Hunter Biden

As far as one can see from what (little) has been reported, Joe Biden did not act in any official capacity as vice president that would have benefited his son, who was appointed to the board of a Ukrainian oil company while his father was in office.  But the "there's nothing to see here" defense is insufficient.

To the layperson, Hunter Biden's lucrative appointment to Barisma's board had nothing to do with his knowledge or experience, and everything to do with his being the son of the sitting vice president. Just a Trump can't use as a defence "Ukraine got their aid and the phone call so nothing's  wrong here", neither can Joe Biden claim that just because he didn't do anything that would have benefitted Hunter that's OK too. Family and friends who have access to powerful people often try to leverage that access for personal gain; and there is no other word for that but "corrupt". Not calling it out is precisely what (thinking) people mean by the swamp of political influence in DC, namely the acceptance of bought and paid for influence.   

Biden's defense would be far stronger had he not dismissed the concerns his aids expressed to him at the time. That in hindsight was poor judgement. Simply asserting that it wasn't his decision to make wasn't good enough; he should have gone on record as disapproving of his son's choice to take up the offer. That may be hard for a father of a troubled son to do, but it would have been the right call.

The Democrats are wrong not to call him on this; yes, he may be their best bet to oust Trump next year, but by pretending the issue will go away - Trump won't let it - they are both deluding themselves and displaying the same double standard as the GOP. They rail against nepotism in Trump's white house yet are silent when it's in their own camp. That makes them look both corrupt and hypocritical to boot. 

Biden needs to get out ahead of this by making clear that even if at the time he didn't think it was an issue, in today's context he wouldn't have made the same choice. But that's a weak defense given that at the time he was advised against letting his some take the position which makes it clear that it's not that times have changed. Better would be to own it; to admit that he let his love for his son cloud his judgment; and that he won't let that happen again.

Of course that's a risk since admitting to poor judgement isn't going to help his election chances either in the primary or the general election. Letting it slide, on the other hand, may help him to the top of the ticket, but will compromise his chances of reaching the White House. 

Whatever Biden Snr. decides, everyone should be clear that when family members take positions that can only reasonably be attributed to their proximity and access to power, at the very minimum, holders of public office, elected or otherwise, need to go on record and state clearly that they will erect a Chinese wall between them. That may not be sufficient to drain the swamp, but a necessary starting point is stating publicly that buying access to power isn't right. And that applies to both sides of the aisle.   

Trump stew

Whether or not it was Nancy Pelosi's intention, her withholding of the Articles over Christmas and New Year seems inspired. Although Trump's mindless boosters at Fox and in the GOP claim, without evidence [sic], that Trump is completely untroubled by his impeachment, his ranting letter to the Speaker and the tweetstorm of mindless vitriol he has spewed over the last few days suggest otherwise. Trump seems angry probably because he is not in control of the situation and because he has been bested by a powerful woman. Perhaps Pelosi thought that letting him stew for a few weeks might knock him completely off his rocker and generate some more impeachable material in the process. Even if it doesn't, it was certainly worth a try; and it keeps the Never-Trumpers energised. Not too shabby.     

Strange times

Who would ever have thought that we would see phrases like these about a sitting US president.

"Trump went on to claim, without evidence, that..."

"Trump, ... has spent the Christmas period furiously tweeting and retweeting false claims and conspiracy theories..." [emphasis added].

Yet this is not uncommon in the reporting of many of not most of Trump's public statements. 

And notwithstanding the denials from the duplicitous nut-jobs that now seem to make up the public face of the GOP, to have any public figure, much less the president, lie so ubiquitously with such a lack of shame or conscience, continues to be as shocking, three years on, as it was on his rise to power.  Politicians often shade the truth but before Trump, at least in democracies, they did so in subtle ways that were not completely outrageous or easy to disprove. But as with some many norms, Trumps has paid them no heed. And in re-setting the bar, a bar that Newt Gingrich had already lowered considerably during his time as Speaker, Trump has set a new low for honesty, or lack thereof, in public office. 

Since there is no longer a robust media to hold public figures to account, it is unlikely we can ever get back to even slightly higher ground (the "high ground" is completely out of reach).       

Strange times, indeed.

A long drawn out process

Although it looks unlikely that an indefinite delay in sending the Articles to the Senate is tenable, a temporary delay has considerable utility.  It allows senators with the vestiges of a conscience to think long and hard about the probity of their decisions.  It allows time for more people to come forward with useful information. It might even allow the courts to render a verdict on Trump's preposterous assertion of immunity from demands for information from Congress. All have the potential to sway public opinion in in the Dem's favor in the longer term. 

High Stakes: impeachment #6

Nancy Pelosi has decided to hold on the Articles until she gets a commitment from Mitch McConnell that he will agree to a process for the trial phase that she believes is fair. Of course fair is to some degree in the eye of the beholder, but it's an interesting gambit. Her (and Chuck Schumer's) argument is that a fair trial would allow the calling of key witnesses, something McConnell is hoping to avoid at all costs.

There's no guarantee that even with those witnesses public opinion will be swayed, let alone Trump removed from office. But the delay itself is useful. For example today Christianity Today published an op-ed calling for Trump's removal from office: "But the facts in this instance are unambiguous: The president of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents. That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral".   Perhaps this is a harbinger of a bigger shift in public opinion. Given time for the facts to sink in before the matter disappears in the rear view mirror, it might move enough if not for a conviction but for his defeat at the ballot box.

McConnell has cleverly framed the gambit as Pelosi not wanting to go to trial because her case is weak. The beauty of his ploy is that there was really never any doubt that the Senate would acquit, in large measure because the Republicans seem not to be interested in a just outcome or a fair process. But by framing the all but certain acquittal as a function of a weak case rather than GOP intransigence, he has set up a high stakes showdown.  If Pelosi blinks first, and sends on the Articles before getting the commitments she needs, the trial will be a circus starring Trump's sycophantic acolytes in the GOP. The longer she resists the more time McConnell has to hammer on his argument about the weakness of the case.

Getting any commitment from McConnell will be difficult, as unscrupulous and untrustworthy as he seem to be.  But as wiley an operator as McConnell clearly is, in Pelosi he has likely met his match. Being in different chambers they have seldom sparred directly but now they are head to head, toe to toe.  I suspect that McConnell has underestimated her; my money is on Pelosi to come out on top.  

The die is cast: impeachment #5.1

After the vote was taken, Speaker Pelosi indicated that there may be some delay in sending the Articles to the Senate. Although she conditioned their transmittal on Mitch McConnell's commitment to a fair process, it is possible that this stalemate might continue for some time as noted in my previous post. Indeed, it might become the final answer: Trump was impeached; but never acquitted. That might be the best outcome of the whole sordid business.

Once the die is cast: impeachment #5

If events proceed as anticipated, the House will vote in the affirmative to impeach Trump, the Articles will be sent to McConnell and the Senate will acquit him in short order. At that point Trump entirely free to act as he pleases since there is now check whatsoever on his abuse of office. He could (and likely will) act to undermine the democratic process to secure another term in office. Once impeachment is done, and the verdict is in  there is no other remedy besides the election and that he would likely rig in his favor.  The only possible check on potential malfeasance is to hold the charges in abeyance as a sword of Damocles over his head to keep him slightly more honest than he otherwise would be.   

Nonsense is no defense

1) "It's not a crime". Impeachment is a remedy set out in the Constitution and does not require a crime under US law. It is applied when the Constitution, the highest law in the land, appears to have been violated.

2) "The aid was released, and the meeting happened". The completion of an illegal or improper act does not alter the fact of the attempt. A failed robbery attempt is still a crime, albeit not as serious as were the robbers to have been successful. So is attempted murder.

