Sunday, July 17, 2016

Weekend Roundup

July is a month I can hardly wait to get done with, even though it leaves six or seven weeks of brutal heat to come. This year is about average for Kansas, aside from a surplus of rain that more than wiped out the spring deficit. Fitting that the major party conventions will also be dispatched during this month, although as I'm writing this they still loom: the candidates are settled, so no suspense there, and one of the veeps was revealed this week -- the utterly repugnant Mike Pence -- so the only remaining question is how to what extent each party embarrasses itself in trying to put forth its best face. Most years there is a post-convention bump in the polls. This year there's a fairly good chance for a post-convention slump.

Some prominent news items from this past week:

  • Bernie Sanders gave up his presidential campaign, acknowledging that Hillary Clinton had clinched the nomination, and endorsed her, vowing to do everything in his power to defeat Donald Trump in November -- mostly by repeating the planks of his "political revolution" platform, which Hillary is increasingly obliged to cozy up to.
  • Donald Trump, on the other hand, boxed himself into a corner and got stuck with Cruz-supporter Pence as his VP nominee. Pence is considered a sensible mainstream choice because he rarely initiates the right-wing lunatic programs he invariably winds up supporting. He's acceptable to Trump because he's so pliable he's already reversed himself on all of Trump's campaign platform, setting a fine example for all the other Republicans who had opposed Trump by showing them how a good puppy can roll over and play dead.
  • The UK has a new Prime Minister, Theresa May, committed to carrying out the Brexit referendum, in her own sweet time (and without the possible complication of electing a new parliament). She then picked the more flamboyant and demagogic Boris Johnson as Foreign Minister.
  • Factions of the Turkish military attempted a coup to seize power and oust democratically elected president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been widely criticized lately for recent laws that have restricted popular rights -- a power grab occasioned by worsening relations with Turkey's Kurdish minority and several "terrorist incidents" blamed on ISIS. The coup appears to have failed, with various members of the military being arrested in what threatens to turn into a large-scale purge.
  • Obama decided against a planned withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, changing their engagement orders to initiate offensive operations against the Taliban, thus widening and extending the war there. Escalations against Syria and Iraq continue, putting the US on its most aggressive military stance in years. At the same time, Obama is committing more US/NATO troops to the Russian frontier in Eastern Europe, increasing "cold war" tensions.
  • Eighty-four people were killed by a truck plowing through a Bastille Day crowd in Nice, France. The driver was Tunisian, so this is being played up as a "terrorist attack" although there doesn't seem to be any indication that he was politically or religiously motivated. (Which isn't to say the ISIS folks don't dig what he did.)
  • Three police officers were killed in Baton Rouge, a little over a week after Baton Rouge police killed Alton Sterling, starting off a round of Black Lives Matter protests. Early reports show that the shooter was another ex-Marine (like the shooter in Dallas).

Meanwhile, some scattered links this week:

  • Julie Bosman: Public Schools? To Kansas Conservatives, They're 'Government Schools': And like conservatives everywhere, they understand that the first step in demonizing someone or something is establishing what it's called. Until recently, Kansans prided themselves on their public school system (not that my own experience was very positive). That started to change as home schooling became popular for Christian fundamentalists, and turned into something more vicious when Republicans discovered that school teachers might pose a political threat, and more generally that education in the liberal arts and sciences might work against their dogmatically cultivated interests. And lately, of course, it has come down to money: public spending on education adds to deficits and/or taxes.

  • Patrick Cockburn: A Hillary Clinton Presidency Could End Up Letting Isis Off the Hook: Cites a paper by Michele Flournoy, widely considered to be Hillary's likely pick as Secretary of Defense, arguing that the US should refocus its Syria efforts against Assad rather than against ISIS. Still, it's not like she'd switch sides and back ISIS against Assad -- something that might actually work (distasteful as it may be; it's not as if the US has never supported Islamist fanatics before). No, she wants to buck up the pro-American Syrian rebels, the least effective group in the long civil war. Still, that doesn't justify Cockburn's provocative headline: Hillary is enough of a hawk she'd be happy to pound ISIS and Assad alike, and for however long it takes. Cockburn also implies that Hillary would forget the lessons Obama had learned about the futility of war in the Middle East (giving Obama far more credit than he deserves):

