–by Sebastian
I feel like am barely treading water about the Trump Presidency. It creates such a huge number of scary possibilities that I don't know how to form a good plan about what to do about it. I normally like to tackle the big picture and then fill in details, but I can't do that. However there are a few details I'm sure about. This is one.
We can't play into the dynamic of normalizing Trump. That just activates the tribal patterns where each side downplays problems on their side, each side is mistrustful of the reliability of the other, and each side makes hyperbolic criticism of the other side for effect. The post that triggered this thought is Erik Loomis's If Only Reasonable Moderate John Kaisch Had Won the Election
The body of Erik's post is a normal criticism of normal Republican gun policies. That is fine. Don't stop criticizing stupid policies. But do not, even as a point of regular political hyperbole, insinuate that being under President Kaisch would lead to about the same outcome as being under Trump. Even if you strongly disagree with most Republican policies. Even if you think that living under a standard Republican would be horrible.
Trump offers all sorts of bog standard Republican policies PLUS a huge number of risks to our continued existence in a democratic republic. Is he going to hurt overtime standards? Yes. He also has a growing personal security force which could form the kernel of a private army. That is different. Is he going to resist the minimum wage? Yes. He also is going to blunder into multiple international crises because he refuses to attend intelligence briefings. That is different. Is he going to let Congress wreck Obamacare? Probably. He is also going to attack companies just because people give him minor offense.
If you understand that Trump is dangerously different, part of dealing with that fact is that you don't get to play with certain types of normal political hyperbole that might have been fun before.
I don't know what the specific crisis points will be, but I am certain that there will be multiple crisis points where our best chance for survival will lie in the hands of people who have been Republicans a long time. We want them to see these crisis points as soon as they can. One way of helping them with that is to not put everything through the normal political lens. Don't make it easy for them to discount what you're saying by providing them the opportunity to think "Well, they aren't reliable because they think all Republicans are basically Hitler". Don't help them activate all the tribal protections of discounting the other side by using rhetoric which lumps all Republicans together.
I can't guarantee outcomes. Maybe we are already lost. But if we aren't, we can't be unguarded in using political hyperbole anymore. We have seriously dangerous things that we need to be able to talk about in scary terms. We must not contribute to a dynamic which will help Trump survive under the normal tribal concepts.
When you want to talk about regular political issues, you do not want to say things that suggest that Republicans are the same as Trump because when you want to talk about country shattering political issues you don't want the association to be strong.
I think Erik is a good guy. We disagree on all sorts of things. His post isn't a deep failing. It is just incautious at a time where we need to protect every tiny advantage. If we repeatedly do it, we are actively hurting our chances of surviving Trump's presidency with our republic intact.
Update: I meant this to be in the original post, but it got lost in draft somewhere. This advice applies to normal Republicans going forward with normal Republican policies. Don't criticize a normal Republican opposing miminum wage hikes by comparing them to Trump. However if a Republican is supporting some sort of actually corrupt or dangerous measure, of course attack that by linking them together.
Thanks for this Sebastian. I appreciate your consistently candid, reasonable, and scrupulously fair-minded voice here. Your advice here is, I think, excellent. Please do not hesitate to call me out if you think I’m engaging in stupid and non-constructive partisan crap.
I think your fourth paragraph here is particularly apt. Trump is trafficking in a variety of generic (R) policy points, and he is also trafficking in truly disturbing and, to my knowledge, unprecedented positions and actions.
The first are worthwhile topics of debate. The latter are not.
We will, I hope, all do our best to try to keep the wheels on. I don’t think there’s a way to predict how it’s all going to play out. We’ll see what’s left when all is said and done.
I guess seeing Trump as a not-normal Republican sort of depends on how much support he gets, or doesn’t get, from the presumably normal Republicans who comprise the majority in both houses of Congress.
IOW: If they don’t oppose him, he’s a normal Republican.
I am a bit leery of the idea that Democrats need to go easy on the Republican Party just in case it might see the light and split from Trumpism. So far, the major Republican figures who I’ve seen actually doing this are in the single digits.
This sounds like a tactic for permanently killing any basically decent political party: attack them with a sort of two-pronged, good-cop/bad-cop routine, and then argue that in campaign rhetoric and advocacy they need to make extremely careful distinctions between the two cops on the dim hope that they’re not actually in cahoots.
CaseyL, that is a good point. On some level our ability to directly influence them is limited. But our part of the dynamic needs to be to set the stage where it makes sense for them to see themselves as potentially still Republicans, but Republicans who won’t go along with certain types of craziness.
That is a lot easier hurdle to jump than getting them to repudiate a big part of who they see themselves as being.
That might still happen, but because it is a bigger deal, it might come much later–perhaps too late.
If we frame opposition to Trump as ‘You have to become a Democrat to do it’ we will get people much further along in time and thinking than we will as ‘We can disagree about partisan issues, but we need to save the Republic’. I’m not sure how much time we have, and I’m not willing to risk that it isn’t very much time.
I can’t guarantee outcomes. Maybe we are already lost. But if we aren’t, we can’t be unguarded in using political hyperbole anymore. We have seriously dangerous things that we need to be able to talk about in scary terms. We must not contribute to a dynamic which will help Trump survive under the normal tribal concepts.
When you want to talk about regular political issues, you do not want to say things that suggest that Republicans are the same as Trump because when you want to talk about country shattering political issues you don’t want the association to be strong.
This pretty much “What Sebastian said” to me.
From a (R) perspective it is impossible today to have any discussion of normal policy decisions because, well, the people I would be discussing it with lump everything together.
Also, there will be a honeymoon period that Trump has on the (R) side because right now the greatest threat to any R policy, person, Congressman or Senator is to be exposed to a cybercascade started by Trumps people.
So there will be some time before anyone other than the most senior Senators challenge him, publicly or even semi-privately.
This will wear off as people get tired of everyone being bad except him, but not if the other side doesn’t start to make the distinction between a policy discussion(even ones that are not popular) and a dumbass stunt/idea/tweet/dangerous policy.
I really think the challenge will be to prevent him from unilaterally declaring a bunch of things through Executive Order, the limitations on that ship have also sailed.
And the recourse takes a long time.
Except that Republicans went scorched-earth on the Democrats, demonized them in every way as evil worshippers of the demon Obama and argued that you have to become a Republican to oppose him, and that worked incredibly well!
Excellent and valuable post, in my opinion. I do not think Sebastian exaggerates the danger one bit, and his prescription makes good sense. Pretty hard policy to coordinate, though, unfortunately.
Matt, I’m not asking that anyone go easy on the Republican Party. I’m saying we need to be clear on what is regular politics and what isn’t. Erik’s post was perfectly fine in attacking Kaisch on gun policy. If you disagree on a normal policy issue, feel free to attack it.
What isn’t ok is to insinuate that because a Republican disagrees with you on a normal policy issue that it really doesn’t matter that Trump is president instead of him.
If you bucket the highly irregular and dangerous things together with the typical policy disagreements, you risk having a lot of people treat them like regular policy disagreements–i.e. things that don’t need to be paid attention to and that can just be voted on party lines.
I don’t know. Trump being president is going to normalize a lot of fairly radical GOP policy proposals and the congress people pushing them that down the road the press may be all like “privatize Medicare? Why not, at least you’re not Trump!”
Erik’s post is an attempt, ISTM, to remind people that it’s not like the GOP congressional leadership and assorted governors are a bunch of centrist moderates.
Let’s talk about Republicans just for a minute.
Richard Nixon won, in part, by visiting Vietnam, and scuttling the Paris peace talks. [Lots of other things during his presidency …] Then, he sought reelection by having his thugs burglarize the DNC offices. Then Ford, pardoning Nixon. Okay, whatever.
Jimmy Carter, with sweaters and hostages.
Ronald Reagan won, in part, by making a secret deal with Iran to trade arms for American hostages (hostages having made Jimmy Carter unpopular, along with his sweaters, and other environmental initiatives). During his office, the Iran Contra scandal occurred. Oliver North, fascist par excellence, ran for office in Virginia. He wasn’t supported by nonfascist Republican John Warner (so +1 for nonfascist R’s!). Then Bush I who was probably involved with Iran Contra, but whatever.
Clinton, extramarital sex, blah blah blah.
Bush II, wins with the help of the Supreme Court and his brother. Democracy in action. Disaster ensues, including not-just-controversial Iraq war, but torture. Torture? That’s not US. But Cheney style politics begins, including teaparty Republicans. The country has a recession not seen since 1929.
Obama wins pretty easily. Has a scandal-free administration, and brings back the economy, including addressing wealth inequality for the first time in decades. By the time he leaves, we’re back on our feet! Yay! But he has a Republican Congress for the last 6 years that largely blocks his agenda, including a Supreme Court appointment, which was basically a move in huge disdain of the Constitution.
Trump wins the electoral college with the help of Vladimir Putin and a partisan FBI. Hillary Clinton wins the popular vote by a substantial margin.
Okay, yes, Trump is acting like a dictator, because he has all three branches of government, and he can. Maybe other R’s wouldn’t have been so in your face about it? But, really? Their history is quite questionable. But sure, I’d rather have Kasich. At least he doesn’t have massive conflicts of interests, and is not in thrall to a foreign government.
The fact that Evan McMullin rejected the whole thing? I think he’s the real patriot among the R’s, even though I don’t agree with hardly any of his policy positions. I couldn’t vote for him, but I’m definitely on his side during the coming war.
There’s McMullin, and Lindsey Graham, and to some extent John McCain, over the Putin connection. The last two pleasantly surprise me, though it’s consistent with McCain’s longstanding Russia hawkery.
A lot of Republicans who got reputations as moderates are rolling over. My state’s governor, Charlie Baker, refused to vote for Trump but last I heard was going “wait and see”.
A lot of Republicans who were once the far-right conservatives are now being mentioned as the “reasonable” ones. Senator Beauregard J. Butchmeup is a prime example.
I’m sorry to disagree with Sebastian, but people who hold conservative principles and yet cannot bring themselves to abandon the party of He, Trump get no sympathy from me. History has shown over and over that the Democratic Party is willing to adopt, let alone just consider, conservative ideas — much to the annoyance of some of us, I might add. Whatever “the Republican Party” may be in theory, it has become the Party of Trump in practice. It has fallen for a narcissistic proto-fascist con man after spending eight years in entirely un-principled opposition to Obama. Why would any sane person, with a principled preference for The Market over The Government, imagine that “the Republican Party” as it currently exists is either more congenial to his/her principles or more amenable to change from within than “the Democratic Party”?
Come on in, sensible conservatives. The Democratic water is fine. You’re more likely to change the Democratic Party to your liking from within than you are the Republican Party at this point. After the Trump Rump of the GOP is crushed electorally, you are welcome to go back and take over whatever remains of “the Republican Party” and rebuild it as a party that competes for hearts and minds rather than sheer power. If and when that glad day comes, it will be a positive pleasure for a commie pinko Democrat like me to argue policy with you. Until it comes, policy arguments are beside the point.
–TP
Until it comes, policy arguments are beside the point.
That’s kind of what I was thinking. With some exceptions, Trump’s biggest shortcomings can’t even be described as matters of policy. They’re matters of personality and process. It’s like describing a football team who takes the ball from the ref and spikes it in the end zone as having called “a play.”
But, on the other hand, I think that’s more or less Seb’s point. We’re not arguing over whether to run, pass or punt. We have someone who may well stab the opposing team’s quarterback and shoot the refs if they throw a flag.
people who hold conservative principles and yet cannot bring themselves to abandon the party of He, Trump get no sympathy from me.
Tony, the issue is not whether they deserve your sympathy. Nor is it what they logically and reasonably (by your lights) should do.
Rather the question is what is going to be the most effective way to get them to support at least some of the things that you think should be done.
Regrettable as you may find it, tribal feelings are going to keep a significant number from leaving the Republican Party. So, do you just write them off? Or do you decide to exhibit some empathy, accept that they will support some things you want if you can refrain from giving in to your irritation at their failure to just change parties, and help them decide to do the right thing by working with them?
Let’s start with a big ‘Go Independent’ drive and proceed from there 😉
This is an excellent article on crowdsourcing journalism, which also offers very good advice to journalists in dealing with a Trump presidency:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/what-journalists-can-learn-from-david-fahrentholds-trump-coverage/511277/
First, as he notes, his technique was “a way to get around the blockade Trump puts up around himself, a way to spread questions far and wide.” That may be particularly important in covering a politician who denies access to media outlets whose reporting he finds objectionable.
Second, Fahrenthold advises, “Don’t focus on what Trump says. Focus on the results of his actions. Stay in your lane and focus on one particular area.”
Apropos of my previous post, this Digby retrospective from 2015 described pretty the problem the media is going to have in holding Trump to account:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/trump-brought-new-hope-to-news-business.html
Trump is less like a traditional Republican candidate than he is like the missing Malaysian Airlines plane. He’s the kind of news event that CNN has, in the Zucker era, become best at covering — the news event that can fill the vacuum of endless cable time, with no details too small, no rehash too repetitive. Such stories require no secret political and culture language. Rather, you just keep the camera trained on what’s in front of you. Trump provides his own narrative and talking points. In this, Trump, beyond politics, offers new hope for the news business….
Wolff notes that this may be the first time in a couple of decades that we have a candidate who breaks down the media silos and reaches into the general viewing population. He hypothesizes that with politics polarized and the most engaged citizens dividing more neatly within the two parties and squeezing the political audience into a much smaller universe than ever before, perhaps this represents a sort of new “center” of millions of people who are drawn in by the drama. As he writes, everyone’s riveted to the show, asking each other:
“Will he self-destruct? And how? And who will he take with him? Or, even more astounding, will he go the distance and blow up everybody in his way? That’s news. That’s a story. That’s television.”
It is. And it’s possible that going forward it’s also politics, which is a much more scary proposition. For democracy to work, it requires at least a baseline level of rational understanding of what politics does. The Trump paradigm has no use for that.
The problem with “Go Independent” drives is that, as we saw with the Electoral College, the Democrats perpetrating them always seem to find them more attractive than the Republicans they’re intended to hook.
I was reading a Q&A on Vox attempting to explain why Trump did so well among working class whites and the interviewee noted that given Trump’s basic pitch it wasn’t at all surprising that Trump did well in that demographic.
What was surprising was how well Trump did with better off GOPers. That is my thought as well – what, exactly, are those people thinking? My guess is that they figured they would get both a massive tax cut and a huge roll back of federal regulation of business, which, apparently, is all they care about and also probably what they will get (although perhaps if Trump starts a trade war, they might have second thoughts).
And look at the stock market – the Dow is at an all time high. Whee!
Also, I have to say that a lot of business executives seem to think that any regulation that stands in their way of making a profit is illegitimate. See, e.g., Uber in SF and elsewhere (“Uber has tended to barrel into new markets by flouting local laws”*), or the Volkswagen emissions cheating, or Goldman Sachs in lots of things (most recently), or Wells Fargo opening fraudulent accounts, the oil & gas companies forever.
The only way I can see that this stops is to put a number of these executives in prison. IIRC repeatedly, knowingly, and intentionally violating laws that carry only civil penalties is a criminal offense (or can be) and I’m not sure why it’s not used more often. It will probably take a fundamental restructuring of corporate liability – as it is now, large corporations are so big and responsibility so diffuse that things like WF can occur and very few individuals (or none) can be held criminally responsible.
And in the meantime, one of the only avenues available to those wronged to hold big business accountable – litigation and class action – are preempted by horribly biased arbitration clauses (thanks to, essentially, an aside in a SCOTUS opinion some 20-25 years ago).
Feh.
*the financial times: ” The taxi company’s Regional Manager for the UK, Ireland & the Nordic Countries delivered a spirited defence of Uber’s unique, revolutionary, disruptive and socially liberating business model to a London employment tribunal, where judges decided it’s a taxi company.”
ugh: … the Dow is at an all time high. Whee!
One Drudge-reading Trump-supporting engineer I work with (the one I often greet with “Heil, Trump!”) has been crowing as if:
a) the DJIA rose from 6,000 to 20,000 after Trump got elected; and
b) a 3-fold rise in the DJIA is the “white working class” dream.
What can you do with people like that?
–TP
Matt, the ‘go independent’ was mainly tongue-in-cheek. The main effect would be that those ‘independents’ would on election day vote as they would have voted in their old party and at least the GOP would see it as a plus to get rid of the ‘impure’ ones that could otherwise try to meddle by e.g. voting in primaries. From that POV they are the lumpenproletariat. And even parts of the Dem leadership would hope that it would be the actual liberals leaving instead of rocking the boat. On election day (or so they hope) those would have no other ‘real’ choice than to vote for the ‘only electable’ candidate chosen for them by the serious people.
It would only hurt the parties, if they had to rely on membership fees (as opposed to donations by ‘interested’ groups and individuals).
This is fine advice, so far as it goes, Sebastian. And I think I hear what you’re saying, and can more or less get behind it: criticize, just don’t demonize ‘normal’ Republican policy positions]. Save the demonization for Trump’s really crazy, demonic stuff, so we can hope for a coalition of the sane to keep it in check.
But I do have a couple of quibbles with taking that TOO far.
One is that this again seems to hold Republicans to a very low standard. This is directed at Democrats and liberals, who are expected to be the adults. Republicans, on the other hand, we’re supposed to treat with kid gloves, lest their tribalism is provoked into a flare up and they just indiscriminately circle the wagons around all the crazy. After all, we all know Republicans can’t be expected to act sanely or rationally if their tribalism is provoked!
The really unfortunate thing is, this might not be wrong.
It’s still awful that that is the low bar we’re setting for Republican leaders though. A responsible political leader should normally be expected to oppose, say, starting a shooting war with China over some errant tweets, regardless of whether Democrats have been sufficiently soft on their efforts to, say, gut Medicare.
The other question is whether this is going to really be strategic for the D side. To a certain degree, linking things like Medicare cuts or global warming denial very firmly to Trump, rather than Republicans in general, could pay off very big. If and when Trump himself flames out spectacularly, playing that hand right could mean he also discredits the whole basket of bad policies on his way down.
The degree to which that should be done is an open question. Obviously, if it’s a choice between that and a shooting war with China, I know what I’d pick.
But then, I’m an adult.
sapient’s list of Republican triumphs omitted the fact that Reagan’s people ensured (after secret negotiations with the Iranians) that the hostages would not be released til after Jimmy Carter’s presidency ended, thus avoiding any possibility of Carter’s re-election. I see to my surprise that this is called a conspiracy theory, but:
Nevertheless, several individuals—most notably former Iranian President Abulhassan Banisadr,[2] former Naval intelligence officer and National Security Council member Gary Sick; and former Reagan/Bush campaign and White House staffer Barbara Honegger—have stood by the allegation
However, as regards the main meat of Sebastian’s proposal, and Dems’ and progressives’ understandable reluctance to go easy on Republicans at all, I think the way to think about it is this. If the US (or the earth) was threatened by hostile aliens, Rs and Ds would come together and cooperate to see off a massive outside threat, which would destroy everybody indiscriminately. After the threat is disposed of, the two sides would resume normal relations/hostilities. Sebastian’s proposal, it seems to be, is not that one should reset one’s attitude to Republicans and their policies, but that one should choose one’s language, and one’s battles tactically, to see off the larger threat.
Sebastian’s proposal, it seems to be, is not that one should reset one’s attitude to Republicans and their policies, but that one should choose one’s language, and one’s battles tactically, to see off the larger threat.
Yes.
But it’s still…weird that we should need to butter up Republicans to ensure this.
We’re not just talking about coming together in the face of a common alien threat, we’re talking about how if the Democrats talk even a little too harshly, the Republicans are going to up and go, “Waaaaah! You’re such meanies, we’re going to have to go side with the space monsters instead. You’ll be sorry when the human race has been liquified!”
Loyalty to one’s country (and one’s planet!) over one’s party ought to be something we could take for granted. It apparently isn’t. (And probably hasn’t been for a long time: the Iranian hostage thing is telling.)
It’s also a question of framing the argument. For example, although Trump voters support expanding fossil fuel usage, they also strongly support expanding renewables:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/10/31/clinton-trump-supporters-deeply-divided-over-use-of-fossil-fuel-energy-sources/
When it comes to policy, Trump is an idiot, but he apparently understands mass communication at a gut level. Clinton simply didn’t (which is one of the reasons Obama beat her).
Ugh: Those guys are all about the tax cuts and deregulation. Nothing else matters. They don’t even really seem to care if it sparks a bubble that eventually collapses in another massive financial crisis. They can always blame it on the little people again and get bailed out.
Let’s start with a big ‘Go Independent’ drive and proceed from there
Ah, but “independent” translates as “not part of a group.” And, for a lot of people, belonging, specifically belonging to a group, is important. That’s part of the reason for the tribalism that we keep talking about.
This is a bit odd, but I sort of agree partway with both sapient and Sebastian.
Corey Robin was making the case pre- election that Trump was in the mainstream of Republican positions over at Crooked Timber. This led to some truly strange arguments over there between Corey and Clinton supporters, people who would normally be pretty similar to Sapient. The anti- Corey Clinton supporters were saying that Trump was a whole new thing. Corey pointed to the sorts of things sapient mentioned.
I think it is going to be hard to distinguish between Trump’s own special brand of loathsomeness and mainstream Republicanism. Take Islamophobia. Back in the days of that well known friend of Muslims George Dubya Bush, Islamophobia was waiting to burst out, but Bush took the correct moral stance. ( My fingers are really puzzled with me over what I made them type just now.). But Islamophobia has gotten more and more mainstream with Republican voters and also with people like Bill Maher. Dubya might be the one out of step here.
On the other hand I think we should be trying to reach at least some Republican politicians and voters. One thing we could do is acknowledge that some people voted for Trump with some serious reservations about him. In some cases the reservations are only about his personal life, but at least some saw him as the lesser evil and didn’t like his nasty comments or hoped, odd as it might seem, that he would be less likely to plunge us into more Mideast wars. If he in fact seems likely to start a war with Iran or pokes China too hard some of his antiwar supporters ( yes, weird, but they exist) will turn against him. I read some of these people at the American Conservative and a couple of other places. They fall into various categories. But there are some possible allies even amongst Trump voters on some issues.
JL, I don’t think it has to be about “treating Republicans with kid gloves.” But just talking to them in terms that they understand, and making arguments that makes sense to them. Rather than using just the arguments that make sense to you (generic, not personal, “you”).
Take ecological issues, for instance industrial scale logging. At the moment, if you make an argument based on science, and how people (especially people outside the US) will be hurt by global warming, you probably get nowhere. But suppose you put it in their terms? For example:
The Lord gave mankind stewardship over the earth. [insert citation from Genesis] A good steward doesn’t trash the place that he is responsible for, does he? No, he does not. A good steward tries to make the place he is responsible flourish, and to leave it better than he found it. Look at a forest, and then look at the same space after it’s been clear-cut. Does that look like good stewardship? No, it does not.
That makes the argument against that kind of logging. But it is in their terms, not “tree-hugger” terms about evil corporations – corporations which their “tribe” tells them are good. Which means that there is a chance that the message will actually get thru. And that, after all, is what you want.
Perhaps a different way to put it is, Do you want to get them to agree with your reasons? Or do you want them to get on board with the actions you think should be taken? And are you willing to give up the former in order to attain the latter?
wj – my reluctance to fall in with this idea is that I’ve never seen any evidence that the GOP is willing to “get on board” for less egregious actions regardless of how one frames one’s argument. Look, for example, at the NC GOP, which offers some very good evidence that they’re impenetrable, unreachable, and treacherous.
But just talking to them in terms that they understand, and making arguments that makes sense to them.
While I agree with trying to do this, I think it’s a different point from the one Sebastian was making. The key word in Sebastian’s post, in my mind, is “hyperbole.” That’s not so much a matter of convincing Republicans (in office) of anything so much as a matter of opposing “normal” bad policies differently than one would oppose Trump’s utterly lunacy. Don’t (accidentally?) treat them the same way rhetorically.
You are likely correct that the Republican party won’t get on board. But getting the support of voters who normally support the GOP is a distinct possibility. And if you can get enough of them, you may get some Republican legislators to vote with you. Even though the party remains opposed.
Trump gives the Republicans a lot of cover for going all-in on building their Uncle Miltie (Friedman) dreampark. If it goes bad (as it likely will) they can always turn around and try to pin it all on Trump while the donors all pat them on the back for two years of extra windfall as the rest of us reap the populist whirlwind.
Yes, I fear Trump’s agenda – whatever that is today – but I also fear what Ryan and Co. will try to slip through knowing how distracted Trump will keep everyone, and I fear the latter a little more than I do the former because the latter has staying power.
Perhaps a different way to put it is, Do you want to get them to agree with your reasons? Or do you want them to get on board with the actions you think should be taken? And are you willing to give up the former in order to attain the latter?
Or to put it another way, even though it might put some people on the other end of this accusation than they’re used to being: do you want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good?
Going a bit astray of the topic, I also fear the what the free-market worshipers and privatization-fetishists will do, because it might appear to be working for long enough for them to gain an even better foothold on power in the midterms and possibly even 2020. They may be able to piss on everyone’s head and tell them it’s raining, and not enough people will get wise to it before everyone’s soaked.
Don’t (accidentally?) treat them the same way rhetorically.
You’re right, hsh, that is what Sebastian was saying, but we’ve been developing the idea of how to stop “ordinary” Republicans from being forced (or forcing themselves) further into the deplorable category, because that’s also going to be necessary for harm minimisation, if it can be achieved.
But do not, even as a point of regular political hyperbole, insinuate that being under President Kaisch would lead to about the same outcome as being under Trump.
I understand this point, and agree that it would not be the same, but I don’t quite get how the objective or tactics should change.
Much of what I fear from Trump is standard Republican policy, which I oppose. On top of that I fear his lunacy and corruption. So what do I try to get Republicans to do, and how do I do that?
