Month: August 2022

First there was the bipartisan gun bill, which was about a quarter of a loaf, but more than anyone reasonably expected. Then we had the passage of the Chinese chip bill with significant GOP support. Today, it appears that a small, but important, part of the BBB is going to squeak through the system. There is even a possibility that a gay marriage bill could pass the Senate with at least ten GOP votes. What in the name of Donald Trump is going on here? You could almost argue that Biden’s 2020 campaign optimism about the workings of the process had some basis in fact, and that the GOP has become a normal center-right party again.

A reasonably large number (not a majority, of course) of Republicans is actually behaving responsibly for a change, instead of trying to burn it down. Perhaps the pending election has caused them to concentrate; perhaps it is the backwash of the January 6 committee; or maybe it is just one of those inexplicable things. In any event, enjoy it while you can, because it won’t last. If the GOP wins the House, as expected, the next two years will feature a boatload of bogus Benghazi-style investigations, a horrific debt ceiling crisis, and God knows what else, because that’s what the red base wants.

Faced with the mounting list of abortion horror stories, of which the one about the raped 10-year-old is among the most prominent, has the anti-abortion side taken it to heart and tried to clarify the new and revived laws? No! Instead, it routinely calls such stories “fake news,” even when they can be verified by the media.

It would appear that some elements of the Catholic Church have learned their public relations methods from Donald Trump. Given their supposed moral standing, they should be embarrassed, but like Trump, they’re not. The ends justify the means.

As anyone with any sense predicted, doctors are having great difficulty applying the new (or revived) state abortion prohibitions to certain kinds of doomed pregnancies. As a result, women aren’t getting the medical care they need, and the horror stories are mounting. Ross Douthat thinks the way to solve that problem is to somehow make it clear to doctors that they are in more jeopardy from malpractice cases than from a criminal prosecution from an overzealous state attorney. Is he right?

Leave aside, for the moment, the equities involved in putting doctors in this kind of a no-win situation. If you were a doctor, what would you do? That’s right! You would dump patients who put you in peril and tell them to seek treatment in other states. You might even leave the profession altogether. What else could you do?

So, no, terrorizing doctors with civil liability is not good public policy. It only makes things worse.

About two weeks after stating that Hungary, unlike the rest of Europe, would never become a “mixed race” country, Viktor Orban was given a warm embrace by CPAC. And why not? Racism, xenophobia, control of the media, authoritarian rule, a soft position on Russian aggression, and a side of grifting–what’s there for “conservatives” to dislike?

The question Orban should be asked is why, if he so despises the EU, he doesn’t just leave it. The reason nobody asks the question is that everyone already knows the answer: the EU is Hungary’s sugar daddy. Orban has the best of both worlds; he gets to be both a beggar and a chooser.

That needs to stop. In addition, what “works” in some sense in a small and relatively insignificant country will not work in a nation of descendants of immigrants with global interests and responsibilities. American reactionaries would be wise to remember that–not that they will.

Josh Hawley, the consummate cynical insider turned insurrectionist, has thrown in his lot with the Putin-loving minority in the GOP. He alone voted against adding Finland and Sweden to NATO in the Senate. His vote sets him apart from the majority of his party, and the other non-Trump candidates for president in either 2024 or 2028, which clearly was the point.

Hawley is making the same bet that Putin is–that the American public will get tired of the economic costs of the war at some point and will turn on the politicians who supported Ukraine. The odds don’t favor him as of today, but what does he have to lose? The establishment in his party doesn’t like him, anyway.

Think of this vote as the right-wing equivalent of Obama’s position on the Iraq war, except Obama was speaking out of conviction, not ambition, and was correct about the war. There is no good case against Finland and Sweden in NATO.

The combination of inept, extremist GOP candidates, falling gas prices, abortion politics, a playing field that currently operates in their favor, and some recent and prospective legislative successes has given the Democrats some hope of retaining control of the Senate. That result would be consistent with the prediction I made about a year ago. What would it mean in the real world?

The most positive outcome would be the ability to move judicial nominations through the system. Since the House is almost certainly going to roll to the GOP, however, constructive legislation will still be impossible. A crisis over the debt ceiling is a virtual certainty under any plausible circumstances. We will still be subjected to a boatload of Benghazi-style investigations. The inability of the new Trumpist House members to accomplish their agenda may make them more, not less, nihilistic. Finally, Democratic control of the Senate would make it harder for Biden to run against Congress in 2024.

In short, this would hardly be an unmixed blessing.

The result of the Kansas abortion referendum is strong evidence that the polls showing majority support for abortion rights are accurate, even in red states. What will that mean in the real world?

We don’t know if support for abortion rights necessarily translates into more votes for Democrats in November. However, the very high turnout in a primary in which the deck was stacked in favor of the anti-abortion side is a danger sign for the GOP. For canny politicians like DeSantis, this is a very good reason to avoid pushing the abortion issue until the general election is over.