    The world may soon regret the passing of the Obama years as a Clinton administration plunges into conflicts where he hung back. He had clearly learned from the outcome of wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya in a way that she has not. He said in a speech on terrorism in 2013 that "any US military action in foreign land risks creating more enemies" and that the Washington foreign establishment's tendency to seek ill-considered military solutions was self-defeating. [ . . . ]

    All this is good news for Isis and al-Qaeda, whose spectacular growth since September 11 is mainly due to the US helping to spread the chaos in which they flourish. Obama could see the risks and limitations of military force, but Clinton may play straight into their hands.

    As for Hillary, what I find more worrying is that she still doesn't seem to be totally onboard with Obama's Iran Deal; see Philip Weiss: Iran deal is still imperilled by deep state -- hardliners, Israel lobby, Hillary Clinton. Part of the problem here is that Democrats and GOP are in a race to the bottom on Israel.

  • Donald Johnson: The iron law of institutions versus Bernie Sanders: Cites various editorials at the New York Times, finding them consistently obsessed with demonizing Sanders.

    Clinton supporters at the NYT have been almost uniformly nasty -- they hate Sanders and don't bother concealing it. Ultimately his policy based critiques of Clinton terrifies them and they don't want him or the movement he represents to have any credibility even if he endorses Clinton, because he hasn't retracted his critique. And yes, this does tie in with the Israel-Palestine conflict, because Clinton support for Benjamin Netanyahu flatly contradicts liberal ideals, so she either does this for the money or because she is a militarist like Netanyahu or both. (I think both). They tiptoe around that.

    This is a quibble, but I think Netanyahu is much more racist than militarist, not that they don't share an abiding belief in their respective nation's exceptionalism, especially as exemplified through military prowess (in both cases long in moral decline). But then I guess I'm leaning toward the "money" explanation for Hillary. Despite a term as Secretary of State which should have opened her eyes a bit, she seems completely in thrall to the donor class, which has in turn been completely cowed by Netanyahu, rendered blind to the racism which pervades Israeli political culture.

    It's not just institutions that are bitter over Sanders. Consider this Robert Christgau tweet: "This is more than I thought the progressives would get and has cut into how personally dislikable I find Sanders." "This" is Heather Gautney: How Bernie Sanders Delivered the Most Progressive Platform in Democratic Party History. Christgau is clearly closer on the issues to Sanders than to Hillary but supported the latter, I guess because he found Sanders "personally dislikable" -- I doubt that the two ever met, yet this seems to matter more to him more than, say, the Iraq War vote. There are others I know and respect politically who have directed even worse snark at Sanders, a personal bitterness I find unfathomable -- I certainly can't rationalize it like Johnson does for those New York Times flacks.

  • Martin Longman: Mike Pence Is Not a Conventional Politician: On Trump's Veep:

    Let's start with some things that are being said that simply aren't true. Writing for the BBC, Anthony Zurcher says "In a year that has defied political conventions, he was a very conventional choice."

    But there's absolutely nothing "conventional" about Mike Pence. He is a man who cannot say if he believes in the theory of evolution and has spent twenty years spreading doubt about climate change. He's a man who wants teenage girls (including victims of incest) to get parental consent to use contraceptives, who has done all he can to deny contraception to women of every age, who signed a law mandating that all aborted fetuses should receive proper burials, who supports discrimination against gays and wants to withhold federal funding from any organization that "encourage(s) the types of behaviors that facilitate the spreading of the HIV virus." [ . . . ]

    Obviously, I could go on for a long time highlighting things about Pence that are alarming or ridiculous, but I'm trying to focus on things that set him apart from even mainstream conservatives. I mean, it matters that he loved the idea of fighting in Iraq or that he has rigorously supported the same kinds of free trade agreements that Trump opposes, but he's not alone in those things.

