Cromwell

If you haven’t read the article about Puerto Rico in yesterday’s NYT, I would strongly recommend it as a case study on American politics.  It isn’t pretty.

The background of the story is that the island’s debt is unsustainable, which means that some creditors are going to lose a lot of money, the federal government will have to provide a bailout, or both.  The story tells us that hedge funds with big speculative investments (at very high interest rates, naturally) are fighting through the political system to make sure that they aren’t the losers in this process.  Their weapons are campaign contributions, lobbyists, and Astroturf political groups.  Thus far, they are at least holding their own in the battle.

According to the article, Rubio, given his large number of Puerto Rican constituents, is in the middle of this discussion.  He initially supported the idea of a bankruptcy process, but changed his mind after some of the hedge funds in question started contributing  money to his campaign.  He now sees bankruptcy only as a “last resort,” whatever that means.

There are a number of things to take away from this:

1. Bernie Sanders really should jump on this article if he truly wants to make his case that the system is rigged against the average citizen.
2. Notwithstanding their rhetoric, Republicans do not oppose bailouts as long as they go to their kind of people.
3. Rubio didn’t exactly cover himself in glory by repudiating his previous commitments on immigration.  This is additional evidence that his backbone is a lot more flexible than he would have you believe.

It has occurred to me that the two have a lot in common.  How do they stack up?

            Sanders      v.     Santa

Northern Base         Vermont                  North Pole

Age                             Old                            Timeless

White Hair                Yes                            Yes

Free Stuff       Government Spending     Christmas Presents

And the winner is. . . Santa, who polls much better than Sanders, although GOP voters would probably launch a war against him if they thought he was giving presents to the undeserving poor.

 

 

 

 

Twelve pollsters polling

Eleven cameras running

Ten walls a-building

Nine fairs attending

Eight guards a-guarding

Seven limos driving

Six taxes cutting

Five more debates!

Four town halls

Three web ads

Two new wars

And a Trumpster in a clown car.

 

Thus begins a series of special posts on Christmas.

1. Was there a line for the ladies’ room?
2.  I can’t put my finger on it, but there is something about Martin O’Malley that annoys me.  I wish he would quit and leave the stage to the two serious candidates.
3.  I appreciate Sanders’ passionate, no b.s. approach to the issues.  Unfortunately, almost everything he says about programs that cost money is a left-wing cliche, and he never deals openly with the tax consequences of these programs or what they might mean to the overall economy.
4.  The split between O’Malley and Sanders on the one hand and Clinton on the other with regard to ISIS and Assad directly mirrors a similar split in the GOP field.  There were times when Bernie sounded just like Rand Paul.
5.  The question to Clinton about her responsibility for the ongoing problems in Libya was completely fair and appropriate (unlike all of the GOP rubbish about Benghazi).  Her comments about the Libyans refusing help were news to me.  I would hope that someone would follow up on that in the coming days.

Nothing that was said tonight will make a significant difference in the election.  It will be interesting, though, to see if Trump accuses his GOP critics of agreeing with Hillary.  I’m willing to bet he does.

It is an article of faith among Reactionaries that they constitute a majority of “real Americans,” and that the key to winning the presidential race is to mobilize millions of evangelical voters who are turned off by moderate GOP candidates and do not vote.  In electoral terms, this is the basis for the Cruz campaign.  Unfortunately for him, there is no support in the data for this position, as he will discover if he gets the nomination.

Similarly, the “Sanders Revolution” is based on the premise that he can inspire millions of disaffected potential Democratic voters to register and vote for him.  These people actually do exist, but there is no reason to believe that they are sufficiently motivated by a cranky old white guy to get out and vote, even though it might be in their economic self-interest.

He’s the big favorite in the Assad primary, too.  No polling yet on Xi.

I’ve got those dirty, lowdown contraception blues.

You surely know of them; they’re all over the news.

We try to shut Obama down, but we always lose.

We don’t accept that there’s a woman’s right to choose.

 

We’ve done our level best to stop Planned Parenthood.

We should eliminate their evil deeds for good.

We’d close the government if we only could.

Why can’t Ryan win for us, like he said he would?

 

I’ve got the blues.

Abortion clinic blues.

Can’t find an offer that Obama won’t refuse.

I know the folks back home can feel my frustration.

Guess I’ll keep pushing for more state regulations.

The real significance of the agreement is that, for the first time, the principal players in climate change prevention–the US, China, and India–have all recognized that they have a direct and compelling stake in the matter, and that nothing will be accomplished (and disaster looms) if anyone insists on the right to be a free rider.  As a result, even though the structure of the deal is unconventional, it is conceivable that it could work.

(As I predicted, the Fiorina boomlet fizzled out months ago, so my Fiorina Friday feature is being discontinued.  However, one of her comments at the latest debate requires a response.)

