Response to Calculated Silence

(See: Just Above Sunset: Calculated Silence)

"This is awful,” says Josh Marshall. "But, really, stop saying it’s awful.”

This kind of griping operates on the premise that broadcasting a situation in which you have zero power and acting as though your attempted shaming will produce any positive effect will have some positive effect. It won’t. Broadcasting weakness is never an effective strategy. Always choose to fight on a different ground. It looks hapless to try to shame people with acts they are carrying out openly, eagerly and happily. You look stupid. 

Rhetorically, politically and in the simplest terms of reality, Republicans know there is no justifying this legislation. The public has already spoken. It is overwhelmingly unpopular. They are trying to do it in the dead of night because they know that. ... They are trying to slip it past everyone, do it by stealth and keep all the details secret until it’s too late. ... 

Accept their freedom to do it and label it for what it is. Adjudicate it at the next election.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but the truth is, no. This is one of those rare occasions I disagree with Josh Marshall. We Democrats do too much already of what Josh is asking us to do, and it’s been killing us.

Rather that pushing back on all those accusations that Hillary placed the nation’s safety at risk with her home email server, or Donald Trump’s charge that she “shredded” thousands of emails after they had been subpoenaed (both those are false and can be proven false), Democrats chose to ignore all of it, thereby surrendering the field to the Republicans. This could only leave Democrats and Independents to assume that, hey, if the party isn’t going to fight this, she must be guilty!

That, as much as anything, lost the election right there. Forget this business that telling the truth makes you look stupid; keep in mind that not telling the truth makes you look too gutless to stand up for your convictions, which is even worse.

The larger point is, if you don’t speak out and say what’s wrong with all of what the Republicans are trying to do, what chance will you have to “adjudicate it at the next election”? By that time, voters will likely have no idea what you’re talking about. After all, the process of publicly “shaming” someone does not necessarily involve getting them on your side; the main idea is to get the public in your corner.

The truth is, there actually have been several cases of Republicans back-tracking on themselves. A prominent one is their being “shamed” into converting “Repeal Obamacare” into “Repealing and Replacing Obamacare”, simply because they didn’t want to face public rebuke for abolishing certain very popular elements of Obamacare, such as forcing insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions. That’s quite a reversal for folks who don’t believe government should be forcing insurance companies to do anything at all.

Trump’s baldfaced shamelessness is already spreading like a disease among his fellow Republicans. You see it in the DNI boss Dan Coates explaining his refusal to answer questions in Congress, and when asked for his justification, replying, “I’m not sure I have a legal basis,” as if to say, “And what are you going to do about it?”, knowing full well he’ll get away with it without being cited with contempt of Congress. 

The problem is, because our founders couldn't think of everything, they made sure that our system of government is, to some extent, an honor system that is currently being managed by operators who have very little honor, and thanks to the influence of our president, have less and less of it every day.

Response to Not Quite Watergate

(See: Just Above Sunset: Not Quite Watergate)

Friends have been asking me why I post so rarely in the current days of rage, when there seem to be so many obvious things to say, and I tell them it’s precisely because there’s so much to say that everyone beats me to it — that when I began writing a few years ago, I vowed to try not to say things unless I thought either they weren’t being mentioned at all, or maybe were just not being said enough.

So here are a few topics that I think have been somewhat neglected of late:

1. I wouldn’t be surprised if we eventually find that there was little if any collusion in the elections between the Trump campaign and the Russians. Still, Donald Trump and the Republicans do seem to be hiding something, don’t they?

Why is it, whenever the subject is broached that we need to seriously look into the invasion of our democracy by Russia, Republicans always try to change the subject to questions of “Who leaked this information?” and “What can we do to plug all these leaks about Russia?”

Why do Congressional and Justice Department probes into this stuff seem to make them so nervous? It might have little to do with exposing collusion between Russia and Trump, of which, at this point, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of evidence; it might be something else, maybe having to do with illegal or shady business deals, I don’t know. We’ll just have to wait and see.

I can’t help but believe that, had the roles been reversed and Hillary had won, Democrats would still be seriously concerned — unlike the way the Republicans are acting today. This is, in fact, because the two parties are not carbon copies of each other. Liberal Democrats tend to believe in the motto, “It matters not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game,” while Conservative Republicans tend to believe the opposite: “It matters not how you play the game; all that matters is that you win."

And by the way, this contention that all this Russia talk is just a bunch of Democrats who are looking for a way to explain why their candidate lost?

No. In fact, I’ve met very few Democrats who believe the Democratic emails published by Wikileaks had anything to do with Hillary’s loss. And, in fact, if anything, our chagrin isn’t so much how come Hillary lost?, it’s the even-more-shocking question of how come that idiot, Donald Trump, won!

2. Did Trump and his attorney really claim that James Comey’s testimony “vindicated” Trump, in that he admitted that he did, indeed, tell Trump three times he wasn’t under investigation? Do those two guys find it at all interesting that nobody else seems to share their view that the hearings “vindicated” the president?

(A sidebar here: This is another case of Donald Trump telling us all what to think about something. Along those same lines, I’m convinced that one reason he hates the media is that they refuse to go along with his belief that he, as the subject of the news of the day, gets to determine what the news of the day is! Anything else the media chooses to cover is, by definition, just fake news.)

Anyway, I find it curious that Trump had been obsessing over whether he himself was under FBI investigation, to the point of bizarrely including mention of it in his letter firing Comey — reminding everybody that Comey had assured him that he was not being investigated, so no one could then accuse him of firing the guy who was investigating him.

But nobody was even contesting whether or not Comey ever told him that — simply because it wasn’t an issue! — in fact, everybody realized that the FBI probes were not so much about Trump as about Russian interference into an election that was won by Donald Trump, knowing that, at some point in the future, the investigation might find itself looking closer at the candidate himself!

In other words, no matter how the President tried to noodle this, lots of people of both parties were likely to look at any Comey firing askance, seeing it as Trump firing the guy who is investigating a matter that will necessarily be of major concern to the president.

3. I keep hoping nobody tries to disabuse Trump of his dubious belief that it’s very hard for Republicans to win the Electoral College, just on the off-chance that, in the meantime, maybe we can talk him into helping us do away with the damn thing.

(And the only reason I even broach the subject at all is the knowledge that neither he, nor anyone close to him, ever lays eyes on anything I write — and even if any of his advisers did try to tell him about this, he obviously wouldn't listen anyway.)

So here’s the thing about why I think he could be wrong about that. It comes from William Murphy, a professor of American history at State University of New York at Oswego, who made this argument last December on Newsweek/Quora, that Republicans seem to have at least a temporary advantage:

Democratic voters live in large urban areas, and are concentrated in several parts of the country. There are more of them, somewhat, but they live in relatively compact geographic areas. This gives Republicans a mild advantage in the electoral college; Republican voters are more spread out, and the Electoral College system potentially over-represents them slightly as a part of the overall population. This is, as I said, slight; it does not mean that Democrats cannot win the electoral college, or that Republicans are always more likely to do so. 