3) "We do it all the time: get over it". While bargaining is certainly an important part of diplomacy, the 'bargain' being stuck here was for private personal gain, not for the good of the country. That makes it abuse of office.

4) "The Biden's (father and son) were acting corruptly so the call for an investigation is legitimate". If the investigation requested had been into corruption in general, and not into the Bidens in particular the claim might have had merit. But because it was specifically directed at Trump's likely political opponent and was only requested after Biden declared his candidacy, indeed only after he appeared to be Trump's most threatening opponent, it can't be argued that his interests was about corruption in general, else why did he not pursue the matter his first three years in office?

5) "It's a politically motivated witch-hunt / coup". While there have been some Democrats who were calling for Trump's impeachment almost since his election, (and arguably with some reasonable cause), most resisted it. Since the Dems took back the House, they have been looking into a series of allegedly nefarious dealing by the President, but none, even Meuller's allegation of obstruction of Justice by the White House, were considered by the Democratic leadership as strong enough to support impeachment. The Ukraine matter is different in that not only does it conform almost, stereotypically, to a pattern of behaviour, it was also so simple as to make it easily understandable to a public that may not have time for the minutiae of the Meuller report. And in a single effort, Trump has committed three offenses: the solicitation of foreign interference in a US election; the abuse of his high office; and the obstruction of Congress in its oversight responsibility. Not a bad triumvirate for an amateur.  (It might have been clearer to the public to charge only the second article, that of obstruction of Congress, since that is the clearest example of the repeated pattern of obstruction this White House has engaged in. But to charge obstruction without a serious offense worthy of Congressional investigation would have been problematic, as it would have allowed the GOP to argue that the requests for information being refused were frivolous).

5) "We haven't heard from all the possible witnesses" First, if 17 witnesses all consistently make the same allegation, it is unlikely that another witness will, under oath, add or detract from the account of events established so far.  The "additional witness" defense is not intended to bring forward anyone who knows about the attempted extortion, but to bring in other people simply to muddy the waters (like Hunter Biden).   

6) "The testimony is all hearsay and therefore not admissible". First nothing prevents hearsay evidence in an impeachment. Second, some witnesses had first hand knowledge of the plot to extort Zelensky. Third the call transcript is an official record of one element the attempted extortion; it is not so much a "smoking gun", as video of the gun being fired by the perpetrator at the victim.  Moreover, the witnesses best placed to provide mitigating explanations are the same people, Mulvaney, Bolton, Pompeo, who have been told by Trump not to obey the congressional subpoenas. Were they really able to provide evidence that would change the understanding of the events concerned, Trump would certainly have encouraged, probably compelled, them to testify.   

7) "There facts are not established". Just nonsense; the facts are clear. Only willful blindness leaves any doubt as to what was going on. 

Bribery or extortion?

There was some mention in recent weeks of the word bribery to describe Trump's actions vis a vis Zelensky and the Biden investigation he wanted announced. Ultimately the word didn't appear in the Articles as voted on by the House Judiciary committee. In his testimony before the House Intelligence committee, Noah Feldman suggested that because bribery wasn't a statutory felony when the Constitution was written, the word had a more expansive definition in the minds of the Founders than it commonly does today.

But since impeachment is about swaying public opinion, using antiquated language is not going to move the needle, or for that matter, Republican self-serving head-in-the-sand denials, however much more directly it appears to connect Trump's misbehaviour to the Constitution.

Bribery is generally seen as an offer made to tempt its potential recipient to act in an improper manner. Bribery is distinct from trade in that it implies the act sought contravenes some rule or regulation.

Blackmail and extortion on the other hand are based on a threat, generally of dire consequences, rather than an offer of something of value. With a bribe, the recipient will be better off then before after the exchange. In extortion the best the target of the blackmail can expect is that they won't be significantly worse off. That is perhaps why extortion seems far more egregious than bribery.

It could be argued that the offer of a White House meeting was a bribe since it would benefit Zelensky and wasn't something that he already had.  The withholding of Congressionally appropriated funding, by contrast, was something that Zelensky could reasonably have expected was rightfully his and Trump was threatening to taking it away.

Despite the distinction, neither are acceptable or excusable. 

A terrible precedent and an immediate threat

Assuming things go the way almost everyone expects -- the House voting to approve the Articles of Impeachment drafted by the House Judiciary Committee, a Senate trial with a vote along party lines -- a  constitutional precedent will have been established that blackmailing a foreign entity using the power of the presidency is not an unconstitutional act. Since the offence charged here involved both abuse of power and the involvement of a foreign entity in interfering in the US electoral process, both of which were problematic, that used in combination is not established as impeachable means that either one alone could not be either. That opens the door for purely domestic abuser of power, for example the dangling of a presidential pardon in exchange for political favors, and for the unsolicited interference of a foreign entity in a US election.   

The precedent is not just something for future candidates to worry about (or revel in). It also paves the way for Trump to behave in nefarious ways in the run up to the next election. His acquittal by the Senate will embolden him to treat the election like one of his shady business deals; he will see himself as completely vindicated and untouchable. That's extraordinarily concerning.     
    

Partial symmetry, politicians and bureaucrats

Democrats and Republicans have both had investigations on which they pinned their hopes of a political knockout blow. For the Dems it was Meuller, for the GOP it was IG Horowitz. Both Meuller and Horowitz were public servants well used to serving masters of different political stripes and both presented their findings in carefully worded, fact based accounts. Neither gifted one side of the political aisle or the other with a clear case to sell to voters. Both political tribes were disappointed; but that's where the symmetry ends.

The differences in how Democrats and Republicans reacted is instructive.  The Dems swallowed the bitter pill after trying (and failing) to leverage Meuller's testimony into a public condemnation of Trump's behavior that would have allowed them to start impeachment proceedings; they had to wait another 6 months until Trump misbehaved yet again to move forward.

The GOP in contrast has rubbished IG's report and slandered its author, someone their Justice Department appointed.  The Trump administration's approach is to keep the revolving door of political appointments going until they find sufficiently unprincipled and sycophantic people who will follow the President's random walk through conspiracy-theory-land. If the tactic works and Trump and his ilk are elected next year, it will be a sad reflection on the ignorance and or callousness of those who voted for them. 

Impeachment #4

Spectacular

I got my first pair of glasses, I think, in 1976. The lenses were made of glass and cost sixty quid. That seemed a lot to someone in a high school (when LPs cost £2.99-£3.99). Today I just ordered a new pair of glasses; they are plastic, have high RI, are lighter than my first pair, and have multiple sophisticated coatings to cut UV and a frequency of blue light that (supposedly) is emitted by LED displays. The were $46.95. Adjusting for inflation, they were 91% cheaper than my first pair.

It is often said that we don't pay enough attention to the things we can now buy that were much more expensive a generation ago. And its true that inflation has outpaced middle earners' incomes for some time. Nevertheless there are examples, like this, of things that make ones dollars go further.

In your face

The White House's decision to simply not participate, let alone cooperate, with the Congress' impeachment process is the most blatant example to date of exactly why impeachment is the only recourse and removal the appropriate remedy. 

In maintaining that the President is not accountable to this Congress, Trump is behaving in precisely the way the Founding Fathers feared. And it is precisely to create accountability in the executive branch that impeachment was included in the Constitution. To those outside his adoring base, it also makes the President look as though he has something to hide, his loud public protestations of innocence notwithstanding. 

Of course, this behavior is only possible precisely because this is an impeachment by Congress and not a case tried in the judicial branch. There is no mechanism to compel Trump to participate and the ultimate arbiter is not a quasi-randomly selected jury of 12 but an group of 50 senators and thus, ultimately, the 153 million registered voters.

