Cromwell

To be at all interesting, a scandal has to revolve around one (or more) of three motivations:  money; power; and sex.  The e-mail issue doesn’t implicate any of them.  What is it about?  Stupidity?  Carelessness?  Yawn.

Ronald Reagan got a substantial boost from the performance of the American athletes in the Los Angeles games in 1984.  Given that the Democrats are making a concerted effort to appeal to American patriotism in the face of Trumpian gloom and doom, could the same thing happen in Rio?

Probably not, for the following reasons:

1.  The incumbent cannot benefit, because he can’t run for re-election.
2.  The 1984 Olympics coincided with a dramatic improvement in the American economy.  That isn’t happening today.
3.  The country is more polarized now than in 1984.

That said, if we don’t win the medal count, you can expect Trump to blame it on the “losers” Obama and Clinton.

Consider the following lyrics:

There’s colors on the street.

Red, white, and blue.

People shuffling their feet.

People sleeping in their shoes.

There’s a warning sign on the road ahead.

There’s a lot of people saying we’d be better off dead.

Don’t feel like Satan, but I am to them.

So I try to forget it any way I can.

 

Keep on rockin’ in the free world. . .

Those words were written in 1989.  They might as well have been written yesterday.

David Brooks had it right:  the best pop culture analogy to Trump’s convention speech is Bruce Wayne/Batman.  Of course, America isn’t Gotham City, and Trump’s parents weren’t killed by criminals, but to Trump, those are just details.

Assume, for the purposes of argument, that crime in America really is as bad as he says.  He still isn’t Batman, for the following reasons:

1.  He’s a developer, not a crime fighter.  At least Rudy Guiliani has some credibility on this issue.

2.  He has no ideas on how to fight crime.  Beating your chest and projecting strength is not a crime-fighting strategy.

3.  Crime in our country is almost exclusively a state and local issue.  What exactly can the President do–call out the military to police the streets of Chicago? That’s a third world “solution,” but, in all honesty, I can imagine a President Trump trying something like it in order to prove how tough he is.

It appears to me that there are two separate threads in the Bernie or Bust movement:

1.  People who are too myopic to admit that there are huge differences between Hillary and Trump; and
2.  More sophisticated people who view a failed Trump presidency as the most likely path to the revolution.

#2 has to have occurred to Bernie.  Fortunately, if it did, he clearly didn’t give into it, because the dangers of a Trump presidency are just too great.

1.  People have come to take the current state of affairs (peace, free movement, democratic governments) for granted.  They shouldn’t.
2.  The ultimate test for the EU will be to create citizens who view themselves as Europeans–not just residents of their own countries.  The fact that young people supported Remain suggests that the European identity is making some headway, but it will take time.
3.  The biggest single problem with the EU is the euro, because saving it has become a self-defeating end in and of itself.
4.  Creating “more Europe” to save the euro, under the present circumstances, just means imposing German views about austerity that won’t work in most of the rest of the union with even more vigor.
5.  The EU will survive Brexit.  It would not survive Frexit.
6.   Instead of creating “more Europe,” the powers that be should focus more on improving the aspects of the union that have strong public support, like the single market.
7.  The best way of dealing with the euro problem, as I have said before, is for the Germans to return to the mark.  The value of the mark would rise dramatically, thus enriching the German people.  The Germans would no longer feel obligated to bail out the rest of the EU countries, or to impose austerity on them.  The remaining euro countries would have more fiscal and monetary flexibility to deal with their structural problems.
8.  It is much more likely that the powers that be will just continue with their half measures.  Declining to sanction Spain and Portugal is more evidence of that approach.  Will the next shoe drop in Italy?  We’ll see.

DNC meeting, day four.

Some women were moved to the core.

The speech was OK

Not much more I can say

At least sanity was restored.

 

The lines about Trump were razor sharp.  The rest of it sounded like a shopping list, but that’s the way most people speak.  We won’t be electing her for her oratory.

Obama is the charismatic Golden State Warriors.  Hillary would be the grit and grind Memphis Grizzlies.

