Response to Discounting Experience

(See: Just Above Sunset: Discounting Experience)

Here’s what Kevin Drum thinks:

Liberals like to think that maybe more diplomacy will stop North Korea’s nuclear program. It won’t. Conservatives like to think that tougher sanctions, or possibly military force, will stop their nuclear program. They won’t. Donald Trump likes to pretend that China can stop their nuclear program. They either can’t or won’t. Like it or not, this is where we are.

There are only two options left. Either we accept a nuclear-armed North Korea or we launch a nuclear strike to take out their capabilities. Since a nuclear strike is insane for too many reasons to list – including the fact that it might not even work – this means we really have no options at all. We can, if we want, maintain a hostile attitude toward North Korea as a signal to others about the price of developing nukes, but we basically have to accept the reality that North Korea is a nuclear state.

But wait! One of those two options — that is, accepting a nuclear North Korea — might be an actual option, but only if Kim’s plan weren’t to go ahead and use his nukes on us — but it seems that is his plan. And this leaves us with only one option, which would be to launch a nuclear strike to take out their capabilities.

And that’s especially true after hearing today that Kim’s thinking about taking out Guam with one of his maybe 60 newly-released mini-warheads, each small enough to fit inside a missile. I suppose it’s a good sign that he’s threatening one of our territories first, which he probably wouldn’t do if he were serious about hitting our mainland, since he must know that destroying Guam would likely be immediately followed by us destroying North Korea.

Which means he’s probably bluffing — although you willing to chance that?

But let’s back up a bit. Since we already know that the “bomb North Korea” option is extremely problematical, maybe we should leave that as the absolute last alternative. As stupid as this may sound, I happen to believe some sort of diplomacy is more likely our only hope, assuming there is any hope at all of avoiding massive death and destruction.

And if we’re going to negotiate, maybe we should try to figure out what all these things the U.S. is doing that Kim finds “threatening” — other, that is, than us just telling him to stop threatening us or we’ll rain fire on him like nobody’s ever seen?

The most I could find is he’s still pissed off about things we did to them back in the early 1950s, during the Korean War. That story comes from WaPo’s Anna Fifield, back in May: 

The Kim family has kept a tight grip on North Korea for some seven decades by perpetuating the idea that the Americans are out to get them. From the earliest age, North Korean children are taught “cunning American wolves” — illustrated by fair-haired, pale-skinned men with huge noses — want to kill them. 

Kindergartens and child-care centers are decorated with animals holding grenades and machine guns. Cartoons show plucky squirrel soldiers (North Koreans) triumphing over the cunning wolves (Americans). 

“North Koreans live in a war mentality, and this anti-American propaganda is war-time propaganda,” said Tatiana Gabroussenko, an expert in North Korean propaganda who teaches at Korea University in Seoul. 

The thing is: there is some element of truth to the North Korean version of events. It’s only a kernel, and it is grossly exaggerated, but North Koreans remember very well what most Americans have forgotten (or never knew): that the Korean War was a brutal one. 

“Korea is called the forgotten war, and part of what has been forgotten is the utter ruin and devastation that we rained down on the North Korean people,” said John Delury, a professor in the international relations department at Yonsei University in Seoul. “But this has been ingrained into the North Korean psyche.”

Remember Dean Rusk, Secretary of State under JFK and LBJ? He figures in this story:

First: a little history.

The Korean Peninsula, previously occupied by Japan, was divided at the end of World War II. Dean Rusk — an Army colonel at the time, who went on to become secretary of state — got a map and basically drew a line across at the 38th parallel. To the Americans’ surprise, the Soviet Union agreed to the line, and the communist-backed North and the American-backed South were established in 1948 as a “temporary measure.”

On June 25, 1950, Kim Il Sung, installed by the Soviets to lead North Korea, decided to try to reunify the peninsula by force, invading the South. (Although in the North Korean version of events, the South and their imperialist patrons started it.)

The push south was surprisingly successful until Gen. Douglas MacArthur landed his troops on the mudflats at Incheon, sending the northern troops back. Then the Chinese got involved, managing to push them back to roughly where they started, on the 38th parallel.

All this happened within the first six months or so. For the next two-and-a-half years, neither side was able to make any headway. The war was drawn to a close in 1953, after exacting a bloody toll.

“The number of Korean dead, injured or missing by war’s end approached three million, 10 percent of the overall population,” Charles K. Armstrong, a professor of Korean history at Columbia University, wrote in an essay. “The majority of those killed were in the North, which had half of the population of the South.”