I’m old enough to remember when the vast majority of baseball games weren’t televised. If you were a real fan, you listened to them on the radio; the local announcers were effectively members of your extended family. They were important to you, and to the community.

I didn’t grow up in LA, so I only knew Vin Scully from his work on TV, but even from that limited sample, I can tell you that he was the best. He will be missed, and not just by Dodger fans.

In a somewhat similar vein, I only have vague memories of Bill Russell as a basketball player. I remember him more as an announcer. He was a man of immense intelligence and dignity, but what made him stand out more than anything else was the way he laughed–a sort of raucous cackle. He will be missed, too.

If you’re an optimist, or a Biden supporter, the killing of al-Zawahiri proves that it was unnecessary to keep American troops in Afghanistan, and that the administration’s decision to withdraw was correct. If you’re a pessimist, or a GOP voter, you probably think that the episode proves the Taliban will continue to harbor terrorists, and that an attack on American soil is inevitable as a result of the withdrawal.

Both arguments are plausible. The only way we will get a definitive answer is if the worst fears of the pessimists are shown by events to be correct. The Biden side has the obligation of proving a negative, which isn’t really possible; if there are no terrorist attacks for ten years, how do we know one isn’t just around the corner?

The election of Lincoln, logically speaking, did not require the Confederate states to secede. Nobody, including Lincoln, thought the federal government had the power to abolish slavery where it already existed. As to the territories, Lincoln didn’t have the votes in the Senate to eliminate slavery, the Dred Scott decision precluded him from doing so in any event, and slavery was not economically viable in many of the western states regardless of what the law said.

Secession was thus a rash and unnecessary decision; it was also the only way that slavery could, in the end, be abolished–as a matter of wartime expediency. That is, of course, exactly what happened.

If secession had never occurred, what then? My best guess is that slavery would have been abolished decades later, with compensation paid to the slaveowners; after all, that is what happened in the British Empire. Most of the freed slaves, with few resources of their own to call on and no help from a government that had paid a huge sum to free them, would have ended up as sharecroppers on plantations, with no meaningful political rights.

Does that story sound familiar?

After weeks of hard negotiations with innumerable twists and turns, Joe Manchin was finally persuaded to support a slimmed-down version of the BBB that would do a lot of good, particularly on climate change. It was wonderful news, but we don’t have a deal yet.

Sinema still stands in the way. Like Manchin, she enjoys being mysterious and unpredictable. Nobody knows how she will vote at this point.

Just as Schumer managed to get Manchin on side, Manchin needs to get her working on the same team. She is Manchin’s Manchin.

A group of moderates from both parties is trying to start a third party. Is that a good idea?

No, because it is based on a false premise: that both parties are controlled by extremists. That is only true of the GOP. The Democratic Party may have its share of noisy culture warriors, but it is run by moderates who respect the norms of liberal democracy and want to improve the lives of all Americans, including those in red states.

In other words, as I’ve said many times, saying that Donald Trump and the 20-year-old guy on Twitter are the same thing is false equivalence.

Bret Stephens is a bundle of contradictions. On domestic issues, he is a CL; he has never seen a tax he didn’t want to cut, or a regulation he didn’t want to repeal. Issues which lack any kind of plausible rugged individualist solution, such as climate change, simply don’t exist for him. On foreign affairs, on the other hand, Stephens is a super-hawk, willing to run any risk and pay any price to support American domination of the entire world. As a result, he advocates the following:

1. He thinks Biden needs to do whatever it takes to guarantee a quick victory for Ukraine over Russia. Given the Russians’ enormous advantages in manpower and equipment, that can only mean NATO airstrikes on Russian positions in Ukraine. In other words, he wants NATO to declare war on Russia, and risk nuclear war.
2. At the same time, he wants Biden to walk away from the Iran nuclear talks and put the fear of God in the Iranian leadership. That means threatening war, and presumably following through, if necessary, as we have no further economic levers at hand.
3. Finally, he wants to take a more aggressive stand with China over Taiwan, which could also lead to war.

Three wars at once! That’s rather a lot, don’t you think?

Paul Krugman is a huge fan of U.S. Grant. He gives Grant huge kudos for engaging in total war to defeat the Confederacy. It might not have been flashy, and it cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of men, but in the end, it was effective. It was the right call.

Would it be ungracious to point out that Putin is using the same kind of tactics in Ukraine? Krugman doesn’t seem to be aware of that, but maybe he should be.

Nancy Pelosi refuses to say whether she intends to visit Taiwan. The Chinese, as you would expect, are growling. Would it be wise for her to send the message that America stands behind Taiwan?

No. We are long beyond the point of making symbolic gestures relative to Taiwan. What we need now is quiet diplomacy with our allies to defend Taiwan, not noisy gestures that piss off the Chinese without generating concrete results.