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Sunday, July 29, 2018

I've been wanting to write something about the liberal hawk rants over Trump's summits with Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin, his snubs of "traditional allies" like the EU, his denigration of NATO, and other acts (or just tweets) crossing the line of politically correct dogma, in some cases even eliciting the word "treason" (the one word I'd most like to vanish from the language). Still, as I ran out of time, I decided to do a quickie Weekend Roundup instead, then found myself sucked into that very same rabbit hole.

I don't know why it's so hard to explain this. (Well, I do know that everywhere I turn I run into new examples of well-meaning idiocy -- the Stephen Cohen piece below has a bunch of examples. A couple more, by Michael H Fuchs and Simon Tisdall, just showed up in the Guardian. There's that piece by Jessica Matthews on "His Korean 'Deal'" over at NYRB. The Yglesias pieces I do cite below are nowhere near the worst.) After all, a key point was written up by the late Chalmers Johnson nearly years ago and recently republished at TomDispatch as Three Good Reasons to Liquidate Our Empire.

The fact that I missed writing up a Weekend Roundup last week no doubt adds to the eclectic and arbitrary mix below. It's been real hard to sort out what's important., especially when everywhere you look turns up new heaps of horror.

But I also neglected the one bright spot I'm aware of from the last two weeks: we had a rally here in Wichita where Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders spoke and some 4,000 people showed up. This was an event for James Thompson's campaign for Congress (the seat previously held by Mike Pompeo and, before that, Todd Tiahrt). Thompson ran for the vacant seat after Trump nominated Pompeo to run the CIA, losing by a 6% margin a district that Trump won by 28% despite getting zero outside support from the national or state Democratic Parties. Thompson vowed to keep running, and we're hopeful.

Kansas has a primary on Tuesday. Thompson has an opponent, who may have gotten a lucky break with a newspaper article today that claims the only issue separating the candidates is guns: Thompson, a former Army vet, is regarded as more "pro gun" -- not that he has a chance in hell of wrangling an NRA endorsement. Actually, I suspect there's a lot more at stake: Thompson has established himself as a dedicated civil rights attorney, while his opponent worked as a corporate lobbyist.

The Democratic gubernatorial race is a mixed bag, where all of the candidates have blemishes, but any would be better than any of the Republicans (or rich "independent" Greg Orman). Jim Barnett got the Wichita Eagle endorsement for Republican governor, but the actual race seems to be a toss-up between Jeff Colyer (former Lt. Governor who took over when Sam Brownback returned to Washington, and a virtual Brownback clone) and Kris Kobach (current Secretary of State, freelance author of unconstitutional laws, and a big Trump booster). Polls seem to be split, with a vast number of undecideds. Kobach would turn Kansas (even more) into a national laughing stock, which doesn't mean he can't win. Orman came very close to beating Sen. Pat Roberts four years ago, after the Democrat ducked out of the race, but I don't see that happening this time, making him a mere spoiler.

Some scattered links this week:

• Matthew Yglesias: He seems to have given up on his "week explained" articles, but still writes often and broadly enough his posts are still useful for surveying the week in politics. Most recent first:

  • Closing ads from the Georgia gubernatorial nominees perfectly illustrate the state of the parties: "Stacey Abrams talks about issues; Brian Kemp says he's not politically correct."

    Abrams's ad is called "Trusted" while Kemp's is called "Offends," and they only diverge further from there. Abrams talks about issues, and she talks optimistically about making people's lives better in a concrete way. Kemp, typically for a 2018 Republican, talks exclusively about diffuse threats to the white Christian cultural order.

    Abrams says she has "a boundless belief in Georgia's future," and talks about Medicaid expansion, middle-class taxes, and mass transit.

    Kemp describes himself as "a politically incorrect conservative" and literally does not mention any policy issues. Instead, he says that he says "Merry Christmas" and "God bless you," stands for the national anthem, and supports our troops, and that if that offends you, then you shouldn't vote for him.

  • Trump's enduring political strength with white women, explained: "There are huge divides by age and education."