But the war ended with an armistice, not with a peace treaty. That means that, to this day, North and South Korea remain in a technical state of war.

But while it lasted, we were brutal. We dropped more bombs in Korea than we did in all the Pacific in WWII:

The United States dropped 635,000 tons of bombs in Korea, not counting the 32,557 tons of napalm, Bruce Cumings, a University of Chicago professor who’s written several books on North Korea, wrote in “The Korean War: A History.” This compared with 503,000 tons in the entire Pacific theater in World War II. 

“If we keep on tearing the place apart, we can make it a most unpopular affair for the North Koreans,” Defense Secretary Robert Lovett said after the napalm and aerial bombing campaigns of 1950 and 1951, according to Cumings. “We ought to go right ahead,” Lovett said. 

Rusk said the United States bombed “everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.” After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops, former Post correspondent Blaine Harden wrote on these pages in 2015. 

Air Force commanders complained that they’d run out of targets. 

“The physical destruction and loss of life on both sides was almost beyond comprehension, but the North suffered the greater damage, due to American saturation bombing and the scorched-earth policy of the retreating U.N. forces,” Armstrong of Columbia wrote.

And the Kim regimes haven’t let their people forget:

The Kim regime keeps its people afraid by constantly blaming the United States for its situation, especially sanctions for its economic plight. But this also helps it unify the populace against a supposed external threat. ... 

“When a new and untested American president starts dangling out the prospect of a surprise missile attack as the solution to the North Korean problem, it plays directly into their worst narrative that the regime tells its people,” Delury said.

The regime punctuates their war narrative with many museums throughout the country designed to remind their people of the atrocities, such as the "Sinchon Museum of American War Atrocities", south of Pyongyang, commemorating a massacre there in which 35,000 women, children and old people were said to have died in 1950, at the hands of American troops, according to the North, but doubts about the culprits remain: 

US troops did indeed commit several massacres of Korean civilians during the war, such as at Nogun-ri in South Korea on July 26, 1950, when American soldiers shot South Koreans fleeing the war zone, an event for which then-President Bill Clinton expressed his “regrets” in 2001. However, several scholars have put US responsibility for the Sincheon massacre in doubt, as did famous South Korean novelist Hwang Sok-Yong, who traveled to North Korea in 1989. 

In his book “Sonnim” (The Guest), based on eyewitness reports of the Sincheon atrocities, Hwang affirms that Korean Christians fleeing toward South Korea and Korean communists perpetrated the massacre, not US soldiers. Hwang says he did not see any evidence that American troops were involved.

Still, they continue to talk about this sort of thing in Korea. While we see that war as being over long ago — even if technically it isn’t — apparently, for some reason, the North Koreans don’t.

So as farfetched as it sounds, getting Kim to see the Korean War the way the rest of the world does, might help. Maybe China and Russia could host a meeting in Geneva or somewhere, giving Kim a chance to meet representatives of other countries face-to-face, showing him what’s really going on out here, which might even lead to a peace treaty that actually ends the Korean War, instead of it continuing as an anomaly in history as just a cease-fire.

Maybe we could get Bill Clinton involved, and somehow return us all to the so-called “Agreed Framework”, in which they stop testing nuclear weapons, while we supply them with the sorts of things that keep their energy needs satisfied, as well as their needs for food for the populace, at the same time as we offer help in modernizing their economy and reintegrating them into the rest of the world.

The hardest part, of course, will be sneaking all this past Donald Trump. Hmm.

Okay, well, see you all after the apocalypse.

Response to The Day Came

(See: Just Above Sunset: The Day Came)

“What the prosecutors should be looking at are Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 deleted emails,” Trump said, to uproarious applause. “And they should be looking at the paid Russian speeches. And the owned Russian companies. Or look at the uranium that she sold that is now in the hands of very angry Russians.”

That, of course, came from his rally in West Virginia last night, before a crowd of cheering admirers primed to swallow whatever poop he fed them as if it were ambrosia from heaven. The truth about these claims, which Trump must have heard before since he regurgitates all this stuff on a regular basis, did not likely have any advocates in attendance.

Still, if nobody ever revisits it, people will start to believe that the truth is not true, since they never hear anybody say it:


* Clinton’s deleted emails: Trump’s line on the maybe 33,000 private emails that Hillary “deleted” is that she destroyed them under subpoena, which is not true. After she had left office, Congress asked — not subpoenaed — the State Department for copies of any old emails from ex-Secretaries of State having to do with official business, and State onpassed the request to her.