    To the degree that it can be legitimately argued that Pence is "conventional," it's an enormous testimony to how far right the party has drifted since the time of Jack Kemp and Dan Quayle and Poppy Bush and Gerald Ford. But it's actually not true that we've seen someone this far right nominated before. No, not even Palin or Cheney were this radical across the board.

    For more, see Longman's pre-pick Mike Pence Makes Zero Sense as Veep:

    If Trump is using the same theory of the case that McCain used in picking Sarah Palin, that it was necessary to shore up weak support from the Christian conservative base, then we already saw that this is a losing strategy.

    Selecting Pence will drive responsible business leaders even further into Clinton's camp. It will severely alienate women and moderates on social issues. Millennials will flee in panic. And, once the press picks over Pence's congressional record, any reassurance that Trump will have a steady hand to deal with Congress will be completely undermined.

    Pence has actual negative charisma, so he won't win over anyone by being smart or funny or charming.

    Other pieces on Pence: Sean Illing: The sad incurious case of Mike Pence; Nico Lang: Mike Pence is even worse than you think; John Nichols: Trump Pick Pence Is a Right-Wing Political Careerist Who Desperately Wants Out of Indiana; Charles Pierce: Of Course, Donald Trump's Vice Presidential Announcement Was All About Trump; Mike Pence Is a Smooth-Talking Todd Akin; George Zornick: Vice President Pence Would Be a Dream for the Koch Brothers.

  • Ron Paul: Fool's Errand: NATO Pledges Four More Years of War in Afghanistan: Obama may be a "lame duck" as far as appointing new judges is concerned, but no one seems to be using the term as he's laying out the framework that will tie up his successor in hopeless wars through that successor's term: adding troops in Afghanistan and Iraq/Syria (and on the Russian frontier in Eastern Europe). I don't often cite Paul because I don't generally approve of his snark, but this isn't terribly off base:

    President Obama said last week that the US must keep 3,000 more troops than planned in Afghanistan. The real reason is obvious: the mission has failed and Washington cannot bear to admit it. [ . . . ] Where else but in government would you see it argued that you cannot stop spending on a project because you have already spent so much to no avail? In the real world, people who invest their own hard-earned money in a failed scheme do something called "cut your losses." Government never does that. [ . . . ]

    The neocons argue that Iraq, Libya, and other US interventions fell apart because the US did not stay long enough. As usual they are wrong. They failed and they will continue to fail because they cannot succeed. You cannot invade a country, overthrow its government, and build a new country from the ground up. It is a fool's errand and Washington has turned most Americans into fools.

    Paul underestimates the ingenuity of the war crowd. For instance, Mark Perry: How Islamic State Is Getting Beaten at Home -- and Taking Terror Abroad argues that events like Nice show how much progress Obama is making against ISIS in Syria. Perry confuses killing people, which the US is quite proficient at, with providing a viable, peaceful alternative, something the US evidently has no clue how to do. He could have noted that the recent shootings of police in Dallas and Baton Rouge are at least as much a part of the war coming home as the "sudden radicalization" of the truck driver in Nice.

  • Dani Rodrik: The Abdication of the Left: An important economist on globalization issues faults the left in Northern Europe for failing to respond coherently to the negative repercussions for their countries:

    Latin American democracies provide a telling contrast. These countries experienced globalization mostly as a trade and foreign-investment shock, rather than as an immigration shock. Globalization became synonymous with so-called Washington Consensus policies and financial opening. Immigration from the Middle East or Africa remained limited and had little political salience. So the populist backlash in Latin America -- in Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, and, most disastrously, Venezuela -- took a left-wing form.

    The story is similar in the main two exceptions to right-wing resurgence in Europe -- Greece and Spain. In Greece, the main political fault line has been austerity policies imposed by European institutions and the International Monetary Fund. In Spain, most immigrants until recently came from culturally similar Latin American countries. In both countries, the far right lacked the breeding ground it had elsewhere.