Impeachment for lunacy is one thing, I guess, but that’s a long shot. Challenging him in the 2020 primaries is another, but who knows if he will even run. We could say, “oppose his agenda,” but on many topics it’s standard GOP stuff, so you are asking Republicans to oppose their own preferred policies on the grounds that Trump likes them.
So what to do?
Which means that there is a chance that the message will actually get thru. And that, after all, is what you want.
I think if I tried to make religious arguments they would come off as insincere and condescending. And to a degree they would be.
But like hsh, I’m not reading this as a call to somehow suddenly come up with arguments or messages that will actually reach Republicans after all these years.
Rather, it’s about opposing “normal” things in the normal way. So as Ryan works to trash Medicare over the coming months, we can point out that that will literally kill people, as per usual, and maybe even call him a dead eyed granny killer, as per usual. But we should stop short of labeling him a Trump licking wannabe Nazi or whatever.
That way, if/when the time comes for Ryan to stand up and say something like, “no, I’m sorry Mr President, but the Congress will NOT be authorizing the funds for your gas chamber/crematorium complex in Indiana,” he might actually feel like standing up and saying it, rather than sitting it out because of “tribalism”.
I’m not, unfortunately, actually disagreeing with this logic. It’s probably a good idea so far as we can pull it off (which is only so far – somebody is still going to call Ryan mean names somewhere).
I’m just pointing out that I think we can all agree that there’s a certain…inequality in the calculus of moral responsibility here.
lack lecou, I fully agree on the religious argument problem as far as sincerity is concerned. But I fear this is just one part of the problem. There has been a culture war on that inside the evangelical movement for some time and the guys arguing good stewardship get (until now) steamrolled by the neo-James-Wattistas using every dirty trick in the book (and lots of dirty dark money). That well has been very deliberately and successfully poisoned.
I’m not afraid.
We are smarter, richer and more numerous than they are.
13,000 at Standing Rock in Winter to shut down the pipeline.
How many will be in DC or NYC this summer after some random Trump provocation?
13,000 at Standing Rock in Winter to shut down the pipeline.
Yes: while Obama is still in office.
What do you think would have happened if Trump had been in office?
My guess is he’d call out the nearest troops with orders to fire live ammo into crowd. There would have been a bloodbath. And the GOP would have applauded.
As US Grant might have said: “Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing about what Trump is going to do. Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault, and land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Trump is going to do.”
Again, we are smarter, richer, and more numerous. We need to make him afraid.
Turn out in public when you can. The odds are against Trump. Shooting peaceful demonstrators will end him.
I haven’t read all the comments, but expanding my own a bit, the problem is that the scariest Trump policies aren’t necessarily the ones that are unique to Trump. Global warming for instance– denial seems to have become the Republican position. On Iran, he seems very militaristic, but so do other Republicans. If anything, Trump’s fondness for Putin is a complication for warmongers, as we are supposed to be fighting against a Hezbollah- Syria- Iran- Russia axis in the Mideast and Trump seems confused about what the political line is supposed to be.
Picking a fight with China might be the scariest short term policy Trump seems inclined to pursue. It would be good to know where that comes from. The Ian Welsh piece I linked recently said it was maybe part of a negotiating strategy. If so, it seems like a really stupid one.
Kissinger has been making nice noises about Trump. I don’t know what game he is playing.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2016/1220/Why-Henry-Kissinger-is-optimistic-about-Trump-and-his-policies
The backfire effect paper I linked to said you try to appeal to people on issues by not challenging their basic view of the world. Easier said then done.
I don’t know what game he is playing.
The verging on senility game.
When I read taht TRump was thinking of appointing Romney to something, I thought, “Good! At last a nomination that isn;t flat out anti-America!’
In other words, I realize that refusing to accpet Trump as normal is not he same thing as automatically going straight o hyberbole on all Republicans.
But any discussion of normal Republican actions gets apocalyptic pretty fast, even if one sticks to jus the facts and uses a calm tone of voice.
For example, voter suppression. How can tgaht be seen as anything other than an attack on the foundation of representative government? Yet voter suppression is a mainstream Republican idea.
Trump is actually better than mainstream Republicans on one or two issues.
13,000 at Standing Rock in Winter to shut down the pipeline.
Will they come back in February?
It’s a bit early to worry about that just yet, but if everything is an existential crisis, it’ll only speed us towards the point where compassion fatigue becomes an issue.
wj,
I repeat my invitation: come on over to the Democratic tribe, for now at least. What’s stopping you? The hope that, by working from within, you can make the Republican tribe saner or more principled? Seriously?
Aside from loyalty (I won’t call it “tribalism”) what’s the basis of your attachment to today’s GOP? What part of its agenda or world-view is so appealing to you, relative to the corresponding Democratic agenda or world-view, that you’re willing to stick with the party of Ryan and McConnell, not to mention Trump?
Remember: parties are about power. To be a Republican in Congress means, operationally, that you vote for Ryan for Speaker or McConnell for Majority Leader. A Republican Congressman or Senator may be downright liberal, but if he or she votes for Ryan or McConnell to control the agenda — to decide what questions even get a vote — then that legislator is merely pissing into the wind. To be a Republican voter means, operationally, that you sign a voter registration form to that effect and (in states like MA) lock yourself into voting in the GOP but NOT the Dem primary. Ideology is not what party affiliation is about; power is.
At this moment in history, which party do you really want to be in power?
–TP
I guess I take a non-binary view. I remain, in my mind and in formal registration, a Republican. Since California uses a “top two” primary system, my registration only impacts my options in the Presidential primary. I can and do vote for Democrats when they seem to me to be the preferable choice. (And sometimes, I admit, for third party candidates, if the two major party candidates are both unacceptable.)
Is my refusal to simply surrender my party to the lunatics quixotic? And futile? I sometimes suspect so. But the country needs two parties capable of governing . . . and the odds of returning the GOP to sanity look at least as good as the odds of any of the visible third parties becoming capable. As I have mentioned, I’m increasingly seeing sensible people running as Republicans for local and state office. So perhaps not a totally hopeless exercise.
And I don’t really see what becoming a Democrat would do for me. Besides, I expect, further increasing the 2-3 emails per day that I already get from the DNC. Who needs that?
I don’t know what game he [Kissinger] is playing.
The verging on senility game.
Actually, it’s the old “sucking up to power game” that Kissinger has played ever since he was a professor at Harvard with ambitions to make it in the Real World[tm]. He just oozes the “I’m-so-brilliant-I-can-recognize-the-brilliance-in-you” vibe that he perfected in the Nixon Era. Bright enough, but without any principle except self-advancement. Ever.
Bright enough, but without any principle except self-advancement. Ever.
He’ll get along great with Trump. They have the same thing-that-passes-for-an-ethos.
I doubt that your personal and temperamental aversion to hyperbole is any more a political strategy than the easy hysteria with which so many tribal Democrats have greeted the advent of the Donald. Your idea — to keep one’s powder dry in order to preserve the option to mobilize a herd of mythical moderate Republicans — is frighteningly reticent of Hillary’s failed electoral strategy.
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The fundamental problem with hyperbole is the same as the problem with normalizing: both have been employed step-by-step to get us to the point where “we” (the leftish elements) are powerless and disoriented, where there is effectively no left left. The hyperbole being used to attack Trump misfires because it is transparently insincere and grounded on no considered left critique or commitment. The whole of the Clinton campaign consisted of exactly the hyperbole you complain of, all of it oriented not by a sincere and intelligent assessment of the problems of the world and the country, but by an imperative to normalize the amoral incompetence and inability to learn from consequences that has characterized the political establishment for a generation.
.
You say Trump will take us into international crisis because he refuses to take a daily intelligence briefing from the surveillance agencies of the Deep State. Really? How has that been working out, that daily brief? The CIA chief has been calling the legitimacy of the election into question but offering no evidence beyond his own say-so and no mechanism beyond accurate documentation of the Clinton campaign’s cynical manipulations of Party and press — you don’t think that might be construed as an attack on the Constitutional order? Because that is what it is.
.
And, you say dismantling Obamacare or frustrating campaigns to increase the minimum wage are just normal Republican politics. What they are is normal plutocratic politics. The U.S. has become a plutocratic oligarchy, a government for billionaires, by billionaires and their lackeys, and now of billionaires. We got here because both Parties served the plutocracy unswervingly. While mainstream pundits repeated forty year old cliches about the politics of an excluded middle, we got a politics of an excluded left. Obama and the Clintons set this up, set up this triumph of the plutocrats, destroyed the Democratic Party as a vehicle for either populist or socialist politics, or even for effective liberal criticism of the status quo.
What is wrong with Erik Loomis is that he cannot see that Scott Lemieux has always been a malignant fool. But he is right about the nature of the Republican Party.
We are powerless. That is the Big Picture. Left-Liberals and social democrats need to own up to their role in empowering the plutocracy by supporting the likes of Hillary Clinton. We cannot cry wolf now about corruption, about government by Goldman Sachs, about military adventurism or wring our hands over inequality, because we (not me personally) just got thru campaigning for a different brand of all that stuff. We rode “lesser evil” in this direction and — surprise! — we arrived where we were headed.
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The good news such as it is that politics has big ups and downs. Trump got here because he was able in his addled stream of consciousness to utter occasional truths that had been normalized out of the mainstream political discourse. Truths such as that (Clinton-Bush-Obama) trade and economic policy had devastated the midwest or that U.S. mideast policy had created ISIS. Truths that ought to be coming from the left, but cannot because we are too busy defending the Rube Goldberg giveaway to for-profit insurance companies and Big Pharma that was Obamacare.
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I would not worry about hyperbole/normalizing as much as I would recovering the ability to speak the truth, lost to various accommodations to the plutocracy. Hyperbole/normalizing belongs to the fake news world of Facebook hysteria, twitterstorms and the New York Times / Washington Post / Politico.
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Tell the truth. Think critically. And, do not support any politician bought for you; pay for your own politics and stop ordering off the menu. Admit your powerlessness, but hold onto your critical capacity for independent thought. Politics is a team sport, but if the left and center is to have a team — and we do not, as a matter of fact, right now — it will have to oppose the plutocracy on every damn issue, from the authoritarian deep state to the minimum wage. Not with rhetorical hysteria or misplaced normalizing but with intelligent commitment to the interests of the non-plutocrats.
Trump will fail. That is a political certainty — every politician fails sooner or later or just dies. If he is replaced by another plutocrat . . . that will be another failure of the putative left, even if we elect her.
The fundamental problem with hyperbole is the same as the problem with normalizing: both have been employed step-by-step to get us to the point where “we” (the leftish elements) are powerless and disoriented…
Actually, no.
What got you to this point is real simple. In 2010, Republicans, especially very conservative Republicans, made a great effort to win legislative seats at the state level. Democrats (apparently) did not.
The result was that the Republicans controlled redistricting. Which let them control Congress for the last few years . . . even when Democrats got more total (nationwide) popular votes for Congressional seats. Not to mention controlling voter registration and voting rules.
Want to stop feeling (and being) powerless? Get out there in 2018 and 2020 and work at the state level. Otherwise, you are going to be stuck for the foreseeable future.
bruce wilder, I don’t know who you are, but criticizing “plutocrats” when by that you mean Democrats? Your train has derailed.
ws, actually yes.
Yeah, apparently Obama tasked Tim Kaine as a part-time DNC chair to dismantle the 50-state strategy and his own Organizing for America campaign apparatus. Combined with the policy shortcomings of the Democratic Administration and Democratic Congress, the Dems managed historic losses on a record budget. No one was to blame of course. Tim Kaine became Clinton’s V-P. And, as documented in the disclosed DNC emails (Damn those russkies confusing us with documented facts!) Clinton bypassed the campaign finance laws to drain funds from state Parties and prevent the Dems from regaining the Senate, while the Steve Israel’s and Wasserman-Schultz’s busied themselves recruiting reactionary candidates.
If you let the plutocrats finance your politics, this is the Democratic Party you get . . .
Yeah, apparently Obama tasked Tim Kaine as a part-time DNC chair to dismantle the 50-state strategy and his own Organizing for America campaign apparatus.
Link for this conspiracy theory? And you were involved in the Democratic party how?
And by the way, Bruce Wilder, you live where? And are involved in what local Democratic party?
If you let the plutocrats finance your politics …
you have enough money to have a campaign!!!
If you let Putin finance your campaign, don’t ever reveal your tax returns! Somebody might notice!
And you were involved in the Democratic party how?
And by the way, Bruce Wilder, you live where? And are involved in what local Democratic party?
What do these questions have to do with the quality or truth of what Bruce Wilder wrote?
The issue I have is that, if Seb’s post were a PSA about the importance of brushing one’s teeth, Bruce’s comment would be a PSA about eating properly, exercising sufficiently, and getting enough sleep. I’m not really seeing the conflict, and agree with both to some degree.
Bruce makes some points that are difficult to take, but not that I could disagree with much, even if I still strongly perferred Clinton to Trump within the landscape as it was.
…and if you don’t actually “campaign” with that money, you’ll never have to repay all the favors you owe (but don’t really owe – but you still owe) since you’ll lose, and then it’s money for nothing!
Except your party will still feel obligated to accommodate the whims of the large donor class, so it’s compromising your principles for nothing. Assuming your principles weren’t already aligned with the plutocrats, which those of most of the Democratic apparatchiks already are.
Also, what hsh said, and how.
Bruce,
If you don’t like government by and for plutocrats (and I’m not fond of it myself), how about something like a plan for getting from where we are today to something better. A practical and feasible plan, not just rhetoric about how voters should do the right (by your lights) thing. What specific steps would be needed to make it happen? (A little something on what would constitute “better” would be of interest. But is peripheral to the core question.)
Until and unless you have an action plan, you’ve got nothing. Or at least, nothing more than a guy bitching about today’s weather.
Today’s weather was fine, thanks. No promises about tomorrow.
What wj said.
At least Bernie gave it a shot, and should a similar effort be made at state level …
A plutocrat is someone whose power come from the fact that they are wealthy. Does/did Hilary’s ‘power’ come from the fact that she is wealthy? I don’t think so. I do think that there is something to the pop psychology that the Clinton’s as a couple felt the inordinate need to make sure they were financially secure, but I’m not sure that is such a horrific sin. Sebastian was complaining about Hillary getting big speech fees, but someone countered that what she made was actually peanuts compared to others.
I do agree that there is a big problem with plutocracy and the influence of wealth in politics, but it seems like it’s not something confined to politics, it is something general to the US and it is going to be really hard to change it given current trends. However, the unrelenting focus on plutocracy tends to give a short shrift to other aspects of liberalism, which is why Sanders was his own way a very divisive candidate. I’ve not a f**king clue what the answer is, but I don’t think that making plutocrats to be (to quote Douglas Adams) the “bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.” is going to get us to where we want to be, however satisfying it might feel.
What do these questions have to do with the quality or truth of what Bruce Wilder wrote?
It has to do with the extent of involvement he has with the Democratic party. I just love how people (and he may or may not be one of them) who have never tried to get person nominated, funded, and then elected, complain about how Democratic candidates get money from wealthy donors.
Bernie was an anomaly and, although he did surprisingly well, let’s remember that he didn’t get enough votes to be nominated. (And we really never learned all that much about his finances or his sketchy past).
sapient, that doesn’t actually effect the truth of what was said either. “Doesn’t he realize how you have to operate in the system as it stands?” is a meaningless rebuttal to a criticism of how the system currently stands. Likewise your invocation of the primary’s outcome. If the validity of the current structure of the process itself is being questioned, pointing to things that are caused by that structure is both beside the point and a bit patronizing; its underlying premise is that change is not possible, and indeed, should not even be contemplated. It’s a red herring, not a response.
that doesn’t actually effect the truth of what was said either. “Doesn’t he realize how you have to operate in the system as it stands?” is a meaningless rebuttal to a criticism of how the system currently stands.
Why do you think that I was, with my comment, trying to “effect the truth” whatever it is you mean by that? Calling a person a “plutocrat” isn’t a criticism of the system, and does nothing to improve it.
For the non-plutocrats among us, the most accessible levers are probably going to be state and local elections and maybe House seats.
Which can still be pretty good levers.
Direct action and/or acts of civil disobedience are also always options, but they are *generally* (not always) of symbolic value.
bruce: Truths such as that (Clinton-Bush-Obama) trade and economic policy had devastated the midwest or that U.S. mideast policy had created ISIS.
Truths?
First off, even if “the midwest” has been “devastated”, it takes some determined, Trump-class squinting to see Clinton, Bush, and Obama in the same light. “Trade and economic policy” is a handy catch-all like “WMD”, but trade policy and economic policy are different things. You can have open trade AND a policy on taxes, spending, and regulation that ‘compensates the losers’ — if you can get it past a Republican congress, and the “losers” are willing to accept the compensation instead of preferring to have their grievance.
Second, WHICH “mideast policy” was it that “created ISIS”? Was it the failure to continue occupying Iraq? Was it the failure to tell the religious fanatics in Riyadh to fnck off? Or to tell the same to the religious fanatics in Jerusalem? Or to bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran? Or what?
He, Trump peddled these “truths” with some success, but about 3 million more Americans rejected them than fell for them. It will be interesting to compare notes in a year or two with the they’re-all-the-same-so-let’s-give-the-demagogue-a-chance crowd.
–TP
@lj
A plutocrat is someone whose power come from the fact that they are wealthy. Does/did Hilary’s ‘power’ come from the fact that she is wealthy? I don’t think so.
The US government is a representative system. Plutocrats can either hold the reins of power themselves, or they can have representatives beholden to them and their interests do so. A “representative plutocracy” is still a plutocracy.
Sebastian was complaining about Hillary getting big speech fees, but someone countered that what she made was actually peanuts compared to others.
Yup, merely more in an hour than what 95% of households in the country make in a year is plainly not a sign of extravagant wealth. It’s peanuts.
—
@sapient:
Why do you think that I was, with my comment, trying to “effect the truth” whatever it is you mean by that?
Pedantry time. But you’re literally asking for it.
What I mean by that is that you weren’t addressing the content of the comment (and yes, there was actually content), you were setting up an indirect argument from authority to dismiss the comment out of hand by rejecting the author as lacking sufficient credibility. “If you can’t prove that you can do it better yourself, STFU” is not a rebuttal of anything; if I’m trying to put a basketball through a hoop, it doesn’t matter if Stephen Hawking or LeBron James is the one who tells me I need to stop trying to kick it from under the opposite hoop – and the truth value of a statement that I should instead use my tongue to propel it doesn’t change if it’s Mr. James who states it. As you certainly know. Like I said, pedantry.
NV, you ruin pedantry for everyone.
Aw, thanks, count!
Pedantrywise, aren’t we getting mixed up here between “affect the truth” and “effect the truth”(in reality the meaning of the latter is hard to discern)?
What do these questions have to do with the quality or truth of what Bruce Wilder wrote?
It has to do with the extent of involvement he has with the Democratic party. I just love how people (and he may or may not be one of them) who have never tried to get person nominated, funded, and then elected, complain about how Democratic candidates get money from wealthy donors.
What color is your shirt?
Tuesday.
What color is your shirt?
Tuesday.
Not every response in a conversation is about the “quality or truth” of someone else’s comment. If you believe that people can point fingers and say “plutocrat” and that makes the system better, that’s okay with me. I don’t agree with you.
People who actually have been committed to working (beginning at the party level) to get a candidate elected have the authority and experience to comment on “the system”. Most of those people (among Democrats, anyway) would be quick to agree that money distorts politics. They have worked to get more appointees (like Kagan, Sotomayor, Ginsburg and Breyer, all appointed by the “plutocrat system” btw) who would have overturned opinions like Citizens United. Those who point fingers at “plutocrats” have done squat.
By the way, what color is your hairshirt, hairshirt?
i like this: https://thinkprogress.org/rev-barber-moral-change-1ad2776df7c#
That is beautiful, russell. I love Reverend Barber. His speech at the Democratic Convention was monumental. By the way, Tim Kaine, who was maligned earlier in this thread, is a social gospel reconstructionist.
I’m going to look for what’s happening in my town on New Year’s, although my annual New Year’s party is well attended by people who might be interested in seeing the live streamed National Watch Night Service.
Thanks, russell.
That is a nice sermon Russell. But if there is one weakness in todays progressive movement it lies here:
The modern progressive movement regularly mocks the very religious and moral underpinnings of the movement he stands for and is then confused why the people that believe in these institutions aren’t rallying with them.
Surely this may not apply to any one individual, as there are many deeply religious progressives, but as a matter of course there is lots of religious ground ceded to the Right in the name of the big tent.
Yeah, and I hear that there was a SJW in Judea around 2000 years ago that the Conservatives mock regularly also, too.
But that doesn’t matter, because he was a dusky radical Palestinian socialist, or something.
“What would Jesus do?”
Well, anything he can if he makes it across the border.
Yup, merely more in an hour than what 95% of households in the country make in a year is plainly not a sign of extravagant wealth. It’s peanuts.
It’s not (a sign of extravagant wealth), unfortunately. It reminds me of when (I think) John Scalzi’s list of things that the poor have to deal with and then having people overrun the comments saying ‘ha! You think that is poor? There are people in 3rd world countries who would be happy to have a life” When the main thrust of an argument sounds like the 4 Yorkshiremen, I think some nuance lost.
J.P. Morgan was a plutocrat; Warren Buffett is close enough to one.
J.D. Rockefeller was a plutocrat, though not exactly in the Morgan-Buffett mold; more in the Henry Ford or Bill Gates mold.
Bill and Hillary Clinton are super-well-paid workers, like Beyonce or A-Rod. When they have amassed enough wealth (plutos) to control a large segment of the economy, THEN they will be plutocrats.
It’s fair to knock them as beholden to plutocrats in campaigning, or solicitous of plutocrats in governance. It is nevertheless ridiculous to even suggest that He, Trump and his Billionaires-And-Generals-Administration will be better on that score.
It is also somewhat utopian to assert that Bernie (who I voted for in the primary) could have made the plutocrats buckle at the knees all by his lonesome. Had “working class blacks” picked Bernie over Hillary, as “working class whites” picked He, Trump over … everybody, the likeliest outcome would still have been a Republican president-elect because the American electorate has a hard time kicking the habit of alternating between 2-term presidents of opposite parties.
–TP
Tony P @ 11:27 am
You said: “You can have open trade AND a policy on taxes, spending, and regulation that ‘compensates the losers’ — if you can get it past a Republican congress, and the “losers” are willing to accept the compensation instead of preferring to have their grievance.”
That would be the neoclassical orthodoxy of good neoliberal economic policy which conveniently nests inside the political dynamic you mention. Ordinary folk might call it “bait and switch”. (Hat tip to Rich Pulchalsky)
Tim Duy had a useful response to Krugman playing neoliberal asshole the other day. I do not agree with Duy’s bottom line helplessness, but he has covered some of the highlights that are important.
http://economistsview.typepad.com/timduy/2016/12/responsibility.html
I do not agree with Tim Duy’s bottom-line helplessness stance going forward, but in contrast to Krugman, he at least acknowledges the large role played by discretionary policy favorable to financialization.
You can invest a lot in sussing minor differences between the neoliberal good cop Dems and the neoliberal bad cop Reps, and ditto for the Bush II neoconservatives vs the Clinton II neoconservatives. The bottom line is that they are playing good cop bad cop and we are the mugs.
The Clintons play for Team Plutocrat in the Plutocrats’ league. Call them whatever you like.
I’m having one of those moments where I think I watching two people who largely agree with each other argue as though they don’t, each responding to things the other hasn’t actually written.
Frex: I don’t get the impression that bruce wilder is all that pleased with the election of Trump to the presidency, nor do I think Tony P. is any sort of neoliberal.
But let’s see where this all goes, if anywhere at all.
By the way, what color is your hairshirt, hairshirt?
Dried blood.
I think it is a sign of how successful rightwing hatemongering toward the Clintons has been that even people who are not righwingers repeat the rightiwng lines about them being elites and corporatists and pro-status quo and so on. Clinton is a moderate from a modest background, self-made to reasonable amounts of wealth, though not in the top league at all, with along history of concern for populist issues and an unfortunate tendency to compromise when she shouldn’t. NOt my favorite politicians but by no means the sell out to corporate power that the republicans have portrayed her as being (to disguise their own agenda and to divide and conquer the rest of us).
The modern progressive movement regularly mocks the very religious and moral underpinnings of the movement he stands for
The “modern progressive movement” is not one single thing, and includes people who are suspicious of and even hostile to religious faith, and also people who embrace it.
I know lots of folks in both categories, and don’t know a single person who mocks Barber’s work or the work of the Moral Mondays folks.
Maybe it’s something else that is being held up to ridicule. rightly or wrongly.
NOt my favorite politicians but by no means the sell out to corporate power that the republicans have portrayed her as being
What (R) politician has the standing to criticize anyone for being a shill for corporate power?
Bruce,
Tim Duy’s piece is him raging at what happened in the 80’s and 90’s along with a dose of the Chinese are coming and claiming that it was the fault of neo-liberalism. While there is some truth to that, it depends on knowing what the future was going to bring, which I don’t think anyone did. Duy writes:
Sometime during the Clinton Administration, it was decided that an economically strong China was good for both the globe and the U.S. Fair enough. To enable that outcome, U.S. policy deliberately sacrificed manufacturing workers on the theory that a.) the marginal global benefit from the job gain to a Chinese worker exceeded the marginal global cost from a lost US manufacturing job, b.) the U.S. was shifting toward a service sector economy anyway and needed to reposition its workforce accordingly and c.) the transition costs of shifting workers across sectors in the U.S. were minimal.
Go back to the beginning of that. Who would, during that time, want an economically weak China? Setting aside concerns about Chinese people, every company that sold anything on a global scale wanted access to that market. Tienamen Square was 1989, Western nations were trying to figure out how to avoid a total meltdown. Sure, most favored trade status and accession to the WTO were carrots. But there were (and are) no sticks.