A defendant in a criminal trial could not mount a defense based on the argument that the process was illegitimate (although many dictators bought to justice have done exactly that), but this is a in essence a political "trial" and Trump's strategy plays well with his base; its a gamble and the dice will again be rolled just under a year from now. 

Impeachment #3

The likely events of the next few weeks are now relatively clear. The House Intelligence Committee will write its report; the House Judiciary Committee will draw up articles of impeachment, the House will vote along party lines to impeach, the Senate will take them up and then acquit Trump, again on party line vote. 

Nothing is going to change that; Meuller's report didn't; the House Intelligence Committee hearings didn't; and nor will any new evidence that shores up a direct line of accountability from the attempt to blackmail a foreign leader to the current occupant of the Oval Office. 

Holding things of value to another country hostage may not be unusual; but doing so not in the national interest but in pursuit of personal gain is. Of course Trump's ego is so bloated that he could argue that his reelection is vital to the national interest; we've not heard that one so far but it may yet come.

As vile an individual as Trump is (his lying, cheating, lack of work ethic, celebration of his own ignorance, narcissism, his never seeing fault in himself but always in others, his lack of loyalty, his demeaning of those he dislikes), and the damage he is doing to America's standing in the world, to the rule of law, and to trust in venerable institutions on which we relied for a well ordered society, the question can legitimately be asked "does his breach of the norms of presidential etiquette and behavior warrant impeachment"?

Reluctantly, I have to say that it's not clear to me that it does.

However, were there to be a solid case for obstruction of justice, something that seems plausible given his instructions to his staff to defy congressional subpoenas and his refusal to comply with legitimate Congressional requests for information, then yes, a case for his removal from office becomes firmer.

As Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her recent judgement "Stated simply, the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings". The balance of power between the three co-equal branches of government is in danger of being upset by an overly combative and obstreperous self-aggrandizing chief executive.

Such a precedent cannot be allowed to be established without a challenge from Congress. The executive branch cannot be granted blanket immunity from Congressional oversight. That is not what the founders wanted, and is decidedly not good for the country.  A Congressional motion of censure would be symbolic but ineffective.  Impeachment and removal from office therefore does seem the most appropriate remedy.

Google's mantra

(c) Time Magazine; https://time.com/4023367/google-china/

Google's slogan / mantra / motto / values statement, "Do no evil", sounds great. And not withstanding Eric Schmidt's somewhat jaded observation that "Evil is whatever Sergey says is evil", it seems like a good place to start.

But there's another way of thinking about it; specifically in terms of freedom of action. A seemingly converse statement "Do good" is in fact far more constraining. There are lots of courses of action that might be neither good nor evil, which are precluded under the latter dictum but available to Google. "Don't break the law" is very different from "be kind to everyone".

While Facebook seems to neither care about the morality of its decisions, nor about the morality of obfuscating and dissembling to Congress and the public, Google was, for many, a beacon of hope that at least one of the the tech giants might be the bridgehead to a more socially responsible flavor of capitalism. I'd say the jury is decidedly still out on that question.

Impeachment #2

The numbers haven't moved. After two weeks of public testimony, the number of Republicans and Democrats wanting impeachment and removal was almost exactly where it was before they began.  Disappointing as that is for the Dems, it is not entirely surprising. The most obvious go-to explanations are" party affiliation; tribalism; and news source echo chambers.

But that's inconsistent with the fact that the polling numbers did move when the scandal first broke. If these hypotheses were true, the numbers would not have moved at all even then. This suggests another explanation; that like rumors that move stock prices before any official announcement, people had already 'baked in' the information before the public hearings. Those who, on reading the transcript of the Zelensky call, viewed Trump's alleged behavior as wrong were already persuaded and the hearings merely corroborated what they already strongly suspect to be true.

That in turn suggests that Trump's consistently dishonest and inappropriate behavior had already prepared the ground and rendered the Zelensky phone call far less shocking than it would have been had it been made by any of Trump's predecessors. That's a sad reflection on how far he has undermined trust in the presidency. 

No inquiry wanted here

The ongoing impeachment investigation into Trump's attempts to extort political dirt from Ukraine  centers around an exchange of things of value between two political heads of state for the personal benefit of at least one of them (a meeting with Trump might be considered as a Ukrainian domestic "thing of value").

Trump was conditioning a meeting that Zelensky wanted on his making a public announcement that he was reopening an investigation into Hunter Biden. Military aid that Ukraine wanted was also in the mix as part of the deal.

While there can be no doubt whatsoever that this was the bargain, or quid pro quo or whatever you choose to call it--it's still the same, its not clear that Trump actually wanted the investigation; rather he wanted the appearance of one, hence the ask for the announcement. Were there to be an actual investigation it is quite likely that no wrong doing would be found, undercutting Trump's case; better therefore to have an announcement that the GOP could speculate on endlessly with having to deal with an awkward fact-based counter-narrative. Trump thieves in a world of speculation, smears and innuendo. Facts constrain him, which is, in part, why he hates journalists.  

"The most transparent president in history".

According to the New York Times, Trump yesterday claimed to be "the most transparent president in history".  While it could certainly by argued that he lies and dissembles with greater consistency than any president in history, what about transparency? 

Well, a case might be made that he is right. He blurts out his rambling stream-of-consciousness thoughts with absolutely no filter or forethought. He confesses in public to wrong-doing (though never sees it as such). He is transparently self-serving, narcissistic, dishonest and corrupt. 

If that's what he means by being transparent, then kudos for self-awareness!

Impeachment #1

The question isn't "did he try to extort the leader of a foreign country to provide information for use in his election campaign, making a meeting with him, and Congressionally approved military aid, contingent on doing so". That's now abundantly clear: it is "Yes, he did". The facts are not in dispute.

The only question is does doing so rise to the level of a "high crime or misdemeanor" sufficient to remove him from office. And it appears the answer to that question is also clear. If you are a sitting Democratic Senator it's "Yes" and if you're a sitting Republican senator, it's "No". That's not going to change. Nothing short of shooting someone in 5th Avenue will cause the Republicans in the Senate to think otherwise.

For the record, the whistle-blower's testimony is completely immaterial. Everything he set out in his complaint has been corroborated by witnesses closer to the alleged transgression than he (or she) was, so her testimony is not only moot and a distraction but of lesser value that that of those who have already testified in the Congressional closed door hearings. And outing him would send a message that the executive branch cannot be held to account even when it goes completely rogue.

We are about to enter the public relations phase of the process and the Republicans have shown themselves vastly more adept at managing the messaging. The Dems complexly blew the Meuller report which should have been a clear case of obstruction of justice, the charges that caused Richard Nixon to resign. And they are in danged to blowing the Ukraine scandal too. Jim Jordan, the new GOP's point man on the House intelligence committee is a master at distraction, obfuscation and "whataboutism", and he will run rings around the calm and deliberate, but ultimately boring and non-telegenic Adam Schiff.

When the House moves articles of impeachment against the President relating to the Ukraine scandal, as it looks set to do, and the Senate then acquits the him, what matters is how the hearings and the messaging influence independent voters in swing states.  If the Dems screw this up, which they look likely to do, Trump will be back in the White House for another term.

Whiskey and soda

This evening I was looking for something to drink and neat scotch at 5:30 seemed a little premature. As I was reaching in the fridge for the water, I happened upon a bottle of San Pellegrino. Diluting a single shot of a reasonably good single malt with five times the volume of sparking water seemed mildly sacrilegious, but on dropping in a couple of ice cubes and taking a sip I was transported back to my childhood; that was my mother's drink of choice when we had guests, and I could see her sitting in her favorite chair in the living room and even, albeit faintly, remember the smell of her cigarette smoke. 

