Cromwell

When Hollande was elected, he was confronted with the following clear and fundamental choices about the future of France and its economy:

1.  Should France join Germany in promoting austerity, or align itself with the southern European states in supporting Keynesian policies within the EU?
2.  Should France emulate Germany in adopting reforms to make its economy more capitalist-friendly, or soak the rich and continue to protect labor insiders?

In the event, when he approached the fork in the road, he . . . took it.  He supported German efforts to impose austerity on Greece, but offered to lighten the Greeks’ load a little bit.  He ran deficits in excess of those permitted by the EU, but not by much, and fought the battle to do so not openly, but in a passive-aggressive way.  He supported a supertax, and then backed off.  Today, he is in a desperate struggle with the unions for labor market reforms that are too watered-down to make much of a difference in the French economy.

France has not performed badly over the last eight years relative to most of the countries in the EU.  The problem is that the French compare themselves, not to Spain or Italy or Greece, but to Germany, and the German economy is growing much faster than theirs.  No one takes France seriously as an equal partner to the Germans anymore.  That is unacceptable to the French.

When it is all said and done, Hollande’s inability to make up his mind is likely to split his party and will put Le Pen into the second round of the election in 2017. At that point, anything can happen;  do not assume that she has no chance of winning.

The GOP nominee Don.

His friends wonder what’s going on.

He’s got little cash.

His campaign smells like trash.

It’s no lumiere, too much son.

While a few members of the GOP establishment (e.g., the Bush family; Mitt Romney) have conspicuously refused to endorse Trump, the predominant opinion appears to be that Trump is not a real Republican, but a kind of independent and unaccountable force of nature, like an earthquake or a tornado. He is their ally in the all-important battle against Hillary, so he has their support, but he is not one of them, and they bear no responsibility for him.  They are free to criticize him as they see fit and to pursue their own interests and ideology through the campaign.

The obvious rationale for this approach is that it protects the GOP brand–low taxes for the wealthy, “freedom,” etc.–in the likely event that Trump implodes. The logical problem with it, however, is that it ignores the wishes of the large proportion of GOP voters who clearly prefer swaggering government to limited government.

Will moderate swing voters buy into the idea that the GOP is actually Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and not Trump and the rank-and-file in congressional and state races?  If Trump should somehow prevail in November, will the congressional GOP leadership continue to treat him as an independent, or will the two forces unite?  These are extremely important questions, and no one will know the answer until after the election.

The GOP nominee Don.

In Cleveland he’ll take the baton.

He’s now in the news

For his friends who hate Jews.

That’s not how the race will be won.

 

 

I’m going to half defend Trump here.  No, really:  hear me out.

Yes, Saddam was a brutal dictator who invaded his neighbors for no good reason, oppressed the Shiites and Kurds, and basically killed people for sport.  No, the record shows that Trump didn’t oppose the invasion from the beginning, regardless of what he says today.  And no, the people Saddam butchered weren’t terrorists; that is a typical piece of Trump misinformation.  The real point, however, is that there weren’t any Iraqi terrorists for him to kill, which brings up two legitimate questions:

1.  Would Iraq be a better place to live today if Saddam were still in power?
2.  Would the world in general be a better place if the Iraq invasion had not occurred?

Here are my responses:

1.  It depends on who you are.  If you’re a Shiite or a Kurd and you’re far from the action, you are clearly better off today than you were 15 years ago.  If you’re a Sunni, and you were good at keeping your head down and your mouth shut, Saddam wasn’t a huge problem, and you are living with IS and a Shiite majority today.  If you are a Sunni or a Shiite on the front lines of terrorism, you have far more freedom, less reliable electricity, and less security than you did before the invasion.  It’s definitely a mixed bag.
2. While Saddam was dangerously unpredictable, he kept Iran in check, and IS would not exist today if he were still in power, since it relies heavily on military expertise and assets obtained as a result of the invasion.  On balance, I think you would have to say the world as a whole would be better off if the invasion had never occurred, and that doesn’t even factor in the horrific costs of the invasion itself to the US and to the Iraqi people.

So, while he was (as usual) wrong about the specifics, in my opinion, Trump got the bigger picture right.  I guess “truthful hyperbole” can actually contain some truth every now and then.  Considering the source, you could call it a germ of truth.

 

             Buildin’ Up the Wall

When you think the world’s your oyster.

The establishment is finally beaten down.

This is only the beginning.

Gonna show those folks who think you’re just a clown.

 

Bashing Muslims; tweeting night and day.

Running crazy; that’s the only way.

 

So tonight

Gonna leave those old ideas up on the shelf

And just enjoy yourself.

Oooh

When the madness of the message gets to you.

Life ain’t so bad at all

When you’re buildin’ up the wall.

 

Parody of “Off the Wall” by Michael Jackson.

I have noted previously that the best insight I ever had into politics came when a character in a dream told me that voters didn’t really expect politicians to solve their problems–they just needed to know that the candidate’s heart was in the right place.  Based on that, I have speculated that Trump voters don’t really think he can force Mexico to pay for the wall or ban Muslims from the country;  it is intent that matters, not results.

