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Why Must We Fight?

Why must we fight?

Shots in the night.

Peace out of sight.

Turn out the lights.

 

Where does this go?

Nobody knows.

Progress is slow.

Don’t worry so.

 

Will the West win?

Patience runs thin.

Ignore the din.

Believe again.

When Rick Scott, a wealthy businessman with few political skills, was elected Governor of Florida in 2010, I (sort of) joked that his first task as the CEO of Florida, Inc. would be to identify his underperforming assets ( the elderly, children, the poor, etc.), securitize them, and sell them off to German investors.  Fiorina gives me the same feeling, but on a national scale.

As I have noted on multiple occasions,  running a business is a fundamentally different task than running a government.  From Fiorina’s perspective, however, I can see the appeal of a public sector job;  unlike HP, the shareholders voters would have to wait four years to remove her from office.

If I had the ability to do caricatures, I would draw Ted Cruz as a vampire;  it’s just something about the way he looks and the gloom he projects.  With that as background, let’s see how he stacks up against the best known vampire of them all:

                                                  Cruz        v.          Dracula

Gloomy presence                     Yes                     Yes

Viewed by establishment      Hated                  Feared

Active at night                Debates; filibusters   Drinks blood

Attractive to                     Reactionaries            Women

Ambition                          Presidency                  Perpetual life

And the winner is . . . Dracula.   Cruz is still way behind in the polls.

Imagine no Obama.

It isn’t hard to do.

An end to free stuff.

And no abortions, too.

Imagine the black people

Leaving us in peace.

 

Imagine all the tax cuts.

It’s easy if you try.

A wall around us.

No more liberal lies.

Imagine just white people

Living here today.

 

You may say we’re just dreamers.

But we’re not the only ones.

We hope someday you’ll join us.

And our country will live as one.

 

Parody of “Imagine” by John Lennon.

Based on the last debate, the GOP’s idea of an oppressed worker is . .  a community banker.  Strike up the Internationale!

Three reasons:

1. His views on immigration have pulled the GOP to the far right on this issue, thereby alienating Hispanics, other minorities, and moderate white voters.
2. Less obviously, his success as an entertainer has attracted millions of new viewers to the debates, which will make it more difficult for the ultimate GOP nominee to disavow statements made during the debates and pivot to the center during the general election.
3. Instead of attempting to unify the party, he is doing everything he possibly can to publicly expose the fault lines between the GOP factions and the weaknesses of his opponents.  The eventual nominee will consequently enter the general election with a divided party and with his shortcomings a matter of public record.

By all rights, Ted Cruz should be the leading Reagan Coalition candidate at this point in the campaign.  He ticks all of the boxes:  he’s impeccably evangelical; his righteous rage is palpable; notwithstanding his Rick Perry moment at the last debate, his intelligence is unquestionable; he looks reasonably Reaganesque; and he couldn’t be more despised by the GOP establishment if he tried (and he probably does).  He also has plenty of money.  For all of this, he is currently stuck far behind Trump and Carson.  Why?

There are two potential reasons.  First, even though his battles with the GOP leadership are the stuff of legend, he is still a politician, and as such he has failed to stop Obama.  In other words, he can’t portray himself as a white knight untainted by Washington corruption and stupidity as convincingly as the two complete outsider candidates.  Second, it is perfectly possible that people just dislike the guy; he exudes gloom, anger, and ambition from every pore.  Can you imagine seeing that on TV every night for four years?  Me, neither.

There once was a Texan named Cruz.

His campaign was singing the blues.

He’s stuck in fourth place

This far into the race.

Perhaps he’s perceived as old news.

 

For the foreseeable future, Tuesday will be Ted’s day on this blog.  A substantive posting will follow.

We heard plenty of blather and pablum from both sides of the aisle after the events in Paris, but not much in the way of actual alternatives.  Here is my analysis of the commentary:

1.  Take the gloves off the air campaign.  This alternative from Ted Cruz at least has the merit of being achievable, and I can imagine some incremental changes along those lines.  The fact is, however, that we can’t win this battle through strategic bombing alone (you could ask the North Vietnamese about that), and YouTube videos of “crusaders” bombing innocent civilians would be about the most potent recruiting tools for IS that one could contemplate.

2.  Work harder with our allies.  Duh:  we’ve been doing this from the beginning.  The problem is that our allies in the Middle East all have higher priorities than defeating IS.  In particular, the Saudis are more concerned about Iran, and the Turks would rather fight Assad and the Kurds than help with IS.

3.  Make a deal with Assad and the Russians.  Yes, we could defeat IS that way, but it would require us to betray our allies in the region, accept Russian leadership in the Middle East, and tolerate Assad’s human rights violations.  Not happening.

4.  Arm the Kurds.  We’re already doing that.  The Kurds are reliable allies, but they are only interested in protecting their homeland, and ultimately in declaring independence; don’t expect them to be willing to go much beyond that. Giving more support to them alienates both the Iraqi and Turkish governments.

5.  Send a large force of American ground troops to Syria.   Yes, we would win the war–but at what cost?  And what happens afterwards?  Do we take on Assad and risk war with the Russians?  If not, what kind of political establishment emerges?