All it means is this: in the event that circumstances line up just right so there is a split between the popular and electoral votes, the split is, for the moment, likely to favor Republicans. 

But that’s a far cry from having a decisive advantage in the electoral college, because the electoral college is still mostly weighted by population. States have a total number of electoral votes equal to their total representation in the two houses of Congress; seats in the House are apportioned according to population, but every state has two senators. Aside from a handful of states with overwhelmingly large populations (chiefly California, New York, Florida and Texas), there is not enough difference in population among most of the rest of the states to balance out the effect of those two votes every state gets regardless of population, from their two senators. 

So in a very close election, the possibility of a popular vote/electoral vote split becomes a reality, and if it happens, it is somewhat more likely that it will favor the Republicans. Right now.

Right now?

Okay, but I tend to think urban folk being mostly liberal and rural folks being mostly conservative, at least in this era of political division, is a bit more of a permanent condition than Murphy seems willing to admit. But also, one would think the condition that tips the College to the Democratic vote in any given election will be there being so many more of them — which would also, one might think, have them winning the popular vote as well.

Still, as long as we have it, this Electoral College foolishness should continue to favor red states, at least until we Democrats start having a whole lot more babies.

In any event, had there been no such thing as an Electoral College last year, Trump wouldn’t be president now. In fact, I will predict the same result for 2020, assuming he’s still in politics at that time.

Which brings us to this:

4. I’m starting to alter my thinking about the possibility of impeachment, or at least the threat of it bringing on a negotiated exit.

Up to this point, any suggestion on either side that Trump could get impeached has been countered by a reminder that the Republicans, who hold both houses of Congress, won’t let that happen.

But I think Martin Longman makes a good point — that the Republicans wisely came to realize that Donald Trump is one of them after all, and offers them the best chance they have had in years of getting their agenda passed — the problem being, buffoon that Trump is, their agenda keeps getting stalled by all these distractions that have nothing to do with their agenda.

So as the case against Trump becomes stronger and stronger, isn’t it just possible that Republican congressmen and senators might start contemplating whether their programs might be better served by a President Pence?

How would this work? I can see a negotiated settlement in which Trump resigns, in exchange for no jail time, or at least avoiding the disgrace of impeachment.

The only problem I see with actual impeachment is, what if the Democrats don’t play along? 

Remember, it takes a two-thirds majority of senators to convict, and after all, there’s always the chance that Democrats would prefer a klutz of a president who is too incompetent to get anything passed, to a Republican capable of getting things done.  Not that I have a vote count at this early date, but I think we'll all have enough time to work out the details.

But if you think things are strange now, wait until next year, when we get to watch Democrats struggle to keep the Republicans from kicking Donald Trump out of the White House.

Response to Vengeance and Destruction

(See: Just Above Sunset/Vengeance and Destruction)

The most famous scene in “A Few Good Men” is the courtroom confrontation between Navy defense attorney Lt. Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise) and the GITMO base commander, Marine Col. Nathan R. Jessup (Jack Nicholson):

Kaffee: Colonel Jessup, did you order the Code Red?  

Judge Randolph: You don't have to answer that question!  

Col. Jessup: I'll answer the question! 

[to Kaffee] 

You want answers?  

Kaffee: I think I'm entitled to.  

Col. Jessep: You want answers?  

Kaffee: I WANT THE TRUTH!  

Col. Jessup: YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH! 

[pauses] 

Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know; that Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, SAVES LIVES! You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it! I would rather you just said "thank you" and went on your way — otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a DAMN what you think you are entitled to!  

Kaffee: Did you order the code red?  

Col. Jessup: I did the job I...  

Kaffee: [interupts him] DID YOU ORDER THE CODE RED? 

Col. Jessup: YOU’RE GOD DAMN RIGHT I DID!

And then, to Colonel Jessup’s surprise, they place him under arrest!

What makes this scene work so well is that delicious feeling that comes from watching some condescending, know-it-all bully fall into a trap set by someone who he thinks is inferior to him, and then compound his own humiliation by having to ask someone else to explain the situation to him.

You want to see an example of this in real life?

“People, the lawyers and the courts can call it whatever they want, but I am calling it what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL BAN!”

He's god damn right he does!

Donald Trump’s apparently fed up with people not giving him what he wants, and with being told by underlings that he has to follow some politically correct script that he doesn’t even understand. 

Trump not only undercut his own spokespeople, who had been admonishing reporters to stop calling it that, but he also undercut his own Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, who insists on calling it a “travel pause”, a temporary action until they can figure out what the hell they're doing, but especially all his Justice Department attorneys, who have been working like beavers to convince the federal courts that it’s not actually a “travel ban”, a term that seems to some to reek of unconstitutionality.

So far, the appeals courts don’t seem to have been buying the administration’s arguments, and this is causing the boss to lose his cool:

At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is "no reason to be alarmed!"

What is the matter with this guy? If he hasn’t anything helpful to contribute, can’t he just butt out? Does he not realize the damage he’s causing his country?

I know he doesn’t drink, but for his own sake, I think he should take it up, because he needs an excuse that might help explain his habit of acting like the drunken relative who shows up at the funeral and starts blowing out all the candles.

He kept insisting during the campaign that it was Hillary who was temperamentally unsuited for the job, not him, but if he is such a talented and capable guy, why can’t he seem to stop making a fool out of himself? Why can't he see what the rest of us see, that his popularity might actually go up if he only were to stop tweeting?

I have a theory. It’s something he learned during the primaries:

First, he gets a following by saying whatever stupid thing that pops into his head, but when he stops saying that stuff, he learns that he not only doesn’t expand his base, he loses his original following. He’s in a bind. While it may be hard to walk around with your foot in your mouth, at least it gets you attention that you wouldn’t get otherwise — which is apparently the best he is capable of.

Whenever he took the advice to stop acting like a jerk — to “ pivot”, so to speak — his numbers would drop, and when he went back to his old ways, his numbers would go back up, although not ever enough to achieve more than plurality status. If it weren’t for all those recalculating Republican “Never-Trumpers” switching to whom they saw as a low-life, he never would have won.

It’s a situation similar to Morton Downey Jr.’s old TV program. Although his outrageously tasteless show always seemed to have the highest ratings in its time-slot, it couldn’t find advertisers who wanted to associate their product with it, so stations stopped carrying it, and then it quietly disappeared. Sometimes the best you can do is still just not good enough.

Meanwhile, we’re stuck with him. At least if this were television, Trump would just quietly disappear from the schedule and be replaced by something that didn’t suck. Unfortunately, national governance doesn’t work that way.