At the same time that she turned over the emails to State in early December of 2014, she ordered that all her old private exchanges having nothing even close to a connection with government business be deleted. Maybe she should have kept them, just so she could later prove they had nothing to do with her job, but there didn’t seem to be a reason to at the time.

In early March of the following year, two days after the New York Times reported that Hillary had used a personal email account when Secretary of State, the House Select Committee on Benghazi issued a subpoena for all emails having to do with Libya. Later that month, an employee of Platte River Networks, the subcontractor who had been charged with dispatching the emails, had what he termed an “oh, shit! moment” when he realized he hadn’t gotten around to the deletions, so he erased the archive at that point, at about the same time that Clinton’s lawyers sent a letter to the committee to inform them that the pertinent Libya emails had all been included in the December turnover.

Did Clinton issue a deletion order after the subpoena had arrived, as Trump claimed? According to Politifact, the FBI looked into that, and

the FBI learned no one on Clinton’s staff specifically asked the employee to delete the emails following the New York Times story and subpoena. Rather, the employee made that decision on his own.

In other words, it’s been checked out already by the FBI, and they decided that there’s nothing to it. Case closed.


* Uranium Hillary sold to the Russians: The uranium story is a convoluted one, but the bottom line is that there wasn’t any. Zip!

This fable originated in the book Clinton Cash, by Breitbart’s Peter Schweizer. Here’s how Snopes summarizes the issue:

The mining company, Uranium One, was originally based in South Africa, but merged in 2007 with Canada-based UrAsia Energy. Shareholders there retained a controlling interest until 2010, when Russia’s nuclear agency, Rosatom, completed purchase of a 51% stake. Hillary Clinton played a part in the transaction because it involved the transfer of ownership of a material deemed important to national security — uranium, amounting to one-fifth of U.S. reserves — thus requiring the approval of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), on which the U.S. Secretary of State sits.

Sounds like trouble for Hillary? Maybe not so much:

Among the ways these accusations stray from the facts is in attributing a power of veto or approval to Secretary Clinton that she simply did not have. Clinton was one of nine cabinet members and department heads that sit on the CFIUS, and the secretary of the treasury is its chairperson. CFIUS members are collectively charged with evaluating the transaction for potential national security issues, then turning their findings over to the president. By law, the committee can’t veto a transaction; only the president can. According to The New York Times, Clinton may not have even directly participated in the Uranium One decision. Then-Assistant Secretary of State Jose Fernandez, whose job it was to represent the State Dept. on CFIUS, said Clinton herself “never intervened” in committee matters.

And as for Trump’s, "look at the uranium that she sold that is now in the hands of very angry Russians”?

Russia doesn’t have the licenses to export uranium outside the United States, Oilprice.org pointed out, "so it’s somewhat disingenuous to say this uranium is now Russia’s, to do with what it pleases." The Kremlin was likely more interested in Uranium One’s assets in Kazakhstan, the world’s largest producer.

The fact that Trump keeps making this claim is further proof (as if anybody needs further proof) that Trump is either (1) too stupid to be president of the United States, or (2) too much of a jerk to be president, or (3) possibly both.


* As for Trump’s suggestion that prosecutors "should be looking at the paid Russian speeches" and "the owned Russian companies”, it’s hard to know what the hell he’s talking about.

I wasn’t able to find out if Hillary ever got a paying gig to speak in Russia, although her husband got paid $500,000 to speak there in 2010. Then again, according to Politifact, Bill Clinton has made a lot of speeches in a lot of places, sometimes getting paid even more:

Bill Clinton regularly delivers speeches for fees of $500,000 or higher — such as a $750,000 speech in Hong Kong in 2011, paid for by a Swedish communications company, and a $600,000 speech in the Netherlands, also in 2011, paid for by a Dutch finance corporation.

But none of that has ever been linked with charges that either Bill or Hillary may have helped Russia intrude in our elections, or that they have ever taken any meeting with Russian spies offering quid-pro-quos for helping to repeal U.S. sanctions against Russia.

Nor, by the way, have I any idea what Trump means by “the owned Russian companies”, but sometimes, as evidenced by those phone conversations with the leaders of Australia and Mexico, he just blurts out things that have nothing to do with anything.

Does he actually believe the stuff he says, or is he just playing the village idiot for effect? I don’t know.

But maybe it’s Dada?