You can tell Duy is going off the rails when he brings up the ophoid epidemic and intones
The latest causalities in the opioid epidemic are newborns.
The transition costs were not minimal.
When you want to blame Bill Clinton and feckless Dems from the 80s for the opioid epidemic, failing to take into account the problems with healthcare (which push opioids on low income patients), racist drug laws (which use punishment rather than rehabilitation) and Big Pharma (which have traditionally supported Republicans, not Democrats), you are really stretching.
I point this out while agreeing with hsh’s observation that it seems like straining at trying to find reasons to yell at each other. The temptation is to try and reduce things to a single cause, in this case, the decision to play nice with China in the 90’s. Even if it could be reduced to that, you have to acknowledge that it wasn’t simply Clinton, or Dems in the US, but the whole world’s fault. When it is the whole world’s fault, you have to wonder if there might be something more to it than finding someone to blame.
It wasn’t the whole world’s fault that mainstream Republicans and a great many Democrats turned their backs on the inevitable victims of the so called free trade agreements. The 90’s was the era when Tom Friedman was treated by the DLC types as the voice of reason for babbling on about the golden straitjacket and agreeing with Thatcher that there was no alternative. The same textbook economics that said that free trade was a net good also said there would be losers in the US, but theoretically that didn’t matter because the net gains could be used to make everyone better off. Opponents were treated as Luddites. And there were opponents, including in the chattering classes and even in the economics profession, but they were ridiculed or ignored. The upper middle class Democrats for the most part went along with this. So no, it wasn’t the whole world. As a rough approximation the same batch who thought the Iraq War was a good idea and ridiculed dissenters also mocked or ignored the silly people who said globalization had a down side. People who echo the views which prevail amongst the people who matter have a built in protection against being held to account for their mistakes.
WHICH “mideast policy” was it that “created ISIS”?
Iraq, Libya and Syria
The same textbook economics that said that free trade was a net good also said there would be losers in the US, but theoretically that didn’t matter because the net gains could be used to make everyone better off.
But by the end of the Clinton administration, it did look good, and the problems that were evident could have been solved with more years of Democratic control, particularly a Democratic Congress rather than the one that Bill Clinton had. It didn’t help that Bush II and the kleptocrat Cheney arrived.
What the American people don’t seem to get is that we have to have a sustained period of liberal government (not just two years of a President and Congress working together at a time) for policies to be implemented, and tweaked.
We’ll see how Donald Trump’s anti-free-trade policies work out. They’re not much different than what Bernie was selling.
Interesting charts here. Those evil plutocratic Democrats!
I’m not sure what precisely was going down between Krugman (the person Bruce Wilder thinks stands for neoliberalism) and Tom Friedman during the 90’s, but I’m a bit surprised they would have been in the same boat
https://www.nytexaminer.com/2013/01/tom-friedman-is-still-wrong-paul-krugman/
I suppose one could say that Thatcher was in the 90’s, but she was ousted in Nov of 1990. I didn’t follow Friedman closely, so perhaps he was carrying the banner of Thatcherism through the 90’s, and you can argue that Thatcherism is the bones of New Labour, but that seems like a leap. Friedman also talked about Brazilification, which he swiped from Douglas Coupland, talking about how the middle class disappears in the face of rising income inequality, which seems pretty prescient.
Yes, there were people who said silly things about globalization, but I’m not sure what the alternative would have been. If the people who took globalization forward hadn’t done it, I pretty sure that another group of people would have. Unfortunately, a lot of globalization took place as many of the oversight aspects of government were being removed, which I don’t think you can blame on Democrats. Krugman has certainly advocated for more structural spendingas have other Democrats, not to mention protecting Social Security (remember that lockbox?) and Medicare, and it wasn’t Dems that repealed Glass-Stegall.
Needless to say, my perspective on globalization is a bit different than most. I wouldn’t be sitting in front of a largish monitor in Southern Japan communicating with people all over the world, I don’t think I would have met my wife and had a family, or had the life I had. Maybe it would have been just as good, I don’t know. And I certainly realize that there are a lot of downsides to all this, but those downsides seem to result from an almost exclusive focus on shareholder value and the exploitive practices to get that value. The answer isn’t somehow withdrawing from global trade but to make it answerable to something other than having the companies profit. Maybe that requires painting Krugman as a hopeless dupe who was shouting down all the people who argued that free trade was the devil’s workshop and the only possibility I see would be to make globalization something like racism, where everyone recoils from the notion. Though that is going to have just as many downsides as the current circumstances.
That’s because if you have a lot of the people doing that kind of shouting down, it tends to bring on the sort of folks who killed Vincent Chin. If it would be possible to ‘stop’ globalization (by which you don’t ‘stop’ it, you just magically remove all the bad aspects and get to keep all the good ones) without opening that Pandora’s box, I’d love to know how, but I don’t think it is possible to open up to the world without opening up economically on a lot of different levels. And I’m not sure that ‘protecting’ American workers is going to end up protecting anyone but white males, given US problems with racism and sexism. But as long as we have ‘normal’ Republican policies that we have to separate out from the really batshit crazy Trump policies, I don’t see any sort of protectionism as getting us back to anyplace we want to be.
Krugman and Friedman were in the same boat in the 90’s. Krugman regularly mocked anti- globalization protestors. He started changing his tune in the early 00’s. I think this might have had something to do with Joseph Stiglitz coming out in defense of the protestors– up to that point all the mainstream liberal types treated trade agreements as an unalloyed good. Alan Greenspan was another lionized figure at the time. The financial markets were the font of all wisdom. That was what Friedman preached. There was no alternative. The markets imposed a golden straightjacket on possible government policies, it was a tight constraint and clearly Friedman loved it.
Incidentally, people like Dean Baker were also warning about the various bubbles that were propping up the economy both in the 90’s and later under Bush. But they were ignored. The market knew all.
I followed this stuff in the 90’s. It was overshadowed after 9/11 and also, with the arrival of Bush, many mainstream liberals shifted leftwards. Friedman became a figure of mockery in the lefty blogosphere and nobody worships Greenspan anymore, at least on the left. But when people talk about neoliberalism in an American context, they are referring to the ideology that dominated the upper middle class NYT style liberalism in the 90’s. The debate between Sanders and Clinton supporters on the domestic front was over the extent to which one believed she had left that ideology behind, though of course there were also people who either deny or seem totally unaware that there ever was such a thing as neoliberalism. The term, incidentally, may mean something else in Europe. I gather that from discussions elsewhere, but don’t know what the alternative meaning is.
On a totally different subject, here is that rare thing, a writer who is honest about the Syrian conflict. ( He criticizes some on the far left who make the standard far left mistake of thinking anyone who the US government hates must be good, without letting the US off the hook.)
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/12/28/the-pathologies-of-war-dual-propaganda-campaigns-in-reporting-on-syria/
Here is Time Magazine on the three wise men who were the heroes of the day–
http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2054093,00.html
And here is the cover
http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19990215,00.html
The economy is not my main issue. I read Dean Baker’s blog sometimes. But if you want some idea of possible alternatives and don’t wish to dismiss the issue because alternatives would only help white guys, you could try reading Baker’s blog or part of his book–
http://deanbaker.net/books/rigged.htm
And on regulation, Rubin and Summers worked for Clinton. You can read about their role here–
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/business/economy/09greenspan.html
Republicans wanted deregulation. So did many Democrats. There was a split in the party then. I think there has always been a split in the Democratic Party, one which continues today and it is a mistake to talk about the Democrats as a monolith. And if people think third parties are a waste of time and everyone on the left should vote Democrat, it will inevitably be split between DLC types and those to their left.
@GftNC:
Pedantrywise, aren’t we getting mixed up here between “affect the truth” and “effect the truth”(in reality the meaning of the latter is hard to discern)?
No, we’re getting mixed up here between quibbling about definitions and quibbling about typos. From where I’m sitting, sapient’s insistence on reading my careless replacement of affect with effect as intentional – rather than assuming I can’t proofread what I write worth a damn (for the record, I can’t; I review my comments before posting them, and am as likely to add new errors at that point as I am to catch old ones) and meant the same thing by that phrase as hsh had meant immediately above when discussing the relevance of sapient’s response to bw – looks an awful lot like petty, pedantic grammar trolling. Which is not something sapient usually does, but in retrospect, that looks an awful lot like it.
Incidentally, I didn’t catch my mistake until reviewing today. That doesn’t make my pedantry about sapient’s appeal to authority any less true – especially since they responded by doubling down and re-asserting that only those integrated into (and invested in) the system are allowed to criticize it; nor does it make grammar trolling less petty. Not that we’re not both being a bit petty here, but grammar trolling is a line I’m personally not really inclined to cross.
—
@lj:
It’s not (a sign of extravagant wealth), unfortunately. It reminds me of when (I think) John Scalzi’s list of things that the poor have to deal with and then having people overrun the comments saying ‘ha! You think that is poor? There are people in 3rd world countries who would be happy to have a life” When the main thrust of an argument sounds like the 4 Yorkshiremen, I think some nuance lost.
I’d respectfully suggest that significantly more than a little nuance is also lost when your response to someone moderately consistently earning more in an hour than what 95% of the population earns in a year boils down to “ha! You think that is rich? There are people in the US who would be appalled to get so little”. Which is exactly what trivializing that level of income as “peanuts” communicates.
I’m not sure what precisely was going down between Krugman (the person Bruce Wilder thinks stands for neoliberalism) and Tom Friedman during the 90’s, but I’m a bit surprised they would have been in the same boat
Unless 2016 is in the 90s, I’m not sure where you’re seeing bruce wilder is asserting that Krugman was pro-neoliberalism in the ’90s, or if you weren’t suggesting that, what was your point of bringing up Krugman in the way that you did.
Ha, ignore that last paragraph. I’ll just be over in the corner beating myself up for yet again forgetting to refresh before submitting a comment…
We’ll see how Donald Trump’s anti-free-trade policies work out
I was suspicious of the TPP, now I am more or less for it. Oddly enough, the guy who changed my mind about it was Evan McMullin, who came at it from a national security / engagement with the world point of view, rather than a primarily economic one.
The answer isn’t somehow withdrawing from global trade but to make it answerable to something other than having the companies profit.
Yes.
Krugman admitting to a guilty conscience–
https://books.google.com/books?id=c3NtIKNmzMUC&pg=PA84&lpg=PA84&dq=krugman+admitting+error+on+globalization&source=bl&ots=qIelCG7BNu&sig=17deu0ijDbMuByOgfHnWEpY0sEs&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiax4fel5fRAhUL0oMKHSazBToQ6AEIITAB#v=onepage&q=krugman%20admitting%20error%20on%20globalization&f=false
And Krugman vs Krugman–
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/krugman-then-and-now-on-trade.html
And finally, because I need to do other things, a link to an article by Baker and Bernstein., Bernstein was Biden’s economic advisor. They agree that tariffs are a bad idea.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/12/trump-trade-deficit/509912/
Republicans wanted deregulation. So did many Democrats. There was a split in the party then. I think there has always been a split in the Democratic Party, one which continues today and it is a mistake to talk about the Democrats as a monolith.
It’s always inspiring to see people who marvel and laugh at how working class whites could act contrary to their economic interests turn on heel and insist that they have no self-interested economic motives in supporting DLC-style Democrats, and that they seek only to advance the common good…
I don’t do economy much either, but I wonder what alternatives you are saying should have been taken for Clinton and his notion of triangulation? What Sanders-like alternative was out there waiting for their chance? The questions of globalization aren’t economic choices, they are political ones and should be seen as such.
Furthermore, deregulation is not a binary value. Republicans generally wanted (and continue to want) deregulation without oversight. Dems, not so much, though it often depends on the industry. And Republicans tend to be more protectionist than Dems. This is one way that they earn those campaign donations.
Free trade needs governments that are willing to redistribute profits to make sure that no one has been left behind. Unfortunately, the other party is totally against anything that even faintly suggests this can be an option. This suggests that rather than rail at globalization, it would be better to concentrate on keeping the party that refuses to consider the other half of the equation out. Some sort of litmus test of anti globalization probably won’t get you there.
There is a solution to this problem. We can bankrupt them.
http://occupyyourbrain.tumblr.com/post/155072919142/anti-trump-resistance-act-one
ONe day a week (or a month, if weekly is too much for you), shut off every electrical appliance in your home for 24 hours.
It’s been said that if 10% of americans went off the grid, the utilities would all go bankrupt. Going off-grid is costly. DOing a 1 day blackout saves money. If we could get all the Bernie voters to do this, we’d bankrupt the utility companies. We could certainly send a sharp economic message to the energy sector. It could be sunday, or saturday. Leave the heat on, but turn off all electricity. Your food will stay fresh in the fridge for a minimum of 24 hours if you don’t open the fridge door, so you won;’t ruin your food.
Pass it on. One day a week, starting inauguration day.
If doing a single 24 hour electrical power fast is too difficult, then 2 half days a week, or four quarter days. Just make sure your fasting sums to 24 hours a week or more.
Back for a moment. Li, you are the one imposing litmus tests and erecting straw men. Stiglitz and Rodrik and Baker and other liberal economists were and are not talking about ending globalization, but about managing it and not in Tump fashion ( tariffs and the like). Stiglitz, when he started writing about the globalization debates, didn’t say the most extreme protestors were right about everything. He said that they had some legitimate points.
There are in fact people who do try to make it black and white and for the most part it has been the advocates of the trade deals. Krugman says that himself in one of the links above– the nakedcapitalism one. They exaggerated the benefits and downplayed the downsides. And again, it’s not accurate to talk about Democrats as a monolith on this issue.
Errands to run.
It’s been said that if 10% of americans went off the grid, the utilities would all go bankrupt.
Then it must be true.
“Republicans wanted deregulation. So did many Democrats.”
Democrats will consider other points of view, and sometimes adopt them. Republicans don’t.
Krugman vs. Krugman: “When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?”
It’s all part of liebrals disrespecting faith-based policies, y’know.
TPP is very likely to be a net benefit to the US. And the success of some east Asian economies, like Vietnam, are dependent on the passage of TPP. Also, not passing it will leave a vacuum that China will be more than happy to fill.
“Then it must be true.”
Make it so.
Because there could not possibly be any thing greater to be wished for than the bankruptcy of the utility companies. Well except for perhaps a Die Hard type fire sale.
Tim Duy’s piece is him raging at what happened in the 80’s and 90’s along with a dose of the Chinese are coming and claiming that it was the fault of neo-liberalism. While there is some truth to that, it depends on knowing what the future was going to bring, which I don’t think anyone did.
lj, it also depends on forgetting (or never learning, for those who didn’t live through it) that in the 1980s it was Japan that everybody was getting hysterical about as an economic competitor.
After a couple of decades of economic stagnation there, Japan no longer seems like a major threat. Wonder how China will look a 20 years down the road.
My guess (for what little it is worth) is that China, like Japan, will be considered a major economic power. But not an economic threat (unless Trump’s economic policies have trashed the US economy, of course). I think we will be just finishing up panic over India’s economic rise, and getting set to move on to a new unstoppable threat.
Because there could not possibly be any thing greater to be wished for than the bankruptcy of the utility companies.
Marty’s right. (His insinuation, not his raw words.)
It would be just ever so much more inconvenient to try that kind of boycott against, for example, Google or Chevron. Why not go after a company in a massively regulated industry? That‘ll show ’em!
/sarcasm
wj; yeah it was all about big-time Japanese investors gobbling up US iconic properties (in NYC and Hollywood got most of the press IIRC) because they had oodles of cash to spend.
Less coverage of how said investors got taken to the cleaners as a result.
Because there could not possibly be any thing greater to be wished for than the bankruptcy of the utility companies.
It’ll shake things up!
It’ll shake things up!
Indeed it will. Everybody whose pension fund has a lot invested in utilities (because they are generally safe investments) will take a big hit.
Plutocrats? Not so much.
“No one’s to blame.”
“It’s complicated.”
“There is no alternative.”
“It was inevitable.”
“It is not clear that we could do anything now.”
“No one could have known.”
I don’t know whether that’s neoliberalism talking or dementia setting in. Either way, it seems hard to argue and like maybe the whole entire point is to make it hard to argue.
Or, just refuse to see any connection between the past and present, policy and consequences.
Way upthread (Dec 26 3:26 pm), my first comment was about the political problem posed by elite amoral incompetence immune to learning from serial failure.
Those are harsh words that I plagiarized from Ryan Cooper writing last May about the crazed foreign policy consensus to which Hillary Clinton subscribes, which he termed the foreign policy blob.
http://theweek.com/articles/623576/fear-foreign-policy-blob
Our elites get into these bubbles where they can draw no connection between stupid policy (“let’s invade an unstable country for no good reason, and spend trillions we borrow from China making things worse and killing lots of people”) and, say, ISIS or, in the case of economic policy, opiate addiction, record levels of debt and stagnant wages.
And, then we rationalize ourselves out of criticizing their performance, while rooting for our team (which isn’t “our” team at all).
Plutocrat pointing, and now “the blob”? Rage on about your imaginary Hillary fantasies, bruce wilder. Some of us have moved on to the real problem: republicans controlling three branches of government, with a demagogue at the helm.
Some of us have moved on to the real problem: republicans controlling three branches of government, with a demagogue at the helm.
That’s certainly a very big and real problem. I’m just not sure what “moved on” means.
Way upthread (Dec 26 3:26 pm), my first comment was about the political problem posed by elite amoral incompetence immune to learning from serial failure.
Forgive me for asking again, but what do you propose should be done about it? What actions (other than raging about it on-line) do you think would realistically lead to the change you desire? How do you persuade politicians to do something different? How do you persuade real voters to vote for those politicians?
Or do you think that nothing can be done about it?
That’s certainly a very big and real problem. I’m just not sure what “moved on” means.
It means they’re no longer endlessly referring to the outcome and legitimacy of the election, let alone making snide comments about the primary.
Oh, wait.
I’m just not sure what “moved on” means.
Well, there are elections coming in Virginia, where a candidate could be supported.
Governors are running in November in Virginia and New Jersey.
People who complain incessantly about the evil DNC can get involved in their local Democratic party now to help choose candidates for Congressional races in 2018.
There’s the Women’s March (and men are invited to that).
There are everyday phone calls that can be made to Congressional offices regarding matters of interest, including today’s amazing speech by John Kerry, Obamacare, Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, Muslim registries, nuclear weapons, corruption in government, Russian intervention into our electoral system (and now our government) ….
There are many local advocacy groups, including community organizers (my local one is Virginia Organizing Project) that do work for local communities, such as advocate for living wages.
In other words, there’s a lot. Complaining Bill or Hillary Clinton, who is unlikely going to be a candidate for office ever again, seems kind of ridiculous. And if we do want to complain, which I do, or call names, which I do, maybe the targets should be updated?
Oh, and since you’ve appeared, NV, let me assure you that, earlier, I wasn’t grammar policing. I was just expressing my failure to comprehend your point.
So I guess you’re okay with criticizing Obama, since he’s still president. If you think people should be out doing all these things, why are you bothering to comment on this blog? Is it because you hope to influence how people think? It is because it’s more interesting than other options for the use of particular bits of your time? Are you critical people who discuss their pets or football or the last restaurant they ate in?
I’m okay with any little thing, hairshirt. I comment with my own particular views and rage. Do you have a problem with that?
I think Benjamin Rhodes might have coined the “blob” term. It refers to the D.C. think tanks and others.
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-skeptics/rhodes-right-about-the-blob-16147
The Obama Administration was considered insufficiently interventionist by the DC blob. People on the further left think Obama was too interventionist. Obama seems to have thought so himself at times, referring to the mess in Libya for instance and he seems to have picked some half in and half out policy in Syria that left no one happy.
Do you have a problem with that?
Would you have a problem with it if I did? ;^)
People on the further left
People who see themselves as torchbearers for “the left” whatever the hell that means.
Right now, “the further left” means Putin apologists who vote for candidates on “the left” whatever that means. Putin, the right-wing, white nationalist embracing, atrocity perpetrating interventionist from Russia.
Further left means in this context people who oppose the idiotic and immoral interventions that America engages in. Some of them (Yemen) are unbelievably vile, though ignored by many who condemn similar acts by Putin. It is true that some on the far left turn into apologists for other mass murderers. That is what my link to the counterpunch article was about, in part.
There is no particular reason why people should choose between being apologists for Putin’s atrocities or being apologists for ours.
I guess they might not want to spread their apologism too thin.
Oh, wait. You weren’t suggesting being an apologist for both.
I’m sorry
to me moving on means putting aside complaining about HRC and finding ways to advance points of view that are more like my own.
among other things it looks like this. there will ba a census in 2020, which means opportunities to redraw districts, which means opportunities to win back house seats. districts are drawn by state-level actors, and state-level races are places where individual people can actually make a dent.
so go make a dent.
a minority of the population currently holds a disproportionate amount of power at the federal level. it will take time and work to rebalance that but it’s not out of reach.
i’m happy to put my anti-plutocrat cred up against that of anybody here. know what? the settled law at the moment says money is speech, so talk about eliminating the influence of monied interests at this point is pretty much just wanking.
as far as atrocities, take a look and see where your best possible path to improving things lies. then take that path.
stuff is pretty f***’d up and it is going to get worse. the POTUS-elect is an ignorant thin-skinned intemperate flaming @sshole, and the majority party in both houses seems disinclined to do anything to moderate his statements or actions. making anything positive happen anytime in the forseeable future seems impossible.
the way to achieve the impossible goals is to achieve the possible ones first. if that seems like an unacceptable compromise, i welcome you to put an alternative course of action on the table.
Had the previous comment sitting around and didn’t see the next page of comments, and I’m a bit confused now about what we are talking about. Donald thinks it is a big thing that Krugman’s sorry, but given the current state of the world, everyone ought to be sorry for somethings. I certainly am.
To go back to the 80’s and 90’s and find that it was a cabal of Democrats responsible for our current situation is pretty f**ked up to me (I was going to say disingenuous, but that implies dishonesty.) I don’t think it was inevitable that we ended up where we are. I mean, if Gore had won (another person that many might define as a plutocrat), he might have paid more attention to Bin Laden, but even if 9/11 had still occurred, I don’t think he would have extended it to Iraq. I would think that he would have acted on climate change, and had deregulation of the energy sector so that power generated locally, which would have created industries that could not be outsourced, we might have had a way to address the problems of coal miners in WV. Gore, as a putative plutocrat, would have had more elbow room to deal with these problems, unlike Obama, who entered office with any number of crises conveniently handed to him by the previous administration and a limitation on how he could act. So, in retrospect, it was all Bill Clinton’s fault for not keeping his d**k in his pants, which means that it was Hillary’s because she couldn’t keep her man happy.
In other breaking news, what Russell and wj said.
Would you have a problem with it if I did? ;^)
Wanna fight? Actually, I do hope you make it to C’ville. We can wine and dine, no fisticuffs.
Some of them (Yemen) are unbelievably vile, though ignored by many who condemn similar acts by Putin.
Putin’s intervention in Syria does not equal the US intervention in Yemen, You can spin that all you want, Donald, but that dog don’t hunt, as they say here in JDVance country.
We’ve had a decades long relationship with the Saudis. We recently stopped some support for their (and eight other countries) intervention in Yemen. We still support Saudi Arabia hugely. And Israel.
Donald, get a job. Preferably as a State Department official.
I hereby strongly condemn the Syrian/Yemeni rebels stirring up trouble, the (l)awful governments that are fighting them, and the outside forces that are committing war crimes on all and sundry. A plague on all their houses, and may they all fnck right off and die.
That outrage, while good and justified, seems rather diffuse and unfocused, doesn’t it? Oh well.
A plague on all their houses, and may they all fnck right off and die.
I know you don’t mean this, Snarki, and I’m not saying anything against you, but wouldn’t Trump, who wants to play with nuclear weapons, do something with this?
Something really sad. Sad. Tragic. Our friends from other countries really not …
This isn’t snark anymore.
Nothing in that response justified our policy in Yemen or even drew a clear distinction between that and Syria. On atrocities, the first step is to persuade Americans that these matter when our country is responsible.. It will be much easier to do this in a few weeks once a Republican can be blamed. Sad but true, He also seems likely to commit more, but it is hard to tell what Trump means to do.
The point about Krugman and so forth is that there is no such thing as a unified Democratic position on economics or free trade and millions of Americans were hurt by the policies pushed in the 90’s. And it simply isn’t accurate to blame it all on Republicans.
For that matter, there is no unified Democratic position on Israel-Palestine, as we see today, or on Syria or Yemen or the Saudis or various other topics. There was no unified Democratic opposition to Iraq. Trying to stop Trump’s various idiocies will keep us unified, but when it comes time to talk about what we want to see instead or who we support all the divisions that popped up in the primaries will come back, and they should, because not every important issue divides along party lines.
Trying to stop Trump’s various idiocies will keep us unified, but when it comes time to talk about what we want to see instead or who we support all the divisions that popped up in the primaries will come back, and they should, because not every important issue divides along party lines.
Of course, but I hope you have a position in the State Department to “do the right thing”. Because all is possible, right, Donald? We can force nine countries to do the things you want them to do!
By the way, Donald, are you still insisting that the atrocities reported in Syria are anti-Putin propaganda?
I think one of the side effects of the Nader campaign that is still active 16 years later is this kneejerk reaction to any criticism of “The Democrats”. As I am going to start pointing out explicitly from now on, there is no such thing as a unified Democratic Party position on a great many issues, including the one I bore people to death about here–Yemen. On that issue and others, I bet I am closer to a lot of Democratic politicians than some of the people here who argue against me.
That’s nice. Care to support any of them, instead of criticize them?
Get a job.
“Get a job”.
You can’t help yourself, can you? It’s not even clever as an insult. If it were devastatingly clever it would be both entertaining and hurtful, but it isn’t.
Gftnc thought it was stress, but you have always gotten nasty and personal very fast, long before the election.
to me moving on means putting aside complaining about HRC and finding ways to advance points of view that are more like my own.