Meanwhile, you would think that Trump himself would realize his problem with tweeting, that it really doesn’t do what he thinks it does:

“I can do messages around the media and get my word out, the way I mean my word,” he told the Christian Broadcasting Network at the end of January.

But the truth is, I myself have neither the time nor the patience to go searching through “social media” for some random person’s twitter droppings on the remote chance that one of them might be “newsworthy”. I let our “news media” do that work for me, which seems to work out just fine.

And as I imagine it is with most of the public, I never see Trump's tweets directly, I only read whatever is picked up by the media, and that only seems to happen when he says something arguably stupid — which, of course, seems to happen on a daily, if not hourly basis.

Response to The Fear Factor

(See: Just Above Sunset: The Fear Factor)

Has it really been only 100 days? Jeez, it seems like it’s been an eternity! They say time flies when you’re having fun, which might help explain why it seemed so long.

Or it may be that, on virtually every one of those days, something would happen to make headlines, even if it was only something he said in a tweet, which helped remind us that old Tweetybird was still our president. But when I say “something would happen to make headlines”, I’m not saying something good or meaningful happened, I’m just saying something happened.

According to ThinkProgress, of the 36 things Donald Trump had promised on the campaign trail to do “on Day One”, he failed to do 34 of them. Apparently the only two promises he kept were "Pursue a hiring freeze on all federal employees to reduce workforce size”, and "Issue a temporary moratorium on new agency regulations.” 

And incidentally, somewhere along the way, Trump had amended his definition of “Day One”:

"...which I will consider to be Monday as opposed to Friday or Saturday. Right? I mean my day one is going to be Monday because I don’t want to be signing and get it mixed up with lots of celebration,” Trump said in an interview with the Times of London.

(Forget all the celebration, as I remember the actual full Day One, the day after the swearing-in, Trump spent disputing the media's estimates of the size of the crowd that came to watch. And was that not also the day he sent Sean Spicer to the briefing room to do his Melissa McCarthy impersonation? I forget.)

Okay, but back to those first 100 days:

Trump’s “Contract with the American Voter” listed 10 pieces of legislation in his “100-day plan,” and it’s a big deal that he and the Republican-controlled Congress have passed zero of the 10. He keeps saying he’s achieved far more in his first 100 days than any previous president, but other than the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and a tougher approach to undocumented immigrants, he hasn’t implemented many tangible changes to federal policy.

And of those two, only one — deporting illegal immigrants, including some of whom he had promised he wouldn’t — is remarkable. The other, which is confirming a new Supreme Court justice, was no actual achievement on his part. The only people who opposed him had no power to stop him. Let’s face it, he could’ve done that in his sleep.

And what was with that mysterious “tax plan” he sprung on everyone, including his own treasury department, a day or so before the 100 days ran out?

My own theory is that, at some future time, since that was the first of those ten legislative promises that went missing, Trump will claim that as a “First 100 days" accomplishment of sorts in that he introduced the plan in his first 100 days.

Or maybe he won’t, depending on whether or not he comes to realize, as we all do, that that would be just too stupid.

And as for that other elusive promise, the famous “Wall”?

Not only do I not want that useless and mostly ugly wall built at all, and not only do I not think we should pay for it, since I can think of many much better uses for the funds, but in fact, I don’t even want Mexico paying for the wall, and don’t really even understand the reasoning behind Trump demanding that Mexico, of all people, pay for it.

I guess the argument is that our immigration problem is Mexico’s fault? Think about it. Is that not stupid?

What does Trump assume, that Mexico wants its people flooding across our borders, getting low-wage jobs here and then sending some of it home to their families, instead of Mexico being able to keep their workers working inside their own country, where they can spend all their earnings in Mexico instead of in some foreign country — and also pay taxes locally on that income, instead of paying American taxes?

Maybe Trump's problem is that he’s too competitive, rather than cooperative, where there’s always got to be a winner and a loser, rather than two winners. Maybe he’s just not capable of understanding that cooperation with our neighbors was what NAFTA was all about in the first place, given that having a failed state right next door is exactly what we don’t need.

And while I realize we’re not supposed to blame Trump’s voters for the trouble he’s getting us into, I can’t help it. I do. Still, I think I figured out the 96% of the Trump voters who are not disappointed in him after all:

They never seriously expected, nor cared, what he might do when he got into office; they just like his attitude.

Forget that talking tough doesn’t work all that well, they can’t stand having leaders who don’t do it. Forget that cutting taxes on the rich never seems to pay for itself, they just prefer to vote for someone who insists that it does. They’re not looking for smart leadership, they’re looking for bold leadership.

It’s just that they got tired of all those namby-pambies of both parties that have been running the country and just wanted, for once, to elect some politically-incorrect-but-attitudinally-correct nitwit to the White House. What he actually does once he gets there is just details that don’t concern them, which is why they don’t seem all that upset by losing their Obamacare.

There seems to be a disconnect in their brains between, on the one hand, the problems of their everyday lives, and on the other, the rockstar they proudly put in the oval office.

It’s just possible that we are witnessing the ultimate failure of the whole concept of people ruling themselves.

Response to Ending in China

(See: Just Above Sunset: Ending In China)

Although not a “believer”, in the traditional sense, I actually do believe in Norman Vincent Peale’s “The Power of Positive Thinking", but not in the sense that you, Alan, describe it — either a bit of slight-of-hand one invokes hoping to magically make things better, or else nothing but a bluff — but in the sense that, if you’re going to get some seemingly impossible task done (like FDR’s task of turning around the economy, for example), you’re not going to bother even seriously trying if you keep thinking it can’t be done.

Trump’s different. He’s a bluffer. He doesn’t bother learning how to do something, he just figures he can get people to do things by the force of his own personality. Someone who just bullshits you doesn’t really believe in a positive anything.

But while I’m here, I also want to reiterate, and join Paul Waldman in disputing something I’ve been hearing on TV all week from Republicans, and even some news people who ought to know better:

Ask any conservative about what they objected to in former president Barack Obama’s foreign policy record, and the first words out of their mouth will be “RED LINE!” 

They’ll tell you that Obama was weak and feckless, and that his unwillingness to attack Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s government after it used chemical weapons on civilians in 2013 sent a message to the world that the United States wouldn’t stand up for its principles or follow through on its threats.

Even after all these years, Trump still argues that line, even after revisiting his own tweets from back then, admonishing Obama not to give in to temptation and join the fight in Syria:

Donald J. Trump  

✔@realDonaldTrump 

The only reason President Obama wants to attack Syria is to save face over his very dumb RED LINE statement. Do NOT attack Syria, fix U.S.A. 

