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?

Response to Gaslighting America

(See: Just Above Sunset: Gaslighting America)

“Alternative facts”? Really!

Okay, here’s an example of what might be called an “alternative fact”:

"Two plus two equals one hundred and fifty three.”

Which is about as true as anything else we’ve heard from the Trump administration in its first three days. In fact, just within the first half-hour of his presidency, up through the end of his incredibly goofy speech, Donald Trump had already earned a place as one of the worst presidents in America’s history. 

Admittedly, the Trump people said they wanted to change things when they came to Washington, and sure enough, one of the things they changed was, they did away with the tradition of trust there used to be that whatever the White House told us could be assumed to be true, at least until further investigation proved otherwise. 

I must confess, every time I see that superfluous Kellyanne Conway flash that used-car salesman smile of hers, and hear her condescendingly utter something like, “I really think everybody needs to take a step back, and take a very deep breath, and think about what their words are”, I want to climb inside the TV set and punch her in the mouth. In fact, I really think she, herself, "needs to take a step back, and take a very deep breath," and to just keep on going until she explodes.

That might take care of the news media’s dilemma on what to do whenever this brainless pop tart offers herself up as a guest. With her “alternative facts” bullshit and whatnot, she always offers up plenty of provocative entertainment and diversionary distraction, but don’t we already get more than enough of that from her boss? As far as I can tell, she adds nothing useful to the public discourse, and could be safely ignored by the talking head shows, if they’re willing to try. If she accidentally announces something important, I’m sure the administration will find a way of getting it to us.

Like Kevin Drum, I don’t want to be too critical of Chuck Todd’s questioning of Conway on Sunday, but I do think it would be better if he hadn’t spent so much time trying to pin her down on whether sending Sean Spicer out to nitpick on the size of the inauguration audience wasn't a waste of precious time, instead of focusing on the more important issue of whether this administration will continue to barrage the public with these so-called “alternative facts” — which is what most intelligent people often refer to as falsehoods, and maybe even, depending on the circumstances, outright lies!

But maybe we could quickly settle this by boning up on the terminology in the dictionary — which is not as easy as it sounds: 

true: in accordance with facts or reality 

false: not according with truth or fact; incorrect 

lie: an intentionally false statement; used with reference to a situation involving deception or founded on a mistaken impression 

fact: a thing that is indisputably the case; 

• (usu. facts) a piece of information used as evidence or as part of a report or news article; 

• (chiefly Law) the truth about events as opposed to interpretation

But who’s “reality”? And who’s “facts”? One problem with dictionary definitions is they make it all sound so “relativistic”, despite Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous reminder that "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."

Or else, for a slightly deeper dive, maybe we should look up “truth” in Wikipedia:

Many human activities depend upon the concept, where [truth’s] nature as a concept is assumed rather than being a subject of discussion; these include most (but not all) of the sciences, law, journalism, and everyday life. 

Some philosophers view the concept of truth as basic, and unable to be explained in any terms that are more easily understood than the concept of truth itself. Commonly, truth is viewed as the correspondence of language or thought to an independent reality, in what is sometimes called the correspondence theory of truth.

I think a corollary to all that is, quite simply, "Hey, you can’t make this stuff up!" Believe it or not, there are many opportunistic relativists among us who believe you can make stuff up and call it truth, simply because it suits them. Many of those people are called “conservatives". 

But one last thing that occurs to me, after seeing this and hearing about other columns lately that allude to Donald Trump's “Gaslighting of America”:

Given the habit of Donald Trump and his mini-me surrogates to turn any criticism back on his accusers — and also, given the fact that, once they get wind of it, all this recent “Gaslighting” talk will probably start giving them ideas — we all need to keep a sharp eye out for them starting to accuse the press itself of trying to “Gaslight America”, by us "falsely claiming" that he and his people don’t tell the truth!

And as I said before, you can’t make this stuff up, although I’m sure that won’t prevent them from trying.

Response to Paranoid and Vindictive Men

(See: Just Above Sunset: Paranoid and Vindictive Men)

Let me get this straight:

On Friday, Donald Trump is going into a meeting with the top leadership of American “intelligence” (in quotes, as he writes it), with whom he is having a public dispute in which he has publicly declared himself on the side of our nation’s foes, and is also apparently threatening to (or maybe "just dropping hints that he may”), according to the Wall Street Journal, “restructure and pare back the nation’s top spy agency”, that agency being the CIA?

In other words, if he doesn’t like the hand they deal him, he’ll reshuffle the deck more to his liking?

If true, this is indeed scary, partly because hints of this approach to governance (and he’s not even governing yet!) have not seemed to elicit the widespread panic it richly deserves, but also because it suggests we have need for a constitutional amendment to instruct us on how to deal with a leader who either (1) is pulling a “Nixon”, pretending to be crazy as a ploy to keep our nation's “enemies” off-balance, or (2) is pulling a “Nixon” in the sense of not just pretending to be crazy, but of actually being crazy.

Either way, we’d have a serious problem that we need to somehow deal with. The planet has already experienced, just within the past century, a nutcase national leader who’s way of dealing with his world was to try to scare everyone in it to the point of distraction, apparently not anticipating that they all might just kick the crap out of him — which, of course, they did.

How should we deal with that eventuality if it happens here?

Maybe we need some constitutional safeguard, in which a standing committee, including members of both houses of congress from both parties, plus all the sitting Justices of the Supreme Court, would meet and decide whether the president-elect — or even the president! — is or isn't a dangerous crazy-ass psycho, and should be forced to be analyzed by psychological professionals to determine whether or not his being president is a mortal threat to the country, and whether or not he is to be removed, and maybe even detained, until a new election can be held.

(And by “new election”, I mean a popular vote election, of course, with none of your “electoral college” funny business. If we get to set this up from scratch, there’s no reason that we can't do this right this time.)