6.  Declare war.  Jeb’s option–how does that help?????

The fact is that our best option was, and is, to reach an agreement with the Russians for a transitional government that would protect Russian interests, while introducing some element of real democracy to the Syrian political system. The biggest obstacle to this is Putin’s insistence on supporting Assad.

One hates to say it, but in the real world, successful attacks by IS on the Russians may ultimately be the best hope of peace in Syria.

Thomas Friedman is the columnist who famously proclaimed that “the world is flat.”  When he is not writing about the impending collapse of the environment, he is usually arguing that, due to technological changes and globalization, no one’s job is safe any more;  even everyday employees are now entrepreneurs, whether they like it or not.  Milton Friedman was the well-known libertarian economist who advocated for a smaller state.

In listening to Marco Rubio during the last debate, I got the impression that his ideology is a sort of mixture of these two ideas.  The notion that inequality in this country is driven by the different treatment of large and small businesses, and that the size of the federal government exacerbates the problem, is very odd at first blush, but if you accept the premise that there is no longer any meaningful distinction between capital and labor in our evolving economy, and that workers are really all just large or small business people, it starts to make sense.

Of course, it is not exactly a coincidence that writing off the distinction between employers and employees serves the GOP’s interests perfectly, and it is doubtful that many people would agree that Thomas Friedman’s utopian/dystopian view of the world is an accurate reflection of most of our economy at the present time (i.e., most of us are not Uber drivers, and most of us do not rent out rooms through Airbnb). Give Rubio credit for his imagination, however.

Talk Like a Republican

The GOP

Will take good care of you and me.

We’ve had enough

Of paying for lots of free stuff.

Our guys are great

It’s Hillary that we really hate.

She’s going down

With all of her friends in DC town.

 

Oust the bums, cause they’re really dumb.

Talk like a Republican.

 

If you want to find Donald Trump

He’s standing behind the border wall.

Ted Cruz is, too

Establishment’s really turning blue.

Compromise is done

Cause we know the war is nearly won.

Don’t get in our way

The middle no longer has a say.

 

Tax cuts with no ifs or buts

Talk like a Republican.

 

Parody of “Walk Like An Egyptian” by The Bangles.  Dedicated this day to Donald Trump, who apparently said that the attacks in Paris could have been prevented if more of the Parisians had guns.  Really.  You couldn’t make this stuff up.

I’m not at all sure that I will watch tonight’s debate, but here are some questions I wish the moderators would address to the Bern:

1.  What, if anything, does the failed attempt to bring single-payer to Vermont say about your plans to expand the welfare state?
2.  How high can taxes be raised on the wealthy without blunting economic growth and causing capital flight?
3.  Why do you think America’s geopolitical interests in the Pacific are best served by defeating the TPP?
4.  What would you propose to deal with the problems of energy storage that are associated with efforts to promote wind and solar power?
5.  How, if at all, should American policy change towards Iraq and Syria?

The religious wars in Europe in the 16th and 17th Centuries burned themselves out.  The wave of anarchist bombings and assassinations at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th Century that resembled the events of the past year eventually died out.  While Iran certainly continues to present problems, it is no longer the Islamic revolutionary state that it was in 1979; it is simply a conventional state pursuing its own interests in the Middle East, just like all of the others.

We will ultimately prevail over this menace.  It will take time and patience and discipline and carefully directed force, but we will win, because the terrorists have nothing worthwhile to offer as an alternative.

In the meantime, there are no quick and easy answers, so don’t be disappointed if you don’t hear any in the next few days.  Show your disgust by all means, but overreacting and searching for scapegoats is counterproductive.

 

In a rare lucid moment, Marco Rubio noted that the Republicans will be making a mistake if they make the election a contest of resumes, because none of the GOP candidates has a more compelling resume than Hillary.  Since Fiorina has made little or no effort to stake out any ideological positions that set her apart from her GOP rivals, however, it would appear that her case to be the nominee consists of the following:

1.  I have experience running a large business organization.
2.  As a woman, I am uniquely qualified to take on Hillary.

As many people (not just Trump) have pointed out, her CEO background is, at best, a mixed bag.  I, of course, would maintain that running a business is in no way analogous to running the government, so I wouldn’t be impressed by this line of reasoning even if it were unequivocally true.  As to #2, I can’t argue with the premise, but while being female could help her in the general election, it isn’t much of a reason for the electorate to make her the leader of the free world.

Yes, under three conditions:

1.  Catastrophic electoral defeat:  Let’s say, hypothetically, Ted Cruz is the nominee in 2016, and he leads the party to a defeat comparable to 1964.  That might cause a reassessment of both tactics and policy.
2. A sweeping victory:  Now the realities of getting legislation through the system with widespread public opposition and the constitutional limits on federal power come to the fore.  The party will have to settle for less than the Reactionary agenda, and defend its failures.
3. The Reactionaries form a third party:  The remainder of the GOP is now free to cooperate with the Democrats on selected issues, and radical ideas are no longer in vogue.