Vat 69, soda and ice; that was Steyning in the 1960s.  Later there was a spell where Dimple had pride of place in the corner shelf that held the drinks. In Storrington the shelves gave way to a more modest display on the trolley in the dining room where Grants was the preferred brand. How times change.

       

If...

If only Mayor Pete were 10 years older. To my ears, he is the most measured, smartest candidate on offer in a crowded field. But at 37, despite being far wiser than his years, he still seems just a little too young.  Of course my yardstick is partly self reflection; I know that 20 years ago I would not have been capable of shouldering that kind of responsibility (nor, for that matter, am I now), or distilling the complexity of the issues he will confront into action items. Admittedly, that may not be a good yardstick. But Biden, for all is faults, had been there (or at least close enough to know what to expect) as has Warren, to a lesser extent, too.   While I'd live to see a woman of color in the White House, Harris has performed inconsistently in the debates. Bernie is both too old, too ill, and too radical. And none of the others have a prayer.

Perhaps a Biden/Buttigieg ticket would clear the way for Mayor Peter to get two terms (2024, 2028) but there's a risk that the Dems could loose in 2024. And a B/B ticket also means not electing a woman nor another person of color.  And then there's electability; Mayor Pete might not bring enough independents on his own; he is too new on the scene to earn the trust of the black vote which Harris and Biden have.  So in no particular order (yet)...

• Biden/Buttigieg (experience and fresh ideas)
• Warren/Harris (two women in the top jobs)
• Biden/Harris (fighting for the under-represented)
• Warren/Buttigieg (the intellectuals)

Of course all these combinations are predicated on the VP candidate accepting the job which is by no means certain. Harris and Buttigieg may both have other plans.

Republicans, what did you expect?

Republicans are suddenly all up in arms that Trump's reckless decision-making has led to a foreign policy, national security and humanitarian disaster.

Really?

You ship of fools didn't see this coming? You threw order, decorum, protocol and precedent to the four winds and now seem surprised that in their absence bad things happen? How could a lust for power and influence have so blinded you to reality? A second rate reality TV personality with no interest or experience in government or foreign affairs, who has run a family real estate business with some pretty shady goings-on; this is the man you stand behind, the man you are willing to entrust our futures to?

Really?

I understand escalating commitment to a failing course of action (Staw and Ross, 1976), but how many lines does he have to cross before you wise-up (or fess-up that you knew all along but went along anyway)?   

It's time to get real.  Really!

The lining of the pockets

Brazen; that's about all one can say about Trump's decision to host the next G7 summit at his own hotel. That he sees no problem with enriching himself by funneling taxpayer dollars into his own pockets through his tenure in public office is at once astounding, and at the same time, given what we know about him, not in the least surprising. Yet it plumbs new depths in corrupt self-dealing. His prior forays into pocket-lining were simply preludes, testing the water, softening up the critics before cashing in "the big one". 

For Mulvaney to say that "the team" concluded this was the best venue can only be explained as either a bald-faced lie, or by assuming that "the team" was told what the outcome would be and then asked to find "comparables" to give the preordained answer a semblance of plausibility.

Anyone who sees this as acceptable behavior is implicitly condoning corruption in the highest public office and the abuse of public trust that plagues America democracy. 

This is the corruption in the "swamp" Trump said was the problem with Washington. What is now clear is that he didn't mean it was wrong; only that he couldn't get in on the action. Now he has; so I suppose that's alright.

Plus ca change, plus c'est encore pire. 

The Orwell Maneuver

In his epic novel "1984", George Orwell wrote about totalitarian regimes shaping the narrative by simple repeating self-evidently false statements so often that people ended up questioning their own beliefs and ultimately relinquishing what they knew to be true. That tactic was on full display today.

First Trump claimed victory in Syria even though he got nothing of substance from Turkey in return for not imposing sanctions; his boast (obviously) ignored the fact that the situation he claimed falsely to have resolved was one entirely of his own making in the first place.

Then there was Mick Mulvaney's admission that a political quid pro quo did take place in Trump's dealings with Ukraine but that this was business as usual. Yes negotiations involve the use of leverage, but that should be to extract concessions in the national interest, not for personal political gain.

Mulvaney tried to suggest that the action being called for was backward looking to the last election. That could be construed in two ways: it might be taken as evidence of an effort to prevent future meddling in the upcoming election by better understanding what happened three years ago. But that seems to very unlikely given that Trump has shown no interest in preventing foreign meddling in US elections; indeed, he has encouraged it. A more likely explanation is that Trump's ego (and rellection chances) require that any suggestion that his win was tainted by interference be purged from public memory, that the Meuller report was a hoax and missed the "real villain". To do this he needs a countervailing conspiracy theory that the Democrats were somehow guilty of instigating and benefiting from foreign election meddling.

But despite Mulvaney's claim, the action being sought clearly isn't just about interference in the last election. His admission of a quid pro quo is particularly problematic given the ample evidence, specifically the transcript of the conversation with Ukraine's President Zelensky, that the ask was not limited to an investigation of possible tampering with the last election but an effort to smear a current and future political opponent. Having admitted that aid (and a visit) was part of the bargain and given that what was being asked has been clearly stated elsewhere, Mulvaney has, in essence, made an iron clad case for impeachment.

As if not content with all this, Trump then confirmed that he wants to use his own hotel to host the upcoming G7 conference, a clear violation of the emoluments clause.

In an era of astonishing stupidity and corruption in the White House, this was one of the most head-spinning days in living memory.

Senator, please answer the damn question...

At least Bernie was up front about raising taxes on everyone to pay for medicare for all.  Elizabeth Warren (again) refused to admit when pressed repeatedly that taxes need to rise. We understand that costs overall (assuming you take up medicare) would go down. I can only assume Warren has decided to never ever make a statement that the GOP can use in their campaign ads. But it's wearing thin for those of us who want to better understand how her plan would work. So, Senator Warren, please answer the damn question (even if you didn't write the damn bill).

This time it's different?

It could be. Trump's violation of norms? Meh! Not reading briefing books? Who does? Circumventing diplomatic protocols? Who cares! Vulgar behavior? Just locker room stuff. Cussing?  Get over it, for @#$% sake. One after another, these instances of unprecedentedly terrible behavior have been brushed aside.

But this time Trump's capitulation to Erdogan's request to "get out of the way or be run over" (imagining and paraphrasing the phone call, Sunday October 6th), to be crudely cynical, has the makings of some real "made for TV" moments, and is right in Trump's reality-game-show wheelhouse. Except this doesn't look good for him and he can't stage manage the consequences.

Images of fleeing refugees, shelling, burning buildings, and troop convoys flying flags from 'mainly Muslim countries', all unleashed by an ill-considered spur-of-the-moment decision, made without consultation with military experts, show clearly enough for even the most willfully blind Trump supporter the appalling consequences of a having a fake president, one who refuses to take his enormous responsibilities seriously, who treats experts with contempt and who, astonishingly, thinks himself a "stable genius" with "great and unmatched wisdom". If this isn't enough to change minds, nothing will be.           

Free Lunch? No such thing

"Good lunch - thanks. Heard from White House—assuming President Z convinces trump he will investigate / “get to the bottom of what happened” in 2016, we will nail down date for visit to Washington. Good luck! See you tomorrow- kurt"   - Kurt Volker's tweet.

Proof:

1) with no change in meaning, replace "assuming" with "if"
2) with no change in meaning, insert "then" after "in 2016,"
3) An "if / then" statement-pair conditions the second action (after the "then") on the first (after the "if).
4) One action being conditioned on another is exactly the alleged (and apparently elusive to Republicans) "quid (this) pro (for)  quo (that)".

Quod erat demonstrandum.