Yeah, I know the real dangers in us setting up something like that — it’s easy to imagine some person or party misusing it someday — but as Donald Trump may soon prove to us, there might also be dangers in not doing it. Do we really want to take a chance that some minority of voters accidentally decides to hand over the country to, for example, someone working for our enemies?

Sounds a lot like that 1964 movie, Seven Days in May, "an American political thriller motion picture about a military-political cabal's planned take-over of the United States government in reaction to the president's negotiation of a disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union” — but with the twist in this version being that, this time, the generals would be right!

The bad news, of course, is I think that there’s essentially no chance of ever getting that passed, or at least not until after Trump is no longer in office, and that just might be too late.

Response to What Trump Knows

(See: Just Above Sunset: What Trump Knows)

I must admit, I do have a few problems with any analysis of cyber hacking that says some kid in his basement can’t have hacked the DNC.

After all, the original so-called “Guccifer” — who hacked Colin Powell, George Tenet, Richard Armitage, John Negroponte, "Senator Lisa Murkowski; a senior UN official; members of the Rockefeller family; former FBI and Secret Service agents, as well as the brother of Barbara Bush, CBS sportscaster Jim Nantz, ... former Miss Maine Patricia Legere”, among others, and was eventually arrested for hacking the emails of former Bill Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal — was not a foreign power, he was just some unemployed taxi driver in Romania who believed the world is run by the Illuminati, and did it all with "no fancy equipment, only a clunky NEC desktop and a Samsung cellphone, and no special skills beyond what he had picked up on the web.”

That being said, I wouldn’t trust Donald Trump to know any more about that than he knows about anything else he pretends to know about, but doesn't.

(I should also point out that most of us writing computer code back in the day — you, Alan, doing much more sophisticated systems work in Microsoft, and me, on my Apple II+ at CNN, writing a program that instantly computes the costs of renting one hour of an AT&T video landline between any two points in the United States — for example, Grand Junction and Cincinnati — hadn’t a clue about what it was that made the underlying DOS — and, in my case, "Apple DOS” — work its magic in the background. I myself gave up programing in HTML when Microsoft stopped letting me do it myself, without it automatically changing all my raw ASCII into something I hadn’t intended. But enough of all the nerdy stuff, except that it’s hard to believe someone like Trump, who has has never owned a computer and probably couldn’t tell you what “HTML” even stands for, actually knows “a lot about hacking”, as he claims.)

So what big secret does Trump know that we’ll find out on Tuesday (or Wednesday)?:

“I don’t care what they say, no computer is safe,” he added. “I have a boy who’s 10 years old; he can do anything with a computer. You want something to really go without detection, write it out and have it sent by courier.”

Maybe he’ll announce that his ten-year-old son, Barron, did the hacking of the DNC?

Or maybe he’ll announce that, since launching a missile relies on computers, he’ll be modifying American defenses to have all our bombs delivered by bicycle couriers?

And along the same lines of what Trump knows about anything, if Trump keeps insisting the CIA was “wrong” about all those "weapons of mass destruction”, he needs to update himself on what actually caused that “disaster” back then. What the CIA probably got wrong was not standing up to George Bush's and Dick Cheney's “stovepiping” of intelligence analysis data, allowing them to manipulate the unexamined raw intelligence for their own political purposes, making it look like Iraq was working on programs it wasn’t working on, simply to support their agenda. (Maybe before this week's announcement, Trump can read Seymour Hersh’s excellent 2003 New Yorker piece on how it all happened.) 

If Trump doesn’t understand the past history of his own country, one can only imagine how he’s going to really screw up its future. 

And this brings us back to the question of whether our present situation is a failure of democracy, or a failure of our republican form of government, and the answer is clearly the latter, since if we were really a democracy, than the president-elect would be the one that got the most votes. In other words, this may be what happens when you have a klutzy electoral system that allows an uninformed minority to put one of its own in charge of what is arguably the most powerful nation on the planet.

So Happy F'ing New Year, and God Help Us, Every One!

Response to A Parting Shot from the World of Common Sense

(See: Just Above Sunset: A Parting Shot from the World of Common Sense)

Who knew Tom Friedman had this in him?

Although I think he's misreading what John Kerry was saying about the impossibility of Israel being both democratic and Jewish at the same time. Friedman seems to think they can be both, while I agree with Kerry — that they can’t — although the implication of that would be that we just forget about trying to help all those people solve their problems over there at all. Since both sides made their bed, maybe they should be left to figure out how to sleep in it, without our further help.

And wouldn’t it be interesting to find out after he gets into office that Trump is only pretending to be Israel’s new best friend? So maybe once he gets control, by threats and  lots of tough talk, he forces them to cut the shit and do the right thing? Time will tell, but that does seem to be beyond the range of his capabilities.

But maybe included in an eventual solution could be the Palestinians being granted the right to build their own settlements within Israel, with eventually the whole country being one big land of Israeli and Arab settlements!

Which is to say, maybe the single-state solution is best after all — not a Jewish state and not an Arab state, where everyone is in control! That, of course, would be the democracy without the Jewish state part, but to make that work, there would have to be no right-of-return for anyone, including Jews and displaced Arabs alike — although the refugees would have to be compensated.

The problems, of course, include that this is not what Jews who moved there bargained for, and even fairly-compensated Arab refugees would still be without a country, not necessarily recognized as citizens of wherever they are living right now, so it might be a tough sell to get this new state accepted by all parties involved.

But if the deal does stick, they’d have to change the name. How about “Israelistine"?

Not likely. It would only work if most everybody wanted it to work, and they don’t.

So if I were a Jew who was living in Israel today, looking ahead to whatever state or states are in my future, I’d just move the hell out to somewhere else.

