.
The Trumpster’s made an offer I don’t think I can refuse.
Obama’s crowd is dead to me; I’m glad to see them go.
But the right is jumping on my back to annex land, you know.
I made my name by balancing–by lurching to and fro.
Jerusalem’s a powder keg; it won’t take much to blow.
I’ve got the blues.
The annexation blues.
I used to blame Obama
Now I don’t have an excuse.
It seems that things are going well.
The future’s very bright.
But it only takes a single spark
And we’ll all say good night.
The EPA head named Scott Pruitt.
In picking him, Trump really blew it.
He’ll turn the air black.
And clean water we’ll lack.
The left will then claim that they knew it.
While, as noted in a previous post, Israel resembles South Africa in several respects, it also shares similarities with a more familiar country: the US. We, too, are a nation of settlers who overwhelmed the indigenous population. The essential differences between the US and the other two countries are demographics (unlike Israel and South Africa, the indigenous population was too small to resist the settlers in the long run) and timing (international norms regarding ethnic cleansing didn’t exist in the 18th and 19th centuries).
The evolving Israeli vision for the Palestinians looks a lot like a South African homeland under apartheid, but it looks like a reservation, too. And if that analogy makes people feel uncomfortable, well, if the shoe fits . . .
CROOKED MEDIA SELL FAKE NEWS AND ARE ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE. FORTUNATELY, I’M WAY TOO PRESIDENTIAL TO LET THEM GET UNDER MY SKIN!
The head diplomat known as Rex.
The national muscles he’ll flex.
He’ll clean up the mess
But with just mixed success
Who knows what the Don will do next?
And so the clean-up crew has arrived south of the border. The job was onerous enough in Europe, but imagine trying to persuade the Mexican public that Trump’s statements over the last two years about illegal immigrants and the wall should be taken seriously, but not literally, when all of the recent evidence is to the contrary.
I wasn’t kidding when I said he had the worst job in America.
The case for a “Christian” Declaration of Independence revolves around the reference to a “Creator” who is the source of our natural rights. Without the “Creator,” it wouldn’t make sense to identify a natural condition as a “right.” And so, as the story goes, the drafters of the Declaration must have been Christians.
Well, not really. The use of the term”Creator” rather than just “God” is important here. It would have been the most obvious thing in the world to say “God” rather than “Creator,” so the choice of wording was intended to be meaningful.
“Creator” is completely consistent with Deism, and there is plenty of collateral evidence to show that many of the Founding Fathers were, in fact, Deists, not orthodox Christians. It is, therefore, a clear mistake to attribute an orthodox Christian slant to the Declaration.
Paul Krugman once made the observation that Democrats were ambivalent about immigration, but Republicans were schizophrenic; the reactionary base hated it, but the business community depended on it and supported it. He was right.
So, consider the position of the American farmer on the Trump Administration. On the one hand, he looks forward to less regulation, fewer taxes, and protection for Christians; on the other, he would be the big loser in any trade war, and Trump’s crusade against illegal immigrants may well deprive him of his workforce.
Trump won the agricultural states, which of course suggests that his views on trade and immigration were taken “seriously but not literally” by farmers. What will they do now that he is actually turning his views into policy? It will be very interesting to watch.
As the story goes, someone asked Hamilton why the Constitution didn’t include any references to God. Hamilton, apparently doing his best Bob Newhart impression, responded “We forgot.”
They didn’t, of course. The 1787 iteration of the Constitution was a document intended to define and allocate power, not a philosophical statement. And, notwithstanding what the current crop of “constitutional conservatives” say, it was an effort to enhance federal power relative to the Articles of Confederation; if the Founding Fathers’ primary concern had been to limit federal power, the Articles already did that quite nicely.
The religious right typically makes the argument for a “Christian” version of the Constitution based on language in the Declaration of Independence. That is an erroneous interpretation, for reasons I will discuss tomorrow. For present purposes, the point that needs to be made is that, even if you accept the religious right’s view of the Declaration, it is legally inappropriate to use the Declaration to interpret the Constitution, for the following reasons:
1. The two documents were written by different people. For example, Hamilton and Washington were in the Continental Army at the time of the Declaration, while Jefferson was in France during the Constitutional Convention.
2. The two documents were written for different purposes. The Declaration was a piece of wartime propaganda that was intended to justify the Revolution, while the Constitution obviously sets up a completely new system of government.
3. The two documents were were written at different times. The Constitution was written after the war and the experience with the Articles, which undoubtedly had an impact on the mindset of the delegates.
4. The Constitution was ratified; the Declaration was not. As a result, the opinions of plenty of people outside of the Convention itself are relevant in interpreting the Constitution.
The bottom line is that it was appropriate for Lincoln to make the broad, philosophical argument that the Constitution was a first and imperfect step in the realization of the ideals inherent in the Declaration, but from a purely legal perspective, using the Declaration to interpret the Constitution is a mistake. The Constitution is in no way a “Christian” document; it owes more to Plato and Aristotle than to St. Paul.
Michael Gerson had a column in yesterday’s WaPo which was a full-throated defense of the use of American military might to extend and protect American political values. He argued in the column that Obama was more motivated by “realism” than his predecessor, and that Trump is simply taking this approach to a new level.
There is some truth to this. Obama always made his preference for the foreign policy of Bush 41 over Bush 43 very clear. He supported the traditional concepts of the Pax Americana, but he wanted to do it on the cheap, and he put more of an emphasis on the avoidance of stupid stuff than on putting out fires in order to avoid squandering American resources. Whether this was a good idea in the long run will be for historians to judge.
Trump shares some of Obama’s skepticism about large-scale military entanglements, nation-building, and the value of some of our Sunni “allies” in the Middle East. His neo-mercantilist “realism,” on the other hand, is unique to him, and is in no way an extension of Obama’s foreign policy ideas.
I have espoused an approach to foreign policy that is based more on interests than values, but Trumpian “realism” is a bridge too far. Here is what I would say about it:
If you’re ever tempted to think of the Founding Fathers as plaster saints rather than practical politicians living in the moment, just contemplate the meaning of the 3/5 Compromise. Leaving aside the inhumanity of it for a moment, what possible sense can you make out of calling a slave 3/5 of a person? You can see an argument for 1/2, but 3/5?
It reminds me of the insurance commercial in which the narrator says, “Whaddya supposed to do–drive three quarters of a car?”