    But the experience in Latin America and southern Europe reveals perhaps a greater weakness of the left: the absence of a clear program to refashion capitalism and globalization for the twenty-first century. From Greece's Syriza to Brazil's Workers' Party, the left has failed to come up with ideas that are economically sound and politically popular, beyond ameliorative policies such as income transfers. [ . . . ]

    A crucial difference between the right and the left is that the right thrives on deepening divisions in society -- "us" versus "them" -- while the left, when successful, overcomes these cleavages through reforms that bridge them. Hence the paradox that earlier waves of reforms from the left -- Keynesianism, social democracy, the welfare state -- both saved capitalism from itself and effectively rendered themselves superfluous. Absent such a response again, the field will be left wide open for populists and far-right groups, who will lead the world -- as they always have -- to deeper division and more frequent conflict.

    We in America have far too little appreciation for the destructiveness of the right's conflicts, not just because we fight our wars far away -- not that US policy in Central America and Haiti hasn't sent waves of emigrés our way, but refugees from US wars in the Middle East mostly head for Europe -- but also because we are reluctant to credit our wars with the right's division and depradation of the middle class here, let alone the growing frequency of sporadic violence.

  • David Smith: Donald Trump: the making of a narcissist: Long profile on a guy you probably think you already know too much about. Still, some of his key insights are based on a profile and book by Mark Singer:

    In the nine years since, Singer has seen nothing to alter his view of Trump as unburdened by a hinterland. "People talk about a private Trump and a public Trump," he says in his Manhattan apartment. "I'm not so convinced because I've seen both and the bombast is there, the obvious extreme self-involvement has always been there. He doesn't have a sense of irony. He's a terrible listener but that's a characteristic of narcissistic people. They're not engaged with anybody else's issues."

  • Tierney Sneed: Forget Trump! The GOP's Convention Platform Makes It the Party of Kris Kobach: Kobach's day job is Secretary of State in Kansas -- i.e., the guy in charge of making sure that undesirables can't vote -- but he's also a notorious moonlighter, crafting dozens of pieces of legislation for Republican state legislatures, most of which are subsequently declared unconstitutional. He was the only Republican of note in Kansas who endorsed Trump before the caucuses (Brownback, Roberts, and Pompeo lined up for Rubio, while Huelskamp -- locked in another primary challenge by farmers who don't appreciate his opposition to farm subsidies -- is still proud to be known as a Cruz supporter), so he had an inside track on Trumpifying the GOP platform, and as usual he's first in line to take credit for feats normal lawyers would find embarrassing. One peculiarly Kansas touch was "language opposing the inclusion of the prairie chicken and sage grouse on the endangered species list" -- oil people find those birds annoying, and Kansas Republicans can hardly wait for them to become extinct, and therefore no longer a threat to the oil bidness.

    For more on the platform, see Donald Trump's weaponized platform: A project three decades in the making. I seriously doubt that Trump came up with any of his idea by reading William S. Lind and/or Paul Weyrich or that he's come up with anything as coherent (if that's the word).

  • Sophia Tesfaye: Will Republicans listen to one of their own? The Senate's only black Republican reveals his own experiences with racial profiling: I've seen reports that the late Philando Castile (shot dead by police in Minnesota) had been repeatedly pulled over by police for minor or imaginary infractions, but it's worth noting that wealth or ideology doesn't prevent this sort of profiling from happening, as Scott's story makes clear.

    But during his speech, the second on policing and race this week, Scott also shared the story of a staffer who was "pulled over so many times here in D.C. for absolutely no reason other than driving a nice car." The staffer eventually traded in his Chrysler for a "more obscure form of transportation" because "he was tired of being targeted."

    He asked his Senate colleagues to "imagine the frustration, the irritation, the sense of a loss of dignity that accompanies each of those stops."

    "I do not know many African-American men who do not have a very similar story to tell no matter their profession. No matter their income, no matter their disposition in life," he said. "There is absolutely nothing more frustrating, more damaging to your soul than when you know you're following the rules and being treated like you are not."

    "Recognize that just because you do not feel the pain, the anguish of another, does not mean it does not exist," the Republican reminded his fellow conservatives.

  • Some links on the Turkish coup:

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