Response to White Blues

(See: Just Above Sunset: White Blues)

"Some conservative publications have taken to arguing this week that the President-elect did much better on Election Day than his nearly 3 million-vote deficit suggests – if only certain liberal cities and states were completely discounted from the popular vote total."

That’s according to Matt Shuham, of Talking Points Memo, under the headline, "Conservatives' Special Revisionist Math: Trump Won Popular Vote If You Nix CA!”. And with not dissimilar math, one could argue that “Clinton Won Presidency If Only You Discount All Those Votes For Trump!”

As for the conservative claim that California accounts for all the votes that gave Hillary her popular vote victory?

By far, the most popular target for wholesale disenfranchisement in these thought-experiments is California. Clinton won the state’s popular vote by more than 4.2 million, according to a tally by the Cook Political Report, which is an even larger margin than her nationwide popular vote lead, which was nearly 2.9 million.

Okay, but I could argue that maybe those votes actually weren’t from California after all — maybe they were, for example, in Texas, a state where, at last count, 3,877,868 votes were cast for Clinton, also well over her 2.9-million national margin.

Why Texas? Good question! Maybe we could make that New York, a state Hillary won with 4,547,218 votes, of which about 2,900,000 were the surplus we’ve been looking for.

But what we’re forgetting here is, when you're talking about the popular vote, you're talking about a national vote, so it doesn’t matter what state (or combination of states) the votes come from, since, with the popular vote, states would be irrelevant!

With a national popular vote, the distinguishing element is that it actually hurts or helps no group in particular.

Back in the 1990s, when I first started looking into this idea of us abolishing the indirect vote, I was told that Democrats would never go for it because of a belief that the electoral system helped inflate the power of urban minorities, who otherwise would just get lost in the crowd. These days, the argument has swung back to helping protect small states who tend to vote Republican, and so switching to the popular vote would wipe out this protection, and thus, would be seen as “hurting” the Republicans.

Think of it this way:

Suppose we had neither an electoral or popular vote system; suppose we had a plutocracy, in which, instead of casting votes at the polls, we bought political offices with money, deposited directly into the treasury. As you can imagine, in a country where the candidate who put up the most money wins, the billionaires always get their way, and any attempt to change to a democracy would be met with complaints that such a change would unfairly punish billionaires.

And Americans, being a fair-minded people, wouldn't want to see anyone be disadvantaged, so they'd hesitate before improving the way they pick their presidents, at least until they had more time to think about what to do — sort of like today.

Absurd thinking? Hey, you said it, not me!

So to beat a dead horse:

The electoral college system is always, arguably, biased in favor of some group or another, which means that, at the same time, it is biased against some other group. We somehow need to stop allowing our election system to be biased for and against people. The way to fix that is to go to a system that has no built-in bias, and that’s one that gives one person one vote.

But then, there's Bill O’Reilly, jumping in with his own theory of what’s behind the movement to abolish the electoral college:

“Summing up,” he said, “[the] left wants power taken away from the white establishment. They want a profound change in the way America is run.”

Fair enough — and he is to be applauded for his candor! — but doesn’t that imply that the right wants to keep the electoral college because they don’t want power taken away from the so-called "white establishment”?

(Here’s a hint: The answer is, yes, it does imply that!)

And by the way, O’Reilly went on to also observe this:

“Very few commentators will tell you that the heart of liberalism in America today is based on race,” O’Reilly said. “It permeates almost every issue. That white men have set up a system of oppression. … So-called white privilege bad. Diversity good.”

I’d argue that “commentators” who think that way are probably “conservative commentators”, since many of those tend to see the difference between the parties as having almost everything to do with race. In fact, in my experience as a white transplanted Yankee living in Georgia who often finds himself chatting with Republicans, they are usually puzzled to discover that I myself am not a Republican, since when they think of a Democrat, they picture someone who is not all that white.

But no, the treatment of minorities by Republicans is only one of the many reasons I call myself a Democrat, others being a belief that Keynesianism makes the most sense on what to do about the economy, since the best way to get people to spend money is to let them get their hands on some; and that we, as a nation, should do what we can, no matter how much it costs, to improve the opportunities of those not born into rich families — and that includes universal healthcare; and a belief that illegal immigration does very little, if any, harm to this country; and a belief in freedom of religion, the take-away of which being that Christians should be allowed to fully celebrate their faith in ways that don’t trample on the rights of the rest of us; and that our best foreign policy would not be to try to intimidate the rest of the world, since that’s something the Nazis tried to do, and look what that got them!

We could go on and on, but let's not.

All this nonsense reminds me of something I heard back in the late 1960s while sitting in the back seat of a Triumph TR-somethng that was being driven the seven miles from Newark, Ohio, to Granville, Ohio, when the driver blurted out, seemingly apropos of nothing, “Imagine what a different world this would be had Barbra Streisand been born without a nose!” In this particular instance, for example, had Barbra Streisand been born schnozless — and given the famous “butterfly effect” — who’s to say that Hillary might not have won Pennsylvania?

And hey, for all we know, maybe in that world that knew no Streisand schnozzola, maybe her noselessness could have caused some butterfly to take a left instead of a right-turn, which, through a series of unforeseen events, somehow got rid of the electoral college?

Sure! Why not! It’s been a strange year anyway.

Response to The New Old World Order

(See: Just Above Sunset: The New Old World Order)

Now I’m starting to get very uneasy.

And what’s weird about all this is, although he’s been pretty clear all along about his intentions if he ever became president, Trump still will become an accidental president in the sense that he and his people were surprised on election night, and that he may not have really expected to win!

Josh Marshall is right about the national press being in the dark, having to rely on posts in Facebook for leads. I wouldn’t even know how to do that sort of journalism.

