Cromwell

Guns don’t kill people; video games kill people. Or so says the GOP.

Then why do video games only kill people in this country?

George W. Bush sent troops to Iraq to impose liberal democratic values and create a model state for the Middle East. Thousands of Americans, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, lost their lives as a result. Iraq predictably wound up as a ramshackle democracy and an Iranian client state. It was a disaster.

When Qaddafi threatened to exterminate Libyan rebels, our European allies persuaded a somewhat reluctant Barack Obama to assist the insurgents with air power. The campaign was a military success, and the government was toppled, but no one had a viable plan for what came next. The country is still engulfed in a civil war. It was a disaster.

When the Arab Spring came to Damascus, neither Obama nor Trump was willing to provide any meaningful military assistance to the rebels. Assad, with lots of foreign help, turned his country into a pile of rubble. Hundreds of thousands died, and millions left, destabilizing the area and European politics, to boot. It was a disaster.

Both Obama and Trump, albeit for slightly different reasons, have supported the Saudi war in Yemen. It has created a humanitarian disaster for minimal geopolitical gain.

What is the message from this? Your first response is probably to stay out of the Middle East altogether, and there is something to that. The real lesson, however, is to stick to our core mission of preventing terrorism and keeping the oil flowing, and to avoid any big military or political projects. That is a reasonably limited goal, and is achievable.

The NRA makes a great scapegoat for the Democrats, just like Wall Street, drug companies, and fossil fuel industries, but the real cause here goes much deeper than that. As I’ve noted many times before, to a reactionary, guns aren’t objects; they’re icons representing strength, independence, masculinity, Christianity, and the rejection of a government that they view as being hostile to all of those values. The NRA is just the most prominent mouthpiece for those views.

As long as reactionaries continue to feel this way and comprise a substantial part of the electorate, there will be little or no progress on gun violence. Appalling as these events and that statement may be, that’s just the way it is.

The concept: Clintonism without Clinton’s baggage and unpopularity. Hold on to Clinton’s voters, appeal to white male workers through identity politics and a degree of economic populism, win the Never Trumpers with reasonably moderate policy proposals, and take advantage of Trump’s unpopularity with millennials, women, and minorities.

The challenge: Surviving numerous debates with Elizabeth Warren, who will be looking to take him apart. It could happen.

The prognosis: The concept is sound; the candidate’s personal frailties are the issue. Chance of success: 40 percent.

Based on history and culture, every nation is exceptional. What makes American exceptionalism unique is its focus on politics and the belief that it can and will work everywhere in the world. Historically, Americans have argued that what some call bourgeois freedoms are universal rights, and that any country that observes them will thrive. This belief in universal rights, and America’s obligation to enforce them, has led us into a number of quagmires, but it has also resulted in greater freedom and prosperity in most of the world.

National conservatives don’t believe in that version of American exceptionalism. To them, American exceptionalism revolves around history and culture; in that sense, it is the same as Russian or Chinese or Israeli exceptionalism. The rest of the “America First” agenda follows naturally from that premise. Why would America fight for universal rights if they aren’t universal, but arise from a specific set of historical circumstances that aren’t present in most of the world?

It’s October, 2021. The financial crisis is in full swing. It’s 2008 all over again. Everyone is looking to Washington for answers. What will President Sanders do?

Bernie really, really hates bank bailouts. He thinks Obama blew it by not exacting tons of flesh–pounds wouldn’t be nearly enough–in exchange for saving Wall Street. He fears that the big banks will wind up bigger and more powerful than ever if Congress passes another TARP. And so, he does nothing, and lets the vampire squid take the medicine they so richly deserve.

The problem is, the rest of us go down, too. The Great Recession of 2008 is replaced by something more akin to 1929. Unemployment reaches levels not seen in 90 years.

Isn’t that, in and of itself, enough reason not to vote for Sanders?

Brexit under Theresa May was a stopped-up mess. The government kept holding votes on the same plan, to no effect. She couldn’t go forward, and she couldn’t go back. Parliament’s attempts to take control of the process were equally ineffectual. The system was at an impasse.

To use a medical metaphor, the body politic was constipated.

Enter Boris Johnson, who is determined to deliver Brexit, come what may. It may be unconstitutional, and it’s certainly going to be ugly, but it’s going to happen.

To extend the metaphor, guess what’s about to hit the fan!

It’s July, 2020. The stock market is crashing as the result of Trump’s latest gambit in the trade war. Normally, investors would be looking to the president for reassurance, but in this case, Trump is responsible for the instability, and no one believes a word he says, anyway.

Enter Jerome Powell, who promises to do anything necessary to avoid a financial meltdown. The markets regain confidence, and a crisis is averted.

And so, a man who is the target of endless baseless complaints from President Trump manages to save his presidency. It could happen. If it does, don’t expect any gratitude.

On the Democrat front runner Joe.

He and Kamala went to-and-fro.

And Cory jumped in.

So who got the win?

The pundits say no one, you know.

Donald Trump constantly complains that CNN is “fake news.” Today, he must think they’re his best friends.