Fear and self-loathing

Republicans are in a bind. In 2015 when Trump first appeared on the political scene, most - as noted by Seth Meyers - probably though he was running as a joke. But as it became clear he was serious about running and his talent for tapping xenophobia, fear and hatred propelled him to the fore, they had to come to terms with a stark choice; reject him and risk losing power, or embrace him in a Faustian bargain to secure the Congress. And since the Democrats were screaming that Trump was the devil incarnate, their only response was to rally round him.

Ross and Staw's model of escalating commitment to a failing course of action is instructive here. In those early days, there was little indication that Trump could not step up to the role; but as data emerged over the first year that he was either incapable of rising to the demands of the office or was uninterested in doing so, they were still convinced that the situation was manageable and that his worst excesses could be mitigated and contained.  Now they are both psychologically and publicly committed. To abandon Trump after four years of supporting him makes them look foolish and must likely cause huge cognitive dissonance with the narratives they have had to develop to justify their support.  Now things are getting pretty serious (if Meuller's findings weren't already). Trumps abuse of power for political gain is simple enough for most voters to grasp (in a way that the Dems had hoped the Meuller report might have been but in the end wasn't).

Then there's the Turkey fiasco. Now the consequences of Trump's decisions by uninformed whim are having highly visible and salient consequences; people are dying and American troops are in harms way as a direct result. That is potentially so politically damaging that even Lindsey Graham, usually a shameless apologist for Trump's excesses, has criticized him.

And while Michael Cohen's conviction and Paul Manafort's were problematic, they were swept aside and ultimately under the rug by the torrent of disinformation from Fox, the barrage of lies from the White House and the seemingly never ending miss-steps and chaos Trump manages to create. But Giuliani's actions are arguably more serious. First they fit an emerging pattern of rule breaking and potentially criminal misconduct. Second it brings Trump's personal agenda squarely in opposition to America's national interests and the processes of government that the nation relies on in its foreign relations.

Combine this with the growing list of failed initiatives - North Korea, Iran, the Middle-East peace initiative, and trade with China - and the two accomplishments - the juicing of the economy and the markets with tax cuts and the appointment of two conservative justices to the Supreme Court - begin to look less convincing reasons to renew his term.  But Trump still whips up fervor among his base, sufficient to instill fear of a primary challenge in the House races, so their self-loathing and disdain for him are outweighed by fear and self-preservation instincts. But the longer they stay with the sinking ship the less they can claim any semblance of moral authority. Republicans, in embracing Trump, have become the party of weak, self-interested, immoral, lackeys. Until they rediscover some backbone we seem to be left with a somewhat unpalatable choice; more chaos, rule-breaking, dishonesty and corrupt behavior, or a pretty radical experiment in left wing ideas that the majority of independent voters may, with some justification, be very wary of.

Hunter-killer

The White House's effort to smear Joe Biden, despite its mind-blowing hypocrisy, has brought an issue front and center that the Democrats need to step up and address head on.  Notwithstanding Trump's flagrant abuse of his office for his and his family's personal gain, his focus on Hunter Biden highlights the appallingly corrupt but widely accepted nature of America politics. Did Hunter Biden act unethically? It's hard to say without answers to more specific questions. Did he advocate to his father for any of the organizations he was involved with while his father was in power? Did he pass any private information or insights gained through conversations with his father to those organizations that might have been helpful to them.

Biden Jr. is quite right when he notes this was poor judgment on his part, but arguably he is right for the wrong reasons.  He implied in an interview with Amy Robach, excerpts of which were screened this morning, that his mistake was not appreciating how it might interfere with his father's political campaign. But that's a paradigmatic concern, not an admission that in principle such behavior is intrinsically problematic. Of course, he (and the many other's in his position) will argue that the prevailing view in the circles in which he moved was that there was nothing wrong with cashing in on a famous family name, so long as there was no explicit connection between the actions of their powerful relatives and the interests of those he associated with professionally. But that's the same line of reasoning as the #MeToo perpetrators use to defend themselves: "those were different times and the norms were different then". They were, but that's no excuse.

The Democrats need a #MeToo moment when it comes to political influence and the appearance of corruption. As uncomfortable as it will be as skeletons in the closet are discovered, if they are to regain the moral high-ground they will have to confront the way business gets done in Washington and make some concrete and far-reaching proposals to clean up the town. They will need to make the case to the American electorate that they are not going to be part of the problem that alienates the political elites from the voters, that puts personal interests and campaign donor's interests ahead of those of the electorate.  Trump was right about the swamp and while he's clearly part of the problem, unless the Democrats take a clear stand against a system that works for rich  interest groups, voters will remain rightly cynical about the motives of our elected officials.

Fox abandons Shep

Shepard Smith, one of the few journalists left a Fox News (Chris Wallace is the other who comes to mind) has had enough; he announced his departure on Friday.  His decision may signal the end of Fox as anything resembling a news organization. The Tromp-o-sphere, the alternate reality universe we were first introduced to by Ms. Conway shortly after Trump's inauguration, has no use for facts; only opinions, usually xenophobic, intolerant, and bigoted. The only silver lining might be that if all the serious journalists leave, viewers might come to realize that Fox is the television analog of the tabloid press. But it's a very thin lining; there are lots of Sun readers who think they are getting the news. Then Fox will become the litmus test; Fox watchers are too stupid, indoctrinated or willfully ignorant to be taken seriously.   

Learning to drive

There isn't a Tesla autopilot in each Model 3. There is just one, cloned across all models on the road. And Tesla owners are all teaching it to drive.  There are more than 600k Model 3's with autopilot on the roads, all collecting data to improve the autopilot's intelligence. While autopilot isn't as smart as a person, it has had far more driving "experience" (about 16 billion mile) than any single human driver, which will eventually make it safer than the safest human driver.

The need for AI's to gather oodles of data to perform well creates an enormous network externality. As more products incorporate AI, the data economies of scale will turn competitive markets into create winner-take-all industries which without antitrust regulation will mean a series of uncompetitive monopolies. Google is already at that point in search. Only where function follows fashion, for example in social media will industries see the unseating of incumbents.  For free market enthusiasts that presents a problem. It's time to create an government entity to deal with market power and concentration.   

More evidence

Today there is more evidence, not only of Trump's unfitness for office, mentally and morally, but of conflicts of interest that make it hard to believe he is acting in the country's interest and not his own. Trump himself admitted in an interview a few years ago that he has a conflict of interest when it comes to Turkey; he has franchise naming rights on a very large building ("two towers!"!)  in Istanbul.

On Sunday he took a call from Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey's authoritarian president and immediately afterwards announced that he would pull troops out of northern Syria. The sudden withdrawal, decided without any consultation with the his NSA, the NSC or the military top brass clears the way for Erdoğan to launch a military campaign not the region. And that he did three days later.

Not only does Trump's decision strengthen China's and Russia's standing in foreign affairs, it is morally indefensible. And because of Trump's business dealings in Turkey, its is entirely possible that Erdoğan used this a leverage to get what he wanted. "wouldn't it be a pity if the Turkish Parliament decided to expropriate the building?" he might have hinted.

So on top of digging into Trump's Ukrainian shenanigans, Congress needs to subpoena the records to that telephone call too; if betraying US allies and compromising US foreign policy for personal financial gain (or to avert personal financial losses) doesn't rise to the level of a a "high crime and misdemeanor", it's hard to see what does. 

We have reached a point where collectively we must decide whether we are a country that turns a blind eye to corruption in high places or one that stands for the rule of law.  More evidence that we are on the brink of degenerating into a banana republic.

It's official !

Not only do we have a kleptocratic narcissistic megalomaniac in our highest public office and a completely dysfunctional government, we can't even keep the lights on.  PG&E will be cutting power to almost a million customers in California for potentially up to five days because of high wind gusts. Thus, we are officially a banana republic (and puts "leaves on the tracks" in a slightly better light).