7:13 AM - 5 Sep 2013

Donald Trump has a tendency to “misremember” things he’s said in the past, helped along by another of his tendencies, to just not listen or acknowledge when reminded of things he’s said before, such as:

In a May 2016 interview on MSNBC, Mr. Trump said the United States had “bigger problems than Assad.” He added, “I would have stayed out of Syria and wouldn’t have fought so much for Assad, against Assad.” … 

“I think going in was a terrible, terrible mistake. Syria, we have to solve that problem because we are going to just keep fighting, fighting forever. I have a different view on Syria than everybody else,” he said during an interview with The New York Times.

And while Obama’s famous “RED LINE statement”, according to Trump, might have been "dumb", maybe because it set up public expectations of military action that would go unfulfilled, Waldman is right when he claims that Obama didn’t “back away”:

In December 2012, the Obama administration announced that it had intelligence demonstrating that Assad’s government was preparing to deploy chemical weapons. Obama said that any use of such weapons would constitute a “red line,” and “there will be consequences.” 

The following August, Assad launched a chemical weapon attack on civilians, and the administration threatened to begin a bombing campaign. Obama then sought authorization from Congress for military action, but it quickly became clear he wouldn’t get it, including from Republicans. In the end, the administration partnered with Russia to negotiate a deal under which Syria would hand over chemical stockpiles for destruction.

The point of which is, every time some Republican — and also some pundit or reporter, for that matter — goes on TV to state as fact that President Obama drew a red line, then totally ignored it, they need to be reminded that, first of all, the people’s representatives in Congress turned down Obama's requests for military action in Syria back in 2013 — something which our present president agreed with Congress on back then — but that, nevertheless, Obama continued on to work with Russia, of all countries, to destroy Syria's chemical weaponry — which, by the way, actually amounts to not walking away.

And in retrospect, it may be just as well that Obama didn’t get his way in 2013, since winning that fight would probably have been just as impossible as it seemed at the time, and even fighting it would have only added more death and destruction to the chaos.

But now President Trump has his own chance to bluff his way through this problem in Syria, giving not only all of us a real-life opportunity to second-guess his decision, but also to see how he spins his results when the next election campaign rolls around.

Response to One Very Bad Day

(See: Just Above Sunset: One Very Bad Day)

Do you, as I do, get the feeling that every morning, every member of the Trump team gets out of bed, and while getting dressed, ties his shoelaces together?

It seems that General Michael Flynn is offering to tell his “story”, in exchange for legal immunity from prosecution. Given that we seem to have handed our government over to a family of grifters, I wouldn’t jump to the same conclusion as the one outlined here:

”Donald Trump should be worried about this amazing story that Flynn has to tell, even if no one knows what that story is – yet. It’s easy enough to guess. Trump fired the guy. This seems like revenge. This will involve Trump and Russia – or it won’t. … Trump knows what Flynn knows. This cannot be good.”

I’ve not gotten the impression that Flynn, since his departure from the Trump camp, is playing the part of the “disgruntled ex-employee”, out for “revenge”. In fact, I’ve gotten the impression that Flynn and Trump are still, as the saying goes, “as tight as thieves”.

Frankly, I think I smell a rat.

We need to keep in mind that, just within the past week, we’ve seen a third-rate scam, apparently staged by the gang in the White House, to “leak” information to the public that corroborates some fuzzy story that Donald Trump has been telling about being surveilled by the Obama administration, a preposterous tale involving the “unmasking” of innocents that is so incomprehensible and convoluted, it barely serves it’s (I think) intended purpose as a diversion from the actual issue of investigating Russia’s interference in our 2016 elections.

How is it, you may be asking, that this gang of rodeo clowns has been able to change the subject, from a serious probe of Russia's attack on our country, to “incidental” surveillance of innocent persons whose identity was somehow “unmasked”, something that has absolutely nothing to do with Russia?

I’m wagering that it has something to do with the low expectations of those whom the Trumpsters have been able to cajole over to the dark side. The point is, whatever they may think of Donald Trump, the Republicans largely share a conservative agenda with him, and know that their choice is to either (1) back him up on his bullshit scams, or (2) side with the dreaded Democrats and their liberal agenda. It’s as simple as that.

So what story does Flynn have to tell those committees?

I don’t know the details, but I’m pretty sure it’s one that reflects well on Donald Trump, and also furthers the diversion of attention away from Russia (an area of discussion that can only hurt Flynn), and toward whatever case Trump is trying to make about Obama spying on him. I would not be surprised to learn at some point that whoever at the White House arranged for Nunes to stage his stunt is also behind Flynn volunteering to “tell all”.

And by the way, how has President Trump been doing so far? I hear it’s not so hot, especially when it comes to keeping his campaign promises. But fortunately, nobody is really paying too much attention, which is fine, because all that stuff is really boring anyway. 

Any chance this presidency is just a continuation of the campaign itself, with all those outrageous tweets and contretemps in the headlines on a daily basis to divert our attention from the fact that Trump had nothing especially worthwhile to say?

But what happens if Trump's success rate continues on this same path, and he runs out of diversions?

If that happens, and I were Barrack Obama, I'd think about moving to Canada.

Response to All-American Deal-Making

(See: Just Above Sunset: All-American Deal-Making)

One problem with having someone ghost your best-selling book about how good you are at making deals is that you end up spending the rest of your life playing the “other people’s expectations" game, since everybody is left with the impression that you are a whiz at making deals, even if you aren't really, and that leaves you trying to live up to your own hype.

Having your reputation precede you wherever you go can, I guess, be great for your ego, but I would think it could also cramp your style.

One of my last duties at CNN was to represent the satellite needs of the network pool on President Reagan’s one-day visit to the European Parliament building in Strasbourg, France, in the summer of 1985, starting with my own advance trip to Paris in the spring.

I found myself sitting in a meeting hall with just me and Francoise Husson, CNN’s French-born former London Bureau Chief who was serving as my translator, on one side of the table, and about forty representatives from the EU Parliament and various French entities, mostly of the government and TV networks, the telephone company and power company and whatnot, on the other. Through Francoise, I informed them of what we would be needing and when we would be needing it, and after about ten minutes of anguished (and, to me, incomprehensible) French words exchanged among themselves, they came back to let me know why they wouldn’t be able to deliver the workspace in the Parliament building, or the power, or the phone lines, or the security, at least not in time for the event in June.

To which I shrugged my shoulders and replied that I understood the problems (I lied), thanked them in advance for their efforts and suggested that all we all can do is do what we can, and hope for the best.

With that, the meeting was over, and Francoise and I went out to dinner, at which time she told me that what I said to them seemed to baffle them, since, me being an American, they expected a whole lot of that hard bargaining that we Americans are famous around the world for. In fact, she thought they were pleased with the lack of fuss. After all, Americans are also famous for skipping all the jibber-jabber, cutting through all the ceremony, and just getting to the point, one of our famous foibles that is sometimes actually appreciated overseas.

