Cromwell

The British and Irish have made significant progress towards resolving the Northern Ireland issue over the last 20 years.  I would say that the membership of both countries in the EU has been helpful in that regard, for the following reasons:

1. The fact that both countries are members of the same political entity makes the Ireland/Northern Ireland boundary look like an absurd anachronism;
2. The other EU members provide a potential resource for mediation; and
3. The influence of the Catholic Church over the Irish government has clearly diminished in recent years.  While there are numerous reasons for that, I have to believe that the day-to-day connection between the Republic and a variety of more secular countries within the EU has played some sort of role in the process. That change, in turn, makes the ultimate acceptance by Protestants in Northern Ireland of a united Republic more plausible.

Brexit would put all of this at risk.  It would harden the border between the Republic and Northern Ireland and make unification more difficult.  For that, and other reasons I will discuss in the future, Brexit should be rejected.

Historically, the GOP has been the party of free trade, due to the strong influence of its business constituency.  It is now poised to nominate an avowed protectionist as its standard bearer in 2016.  What is the likelihood that it will return to its roots after the election?

Jeb Bush was the only candidate that I can remember making any significant attempt to defend free trade during the debates.  By the end of the campaign, you would have to say that all of the candidates were on board in differing degrees with Trump’s opposition to trade agreements.  As a result, I can only see two scenarios in which the GOP would revert to its previous position in 2020:  a catastrophic Trump defeat in 2016; or an even more catastrophic Trump presidency.

If I were a cartoonist, I don’t think I could resist depicting Trump as a gorilla, given his penchant for chest-beating and obnoxiously aggressive behavior.  It is only fitting, then, that he had lots of opinions about the incident involving the gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo.

The elephant is too passive a symbol for today’s more assertive GOP.  The gorilla would make a perfect replacement.

About a week ago, I posted a column on Trump and the Ryan budget in which I noted that anyone voting for Trump on the basis of his promise not to cut entitlements was making a serious mistake, given his, shall we say, flexibility with the truth.  Right on cue, the AOL News ran an article on Monday in which unnamed sources indicated that Trump had indicated a willingness to cut Social Security in his meeting with Paul Ryan; he just doesn’t want to talk about it during the campaign, because he knows it will hurt his chances of winning.

The bottom line is that Trump’s attitude towards selling himself in politics is the same as it is in business–the entire voting public is, in a sense, a customer base for Trump University.  The difference is that his interests have turned from money to power.  And that’s really, really scary.

 

The GOP nominee Don.

He wants the establishment gone.

It’s all plain to me.

Is it so hard to see

That the emperor has no clothes on?

The Bush family and Mitt Romney, who have old-fashioned principles and no political prospects for the foreseeable future, clearly do not plan to attend or support the Trump coronation.  Most of the other active GOP players, most notably Marco Rubio, have fallen into line, as expected.  The following graphic will explain why it is in their self-interest:

                              Support                     Don’t Support

Trump Wins     Cabinet post?       Alone in the wilderness

Trump Loses     Slightly tainted    No future support from Reactionaries

If you have plans to run for office as a GOP candidate in the future, the risks of supporting Trump are clearly outweighed by its benefits.

Cruz hasn’t committed himself yet, but you can expect him to fall into line eventually.  It makes sense for him to put off his endorsement to the last minute because:

1.  It gives him more leverage with Trump;
2.  It will attract more attention; and
3.  It puts more distance between the endorsement and his personal attacks on Trump, thereby making him look slightly less like the spineless, self-serving hypocrite that he will actually be.

 

I never served in the armed forces.  I have not lived through a conflict that anyone reasonably believed could cost me my life or my freedom.  I don’t know anyone who died fighting for our country.  For these omissions in my life, I have no regrets.

I have serious doubts that anyone without these experiences can feel as intensely patriotic as anyone with them.  It is also completely obvious that even the best and most “realistic” of movies and literature portray warfare in a fragmented and sanitized way.  Nevertheless, they are my point of reference, because nothing better is available.

What I can do, notwithstanding the acknowledged limits of my understanding, is try to put myself in the position of a young farmer from Ohio with no previous experience of warfare who found himself fighting desperately to save his country at Gettysburg, or a man who willingly gave up a comfortable desk job to throw grenades into tunnels in the face of withering Japanese fire on Okinawa because it needed to be done.  My life today would be very different without them, so they are entitled to my undying thanks, and they have them.

Donald Trump lies, shamelessly, all of the time; a fact-checking organization reviewed his statements at one point and rated 75 percent of them, I believe it was, false.  While some of his lies are just typical ideological mumbo-jumbo, he has broken new ground by citing long-discredited conspiracy theories, and occasionally he just makes demonstrably and even gratuitously incorrect statements about insignificant facts (e.g., Trump steaks).