Isolationist

Trump's decision to abandon the Kurdish fighters who helped US forces defeat ISIS is, in strictly practical terms, foolish and short sighted. But it is sadly symptomatic of his instrumental approach to relationships. Once ISIS was defeated, he reasoned (presumably), the Kurds had served their purpose and could be discarded like his ex-wives.  But this sends a clear signal that will long be remembered, well after Trump is gone from the White House - that America is an unreliable partner.  That will have the effect of undermining local groups potential cooperation with the US as "force multipliers". America will then either have to deploy more forces to achieve the same ends or accept that its global influence will be reduced. Trump's shortsightedness either stems from a cynical calculation that when this chicken comes home to roost he will be gone from the presidency, or that he simply doesn't care. Either way, Colonel Jessep's immortal words seem completely appropriate: "You have no idea how to defend a nation. All you did was weaken a country today. That's all you did. You put people's lives in danger."

Biden his time?

Joe Biden needs to up his game if he is to make it to the final. He's fumbling the ball and the moment and needs to regroup and launch a more targeted attack on Trump to counter the torrent of conspiracy theories and misinformation Trump and his defenders are spewing. First he needs to point out that in pressuring for the Ukrainian chief prosecutor's removal, a man who allegedly had corruptly halted investigations into a number of companies including Burisma, the oil company on whose board Biden's son sat, he was hurting his family's interests, not helping them. That he has let a narrative that is the complete opposite take hold has become a serious political problem for him. Second, he might point out that when it comes to self dealing and nepotism, Trump might want to look closer to home. Biden's son may have earned a million dollars or so; but Trump's family (he included) will likely be profiting to the tune of billions. No one to my knowledge has put a value on the trade mark application approvals Ivanka suddenly received from China shortly after her father was elected. There are two astonishing aspects to this story; the first is that Trumps is so tone deaf that he can't see how much worse his intermingling of state and personal business is that Biden's was; and the second is that Biden hasn't, in the weeks since the Trump misinformation machine (ably led by the nincompoop of a lawyer Rudy Giuliani) began pushing this story, found a way of combating it effectively in the media. That's not to say that Biden should have asked his son not to take a position which in hindsight clearly looks like an attempt to gain access to the vice president; its was an error of judgement. But it was a judgement call, albeit a poor one, and not in the same leagues as the flagrant attempts at self-dealing that the current occupant of the White House displays on a nearly daily basis.         

Gun control

The AR-15 has become the poster child (literally) for the case for and the case against gun control. But banning assault weapons really misses the point. First, a very small proportion of shooting deaths involve assault weapons. But because they they are generally high profile "mass shootings" this particular gun gets more coverage than other weapons. Second, there are really only two uses for guns; for sport (which may or may not involve killing) and for killing, which may be homicide or self defense. Few if any hunters use assault rifles, so in the sporting category, we are talking about target practice. In that context its unclear that the government need get involved in the choice of weapon sportsmen chose. The area in which there is a legitimate concern for government action is when weapons are used for killing people. And they can be used in two ways, call them offensively (homicide) or defensively. Banning ARs will, as gun rights advocates rightly point out, make it more likely that those owning ARs will be criminals (once the ban is in place, owning one would in and of itself be a criminal act). America is a county swimming in guns and a home invasion or other crime in which threats of violence are used will be carried out with a gun. Some would argue that when confronted with an armed assailant, the best course is to comply and or wait for law enforcement. But there are those who want the right to chose otherwise; who believe that by the time law enforcement arrive the crime will have been committed and the the best, if not the only way to meet such a threat is with a response that is of commensurate force. This may or may not be a correct assessment but it is a choice nonetheless that is it not clear to me that the government should constrain.

Banning ARs will create an asymmetry that puts the person who chooses to confront an armed assailant at a disadvantage, to some degree forcing their hand.  And since the government essentially grants that citizens have the right to use deadly force to defend themselves (which the AR ban does, since it only seeks to ban one type of weapon, not to prevent an armed response to an armed (or unarmed) assailant), then in banning ARs, the government is not acting on moral grounds but practical ones; and that choice limits the right of those who chose to use deadly force in self defense to use what they consider the most effective means enacting their choice. If the government was acting on moral grounds it would expunge all stand-your-ground laws, make it illegal to use deadly force in any setting even self defense and ban all weapons, hand guns as well as ARs. If the magazine size is the issue then hand guns with magazines of 10 rounds or more which can be quickly reloaded ought to be treated the same way as California treats ARs -- only small capacity magazines are allowed and a special key be required in an effort to slow down the reloading process.

An argument for banning ARs might be that this would tilt the "balance of fire power" in favor of law enforcement; but ironically there are those on both sides of the debate who think that might not be such a good thing. The anti-federal government survivalists won't trust national law enforcement and the left tents to distrust local law enforcement. Of course the left is more likely to opt for a legislative solution than an armed one.

Its time to get beyond the symbols and begin talking about the real issues; access to weapons (and ammunition) in general, the relationship between law enforcement and those they are sworn to protect and serve, and the root causes of violent crime. While we are fixated on images of the AR-15 we will never make progress in solving some very real issues.

Why Impeachment Must Not Succeed

The evidence is mounting that Trump acted in a way that justifies his removal from office. He not only used the power of the office to try to extort another country to provide dirt on a political opponent, but then went to some length to cover up (and then miss-characterize) his actions. That, as I read it, is sufficient justification. At the moment Senate Republicans are almost to a person backing Trump, so his removal looks unlikely. But as more evidence emerges that could change, if they believe removing him from office might harm their or their chances in the 2020 election.

If it does and they change their minds and turf Trump out, they might actually put Mike Pence into the White House for at least another term if not two. Why? Because Trump supporters will see this as a successful attempt by the Democrats to thwart the will of the people (albeit a minority) and redouble their efforts to move the country to to the right.

So the best outcome might be to impeach and then loose the Senate vote but in the process make Trump unelectable in 2020; since he is unlikely step aside voluntarily for Pence (or anyone else),  and no one will be able to oust him, that would put a Democrat into the White House.

Framing impeachment

The Dems' success in the next election will depend on how they frame the impeachment proceedings. If they frame it as an effort to remove him from office they will loose. They will  they will loose because the GOP will circle the wagons, the Senate will vote along party lines and Trump will feel and proclaim loudly that he is innocent, that he has been vindicated, and the Dems attempted coup has been foiled by his strategic genius. That message will sell well in the red states.

If on the other hand the Dems frame it against the backdrop that the Senate will never remove him from office, they gain several advantages. First they put GOP senators on the spot since if they do vote along party lines they will confirm the Dems' narrative that they are more concerned with holding on to power than with justice, national security, corruption, abuse of power and the good of the country.  It also allows the Dems to set expectations properly; that the trump will remain in office but that his misdeeds will be laid bear for all to see; with that more modest objective, the focus can shift from Trump's removal to his abuse of public office which will help swing votes either not vote to reelect him or event vote for his Democratic rival.

Tough Break

If you voted for Trump, it must be really hard to come to terms with the fact that he is quite evidently off his rocker.  His deranged tweet storms, his inability to deal with reality that leads him to create his own fictional world in which his all actions are "perfect" and he is "a stable genius", all are signs of someone who, were he not in the White House would lead most people to view him with pity and otherwise ignore his self-indulgent outbursts. But for the foreseeable future he remains a burden we all have to deal with in one way or another.     

Family ties

The legitimacy of the newly initiated impeachment inquiry depends on your take on Hunter Biden.

If you think that because no criminal charges were brought, that while Biden Jr.'s actions were unseemly and arguably improper, nothing criminal took place. But of course that's a difficult position for Democrats who are up in arms about improper behavior which did not involve criminal culpability (see the Meuller Report).