The more I know, the better informed my points of view will be, making them more worth advancing. That’s why I enjoy the critical discussions of past and current policy. I can’t think of a much better guide than recent history.
That said, I’m all for the sort of ground up – from local to state to federal – efforts the Republicans have beating the Democrats at being turned around against the Republicans and for the Democrats.
But we still have to know what it is we want the Democrats to do if and when they manage to win.
You can’t help yourself, can you?
I myself, have two jobs.
Clearly, my editorial job I don’t do very well off hours.
Wining AND dining! (Not pugilism…)
But we still have to know what it is we want the Democrats to do if and when they manage to win.
Really? The fascists are here. You’re going to dick around what the resistance is going to offer in return for the Muslim registries? I think that’s an argument for later.
Okay, I supported Hillary, and would have supported the Bernie program. But wondering “what we want the Democrats to do”?
As opposed to the fascists?
I’m going to throw up now.
Hey, hairshirt, obviously you don’t know what C’ville is about. It’s up to you though, bro. Not forcing it.
Opposition to fascists is a no-brainer. I don’t need to be informed about how bad Trump is. He’s self-evident.
Either way, I don’t see why critical discussion of policy has to be abandoned as though there’s some upper limit on thoughts are words we’re approaching such that we won’t have any left to oppose Trump and the anti-government types and theocrats (in some cases, both, with no sense of irony) in congress.
I’m all in for wining and dining in C’ville. I might even be able to get out for a night without kids in tow.
thoughts and words, that is.
But we still have to know what it is we want the Democrats to do
I’d start with governing while not simultaneously trying to promote their fine line of steaks and hotels. To that, add not getting into dumb-ass pissing contests on Twitter with everyone who annoys you. Especially nuclear-armed folks who annoy you.
I’d follow that up with not f**king over all of the people who have spent their entire working lives paying into SS Medicare and Medicaid, and who are relying on those and similar programs to keep them alive.
Seriously, courtesy of Trump and the (R)’s, it ain’t a high bar. Don’t be a flaming ass should cover it.
The I- P issue is one where there is a clear difference between the parties and yet if you want to talk about it ( and most liberals don’t) it is necessary to talk about the history and the ways that most Democrats contributed to the utter collapse of the long farcical peace process. You can’t make token disapproving noises about settlements and give billions of dollars in aid to Israel every year and defend them in the UN and expect the Israelis to care about your disapproving noises. It is even harder for them to take the noises seriously when they know many Democratic congressmen will criticize a Democratic President for making those noises. And why do most Democrats support Israel no matter what? The same reason as Republicans. Money and single issue voters. Clinton was a panderer to Netanyahu during the campaign. Sanders wasn’t. Anyone interested in this issue would want to know why ( wikileaks was relevant here). Now the 2ss is in shambles, and this absurd bipartisan support Israel received is a big part of why it happened. The stage is now set for Trump and Netanyahu to begin their mutual admiration society. This may well lead to further Mideast disasters and again, one with our fingerprints all over it, with both Democrats and Republicans to blame. Netanyahu’s real anti- genius here was to take a situation where he had guaranteed pandering from both parties and irritate Obama so much he allowed the UN resolution to pass and let Kerry tell part of the truth as a parting shot.
I’m thankful to be disabused of my false notions of the wonderfulness of Trump and his advisers and his staff and his cabinet and the great Republican folks in congress. Here I was thinking how awesome they all were. It’s not at all as though I’ve been in shock and disbelief in the face of this waking nightmare I find my country in. At least now I finally get it.
further left in this context means actually caring about human rights, international law, anti-militarism, anti-imperialism and other such quaint concepts in a principled way – that entails being able to evaluate, criticize and condemn the policies and choices of your own country and/or the party that you might prefer for other reasons.
And it’s actually very simple to do this: just imagine your friends, family and home are being bombed to shit tomorrow morning – dead bodies, severed limbs, screaming babies in the rubble – and how much you would care who threw the bombs or sold the arms and for what reason.
Adding to the list of things Democrats should do–cease supporting a war which moved into crimes against humanity territory almost from the beginning.
An extremely low bar. Apparently still too high for some.
And what novakant said.
Democrats in Congress seem split midway between Kerry and Trump regarding Kerry’s speech. Some seem closer to Trump.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/28/us/politics/john-kerry-israel-democrats-republicans.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
” and how much you would care who threw the bombs”
I would care enough to want to track them down and kill them.
“… or sold the arms”
I would care enough to want to track them down and kill them
“…and for what reason.”
THAT requires a bit more thought. Good reasons, applied by sociopathic morons? Bad sociopathic reasons, uncritically accepted by morons?
All of which is why I really don’t want to support stuff that would put me on the receiving end of such righteous retribution.
I guess I’m unclear on who, among folks here, all of this was addressed to.
You guys raise good points, but you’re talking like the rest of us have some magic wand we can wave and make it all better, if only we would wake up and notice all this injustice going on.
The world is a messed up place. We often contribute to that, because one of the messed up places is us, but other folks also do a bang-up job of making their very own messes.
novakant, you’re from the UK, right? want to discuss your history, and your role in the mess that the middle east has become? why didn’t you wave your magic wand, dude?
I liked Bernie better than HRC. I sent him money. He lost. Some but not all of that was due to DNC shenanigans. Guess what? Parties can pick their nominees any way they like. They used to do it via a bunch of old white guys sitting in a room.
We all do what we can.
It’s probably going to be a weird four, or eight, or twenty, years. We can all yell at each other for our lack of doctrinal purity, or we can make use of whatever means are actually available to us to make the best available outcomes happen.
I’d love for their to be a viable Green party here, but the American Greens frankly can’t find their own @sses with both hands and a flashlight.
I’d love for their to be a viable Democratic Socialist party. It doesn’t exist outside of maybe the northwest and Vermont. And no, Elizabeth Warren is not, remotely, a democratic socialist, or any kind of socialist.
There is a (D) party and they are closer to my interests than the (R) party. And there are a few (R)’s who aren’t around the freaking bend.
That’s what is available to work with, today, in the real world.
I’m 60, I don’t have time to wait 25 or 50 years for a real, democratic left to emerge. I’ll do what I can to help make that happen. But in the meantime, my options are Eisenhower style (R)’s aka the (D)’s, or Reagan style (R)’s, or Franco style (R)’s.
So I’ll support the Eisenhower types, work with the Reagan types when I can, and oppose the Franco types at every opportunity.
That’s my plan. It’s a plan I can actually act on. I like that.
It’s hard to know sometimes if russell is a real person, or a platonic ideal of good sense and sanity. In other words, as almost always, WRS.
I guess I’m unclear on who, among folks here, all of this was addressed to.
My take is that it is a reaction to the general notion that we should only be talking about certain things and that suggestions that we look critically at our own “side” (whichever that may be in a given context) rather than being unswervingly faithful partisans are met with “but Trump (or the Russians or whoever) is way worse” (like we don’t already know that).
Eye on the prize and all that, but we’re really just shooting the sh1t here, not changing the world. I find more enlightenment in the stuff, say, Donald brings forth, because I already know what a clown show on steroids Trump and the Republicans are.
One more thing (sorry!) – Maybe no one (here) has a viable solution (now) to the problems being brought up, but there can’t be a solution if the problems aren’t at least acknowledged first.
further left in this context means actually caring about human rights, international law, anti-militarism, anti-imperialism and other such quaint concepts in a principled way – that entails being able to evaluate, criticize and condemn the policies and choices of your own country and/or the party that you might prefer for other reasons.
As definitions go, that one could easily apply to “further left than the rabid reactionaries in the Republican Party.” Amazing as at may be to some, there are actually conservatives who would agree with caring about all those things. Not, admittedly, among the loud voices in the Congress, etc. But we are out here.
I’d love for their to be a viable Green party here, but the American Greens frankly can’t find their own @sses with both hands and a flashlight.
I’d love for their to be a viable Democratic Socialist party. It doesn’t exist outside of maybe the northwest and Vermont. And no, Elizabeth Warren is not, remotely, a democratic socialist, or any kind of socialist.
While those aren’t my personal desires, I agree with Russell in principle. Me, I’d like for there to be an actual conservative party. (As opposed to one devoted to reactionaries and fantasies of a past that never was.) One willing to make changes when there is a real need (and there are a fair number of those at the moment), and backing off changes which have been tried and failed to work. Not merely been disliked by some; failed to work.
And yes, neither Warren nor even Sanders are nothing like the real democratic socialists of the world. Let alone anything further left.
Damn, What hsh said, too. I know F Scott Fitzgerald said “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”, but a) I do not have pretensions to first-rate intelligence, and b) I do not in any case consider russell’s and hsh’s viewpoints to be completely opposed to each other. I don’t know if they agree…..
Netanyahu is the target of a criminal investigation happening soon, if that makes anyone feel better.
Sapient, yes, a bit better.
But to get seriously feeling better (on that score) will require actual indictments. Better yet, convictions. Investigations, after all, don’t always end up that way.
Gosh, a very beautiful version of Leonard Cohen’s Democracy, performed by Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer in aid of PEN America:
https://pen.org/donate-democracy
I don’t know if they agree…..
I do. I’m completely with russell on the very low bar for a standard of governance that is being set by Trump, his people, and congressional Republicans in general. I support whatever effective efforts are available to oppose their agenda and ultimately remove as many of them from office as possible and to do so as soon as possible.
I genuinely worry for my children’s futures because of the people soon coming into power in this country. We’re going to have a complete nitwit for president.
I genuinely worry for my children’s futures because of the people soon coming into power in this country. We’re going to have a complete nitwit for president.
I agree, which is why I feel that our plan to minimize the horror should be our major focus.
…
Eye on the prize and all that, but we’re really just shooting the sh1t here, not changing the world. I find more enlightenment in the stuff, say, Donald brings forth, because I already know what a clown show on steroids Trump and the Republicans are.
First, I never stated that we shouldn’t talk about things. Donald comments on either Yemen or Israel constantly – the way politicians feel that they have to deal with those situations is apparently his litmus test for morality. The US has had long and difficult relationships with that area of the world, and there’s plenty of evidence that Obama is as disgusted as anyone. I mean, I don’t see the point in talking about it in every single thread – we’ve done it a million times, and we all know what the issues are. Donald thinks there’s an easy solution, to just quit them. Maybe Trump will nuke them, then Donald won’t have to stress anymore.
In order to resist the “clown show on steroids” that is taking power on January 20, we’re going to have to be organized with a consistent message. I don’t see how navel-gazing, breast-beating, and making false equivalencies is going to help us with that. Also, the amazing accomplishments of the past eight years with regard to the economy, health care, the environment, lgbt rights, two wonderful Supreme Court justices, etc., despite Republican obstruction and disrespect, are never acknowledged by the people who should be touting them; rather, the false narrative of the terrible plight of the white working class, who were supposedly ignored by Democrats, has been trumpeted by Donald and the “left”, and then (along with the “left”‘s “crooked Hillary” theme) echoed by Donald Trump.
So, in sum, Yemen is a tragedy, and would be whether the Saudis had our help or not – or maybe it would be a worse one. The Saudis have a coalition of nine countries, and they buy arms from a lot of other places, including the UK. China has been chummy with the Saudis, and would probably be willing to help them out with various tasks that we are now doing. So maybe it would make us look good, but we also might lose some leverage with regard to other initiatives such as the Iran deal. This is probably why we’re doing it – I doubt that Obama has it out for Yemeni children.
But, sure, let’s all pretend that Democrats, in their foreign policy, are motivated by greed and bloodlust, and that they are “the blob,” instead of seeing them as they are – people who have been adhering to policies and norms that they’ve tried to improve and build on since WWII, some of which are flawed, but which have kept us out of a nuclear conflagration. By the way, East Asia, South America, Europe and other places also exist if we want to talk about foreign policy. Do we only care about the Middle East?
And as for Trump and his coming disaster, we need to be discussing the various details about what’s at stake, and what we might be able to do about it. We don’t have any power in the Federal government at the moment (and I fear that we won’t for a very long time). But we can work through the states, and work through nongovermental organizations to implement changes that we want to see.
We need to start thinking about being our own government, and how we can create policy organizations that can be nationalized if and when we regain power.
I think this explains a lot, about various of us here, and about the electorate as a whole:
http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/the-psychological-research-that-helps-explain-the-election
fwiw I’m right in line with hairshirt’s comment and also always appreciate donald’s posts.
novakant’s too for that matter.
the only thing i’m responding to here is what appears to be the sense that nobody but donald (or whoever) gives a crap about the Yemenis (or whoever). I don’t think that’s so.
the strongest pushback I think anybody is offering comes maybe from sapient, and IMO sapient’s last comment demonstrates a concern for donald’s issues as strong as donald’s, only balanced with a more complex view of the variety of forces that are in play.
frankly, I’m not sure there is a “right approach” to the middle east. we could just stay out of it altogether, which might give us the illusion of having “clean hands”, but a lot of nasty stuff would probably still go on. more of it, perhaps.
it’s a messy, complicated situation that took decades to create, and will probably take decades to sort out.
Well kum-fnckin’-baya! (sort of…)
Unfortunately, the yahoo from Netanya has been the target of this kind of investigation many times already iirc and until now always came out on top.
What’s worse, he is a ‘moderate’ if compared to a significant part of his coalition (some members of which openly advocate genocide, preferably including moderate Israelis).
I think Bibi has no serious political beliefs himself apart from wanting to be on top. He’s a less charismatic version of Berlusconi and Trump in that regard.
I think Bibi has no serious political beliefs himself apart from wanting to be on top.
This is wrong Hartmut. I have been watching him on and off for years, and (contrary to what he has repeatedly said) it has been absolutely clear from his actions, and their timing, that he believes that he must never allow the Palestinians to have a state, and he believes that he must frustrate any attempt which could realistically result in them having a state. There are people worse than him (in racist attitudes etc) on the even-more-rightwing Israeli right, but only the US Republicans believe his rhetoric about negotiations for a state (and not the rightwing Republican billionaires who fund the settlements, they don’t believe it.)
Our ever-eloquent and insightful president-elect on sanctions against Russia:
What a maroon…
I think, if Bibi got offered (by some Higher Being) to be unchallenged supreme ruler of Israel for life in exchange for a 2 state solution, he would not hesitate, provided he believed that said Being could be trusted to hold up its side of the bargain. And he knows very well that he could not keep in power on the opposite side of the political spectrum. He needs the radical settlers as his base (like the GOP needs the US equivalent). He saw Sharon’s fall from grace and will not risk the same.
He is definitely a bad faith actor but that does not require to have any actual faith.
Well, I can’t read his mind, so this has to be a matter of opinion (btw, I believe that Hitler was a genuine Nazi while I very much doubt that Stalin actually believed communist doctrine).
Ben Rhodes works for Obama– the blob is his term. It describes the think tank mentality in DC which sees military intervention in some form as the solution to problems. By D.C. standards Obama hasn’t intervened enough. The pressure is on him to intervene. The only lesson the blob took from Iraq is that ordinary Americans won’t support prolonged wars where thousands of American troops die and tens of thousands are wounded. For them it is obvious that the Iraq syndrome is something to be worked around. Rhodes talked about the blob in a NYT Sunday profile and it made a stir at the time.
We discuss every issue here endlessly. Torture was discussed endlessly. There were arguments for torture. Much better than the ones for our policy in Yemen. The argument is that we help the Saudis kill innocents because they might turn to others who would help them if we didn’t. Incidentally, I first heard that argument given for East Timor–if we hadn’t helped Indonesia then someone else would have. This applies to every situation. Short of nuclear annihilation, there is no atrocity you can’t justify with this argument. The main utility of the argument is to make the arguer feel better about who they support. So long as there wasn’t much attention paid the Obama Administration supported the Saudis. With pressure they pulled back slightly. So did the Chinese risk calculation change? Are the Democrats who oppose Obama on this a bunch of naive idealists who just don’t understand the complexities of the world like the big grownups do? Is it a coincidence that the Republicans mostly support the war on Yemen and the Democrats who voted with Obama include people like Schumer and Elliot Engel who are also big critics of Kerry’s speech? I think the idea that we always have to,imagine some,complex outside reasons why we have to support atrocities ignores or obfuscates the domestic pressures which probably do more to determine which batch of people we help bomb. And it is amazing how the complexities of the outside world vanish when we decide to bomb someone else or overthrow them. Then it becomes a question of good vs evil. I don’t believe that either. The people who supported arming rebels in Syria were thinking more of opposing the Syrian-Iranian-Hezbollah-Russian axis. Humanitarianism plays the same role it plays in Yemen.
As for bloodlust, outside of psychopaths of which there probably are some people usually have reasons for the policies they support. Putin does too. So does Assad, who used to live in Britain and has a wife who has a degree in computer science and had planned to go to Harvard and probably would have fit right in at liberal cocktail parties. Not joking and not being snarky. Atrocities are not necessarily committed by governments whose leaders are acting out fantasies of being Jack the Ripper. Sapient’s defense at bottom is an appeal to the notion that People Like Us can’t do bad things and if they appear to do so it must be for a very good reason. It’s not true. People Like Us probably tak themselves into thinking that a policy which is convenient and politically easy is morally right. Pressuring an allly like the Saudis or the Israelis is going to be difficult, not least because they have plenty of lobbyists and supporters in DC.
Sapient’s defense at bottom is an appeal to the notion that People Like Us can’t do bad things and if they appear to do so it must be for a very good reason.
Your argument is that everyone in the world is evil except you, and the only arbiter of morality is you.
By the way, Putin and Assad want power forever. Obama just gave power to a psychopath because he believes so strongly in democratic institutions. I would say there’s a difference here, but both sides do it, right?
just chill everybody. I’ll be back soon to straighten this all out.
Happy New Year.
sapient, Donald’s claim is nothing like your strawman of it. It’s not by any stretch a claim of purity, it’s an indictment of those who claim purity, and your comment is little more than “I know you are but what am I?” For someone who claims the world in general and foreign policy in particular are very complicated, when it comes time to explain the motives of policymakers you support, it’s a bit… odd how all nuance and complexity vanishes, and they’re selfless good-faith actors.
It’s not necessary to be fundamentally evil to do very evil things. This is a fairly banal observation that goes hand in hand with realpolitik, even if it runs afoul exceptionalist ideas. It’s very strange to see someone who espouses the value of acting in accordance with realpolitik simultaneously reasoning via black-and-white morality and bitterly opposing the idea that (our kind of) people are motivated by self-interest.
No sapient, that’s not the argument. The argument is that people rationalize. I do too, but my rationalizations don’t happen to include what governments do or don’t do. My flaws lie elsewhere and sadly, they are none of your business. It costs me nothing to say that the US is guilty of complicity in war crimes, so there is no virtue in it. Lots of people seem to identify with political parties or governments and start rationalizing away if you mention some crime that their idol has committed. This is a mistake.
This sort of argument comes up sooner or later. Everyone is a moral absolutist when condemning the crimes of someone they don’t like. But you are a self righteous prick if you condemn the acts of a supposed good guy. Btw, some on the right are already talking about Trump Derangement Syndrome. It’s gonna be a thrilling four years.
So what are the odds that the US is the one country in history where foreign policy is determined on the basis of what is right and any unfortunate tragedies that may occur are due solely to the pressures and complexities of things outside our perfect country? There was a fight over whether the word occupation would be used in the Democratic platform. The Clintonites won. The reason given was that using harsh language like that would get in the way of negotiations. In some other situation maybe, but Obama leaned over backwards and was more supportive of Israel than his predecessors and it got him nowhere. Domestic politics determine our Israel policy. The few times Obama did criticize Israel he was undercut by Democrats in Congress. There is no reason to think Israel is the only foreign policy issue where domestic pressures help determine what we do.
Also, sapient, you keep forgetting that on Yemen, many Democrats agree with me. Plus there is the fact that the only reason I know about Yemen is that other people in various ngo’s along with a tiny number of columnists and reporters write about it. If it was just me you would have a point. Maybe the rest of the world agrees we should be helping the Saudis bomb Yemen. But that appears not to be the case.
Also, sapient, you keep forgetting that on Yemen, many Democrats agree with me.
Democrats in Congress can afford to grandstand because they know their votes aren’t going to prevail.
And what would be the point of grandstanding? Yemen isn’t some massive grassroots issue. Also, look who is suddenly being cynical about the motives of politicians. So you are siding with the Republicans here, and Schumer and Elliot Engel.
But this is a step forwards. It seems that it is okay to question the motives of people in DC. Even if they are Democrats.
I’m going to wait and see bobbyp’s solution to everything.
Also, look who is suddenly being cynical about the motives of politicians.
I am not cynical, and I think grandstanding is fine when politicians have to get your vote, Donald.
More same same. Donald can’t tell the difference between autocrats and democrats, but many people get it.
Hurry back, bobbyp.
Hilzoy just tweeted this link. Thanks, Hilzoy!
Great link, sapient. From it:
I don’t want to overstate whatever impact this may have had. I just find it interesting how these little, random things pop up during campaigns. Depending on when they happen, they can make a significant difference in the course of things – sort of like a football bouncing one way or the other, allowing one team to pick it up, possibly to run it in for a touchdown.
And this:
Donald can’t tell the difference between autocrats and democrats, but many people get it.
Using a false equivilancy to complain about a putative false equivalency. Good work.
Taibbi:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/something-about-this-russia-story-stinks-w458439
Pending further news, that seems a reasonable analysis from Taibbi.
Well, Ugh and Nigel, while skepticism is always a thing (sometimes a good thing), you might want to combine what the US intelligence is saying with what your lying eyes are reporting. Trump’s campaign advisors, cabinet picks, possible financial ties, loving tweets, admiration for dictators, and now a new story (about the electricity grid being hacked).
Probably nothing to see here.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/05/obama-international-arms-weapons-deals
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-saudi-security-idUSKCN11D2JQ
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/uk-has-sold-56bn-of-military-hardware-to-saudi-arabia-under-david-cameron-research-reveals-a6797861.html
and this is waht the Saudis do with the weapons
https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/10/13/yemen-saudi-led-funeral-attack-apparent-war-crime
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/03/25/civilian-casualties-war-crimes-saudi-arabia-yemen-war/
Stop rationalizing and start speaking truth to power.
An interesting aspect of strategy that has not been much discussed here – whether Democrats ought to be making more of an effort to accommodate (or at least not completely alienate) white evangelicals…
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/democrats-have-a-religion-problem/510761/
As the article points out, Obama was probably the ideal politician to negotiate this tricky issue. It ought at least a metric by which the next generation of leaders is assessed.
Nigel, I have been informed this is not a problem.
Haven’t had a chance to read many recent links yet, but on the Taibbi piece I was also initially a bit aghast, as Russia’s hack has formed part of my foundational narrative about the election, but after mature reflection (!) I think it is valuable and important to be at least slightly sceptical until better corroboration is available (while accepting this is very difficult to come by in intelligence matters), because the whole issue of fake news, confirmation bias etc is a huge, maybe even existential risk to the world as we wish it to continue, develop, and be understood.
Nigel, white evangelicals have proved by supporting Donald Trump that “faith” is not what’s driving them. Democrats can’t “reach” them unless they embrace anti-choice, anti-lgbt positions, or unless they have some quirk that doesn’t offend white evangelicals.
What Democrats “need” is to freaking support their nominee and get their people to the polls. They need to do that overwhelmingly because Republicans suppress the vote.. They don’t need white racists, which is what we’re talking about here. There’s nothing at all authentic about their faith if they’re letting Donald Trump, the pussy-grabbing sex offender whose sex objects have, no doubt, had abortions, who defrauds his customers, cheats his workers, and insults disabled people, prevail over Hillary Clinton. These articles are bogus.
This wasn’t an election about “what Democrats did wrong”, except to the extent that they didn’t turn out in large enough numbers, mostly because people like the Vichys here vilified their candidate, and bought into the “economic anxiety” fraud.
after mature reflection (!) I think it is valuable and important to be at least slightly sceptical until better corroboration is available
What kind of corroboration do you need? Isn’t every day’s news enough? The collaboration between Trump and Putin isn’t exactly a secret, even without evidence of hacking, is it? And we know there was hacking, and we know it was Russian hackers.
Obviously, it would be great to have a bipartisan commission investigate the matter. When is that going to happen? After the nuke drops?
Vichy, Vichy, Vichy.
The Taibbi piece was a good perspective piece, but I found it interesting that despite its skeptical premise and iconoclastic tone, Taibbi is still too orthodox to mention the very real possibility that any Russian interference that may have taken place was at least as likely blowback – for us in general (and Clinton in particular) meddling in Russia’s sphere of influence over the last several years – as it was a conspiracy between Trump and Putin…
…I’ve (decidedly non-Evangelical) Christian relatives who loathed Trump profoundly but still voted for him because while “neither candidate was very Christian”, he’d at least nominate more “religious-friendly” judges. I find the “faith under siege” narrative absurd, but there are a lot of people who are open-minded but deeply religious who find it compelling. One factor with that is certainly the patronizing tone a lot of Democrats adopt when talking about traditionally Republican voting blocs’ religiosity, which the Republicans are all too eager to endlessly play back to reinforce their culture war narratives.
One factor with that is certainly the patronizing tone a lot of Democrats adopt
It’s hard not to be patronizing to deeply stupid people.
Taibbi’s piece is a little thin on wha motivation there might be to overplay the Russia connection by Obama and the intel agencies, merely suggesting that it distracts from the recent election loss and I’m not sure what it could be, it does seem true that we’re relyinf heavily on non-public evidence.
it does seem true that we’re relyinf heavily on non-public evidence.
Trump’s connections with Russia are very public. The hacking is more or less icing on the cake. And if the usual pre-election norms had been observed, like scrutiny of Trump’s finances, there might be a whole lot of other public evidence. I mean, look at Trump’s tweets, and Russia’s response, and Russia’s response to Obama’s sanctions.
Again, how much corroboration do we need, and what would it look like? Do we have to out all of the CIA operatives?