  • Republicans now like the FBI less than they like the EPA: "Meanwhile, most Americans have an unfavorable view of ICE." On the other hand, that 83-84% of Democrats "have confidence" in CIA and FBI shows them to be pretty gullible.

  • Donald rump is actually a very unpopular president.

  • Swing voters are extremely real: A lot of polling data here. A couple things I'm struck by: that a relatively significant number of voters saw Trump as moderate or even liberal; and that even on extremely polarized issues (like abortion) both parties have large minorities that still vote for their chosen party.

  • Trump says he's "not thrilled" by Federal Reserve interest rate hikes.

  • Trump's latest interview on Russia shows the profound crisis facing America: This piece winds up wobbling as severely as Trump does in the interview at its heart. So while this much is true:

    Trump was evasive and ignorant, relentlessly dishonest, and at turns belligerent and weirdly passive -- all in an interview that lasted less than eight minutes. It's clear that he is either covering up some kind of profound wrongdoing or else simply in way over his head and incapable of managing the country's affairs. . . . Trump and Putin sat in a room together for a long time. They presumably talked about something. No staffers were there, so it wasn't that Trump was zoning out while the real dialogue happened at the staff level. . . . And then there is Trump's relentless fishiness on the subject of Russia and hacking. . . . Trump, of course, had nothing of substance to say about this but returned to a longtime theme of his tweets -- that the investigation is a "witch hunt" and that its very existence harms the country -- that completely undermines the pose that he thinks it's bad for Russian state-sponsored hackers to commit crimes against Americans. . . .

    The problem in the US-Russia relationship for a long time now has been that while Russia does a lot that America sees as misbehavior that it wants stopped, there genuinely isn't that much that America affirmatively wants from Russia or that Russia can do for us. And Trump himself has no ideas on this front either. He likes that Putin likes his North Korea diplomacy, and doesn't see that maybe Putin likes it because it's really absurd and Putin doesn't have America's best interests at heart.

    Yglesias thinks the last line is the "best case" scenario -- others readily parrot Cold War memes claiming that Russia's intent is to do harm to America regardless of consequences for Russia. They evince a classic case of projection: attributing motives and even acts to Putin that are really their own. After all, is there any "misbehavior" that America's Russophobes have charged Putin with that American agents haven't carried out many times over? (I won't bore you with the list, but even when it comes to fomenting revolts to annex territory, Crimea is small potatoes compared to Texas and Hawaii. And don't get me started on shooting down civilian airliners.) It's no surprise when conceited, self-aggrandizing nations abuse their power, and from our perspective it's easy to fault Putin's Russia when they do. However, one should respond just as readily when America does the same, and that's a part that's inevitably missing when Yglesias and others rattle off their list of Russian "misbehavior." Also missing is recognition that there is a huge imbalance in interests and power between America and Russia, as should be clear from the areas of dispute: Ukraine and Georgia are literally on Russia's border, traditional trading partners that the US and Europe have conspired to lure away, while NATO expansion has moved American troops ever closer to the Russian border, while new anti-missile systems seek to negate Russia's nuclear deterrent, while sanctions further isolate and impoverish the Russian economy. It may be inappropriate for Russia to interfere in the political affairs of its neighbors, but that isn't a complaint that Americans are entitled to make without focusing their efforts on their own country's same violations.

    It makes perfect sense that Putin and his cronies might see hacking as a way of leveling the playing field, or maybe just poking the beast. (It's certainly not as if the US isn't doing the same thing and then some: my book notes file has a dozen or so volumes on "cyberwar" and the NSA.) I've spent enough time looking at server security logs to know that a lot of mischief arises from .ru (and .zh) domains. And it makes sense that Putin would favor someone like Trump, and not just because they share authoritarian streaks: Putin is tight with many of the oligarchs who managed to snap up so many previously state-owned enterprises, and those oligarchs are used to doing business with billionaires like Trump. If anyone in American politics is capable of putting personal avarice above imperial hubris, it's surely someone like Trump.