Developed in reaction to World War I, the Dada movement consisted of artists who rejected the logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern capitalist society, instead expressing nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest in their works. …

Many Dadaists believed that the 'reason' and 'logic' of bourgeois capitalist society had led people into war. They expressed their rejection of that ideology in artistic expression that appeared to reject logic and embrace chaos and irrationality.

Sometimes I wonder if Donald Trump’s whole life might someday be revealed to be one long Dada-esque “happening”, some early 21st Century example of impermanent “performance art”, and wondered if future generations might celebrate this man as America’s one and only original, home-grown, true creative genius.

Response to Doctor Doom

(See: Just Above Sunset: Doctor Doom)

This is from Peter Beinart of The Atlantic:

The West is not a geographic term. Poland is further east than Morocco. France is further east than Haiti. Australia is further east than Egypt. Yet Poland, France, and Australia are all considered part of “The West.” Morocco, Haiti, and Egypt are not. 

The West is not an ideological or economic term either. India is the world’s largest democracy. Japan is among its most economically advanced nations. No one considers them part of the West.

Before I even get to that, here’s this question that’s been bugging me:

What does it even mean when we refer to President Trump as the “leader of the free world”?

And I don’t mean that as a slam against Trump.

What I mean is, for the benefit of those too young to have lived through it, there once was a time in history, back in the “bi-polar” days, when the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact nations comprised one pole of the geopolitical world, referred to generally as “The East”, and the other pole, the United States, along with its NATO allies and other hangers-on, were called “The West”.

There were also nations that were not aligned with either side, known as “The Third World”, who seemingly saw their global function as playing one side off the other, sort of like a child of divorce playing his parents. And yes, while most of these were poverty-stricken, but that was not what defined them as “Third-World”, as that term is used nowadays — Third World nations were called that only because they could not be lumped in with the other two worlds.

So back in those days, where did Japan fall? And how about Haiti? Heh?

And let me say right that, while I agree with just about everything else Beinart says here (as I usually do), I don’t agree, at least under the classical definitions of “East” and “West”, that Japan and Haiti were in the “Eastern” camp, no matter where they were (and still are) located on the globe, and no matter what the predominant skin color of its inhabitants, since neither of them were under the spell of communism or the Soviet Union. Likewise, those of us in the so-called West are not called “Westerners” because we’re white or Judeo-Christian.

In fact, because the world is no longer divided into nations that allied themselves with the now-defunct Communist-led Soviet Union and others allied with the United States, if someone were to hold a world-wide referendum on it, I would cast my vote with those who think we should just retire the whole concept of “East” and “West”, and especially to stop automatically calling the president of the United States the “Leader of the Free World”.

Let’s get with it! The world has actually changed, and there are no real leaders of anything anymore, much less any arbitrary groups to be leaders of.

At least for the time being, that is. Maybe that will change sometime soon. Stay tuned; modern history is still being made. We’ll have to wait to see how this plays out.

Response to No Eleven-Dimensional Chess Here

(See: Just Above Sunset: No Eleven-Dimensional Chess Here)

It’s hard to understand how we ever got to this place of battling healthcare plans.

Try to remember back to when the two parties first offered up their proposals. Do you remember roughly what each contained?

You may remember (as I do) that the need for some sort of plan was sparked mostly by recognition that not everybody in America had access to medical care, much less the quality of health care necessary to thrive. If you or your children weren’t healthy and didn’t have the money to see a doctor on a regular basis, or even to check into a hospital when needed, your only choice was to show up at an Emergency Room, waiting sometimes for hours in hopes of receiving some treatment that you could get for free.

Hospitals, of course, might try to charge you for ER services, but usually couldn’t collect, and unless your life was at risk, they wouldn’t keep you overnight, so you would be asked to take your illness home where, without medical treatment, you could easily die. Eventually, we passed laws against hospitals kicking you to the curb. Still, any costs from your visit would be absorbed by the facility and passed either onto patients who could pay, or to their insurance companies.

The Democrats, who saw this as a problem that needed to be solved, started working on a national program to take care of it, grounded in their belief that, if there’s something that society really needs and it’s something that the private sector either can’t handle well or at all, then we all need to look to the public sector to solve it, so during the election campaign of 2008, the Democrats struggled to come up with a plan to cover as many as possible.

Meanwhile, what was the Republican approach?

Nothing.

Republicans, by and large, didn’t see any of this as a problem, or at least not one that government should get itself involved with. Their idea was no idea at all — just let things be. Can’t afford health insurance? Get a job, and get coverage from your employer.