The existence of the lies is not in debate.  The questions for today are:

1. Why does he think this is acceptable behavior?
2. Why is he getting away with it?

The most plausible response to #1 is that Trump views politics as just another form of business, and he views his business as an ongoing and ceaseless stream of negotiations in which he is unwise to show his hand too early.   In other words, campaigning is nothing but salesmanship, and if the American public is foolish enough to buy into his opening positions, well, caveat emptor.

Does he behave this way with his family?  If he ever prays, does he try to make amazing deals with God?  The possibility cannot be completely dismissed.

As to #2, part of it is the MSM engaging in their familiar practice of false equivalence, but the larger part is that Trump’s supporters don’t care about the details; the only thing that matters to them is that Trump feels their pain and wants to make them great again by destroying their enemies.  In the big picture, the end justifies the means.

 

“The Graduate” will turn 50 next year.  In the unlikely event that you’ve never seen it, the protagonist of the movie is a young, idealistic, newly-minted Baby Boomer college graduate with no clear plans who is confronted with a future in an adult world that looks drab, corrupt, and overly materialistic.  He is comically seduced by Mrs. Robinson, a much older woman who stands for all of the corruption of her generation.  In the end, of course, our hero ultimately retains his ideals and prevails.

The movie is a classic of its kind, but it should be seen as a myth or a cartoon;  the distinction between the boring, racist, materialistic World War II generation and the truth-seeking Boomers was always absurd.  Today, of course, the tables have turned;  Boomers are largely viewed as being narcissistic and self-indulgent, while Mrs. Robinson would be lauded as a member of the “Greatest Generation.” Tom Brokaw probably believes she fought heroically for our freedom at Omaha Beach.  But that is a topic for another day.

The current relevance of this is simple;  it is clear that many Sanders supporters, and possibly even Bernie himself (he is a sixties guy, after all) see their campaign against Hillary Clinton in much the same light as the movie.  My advice to them is to get over their self-righteousness and move on.  In the real world, as opposed to the mythological one portrayed in the movie, there are no perfect candidates, and no completely pure political choices; every election requires an identification of the lesser evil.  Hillary is not the Democrats’ equivalent of Mrs. Robinson, and Donald Trump is, in fact, a clear and present danger to the country.

The GOP nominee Don.

As retro and sexist as Bond.

In Cleveland they’ll say

While he’s king for a day

As a winner, he can’t touch LeBron.

I read two items touching on Saudi Arabia last Sunday that deserve some discussion in this blog.  The first was a letter to the editor in the latest Atlantic from a Saudi prince excoriating President Obama for not standing with his country and the “Egyptian people” (i.e., the military autocracy) in its battles with Iran and the Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.  The second was a feature article in the NYT about the influence of Saudi and other Middle Eastern money in radicalizing Muslims in Kosovo.

President Obama has famously described our relationship with the Saudis as “complicated.”  That sounds about right to me.

Here is my analysis of the relationship:

1. We have no shared values with Saudi Arabia.  None.  If anything, Iran is a slightly less repressive place to live, which obviously isn’t saying much.  The Kingdom is the Islamic State lite.
2.  Our “alliance” with the Saudis has always been based on our mutual hostility towards Iran and both parties’ need to keep the supply of oil flowing smoothly. In the past, the Saudis have also promoted political stability in the area, which is generally in our interests.  All of these things are changing: the Saudis are no longer the swing producer of oil; we have succeeded in making the nuclear deal with Iran, and we have to collaborate with them to some extent in Iraq; and the Saudis have started to play their hand against the Iranians much more aggressively.
3.  Virtually every time there is an act of terrorism against the West, or indigenous people espousing Western values, by radical Muslims, you can ultimately find a connection to a madrassa supported by Saudi (not Iranian) money. The Saudis have built up a soft power empire in that manner that is antithetical to liberal democratic values.
4.  Iran is still a hostile power and must be treated with caution.  Saudi Arabia is too thinly populated to defend itself against Iran, which means that it remains appropriate for the US to guarantee its security, given its continuing (if declining) importance to the world economy.  That doesn’t mean we have any kind of moral obligation to serve as the tip of the Sunni spear everywhere in the Middle East. Our interest is in promoting peace, human rights, and the free flow of oil, not in underwriting Saudi dominance of the area.
5.  Whether we like it or not, we have to work with Iran to get rid of IS in Iraq, and the Iranians will be a player in any political solution in Syria.  Our relations with Iran will, therefore, become more “complicated” (and not just hostile) over time.

In short, Obama is right to refuse to give his unconditional support to Saudi adventures in the Middle East.  And if the Saudis don’t like that, what would they make of a President Trump?

