Month: October 2019

Impeachment may present a greater problem for Susan Collins than for Trump, because it leaves her with two lousy options. If she ultimately votes to convict, the Trumpist right in Maine will be outraged, and she needs every vote she can get in 2020; on the other hand, if she votes to acquit, she will lose swing voters that she also needs, and she will be sending the message for all time that selling foreign policy for private gain is OK. It’s an unappealing menu, to say the least.

So what does she do? Trump will probably survive with or without her support, and the Trumpist right has nowhere else to go. If I were in her position, I would view a vote for conviction as the better option. Of course, she could try to find middle ground by acquitting, but supporting some sort of censure motion, but that is unlikely to satisfy anyone.

Thomas Friedman is right; the heroes of the Ukraine investigation are the civil servants who had the guts to risk their jobs and tell the truth, not the Democrats. Trump, of course, thinks these people are part of the “deep state.” Is he right?

Of course not. The witnesses against him are complying with the law and ordinary ethical principles attached to liberal democratic government. A “deep state” operates lawlessly in the dark purely at the whim of authoritarian politicians in power. It is the antithesis of the bureaucratic opposition to Trump.

Trump was undoubtedly hoping that the MSM would fall for his favorite false equivalence trick, and that Biden would be damaged by the Ukraine story just as much as he was. It isn’t working, because this isn’t 2016, and the MSM have learned to push back vigorously against his lies. They are making it clear, every time the story comes up, that there is no evidence that the Bidens did anything illegal. The consequences are plain to see.

It is unpleasant and unprecedented for reporters to have to call our president a liar over and over again, but what else can they do, if they want to avoid becoming mouthpieces for the lies? No wonder the Trump campaign is pouring so much money into Facebook, which won’t do the same thing.

It’s November, 2020. It’s a beautiful day. The sun is out, and the sky is blue. American unemployment is below 4 percent, and the country is more or less at peace. The markets are doing pretty well. Life seems good.

But Elizabeth Warren says America has turned into a hellhole, and that drastic change is needed, immediately. It’s an emergency. We have to do something now.

Can she persuade the public that the apparent idyll is an illusion? If she wants to win, she will have to.

So Trump won’t use American troops to protect the Kurds, but he has no problem keeping a few in Syria to protect the oil. Need I say more?

Many Democrats are worried that an unsuccessful attempt to impeach will result in an electoral disaster in 2020. I don’t think that will happen, for the following reasons:

1. Trump is guiltier than Clinton was;
2. You can make a much better case that his actions are “high crimes and misdemeanors;”
3. The country is even more polarized now than it was then; and
4. 1998 was a midterm election. Overreaching by the GOP helped to drive up Democratic turnout. 2020 is a presidential election, so the bases will already be mobilized, and turnout should not be an issue either way.

(Donald Trump is alone in the Oval Office when he hears an infinitely deep and powerful voice.)

G: DONALD TRUMP!

T: Tucker, is that you?

G: Of course not. Fox News works for me. It’s one of my mysterious ways. I am God.

T: No, you’re not. There is no power greater than I am. Just ask my base.

G: You’re about to find out otherwise.

T: Why? I support your people. I make sure they get religious freedom and conservative judges. They call me King David, or Cyrus, or something.

G: In some ways, they’re worse than you are. They should know better.

T: So what do you want?

G: You’re going to be afflicted by the Democrats. They’re going to impeach you. And they’re led by a woman! How’s that for justice!

T: So what? I’ve learned from the WWE that every story needs a good villain. They’re just giving me a foil to run against. Biden isn’t very inspiring, and I’ve kind of worn out the Pocahontas thing.

G: Not even your base can protect you from me.

T: So what exactly do you have in mind? How does it end, assuming you know?

G: I haven’t decided yet. Either you get removed from power, or you stay in office and destroy America. I could go either way.

T: What do you have against America?

G: They elected you, didn’t they?

T: Well, it’s been fun, but I have to go. It’s time for Fox & Friends.

(God sighs and leaves)

It’s not very inspiring or heartwarming, but you can make a fairly strong realpolitik case in favor of selling out the Kurds in favor of the Turks. We have few direct national interests in Syria; after all, we lived with the Assads without complaint for decades. Leaving a handful of troops as a tripwire was not sustainable in the long run, and would not have given us meaningful leverage in any future Syrian political settlement. Turkey is an extremely important NATO ally and a natural enemy of Russia. We’ve sold out the Kurds before; they had to know it was coming at some point. And so on.

But you would never do it like this! You would exact the highest possible price from Erdogan in exchange for withdrawing. You would get some security guarantees for the Kurds before you made the deal. You would make sure the withdrawal was accomplished in a safe and systematic way. You would insist that the Turks stop playing footsie with the Russians. You might even demand that Erdogan restore some measure of real democracy in Turkey. And once the deal was done, you would stick with it and avoid offending the Turks. In the event, none of that has happened.

