Month: October 2017

Trump really, really wants a war.  Bibi and the Saudis will egg him on in their own interest.  Mattis will enable it, because he hates the Iranians.  Congress won’t stop it, and the base will accept it as long as we fight to “win.” So it’s inevitable.

But what will it look like?  Here are some critical questions and answers:

1.  When will it start?  Mattis will put it off until we’re finished with North Korea.  Reasonably enough, he won’t want to deal with two crises at once.

2.  How will it start?  I predicted months ago that it would be a naval incident.  I still think that is the most likely precipitant, but there are other possibilities: some sort of armed clash in Syria;  a ballistic missile test; something involving Hezbollah and Israel.

3.  Will we have any support from our allies?  Only from Israel and the Sunni despots.  Otherwise, we will be completely isolated.

4.  Will it involve a ground invasion?  No.  That would be too hard, bloody, and expensive.  Trump’s idea of a war is a bomb, a parade, and a statue, not what happened in Iraq.

5.  What will our war aims be?  Initially, this will probably be an Israeli-style exercise in “cutting the grass.”  The key, unanswered question is whether it can be limited to that.  It will depend largely on the Iranians.

6.  Could nuclear weapons be used?  In the immortal words of Sarah Palin, you betcha!  Trump would love the idea of being the first leader in history to annihilate an entire country using nukes.  It would prove that he was the biggest and baddest man of all time!  Believe me.  Believe me.

Imagine, if you can, that you work for Donald Trump.  Your boss, above all, wants to be popular, and to be seen as “the man.”  He has a bad temper and a thin skin. He doesn’t have fixed ideological views on most subjects, but he does have personal biases, and he thinks it is essential to maintain good relations with his base.  He hates being told that he can’t do anything he really wants to do.  Having complained about essentially everything that Obama did in office, he is determined to obliterate his legacy.  Finally, he values loyalty over competence, but for him, loyalty is purely a one-way street; if anything goes wrong, he will throw you under the bus.

The problem is that most of what he wants to accomplish is clearly harmful to his party and to the American people.  How do you make him happy without leading the country to destruction?

The answer clearly is, encourage him to take half-measures and leave the rest to Congress.  By doing that, he appears to keep faith with his base, while leaving open the possibility that Congress can fix the problem he is creating, maintaining plausible deniability for any resulting damage, and opening GOP congressional leaders to criticism if they don’t clean up the mess.  And so, we have the DACA decision, the sort-of decertification of the Iran deal, and his efforts to compel action on Obamacare repeal by damaging the insurance market.

Given the differences of opinion among the GOP factions, it is far from clear that Congress is in a position to address the issues that Trump is creating.  If you’re a sane and moderate GOP congressman, that should terrify you, because Trump is likely to blame you and the other swamp creatures for everything that goes wrong between now and the 2018 election, and his supporters will probably agree with him.

 

You would think that the thrice-married casino owner from Manhattan would be an unlikely champion of traditional values, but this is 2017, and things are different now.  The latest attack is on the availability of birth control, and is clearly consistent with the Reactionary position that birth control is evil because it removes an essential sanction from immoral sexual behavior. In other words, avoiding the social ills associated with unwanted pregnancies has a much lower value than preventing extramarital sex.

This from a man whose affairs were described in hot and heavy detail in the New York tabloids.  If there is a silver lining, it is that the apparently absurd association between Trump and right-wing culture war positions is likely to erode public support for both over time.

Trump’s threats to NBC’s “license” displayed three of his worst traits:  his thin skin; his contempt for constitutional norms; and his ignorance of the fact that the FCC doesn’t license networks.  That’s about par for the course, I guess.

It is generally assumed at this point that Trump will remain all bark and no bite with the media.  That’s not necessarily true.  Wait until you see his reaction to a war or a big terrorist attack before you reach that conclusion.

And the “winner” is . . . incompetence, because it encompasses several of the other traits.  I agree, and would add that it is the one that is most likely to get us blown up.