In any event, the next day, I flew home. Over the next month, bit by bit, I learned that I was receiving even more than I had asked for, and way ahead of schedule. That June, back in France, Reagan's visit came and went with nary a hitch. The French were wonderful to work with. Sometimes, the best bargaining is no bargaining at all, especially if nobody involved in it is in the mood for any of that foolishness anyway.

Unfortunately for Trump, his reputation, undeserved as it might be, precedes him. One of my old bosses who was famous throughout broadcasting for his haggling skills, had that same problem. It was often said of him, “He knows the price of everything but the value of nothing”. Word got around, and eventually, everyone saw him coming, and — well, there’s that old saying about those who are forewarned are forearmed.

In fact, if everyone suspects that Donald Trump cares more about his precious image than the details of any one deal he’s working on, the deal will probably suck in ways he won't even recognize, assuming it ever gets closed at all, or else his deal may just implode, which has happened more than once to...

Hold the phone! BREAKING NEWS!! This just in!!! As I am writing this, while waiting for the voting in the House to begin, word arrives that, instead of voting, they’ve withdrawn the bill!

At first, I thought this meant they postponed it, which is what I had been predicting would happen, but it’s even better than that! Our long national nightmare appears to be over, sort of.

And it seems that Trump has already started doing what, early on, he himself promised to do if the vote failed — he’ll start blaming it on the Democrats and Obama! So, in truth, Sean “Slick” Spicer was wrong when he told reporters there was no back-up plan:

Spicer told reporters during a daily press briefing that there is no back-up plan for the American Health Care Act ... because the bill would pass. 

"No, there is no plan B," said Spicer. "There is a plan A, and plan A. We're going to get this done. We're going to get it done, that's it, plain and simple." 

During a recent meeting, Trump told conservative groups that are against the bill that his plan B was to allow Obamacare, officially named the Affordable Care Act, to "collapse" and then blame Democrats for any negative outcomes.

Hey, good luck with that! And thanks for the heads-up.

Of course there’s a “Plan B”! We’ve just entered it. Trump planned for this and warned us it was coming, that in the event of failure, he would somehow blame it on the Democrats, I guess for not voting for Trumpcare. 

Which is preposterous, of course.

Weren’t they saying through all those years that they would repeal Obamacare in the first five minutes of Day One, once they were able to get one of their own guys into the Oval Office? That didn’t happen, but it wasn’t because of the Democrats, who, yes, were prepared to cast exactly as many “Yes” votes for Trumpcare as Republicans cast for Obamacare, way back when.

The difference between the two votes was that Obama himself turned out to be a more-successful wheeler-dealer than Mr. King of the Big Deal himself. Surprise!

Repeal, which once seemed like a surefire thing back in Republican Dreamland, before the inauguration, back when the moderate “Tuesday Group" was dreaming of “Repeal and Replace”, while, seemingly unbeknownst to anyone, the take-no-prisoners "Freedom Fries Caucus" was envisioning only the “Repeal” part.

That doesn’t sound like a big thing, but it turned out to be quite a deal-breaker. It was the fact that the distance between the two extremities of the GOP is too great to allow consensus on any one bill that queered this deal, and had nothing to with whatever the Democrats were doing at the time — which, of course, was that they were probably quietly watching all the Republican shenanigans with bemusement.

And yes, I suppose we could blame the Democrats for not barging down to the Oval Office to pitch their own healthcare plan, which is known as “Obamacare” — which has already been proven popular with a plurality of Americans who have said they’d rather see it changed than repealed — and which could also be called “Obamacare: New and Improved”, including within it all those upgrades that Barrack Obama was referencing the other day, when he talked about always envisioning the program being improved upon as we went along.

But then, in that same vein, I guess Trump can blame himself for not inviting Democratic input (in which case, I think there’s a chance he could have won!), instead of placing all his faith in all those hopeless congressional Republicans, who have, after years of practice, demonstrated that they still can't organize a one-car funeral.

But think of it! This may be the closest we ever get to a face-to-face contest between Trump and Obama, and after all that negotiating, look who's healthcare version ended up as "the Law of the Land!"

Response to The Expected Perfect Storm

(See: Just Above Sunset: The Expected Perfect Storm)

Here’s the issue that’s at the bottom of the question of what to do about Obamacare:

Do you believe in our national government being involved in the nation’s healthcare, or don’t you?

If you do, you’re probably a Democrat (and/or a liberal), and if you don’t, you’re probably a Republican (and/or conservative, and/or a Libertarian). And for all practical purposes, there is no in-between. 

Which is to say, if you’re a believer, you should be all-in, and if you’re not, you should be all-out, because anything in between is just a tangled miss-mosh, with compromises left in there for the sole purpose of pleasing the other side, which ends up costing us way too much money, and not doing the job any of us want done anyway.

And just to be crystal clear, I myself am a "true believer" — which is to say, I’m a liberal and/or Democrat, the implication of which is this:

If I had to choose between the somewhat-flawed Obamacare and the absolutely brain-dead and duplicitous Trumpcare, please give me Obamacare any day. 

Obamacare may be way too complicated and twisted to be of as much good to anybody as it is intended to be, but it was working pretty well, in spite of the ubiquitous Republican noise machine chanting that it was a total disaster.

But more to the point, Trumpcare is an out-and-out lie, put forth as a stalking horse, with the ultimate purpose of doing away with any and all public healthcare systems altogether.

Republicans actually believe in “Bupkis-care”. That is, they don’t believe in any healthcare program at all, but lack the courage to admit this out loud.

In their soul of souls, they think everyone should take care of their own doctor and hospital bills, without digging into everyone else’s pocket. But they’re afraid to admit this, given the country's having warmed up to the idea of government involvement in healthcare, and so when Republicans seriously brought up “repeal”, and found themselves having to answer questions about what they would do with all the sick-and-dying left out in the streets, they gave into pressure to change their mantra to “repeal and replace” — but with a much better plan.

That was the crack in the dyke.

Before long, they were crawling deeper and deeper into the trap, claiming their plan would keep the good parts of Obamacare — such as coverage of pre-existing conditions, and letting kids stay on their parents’ plans until age 26, and no annual or lifetime caps — but they’d just replace the parts they didn’t like — such as, well, how to pay for the parts they did like — the particulars of which, of course, they would have to get back to us about, since it was going to take some real noodling to figure that out.

But now the time has finally come to place their bets!