But Trump has already changed the way political reporters report. Back in the days of all the major candidates being somewhat “normal", objective reporters wouldn’t allow themselves the luxury of calling out presidential candidates on their false claims, leaving that job instead to the fact checkers like “Politifact” and “Snopes”, but this year, because every Trump sentence carried at least one outright lie and often two or three, reporters have had to take the unprecedented step of including phrases like, "Falsely claiming that..." in their copy. Of course, a lot of good that did everybody.

But the public, or at least enough of it, has been now conditioned not to care what the so-called “lying media" says about Trump, since members of the press are obviously in some sort of private blood-feud with the guy, which means anything they say about what he’s doing is just going to be “one side of the story”. After all, the media obviously got everything wrong during the elections, didn't it? He’s pretty much neutered them, effectively cutting the public’s trust in what they hear of the real world. After all, who’s really to judge what “fake news” really is and what is not?

And history shows that, once the people allow the threads to be snipped between them and the truth, then their whole world is in danger, whether they realize it or not.

In conclusion, I’d like to weigh in on that debate as to who I think is to blame for Hillary’s loss:

Other than the dirty tricksters who spent the last decade or so demonizing a well-respected public servant to the point that even people who refused to vote for her opponent still couldn’t trust her enough to vote for her, the real fault lies with all those ignorant crybabies who know so little, and care even less, about our world that they decided to punish their country (for supposedly “forgetting about them”) by voting to put a Putin-wannabe tyrant into the Oval Office.

Rick

Response to Dealing With the Done Deal

(See: Just Above Sunset: Dealing With the Done Deal)

About that electoral college:

If Donald Trump really wanted to make America great, he’d work to get rid of it. But he won’t, maybe because he really doesn’t. It’s not likely to happen soon anyway, simply because too many people — specifically, Republicans — don’t want to get rid of it.

Why Republicans? Because especially lately, they are the party most likely to win the electoral college without winning the popular vote, since about the only way a party can do that is to win more of the low-population states than the other major party, and those states tend to be more conservative than high-population states, maybe because they have fewer big cities, which tend to be more liberal and Democratic.

The major argument often given against doing away with the electoral college has to do with protecting small states, an argument that was refuted quite nicely by The Washington Post back in 2012, in an article that addresses myths about the electoral college, the first of which was, "The framers created the electoral college to protect small states":

The delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention had a variety of reasons for settling on the electoral college format, but protecting smaller states was not among them. Some delegates feared direct democracy, but that was only one factor in the debate. 

Remember what the country looked like in 1787: The important division was between states that relied on slavery and those that didn’t, not between large and small states. A direct election for president did not sit well with most delegates from the slave states, which had large populations but far fewer eligible voters. They gravitated toward the electoral college as a compromise because it was based on population. The convention had agreed to count each slave as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of calculating each state’s allotment of seats in Congress. For Virginia, which had the largest population among the original 13 states, that meant more clout in choosing the president.

In other words, that "a-slave-is-three-fifths-of-a-person" bit of trickery that slave states settled on to artificially inflate their populations for the purpose of deciding how many representatives they’d send to the House threatened to come back and bite them in the ass when it came to voting for president, since they themselves would not allow much of their so-called “population” to actually vote. To remedy that, they favored giving the states, with their make-believe “populations”, the power to choose the president over allowing actual people to do it.

The electoral college distorts the political process by providing a huge incentive [for candidates] to visit competitive states, especially large ones with hefty numbers of electoral votes. That’s why Obama and Romney have spent so much time this year in states like Ohio and Florida. In the 2008 general election, Obama and John McCain personally campaigned in only five of the 29 smallest states. 

The framers protected the interests of smaller states by creating the Senate, which gives each state two votes regardless of population. There is no need for additional protection.

Another way of putting that, especially in a day and age when we no longer have to pander to the duplicitous chicanery of slave states, is that the choice is between having the American people choose the president and vice-president, or having that decision be made by the states. And if we decide that the people, not the states, should decide, then it will no longer be relevant what this does to any particular state.

Many present convoluted arguments that, as much as we call ourselves a “democracy”, technically we’re merely a “republic", maybe partly because the citizens don’t actually elect their president. In fact, I would argue we’re really a “democratic republic”, but all silly technicalities aside, there ought to be at least one part of our nation’s management that we, the people, choose directly (given that senators and representatives are chosen only by people who live in those states) and that is the executive branch. If only we could do that directly, then few could deny that we’re a democracy.

Another beneficial result of a popular vote would be increasing turnout, which has averaged about 63% of eligible voters since 1828 when we started paying attention to the popular vote, although it’s down in the low to mid 50s in recent elections. As it is, many people say their vote doesn’t really count, and that happens to be true, especially for anyone not living in a battleground state.

With direct elections, every vote would count, no matter what state the voter lived in, which means candidates who campaign only in big population centers, which might be overlooked and excused by Idaho voters under the present electoral system, would find themselves punished by Idaho voters under the popular vote system.

"Hey, wait a minute!", you say, “Aren’t you a Democrat? No wonder you want the popular vote! Democrats win when the people vote directly!"

True enough, but believe it or not, I’ve always believed in the popular vote, even before I realized that the electoral college is probably biased toward Republicans.  Not only is the electoral college an archaic vestige of an age when ordinary Americans weren’t considered as smart as the elite few who would be chosen to be electors, it’s clumsy and unnecessary and, it turns out, it also gives unwarranted power to the low-population state voter over the one from the populous state.

But just becoming a true democracy should be good for the country as a whole — although we’re not likely to get there in the present day America, in which those few with power, understandably, pretty much don’t believe in democracy and majority rule anyway.

Response to The Limits of Cool

(See: Just Above Sunset: The Limits of Cool)

I can think of nothing that gets me more annoyed than someone telling me that Barrack Obama is just too nice.