Prior to Ronald Reagan, the GOP was a relatively moderate pro-business party that genuinely hated deficits and was suspicious of foreign adventures.  Reagan gave the party swagger, both at home and abroad, and Republican voters loved it.  The GOP has never been the same since.

Trump doesn’t necessarily believe in much of what passes for standard GOP ideology, but he provides swagger in spades.  As a result, he can change his positions on a dime without losing his voters as long as he continues to express himself forcefully and thus look like a strong leader.

Trumpian swagger would never play with the blue base.  Is there a Democratic equivalent of swagger?

That’s a difficult question.  If you accept the notion that the Democrats are the “mommy” party, which they largely are, you would want someone who is somehow ostentatiously nurturing.  That wouldn’t work with swing voters concerned about national security.

I think the best answer is that the Democrats need someone who is charismatic and uplifting in the manner of Obama and Kennedy.  The problem, for them, is that these qualities are a lot harder to find than swagger.

If there is one lesson to be learned from the 20th century, it is that a completely ruthless and clear-eyed minority is capable of winning and exploiting absolute power within a given country.  If you don’t believe me, go ask Lenin and Mao.

In a way, that is what Steve Bannon is hoping to accomplish within the GOP.  He has to know that his Reactionary faction doesn’t represent a majority of voters within the GOP, let alone the entire country.  On its face, his efforts to promote Reactionary challengers to GOP establishment figures will just weaken the party and help the Democrats.  His gamble, however, is that if his candidates win the primaries, the PBPs will fall in line and vote for them, no matter how outrageous they are, out of blind loyalty, force of habit, or the fear that any Democrat just has to be worse.  If he’s right, his faction, however small, could gain absolute power in Washington.

He’s probably wrong, but who knows?  Millions of Republican voters with grave doubts about Trump made him president.  We’ll know more after the election in Alabama.

 

You can just imagine how much CTE your brain requires to make a statement like that.  Either that, or Ta-Nehisi Coates is right, and I’m wrong.

I’m pretty sure it’s the CTE.

Initially, Trump tried to have it both ways;  he announced a phase-out of DACA, expressed sympathy for the Dreamers, and threw the hot potato to Congress. That didn’t play well with his base, which is, above all, rabidly anti-immigrant, so he is now demanding huge concessions from the Democrats in exchange for the continuation of the program.  One assumes that he thinks this is a win-win for him;  the base will be happy, and the Democrats will either cave or lose support from Hispanics in future elections.

It won’t work that way.  On principle, the Democrats aren’t going to fund the wall, the base will only be partly mollified, and Hispanic voters are going to blame the guy who took the hostages, not the hostages themselves.  It will be just another example of how the negotiating strategies laid out in “The Art of the Deal” don’t really work in the political realm.

Mexico

Way down here, we’ve plenty of reasons to leave.

Need a job?  Lots of them waiting up north.

Too much crime?  Gang members hanging around at your door.

 

Oh, Mexico

It sounds so simple, I just got to go.

The sun’s so hot, I just have to move on.

Guess I’ll have to go now.

 

Stuck in the desert, and my money’s all gone.

Trusted those smugglers, but they were just liars.

No water to drink, and my brain feels like it’s on fire.

 

Oh, Mexico

I’ve never been away, so I don’t really know.

Oh, Mexico

Why did I have to go?

 

Parody of “Mexico” by James Taylor.

Everything Corker said about Trump was true, of course, but you have to wonder what he was trying to accomplish by saying it.  Was he trying to burnish his legacy, attempting to get Trump to change course, or just blowing off steam?  I would bet on the last, but I can’t say for sure.

Does Trump imagine that the entire establishment wing (i.e., the PBPs and the CDs) of the GOP feels this way about him?  If he does, that will probably make him and his Reactionary supporters even more combative and paranoid than they have been to date, which is saying a lot.