    On the other hand, it was at best a long-shot, as Trump isn't smart or coherent or principled or popular enough to drive his own foreign policy, but he has shown that when he makes a conciliatory gesture on the side of peace, contrary to America's "deep state" dogma, that move turns out to be rather popular, even as it elicits furious scorn from establishment pundits. Most alarming here are the liberals/Democrats who think they're doing us a favor by attacking Trump via widespread residual prejudices against Putin and Russia -- who somehow believe that sabotaging the unholy Trump-Putin alliance is progressivism at its finest. I've been wanting to write something deeper about how wrongheaded these people are, but cannot do that here. When I see people who supposedly cherish peace and are committed to democracy throw their beliefs away just to score cheap and meaningless points, well . . . it boggles my mind.

  • Trump gave congressional Republicans the deniability they crave: The rest of Yglesias' Russia pieces are similarly worthless. Trump doesn't have a foreign policy -- what the US does is largely what it's been doing on autopilot for 20 (or maybe 60) years -- but he does have a persona, which waxes hot and cold according to Trump's intuition of how it plays to his public -- a public which relishes grand gestures while having no command of or feeling for details. And like that public, Trump takes many of his clues from how much he offends the self-confirmed experts -- especially those railing about how Trump's attacking "traditional allies" and embracing "our enemies": people who think they're scoring points by embracing all those past strategies which have repeatedly pushed America into conflicts and wars. The tell here is when critics seize on utter nonsense to put Trump down. For instance, this piece recycles the "I think the European Union is a foe" quote. I've seen the interview the quote was taken from, and clearly Trump was tricked into using "foe" for something much closer to rival.

  • It's time to take Trump both seriously and literally on Russia.

  • Asked directly, Putin does not deny possessing "compromising material" on Trump.

• Damian Carrington: Extreme global weather is 'the face of climate change' says leading scientist: Michael Mann is the scientist, although "other senior scientists agree the link is clear." Europe seems to be especially hard hit at the moment: Patrick Greenfield: Extreme weather across Europe delays flights, ferries and Eurotunnel -- but the heat wave and fires in California rival those in Sweden and Greece.

• Stephen F Cohen: Trump as New Cold War Heretic: More like the guy who didn't get the memo and wound up trying to wing it.

• Elizabeth Kolbert: The Trump Administration Takes on the Endangered Species Act.

• Paul Krugman: Radical Democrats Are Pretty Reasonable.

• Emily Stewart: One chart that shows how much worse income inequality is in America than Europe: based on Eric Levitz: New Study Confirms That American Workers Are Getting Ripped Off. Also includes charts showing that the US ranks third in highest "share of households earning less than half the median income" (after Eurozone losers Greece and Spain), and second in "earnings at the 90th percentile as a multiple of earnings at the 10th percentile, for full-time workers" (after Israel, where the 10th percentile is almost exclusively Palestinian). These numbers come from the OECD, and don't include Russia, the only country where inequality has expanded even more radically than in the United States. Much more here (like: "only Turkey, Lithuania, and South Korea have lower unionization rates than the United States"), but here's the chart Stewart referred to:

  

  Note that the trend line points the same directions in US and Western Europe: that the latter still has considerable and increasing inequality. Indeed, the concentration of capital worldwide is putting increasing pressure on Western Europe, but thus far democratic institutions there have been more effective at resisting the greed and corruption that has managed to so distort politics in the United States. Note especially Levitz's conclusion:

  President Trump spends a great deal of time and energy arguing that American workers are getting a rotten deal. And he's right to claim that Americans are getting the short end. But the primary cause of that fact isn't bad trade agreements or "job killing" regulations -- its the union-busting laws and court rulings that the president has done so much to abet.

• Matt Taibbi: Why We Know So Little About the U.S.-Backed War in Yemen:

  What the U.N. calls the "world's worst humanitarian crisis" is an unhappy confluence of American media taboos. . . . Yemen features the wrong kinds of victims, lacks a useful partisan angle and, frankly, is nobody's idea of clickbait in the Trump age. Until it becomes a political football for some influential person or party, this disaster will probably stay near the back of the line.

  Taibbi also wrote: Trump's War on the Media Should Make Us Better at Our Jobs.

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