Debates always tend to turn into purity tests. This favors outsider candidates with skimpy records over establishment figures with much lengthier resumes. The CNN moderators made this worse by deliberately asking questions that were intended to maximize conflict. I suppose it made for more interesting TV, but I don’t think it really helped anyone identify the person who is best positioned to beat Trump and run the country, which is the ultimate point of the exercise from the Democrats’ point of view.

The format and the questioning also leave the casual viewer with the impression that the candidates disagree with each other to a greater extent than they actually do. Immigration is a perfect example. Whether illegal entry is a civil or a criminal offense is, as far as I can tell, a very minor matter in a much larger picture, but the fringe candidates and the moderators emphasized it because it gave them an opportunity to preen and feel important.

As to the performances, Booker probably won just by looking competent and taking the least amount of fire from the others. Harris is clearly more comfortable dealing with identity issues than policy specifics. Biden was better, but some of his attacks on Harris and Booker were pretty inept, and he still looked older and less forceful than some of the others. Tulsi Gabbard probably scored more points than anyone. The question is, in the long run (or even next week), who cares? You don’t govern with zingers.

The one is a conviction politician who doesn’t seem to realize that the UK has changed quite a bit since 1945. The other is a rogue with impressive political gifts and almost no convictions. Yes, Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson are polar opposites. Who will get the better of the other?

Corbyn would do serious damage to his party regardless of the quality of the opposition. Boris will give him the final shove, and then Labour will spend years picking up the pieces.

Night #1 of Debate #2 featured a pretty intense battle between two also-ran realos and the two fundis–Sanders and Warren. The realos held their own this time. That was encouraging.

I expected a pillow fight between Sanders and Warren, but got even less than that. For the purposes of last night, the two were substantive and rhetorical twins. Warren was even shouting angrily and scapegoating big (fill in the blank) just the way Bernie does. There was absolutely no distance between the two, except that Warren did a little better job of generating positive sound bites.

Warren likes to portray herself as a reformer trying to save capitalists from themselves, but last night, she looked more like someone who actually despises businessmen. Her misguided and heavy-handed proposal to use trade deals and access to our markets to club our allies into adopting left-wing policies sounds like something Jeremy Corbyn could love. It would be fair to call that approach to trade left-wing Trumpism. If you’re a Warren fan, you should be concerned; demonizing the goose that lays the golden egg is not a good way to campaign or govern.

On the one hand, there is no dispute that creating a hard border around Northern Ireland will disrupt supply chains, damage the political settlement, and generally cause unnecessary hardship. On the other hand, if there is no real border, Northern Ireland will effectively remain part of the EU, with massive implications for the entire island and the rest of the UK. If Brexit actually occurs on schedule, what will happen next?

In all likelihood, Boris will rely on legal fictions, which is a polite way of saying he’s going to lie about border enforcement. My guess is that he will simply say that the border is now being policed without providing anything like the amount of resources that are necessary to actually do it. And so, life will go on as before, except that everyone will be pretending that something meaningful has actually happened.

Hey, do you have a better solution, other than stopping Brexit?

The two factions of the Conservative Party that support Brexit have diametrically different views on what should happen next. The CLs see the new GB as being a low tax, low regulation, cosmopolitan, free trading paradise; this phenomenon is usually called Singapore-on-Thames. The Reactionaries, on the other hand, just want to pull up the drawbridge, get rid of the immigrants, and return to the happy, prosperous land of their forefathers.

How is Boris supposed to reconcile these two mutually exclusive ideas? With his mouth, mostly:

1. For the CLs, make a big display of negotiating new free trade agreements with the US and other non-EU countries, even though that process is likely to be very slow;
2. For the Reactionaries, growl at the EU at every possible opportunity, and make sure immigration doesn’t increase (not likely to be a problem, given GB’s economic woes); and
3. Splash more cash everywhere in the hope of avoiding a Brexit-caused recession.

The problem, of course, is that reality inevitably intrudes, and it will bite. The budget deficit will soar, the pound will sag, and the British consumer will suffer. Boris will call on the spirit of Winston Churchill to carry on in the face of this ongoing disaster. But Boris isn’t Churchill, in spite of his fondest hopes, the EU isn’t Nazi Germany, and the outcome will be very different.

Is Kamala Harris a fundi or a realo? Sunday’s article in the NYT strongly leaned towards the latter. So does her record as a sometimes, but not always, progressive prosecutor. And yet, the question persists, based largely on her apparent desire to keep a foot in both camps.

Her latest attempt to explain her position on Medicare-for-all is a perfect example of trying to thread the needle. Frankly, if I could give her one piece of advice, it would be to stop trying to poach votes from Sanders and Warren and to set her sights firmly on Biden’s supporters. Let’s face it; she’s never going to be able to out-fundi Bernie and Liz, but she can make a plausible argument on its face that Biden is too misty-eyed about bipartisanship, and that she has a program which, with a few exceptions, can get through the system by way of reconciliation and executive action. In that way, she could out-realo Biden, dominate the right side of the graph, and win the nomination.