I’m glad you guys weren’t around in WWII.
By the way, we’re always talking about “existential threats” around here. This is what that looks like.
Trump’s admiration for Putin is certainly out there, and ditto Putin’s preference for a Trump presidency, not to mention both of their respective and collective appallingness. And we do know there was a hack, or several, and that it probably (along with other factors, like her unpopularity and the perception of her dishonesty) cost HRC the presidency. And I agree, I would be a lot more inclined to trust the intelligence services under an Obama presidency than under a Bush one, but as a matter of policy we should be wary assessors of news, rather than easy dupes.
as a matter of policy we should be wary assessors of news, rather than easy dupes.
Taken to an extreme, we won’t believe anything. That’s just as problematic.
What Democrats “need” is to freaking support their nominee and get their people to the polls.
Sure, but who are “their people”? Is that a static set of voters of which the percentage who show up at the polls has to be maximized, or are there people who might vote one way or the other? I agree that adopting anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ positions isn’t an option and that there are some people for whom those things are litmus tests, thereby making them unreachable. But that’s not the whole story. You can attack anti-choice and anti-LGBTQ positions without attacking religion, per se. You can even argue against those things on a “WWJD?” basis.
It seems to me you have a tendency not to separate basic truth from messaging and public perception, sapient. No one is suggesting taking different positions on issues. Not everyone (though some are) is saying there’s anything even approching equivalency between Republicans and Democrats where the interests of working people are concerned. (I’d say there’s some truth to the generally pro-business DLC triangulation as a contributing factor, but still nothing approaching equivalency with the corporatism of the GOP.)
You shared Hilzoy’s Politico link, right? So, if you don’t buy into economic-anxiety (or whatever you want to call it) as a factor in this election, what meaning was there to the part about the false doom-and-gloom narrative that Clinton didn’t push back enough on (or even reinforced to some degree)? There was a strong case for continuing the Obama agenda, because it was largely successful and was actually beginning to reach further down into the economy to benefit workers toward the bottom of the income scale, even in the face of Republican obstruction. (Or, at the very least, there was no truth to the narrative that his policies were suppressing the economy, if you’re not the sort of person who attributes credit to the president for economic improvement.). But why would there be any need to make such a case if those issues didn’t really matter?
One thing I don’t think anyone who generally supports Democrats over Republicans is arguing against is GOTV, even if they discuss other things.
You can attack anti-choice and anti-LGBTQ positions without attacking religion, per se. You can even argue against those things on a “WWJD?” basis.
Were you not listening to Tim Kaine? I would put his religious authenticity up against any of those anti-choice Bible thumpers any day of the week.
not to separate basic truth from messaging and public perception, sapient.
Ummm, you didn’t hear the constant refrain of “you’re not listening to these economically anxious people”! Telling the fake “economically anxious” that they didn’t have a gripe seemed like the wrong thing to do, otherwise their fee fees were going to be hurt.
At a certain point, it’s on the citizens not to be fascist enablers and collaborators. At a certain point, the citizens of Germany weren’t going to be “persuaded” in a nice way. Sadly, we’re giving the fascists (still a minority) the tools that we need to save our country, and there isn’t going to be an Allied force to come to our rescue. In fact, the minority fascist citizens are being helped by fascist dictators abroad.
Sad that it’s come to this, but be real. This is where we are. Maybe Hillary should have campaigned more in Wisconsin or not used the word “deplorable”. The one weird trick. I don’t think that’s the problem.
Please rank the following in order of credibility:
o The Gilgamesh Epic
o The Iliad
o The Old Testament
o The New Testament
o The Koran
o Principia Mathematica
o The Book of Mormon
o The Origin of Species
o The periodic table
o Photos of Earth from space
o The 9/11 Commission Report
o The Drudge Report
o The US Census
o Anthropogenic global warming
o Obama’s birth certificate
o Jim Comey’s non-partisanship
o He, Trump’s respect for “faith”
o Vlad Putin’s “respect” for Trump
Then decide where in your rank-ordered list you would put such propositions as:
o The Obama administration is “manipulating intelligence” in the matter of Russian ratfncking of the 2016 election like Dick and Dubya did on Iraqi “WMD”.
o The “white working class” will benefit under Trump’s Billionaires-And-Generals Administration, with Larry Kudlow thrown in.
o Half the American electorate is below average in knowledge, intelligence, or credulity (take your pick) by definition.
On that last point, I am not suggesting WHICH half. History will answer that question.
–TP
we know there was hacking, and we know it was Russian hackers.
Yes, sapient, we know that there was hacking. Nobody (that I have seen anyway) is disputing that.
But do we (meaning you and me) know it was Russian hackers? We believe it. At least I do — not least because the other ties between Trump and Putin that you mention make the intelligence reports that we have seen plausible. But unless you have access to a lot more raw intelligence information than the rest of us, we don’t “know” it.
All Taibbi seems to be saying is that we have gotten burned before (Iraqi WMDs, for example) and so some caution might be advisable.
All Taibbi seems to be saying is that we have gotten burned before (Iraqi WMDs, for example) and so some caution might be advisable.
So because Bush/Cheney cherrypicked and bullied the intelligence community into lying the country into a war that they had wanted for many years, we are never going to trust any administration or any intelligence again, even under the best President of my lifetime?
I am an American whose country is facing an existential crisis. I’m not going to reject everything my government says. I’ll be plenty skeptical of the everything the Trump administration offers up, because they’ve already proved themselves to be pathological liars.
Call me partisan. I’m proud of it, and the side that I choose.
Democrats ought to be making more of an effort to accommodate (or at least not completely alienate) white evangelicals…
Contrary to title of the piece Nigel cites, (D)’s do not have a “religion problem”. They arguably have a white evangelical “problem”, because white evangelicals tend to be conservatives.
I put “problem” in scare quotes here, because it’s not a “problem”, it’s a basic difference in social values and beliefs. Different people have different values, and vote accordingly. Also, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.
Shocking though it may be to ponder, *not all religious people are white evangelicals*. Other than Mormons, the (D)’s do well to extremely well with all other religious groups.
See Pew on the topic.
Younger white evangelicals are also less likely to share their parents’ and grandparents’ socially conservative views, especially on women’s and LGBTQ rights, but also on race and, amazingly enough, abortion.
White evangelicals often live in something of a social ghetto. They are at some risk of marginalizing themselves.
Taibbi is still too orthodox to mention the very real possibility that any Russian interference that may have taken place was at least as likely blowback – for us in general (and Clinton in particular) meddling in Russia’s sphere of influence over the last several years
That’s Marcy Wheeler’s position, and is one I find believable.
And, of course, it’s not like the two hypotheses are mutually exclusive. Could be a two-fer.
I’d just like to know how much DJT owes Russia. Or any number of other sovereign wealth creditors. Or non-sovereign creditors in countries where a word in the right ear opens doors.
Seems like a small ask, to me.
Half the American electorate is below average in knowledge, intelligence, or credulity
Below median, actually, which is likely a lower bar than average.
What an elitist I am.
What Democrats “need” is to freaking support their nominee and get their people to the polls.
…an oblique and almost certainly unintentional admission that rank and file party members “should” be viewed as resources rather than party members, but an admission just the same. Not even vaguely surprising considering the source, but still, it’s a far franker admission than is normally spoken in public…
rank and file party members “should” be viewed as resources
If they’re not trying to get their candidate elected, they’re not in solidarity with the party. I’m not really sure what you’re getting at here, Bernie Bro.
…
And if we do want to complain, which I do, or call names, which I do, maybe the targets should be updated?
…
Get over it. Your candidate in the general was the second-least popular candidate in recent history, and still managed to lose to the least popular candidate – even with all the Never Trumpers she pulled in (indeed, pulling them in seemed to be the bulk of her campaigning). Large swathes of the electorate thought she was someone with poor character who had nothing to offer them, and she couldn’t be bothered to change their minds since history, demographics,the party leadership, the pundits, and the polls all were on her side.
All of which is more relevant than your Bernie Bro crack (nice job moving on, BTW), which is just more-of-the-same culture war BS and veiled accusations of political heresy to dodge the actual point: your vision of the Democratic Party is a party of the few, where your kind of people tell the peons who and what to line up behind, and their role is to do as they’re told and applaud, and certainly never to question or criticize the leadership or suggest a change of course.
What wj said at 12.02 (could not get on the site to post for ages).
Seriously, sapient, we know you are in agony and heartbroken about HRC, whom you supported not only out of party loyalty but because you came to love her, but this thrashing around and accusing people who are your natural sympathisers and (in most cases) fellow liberal Democrats of being “Vichy”, or “appeasers”, or “collaborators” is ridiculously wrong and presumably not helping you to feel any better. In fact, there is nobody at all here who does not consider Trump and his merry men to be a disaster of differing degrees of magnitude (Marty hopes they will not be, and McKT is staying shtum, but they abstained and will have to live with that in the future). But your insistence that yours is the only true path is in its way as bad as would be the opposite. Why are you still quite so invested in HRC and her perfection as a candidate? I ask as someone who ended up crying uncontrollably when she lost, and who still has fantasies that this whole thing is just a dream, and that she is about to start her Presidency. She was deeply unpopular, and due, among other things including (probably Russian) hacking and to fake news and rightwing confirmation bias, was easy to portray as dishonest (which is why we and all conscientious people must strive to counter fake news and our own confirmation bias, and be at least wary of believing everything we read from our “preferred” sources). The next Democratic nominee must not have these negatives, and we must be able to assess this objectively and with open eyes, and if s/he is openly Christian and also, miraculously, able to appeal to white evangelicals without being anti-LBGT and pro-life, so much the better. Why are these such unacceptable views, when they would render the next Dem candidate so much more likely to be elected?
…the other thing with the emphasis on Russia above all else is that it’s currently underscoring the importance of being skeptical. According to polling, if we want to trust that, the fearmongers have convinced half of Democrats that Russians hacked vote tallies, despite there being just as much evidence of that as of Trump’s mythical millions of illegal immigrant votes costing him the popular vote. We need people to be more skeptical and willing to question prevailing narratives, not less.
GftN, Your 3:17 has nothing to do with the issue of whether we should trust the news of Putin’s hacking, which I thought was the topic.
Hillary Clinton was not a perfect candidate, and I never said she was. We will never have a perfect candidate. There is no such thing as a perfect candidate. Donald Trump won. He was not a perfect candidate. Or was he? Was Trump a perfect candidate? This “perfect candidate” shnt is a ridiculous thing to be discussing.
The thing we need to ask ourselves is what is our role, and our job? Is it to only support perfect candidates? No, it is to support the best candidate we have. As Democrats (for those of us who identify with that party), our job is to find a candidate we think is qualified to carry forth our policies and our platform, who we will work towards getting elected. We always hope to find someone who is broadly appealing, so that the person will win, of course. Hillary Clinton met this standard (and by the way, she is consistently the “most admired” woman, according to polls, so her great unpopularity is somewhat overblown).
This is not about Hillary Clinton. It’s about the fact that almost 1/2 of voters voted for a fascist puppet of Vladimir Putin, who is patently unqualified in numerous ways, and yet people here, the Vichys, are ignoring the clear connection he has with Putin, and minimizing the stark danger he poses to the country. They’ll decide later? They’ll ignore the intelligence services because its work was once misused by the Cheney crowd?
Of course, Democrats will try to have a super-popular candidate “next time”. Is there going to be a next time? Putin has been in power for 17 years (today is his anniversary). Look at North Carolina for how willing Republicans are to transfer power. Look at the voting rights situation in this country.
This is not merely a lost election. It’s a lost democracy. It’s not about Hillary Clinton. It’s about fascism, and a puppet government of Russia. The people here who spend all of their intellectual resources trying to blame Hillary Clinton for this, finding reasons that what’s obviously happening isn’t true? They’ll wait and see? Wait and watch the country disintegrate? That’s collaboration. Vichy.
The people here who spend all of their intellectual resources trying to blame Hillary Clinton for this, finding reasons that what’s obviously happening isn’t true? They’ll wait and see? Wait and watch the country disintegrate? That’s collaboration. Vichy.
This is the kind of thing I was talking about. HRC lost for lots of reasons, only one of which was the (probably Russian) hacking. I, for one, am not “blaming” her, it’s certainly not her fault that, for example, the rightwing media bubble etc made her (unfairly I believe) characterised as dishonest. But nonetheless, a huge proportion of the American public thought she was dishonest. The Democrats chose a nominee who was unable to beat Trump, only one of whose advantages was strategic leaks of (probably Russian) hacks. Making a stand, and saying “probably Russian” (although I believe it is Russian) because of distrust of the (often professionally untrustworthy) intelligence services, does not make one Vichy, or a collaborator, or a quisling (actually I don’t think you’ve used that one), or a fascist-sympathiser.
And just to add this: Barack Obama is my President. I support him, and I trust his judgment with regard to the assessment of the intelligence services. That’s because he’s proved worthy of my trust over eight years.
HRC lost for lots of reasons, only one of which was the (probably Russian) hacking.
And this was my point:
Who cares why she lost? What we face now is that Trump won. Trump is dangerous. We must fight him, not try to decide why Hillary Clinton lost. We’ll not repeat an election with Hillary Clinton as a candidate. People who are worried that Hillary was unpopular need not worry about Hillary ever again. No more Hillary.
Now we have to fight Putin and his friend. Let’s not minimize what Putin is and does. People who are excusing Putin and his proxy are on the wrong side.
Who is excusing Putin and his proxy?
And who says we shouldn’t fight Trump (apart from Marty)?
She was deeply unpopular, and due, among other things including (probably Russian) hacking and to fake news and rightwing confirmation bias, was easy to portray as dishonest
Actually, I think it took 25 years of unrelenting obsessive character assassination to characterize her as dishonest. Just to be clear. And in spite of all of that, she not only won the popular vote, but did so by a fair margin.
So yes, arguably the second-least favorite candidate. With the least favorite being the President-elect.
All of the said, it’s a done deal. Water under the bridge. Time to deal with the reality available to us.
I think folks need to be clear about what they’re trying to do when they talk about “not alienating” Trump supporters.
It’s not constructive to be rude to Trump supporters, and it’s not constructive to call them harsh names. All good. They are by and large not actually anyone’s enemy, and they don’t need to be treated as if they are. Or, perhaps, some actually are, and do need to be treated as such, but most are not.
It is, however, not constructive to try to put some kind of Trump-supporter-friendly gloss on what left-leaning people believe and value to try to “appeal” to Trump supporters. For one thing, it will be called out as rank BS.
There are quite strong cases to be made for the things that left-leaning people value and believe to evangelicals, to working people, to rural people. The message does not have to be changed. It requires no new clothes. The relevance of the left-leaning message to those folks simply needs to be articulated. Some of it will be received, and some not. So be it.
And, there are areas of profound difference between what left-leaning people believe and value, and what many or most American conservatives believe. You are not going to make a dent in that, it’s just a dynamic that is, and always has been, part of American political culture.
I’m fine with not being rude to Trump supporters, with not treating them as if they are my personal enemy, and with taking whatever opportunities arise to engage in dialog with them. I already do those things, have done them, will continue to do them.
I’m not interested in trying to “tweak my message” to manufacture agreement where it does not exist. Frankly, I believe in and value the things I do because *I think they are the right things to believe in and value*, and I don’t believe in and value the things I don’t because I think they are not the right things to believe in and value.
I’m not going to change that to try to “win over” Trump supporters.
Frankly, I think Trump is going to be a chaotic cluster****, and I don’t think but find it blatantly obvious that the (R)’s are going to try to seize the next four years as their opportunity to gut every useful public institution that they can.
Some Trump supporters will figure out that that is not in their best interest. Many or most will not, and will in fact find new and creative ways to blame somebody else for the resulting mess.
I don’t see that there’s much I’m going to be able to do to change that. People are invested in their point of view.
I do what I can to make it clear to people who disagree with me that I’m not their enemy, and that I don’t consider them to be mine. There are a million other voices telling them the opposite. Plus, there are some things we are all just going to disagree about.
The degree to which I can change all of that is, however unfortunately, quite limited.
Some hearts and minds aren’t going to be, and aren’t interested in being, won.
And who says we shouldn’t fight Trump (apart from Marty)?
Right now, there is a fight. Obama just issued sanctions against Russia for hacking to try to influence the election. Trump and Putin say there was no hacking. Russia is ignoring the sanctions in order to wait for Trump to ascend.
Whose side are these people on when they say “I doubt the hacking claim”?
Saying “it may well have been, or was probably the Russian security forces under Putin’s direction doing the hack, but as yet we await proof” is not the same as saying “I doubt the hacking claim”. And people saying this are not in any way taking a side. Some (like me) are diehard anti-Trumpers, but the point is that it is a reasonable stance to take independent of your party affiliation.
russell: The relevance of the left-leaning message to those folks simply needs to be articulated. Some of it will be received, and some not. So be it.
Polls showed that when people were listening to the Democratic message, they responded positively. When the message was undermined by negative personal rhetoric (“crooked Hillary”), people were dissuaded from the message.
That’s why it’s important for people who are “fighting” for something not to undermine the message. This is really not that hard.
Saying “it may well have been, or was probably the Russian security forces under Putin’s direction doing the hack, but as yet we await proof” is not the same as saying “I doubt the hacking claim”.
The headline to the Taibbi story is “Something About This Russia Story Stinks” and the entire story is filled with innuendo (kind of like the email stories). Like this “But this could also just be a cynical ass-covering campaign, by a Democratic Party that has seemed keen to deflect attention from its own electoral failures.”
Inquiring minds want to know.
Note the word “could”. If we are going to selectively quote, it is worth noting that this is the paragraph before your quote:
Also, shortly after:
It’s a pretty judicious, evenhanded piece.
russell: ” find it blatantly obvious that the (R)’s are going to try to seize the next four years as their opportunity to gut every useful public institution that they can.”
One of the major goals over the next 4 years should be to make sure that the GOP gets ALL the credit they deserve for their initiatives.
So the Dem minorities in Congress should make sure that every single vote is a recorded role-call vote, and that there’s no crossover Dem votes to pollute the purity of the GOP “mandate”.
It’s a pretty judicious, evenhanded piece.
In the David Broder tradition.
In the David Broder tradition.
Or more accurately, in the more recent tradition of “Emails cast a shadow over the Clinton campaign” in an article containing nothing.
Had to quickly check (had a vague, irretrievable memory):
We normally think of “High Broderism” as the worship of bipartisanship for its own sake, combined with a fake “pox on both their houses” attitude. But in reality this is just the cover Broder uses for his real agenda, the defense of what he perceives to be “the establishment” at all costs.
If this is what you meant, this does not seem to describe either Taibbi (from what I can discover about him) or me. And this particular subject still seems to me to be a very strange battle to keep on fighting in this way. Whatever the eventual proof or evidence about the hack (and you’ve got plenty of Republicans like McCain on your side anyway), what really matters is opposing Trump, and, as russell says, Republicans’ attempts to roll back any gains made under Obama, and you get no argument on that from most of us on this site.
you get no argument on that from most of us on this site.
The article is exactly like the email articles. “Of course, Donald Trump is atrocious and may be the end of the world, but Barack Obama? Isn’t this fishy? Is it just that he’s trying to cover the Democrats ass?”
Obviously, you don’t see this, so I’m not going to keep arguing about it. But, just so you know, this is part of the problem.
Republicans’ attempts to roll back any gains made under Obama
Actually I think they’re looking to roll it back to McKinley.
The worst thing he says about Obama is:
Obama mentioning these humdrum tradecraft skirmishes feels like he’s throwing something in to bolster an otherwise thin case.
which is hardly so terrible. I agree that we shouldn’t keep arguing about it, but just so you know, when you say “this is part of the problem”, what you are really saying is “my party right or wrong. It is not legitimate or permissible to question anything that emanates from my President, my party or my intelligence services when vouched for by my President”. And even for someone who admires and supports your President, this is a chilling message.
It is not legitimate or permissible to question anything that emanates from my President, my party or my intelligence services when vouched for by my President. And even for someone who admires and supports your President, this is a chilling message.
You know what I’m “chilled” by? The reality of Donald Trump. And the fact that our President can’t even count on his supporters to stand firmly behind him on the issue of Putin hacking the election means that his supporters do not know how to fight. We’re doomed.
Okayyy….
John Cole says it better than I did. At least there are people at Balloon Juice who have a clue.
GftNC, I agree emphatically with most everything you’ve said here, but I fear to say your 6:15 is probably the one I agree with most…
I guess I’m unclear about what is in question here.
Do folks think the Russians were not involved in the hacking and release of DNC internal communications?
Or is the question just about motive, i.e., to stick it to Clinton vs help Trump?
And if it was just to stick it to Clinton, how is that any less egregious than if it was specifically to help Trump? And/or, how does sticking it to Clinton exclude a motive of helping Trump?
Putin appears to be engaged in an attempt to destabilize the EU, expand Russia’s sphere of influence and power, and generally advance nationalistic right-wing actors wherever he can find them.
If anyone thinks that agenda is innocuous, think again. If anyone thinks he wouldn’t freaking love to have a friendly individual in the White House, think again.
Cole is right, this is not the WMD thing redux. I don’t accept anything leaked from the CIA as gospel, neither do I think it’s something to dismiss.
I don’t know exactly what is going on under the covers, but sh*t is going on. See also, Comey.
It feels like strange times indeed, NV, when you and I are on the same page. However, any agreement or consensus in these dark days can only be welcome. Happy New Year (just gone in the UK) to all, with no reservations, and many hopes for better times than we are presently envisaging.
Do folks think the Russians were not involved in the hacking and release of DNC internal communications?
No (speaking for myself), I do not think this, but I don’t know for sure.
And if it was just to stick it to Clinton, how is that any less egregious than if it was specifically to help Trump? And/or, how does sticking it to Clinton exclude a motive of helping Trump?
It isn’t less egregious if that was the reason, and it doesn’t exclude helping Trump.
Putin appears to be engaged in an attempt to destabilize the EU, expand Russia’s sphere of influence and power, and generally advance nationalistic right-wing actors wherever he can find them
Enthusiastically agreed.
If anyone thinks that agenda is innocuous, think again. If anyone thinks he wouldn’t freaking love to have a friendly individual in the White House, think again.
As far as I can tell, nobody here (especially me) thinks this.
I think people like myself (I came late to this) believe as a matter of principle one should be cautious about just accepting what the intelligence services say, and doubly should question it particularly closely if it confirms one’s own prejudices. Nobody can deny (or would want to, here) that it looks very much as if it is Putin and the Russians behind the hack, and that it contributed heavily to HRC’s loss, but we don’t know for sure yet and in view of everything that has happened with fake news, confirmation bias etc it behoves one as a personal choice to not just go along with convenient theories, but to interrogate them and reserve final judgement. Interim, practical judgement though: fine with me.
I must admit, though, I too am confused about what was particularly contentious about this. In any case, good night to all.
The earlier detour on this was about the plutocracy. This article indicates that the plutocrats are not worried..
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/01/surging-stock-markets-donald-trump-conman-theresa-may-phoney
What are stock markets telling us when they respond to Mr Trump and Mrs May by sending share prices to record highs? They are telling us that they think that the British prime minister is a phoney and the incoming American president is a conman. They are wagering that President Trump will betray the poorer voters who helped put him in the White House. They are betting that Theresa May will not deliver for the less affluent Britons whose Brexit votes helped elevate her to Number 10. That’s what the cash is saying. The “forgotten men and women” of America will be no better remembered in the Trump cabinet of tycoons. Mrs May’s “just about managing” will find out she is all jam tomorrow, never today.
Thank you, lj.
A fair point about the markets and Trump; regarding May, I’m not sure the markets are telling us anything about her likely domestic policy choices, given that many of the surging stocks in the U.K. index do most of their business overseas.
There is also something of a relief rally, as the Brexit vote failed to precipitate the immediate disaster forecast by many, and the real effects are both a couple of years off, and at this stage hard to quantify.
(Personally, I’d be attaching a much larger risk premium to both Trump and Brexit, but I’m not the market.)
As for May, she does not strike me as a particularly creative or decisive politician, and is going to be engaged largely with Brexit negotiations and probable gridlock over the next couple of years.
Interesting point, Nigel. I wonder how well things are going to go with Hinkley Point when Trump starts a trade war with China.
May is going to do what is good for May and everyone else can be damned.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/30/theresa-may-lie-and-lied-to-become-prime-minister
Interesting point, Nigel. I wonder how well things are going to go with Hinkley Point when Trump starts a trade war with China.
If we could just cancel it right now, I’d be delighted. I’m not an opponent of nuclear power (and some of the newer technologies look very promising), but Hinckley is an economic disaster even if it works, and is a new, unproven version of old tech (the only two other similar plants are way over schedule and yet to start operating).
May is going to do what is good for May and everyone else can be damned.
Sounds about right. That has always been an element of the British Tory party – that they are prepared in the end completely to subsume ideology to electoral success (and in a democracy, that’s actually not a bad thing in itself), but other than that, I really don’t have a clear idea of what she stands for.
Don’t want to leave the impression that I support Hinkley Point or that I thought you did, it’s just that as May tries to suck up to Trump,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/30/theresa-may-israel-john-kerry-attack-extraordinary
I think she’s going to find herself out on a limb. As I think will Putin. Which is probably the only silver lining there is.
Yes, I was pretty open minded about May as PM, as she’s not revealed a great deal about herself up until now, but it does seem that the sphinx doesn’t have a secret.
Going back to the DNC hack thing, it’s interesting just how measured Obama’s earlier press conference was, prior to the expulsion of the diplomat/spies:
http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/barack-obamas-sanity-affirming-press-conference
The stock market is smoking its own bullsh1t. The idea that Trump is going to be some kind of economic nirvana seems grossly misplaced, outside of the tax cut area, and even then large US based and traded MNCs do a great deal of business outside the US where they already pay a zero to 10% effective tax rate and that isn’t going to change no matter what long, slow, deep, soft, wet tax kiss that lasts three days Paul Ryan chooses to plant on them.