On the other hand, if you believe that he and/or his father engaged in criminal wrong doing then Trump's attempt to shed light on it seems legitimate. Of course, threatening to withdraw financial life support from a country to do this is at the very least egregiously heavy handed, but sausage making is not a pretty sight. Republicans will argue that the only reason charges weren't filed was because no one was looking hard enough. That in turn was because Biden Sr. was VP and helped oust Ukraine's chief prosecutor.  (The fact that almost every European country was also calling for his ouster doesn't make it into their narrative). And on which side of that divide Republican senators fall will determine the fate the country's 45th president.

If there is one common theme to both these narratives and one the Dems need to get out ahead of it's the appearance of corruption, whether its Biden Sr.'s  children, or Trump's. Governing and public service is not an adjunct to the family business; it is a sacred trust; leveraging ones family's position of power an influence for financial gain, while not strictly (in the sense defined by the supreme court) corrupt, sure as heck looks pretty darn close. And its the kind of sleaze that helps fuel distrust of powerful office holders and contributed to the populist surge that helped put Trump (with assistance from Putin) into the White House.

As painful as it may be, Democrats need to distance themselves from Joe Biden if for no other reason than to signal that they will no longer  tolerate the kind of turning a blind eye that apparently went on when he was advised that his son's activities looks unseemly.

The waters you swim In

Upstanding people and some legal pundits keep pointing out that there is no explicit quid pro quo in Trump's conversation with Ukraine's newly elected president. Frankly, only the naivest of fools should expect there to be.  Donald Trump may be a sleazy operator who from time to time crosses the line between what's legal and what isn't but he not so stupid as to go on record making an explicit ask.

His experience in real estate has taught him that you can threaten and bully implicitly as effectively,  or more so, than by making a threat explicit. Simply hinting may be more effective than stating consequences baldly, leaving it to the bullied party to imagine what those consequences might be.  The gift of two wrapped fish is not an exchange of favors but it sends a clearly understood message to those who swim in those kinds of dangerous waters.

Perhaps that's why he feels more comfortable interacting with despots than with democratically elected leaders of liberal democracies; despots have gotten to the top often by a similar exercise of power using implied threats. They understand one another better. They speak the same language of the under-world. It is a language of power, not of rationality.

What those involved in drawing up articles of impeachment need to look for then, is not a smoking gun, but a pattern of actions that might seem like ignorant mistakes in isolation but taken together display one or more underlying narratives; of self-dealing, of encouraging aids to break the law, and of mingling the personal with service to the country.

What has frustrated Democrats so far is they were sure time and again that there would be a smoking gun, political or legal. Yet nothing has stuck politically, and legally no single incident seems to rise to a level that makes impeachment a sure thing. They will need to carefully build a case based on circumstantial evidences; and while it might not convince (or frighten) enough GOP Senators, it might provide an important backdrop to the 2020 election. 

Tumultuous times

That was quite a week! First Boris Johnson received a stunning rebuke from the British Supreme Court which ruled unanimously that the prorogation of Parliament was unconstitutional. Parliament reconvenes today (Wednesday).

Then, the straw that finally broke the camel's back dropped in the US. While the tally of Trump's shady, highly questionable activities, is long and well known, it was his blatant attempt to collect information to smear a political opponent that was what appeared to push those who were on the fence over the edge, and led Nancy Pelosi to initiate impeachment proceedings.

Both are events or extraordinary historical importance. I have lived though only two impeachments and never seen the British government overruled by the courts.

Somewhat overlooked but arguably as significant was the Senate's decision to require that the as yet unnamed whistle-blower testify before Congress.  A unanimous decision from a body that has, to the best of my recollection, always voted along party lines when the President's decision were called into question speaks volumes as to the seriousness of the allegation.

And it was only last Friday that Greta Thunberg, a 16 year old activist, railed against the inaction of world leaders, at the UN General Assembly no less, warning that her generation (and history) would never forgive them if they failed to rise to the challenge.

We are living in interesting times.

End run

When Congress refuses to approve spending for the wall...

1. Declare a national security emergency
2. Wait 9 months (so clearly a national security emergency)
3. Under the powers granted to the executive for such emergencies, move funds from projects Congress has sanctioned (like day care centers for military families) to pay for the wall, which it has not.
5. Complain that congress won't fund needed projects (like day care centers for military families).

Since Trump voters a) wont know much of what actually happened and b) believe his every word, hey presto, an end run and score one for the home team.

"Disruptive diplomacy" (aka reality TV)

In his article on Macron's failed initiative to restart talk about the JCPOA by having Trump meet with Iran's foreign minister, Javad Zarif, David Ignatius suggested that the gambit failed because Zarif wasn't sufficiently senior (and 'underling' - only Hassan Rohani or better still Ali Khamenei would have been important enough people ) and because Zarif wan't bearing gifts of concession.

All of which make perfect sense, but there's another contributing factor Ignatius overlooked: it wasn't a disruption Trump himself orchestrated. He'd look like he was being manipulated instead of him doing the manipulating. That would have made him a supporting actor in Macron's drama which would never do.

The critical question

The question as to whether we should believe anything Donald Trump says is largely settled. He lies so routinely and so obviously, that the surprising things is to find something he has said is actually true. That should seem a shocking indictment of anyone, but is particularly unnerving when it's about the president of the United States.

The more substantive question is whether he knows he is lying.  Could he conceivably not himself be able to tell the difference between fiction and imagination, between what is true and the way he would like the world around him to be? It that's so, then he is in a truly delusional state of mind; and that should be deeply worrying to everyone.

Trump's distorting mirror

Donald Trump claims that US consumers won't be hurt by the tariffs he is imposing because Chinese firms (and US firms that use Chinese made parts) will eat the cost and not pass the cost of the tariffs on to consumers. Aside from the fact that depending on the concentration of the industry some may have little choice but to pass them on or make a loss (a simple piece of microeconomics that Trump apparently missed when at Wharton), he also doesn't consider that the same logic applies for goods moving in the other direction.  Applying his logic, if US firms selling in China we to eat China's retaliatory tariffs, US firms would be bearing the cost, not Chinese consumers. All of which is priced into the market which is why it reacts negatively when the trade war escalates.  

A prescient insight...

"The President in particular is very much a figurehead... but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the president is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character, His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it. On those criteria [he] is one of the most successful presidents the galaxy has ever had. He has already spent two of his ten presidential years in prison for fraud". 

Douglas Adams, 1978

The Harvard halo

On the NPR broadcast "Hidden Brain" Shankar Vedantam had as his guest Harvard Professor  Francesca Gino. She explained that the more experienced heart surgeons were leas likely to heed advice from the FDA and inexperienced ones. And that first that listened to people who weren't experts often came up with more innovative solutions. And that weaning red sneakers to teach an  HBS executive education class generated more respect than wearing a more traditional "uniform". This is a classic example of the Harvard Halo. Other R1's have a similar problem; the idea the "two step leverage (Garguilo et al) is an effective strategy remains an article of faith among those who have never worked in industry but who have been patted on the cake by sycophantic wannabes all their professional lives. I'll grant that the red sneaker study was fairly nifty in its design but not something that would be considered rocket science by a brain surgeon (a Brit humor allusion there).  But it's nonetheless a little nauseating to hear ideas so blindingly obvious lauded as if they were the next cure for cancer.   

Any way the wind blows

An august panel of talking heads on one of this mornings Sunday political talk shows spent thirty minutes trying to divine what Donald Trump really believes. After 4 years it's a complete mystery to me why they bother; do they not yet understand that he has no beliefs? Only a tiny set of talking points that he thinks will ingratiate him with whoever he's most recently been threatened by. He is governed by insecurity and opportunism. He is for gun control when he thinks that saying so will score him points. Then he's against it when Wayne La Pierre tells him it will lose him brownie points. He's buy buying Greenland, then it was only a joke, but he won't go to Denmark because he's offended that the Danish Prime Minister was "nasty" to him for calling the idea absurd; this from the man who claims, literally, he is "the chosen one".