If, on the other hand, government runs some program that makes sure everyone can see a doctor even if they can’t afford it, that means the people with money will be paying for the medical care of people without, and maybe that’s the way it’s done in other countries, but it’s not done that way here. All that sort of thing does is encourage people to be lazy, it was argued, and what kind of country would we be if we allowed everyone to be lazy?

In short, the Democrats came up with a plan, and the Republicans refused to, and once the Democrats took over and passed their plan into law one year later, the Republicans started promising to repeal it. In fact, they made fifty-something attempts, but couldn’t get the Democratic president to sign them.

But as the years went by, voters started asking the Republicans what plan they would replace the Democratic plan with, and they were too embarrassed to admit that, since their real objection to the Democratic program was that it was a program at all, they had nothing to offer in its place.

But after a while, some Republican who lacked the ability to foresee what problems this would cause down the road, started claiming, “Of course we wouldn’t just repeal the law without replacing it with something better! Our idea would be to, first, repeal the old law, but then to replace it!”

And when people, once again, asked what they’d replace it with, they started saying, “Oh, don’t worry! We’re working on lots of good ideas! And our ideas are much better than that Democrat idea! Just you wait and see!”

And that brings us up to date, when Democrats howl at how many millions of poor people the CBO says will lose insurance under the most recent Republican bill, smiling Republicans come back with the incredible argument that, because of their newly-granted “freedom of choice”, they are not being thrown out of the healthcare system, those 22-millions would now just be choosing not to purchase it!

(And how is this new Republican-granted “freedom of choice” different from the freedom to not own health insurance that existed before Obamacare came along to “enslave" those millions of poor people, you may ask? Not at all, it turns out, and that should tell you something.)

It’s hard to predict whether they might have been better off just sticking with their original idea — of being the party without a plan, because they don’t believe in plans — but the damage is already done, and there’s no going back.

By now, they’ve got not only Republicans on the right who come close to being “originalists” — those who would prefer to just “repeal” the damn thing, and take their chances — but also some “moderates”, who don’t want anyone to be hurt by repeal — who somewhat naively bought into the idea that you can somehow have a healthcare system that has no requirement for everyone to own insurance, and still be able to pay for patients with pre-existing conditions!

All this new-found magical thinking on the part of Republicans seems to lead both sides to have faith that the two concentric circles of belief can still somewhere overlap, but I’m betting that this probably won’t happen, and furthermore, if it does, the overlap will be minimal.

And I’d go further in saying there’s also a certain amount of magical thinking behind this as well:

Trump associates are cautiously confident that McConnell will eventually secure the necessary votes when the Senate returns from its July 4 recess. He was central in shepherding Trump’s most notable victory – the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch – and that experience in particular, they said, forged their trust.

The confirmation of Supreme Court Gorsuch is being hailed as “Trump’s most notable victory”?

Big Whoop! Such an accomplishment! Who did he triumph over, the Democrats? They had no power to stop it! Take my word for it, if we coulda, we woulda.

But how about now that the McConnell railroad seems to have derailed? Is this now our chance to offer the Democratic idea — that is, neither “repeal” nor “replace”, but “repair”?

It’s hard to imagine how that would work, in that for Obamacare to function, it has to stay in existence (something that would be a deal-killer for at least the conservatives, whose whole idea is to transition it into nothingness) and would have to retain the mandate (everyone needs to sign up, to make it pay for itself — an idea that no Republican of any stripe seems to like.) We Democrats would likely just become a third non-concentric circle that, like the other two, overlaps with nothing.

But how about the idea of all the Democratic senators joining with a few moderate Republicans, overpowering the rest of the Republican conference? Not sure how that even gets started, but even if we got a Senate bill sent to the House, it would probably die there — and if not, it’s hard to see it getting enough votes to ever override a Trump veto.

Maybe the only way out of this is to get ourselves re-elected, not just to the White House but to Congress, too.

But while we’re thinking big, we might as well take advantage of recently-improved public opinions about the whole national healthcare concept and start making the case for single-payer — or even better, an actual taxpayer-supported "National Healthcare System” — the real thing, just like the one they have in Britain!

Why not? It would be less complicated than our system, and much cheaper, and with better outcomes, and it would cover everyone, which is exactly what a government-run healthcare system should be.

Response to Having Nothing to Say

(See: Just Above Sunset: Having Nothing to Say)

Maybe the real problem isn’t so much “having something to say” as it is just deciding to say what you think.

Maybe the real problem is Democrats always foolishly thinking they have to come up with a way to appeal to conservative Republican voters, rather then focussing on appealing to their own voters.