Similarly on the administrative state – how regulatory freezes or rollbacks translates into underpants gnome-type profit is unclear outside a few specific industries. What kind of horrible regulatory burden is, e.g., Silicon Valley, uh, laboring under?
That the market doesn’t seem to have priced in a significant “holy shit! PEOTUS is a crazy motherfncker!” uncertainty discount seems to be a rather large blind spot. Maybe Goldman’s models assume that tariffs only go down.
Going back to the DNC hack thing,
maybe Donald Trump, a fellow skeptic, will be able to provide some of the information y’all need.
“I know ‘things that other people don’t know. And so they cannot be sure of the situation.”
We’ll “find out on Tuesday or Wednesday.” Can’t wait for this reality TV presidency.
In other news, Donald kicked a biographer, critical of him off of his golf course.
Stay tuned with the Donald, and you will surely ferret out the truth!
I wonder why he’s waiting until Tuesday or Wednesday. Maybe Putin is waterboarding some former DNC employee until s/he agrees to confess to leaking. But why would it take that long?
More likely, perhaps, his “witness” is waiting f or the check to clear. Monday is, after all, a Federal holiday.
Smart “witness”!
The Market has been wrong before. Regularly. See also Ugh at 8:16.
We have a chance to get ahead of the curve here, and start right now to refer to it as the “Trump bubble”.
We have a chance to get ahead of the curve here, and start right now to refer to it as the “Trump bubble”.
…shortened to “Trubble”. Sounds plausible.
What kind of horrible regulatory burden is, e.g., Silicon Valley, uh, laboring under?
Briefly, zoning. NIMBYism makes it hard to build new facilities in the Valley. Worse, it means a severe housing shortage. That drives up salaries. It also means lots of people spending two hours (or more) each way on their commutes. IT folks typically work way over 40 hours a week anyway. But that commute time comes out of those extra hours . . . which also drives up costs.
Of course there is the detail that zoning is a local matter. So a Trump administration won’t be able to touch it. And Trump, as a long time developer, doubtless knows that. Not that details like that seem to constrain him noticeably.
Trubble. Right here in River City. With a capital T that rhymes with P that stands for “Putin”.
This is one musical with a grifter as the star, that will NOT have a happy ending, I predict.
Snarki for the win! (I’m embarrassed that I didn’t think of that one. 🙁
Just fill in the Bay wj!
NIMBYism means never having to say “OK, we can change this.”
Experience here shows that there is no conservative as resistant to change as a liberal who sees an attack on the ecology. Which, of course, every change is.
We’ll “find out on Tuesday or Wednesday.”
Tax returns will be released…. someday.
Plan for managing the obvious conflicts of interest with his businesses on December 15…. uh, January sometime.
Revelations about hacking on “Tuesday or Wednesday”. “I know stuff”. No doubt.
What a freaking train wreck.
I found this essay by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie strangely comforting and inspiring.
From it:
The entire essay is worth reading, but my anger is towards people’s reluctance to believe Obama, who cited intelligence reports when he imposed multiple sanctions on Russia for its interference in the election.
Both sides are not equal in this hacking “controversy”. It’s similar to the climate change “controversy”. Both sides are not equal. Even though many of us (including me) do not have the expertise to evaluate climate science, we trust that the argument regarding climate change is plausible, and catastrophic, in part because of the respect that we accord to the scientists who agree, and because what we are seeing ourselves bears it out. We trust it, and act accordingly. We dismiss articles intimating that there might be something to climate denial. We don’t say, well, we don’t really know.
We should be doing the same thing here. Obama has earned our respect and trust. I don’t need to evaluate the evidence myself (and, what if I were given it? What would convince me of its veracity?). Obama has dealt straightforwardly with the country. He has earned my trust and respect. Quite the opposite goes for the other party who is denying the hacking.
That is the source of my anger. It’s not blind loyalty and heartbreak and love for Hillary Clinton. Obama believed it enough to make a significant foreign policy decision. If we’re going to fight against Trump, we have to be willing to believe our own eyes, and trust those who have earned it. We’re going to need to do that, because the propaganda machine of our opponents is highly effective, not necessarily because of what they say, but because of what we do with what they say.
I’ve never been one to think that the prediction of the markets was infallible. What I take away from the market’s apparent feeling on Trump is that it should squash any talk that Clinton is somehow a plutocrat. Would we see the same kind of rise if Clinton had been elected? I really doubt it.
…that “market feeling” argument would be a lot more convincing if the immediate reaction of the markets to Trump’s unexpected win hadn’t been a rapid dive. It may have been followed up by a very swift recovery once Trump made reassuring noises in his victory speech, but the financial sector was quite comfortable with the idea of Clinton winning, and for good cause. She is without question their kind of people.
If the proof required of a candidate’s true progressive bona fides is a long term cratering of the stock market, I think that could be problematic.The rebound of the market also speaks to the criticisms of Hillary and the assertions that if she had only cared more about the Rust Belt, things would have been better.
There is also, of course the point that an infrastructure spending bill that would get denounced as socialism under Clinton is likely to get waived through Congress without impediment under Trump. As Asian markets are noting:
http://asia.nikkei.com/Politics-Economy/Economy/Fate-of-Asia-Inc.-wedded-to-Trump-say-analysts
I personally am not in doubt that Ras Putain is behind major hackery in the US but let’s play devil’s advocate for a moment.
Wouldn’t the intelligence services have an interest in going back to the Cold War, preferably against the old enemy (not the new one, China)? Have the services in the past not lied to both the public and governement? Haven’t US administrations asked the services for data to justify predetermined policies too.
Notice that the few anti-Putin conservatives tend to be Cold War veterans (like the Son of Cain)?
All of the above are also not very friendly with Him The Donald for various reasons.
So, wouldn’t we expect very much the same behaviour, independent of Moscow’s actual behind-the-scenes actions?
Btw, the diplomat eviction is an old Cold War tradition/ritual. That both sides give diplomatic cover to spies is anything but a secret and why should it have changed after 1990?
This is why there is no common set of facts to discuss. Ultimately they watered down the story and appended a kind of retraction. Then every right leaning news site had another “fake news* claim to speed about WAPO and more evidence that Russia hacking allegations are being used to discredit the election unfairly.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/01/01/fake-news-and-how-the-washington-post-rewrote-its-story-on-russian-hacking-of-the-power-grid/#607f1a26291e
Not to mention that 50% of Democrats polled believe that Russia actually hacked the vote count.
It’s unlikely that the 17 intelligence agencies that Obama cited in issuing sanctions against Russia got their info from the Washington Post article. (The way that breaking news is reported, and articles changed to reflect new information, is an issue worth discussing, but not really relevant to the issue of whether Obama should be believed.)
If there’s a conspiracy theory explaining why Obama would enlist intelligence agency findings to support his sanctions for any other reason than what he stated, let’s have it.
Also, long-form birth certificate.
sapient: If there’s a conspiracy theory explaining why Obama would enlist intelligence agency findings to support his sanctions for any other reason than what he stated, let’s have it.
Seconded.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting any suspension of skepticism here. By all means, keep doubting that any administration ever tells the whole truth and nothing but the truth to the public. But you can hold a generalized suspicion and still manage to offer a plausible hypothesis as to why suspicion is warranted in a particular case. What, exactly, is Obama supposed to be trying to gain here?
–TP
It’s not my conspiracy theory but you can bet that many Trumpistas would have no problem with it. They may even add the twist that it was (at least) two squirrels with one rock from evil genius Obama. He did the hack to sabotage Hillary’s campaign as a revenge served ice-cold for grievances in her preseidential run against him. And he presents the Russian friends of Him The Donald as the real perpetrators to embarass him The Donald (once again) and to hand Him a situation He has no ways to deal with. Plus all the cunningly postponed catastrophes resulting from Obama’s presidency will blow up in His face (like the time bomb that by definition each and every Dem POTUS hands to his GOP successor).
Did I forget anything (apart from Obama being a pure-blooded Arab with not a drop of African blood in him*)?
*a rather recent ‘discovery’. I guess the betrayed blacks will now flock to the GOP.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting any suspension of skepticism here.
Alternatively, people could focus their skepticism where it’s warranted. For example:
Trump: “And I also know things that other people don’t know, and so they cannot be sure of the situation.”
When asked what he knew that others did not, Mr. Trump demurred, saying only, “You’ll find out on Tuesday or Wednesday.”
Sean Spicer, spokesman for Trump: “It’s not a question of necessarily revealing,” Spicer said on CNN’s “New Day.”
“He’s going to talk about his conclusions and where he thinks things stand.”
Hmmm. Looks like Putin told him not to keep digging.
Marty, the Forbes piece is about the VT utility malware.
What we’ve been discussing here are the DNC (and RNC for that matter) hacks and subsequent doxing (DNC only).
I certainly understand the difference Russell. However, its is just an example of the overall state of affairs., No one hacked the grid, no one hacked the vote, yet a similar percent of democrats believe the vote count was hacked as the number of R’s who believe there were millions of illegal votes cast.
My point was that the belief of any one fact or fake news story is continuing become even more partisan based and the titular MSM isn’t helping by rushing news out to compete with the rags which, more often all the time, becomes just fuel to the fire.
But, since you pointed it out, the DNC hack is a problem, but foreign powers collect data all the time as do we. The public use of it to try to sway an election was a bigger problem, that probably deserves the pretty scant measures that the administration publicly announced. The contents of the hacked emails were what played a role in her losing the election. And that’s on the DNC and Podesta and the people that they were communicating with.
The contents being public don’t bother me anymore than the secret tape of Romney in the last election bothered you. The contents of each were the problem for the campaign, not how they were made public.
If the proof required of a candidate’s true progressive bona fides is a long term cratering of the stock market, I think that could be problematic.
You’re not making that argument, though. You’re saying that since He, Trump has seen an aggressively bullish market, we must read those tea leaves as meaning it’s absurd to view Clinton as plutocratic. That’s absurd binary thinking (which is, I’m sorry to say, very typical of centerist arguments despite their putative rejection of notions of “purity”), but also absurd in context. Even if both candidates had the exact same stance towards the financial sector, that sector is going to be happier with the candidate who has a pro-financial-sector Congress ready to feed him friendly bills to sign instead of engaging in grandstanding obstructionism and sandbagging of a president of the rival party. And a hypothetical Dem Congressional majority would not have been as finance-friendly as the sitting GOP one regardless of how sympathetic Clinton might be, so yes, duh, of course we wouldn’t see such bullishness had Clinton won… but that does nothing to prove your thesis.
Not As Bad As does not mean Not Bad, and the markets (which are hardly a thoughtful messenger in the first place) aren’t bearing the message you’re suggesting.
More skepticism fodder:
Republican healthcare strategy is Repeal and Delay (because, of course, the “Replace” part of “Repeal and Replace” seems to have been too difficult over the last six years, and before that, they had nothing).
Some people seem skeptical that the Delay will ever end. Rather than be as depressed as I’ve been, I’m just going to laugh at them. Unfortunately, that’s all there is.
The public use of it to try to sway an election was a bigger problem, that probably deserves the pretty scant measures that the administration publicly announced.
Thank you.
The contents being public don’t bother me anymore than the secret tape of Romney in the last election bothered you. The contents of each were the problem for the campaign, not how they were made public.
The contents were similarly harmful to the respective candidates.
An American citizen disclosing information that a candidate would prefer remain private does not in and of itself bother me. So, Romney’s 47% and Obama’s gun-and-religion-clingers seem, to me, to be equally legitimate and fair game. Acceptable political hardball.
Doxing by foreign state actors, not so much. The “how” may have been equally beside the point for the campaigns. They are not equivalent problems for the country.
Just in case anyone couldn’t be bothered to read the New Yorker link above, here’s what Obama himself had to say:
Obama, asked directly, declined to give an opinion on whether the hacks had cost Clinton the election, saying that he would leave it to the pundits—“It was a fascinating election, so I’m sure there are going to be a lot of books written about it.” But Obama also insisted that a healthy political system should have been able to deal with them, to process them and recognize or reject them for what they were. (He didn’t exempt the press from this diagnosis.) That was the danger, and it remains, even if Putin never casts his glance this way again. Although Obama didn’t say so, his views on this may have been informed by his own experience as the object of elaborate conspiracy theories, even in the absence of WikiLeaks. A lot of what happens in campaigns is not fair.
“The Russians can’t change us or significantly weaken us. They are a smaller country. They are a weaker country,” Obama said. “But they can impact us if we lose track of who we are. They can impact us if we abandon our values.” A few minutes later, he added, “Our vulnerability to Russia or any other foreign power is directly related to how divided, partisan, dysfunctional our political process is.” This sounded like what Obama has also said, frequently, about terrorists; it’s worth saying.
Nigel, Amy Davidson occasionally gets it right, but usually she’s a little off, as she is here.
It’s extremely apparent that Obama is furious at the press, which Davidson barely mentions. If you haven’t watched the press conference, you should. He doesn’t “blame” anyone, because his press conference is extremely statesmanlike. He’s not interested in starting WWIII before he leaves, or in inflaming the civil war.
Kind of a pity, actually. If Obama came out hostile to the mainstream media, all those years of conservatives bad-mouthing the MSM would be over in an instant. Big missed opportunity there…. 😉
If Obama came out hostile to the mainstream media,
He wasn’t “hostile to the mainstream media”. If you listened to the press conference, he made a point of noting that the emails were cherrypicked to death, which they were. He also made a point about people being distrustful of everyone, more of their own neighbors and their own institutions than the former head of the KGB.
It was pretty compelling, and quite relevant to the comments in this thread. And pretty much missing from the Amy Davidson opinion piece.
wj and nigel, did you listen to the press conference? He didn’t “blame the press’ because he didn’t “blame” anyone. He talked about the fact that our “political discourse” was broken. He defended the press, in the portion that Nigel excerpted, above.
He said this:
” I’m finding it a little curious that everybody is suddenly acting surprised that this looked like it was disadvantaging Hillary Clinton because you guys wrote about it every day. Every single leak. About every little juicy tidbit of political gossip — including John Podesta’s risotto recipe. This was an obsession that dominated the news coverage.
So I do think it’s worth us reflecting how it is that a presidential election of such importance, of such moment, with so many big issues at stake and such a contrast between the candidates, came to be dominated by a bunch of these leaks. What is it about our political system that made us vulnerable to these kinds of potential manipulations — which, as I’ve said publicly before, were not particularly sophisticated.”
And he said this:
Declassification. Look, we will provide evidence that we can safely provide that does not compromise sources and methods. But I’ll be honest with you, when you’re talking about cybersecurity, a lot of it is classified. And we’re not going to provide it because the way we catch folks is by knowing certain things about them that they may not want us to know, and if we’re going to monitor this stuff effectively going forward, we don’t want them to know that we know.
So this is one of those situations where unless the American people genuinely think that the professionals in the CIA, the FBI, our entire intelligence infrastructure — many of whom, by the way, served in previous administrations and who are Republicans — are less trustworthy than the Russians, then people should pay attention to what our intelligence agencies have to say.
This is part of what I meant when I said that we’ve got to think about what’s happening to our political culture here. The Russians can’t change us or significantly weaken us. They are a smaller country. They are a weaker country. Their economy doesn’t produce anything that anybody wants to buy, except oil and gas and arms. They don’t innovate.
But they can impact us if we lose track of who we are. They can impact us if we abandon our values. Mr. Putin can weaken us, just like he’s trying to weaken Europe, if we start buying into notions that it’s okay to intimidate the press, or lock up dissidents, or discriminate against people because of their faith or what they look like.
And what I worry about more than anything is the degree to which, because of the fierceness of the partisan battle, you start to see certain folks in the Republican Party and Republican voters suddenly finding a government and individuals who stand contrary to everything that we stand for as being okay because that’s how much we dislike Democrats.
He said this:
To the extent that our political dialogue is such where everything is under suspicion, everybody is corrupt and everybody is doing things for partisan reasons, and all of our institutions are full of malevolent actors — if that’s the storyline that’s being put out there by whatever party is out of power, then when a foreign government introduces that same argument with facts that are made up, voters who have been listening to that stuff for years, who have been getting that stuff every day from talk radio or other venues, they’re going to believe it.
That’s what he said.
So, sorry for the stylistic inconsistencies in my previous comment, but he has some worries about the reporting, and the fact that some Americans trust the KGB dictator guy from Russia over their own institutions.
sapient, did you even read what I said? I said IF Obama had done so. Not that he had done so.
Where I come from, those are two very different things.
Sorry, wj – I interpreted your comment as you thinking that I thought Obama had done so. I apologize. On the other hand, it gave me the opportunity to excerpt some of his comments from the transcript of the press conference.
Yeah, I read too fast and then write too fast myself on occasion.
You’re not making that argument, though. You’re saying that since He, Trump has seen an aggressively bullish market, we must read those tea leaves as meaning it’s absurd to view Clinton as plutocratic.
One could take that argument away (note the Guardian article doesn’t say that), but my point is that the suggestion that we simply assign (all?) the problems we are facing to some vague class of people called plutocrats (defined as anyone who has made a lot more money than any of us here can imagine) and suggesting that we once we get rid of them, our political life will be just fine is kidding themselves.
For example, we have something like this
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/dec/29/serena-williams-engaged-alexis-ohanian-reddit
In what possible world does Serena (or even Alexis) find love with someone from the middle class with a mortgage and car loan? This suggests that there is an element of unexamined misogyny in the hammering of HRC about her earnings. This doesn’t mean that we can’t talk about it and that it is not a problem, but this HRC is bad because she earned what seems like the going rate for those kind of speeches is typical circular firing squad bs. And when you get to the point of Clinton is as bad as Trump, you’ve really lost me.
There are, of course, good reasons to distrust some of our institutions.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/10/cia-senate-investigation-constitutional-crisis-daniel-jones
There are of course many people on the right who have been lying for decades about various issues ( most notably global warming) and creating distrust on illegitimate grounds. But it is reasonable to show skepticism of the ” intelligence community”. In this particular case Obama’s response has been so low key I suspect he is being truthful.
I read the press conference transcript. Obama has been attacked for insufficient intervention in Syria, so he defends himself. He criticizes Russian and Syrian govt human rights violations. Nobody asks about Yemen. God bless America and its institutions.
Distrust? Or worry? Or weigh in?
Nobody asks about Yemen.
I’m very happy that you are concerned about Yemen. We all should be thinking about our relationship with the Saudis. It should be a topic of wide conversation, not just among the incompetents here. Oh, I’m sorry, it is.
Very good. Call Donald [Trump]. Or your Congressperson. Start a movement. Get a job.
Thanks for the link Donald. The “morale” argument set forth by CIA is particularly loathsome.
Thanks, Donald. Without you, we would be morally bankrupt. We wouldn;t know our way forward. We would be bereft. We would be without hope. In Hell, in fact. Donald, thank you.
Y’all do know that the CIA can’t really respond to the Guardian article.
And that Ackerman was an Iraq war proponent, fatal for [female] Hillary Clinton. Standards, they are different.
You’re welcome, sapient.
Yes, Ackerman was an Iraq War proponent. I am not a big fan. I haven’t followed him that closely. Was the article wrong?
I knew you’d be gracious, Donald [notTrump]. Your bro, J.D. Vamce, has something very emotionally loving towards Obama in the NYT today, except when it gets to the part about helping anybody. I’d link to it, but the coastal elites have elided it already from the home page. You can probably find it though!
These snarky little back and forths are endlessly fascinating to someone somewhere, someone with truly low standards, but I’m getting bored.
People can be opposed to most of what Trump is likely to do and expect him to be perhaps the worst President in at least a century and still be disgusted by some things that some Democrats have done. And we don’t have to get all dewy eyed over the intelligence commmunity. This upsets you. I don’t care.
Here is a Democrat on our interventionism who makes sense.
http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/02/opinion/marshall-plans-not-martial-plans.html?ref=opinion
I’m bored with you too, Donald, which is why I entertain myself. I like Chris Murphy, on the whole. We’re not really that far apart, although your insufferable sanctimony is why I’m pretty sure I couldn’t ever be in the same room with you. When Chris Murphy gets elected to national office, I’ll support him.
Bye! Peace be with you! Good luck with whatever it is you actually do!
Oh, those lovely little fascists!
Have fun defending whatever it is you’re up to Donald! You can ask all those things of Hitler now.
I’m waiting for a thread, on any topic at all, where Donald participates without ever mentioning Yemen. Just to prove he can.
Probably happen about the time that Sapient finds a Republican with whom he agrees….
wj, I agree with Evan McMullin about Putin, and admire his courage.
Goodnight.
my point is that the suggestion that we simply assign (all?) the problems we are facing to some vague class of people called plutocrats (defined as anyone who has made a lot more money than any of us here can imagine) and suggesting that we once we get rid of them, our political life will be just fine is kidding themselves.
…so your point is a strawman. Having plutocrats and their representatives in charge of the economy is going to – and has – had very predictable policy outcomes. If we want those outcomes to change, it makes sense to stop supporting plutocrats who promote and reinforce them. It won’t solve all of our problems, but it will solve the problem of plutocrats having excessive and unhealthy influence over financial policy.
This suggests that there is an element of unexamined misogyny in the hammering of HRC about her earnings.
That you reject entirely the possibility that there can be substantive objections to plutocratic representatives directing financial policy suggests there is an element of unexamined classism in the breezy dismissal of fiscal objections to Clintontonian politics.
…nope, it’s no more helpful to the conversation when I do it than when you do it. And yet it crops up incessantly in defenses of Clinton’s politics, no matter who is criticizing or what is criticized. “You’re a bad person for disagreeing with me, and your badness manifests in ways that aren’t immediately obvious so I don’t even need to cite them, just waggle my eyebrows suggestively while invoking one magic phrase or another” is a toxic rhetorical ploy meant to turn a debate, discussion, or argument into a lecture or a confession, with all the implicit hierarchy those carry with them.
I’m bored with you too, Donald, which is why I entertain myself.
You’re openly reveling in being a troll, sapient, and you’re treating peers as objects of amusement. Fix yourself.
Wow. There goes another democratic norm…
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/03/outcry-after-republicans-vote-to-dismantle-independent-ethics-body
NV, I don’t think it is a strawman. I think that if you can’t define plutocrat, you are just ranting. Here’s what I said
This doesn’t mean that we can’t talk about it and that it is not a problem
By it, I meant plutocracy and the problems of money. I realize the it wasn’t clear. However, earlier, I said
I do agree that there is a big problem with plutocracy and the influence of wealth in politics, but it seems like it’s not something confined to politics, it is something general to the US and it is going to be really hard to change it given current trends.
So, when you say
That you reject entirely the possibility that there can be substantive objections to plutocratic representatives directing financial policy suggests there is an element of unexamined classism in the breezy dismissal of fiscal objections to Clintontonian politics.
I think you need to re-read the thread. If you’d like to have a discussion about plutocracy, cool, but if you want to misrepresent what I have said in the same gd thread, I’ve got better things to do.
OK, I think sapient qualifies for a temporary ban now, this is getting out of hand.
“Do not consistently abuse or vilify other posters for its own sake.”
I don’t want a ban. Sapient exemplifies what party discipline means, at least in that form. You use the term “Vichy” for anyone who strays off message even if they agree with you about 90 percent of the other things. You denounce them as fascist collaborators. It’s not just sapient vs me and it’s not just sapient. SA
There is a ridiculous overabundance of things for which Trump could be criticized and some of his critics are acting like Joseph McCarthy. The Washington Post has twice made a fool of itself, first with the propornot story saying that hundreds of websites were Putin’s puppets and then with the story about the Russian attack on Vermont’s electrical grid.
Wj– I am waiting for a time when Americans act like their war crimes have some sort of moral significance independent of their use in attacking a hated political figure either overseas or a member of the other political party. When their first instinct isn’t to concoct a rationalization that isn’t an embarrassing moral disgrace. Is it possible? The evidence suggests it is not. But cheer up. In a few years it won’t e Yemen. It will be someplace else.
I am the one who is going to take a vacation from this place.
That last post– too much generalizing about Americans. Only some fall into the caregory of kneejerk rationalizers.
Okay, now I am leaving.
There is still a few more days for Obama to scoop up Dubya, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al and ship them off to the ICC to face charges of Crimes Against Humanity.
Yeah, he didn’t do that in 2009, when he was all Hopey-Changey-Bipartisan. But the incoming GOP couldn’t get more batsh*t insane if they were simultaneously inflicted with mercury poisoning, rabies, and adult-onset Zika. So why not?
My bet: Obama won’t. even. try.
Oh well.
If you’d like to have a discussion about plutocracy, cool, but if you want to misrepresent what I have said in the same gd thread, I’ve got better things to do.
…likewise if you want to change the subject with insinuations that the real issue is your interlocutor’s (and everyone who has the same stance as them’s) unstated misogyny. There’s no response possible to that, because it’s mindreading, sweeping generalization, and for that matter, straight-up conflating correlation with causation.
novakant: the last time I saw a commenter here engage in the sort of targeted abuse sapient has descended to was Brick Oven Bill, and hilzoy dropped the banhammer on him long before it came anywhere near the frequency (let alone blithe flagrancy) we’re seeing ATM.
I’ve a comment in the spam trap, but it can probably safely stay there.
Jesus wept, what have things come to when even Trump opposes the house’s plans to gut the Ethics Commitee?
http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/03/us/politics/trump-house-ethics-office.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
Although of course his tweet did make sure to mention that they (the Ethics Office) are “unfair”, so I guess he’s keeping his powder dry til they start going after him.
Just out of interest, does anyone know what Donald’s “SA” means at the end of the first paragraph of his 07.38?
Jesus wept, what have things come to when even Trump opposes the house’s plans to gut the Ethics Commitee?
He didn’t really oppose it. He thought other monstrous things should come first.