For example, there was, a week ago, in the New York Times, from Mark Moyar, director of the Center for Military and Diplomatic History at the Foreign Policy Initiative, an op-ed entitled "The World Fears Trump’s America — That’s a Good Thing”. Here he is, speaking to the idea that Trump’s phone conversation with Taiwan’s leader scaring the whole world is the way things ought to be: 

During the last eight years, President Obama showed what happens when the world’s greatest power tries strenuously to avoid giving fright. He began his presidency with lofty vows to conciliate adversaries, defer to the opinions of other countries and reduce America’s military commitments. 

Consequently, he received rapturous applause in European capitals and a Nobel Peace Prize. In the real world of geopolitics, however, the results have been catastrophic. … 

Mr. Obama’s passivity in the face of provocations and his failure to enforce the “red line” in Syria led Russia, China and other adversaries to seek new gains at America’s expense. … 

The Obama presidency is but the latest chapter in a post-1945 saga that has been dominated by international fear of the United States, or lack thereof. In 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea because Harry S. Truman’s exclusion of South Korea from America’s “defense perimeter” removed fears of intervention. 

By contrast, Dwight D. Eisenhower employed rhetorical threats and high military spending to fill the Communist powers with fear of nuclear Armageddon, an approach that kept the Communists from launching further invasions. 

Lyndon B. Johnson tried to avert a major war in Vietnam by showing restraint, in expectation of North Vietnamese reciprocation. Hanoi responded by pouring troops into South Vietnam. Richard M. Nixon revived fears of the United States with his “madman theory,” whereby he took seemingly reckless actions to convince America’s enemies that he just might be crazy enough to do it. 

Those fears, and the caution they instilled in the Communist powers, dissipated when the Watergate Congress kicked the legs out from under South Vietnam. The world continued to live without fear of a strong America under Jimmy Carter, whose timidity caused nations to fall to Communism and the United States Embassy in Iran to fall to anti-American extremists.

And before we return from the world of make-believe, let’s have one more quote: 

In 1980, as in 2016, Americans elected someone who made clear his intent to put fear back in the nation’s enemies. Nowadays, even liberal Democrats applaud Reagan for bringing the Soviet Union to its knees. Back in 1980, however, Reagan’s tough, nationalist stances on foreign policy aroused the same condemnation of “fearmongering” currently emanating from the world’s enlightened critics of Mr. Trump.

In fact, the Soviet Union collapsed under its own weight, without any assistance from Ronald Reagan, who not only did not bring it down, he didn't see it coming, barely noticed once it arrived, and finally, along with all the other Republicans, immediately tried to take credit for it.

If anything, Reagan’s ratcheting up our military spending, causing the Russians to do the same, was less likely to hurt them as to help their arms sales, which was then (and continues today to be) one of the only sectors of their economy that other countries are interested in engaging with.

I’m not saying there isn't some liberal Democrat somewhere who “applauds” Reagan for “bringing the Soviet Union to its knees”, I’m just saying that, as a liberal Democrat who doesn’t, I’ve never met a fellow liberal Democrat who did. 

I see from Mark Moyar’s Wikipedia entry that he’s an expert on the Vietnam War, a conflict that ended just about the time he was being born in the 1970s. Had he been old enough to be aware of what was going on at that time, he'd know that the loss of that war had nothing to do with Watergate and everything to do with Americans tiring of fighting someone else's civil war. Richard Nixon's so-called "madman theory" certainly earned him no respect on the world stage, although it probably helped his own country decide he was just nutty enough to earn a one-way ticket back to San Clemente.

Then again, in 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected, Mark Moyar was nine years old. Something that annoys me almost as much as someone preaching to me that our president is too darn nice is hearing it from someone who's a virtual toddler.

And as obvious as this may sound, I would much rather live in a country run by Barrack Obama than by Trump's pals, Putin or Assad (the guys who, right now, are murdering all those innocents in Aleppo), or that jerk Duterte in the Philippines, or Donald Trump himself, or any of his fellow warlords who think the way they all do.

But it's not just from the right that we hear suggestions that Obama hasn't been crazy or scary enough, we also heard something like it from Michele Goldberg, in Slate, who didn't hear what she wanted in his final news conference:

Most of the time, Barack Obama’s near-supernatural calm and dispassion are among his best qualities. Occasionally, as at Friday’s pallid press conference, they are his worst ones. 

Obama spoke to journalists at what should be a moment of acute political emergency. It’s increasingly clear that Donald Trump won the election with the deliberate aid of Vladimir Putin, and the president-elect seems intent on rewarding his benefactor with a friendly state department. Russia also appears to have intervened on behalf of Republicans in congressional races. 

If the situation were reversed – if the CIA concluded that Hillary Clinton won the election (but lost the popular vote) with an assist from a hostile foreign power – pitchfork-waving Republicans would be demanding that she resign for the good of the nation. Stunned Democrats, by contrast, have been leaderless, marching toward the post-inauguration abyss without a fight. Obama might have rallied them by laying out the alarming political implications of the CIA’s findings. Instead, he minimized them. 

It was not a reassuring performance. His refusal to acknowledge the intense alarm felt by his supporters only exacerbates it.

First, it should be noted there’s no reason to believe that Hillary lost the election because of the hacks. Outside of the primaries and the convention, can you remember any significant leak that might have hurt her campaign in the general election? I can’t.

In fact, you’d think the hacking should have hurt Trump more than Hillary, since it was his group, if anyone's, who seemed to be working with unfriendly foreign invaders, trying to disrupt our elections.

Second, had the situation been reversed, the Republicans would grab pitchforks. That's one of the things I like about us: We're not jerks. If we were just like them, I would probably not be on our side, and nor would many others. What would be the point of both sides being jerks?