Back in 1984, in noodling on how to beat George W Bush — a Republican incumbent president who, there was reason to believe, dodged the draft so he wouldn’t have to fight in a war he said he believed in — the Democrats chose to run against him John Kerry, a guy who did not believe in the Vietnam war, but went to fight it anyway! Democrats were calculating that, by putting forth a candidate who knew his way around a real battlefield, rather than some guy who knew what strings to pull to keep from fighting his nation’s battles, they could appeal to the Republican much-vaunted sense of honor and principle.

They miscalculated.

In truth, while Republican voters give out the impression that they care about all that honor and principle stuff, what really mattered to them is that they liked the kind of guy Bush was, a conservative Republican, and didn’t like the kind of guy Kerry was, a liberal Democrat. (And to top it off, Kerry spoke French, for Chrissakes! Why would we want a president who speaks any foreign language, much less French!)

In fact, you can forget about all the phony charges in the commercials we saw on TV during the Georgia 6th race — the anti-Ossoff ones insisted he lied about his experience and was being mostly funded by San Francisco liberals; the anti-Handel ads accused her of using our tax money to buy herself a fancy car, and tried to spend $15-thousand on office chairs, or something — the truth is, she won the race because she reminded everyone that her opponent is a liberal Democrat, and he said absolutely nothing about her political leanings at all.

She was at least honest enough to argue for the one reason to vote against him, which was this: He’s a liberal Democrat, running in a district of conservative Republicans.

For his part, he had nothing to counter with, giving his supporters nothing to get excited about, such as running an ad in which he could say, “Of course I’m a liberal Democrat, and proud of it! After all, let’s face it, Washington is a mess, a mess created by conservative Republicans! At this moment, a small group of Republicans is hiding somewhere in the Capitol building, scheming to find a way to take Obamacare away from millions of Americans who need it! Yes, Obamacare has problems, but Republicans are in charge in Washington! And instead of trying to fix an otherwise extremely successful and popular program, they’re sneaking around, trying to destroy it!”

Instead, Ossoff argued that both parties in Washington are guilty of wasteful spending, and that what this district really needs is more tech businesses.

First of all, for all I know, Ossoff was being perfectly honest throughout his campaign — maybe he really is a genuine middle-of-the-roader who is more concerned that we all get along than he is in not letting the Republicans take away healthcare from millions of Americans.

But if so, then the only reason he did as well as he did yesterday was support from voters who, while not at all excited about Ossoff as a candidate, still voted for him simply because he’s a Democrat.

What he did not benefit from, I would guess, is those in the district who not only wanted a Democrat, but a Democrat who showed real enthusiasm for all those things Democrats believe in, including not only healthcare reform but also global warming, a government-funded infrastructure program that puts money in the pockets of workers instead of billionaire investors, sensible gun control to reduce the thousands of tragic deaths each year, and a theory of a healthy and fair economy that doesn’t rely on cutting taxes for people who are already hoarding more money than they should, instead of investing it in the economy.

But assuming, just for argument sake, that Jon Ossoff actually believed in the things Democrats are supposed to believe in, but decided instead to posture as a non-partisan, hoping to draw votes from both parties, then was this a wise strategy? Since we can only live in one universe at a time, it's hard to test the theory that maybe honesty would have been a better policy.

In other words, could he have won if he had run as a liberal Democrat? And no, I’m not necessarily talking about running as a Bernie Sanders independent, I’m talking about as a plain vanilla liberal Democrat. But we’ll never know until some Democrat has the courage to try it.

Unfortunately, a willingness to go out on limbs is not a trait that we Democrats are famous for — which may be as good an explanation as any for why some reckless dimwit is living in the White House today.

Response to When Sorrows Come

(See: Just Above Sunset: When Sorrows Come)

So we seem to be slowly narrowing it down to this:

Trump has been pushing back on all these investigations (1) because he’s got something to hide, or (2) because he’s a total nut-case and can’t control himself, just like Hamlet.

Someday, he may come to realize that he was wrong about this:

Just when he was pretty sure that it was safe to fire Comey because nobody had been investigating him for colluding with the Russians during his campaign, an investigation that Comey oversaw, he fired Comey — which, of course, got people starting to investigate him for firing the person who was overseeing the investigations of his campaign. He should have known, as most of us do, that just because you’ve never been accused of robbing a bank doesn’t give you license to go out and rob a bank.

In any event — not that it matters anymore but it's still nice to know for sure — but he’s certainly proved Hillary absolutely right when she claimed he was totally unfit for this job.

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.