Yeah, put off the Ethics Committee buggery until August, when everyone is off paying attention to shark attacks or missing white women.
Courage!
Here’s the conservative cuck c*nt (I speaka da Trumpish now; it’s the only way, besides gunfire, to get through to the punk chimps) who introduced the ethics buggery:
http://juanitajean.com/the-good-news/
It’s only good news, like getting over Ebola is good news.
love the jammies.
seriously, who the hell is voting for these people.
Donald Trump tweets that:
“The'”intelligence’ briefing on so-called “Russian hacking” was delayed until Friday, perhaps more time needed to build a case. Very strange!”
Kellyanne Conway says
“Pay ‘significant attention’ to Wikileaks’ Julian Assange saying Russia wasn’t source for DNC/Podesta hacks.”
You’re in good company, skeptics.
Another liar, Jeff Sessions, taking credit for work he didn’t do.
Just love our new government.
From a former JCT Chief of Staff:
“I learned that when the TV cameras are off and it’s just the members of Congress and their staff behind closed doors, they behave even worse than they do when the TV lights are on, particularly the staff,” he recalled. “I found it to be an extraordinarily disagreeable environment with a reckless indifference to figuring out actual policy implications of proposals. I always understood politics — I did lobbying work — but I never appreciated just how systematically indifferent the members of Congress could be to understand what the policy implications of their ideas were, and I was thrilled to be able to move to an academic setting, which had been my long-term plan from the beginning.”
Wonderful.
Although I guess that’s a very good explanation of why repealing the ACA and replacing it with nothing (which is what the GOP is offering, to steal something from Lemiux) can gain traction, when it should horrify any thinking person.
You’re in good company, skeptics.
Part of me says that this isn’t worth responding to, but I guess I just did.
Part of me says that this isn’t worth responding to, but I guess I just did.
The talking points are pretty much the same.
Although, you’re free to distinguish them. Thanks, Skeptics, for giving Pence the right words.
I guess it depends on the skeptics you have in mind. I took it to mean people commenting on this blog, which I’m assuming Mike Pence doesn’t read.
I took it to mean people commenting on this blog, which I’m assuming Mike Pence doesn’t read.
Word gets around.
The Russian hacking thing is deeply annoying because there are about three major ways of looking at it and everyone talks past each other.
The facts as I know them are:
Someone hacked the DNC emails and released them to WikiLeaks.
No one has disputed that the emails were genuine.
The genuine emails confirmed a lot of things that made people leery of Clinton in the context of regular elections.
The hacking appeared to use Russian language tools.
Most Russian hackers are supported by the Russian state in some fashion.
My problem with the discussion is that people turn them into talking points instead of thinking about them.
I tend to believe that if these true emails were enough to sink Clinton, it reveals why she was a bad candidate to begin with. (This is something we can control)
I also tend to believe that Putin didn’t even want Trump to win, he just wanted to damage Clinton. (This is something we can’t control).
I also tend to believe that Russia has been meddling to the extent they can in our elections all along.
Railing about the things we can’t control instead of the things we can control is exactly the problem.
Putin is going to try to sow dissension. We can’t control that. What we can try to control is how closely leaders get aligned with him.
You do that by making aligning with him hurt. The current “Russian Hacks Stole the Election” line isn’t hurting Trump.
It isn’t hurting Trump because responses like “the emails were true” damage the storyline. It isn’t hurting Trump because “proof in hacking is hard” damages the storyline.
You know what hurts Trump? His ego. Illustrating that whenever he does what Putin wants he is being Putin’s bitch? That would hurt.
What’s not really talked about is that the GOP servers could also have been a Russian target. But material from there would be much more useful for blackmail than for embarassing publication (the threat is stronger than its execution as the old chess rule has it).
And my bet is that the GOPsters have much juicier stuff in their files in the first place.
Sebastian H: You know what hurts Trump? His ego. Illustrating that whenever he does what Putin wants he is being Putin’s bitch? That would hurt.
I agree. But calling him out for his preference for Assange’s and Putin’s take on things, to what US intel says, is illustrating that he’s doing what Putin wants.
You may think, as you say, that Putin didn’t even want Trump to win. That’s pure speculation on your part, and it doesn’t matter anyway. Putin did help Trump win, which is disastrous for the United States, and Trump is behaving in a way that suggests that he plans to coordinate his plans for the United States with Putin. I’m offended by that, and think people should be thinking seriously about what that means.
You say that I also tend to believe that Russia has been meddling to the extent they can in our elections all along. Perhaps so, but it didn’t succeed before. It did this time.
By the way, just so we’re clear, although you say The genuine emails confirmed a lot of things that made people leery the emails contained zero substantive scandal, and only confirmed people’s leeriness because people were struggling to find news that would cast Clinton in a bad light. With that many emails, people are bound to find an unflattering thing or two or three. It would be fun to test that, wouldn’t it?
Hartmut: But material from there would be much more useful for blackmail than for embarassing publication (the threat is stronger than its execution as the old chess rule has it).
This is probably true, and could explain some things about why Republicans are so warmly embracing Putin now. Putin was a KGB agent. The KGB was very good at this stuff. Take a look at how he manages his own country and the fact that he’s beginning his 18th year in power. He knows how to discredit people (as well as poison them, and steal their money).
Re sceptics, apart from certain civilians here (including me) – who don’t really doubt that the Russians were responsible for the hacks nor disapprove of Obama’s response, – resolving to stay vigilant and not automatically credulous about information given in politically highly charged times by the intelligence services, let’s not forget that one of the main points of the Taibbi piece was that journalists should require a high level of evidence. It seems to me, with the obvious exception here, that it is hard to disagree with this.
However, if word gets around from this blog, let’s see what happens as a result of this:
I went to lunch yesterday with someone who used to be a very high-level civil servant, who is still in contact with other very high level people in the civil service, politics, etc. They told me that the the overwhelming consensus is that Trump will be impeached, and the betting is on 18 months from now. I said, and this is where we will see if word gets around, that I think machiavellian rightwing Republicans have an excellent incentive to a$$a$$inate him, having concocted credible evidence that lefty plotters did it. This would give them, immediately, a regular Republican President, and a backlash against the left which would ensure a R victory in 2020.
What say reasonable ObWi commenters?
I’ll let you know if they get to me….
I should probably leave well enough alone, but…
This suggests that there is an element of unexamined misogyny in the hammering of HRC about her earnings. This doesn’t mean that we can’t talk about it and that it is not a problem, but this HRC is bad because she earned what seems like the going rate for those kind of speeches is typical circular firing squad bs.
It’s the going rate for members of a certain class, and most members of that class aren’t seeking elective office, nor are they giving those “going rate” speeches to Goldman Sachs.
And it’s disingenuous bs to claim that someone whose household earnings are in the 1% of the 1% – which Clinton’s are* – and whose fiscal policy aims favor that class – which hers did – to be in favor of rule of the rich for the rich – which is what a plutocratic government is – and to scoff** at discussions of her wealth as veiled misogyny – which you most certainly did. Let’s not forget that it was perfectly acceptable – indeed, necessary and noble – to deride George W. Bush as a plutocrat when his household income was around a tenth of the Clintons’ was the year before each of them ran (and for the Clintons, 2015’s measly $10m-ish was a noticeable drop, presumably because they were distracted with that whole campaigning thing). There’s something that’s not examined in this conversation, but it’s hard to see it as misogyny unless you’ve concluded that it will be before actually entering the conversation.
* And let’s not forget they have the power of the Clinton Foundation ($150m in 2013, IIRC), etc. to further both the breadth of their influence and scratch the “I wanna do stuff” itch w/o needing to have the money pass through their pockets before it’s spent.
**You complain about ranting, but scoffing is just as bad. It’s just as emotional and substance-free, albeit driven by scorn rather than anger. And dismissing “going rate for the fiscal elite speaking fees” as peanuts is a perfect example of that, especially when those fees were a meaningful part of what pushed their income persistently into the 0.01% (remember, it’s not just Hillary who was noted to be pulling those in, especially not when she was at State, but yep, misogyny). To say nothing of having the chutzpah to state that calling the Clintons extremely wealthy would require Yorkshireman-esque logic, when in fact that’s more in line with what’s required to call a member of the 1% of the 1% something other than extremely wealthy.
Trump would have to do something pretty freaking terrible to be impeached, like, something I can’t even think of. If he’s making the GOP massively unpopular, why would the Democrats go along with it (which they would have to)?
It’s not like they would get a better policy result with Pence as President.
GftNC, your high level source is self-deluded.
I think that the chance to “remove Trump by kinetic means” has passed: many more opportunities during campaigns than after. As for “concoct credible evidence of lefty plotters”, Nah. Just recruit some young muslim hotheads and set them up to take the fall. Violent lefty plots hasn’t been a thing since 1978 or so.
No impeachment either. It’s not like there’s any level of dishonesty, corruption, or outright treason that the GOP won’t go along with, as long as they see some benefit for them.
Trump dying from health problems/bad diet? Yeah, that might happen.
I got the impression they thought impeachment because of improper relations between his businesses and his office as President, emoluments etc. Do the Democrats have to go along with it? If they do, they might public-spiritedly conclude (which is not altogether unreasonable) that a common-or-garden rightwing Republican, no matter how undesirable, is not as dangerous to the Republic as an erratic, impulsive egomaniac who cannot be controlled.
“You say that I also tend to believe that Russia has been meddling to the extent they can in our elections all along. Perhaps so, but it didn’t succeed before. It did this time.”
I’m not at all certain that it did. Does it swing 44,000 votes in Pennsylvania? I doubt it. Did it swing 22,000 in Michigan? I wouldn’t think so.
“the emails contained zero substantive scandal”
There things worth voting on which don’t count as ‘scandal’. If Trump hadn’t been a genuine threat to the Republic I would have had no trouble saying that there was plenty there which SHOULD have made people leery of her.
Again it is a matter of strategy. At this point I don’t believe we have the luxury of random unfocused moral outrage. Which is why I supported Clinton despite what under normal circumstances would have been massive reservations.
If we believe this isn’t just a normal Republican presidency, we can’t just vent every time we don’t like how things go without disciplining ourselves to think “is this helping stop Trump?”.
I’m not convinced that the current approach to Russian Hacking is helping. I may be wrong about that. I’m wrong a lot. What I find frustrating is that the question of “what is the best way to deal with this to stop Trump” isn’t nearly as focal as general flailing around about Russian Hacking. It feels counterproductive. I’m not saying that there isn’t a way to play up the Russian Hacking that could work. I’m just saying most of what I’m seeing isn’t it.
one of the main points of the Taibbi piece was that journalists should require a high level of evidence
I’m wondering what that means. What “level” of evidence would you require before you hedge?
If Trump hadn’t been a genuine threat to the Republic I would have had no trouble saying that there was plenty there which SHOULD have made people leery of her.
Perhaps that’s just an argument that we can’t have since the election is over, but I saw NOTHING there that would have changed my mind. That has nothing to do with my loyalty; it has to do with the completely innocuous “sins” that were revealed.
I’m not at all certain that it did. Does it swing 44,000 votes in Pennsylvania? I doubt it. Did it swing 22,000 in Michigan? I wouldn’t think so.
Since “emails” casting a “cloud” was front and center of news about Hillary Clinton every single freaking day, I’m thinking that they probably got in the way of her platform. But sure, it’s insidious, just like the propaganda machine that’s happening right now.
I’m not convinced that the current approach to Russian Hacking is helping.
The hacking is part and parcel of the loving feeling that Trump and Putin seem to have for each other, and which betrays Trump’s priorities, which is Putin’s needs first, USA’s somewhere down the list. It also represents, to me, Trump’s illegitimacy. It also is dangerous from what I believe is the idea of information security – that the Assange types are given status as authorities.
Trump is likely to be inaugurated, and to turn us into Uzbekistan. I think it’s important for us to know that, in order to figure out what we’re going to be doing about it. Ignoring the hacking, and Putin’s interest, is missing an opportunity to figure out where we land.
I’m wondering what that means. What “level” of evidence would you require before you hedge?
Editing fail. GftNC, what level of evidence do you require before you stop hedging?
What Sebastian said, particularly his last 3 paragraphs.
Ignoring the hacking, and Putin’s interest, is missing an opportunity to figure out where we land.
Who has suggested doing that?
I’m not a journalist sapient, but better than “it makes sense, and the intelligence services say it happened”.
I’m not a journalist sapient, but better than “it makes sense, and the intelligence services say it happened”.
and Trump’s cabinet appointments are Putin apologists, and Trump’s campaign advisors worked for Putin, and Trump’s son says they have huge financial ties, and Trump changed the Republican platform to favor Putin’s priorities, and …
Obama is more reputable than Mike Pence.
Keep on keepin’ on.
and Trump’s cabinet appointments are Putin apologists, and Trump’s campaign advisors worked for Putin, and Trump’s son says they have huge financial ties, and Trump changed the Republican platform to favor Putin’s priorities, and …
Obama is more reputable than Mike Pence.
No argument about any of this, and there never has been from anybody on this site.
Who has suggested doing that?
Sebastian, who said, “Railing about the things we can’t control instead of the things we can control is exactly the problem.”
Well, we can’t control the hacking, can we? Let’s move on to learning Uzbek. Certainly we can control what language we speak.
No argument about any of this, and there never has been from anybody on this site.
Then why is Mike Pence quoting you verbatim?
“It also represents, to me, Trump’s illegitimacy.”
I’m of two minds about this. I guess I don’t want to talk you out of taking whatever (for the most part–barring chemical or biological or assassination attacks and the like) steps motivate you to fight Trump as long as you think about them and think they are effective. But from my point of view the current iteration of “Russian Hacks” doesn’t seem like a very great method. They seem sore loserish and playing into Trumps hands. (It would be different if it meant something like ‘Russians hacked voting machines’ which a disturbing number of Democrats seem to believe).
If you want to weave it into a story about Trump being a Putin lackey, that seems like a more productive angle. There is a balance to laying the groundwork for that kind of attack, and being seen as a boy who cried wolf.
I think a scary trap we can fall into is crying at every thing Trump does without a plan, because chances are that things won’t all fall apart right away, and enough people will start thinking “there they go again” to be dangerous.
But I don’t know really what to do about that.
I think a scary trap we can fall into is crying at every thing Trump does without a plan, because chances are that things won’t all fall apart right away,
True. That’s why his propaganda is going to be effective, and we have to stop his lies from day 1, including the idea that he’s not Putin’s puppet.
But I don’t know really what to do about that.
We have to push back on the narrative. Like the attempted press narrative that Trump’s tweet is what caused the Rethugs to shut down the independent ethics office, rather than thousands of constituent phone calls. Trump was not the hero.
No impeachment either. It’s not like there’s any level of dishonesty, corruption, or outright treason that the GOP won’t go along with, as long as they see some benefit for them.
But is there necessarily a benefit to them from keeping Trump? It’s not like the VP is a Democrat or something.
Suppose the Republicans do repeal, without replace, of Obamacare. And, because they are getting hurt, a whole bunch of the Republican base get seriously angry. What better defense than to blame (or at least try to blame) Trump for the whole thing? Boot him out and deflect the blame.
Might even work. After all, if the base can forget that they were demanding it, they can forget that the GOP Congressmen were the ones who passed it without a replacement.
Dishonesty, corruption or treason wouldn’t reasons to impeach Trump. They (whichever one got picked) would be rationalizations for doing so. Whole different deal.
Sebastian, who said, “Railing about the things we can’t control instead of the things we can control is exactly the problem.”
I guess I thought there was a bit of space between “railing about” and “ignoring.” But you seem to be hanging your hat on that particular sentence while ignoring these:
It feels counterproductive. I’m not saying that there isn’t a way to play up the Russian Hacking that could work. I’m just saying most of what I’m seeing isn’t it.
If you’re determined to paint everyone as a Putin/Trump apologist because they disagree with your particular strategy, even when they’ve said repeatedly that they at least generally share your goals, I don’t know what the point is of discussing any of this.
Then why is Mike Pence quoting you verbatim?
Dear God, has it really come to this? sapient, you are majorly losing the plot – to say it all over again, but for the last time: nobody here, least of all me, disagrees with your basic points. Why FFS are you wasting all this energy shouting at and insulting your fellow Trump-haters who would do almost anything to bring him down? If you want everybody on your side to think identically to you on every bit of every point of your anti-Trump agenda, you will have a very small side.
If you’re determined to paint everyone as a Putin/Trump apologist because they disagree with your particular strategy, even when they’ve said repeatedly that they at least generally share your goals, I don’t know what the point is of discussing any of this.
and
Why FFS are you wasting all this energy shouting at and insulting your fellow Trump-haters who would do almost anything to bring him down?
I’m not denying that you don’t like Trump. I’m asking you to look at what you say, and believe. Did you read the New Yorker essay that I posted? Did you read Obama’s words that I excerpted? We all have a challenge to scrutinize the news, to look at evidence, to get past propaganda. But trusting what you yourself can see with your own eyes is also useful.
I guess we’re done talking about the hacking (although you never answered my question GftNC what evidence, exactly, would put it all to bed for you, so I guess you’ll have to figure that out on your own). Everyone is cautiously on board with the possibility that Putin maybe was behind the hacking. Good. I guess that’s as good as it gets until they appoint you to the forensics team.
By the way, making skeptical statements about what you kind of believe is how people participate in poli-sci class.
This is how people fight. They say: “Nothing in Senator Sessions’ public life since 1986 has convinced us that he is a different man than the 39-year-old attorney who was deemed too racially insensitive to be a federal district court judge.” It’s somebody else’s job to convince them, not their own to be self-doubting.
By the way, making skeptical statements about what you kind of believe is how people participate in poli-sci class.
This is really beyond self-righteous. Who are you to tell any of us how we should talk to each other on this blog? This is not a place where we are fighting the enemy, whoever the enemy happens to be at any time, this is a place where we are exploring our own and others’ thoughts and opinions, giving (sometimes new) information, and occasionally having an effect on other people’s thoughts and opinions. We might supply tools and information to help fight – as I did by supplying the Indivisible link, or we might talk about how to prioritise our opposition agenda to render it most effective, as Sebastian did. You don’t have a clue how any of us would fight: we’re not fighting here.
Who are you to tell any of us how we should talk to each other on this blog?
Yes, I too am “exploring [my] own and others’ thoughts and opinions, giving (sometimes new) information, and occasionally having an effect on other people’s thoughts and opinions.
I remember well the “outrage fatigue” of the Dubya years, and fully expect Trump to be much worse. When there are a dozen new scandals each week, it is very difficult to get enough attention on ONE of them to really push it to where it can cause changes.
That’s where the Clinton v. Trump campaign really differed: Clinton had ONE nothingburger “scandal”, that got all of the attention. Trump had DOZENS, and few got more than a few days of coverage.
Shorter me: Choose your battles. Shorter shorter me: focus.
Shorter shorter me: focus.
That’s good advice. I choose to focus on Trump’s Putin connection, because I think it’s his motivating factor, Putin is also involved in organizing right-wing Europe, and without Putin, I don’t think we would have had Trump. That’s obviously an “unknown” but I think there’s plenty of evidence for it.
So denying Putin’s role, or minimizing it, seems to be a nonstarter. Even if we’d rather not give Putin credit, we need to understand the shape of things to come.
GftNC: This is really beyond self-righteous. You might notice that I was pointing to Cornell William Brooks and his fellow demonstrators as the hero here, and the example.
I’m asking you to look at what you say, and believe. Did you read the New Yorker essay that I posted? Did you read Obama’s words that I excerpted?
It must be hard, knowing the *truth*, endlessly explaining the *truth*, only to have foolish others refuse to see the *truth*.
For my part, not being quite so invested in the inevitability of everything Trump touches turning to absolute doo-doo, I think Seb has the right of it. If Trump critics go bonkers any and every time the Donald pops off, the criticism will sound like the same old bonker’ish white noise over and over again. If I were a Trumpkin, I’d be totally in favor of that.
Well, Happy New Year McKinney (which it must be for you at the prospect of 24 million people losing health insurance). I know you have anti-Trump folks’ best interests at heart.
You complain about ranting, but scoffing is just as bad. It’s just as emotional and substance-free, albeit driven by scorn rather than anger.
NV, since you seem to be able to read my mind to your total satisfaction, I won’t bother replying. Happy New Year.
By the way, making skeptical statements about what you kind of believe is how people participate in poli-sci class.
Your self-righteousness lay in dismissing the comments of anybody who dares not to completely, automatically toe the line of Obama’s and the intelligence services version of the hacking, as immature and unrealistic (see above), not in your admiration of Brooks, which I am guessing most of us share (I certainly do). I say again, you have no idea how any of us would fight.
And so to bed.
NV, since you seem to be able to read my mind to your total satisfaction, I won’t bother replying.
Please at least do me the favor of pointing out my mindreading – it certainly wasn’t what you quoted there – so I can seek to avoid it in the future. Dead serious here.
GftNC, yes, exactly. The amount of time I spent deconstructing GOP noise and disinformation on social media during the campaign made it particularly irritating to come here and be lectured by sapient (and cleek for that matter) about how evil and gullible I was, and this is precisely more of the same. If you’re not a lockstep uncritical partisan, you’re playing for the other team. sapient’s been posting here for near-on a half-decade, and this is nothing new. It was the same early on under Obama, and it’s always the same when three-letter agencies come up. The only thing that’s changed is the shrillness, hyperbole, and whose interest our disloyalty is advancing.
sapient: how people participate in poli-sci class.
Your self-righteousness lay in dismissing
I don’t dismiss poli-sci. I’m a huge proponent of the liberal arts, as a coastal elite. I just think we’re past the stage of pondering our loyalties with Trump. Oh, did I say loyalties? I forgot, that’s a bad thing (especially in poli-sci, but not so much in a fight).
‘scoffing’ You assume (like sapient, I might add) that because I don’t endorse your interpretation 100% of how plutocracy works, I’m ‘scoffing’.
I would be interested in how to talk about plutocracy, how to erase its problematic effects, I have said it is problematic and quoted where I said it, and you claim that I “reject entirely the possibility that there can be substantive objections to plutocratic representatives directing financial policy ” If you don’t realize that what you are claiming that I said is not the same, you need to take a step back.
I’m headed to work right now, so this is simply a placeholder, but one piece I read that I will try and find is how Japan has seemed to avoid the wave of strongman rightist populism that has washed over the West, and one of the points was that there is certainly not the vast differences between the earning of executives and everyone else. I didn’t agree with the article from a lot of standpoints, but that lack of visible wealth that underlies plutocracy, suggests to me that plutocracy is not simply a problem in politics, I think it is much more deeply rooted and because of that, pointing out that Clinton is not what we would normally think of as a ‘plutocrat’ is not scoffing at the notion of plutocracy, it is suggesting that we need to look at it in a different way.
As I said, I would be happy to have a conversation about this. There is a standing offer for regulars to write front page posts. This is why I suggest ‘scoffing’ is not really what is on my mind.
L_J: “but one piece I read that I will try and find is how Japan has seemed to avoid the wave of strongman rightist populism that has washed over the West, and one of the points was that there is certainly not the vast differences between the earning of executives and everyone else.”
Are immigration issues a big deal in Japan? I had the impression that they just didn’t allow significant immigration at all.
“If you’re determined to paint everyone as a Putin/Trump apologist because they disagree with your particular strategy, even when they’ve said repeatedly that they at least generally share your goals, I don’t know what the point is of discussing any of this.”
Hairshirthedontist: “If you’re determined to paint everyone as a Putin/Trump apologist because they disagree with your particular strategy, even when they’ve said repeatedly that they at least generally share your goals, I don’t know what the point is of discussing any of this.”
Gack. I’ve totally failed to get across what I’m trying to get across if I’ve painted anyone here as a Putin/Trump apologist.
My whole premise is that we all think Trump is going to be a scary disaster area that the US might not survive and that we should try to figure out how not to waste our energy on things that work against ourselves. That’s what I’m thinking in my head at least. I’m sorry if I didn’t get it across better.
Hey, Seb, I think hairshirt was talking to me. But maybe that’s just my narcissism talking. Trying to be “nice” here though, so credit where credit is due.
Happy New Year McKinney (which it must be for you at the prospect of 24 million people losing health insurance)
Sapient, do you have an example of McKinney saying any such thing? Or is this just a personal attack on someone who regularly (but, if memory serves, not always) disagrees with you on policy?
It’s my recollection that he believes that the ACA is anathema. I’m sure, like all Rethugs that he’s got a plan for those who won’t have it anymore.
I called my Rethug Congressman’s office yesteray to get some information on what the “replace” would look like in order to make those 24,000 Americans feel a little more comfy. His assistant had no answer for me; said that she hadn’t had a chance to talk to my Rethug about it. I told her I’d check in again tomorrow to see whether she had a chance to find out what he has planned.
I agree. We should give them all a break, and the benefit of the doubt as well. I can tell they’ve worked really hard to figure this out. Can’t you?
This is not personal. McKinney has taken sides. I have taken sides. I am fighting for my side. He can respond for himself. He’s a distinguished attorney, and a decent man, so they say. He’s well equipped to deal with someone like me.
I think that the Republican, and to some extent Democratic, leadership will use the power of the impeachment to constrain Trump. I don’t think he is beyond understanding that they can, and will, get rid of him if necessary.
The marks attention is always diverted by the uproar of the diversion. Likely Trump is the diversion and ultimately not the con man.
You can con a con man.
in order to make those 24,000 Americans feel a little more comfy.
Oops, forgot the other 000. We plutocrats!
But can you do the can-can with a conman?
“You complain about ranting, but scoffing is just as bad.”
When did scoffing become held in such low regard, right up there with ranting?
And, where does pooh-poohing fit on the continuum of unacceptable blog defenestration?
A world without ranting and scoffing (well, first of all Trump and the Republican Party would be utterly mute in that world, though they could fall back on their sizable reservoir of lying in monotone), would leave the entire intertubes conversation, such as it is, to the prolix peddlers of pedantic poppycock, not to mention we avatars of annoying alliteration.