I’m not sure what she expected President Obama to do more than he did during the campaign, but had he done anything more, he would himself have been intruding in the process, and to say anything more than he did during his final press conference would have been to betray his role as chief executive of our country — which needed his reassurances that we, as a nation, can continue to be as great as we are in the face of what’s about to happen to us in January, as long as we don’t abandon our values.

Obama has a much more important job than Democratic party standard bearer and that's president of the United States, and sending that message to America is a lot more important than anything he might have thought to say to his party in their time of need, if indeed there was anything he could say, other than “Good luck in your future endeavors! I've done what I can, but from now on, you’re on your own."

So yes, when it comes to handling crises as they arise, Omaha can walk on thin ice — and do it better than just about anyone alive — but no, he still can’t walk on water.

Response to Freaky Friday

(See: Just Above Sunset: Freak Friday

Do you wonder, as I do, why Donald Trump’s recent “Thank You Tour” didn’t make a quick stop at the Kremlin?

I know, right? Don’t I sound like Joe McCarthy, from back in the early 1950s, warning us all that the Russians are attempting a coup here in America? But the truth is, there may be reason to believe they’re much closer to doing it now than they ever were back then.

In fact, if you think about it, even if the various actors and writers and directors were communists intending to wreak havoc in Hollywood, what difference would that make? Hardly anybody would pay to see some propaganda movie, so it could hardly have had any effect.

And compared to making a few preachy movies, installing their own Putin apologist, along with his whole platoon of see-no-evil monkeys in high positions in the government, along with a frightened-shitless Congress that will pretty much do what they’re told, then it’s probably bye-bye to the independence of Ukraine and Georgia and Estonia and other previous Soviet states, and since we will probably have dropped out of it by then, NATO will do nothing to prevent it.

Speaking of the McCarthy era, whatever happened to all those right-wingers from back then who imagined commies in every closet? Where’d they go, now that we need them? I’m betting on election day, they were at the polls, voting for Trump, the very guy who’s letting the New Soviets in the back door!

And by the way, while down through the years, we’ve been led to believe that liberals were the true friends of the Soviets, since they were both thought to be left-of-center on the political spectrum, I always thought there was something wrong with that characterization — that, in fact, the Soviet Union, being a brutal dictatorship, was actually part of the extreme right. After all, liberals are famous for wanting everybody to have a vote, while it's conservatives who try to restrict voting to only people like themselves.

In fact, you may remember that, immediately after the collapse of Soviet communism in the 1990s, those Russians looking to restore communist rule were known to all as “conservatives”. 

So how did conservative communists come to considered “leftists"?

It traces back to the late 1800s, when “Social Democrats” — leftists who mostly advocated for democratically-elected governments who would keep capitalism in check — were all the rage in Europe, while Vladimir Lenin, while in exile in Siberia, had different ideas:

Keen to keep up with developments in German Marxism – where there had been an ideological split, with revisionists like Eduard Bernstein advocating a peaceful, electoral path to socialism – Lenin remained devoted to violent revolution...

Lenin later led the Bolsheviks in their takeover of the country, and it was his harsher form of socialist government that set the standard for Soviet rule from then on.

This Russian stuff is really insidious. You can tell Americans right to their faces that the Russians hacked the DNC emails — whether to “undermine voter confidence in the election process” or to “help Trump get elected”, it doesn’t really matter — and polls show that enough of them will just think the whole story is being fabricated by the Clinton campaign, who need to realize that the election is over, they lost, and it’s time to move on.

You could show everyone video of Trump appointing nothing but Russian spies to his cabinet, and those hyper-partisan Republicans would insist it was just another case of the lying media making stuff up. This is as scary as it gets.

What can be done about this? Maybe nothing. Maybe after Trump takes office, he will somehow swear his allegiance to Putin in exchange for opening a golf course in downtown Moscow or something, at which point maybe, just maybe, there might finally be a mood in to Congress to impeach him.

But I do think that, by the time Congress ever gets around to passing something like that, Putin will probably just veto it.

Response to The Dog Catches the Car

(See: Just Above Sunset: The Dog Catches the Car)

For all those years of talk about repealing and replacing Obamacare, and all those votes to shit-can the law, are you telling me the Republicans never came up with any realistic plan to replace it? Other than vowing to keep the good parts of the ACA (e.g., pre-existing conditions) but get rid of the bad (paying for it), there seems to have been precious little thought given to how it would all work.

I can help them with that.

I’m thinking the Democrats might consider joining the Republicans on a plan that I like to call the “Totally Free-Market Job-Killing Obamacare Replacement Healthcare Plan". (After all, who amongst that group can complain about replacing Obamacare with something that has “Free Market” in its name?)

Here’s how it would work:

Obamacare would stay exactly as it is now, including the stuff about preexisting-conditions and about kids staying on their parents' plan until age 26, but with one crucial difference being that no American would ever be forced to buy health insurance (I think they'll really like that part), since all health insurance bills would be sent directly to the federal government, with the government also negotiating prices and amounts of coverage with the insurance companies.

One beauty of this plan is the cost savings of millions that come from cutting out the bureaucracy that would try to sort out whether or not the patient has insurance — since everybody will have it.

How would it be paid for? Higher taxes, especially on those who can afford to pay them!

So why is it called “Free Market”? Because all health insurance would then be free to all, rich and poor alike!

Perfect! What’s not to like? We already know that this plan will work because it’s already proven itself in countries all over the world.

Of course, the success of the “Totally Free-Market Job-Killing Obamacare Replacement Healthcare Plan” (also to be referred to as “Trumpcare") probably relies on nobody ever tipping them off that it’s a plan some people call a “single payer” program.

But until it gets passed by Congress and signed by the president, what say we just keep that to ourselves, okay?