Had they kept their noses clean, we wouldn’t see a painfully joyous Paul Ryan yesterday, clumsily trying to explain how the CBO scoring that shows 14 million fewer Americans with healthcare next year, and 24 million fewer ten years from now, actually supports his proposal:

"Our plan is not about forcing people to buy expensive, one-size-fits-all coverage. It is about giving people more choices and better access to a plan they want and can afford. When people have more choices, costs go down. That’s what this report shows. And, as we have long said, there will be a stable transition so that no one has the rug pulled out from under them."

“Rug"? What “rug"? There will be a “rug”? (More on that in a minute.)

Some problems with his arguments, in order:

1. It seems that his plan is about “forcing people to buy expensive, one-size-fits-all coverage”. Go look at Steven Ratner’s recent New York Times column that has a chart (see “Fact #1”) showing the comparative size of tax credits in 2020 under “Obamacare”, which varies according to level of income, and the “New GOP plan”, which varies according to age, but stays constant across all incomes. In other words, one size fits all.

2. The magical thinking — that “when people have more choices, costs go down” — may actually be true, but it also seems to be that when costs go down, insurers start dropping out of the program, as evidenced by what happened last year.

3. And maintaining a “stable transition”, as described here, seems to suggest that, when the time comes to "pull the rug", everyone will hopefully have enough advance warning to get off it before it gets pulled. And where is this “stable transition” supposed to be transiting to? Sounds like the plan is to leave everyone with “Bupkis-care”, which is pretty much what we had before Obamacare came along.

It’s like you hire an advisor to come into your house to figure out how you can spend less money on food, and they come up with a plan that involves slowly cutting down on buying food, until eventually you find yourself not buying any food, and your family starves to death. But on the bright side, you did save a lot of money.

But last Friday, Paul Ryan explained to radio host Hugh Hewitt what he thought would be the reaction to the upcoming CBO estimates on the reduction of the insured, and how he’d handle it:

"If the government says 'thou shall buy our health insurance', the government estimates are going to say people will comply and it will happen. And when you replace that with, 'we’re going to have a free market, and you buy what you want to buy', they’re going to say not nearly as many people are going to do that. That’s just going to happen. And so you’ll have those coverage estimates. We assume that’s going to happen."

And he was right! Sure enough, the CBO scoring ended up predicting millions more will be uninsured, quite possibly because Obamacare coerced people into buying health insurance, while Ryan’s plan did not.

Ryan seemed to have no problem with there being fewer insured, since, for Republicans, healthcare reform is all about exercising one’s freedom to pick one’s own plan from a whole big list of plans, all of which promotes competition and brings down costs and blah-blah-blah — instead of being about getting more healthcare to more Americans!

I don’t don’t mean to be flip, but if you can’t get a big list of companies willing to compete under a system where citizens are penalized if they don’t buy insurance, then why would insurance companies want to compete among the much smaller group of customers willing to do it without the penalty?

And to that suggestion that there is something wrong with penalties:

What if there were no penalty for not paying income taxes? Couldn't we assume the number of people paying their income taxes would do down? And if so, would that be a good thing?

If there were no truancy laws, do you think maybe there would be fewer parents sending their kids to schools, with the result being that we would become a nation of nitwits? And if so, would that be a good thing?

And then there’s the big problem with Obamacare that you don’t get with Trumpcare, which is that Obamacare taxes the rich to fund Medicaid, which is what many call “class warfare”.

You’ve heard the expression, “it’s his world; the rest of us are just living in it”? Those rich people who don’t like the idea of progressive taxation think they own the economy, and the rest of us are just living in it. But in fact, everyone from high-income through middle-income to no-income, we all own the economy, because we created it, even the poor, by buying and selling goods and services within it, and anyone who tries to claim they deserve most of it, because they earned it, has to get over themselves.

And the “class warriors” are not the people who claim the economy belongs to all of us; it’s those who think it belongs to only the rich who are the real "class warriors".

But then there’s also that question of “socialized medicine”:

Back in the early middle ages, the government didn’t have its own military; rich guys did. We don’t do that anymore. We let our country have a monopoly on owning armed forces. You could call it “socialized military”. I believe in that.

A long time ago, governments weren’t the only ones who printed money; banks printed “bank notes”, which in many cases were worth even more than the so-called national currency. Nowadays, the federal government has a monopoly on printing money. We don’t think of this as socialism, but it really is.

But maybe the big problem with Obamacare has been, because it doesn’t do away with the insurance middlemen, nor own all the hospitals and employ all the doctors, it isn't really socialized medicine. It would be better if it were, in that (1) it would probably have better healthcare outcomes than what we’ve ever had, and (2) it would also be cheaper.

Come to think of it, maybe that’s the answer for both the Democrats, who’s main concern is to get everybody covered, and for the Republicans, who are mostly interested in seeing costs come down, with both of them interested in best possible health outcomes!

Maybe we should just forget Obamacare! Forget Trumpcare! We can even forget about so-called “Single Payer”! Where in the world can we find a system like that?

Would you believe the Jolly Old United Kingdom?

We are so used to hearing some overly-enthusiastic jamoke, usually of the Republican persuasion, off-handedly boast that our country has “the best healthcare in the world”, but luckily for him, nobody ever asks him to back up the claim:

For this [2014] survey on overall health care, The Commonwealth Fund ranked the U.S. dead last. 

1. United Kingdom 

2. Switzerland 

3. Sweden 

4. Australia 

5. Germany & Netherlands (tied) 

7. New Zealand & Norway (tied) 

9. France 

10. Canada 

11. United States 

It's fairly well accepted that the U.S. is the most expensive healthcare system in the world, but many continue to falsely assume that we pay more for healthcare because we get better health (or better health outcomes). The evidence, however, clearly doesn't support that view.

Notice who’s number one? Yep. The UK!

And sure enough, according to a link sent to me by a friend up in Canada (who seems to share my admiration for Britain’s National Health Service), the U.S. topped a chart listing the costliest healthcare systems in the world for that same year, 2014, the most recent available:

The chart is titled, "Healthcare Costs Per Capita (Dollars)”, and runs from left to right, cheapest country to most expensive on the list: 

1. Italy ($3,207) 

2. U.K. ($3,971) 

3. Japan ($4,152) 

4. Australia ($4,177) 

5. France ($4,367) 

6. Canada ($4,506) 

7. Sweden ($5,003) 

8. Germany ($5,119) 

9. Switzerland ($6,787) 

10. United States ($9,024) 

(Source: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD Health Statistics 2016. Compiled by PGPF.)

So maybe not coincidentally, the UK, with their out-and-out socialized medicine, has about the cheapest and the best healthcare system in the world. If we copied them, we’d be up there, too.

What’s that you say? Good luck getting that past the Republicans?

My answer to that is, just give the Trump gang a few years of trying to jibber-jabber their way out of the “Repealing and Replacing” mess they’ve made for themselves, and there’s just a chance Americans will become fed up, and will come to their senses.