But can you do the can-can with a conman?
Yes, we can, can Why can’t we …
I was born in ’56. Between one thing and another it’s been a weird ride in some ways.
I can’t think of any time in my life that has been anywhere as weird as now. For sheer WT bloody F is going on, and where the hell is it gonna lead, today takes the cake.
To McK’s point, I actually am open to Trump not being a total and unqualified disaster. Based on everything we know about him, which can for sure be filed under TMI, my expectation is that he will break stuff left and right for the next 4 years. Not because he’s evil, but because he’s an impulsive vain man-child – IMO of course – and that’s what they do.
But all of that said, because of the profoundly craven nature of modern American governance in general, and the particularly spectacular venality of the Congessional (R)’s, he may turn out to be something of a moderating influence.
If you can imagine that.
Anything could happen. What I take as a given is that it’s going to be a total freaking crapshoot, and we’ll be lucky to come out of it in one piece.
Shields up.
I would really like the conversation here to stay just above the Rethug and Demtard level. Maybe at least 10th grade instead of 5th?
Just what I would like.
@Marty:
Concur. I feel like we’re asking too much.
@lj:
This isn’t about you not agreeing with me any more than your complaints about the futility of “ranting” was about the alleged ranters not agreeing with you.
One of the things most frustrating about talking with you is that from time to time you do things like make assertions that you don’t defend, but instead treat attacks explicitly aimed at them as if they’re attacks on other assertions you’ve made. You don’t do that sort of thing often, but you definitely do it (I’d actually say this was the second time you did this in this very thread*), and that’s exactly what your explanation of my “mindreading” is. I was very clear in targeting my statements about your “scoffing” as referring to your terse dismissals of the idea that Clinton could or should be considered a plutocrat. Your dismissals had no substance; they merely suggested it was absurd to assert she was a plutocrat or that her candidacy advanced plutocracy, and then you asserted in passing that criticism of Clinton relating to her income was based in “unexamined misogyny”. That latter part did a lot to color your tone as scornful and condescending, which is why it’s so damned irritating that you act like you never said it when you tell me off for trying to address that particular point. Again: most of my last couple of comments have been aimed either directly or indirectly at your (dismissive and unsupported) assertion that the real reason a member of the 1% of the 1% is accused of being or supporting plutocracy is because of the speaker’s unexamined misogyny.
Oh, yes. As far as scoffing goes, let’s not forget that you said that Clinton’s “going rate speaking fees” were not a sign of extravagant wealth. Perhaps not one single speech in isolation, but if you want to assert that’s what I meant in referencing them, you’re the one mindreading. Clinton earned ~$20m from speaking fees over two years after leaving State. That is, quite frankly, a sign of extravagant wealth. The Clintons’ wealth puts them in the top 0.1% of households in the US. They also direct a number of charities wielding even more money, a great deal of which is directed towards large corporations (for charitable ends, but that doesn’t change this point). And yet, invoking this level of income as well as how it was made was something you equated with Yorkshiremen. That is dismissive, in that it does not present a model of what “real” extravagant wealth would comprise, and it’s scoffing, as it mocks the assertion by comparing it to a comedy routine. So again, yes, you scoffed, and no, that’s not mindreading.
*See your 6:12PM 01/01/17 and 7:59PM 02/01/17 comments, both linked above. Note in particular that you went from stating what you took from the article to saying that someone could take that away, but the article isn’t saying that, and then you proceed to digress and explain how my criticism of what you explicitly said doesn’t apply to something else you said that I hadn’t referenced.
“I think that the Republican, and to some extent Democratic, leadership will use the power of the impeachment to constrain Trump. I don’t think he is beyond understanding that they can, and will, get rid of him if necessary.”
I’ve been thinking about GFTNC’s 3:08pm comment in which she (and I thank you, and snarki and wj, for the welcome back greeting)
outlined her scenarios of impeachment/a##a##ination and ended with
“What say reasonable ObWi commenters?” … in the mix with Sebastian’s suggestion “You know what hurts Trump? His ego. Illustrating that whenever he does what Putin wants he is being Putin’s bitch? That would hurt.”
Leaving aside the requirement of reasonableness, which isn’t really any fun for me, and besides Russell and Sebastian own what’s left of that small province (anyway, we abandoned reason town seven or eight years ago, a trip in the clown station wagon for which the purposeful early packing and mapping was done in the early days by Paul Weyrich, Rush Limbaugh, the John Birch Society, and Ayn Rand’s femdomed, kneepadded, geek conservative/libertarian bitches, among a cast of thousands) and here’s what I predict:
If any attempt is made to impeach the deplorable orange shitgibbon (nicked that from Balloon Juice), Putin will initiate troop movements, including Russian Naval deployments in the waters to their west, up against the borders of Eastern Europe, and the fake news bucket shops here, working with those in Russia and Eastern Europe will inundate western media (what’s left of its sorry carcass) with even more bullshit than in recent months. The hackers will hit us hard. Roger Stone and various right-wing filth will be sighted in Moscow. Maybe even a Republican congressman or twenty.
Trump, for his part in this “unpresidented” Kabuki, will place the U.S. Military Command on high alert, making the Richard Nixon of 1973-74 look like the Mayor of Munchkintown’s drunk brother-on-law by comparison, and suggest that Congress adjourn and head for home indefinitely, you know, as a precaution.
Any plots to go the further step beyond impeachment will be wikileaked through the usual sources before it can get off the ground and cover, like a giant squid clouding the ocean with ink given to the Republicans (cold-blooded killers, many of them) planning it, by way of framing liberals, Muslims, and Mexican fieldhands for the attempt(s).
There will be hundreds of grassy knolls to take the attention away from the book depository.
Further, if Trump’s plans to deport Mexican immigrants by the trainload and restart the “registry” of American Muslims and the absolutely certain harassment, persecution, and violence that follow against those American communities, not to mention whatever the racist scum pigf*cker Sessions and his Ministry of Atavistic Bullshit tries to accomplish, there will most certainly be black ops terrorist incidents on American soil to move the program along, because scaring the shit out of America has brought these vermin this far, so why abandon what works in the pursuit of malign power.
What else should we expect from the likes of this?
http://fortune.com/2016/11/19/trump-security-adviser-hoax/
sapient, I like the wang dang doodle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G6a6bIrmg8
I think this a nice song too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUStvMsnNXM
russell: I was born in ’56.
Me too. I’m a Libra. I like thinking about astrology, because it’s a lot of fun. You? Just make me laugh. As a teenager, I used to pore over astrology books. I wish it were real. Or not.
I actually am open to Trump not being a total and unqualified disaster.
Open to it? Of course! Please, Trump, just be calm and happy! Don’t listen to those people you’ve appointed! Oh, and as for the Republican safety net demolition? Yeah, don’t listen to my Rethug, or McKinney on that part … Don’t listen to those people who don’t want women to have health care (for example, McKinney doesn’t believe pregnancy is a medical condition). Hey Trump, maybe your daughter is a good person, I’m hoping. So, yeah, Trump, or God, or whomever, yeah, we pray to you! Please spare us!
russell, I don’t mean to dismiss your views in any way. You are wonderful. I am pissed, and intend to be a piss ant. I can do it, and it’s needed. Obama was the high road. McKinney, McConnell, the Rethugs? They dissed it.
I’ll let NV take over the high road! Hilarious!
Holy JFC, Count. Thanks. You’ll keep me off this blog for days.
ASTROLOGY? Sheesh. That’s the kind of woo-woo stuff that drives me up a wall. Sitting around, doing simple calculations to put arcane symbols on a chart, according to some scheme dreamed by Babylonians 5000 years ago, and expecting it to MEAN something? Double Sheesh.
Go outside at night, look up at the sky, appreciate the beauty of our planetary neighbors (Venus is very nice in the evening right now). THAT is worth doing.
And head out to the total solar eclipse across the USA on 21 Aug. It’s got a path from (IIRC) Oregon to Virgina.
And head out to the total solar eclipse across the USA on 21 Aug. It’s got a path from (IIRC) Oregon to Virgina.
Of course!
But folklore is nice too.
“just what I would like.”
Marty, no can do, but I’ll be gone again from these parts for good before the 20th of this month, because the most far-reaching, malign security state in the Nation’s history will be imposed on us soon to keep track of who has been naughty and who has been cuck, and being Muslim and/or Mexican is just scratching the surface of the enemies list.
Thereafter, I may read only the National Enquirer, Trump’s Twitter feed, and Brietbart to keep abreast of all I need to know about this new paradigm, which is elite-speak for dogshit.
I’m already slated for the no-fly list, given my blogging history before now, but I’ll be laying low soon.
And just in case you and MCTX, and Sebastian, all reasonable, decent people in the world that has just fallen and is now past, think conservative creds will see you through, be aware that you are on at least one list too:
http://ijr.com/2016/11/732006-omarosa-republicans-who-vote-against-donald-trump-will-be-put-on-a-list/
That c*nt (we’re all cuck beggars now, so learn to speak the language) has a White House post now. She’ll be working with NSA and Homeland Security to identify Trump’s enemies. She’ll be doing “outreach”, which is what I believe Stalin had in mind when he handed the ice pick to Trotsky’s killers.
Sebastian gets it and expresses precisely, along with Russell and GFTNC, and lj, and sapient in her way, the requisite degree of fear, for which I am eternally grateful, but then he is on two lists because of who he is. You other two seem a little pollyanna-ish and dismissive about what’s coming.
Besides, the first thing Congressional Republicans will pooh-pooh of Trump’s single, barely half-assed, but likable goal of rebuilding our infrastructure, except for the unfortunate rebuilding of the Berlin Wall and its continuations elsewhere, is the repair of the High Road that you and we want to travel on again.
The permanent detour signs to the low road have blocked the scenic High Road for years now and the usual suspects have been jackhammering the pavement and selling off the road signs and guardrails for scrap.
Pack a lunch, because there will be no rest stops along the way. No bathroom breaks either.
When I say we’re all beggars, what I mean is that the malign Congressional Republicans, intent on pushing millions into misery and early death, and Trump and his gaggle of sadistic, Brietbartian, alt-right filth, with many of the same goals, are going to play bad cop/killer cop with us, each taking either or both roles when it suits them to keep us baited breathlessly for minute policy differences between them that might yield some scrap of policy cabbage they can throw at us to appease our desperate selves, and here I include among us many of those who voted for Trump out of some justifiable grievances they harbor, and that we can scuttle after as they move their murderous wrecking crew on to the next victims.
Don’t play that game. Be ungovernable.
How do I know this?
Well, this star power centerpiece of the Trump Inaugural festivities has been telling us for years:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy8RIiTyhMI
Not recent enough for you?
Suck on this:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2016/nov/07/ted-nugent-grabs-crotch-at-trump-rally-video
These nearly dead scum make the Andrew Jackson election revelers in 18whatthef*ck who walked on the White House upholstered furniture in their mud-caked boots look like cucks in drag.
This terminal rouser of rabble announced the other day that he will push Congress and Trump to violate oh-so-precious state’s rights to permit concealed carry weapons, licensed or not, to cross state lines without limit or reporting:
http://washington.cbslocal.com/2012/12/21/nra-only-way-to-stop-a-bad-guy-with-a-gun-is-with-a-good-guy-with-a-gun/
No, he’s got it backwards.
I am the good guy and HE is the bad guy.
I am the good guy and HE is the bad guy.
But I may agree with him about the cross border stuff, because after all, he lives in a different state from me and I wouldn’t dare visit him without the proper firepower.
if i’m not mistaken, orange shitgibbon originates with the scots. a lovely bouquet of their creatively profane epithets for Trump made the rounds a while back.
wang dang doodle is cool, especially (or maybe only) the chester burnett version, but i would take a bullet for mavis.
I appreciate the desire to elevate the discourse, but among the associates of the PEOTUS are a guy whose role models include darth vader and dick cheney, and another guy with a more or less life sized head shot of nixon tattooed on his back.
Nixon. Tattooed. On his back.
we’re living in a world we never made y’all. it is what it is. and what it is, is crazeyology with the lid off. If Hunter S was alive, he’d crap his pants.
Check it out: in a couple of weeks, Donald “you’re fired” Trump, mogul of beauty pageants, failed casinos, golf courses, and one sweet midtown high-rise, a man who has lent his name (for a fat fee) to steaks bad wine and neckties, a guy who compulsively yells at clouds on Twitter, will be the POTUS.
And that’s not the scariest thing I can think of.
From the Dark Planet in the Trump Nebulae, under the sign of Malignity, Earth and its surrounding stars appear to look like roadkill lunch picked over by small, but grasping hands.
Connect the dots.
Big Dipper, Little Dipper? No. Yuge Dipper. You wouldn’t believe how yuge. You’ll have to dip only once to get all of it, believe me.
You other two seem a little pollyanna-ish and dismissive about what’s coming.
No man, this is just me being polite.
I just find it weirdly amusing that things are FUBAR enough for Trump to find the headroom to be the good guy.
The first thing – first thing – the (R)’s in the new Congress did was try to geld the folks who are responsible for keeping them in line.
Watch your asses, everyone.
No, Russell, I meant MCTX and Marty, those other two, the ones on the conservatives-who- didn’t-vote-for-Trump list. Sorry for the confusion.
Two of my paragraphs cross pollinated.
You and I are on multiple other lists.
I don’t know why, but this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pC4o7vHw1Fo
https://thinkprogress.org/donald-trump-is-demanding-the-names-of-federal-employees-working-to-curb-violent-extremism-13a37b0ae469#.11gs1km7m
I’m with Trump/Bannon on this. We need more violent extremism in this country. Why should far-right subhumans have all the fun. I think those federal employees, whose names are on yet another Republican/Trump enemies list, should become violently extreme themselves, but do it in the “private sector”.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/rohrabacher-congressional-delegation-russia
As usual, I’m one half measure behind the beat.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/01/it-turns-out-trump-knows-nothing-new-about-russias-hacking
There is something so spectacularly imminent coming from the eminently killable, besides the notion that being terminally ill without health insurance is what the Founders meant by Freedom and all of the other made-up buzzwords buzzheads vomit all over us, that you will, as we’ve been numbed to believe by the bankrupt weather report fluffers have programmed us to believe, might be SHOCKED!
Tomorrow, maybe the next day, I’ll talk about Poland and what needs to happen to their ascendant conservative right-wing filth, as a model for resistance to conservative right-wing filth worldwide.
NV,
Going back a week to find the source of my scoffing? Kind of embarrassing. I don’t know, maybe you had it in your mind for 5 days and finally got to deliver your denouement. If so, get a life.
About what is ‘frustrating about talking with me’, the quick cure is don’t talk to me. Alternatively, you could ask me to clarify and explain.
For example, the most recent thing that seems to have gotten your nose is bent out of shape because I said ‘unexamined misogyny’. If you had said ‘I don’t think I’m being misogynist because [reasons]’, I would have been happy to explain that there sure seems to be some complaints that Clinton is making was seems to be the going rate for people of influence. You could say that has nothing to do with denouncing the plutocracy. I could reply that I think it is linked and try to make another explanation that plutocracy is not a political problem, but a societal problem. But my willingness to make that argument in more detail requires a little more respect for the discussion than you have shown.
You still haven’t acknowledged that you baldly misstated what I said. Note that took place far earlier then me replying to what looks to me like your drive by comment. If this conversation is important enough to you to keep going, try backing up where I said I do agree that there is a big problem with plutocracy and go from there. If you ask nicely, I can put it up as a front page post and we can discuss it. But if you are not going to try and meet half way, don’t waste your time or mine.
https://www.balloon-juice.com/2017/01/04/open-thread-of-republican-ethics/
Here’s how you resist. You break into his house and boil his fucking family bunny on the stove.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecWhXP2jM28
Hi Seb, here’s the article I mentioned
https://www.ft.com/content/987dddda-bbe2-11e6-8b45-b8b81dd5d080
You asked if immigration issues are a big deal, they are like the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about. The recent case of Renho is sort of a case in point
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2016/09/28/issues/renho-nationality-furor-exposes-japans-deeply-embedded-gender-bias/
The article talks more about gender bias, but it gives the background. Immigration is wrapped up with questions of nationality, and the furor that has taken place shows that the view in the main of nationality by Japanese is an issue that makes the immigration debate a very difficult one to resolve. It does plug into the resistance to populism, but the populism we are seeing is nativist, so it is hard to explain why Japanese aren’t going to the same nativist hell that the rest of the developed world seems to be headed.
This Guardian piece about Canada as a postnational country has some other interesting points. but I’m still trying to digest it.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/04/the-canada-experiment-is-this-the-worlds-first-postnational-country
Back for a moment, before a (I hope) long, alcoholic lunch with old friend:
sapient, your poli-sci comment was obviously intended to convey that anyone expressing any doubts was acting like an immature undergraduate, fiddling while Rome burned, unlike Brooks, and of course yourself.
NV: Mentioning sapient and cleek in the same sentence reminds me that ever since you (absurdly – I read your “proof”) accused cleek of threats of violence he has avoided ObWi, to our great disadvantage. I wish this could be reversed.
Intemperate language by anybody except the Count should be banned. His comments, alliterative or otherwise, are the cat’s pyjamas.
Gack. I’ve totally failed to get across what I’m trying to get across if I’ve painted anyone here as a Putin/Trump apologist.
Oh, jeez! No. I was addressing sapient, Seb. I now see how you assumed I was responding to your words I quoted immediately before. That quote was also addressed at sapient, because s/he seemed to be ingoring what you were saying.
If there’s one thing that bugs me, it’s when people ingore stuff. It’s not quite as bad as when they outgore stuff, but still.
fiddling while Rome burned, unlike Brooks, and of course yourself.
I’m not nearly in the same category as Brooks. I have very little bravery of the laying my life on the line kind, which is why it would be a whole lot easier to quit giving our opposition talking points, waiting for elusive “proof” that our people are the ones worth backing, while the opposition only grows stronger.
Republicans aren’t thuggish. Not thuggish at all.
“I wish this could be reversed.”
Easy, NV. Go here and make amends:
http://ok-cleek.com/blogs/
You may have already been there before the election as troll JenBob, though JenBob at least spoke English without the benefit of sentences coagulated (35 cents right there) with the five dollar words, so maybe that wasn’t you.
It pisses me off that cleek is gone from here.
That said, I agree with you NV, though I voted for Clinton without pedantic vote-swapping rationalizations (my conscience is clean, I think, though I don’t take the extra measure you and your sister do of soaking it with my delicates in bleach to hide the political skid marks) that I’m now glad she and Bill are off the map.
Good riddance to them. The election was stolen, but what else is new in Republican America.
They also owe me a Supreme Court Justice, the shits.
Nothing focuses the aggrieved mind like being up against pure evil, now that THAT emailing, alternative, and better choice bad girl has been vanquished.
“Not thuggish at all.”
I’ve been a federal employee twice in my life and I’m now, as of this month, a civil service annuitant (I earned every penny so fuck anyone who thinks I didn’t) and just when I achieved that I now have to worry that Trump and Republicans will steal it from me (another reason I’m gone from here as January 20, but I’m sure Trump’s and Ryan’s and McConnell’s NSA will beaver away at fucking me after they read stuff I’ve written here previous to that date; they know where the previous posts button is, don’t they?), and these Republican cucks would be surprised at how many Federal employees are conservative dead-eye gun owners who wouldn’t think twice about defending their families’ livelihoods against malign assholes who would threaten it, once both of their eyes are open to the threat:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3VgmSJLJ5s
Tell me how that is different from Ted Nugent, who regularly threatens to murder liberals and who will shred guitar and automatic weaponry on behalf of Trump and the Republican on the stage at this once great country’s 58th Presidential Inaugural.
Unpresidented, indeed.
” I have very little bravery of the laying my life on the line kind”
So all that stuff about how I wouldn’t be fit to tie your war hero father’s shoes (true enough and also true of my own father. who also fought in WWII) was just you projecting your own self-loathing onto me? Thought so.
you projecting your own self-loathing onto me? Thought so.
No worries, Donald. I love myself plenty.
Another thing. Most people don’t use their real name here. I don’t blame them. I sorta wish I hadn’t sometimes, but I made that decision years ago. I actually do have a job, and I sometimes worry about losing it and all the sometimes intemperate things I have said online and whether they will haunt me in a job search. Now if Trump really does go full fascist a pseudonym won’t help at all, but in the ordinary world it does matter, I think. But here I am, using my full name depending on what machine I use and occasionally mentioning details of where I live (and you could even guess what I do if you are the sort of creepy obsessive who tries to worm that information out) and there you are, using your pseudonym.
there you are, using your pseudonym.
True enough, Donald Johnson.
Only cowards use pseudonyms. EEEK!! A SPIDER!!
By the way, Donald, my gripe with you is not about bravery. It’s about sanctimony. I simply don’t understand purism, because choices between bad choices seem to have presented themselves to me in many areas of my life.
EEEK!! A SPIDER!!
My feelings exactly.
Trump and the Republicans have divided and conquered Donald Johnson’s and sapient’s relationship.
Not good etiquette when you are sharing a lifeboat and the sharks are circling.
Clinton and Obama are gone. The Leviathan is about to surface.
My cent and a half.
Tell me to shut up. I don’t mind.
“I love myself plenty.”
Obviously. But perfectly consistent with being the sort of hypocrite that goes around talking about “resistance” and touting the virtues of a war hero father in conrast to someone you attack when you are nothing of the sort.
Now as for your approach to politics, the link upthread about the Republican attack on civil servants was useful. I can’t keep track of all the stupid or nasty or evil things the Republicans are going to do or try to do. There are plenty of real policies to criticize with both Trump and the Republicans. But the demand for “discipline” in your case amounts to what it always does–double standards, being as extreme as possible in one’s rhetoric, dividing the world into good Democrats like yourself vs evil Republicans and their collaborators, and also being very careful to ignore crimes committed by one’s own side. At the risk of irritating wj and others again, the war in Yemen is now killing about 1000 children a week according to Unicef, yet your instinct on this is to defend the policy and denounce self-righteous people who bring it up. This simply doesn’t make any sense at all, except from the pov of someone who thinks solely along party lines. In the long run, and we are already there, when people act like this all it does is increase distrust across the board. If everyone has a partisan agenda and only sticks to the partisan script, then facts don’t really matter. Also, sometimes on some issues (this is especially true in foreign policy), you just have a choice of different types of apparatchiks pushing policies that are repulsive in different ways.
Not good etiquette when you are sharing a lifeboat and the sharks are circling.
I will hereby stop replying to Donald, even when he invokes my pseudonym. He seems to care about the right things, for sure. That’s all.
Look on the bright side. “Donald Johnson” is a name that is probably common to dozens of people nationwide. (If they dig into the e-mail addresses to figure out which one you are, they probably wouldn’t be discommoded by a pseudonym either.)
Those of us, like McKinney, whose names are more uncommon are in a different boat. That’s sure why I stick to initials — although I was thinking more of spam e-mails than Federal snooping when I adopted the practice.
“Only cowards use pseudonyms. EEEK!! A SPIDER!!”
I am only pointing that out because of sapient. I frankly wish I used a pseudonym at this point. People use pseudonyms for all kinds of good reasons, but the self-named wise one has been ranting about the war hero father and the fascist collaborators, a technical term for people who aren’t like the wise one and it strikes me as a little bit ironic.
“By the way, Donald, my gripe with you is not about bravery. It’s about sanctimony.”
Then stick to your gripe. But you didn’t. You made a charge of cowardice, you accuse people of being fascist collaborators, and then you talk about sanctimony.
Now if you want to have a serious discussion about sanctimony and moral purity and so forth that would be worthwhile, to the extent that any discussion online is worthwhile. The problem with your position is that it is self-contradictory. You are about as pure and “sanctimonious” as anyone I have seen online–you just make it all about Democrats vs anyone who isn’t as enthusiastic about them as you are. In my case I mostly am sanctimonious about some extremely narrow topics–war crimes in particular. I mostly sit back and cheer on the liberal-lefties on, say, economic issues, in part because I don’t know enough to participate fully most of the time, but also, in many cases, I don’t see it in the same light as 1000 children starving to death each week in part because of the actions we are taking. And I don’t doubt for one millisecond that if this policy could be blamed solely on Republicans from the start, it would be a major issue on the liberal side, something people would be talking about every bit as much as the torture issue.
I also use a fake email address when commenting. It’s not even a something.com that exists. Doesn’t seem to matter.
Maybe I’m naïve, but I’m not terribly worried about the feds hunting me down for my ObWi comments. A few people here or who used to be here know who I am IRL, but I’d prefer to have some measure of control over that.
Donald Trump can kiss my pseudonymous ass.
I am only pointing that out because of sapient.
I wasn’t the least bit offended, Donald. I was just trying to be funny.
“Then stick to your gripe. But you didn’t. ”
I meant to add that weird creepy obsession with my job. First trying to find out what it was, then telling me to get one. Go frack yourself. That has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with your disagreement with me. It was just you being an asshole, over and over again. I put up with it, but after thinking about it a few days, if this place has any rules, I’m asking them to be enforced. And if I get too heated with you, then send me away for a few days. If it keeps happening, ban me. Same for you. I don’t respect your position on some issues and frequently get angry with you, but my gripe with you is on the ideological front and my sarcasm is about that. It doesn’t go spreading off into personal issues.
I meant to add that weird creepy obsession with my job.
Okay, I said I wouldn’t but let me respond to this, and not as a justification. I’m sorry that I asked you about your job, and told you to get one.
It comes from the fact that I don’t understand anyone who’s had a complicated professional life who hasn’t had to make a choice among bad choices. I don’t understand how anyone can fail to see that foreign policy matters are full of these bad choices.
So now that I’ve apologized, I will not respond to you. You make me furious, and I lose my composure. I will try very hard for it not to happen again.
Bye, Donald.
OK, closing comments on this one. Anyone wants to start something on another thread, consider this your warning.