The problem with Fox News isn’t its right-wing perspective;  there is plenty of room in the spectrum for that.  My issue with Fox is that the message it repeats, over and over and over again, is that white American Christians are under attack by The Other, and need to rise and take their country back to where it was prior to the 1960’s.

Is it any wonder, under the circumstances, that Trump is the GOP nominee?  One can only hope that the new leadership will see that this message is driving the GOP into a ditch, and will change its ways accordingly.

During the 2008 campaign, Hillary Clinton repeatedly made the argument that her methodical, grinding style was better suited for the nuts and bolts of governing than Obama’s flash and eloquence.  Last night, in a supreme twist of irony, she called upon that same eloquence to make the case that she was right. And he delivered, big time, as only he can.  He had help, too;  Biden and Bloomberg were excellent in their own ways, as well.

It was a remarkable night:  one to remember for a long, long time.

The DNC meeting, day three.

The delegates shouting with glee.

A Russian attack.

Trump can’t walk this one back.

You don’t ask for help overseas.

It would be a natural pairing:  a genuine strong man and his apprentice.

I believe we are going to see a overwhelming, spontaneous expression of support from the delegates for the President tonight, as people begin to realize what he has done for, and meant to, this country over the last eight years.  This won’t be choreographed.  It will be real.

Ezra Klein wrote a column in Vox last week in which he argued that Trump is a clear and present danger to the American public.  I agree, for the following reasons:

1.  Trump is a threat to our economic system.   Our economy, and that of the entire world, is based on stability, confidence, and trust.  Putting a chaos agent in charge of the linchpin of the system will cause markets all over the world to go into free fall.  In addition, his plans for a huge tax cut and trade wars will result in skyrocketing interest rates.  A Trump victory will be a disaster for your 401(k).

2.  Trump is a threat to our constitutional liberties.  His plan to “reform” libel laws is intended to suppress legitimate dissent.  His unconditional support for the police and what he calls “law and order” suggests an indifference to the constitutional rights of criminal defendants.  His advocacy of torture in the face of international law indicates that he has no respect for fundamental principles of fairness and decency.   Finally, his strong man act presages issues with constitutional checks and balances.

3.  Trump is a threat to our lives.  Trump’s foreign policy will drive away our allies and leave us alone in a hostile world.  His hair-trigger temper and thin skin are incompatible with control of the nuclear codes.  Finally, his desire to remain unpredictable and to keep everything on the table during negotiations suggests that he is capable of using nuclear conflict as a bargaining chip.

The counterargument to this is that Trump is too lazy to be a genuine authoritarian, that he only wants the trappings of power, and that his man on horseback routine is just a series of opportunistic improvisations.  A lot of that is probably true; I have advocated for some of those positions in previous posts. The bottom line, however, is that the logic of his campaign may well drive him to take more extreme positions than he contemplated when he began.  There could be nothing more ridiculous than a strong man who can’t get anything done; given the choice of looking pathetic or doubling down, which option do you think he would pick?

While the TPP undoubtedly will boost economic growth in the US, and elsewhere, a little bit, its real significance is geopolitical.  It is primarily an effort to counter future Chinese aggression in the South China Sea by creating a rules-based economic alliance to supplement American military power in the region.   Failure of the TPP will send a message to countries bordering the South China Sea that America cannot be trusted, and that they have no choice but to make the best deals they can by themselves with their dangerous and unpredictable neighbor. Chinese divide and conquer tactics will consequently prevail, and the military and political environment will become much more unstable.

Hillary undoubtedly knows this, which makes her pandering on the issue all the more depressing.  From a tactical perspective, it makes no sense for her to engage in a protectionist race to the bottom with Trump, because, given her history, she cannot win it.  She is going to look stupid and weak on this issue during the debates unless she vigorously defends both the concept of free trade and the agreements that she and Bill actually supported.  The best case scenario, therefore, is that Hillary limits her objections to essentially cosmetic issues in the TPP during the campaign, wins the election, and fixes the “problems” with the agreement early in her administration.