After all, that ACA stuff was just Barrack Obama trying to solve our healthcare problem in a way he thought Republicans might buy into — which was an admirable attempt, but look where it got him.

So maybe it’s time to stop working so hard for the other side to come to our side. Maybe we should just do what we should have done from the start, and make the same healthcare choice that that crusty old conservative, Winston Churchill, did. In fact, he was apparently one of the movers behind getting the NHS up and going.

And while I realize Democrats may not be feeling all that bold lately, this may be exactly the time to get started talking about it, just when there might be a constituency primed for trying something brand new.

Response to Kafka Comes to America

(See: Just Above Sunset: Kafka Comes to America)

The overall theme of President Trump’s "new-and-improved" travel ban and Congress’s new "Obamacare replacement" plan, both released on Monday, seems to be this:

In an over-abundance of caution and a sharp eye toward cost control, Donald Trump and his Republicans have unilaterally decided to reduce the number of lifeboats on the ship of state. Yes, this greatly increases the chance of innocent people dying, but not to worry! That’s a chance they’re willing to take, particularly in light of all the money we will save!

It’s not really surprising that, when you listen to the party’s defenders of the new GOP-care bill, you don’t hear them say much about how many people it will or will not cover, since that’s never really been a concern of Republicans, although getting as many Americans as possible covered by good health insurance plans has been a longtime major focus for Democrats.

And, in fact, the new GOP plan — with its doing away with mandates, its Medicaid "block grants" to states, so-called medical “savings accounts” and huge premium increases for those who don’t keep a continuity of coverage — seems designed to allow government-aided healthcare to fade out of existence entirely, by attrition, eventually returning us to the totally “free-market” approach of pre-healthcare reform, proving that despite all those Republican promises, “Repeal and Replace” is, in the long run, just another way of saying “Repeal”.

And where will this leave the so-called “middle class” — or, even worse, the “working poor” — and, even worse still, the “non-working poor”? Will more of them get sicker, stay sicker, and even die because of this?

Probably.

Yeah, but is that such a bad thing?

Your answer to that may depend on whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat. After all, what’s keeping that poor person from going out and getting a job, pulling himself out of poverty by his bootstraps? (Okay, but what if that little six-year-old "poor person" can’t find a job? "Hey, nobody said life will always be fair!”)

But it's also worth asking ourselves:

If the Republicans were right all along when they kept insisting, throughout the Obama years, that Obamacare is such a total disaster! — and everybody knows it! — then why is it, now that they finally get the chance to just shut it down, they seem too absolutely scared shitless to do it?

Then there’s this cutting the number of refugees admitted from 110,000 to 50,000 per year. And the point of that? The reason we take in any refugees has to do with helping them escape imminent danger, which means that any refugees we refuse to take in are probably in grave danger, possibly, of losing their lives.

So why are we reducing the quota? Is this a money issue, in that we only have enough in the budget to save a certain number of lives? In fact, why is there even any limit to the number of lives we help save in the first place? Either we care about saving refugees or we don’t, and if we really don’t, why aren’t we just reducing that number to zero?

Come to think of it, has the White House ever offered any answer to the criticism that their “solution” to the imaginary “problems” that spring from drastically reducing travel from these six countries — from which there has been not one terrorist immigrant who has ever killed any American — has created many more real problems than the imaginary problems they are trying to solve?

And if not, why don’t they just shut the stupid program down?

The answer, of course, has to do with “form over function”. It’s really about image, not reality.

That is, the people Donald Trump is trying to "keep faith with" don’t give one flying damn about whether the Muslim travel-ban actually “works" or not; all that matters to the people who elected him is that somebody is seen doing something about “certain" people, and especially Muslim people, period. The point is not to solve some actual problem or other, it’s just to send a message to everybody that we mean business!

When it comes right down to it, what these people couldn’t stand about Barrack Obama is that he was too nice! Being “nice” is bad, in itself, because it sends a message of weakness! And if you look weak, your enemies will take advantage of you. Forget about “doing the right thing”, the only thing that matters is that your enemy fears you.

Your enemy is (as is Donald Trump, too, by the way) constantly looking you over in hopes of finding some weakness to exploit, in hopes of somehow humiliating you. 

And this over-concern with “messaging” also figures in why we on the left (although also those in the center) become so frustrated with those on the right showing so little regard for actual “truth”. We need to understand, for example, that Donald Trump’s election victory did not ever depend on his superior ability to know and adhere to any “truth”. He won both his primaries and the general election because of his skill in showing what a strong guy he is, what an effective bully he is — or maybe, if you insist, what a complete jerk he is.

There are lots of people in the world who are impressed with the somewhat charismatic dim-wit who, nevertheless, is gifted with the ability to push people around. If that weren’t true, the world would never have tyrants. This past year, in America, that number apparently reached the critical mass needed to elect one president of the United States, but the important thing to remember is that that mass was still not as great as the mass who were not as impressed.

Maybe more people over the next few years will come to see this new GOP healthcare offering as vastly inferior to the plan it replaces, or better yet, for the out-and-out, bait-and-switch scam it seems to be. Maybe most Americans will come to the same conclusion about all of Trump’s phony Potemkin-village-like programs supposedly designed to “keep us all safe”.

Or maybe our only hope is for, somehow, the critical mass of Americans who don’t respect bullies to go back to vastly outnumbering those who do.

Siege Engines

(See: Just Above Sunset: Siege Engines)

Halfway through reading this “Siege Engines” column, I was preparing to comment, asking the question of who is sieging whom, but then saw Andrew Sullivan asking the same question. Given your setup of the siegee always losing, I’d say it’s Trump who has the strong hand here, since there’s not much any of us can do about this but sit and hope for some help from the outside — which, at this point doesn’t exist — or else wait for the sieger to accidentally shoot himself in the head — which, in our case, still seems to be a real possibility.

As I write this, there's so-called “Breaking News” (is there any other kind anymore?) on CNN of our so-called president tweeting that he just learned that Obama tapped his Trump Tower phones back in October. I haven’t heard any details yet, but it may very well be “fake news”, the only question being whether the faking is being done by the mainstream media, or alternatively, by the so-called White House.

After all, claims to the contrary notwithstanding, while we have no examples of the former, we definitely do of the latter — or at least we allegedly do, from some possible “alternative facts” given to CNN’s Sara Murray by some anonymous "senior administration official”, that some other "senior administration official” (which turned out to be — surprise! surprise! — Donald Trump!) “lied” to the press (that’s my word for it; the White House didn’t call it that, they called it a “misdirection play”) when he promised he was going to reveal himself to be a humane and reasonable man in his speech to Congress that night, while in fact his real plan turned out to be that, although speaking in his inside voice in the speech, he would be the same shithead that more than half the nation already knew him to be.