Trump has succeeded in making us look ridiculous and completely unreliable. The big winner, as usual, is Putin; he may not have many resources at his disposal, but he keeps his promises to his friends.

The sad truth is that Donald Trump would be nothing without his mass of like-minded followers. Thanks to the 2016 primary and general elections, and the current polls, we know that about 30 percent of the American electorate consists of reactionaries who are far more wedded to their values than to our political system. If they are ever forced to make a clear choice between the two, things could get really ugly in this country, really fast.

What can be done about this? There are essentially three ways to address the problem:

1. TRY TO CRUSH THE REACTIONARIES: America clearly needs to be more woke! The obvious answer is to win power and use it to destroy the more obnoxious forms of red culture. To which I say, good luck with that. The harder you try, the worse the backlash.
2. FEEDING THE ALLIGATORS: Avoid conflict by making it clear that you represent the interests of the entire American public, not just the woke part. Show sympathy for Christians, and even support limited exceptions to civil rights laws for them. Enforce the immigration laws in a fair but conspicuous way to build trust. And so on.
3. RELY ON ATTRITION: The majority of reactionaries are old white guys who are going to die fairly soon, anyway. Don’t confront or appease them; just wait them out.

So what would I do? A combination of the last two options is the only viable approach.

Theresa May was a conventional politician whose government depended on the votes of the DUP, so she naturally refused to consider an EU offer on Brexit that screwed them over. Boris Johnson is anything but a conventional politician, and he has already lost his majority, so he made a deal which effectively puts the border between the EU and the UK in the Irish Sea. The DUP, of course, will not support this arrangement, which will have implications that go far beyond Brexit, but Boris doesn’t care; all he wants to do is leave the EU and win the coming election. Anything else is just collateral damage.

The government lost the vote on the Letwin amendment, but that doesn’t mean it won’t win in the end. Boris can probably count on every vote he got this time around, and some of the Letwin voters will almost certainly support his deal once they are certain that no-deal is completely off the table. Will it be enough? The final vote will be extremely close, and I make no predictions, except to say that the government probably has as much credibility now in Northern Ireland as Trump has in Syria, and that may matter even more than Brexit in the long run.

If there is one American institution that reactionaries still respect, it is the military. As a result, if conspicuously apolitical military figures start telling the public in large numbers that Trump is an unfit commander in chief, that could be a major problem for him.

Of course, the other possible outcome is that Trump convinces his base that the military is just another component of the “deep state.” If that happens, the health of our political system will be on life support, because there will be no barriers left between 30 percent of the American public and fascism.

Bernie Sanders loves organized labor; it’s his natural habitat. You can easily imagine him as a turn of the century labor organizer fighting to overcome racial and ethnic divisions and unite the working class against the predatory capitalists. He was just born a hundred years too late.

The problem for Bernie is that he is also committed to a hugely expensive climate change program that will cost hundreds of thousands of workers their relatively high wage jobs. As you can imagine, they aren’t too keen on that. The prospect of leaving a coal mining job and becoming a solar panel salesman making far less money doesn’t appeal, for some reason.

If Bernie were somehow elected president, this would be an excruciating decision. Fortunately for him, and us, it is one he will never face, barring a complete economic collapse between now and the primaries.

Back in the days of the Russia investigation, I opined that there would be no significant legal action taken against Trump in the absence of clear evidence of a quid pro quo. As it turned out, there wasn’t even enough evidence of collaboration to make out a case for a conspiracy, so the issue of the quid pro quo never came up.

Today, in addition to his argument that he is above the law, Trump is defending himself by maintaining there was no quid pro quo with Ukraine. The evidence, however, includes the following:

1. The rough transcript itself strongly suggests Trump was offering a deal;
2. What would you expect the co-author of “The Art of the Deal” to propose?
3. There is no evidence that Trump had any ongoing interest in Ukrainian corruption outside of issues that affected him personally;
4. There was no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of either Biden;
5. Why would it have been necessary for Trump to operate a shadow foreign policy outside of the State Department and the NSC if he just wanted to talk about corruption in general?
6. Mulvaney’s “defense” just indicates that the deal involved investigating baseless conspiracy theories about 2016 as well as the Bidens.

Michael Cohen made it clear that Trump frequently uses barely veiled threats in the manner of a mob boss. The letter to Erdogan is of the same vein. Why would any reasonable person, under these circumstances, believe there was no quid pro quo?

Instead of working with the various interested parties in the Middle East to accept our ideas to create regional peace and stability, we can unite them in disgust at our craven, inept “diplomacy,” which has effectively ratified the Turkish annexation of northern Syria. Now, that’s an unintended consequence we can all embrace!

Trump’s latest argument is that the Kurds are basically terrorists who assisted us in the battle against ISIS solely out of self-interest and who aren’t worthy of our support. If that is true, why didn’t we withdraw years ago, and why are we imposing (completely ineffectual) sanctions on the Turks?

As far as I can tell, our objectives in Syria are to offend everyone and look ridiculous, because that is exactly what is happening.