Both the NYT and the WaPo have run articles over the last two weeks about surveys of Trump voters which show precisely that.  QED.

I will be on vacation until next Wednesday, so blogging will be discontinued until then.  I should have plenty of fresh material when I return.

Never a dull day in the UK.

To the extent that there is a military solution to the Syrian problem, it would revolve around the use of the Turkish Army.  The combination of American air power and Turkish infantry would be more than a match for Assad’s forces and IS, and the ultimate political resolution could be left to the Turks, who presumably would be happy to rearrange the affairs of their neighbors to their liking.

There are basically two reasons why this hasn’t happened.  First, the Turks do not appear to believe that the benefits from reshaping the Syrian government and eliminating IS are worth the risks (a confrontation with the Russians being one of them).  Second, the Turkish government, for domestic political reasons, puts a much higher priority on fighting Kurdish militants than on getting rid of Assad and IS.  That puts them in conflict with US policy, which generally supports the aspirations of the Kurds, who are viewed as our most reliable ally.

The only way this equation is going to change is if IS starts becoming much more destructive within Turkey, so the government has to change its priorities.  That isn’t impossible, based on recent events, but it isn’t likely, either.

The Would-Be Man on Horseback

The would-be man on horseback

Came to my home town.

With weird hair and a bright orange face

He’s just an evil clown.

 

The would-be man on horseback

Was sending nasty tweets.

He made me think of days of yore.

Of men in hoods and sheets.

 

The would-be man on horseback

Admitted that it’s true.

He doesn’t give a tinker’s damn

For people that he screwed.

 

The would-be man on horseback

Stood tall upon the stage

His fans erupted to applaud

His message of cold rage.

 

The would-be man on horseback

Is on my TV screen.

I try hard to convince myself

It’s just an awful dream.

 

The would-be man on horseback

Please say it isn’t so.

‘Cause if he wins, the rest of us

Will have no place to go.

Trump advised Erdogan to stop being such a nice guy and do something about all those Muslims in his country.  Oh, wait. . .

This month’s issue of The Atlantic contains an article by Jonathan Rauch about American politics that has generated some buzz.  The gist of the article is that the system has gone “insane” as a result of systemic changes over the years which have weakened the power of middlemen who enforce discipline over both politicians and the electorate.

There is some merit to the article, but mostly I disagree with it.  The federal government made plenty of horrible choices during the Bush Administration, but its operations were not erratic or dysfunctional.  The first two years of the Obama Administration were marked by serious and productive lawmaking.  The Republican nominees in 2008 and 2012 were unquestionably mainstream politicians.  And the systemic changes that Rauch describes in the article took place over decades, so you can’t use them to explain why Congress has been dysfunctional since 2010, or why Trump became the GOP nominee in 2016.

The beginning of the dysfunction occurred when the GOP won the 2010 election and started threatening to shut down the government and default on the debt. The problems with our system, therefore, revolve around the radicalization of the GOP.  The reasons for that were described in a series of posts during GOP Radicalization Week several months ago.

Imagine that it is November 9, 2016.  Republicans are celebrating an unexpected Trump victory.  The markets, however, see Trump as a chaos agent, given his plans to tear up treaties, engage in trade wars, etc.  They are in free fall all over the world.

President Obama calls on Trump to make a public statement to calm things down.  Trump duly complies, telling the media that the inflammatory statements he made during the campaign were just “truthful hyperbole” and are only the starting point for negotiations with Congress and other world leaders.

The problem is that while markets operate on the basis of credibility and confidence, Trump openly views lying as a legitimate negotiating tactic to be used while he is President.  As a result, no one believes anything he says, and the free fall continues.

By the time of the inauguration, Americans have lost about a third of their wealth, and the economy is losing jobs at the rate of a million a month as a new Great Recession kicks in.  And so is America “made great again” by the man on golf cart.

The GOP nominee Don.

The Christian right over him fawned.

They’re buying his crap.

They don’t see it’s a trap.

But you and I know they’ve been conned.

I think you can divide Simon’s career into four phases.  In his first, Simon & Garfunkel, phase, he wrote painfully earnest songs about America in the sixties which captured the idealism of the times and remain standards today.  In the second phase, he went solo, watched America and personal relationships unravel, and wrote darker songs that are nonetheless classics (e.g., “Still Crazy After All These Years” and “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover”).  The third phase, in the eighties and nineties, was marked by the artistic and commercial success of “Graceland,” fallow periods, and some failures.  The later “Surprise” and “So Beautiful or So What,” however, are poignant meditations on love, God, and mortality which captured the subtle joys and sorrows of old age almost perfectly.

His new CD, “Stranger to Stranger,” is fundamentally different than its two predecessors.  Musically, it sounds more like “Graceland” than any of his other works.  The best songs–“Wristband” and “The Werewolf”–were clearly prompted by contemporary events.  There is some filler, even though it is less than 40 minutes long, but it is well worth a listen.

Is this the beginning of a fifth phase?  Time will tell, but his greatness is assured.