Then again, we can’t be sure he lied, since we never can be sure that he didn’t just forget what was in the speech, although he’s also been known to change his mind between the time he says he’s going to do something and when he actually does it. Maybe the “misdirection play” claim was itself just some “misdirection play” of its own, a coverup of sorts, just to make Trump look less like an idiot, as if he did it on purpose. Although I could be wrong about all that. 

(HEY, ARE YOU STILL AWAKE? Don’t fall asleep! That’s just what they want you to do!)

Given the fact that Trump has publicly admitted he likes to keep everyone guessing, will we ever know for sure when he’s lying and when he’s only lying about being a liar? My guess is, no, we probably won’t.

And that brings us back to the question that was being asked the other day:

If the media knows the White House will be lying to us all the time, shouldn’t it just boycott them?

My answer is, tempting as that is, no. The reason is, the purpose for media coverage of the White House isn’t just for whatever actual information they might give to the American people, but also just to report what they say, whether it be a lie or the truth. And if we have reason to believe it’s not the truth? Then we also report that, making sure we back it up with evidence.

As for off-the-record “backgrounders”, we should be very careful and use our best judgement before using whatever information they give us, since we already have good reason to know it may not be true.

As for "not revealing confidential sources”? That’s a little trickier. Here are some guidelines on use of anonymous sources from the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ):

Few ethical issues in journalism are more entangled with the law than the use of anonymous sources. Keep your promise not to identify a source of information and it’s possible to find yourself facing a grand jury, a judge and a jail cell. On the other hand, break your promise of confidentiality to that source and it’s just possible you might find yourself on the receiving end of a lawsuit. … 

The SPJ Code of Ethics contains two pointed statements on anonymous sources:

1. Identify sources whenever feasible. The public is entitled to as much information as possible on sources' reliability. ... 

2. Always question sources’ motives before promising anonymity. Clarify conditions attached to any promise made in exchange for information. Keep promises.

But is it okay to include in your agreement with the source, that “If I find out that you, the source, have deliberately lied to me, our deal is off, and I may just feel free at that point to reveal my source, whether you like it or not"?

This SPJ position paper doesn't say anything about that.

Still, maybe you could try it, but if you do, I’d advise you to do it very carefully, since you’ll be messing with long-standing ethical traditions — and upending ethical traditions may be something best left to the likes of Donald Trump.

Response to Simple and Wrong

(See: Just Above Sunset: Simple and Wrong)

I remember hearing that, during commercial breaks of “I Love Lucy” back in the early 1950s, New York’s water pressure dropped measurably with so many toilets being flushed at the same time, so the other day, when I guffawed on hearing Donald Trump say, "Nobody knew health care could be so complicated!”, I wondered: If enough Democrats and Independents all laughed at the same time, might that cause a measurable earthquake?

If a new president really doesn’t know something because he hasn’t been keeping up with the news, I guess it’s okay to learn on the job, but I have a feeling that even if Trump had been paying attention over all these years to the Obamacare issue, he would still have been confused today, and that’s partly because the “Repeal-and-Replace” Republicans, despite their famous wont to keep things much simpler than they really need to be, have not had the guts to reduce the problem of healthcare in America down to its true essentials.

We need to go back and ask ourselves, what was the problem that needed solving?

The answer depends on who you were to ask. Democrats wanted everybody to have affordable healthcare, even if that meant “Medicare-for-All”, while Republicans mostly just wanted healthcare to be cheaper, especially for themselves and their family and friends, and didn’t talk at all about the idea of “universal” care. In fact, they ignored it altogether, as if nobody really believed in it anyway.

The Democrats drove healthcare reform in America back then, in much the same way that Republicans, especially under Trump, have been pushing immigration being a top-level political problem today, and what Democrats saw was too many poor and middle class people without jobs or health insurance (and also their children) showing up at hospital emergency rooms when they got sick or injured, and sometimes getting turned away once it was learned they were going to be unable to pay their bills.

At least that was true until politicians grew guilty consciences, passing laws that prohibited hospitals from turning away those who couldn’t pay, at which point the costs of their treatment, such as it was, would be passed on to the patients who could, but that sent hospital bills and insurance premiums soaring. In other words, by default, those of us who had the money to pay our bills, were also paying the bills of those who couldn’t.

Since the public was picking up the tab for the poor anyway, what was needed was a way for us to do it more efficiently, and with better outcomes, and probably at lower cost. The result, by an eyelash, was the ACA. Once it got going, most economists seemed to admit that it worked, with a few glitches here and there, but solvable ones.

Or else, depending on if the Republicans ever got in power, we could always go back to the way we were doing it before.

In fact, in a perfect conservative Republican world — although this would be one in which people feel no obligation to help anyone but themselves and their families; but that should go without saying — the hospitals would be told they are no longer under obligation to give away free healthcare, and should feel free to turn away anybody who can’t pay.

And those who couldn’t pay (and that includes their offspring) would go untreated, and would stay sick, and eventually die. That would be “unfortunate" and “sad”, of course, but with all these burdensome sick hangers-on out of the picture, they would cease to be our problem, and this, one would think, would cause insurance premiums and hospital bills to drop.

(Or would it? Or would the expenses of all that costly equipment, not to mention the salaries of medical personnel, just be spread across a smaller population of patients, which would mean higher medical costs for each patient, rather than lower? Whatever.)

Economist Paul Krugman asks the question, "So why do Republicans hate Obamacare so much?”, and has his own theory:

It’s not because they have better ideas; as we’ve seen over the past few weeks, they’re coming up empty-handed on the “replace” part of “repeal and replace.” It’s not, I’m sorry to say, because they are deeply committed to Americans’ right to buy the insurance policy of their choice. 

No, mainly they hate Obamacare for two reasons: It demonstrates that the government can make people’s lives better, and it’s paid for in large part with taxes on the wealthy.

My own theory is, conservatives are, on principle, opposed to the idea of government making it easy for people to live, thinking that “giving people stuff” instead of making them work for it only makes them soft.

How this principle — that of having to work for what you get — applies to their own kids, who generally get their health insurance from their rich parents, is a puzzle that rarely comes up in the discussion; nor does the question of why they believe in that principle, since it’s too hard for them to explain to people who don’t already share your prejudices.

Regardless, it comes down to one of two choices — (1) some sort of universal healthcare, with its efficiencies and better outcomes for all, or (2) what we did before Obamacare, with some people slowly dying in cardboard boxes because they haven’t the money it takes to stay alive.

So in a way, all those Republicans who’ve always thought that the healthcare question is not a complex one, have been right all along! It's essentially a simple choice between Healthcare-for-Everybody, and Healthcare-for-The-Well-to-Do, along with some sort of slow and painful death for most everybody else.

It’s really pretty much as simple as that! So what’s this big problem everybody’s been wrestling with all this time?