Response to The Transition to a New World

(See: Just Above Sunset: The Transition to a New World)

And speaking of Truthiness...

I guess we should give Kudos to Trump for doing that Carrier deal, but the question remains, how long do we all have to wait before exposing the whole thing as a fraud?

Yes, I realize that it's been three-and-a-half weeks since the election, and I should by now have gotten used to this new concept of "Trumpian Truth” — which apparently is some version of truth that is granted an automatic waver from having to jibe with reality — but in fact (and this presumes “facts” have not received that same waver), it’s going to be interesting around here to watch Trump and his deluded constituency try to deal with reality when this new “Trumpian Truth” comes back around to bite them all in the collective rump.

Some, such as Steven Rattner, in the New York Times, are already at it:

Donald J. Trump spent much of his campaign peddling hope to beleaguered working-class Americans that, on his watch, those old-fashioned, good-paying manufacturing jobs would come back to America. … But the vast preponderance of American job losses has come simply because emerging-market countries have gotten much better at making stuff with workers earning far less. 

In 2015, a typical factory employee in the United States earned $37.71 an hour, including benefits; his Mexican counterpart received $5.90 an hour. And American executives say that the productivity that they get in Mexico is at least as good as what they get in the United States.

The Times imbeds a graph here that illustrates the larger problem by showing the discrepancy of hourly wages around the world, which I will do my best to replicate here:

Where Labor Is Cheap

Average hourly manufacturing compensation, including benefits.

Germany: $42.42 ********************************************

United States: 37.71 *********************************

France: 37.59 *****************************************

Britain: 31.44 **************************************

Japan: 23.60 ***********************************

Brazil: 7.97 *************

Mexico: 5.90 *******

China: 4.12 *******

India: 1.59 ***

Figures for 2015 except China (2013) and India (2012). 

Source: Conference Board

By The New York Times

According to more detail from Rattner, Trump’s Mexican dilemma is even worse than it looks:

Mr. Trump’s recent proclamation that he kept a Ford plant in Kentucky from closing was a mirage — Ford never planned to shutter the plant or eliminate any positions. More significantly, Ford is still going forward with the construction of a $1.6 billion facility in Mexico to assemble small cars, which cannot be done profitably using expensive American labor.

Trump could, as he has promised, slap high tariffs on the cars that come back across the border, but that brings us to another important economic reality that Trump hasn’t really been addressing:

Higher import duties would hurt the very people Mr. Trump is trying to help. Thanks to trade, prices of many goods have fallen. In the decade between 2002 and 2012, the prices of toys dropped by 43 percent and those of furniture and bedding fell by 7 percent. 

All told, one study of 40 countries found that if international trade ended, the wealthiest consumers would lose 28 percent of their purchasing power while those in the bottom tenth, who typically rely on more imported goods, would lose 63 percent. Sure, a small number of manufacturing jobs would return, but at an extraordinary price.

So something Trump, along with those geniuses who voted for him because they thought a businessman like him would have a better handle on the economy, need to realize is that, in this new “globalism” environment these days, you can’t really escape the consequences of living on the globe — you either pay for living by increasing your wages, or you do it by lowering the amount of money you spend on everything, but if you try to do both at the same time, you’re going to end up like a dog chasing his tail.

And as for Scottie Nell Hughes’ Trumpian theory of facts?

And so one thing that has been interesting this entire campaign season to watch, is that people that say facts are facts – they’re not really facts. Everybody has a way – it’s kind of like looking at ratings, or looking at a glass of half-full water. Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth, or not truth. There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts. 

And so Mr. Trump’s tweets, amongst a certain crowd – a large part of the population – are truth.

That’s probably because Donald Trump ran a Reality-TV-like campaign that appealed to voters who didn’t care if anything he said was true or not, which tricked you all into thinking there really is no such thing as truth.

But starting in January, there will be a change of the rules, in which Trump’s success will not depend on hoodwinking a gaggle of half-interested red states, but will hang on his ability to make deals with — assuming you people really believe in Him — the Big Man Himself, someone who, I am led to understand, doesn’t take kindly to folks fudging around with The Truth.

Response to The Price of Price

(See: Just Above Sunset: The Price of Price)

According to the Los Angeles Times:

Though he did not discuss healthcare and entitlement policies frequently, Trump insisted several times that he would protect programs serving vulnerable Americans. 

“I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican, and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid,” Trump said last year ...

How many Trumpists will suffer buyer’s remorse, once they realize their hero is hiring Georgia Congressman Tom Price, a guy who wants to get rid of all that, to be his Health and Human Services secretary, in charge of running all that?

And by the way, why does everyone assume that Trump voters were on Obamacare when they voted, and will now lose their coverage? I always assumed they weren’t, and, therefore, won’t.

Who’s right? I don’t know. Maybe none of us do, probably because the so-called “Lying Media” never seemed to ask Trump supporters for a show of hands of those on Obamacare. And nor did anyone, at least that I know of, ask Trump if he even believed in universal healthcare, or whether those 20-million folks will lose coverage when he replaces Obamacare, or if he planned on “replacing” Obamacare with a Medicare-like single-payer program.

I suspect one reason nobody asked him any of that was because they saw no point, since everyone assumed he wasn’t going to win anyway.

And so millions of Americans lost their jobs to the George Bush economy, even as billionaires got even richer from it, and in response, Americans elect a billionaire for president, and he hires other billionaires to run the country. The reasoning? I guess it's that all these rich people were so successful in keeping our share of the recovery gains, we should hire them to, what, do the same on our behalf? I mean, it's not that they need the work!

Which is to say that, Trump or no Trump, Republican politicians will continue to know exactly how to exploit America’s blind spots. Take, for example, the case of Tom Price:

Price, like House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), advocates replacing the government-provided Medicare health plan with a program that provides seniors with a voucher to purchase private health coverage. 