Ross Douthat, like the good Christian Democrat that he is, believes that character in politicians matters.  Is he right?  I would say yes, but not necessarily for exactly his reasons:

1.  It is common for moralistic commentators to view “character” as a single, unified whole, but real people don’t necessarily work that way.  For example, there are plenty of examples of solid, reliable politicians with questionable sexual ethics.
2.  “Character,” for a politician, is a perception based on the standards of the day.  No one expected Louis XIV or Charles II to be faithful to their wives, and they weren’t.  That doesn’t mean they weren’t effective kings.
3.  That said, in a democratic state, the voters are choosing someone to represent their values as well as their interests.  Having Donald Trump as the symbol of your country is an embarrassment to the United States, which definitely has an impact on his effectiveness both at home and abroad.
4.  I can’t help pointing out that Barack Obama’s family life was absolutely spotless, and there were no significant scandals during his administration, but did he ever get any credit for that from right-wing moralizers?  Nooooooo!  Most of them prefer Trump.

 

Trump and Nixon are, of course, the most corrupt and divisive presidents in anyone’s memory.  But how do they stack up against each other?  Here they are:

                                  Nixon            v.          Trump

Party                          GOP                            GOP

Media Enemy          Dan Rather                Katy Tur

Asian Issue               Vietnam                     North Korea

Russia Gambit          Detente                      Election

Building/Corruption    Watergate             Trump Hotel

I Am Not A. . .                  Crook                    Moron

And the winner is . . . Nixon.  Take the crook over the moron any time.

As I’ve noted before, Trump will go to war with North Korea if he thinks events make it necessary, but he really wants to go to war with Iran.  Why this is, I’m not sure.  Maybe, like many of us, he still has memories of the humiliation in 1979.   Maybe Bibi and the Saudis persuaded him to drink the Kool-Aid.  Maybe it’s something else.  In any event, he’s itching for a fight.

Ripping up the nuclear agreement is a self-evidently stupid idea that is even opposed by most of his administration; no further discussion of that is necessary.  But what is Trump’s overall case against Iran?  Here it is:

1.  Iran promotes international terrorism.  There was a time, not that long ago, when this was clearly true.  I haven’t seen any evidence of it in years, however. Like Saudi Arabia, Iran aggressively pursues its interests internationally (including subsidizing militias in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon), but I wouldn’t call that terrorism, and it certainly didn’t support IS.

2.  The Iranian state represses its people.  Coming from the man who loves Sunni despots, this one is pretty rich.

3.  Iran supports the Houthis in Yemen.  So what?  How does that impact American interests, and why are the Houthis any worse than the Yemeni government?

4.  Iran supports the Assad government.  That’s a better argument, but not from someone who clearly prioritized defeating IS and sucking up to Putin over regime change in Syria.

5.  Iran, by itself and through its proxy Hezbollah, is a threat to Israel.  Now we’re getting somewhere!  Netanyahu had a chance to destroy Hezbollah while it was fighting on another front, but now it’s stronger than ever, and a genuine existential danger to Israel.  The real question for an American president, however, is what that means for US interests.  If you regard Israel as tantamount to a 51st state of the United States, the implications are obvious.  If you don’t, and legally it isn’t, the situation is much more ambiguous; in cases in which American interests are not directly involved, the Israelis can be left to fend for themselves, and this is probably one of them.

 

Marxists love to talk about “contradictions.”  Ironically, the Chinese political and economic system is full of them, including the following:

1.  Marxism is a universal political theory, born in Europe, which holds that the state will ultimately wither away and that inequality will disappear.  The Chinese system is ostensibly Marxist, but in reality, the Chinese government believes firmly in Chinese exceptionalism, loathes western political thought, promotes economic inequality, and has absolutely no interest in withering away.
2.  “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” is actually capitalism in which the state picks and heavily supports winners through protectionist regulation, subsidies, and the unequal application of the law.
3.  The Chinese government believes in economic growth above all other values except political stability, which means that it can’t support essential characteristics of a typical capitalist economy such as transparency, a free press, and the rule of law.

None of this matters much as long as the country prospers.  The government has been able to avoid economic crises with a mixture of mild repression and cheap credit.  That won’t work forever, however, and when the crisis comes, the contradictions will be laid bare for all to see.