Since Trump’s only real ideology is self-worship, this campaign is going to focus largely on personal attacks from both sides.  You can expect to see the following:

From the Clinton campaign:

1.  Trump is a loser, not a winner.  Since the whole rationale for Trump revolves around him being a winner, there will be plenty of discussion about his business failures and his privileged upbringing.

2.  Trump doesn’t have the qualifications or the temperament to be President.  Do you really want to live in a world in which nuclear war is viewed as a bargaining chip?

3.  Trump is an obscenely rich guy who doesn’t care about working people.  His comments about wages being too high at one of the debates, his tax cut plan, and his use of eminent domain will feature prominently here.

4.  Nothing Trump says can be trusted.  There will be plenty of evidence about lies, flip-flops, and questionable business practices.

5.  Trump will take away your health insurance.  That’s his plan, anyway.  I suspect he will back off his latest pronouncement on the subject and just revert to his promise to replace Obamacare with “something really great.”

6.  Trump is a misogynist and a bigot.  No elaboration necessary.

7.  Trump’s protectionist plans will be a disaster for American workers.  There should be some discussion about price increases for foreign goods that are a staple of American life.

8.  Trump and the GOP will launch a war on women’s rights.  Trump’s list of potential Supreme Court nominees will be important here.

Trump will respond with the following:

1.  Hillary is a warmonger who will drag us into pointless conflicts in the Middle East.  The evidence to support this:  the Iraq War vote and Libya.

2.  Hillary enabled her husband’s mistreatment of women.  I don’t think this will resonate with anyone who doesn’t already despise her.

3.  I will make great deals all over the world, based on my record as a developer.  No elaboration necessary.

4.  Hillary doesn’t have my business experience and thus knows nothing about creating jobs.  I’ve discussed the “run government like a business” theme on several previous occasions.

5.  Hillary is running for a third Obama term.  We need something different.  In the final analysis, this is the one that matters most.

6.  Benghazi and the e-mails.  Yawn.

7.  I’m completely independent; Hillary is owned by big donors, especially on Wall Street.  Of course, this argument is harder to sell if Trump is soliciting huge sums from GOP donors, as he almost certainly will.

When it is all said and done, the outcome of the election will ride primarily on two unresolved questions:

1.  Will minorities go to the polls in large numbers to vote for a white woman out of fear of a Trump victory?

2.  Are Americans so dissatisfied with the current state of events (5% unemployment, a stock market just below 18,000, no large scale conflicts, etc.) to take a chance on someone without the qualifications or temperament to be President?

During the 2012 campaign, Grover Norquist made a comment to the effect that the only thing he asked of the GOP nominee was to have enough fingers to hold the pen that would sign the Ryan budget.  Trump has enough digits, and they appear to be large enough to hold the pen;  the question is, would he sign?

On its face, no; Trump clearly has serious differences with Ryan on his spending priorities, particularly on entitlements.  That said, a President Trump would be under enormous pressure from the leaders in his own party to ignore his campaign commitments and cut entitlements, and these are people with whom he would otherwise be making his amazing deals.  Would we then see Don the Dealmaker, or Don the Demagogue?

The honest answer to that question is that I don’t know, and neither does anyone else, probably including Trump himself.  One thing is for certain:  any voter who blindly relies on his promises not to cut entitlements is making a mistake, given Trump’s willingness to change course on virtually every issue under the sun, and his need to get along with the leaders of his party to get anything done.

The Democrat maverick named Bern.

For a far left wing party he yearns.

He’s going to Philly.

His platform’s a dilly.

They’ll let him talk when it’s his turn.

Brooks wrote a column in Saturday’s NYT in which he attributed a substantial part of our ongoing inequality and wage stagnation problem to the increasing lack of mobility of American workers in areas with few or low-paying jobs.  He then suggested some remedies for this problem that, for me, were pretty thin gruel.

From 20,000 feet, Brooks is largely right; I have little doubt that it would be more cost-effective to find ways to pay people to leave depressed areas than to make huge public investments in these areas with a very uncertain return.  That said, his column ignored some serious issues:

1.  It is perfectly natural for mobility to decrease as both the population and the country age.  It wasn’t terribly hard to people to leave places that their families had only inhabited for a generation or two.  It is much harder when your family has been there for five or six generations.  As time goes by, the US becomes more like the Old World countries that our forefathers decided to leave than the more dynamic country they arrived in a century or so ago.

2.  Housing is a big problem.  It is difficult to leave a place where housing is cheap to go to a new area where it is much more expensive.  A large part of the “Texas Miracle” is based on the fact that housing is inexpensive due to minimal land use regulation.

3.  The GOP makes the problem worse with its politically expedient nostalgia.  Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump don’t exactly encourage people to up sticks when they tell us that we can bring the good old jobs back just by getting rid of the Democrats.  I’m sure Brooks is aware of that, but he is a loyal GOP member, so don’t expect him to comment on it anytime soon.