This system, which supporters call premium support, saves the federal government money by gradually shifting costs onto beneficiaries, independent budget analyses have shown.

So apparently, the plan is to save federal government healthcare money by gradually not spending any of it! What a stroke of genius!

Price also advocates a new system of block grants to states that would sharply cut federal aid for Medicaid, which primarily serves poor Americans.

So as I understand this, instead of us paying for your medical bills, we give you a coupon worth a couple of thousand dollars you can use to pay any medical bills that might come up — and, by the way, although healthcare costs would probably increase, the vouchers would not, so as years go by, this program would eventually just go poof!

And the reason I say “would” instead of “will” is that, like George Bush Jr's assuming his reelection victory gave him a mandate to “privatize" Social Security (which he tried to soft-pedal by, mid-stream, substituting the term “ownership society” for “privatize”), and just as Americans rejected his plan in droves, they will likely do the same if Price tries that trick with Medicare.

At some point, Bush realized that the public, 77% of whom just last year said that Medicare is a “very important” program, sees the word “privatize”, in reference to public programs, as another word for “abolish” — as well they should! — and I’m pretty sure present-day Republicans are about to learn that same lesson.

As for "block grants" to states to replace Medicaid — in which the feds say to the states, “Here, take this money! Go buy yourself something nice!” — about two-thirds in that same 2015 poll said they value Medicaid for the needy, too, so I hope Price and Ryan (and, indeed, Trump, if he goes along with their ideas) get their heads handed to them.

And if not, and all American public healthcare, including Medicare, bites the dust? Then we all might as well just move to Costa Rica, where it will no longer matter that our Medicare can’t be used anyway.

I really don’t understand the appeal of all this “populism” stuff — which, when you think about it, is just a lynch mob impersonating democracy. Maybe we are now entering an era in which Americans finally learn why you shouldn’t send away for all that seemingly-cool garbage they see on late-night TV, after which maybe we can go back to trusting our government to the professionals who know how to do it.

Response to Ask No Questions

(See: Just Above Sunset: Ask No Questions)

Frank Bruni reports on Trump’s visit to the New York Times editorial board:

The Trump who visited The Times was purged of any zeal to investigate Clinton’s emails or the Clinton Foundation, willing to hear out the scientists on global warming, skeptical of waterboarding and unhesitant to disavow white nationalists. He never mentioned the border wall.

Oh, snap! The guy’s not even in office yet, and he’s backtracking on his campaign vows already? This can’t be good.

I suppose there are some Democrats who actually look forward to making deals with him on those issues that we seem to agree on — such as, say, infrastructure programs — and I myself would be tempted, given that some of these things might never get done if we don’t do them with Trump, since the Republicans we’ve been working with for the last several years are so hard-assed that they refuse to allow Democrats take a part in any solutions because they refuse to allow them any credit.

There are a few reasons to be wary.

One is that we'll need to look closely at these programs that we supposedly agree on, to make sure we’re all on the same page. Here’s a warning from Obama aide Ronald A. Klain in the Washington Post:

As the White House official responsible for overseeing implementation of President Obama’s massive infrastructure initiative, the 2009 Recovery Act, I’ve got a simple message for Democrats who are embracing President-elect Donald Trump’s infrastructure plan: Don’t do it. It’s a trap.

Trump’s so-called infrastructure plan is apparently not what it pretends to be:

First, Trump’s plan is not really an infrastructure plan. It’s a tax-cut plan for utility-industry and construction-sector investors, and a massive corporate welfare plan for contractors. 

The Trump plan doesn’t directly fund new roads, bridges, water systems or airports, as did Hillary Clinton’s 2016 infrastructure proposal. Instead, Trump’s plan provides tax breaks to private-sector investors who back profitable construction projects. These projects (such as electrical grid modernization or energy pipeline expansion) might already be planned or even underway. 

There’s no requirement that the tax breaks be used for incremental or otherwise expanded construction efforts; they could all go just to fatten the pockets of investors in previously planned projects.

The problem is, the things the country needs done — "municipal water-system overhauls, repairs of existing roads, replacement of bridges that do not charge tolls” — are not the kinds of things that investors like to work on, which are projects they can later monetize, such as toll roads and toll bridges. Add to that, contractors are guaranteed a “10 percent pretax profit margin,” and then a tax break on top of that, a windfall on doing the stuff that was probably going to be done anyway even without the incentives.

And once you remember that one main reason for these projects is to create new jobs, which spends new money, and Trump’s plan doesn’t, you have to wonder if Trump even understands our nation's problems in the first place.

So we find ourselves back at the original question: Do we cooperate with this guy in hopes of at least getting some things done that need to be done, or do we freeze him out, like his party did to ours for the last eight years?

I still don’t know a good answer to that — I suppose it may depend on what deals he offers, once he’s president — but I can think of one other good reason to simply ignore any impression that he’s flipping to our side, and that is that, during the campaign, he’s already destroyed the process of how we pick our leaders, and we don’t want to encourage future candidates to demogogue their way into the White House — by making false promises to the peanut gallery, and then breaking them all once they get into office.

Yes, we want stuff done that we think needs to be done, but we also believe in self-government. Governing achieved through tricking the public into voting for you so you can do whatever you want is no better than governing by dictatorship, with some strongman telling the people what they will get, whether they like it or not.

Whether we choose to cooperate with him or not, assuming he’s actually pivoted to policies that are good for America, is almost beside the point, since he’s already screwed up the country, diverting away from its original promise, and toward something it wasn’t meant to be.

Is this the new thing that replaces democracy? Some populist conman or other taking advantage of a fed-up populous, tricking his way into power by posturing and telling them all exactly what they want to hear?

If Trumpism is the wave of the future, then I want my country back.