Fiorina has a narrative supporting her candidacy that runs something like this:

1. The federal government is inept because it is poorly managed and lacks tech skills;
2.  Therefore, what the country really needs is a successful manager with strong connections to Silicon Valley;
3.  That’s me!

When she was asked a question about the tech companies’ position on encryption, an honest answer would have conflicted with her narrative, so she decided to hum a few bars and fake it.  As we know, this isn’t the first time she has done that;  I imagine most of my readers remember her bogus description of the body part footage a few months ago.

As the saying goes, never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Several commentators have noted recently that the GOP is the only conservative party in a democratic state which denies the science of climate change.  This has occurred since 2008, when John McCain supported cap and trade.  While some of their motivation obviously revolves around the economic importance of fossil fuel industries, conservative parties in other countries with similar economic structures (Australia and Canada are the analogies) have shown more flexibility on the subject.  Why?

I would suggest a number of reasons:

1.  The importance of money in US elections, particularly after Citizens United:  Campaigns are regulated more stringently in other countries.  Contributions are a great way of enforcing the party line on this and other issues.

2.  The role of evangelical right-wingers:  There are climate change deniers in this country who base their views, not on science, but on their understanding that God promised no more great floods in the Bible.  These kinds of opinions are less prevalent in other, less religious countries.

3.  America has more small government DNA due to its history:  Australia and Canada did not fight a war for independence against what was perceived to be an oppressive central government.  Any solution to climate change will inevitably require an increase in the size of the state, which is anathema to the GOP unless it involves the military.

The GOP stalwart Paul Ryan

Let the government run, I ain’t lyin’.

He humored the right

But abandoned their fight

So the blues the Tea Party is cryin’.

The men who deny climate change.

The evidence says they’re deranged.

Big money they get

From the fossil fuel set

So maybe it isn’t so strange.

 

I will discuss the reasons the GOP, unlike conservative parties elsewhere in the world, rejects climate change science tomorrow.

After I had written the post in which I called on the GOP to draft Netanyahu, I provided the list of his credentials to my wife and asked her to identify the person in question.  She guessed it was Putin.  I told her that, unlike Netanyahu, Putin didn’t have the support of the entire GOP, but the fact was that he met all of the other criteria in my list, which should tell you something about the current state of the GOP.

Inevitably, that brings us to Donald Trump.

Trump is portraying himself as a sort of American version of Putin:  a strong man who can get things done.  Not surprisingly, he spoken favorably about Putin in the past, and he supports Russian leadership in Syria.  But just how similar are the man with no shirt and the man on golf cart?

There is less here than meets the eye.  The bottom line with Putin is that he is still a former KGB agent–an icy, cynical bastard who puts on his Mussolini shtick because he thinks it helps him with the Russian public.  Some of Trump’s bombast is probably just opportunism, but I have to think that some of it is exactly who he is.  He would be no match for Putin.

 

Random reactions:

1.  The moderators did a good job of keeping the candidates focused on the issues and exposing their differences.  I just wish they could cut off their microphones or use an air horn when they talk out of turn (here’s looking at you, Ted!)
2.  I don’t think anything that happened last night will have a major impact on the campaign.
3.  Jeb Bush was much more effective last night than he has been in previous debates, but it was way too little, too late.
4.  Trump had some interesting comments about the Iraq War, but mostly he just pounded his chest and talked about how strong he is.  At some point, that act just has to wear out;  it makes the campaign look like one of those commercials for guys with low T.
5.  Apparently Ted Cruz believes in surgical carpet bombing, which is an oxymoron.
6.  Carly Fiorina believes that the best way to persuade the Chinese to work with us on North Korea is to engage in confrontations with them everywhere else.  That sounds like the German idea of expanding their fleet to bully the English into an alliance prior to World War I.  You know how that turned out.
7.  The candidates are genuinely divided on Assad.  The logic of the position taken by Trump, Cruz, and Paul leads to acquiescence in Russian leadership in the war against IS;  the others take the position that we have to fight IS and remove Assad, which is also the Obama Administration’s position.
8.  Did you hear any ideas for dealing with Syria, other than the no-fly zone that is supported by Hillary Clinton, that we are not already trying?  Me, neither.

Ross has yet another post today in which he struggles to identify a third way for American Muslims between wielding the sword of jihad on their countrymen and watering their beliefs down to the thin gruel of secularism.  The solution really isn’t that complicated.

As I indicated in a previous post, the genius of our system is that it permits genuinely pious people of all kinds of faiths to practice their religion without any significant interference so long as they do not attempt to impose their beliefs on others.  Since no American Muslim could reasonably hope to force his practices on a country with predominantly Christian roots, this is a perfectly satisfactory resolution of Douthat’s issue, and it does not mean that Muslims must become purely secular people.

In the final analysis, I think this question, for Ross, is really about abortion.  He does not see how a committed, passionate Catholic can avoid being a political crusader, and he assumes that religious people of all other faiths are similarly committed to remaking society in their own image.  They aren’t.