In anyone else, this is the kind of behavior that would at best elicit pitying condescension, but might well end up with his being committed to an institution. And yet, because of his power, the media (and the Democrats) react with horror to every one of his ludicrous utterances. It's time to stop taking him seriously; he has no convictions. His guiding principle is his own aggrandizement and enrichment. Unlike the politically engaged, mainly on the left, who are at once appalled and captivated by this carnival freak show, the vast majority of the America public are blissfully inured to his behavior.  The markets are up: hurrah. They are down 800 points who cares - we don't own any mutual funds or shares. The deficit will top $1T: my pay check is still the same. We need to stop hanging on his every tweet and focus on what he does. He is a feather in the wind; and following every zig and zag will only make us tired and nauseous.

Bully in a China shop

Trump's trade war with China will end badly not only for the US but for the world economy as a whole. It was ill conceived from the start; a unilateral approach was never going to work especially against China which as it becomes more prosperous, is becoming less dependent for economic growth on exports. In liu of a coordinated effort, Trump chose tariffs which cause pain to both parties; bot only one has a political system that makes it vulnerable to the pain that tariffs and higher prices lead to.  Because it is not a democracy, Xi is insulated to some degree from the consequences of the economic consequences of a trade war.  China's political system, too, is better suited to a long game; just as ISIS and the Taliban know they can wait American presidents out, so Xi can look 2 or even six years down the road and know he will still be around after Trump has gone and the American electorate has had enough of the pain Trump's ill-thought-through economic bullying has caused.   

Not the Fox

Dan Bolz made a comment this evening that caught my attention: "In China, Donald Trump has found an enemy as wily as he is". To put Xi Jin-Ping and Trump on the same level seems ludicrously over-generous. China's political system is somewhat meritocratic, at least for those the toe the party line and dogma. Xi is  a meticulous, thoroughly informed  strategic thinker. Trump, in contrast, has a 5 minute attention span, contemptuously ignores knowledge that would help him navigate complex issue.  He is a showman, a third rate TV personality, who had the chutzpah to leverage white resentment to put him into a job for which, as he demonstrates an an hourly basis, he is completely unqualified. Trump an Xi aren't equals; and Xi I'm sure would find the comparison irritating and demeaning.     

Connecting the dots

Growing up I was exposed to monthly renditions of Tom Lehrer's  record "That was the Year that Was". Looking back many things are clearer now. For example, I had imagined him somewhere on the East coast, I'm not quite sure why, perhaps because my aunt lived in New York. And when I learned that he was at Harvard when began his singing career, that impression was reinforced. That was until I learned from a colleague that he had moved to Santa Cruz in the 1970s to teach at UC  Santa Cruz. So when he sings "the breakfast garbage you throw into the bay, they drink at lunch in San Jose, which I had in my minds eye imagined was somewhere in Central America and the bay being the Gulf of Mexico, I now realize are actually the town in which I now teach and San Francisco Bay. Even the album title is contextualized as a play on an American NBC satire that was copied from a British show of the same name ("That Was the Week That Was" or TW3).

Noting in the opening song that National Brotherhood Week was "celebrated" with the killing of Malcolm X now makes sense in the context of the civil rights movement which, as an 8 year old growing up in England, I was unaware of.  References to the use of the Marines to stabilize foreign regimes "until somebody we like can be elected" speaks to a US interventionist foreign policy.  George Murphy, a Californian senator who started his career in Hollywood makes sense with some (recently acquired) knowledge of history.  Jimmy Crack Corn is a reference that only a child growing up in America would understand (and still makes little sense to me). What Lehrer thought about Reagan and now Trump we will never know (at least not though his songs). "Watch Brinkely and Huntely" is a reference to two news anchors of the day who hosted the The Huntley–Brinkley Report from 1956 to 1970.

Many of the issues he sang about are still with us; pollution, racism, antisemitism, the threat of nuclear war and nuclear proliferation. Some was topical, such as the a lament for the Vice President who suffered the fate of Veep's in general, or his recounting of the life of Alma Mahler-Gropius-Werfel who died the year before.  Interestingly, in "Wernher von Braun" he alludes to the rise of China seven years before Nixon's visit and long before it was clear to most commentators that China's fortunes were on the rise.

Would I have enjoyed them more in the 1960s had I known then what I know now? Hard to say, but on the plus side I get to enjoy them with fresh eyes 50 years on.

Thinking ahead

Trump may be an aberration or he may be a more permanent reflection of America's cultural divide and the rightward-shift of the more rural and isolated parts of the country. Only time will tell. But whether he and his brand of politics are temporary or long-lasting, the effect of his time in office will long out-last him. As a white man, that makes me worried. Those who justifiably feel resentment at being demonized by Trump and his supporters may not distinguish between those who look like him but don't share his views and those who wear MAGA hats. I foresee a time when I will have to spend energy apologizing for being white, and for the sins of Trump-ism, even though I stand in staunch opposition to all he represents. And kudos to Susan Rice for  refusing to engage with Wolf Blitzer yesterday, who was baiting her with a mention of Tucker Calrson; her simple and suitably curt reply was "He's a disgrace". Exactly! 

The shadows of Nuremberg

Jews are understandably defensive when comparisons to the Holocaust are bandied about. My father, a lapsed Jew who was born in Czechoslovakia and fled just ahead of the Nazis invasion in 1939, led a medical mission to back to Czechoslovakia in 1945 and was among the first people to enter Terezin after it was liberated. He saw first hand the unspeakable horror of the Third Reich. There is nothing that compares, nor God willing is there ever likely to be, to the systematic organized slaughter of 6 million Jews.  My intent here isn't to make a direct comparison to the Holocaust, but rather to examine elements of its antecedents.

Of particular concern is the use of large rallies at which xenophobia is stirred and reinforced by the excitement and affirmation of the crowd. It is the kind of collective hysteria that was on display at Nuremberg rallies that is echoed today at Trump's campaign rallies. There were thirteen Nuremberg rallies; at the largest in 1937, some estimates suggest as many as 700,000 attended though other figures suggest te number was 350,000. Trump held 186 rallies as part of his election campaign, and another 71 since taking office. While clearly some attendees will have gone to multiple events, assuming each stadium holds about 30,000 people, Trump will have had a total audience of 7.7 million, compared to 2.3 million for the Nuremberg rallies. More people are likely to have attended a Trump rally than attended all the Nuremberg rallies. As a proportion of the population, the Nuremberg rallies may have involved of the population 3.3% over 12 years while Trumps has reached 2.4% in just 4 years. 

Next it is worth considering how the emotional fallout from these events is propagated. Social media didn't exist in the 1930s so propagation would be by word of mouth. The spread of the emotionally charged message would be limited by the size of the networks of the attendees. Assuming at least some dissipation along each link, it would take some time for the message to reach a bring about a sea change in culture sufficient to pave the way for the organized genocide that the Third Reich carried out. The ground was fertile anyway since Germany was still recovering from the Great depression and the strictures of reparations the countries was required to pay. That created resentment and anger, ripe for harnessing by a demagogue.

There are similarities in 21st century America. The financial crisis of 2008 and years of economic decline in middle America along with off-shoring and the creation of most value-creating employment only on the coasts have created the conditions that make the politics of fear and resentment so effective. And today, the emotional intensity of rallies like Trumps has the potential to go viral over the social media networks that are much larger than personal social networks. So those who worry that we may be nearing the critical mass needed to cause an inflection in the culture may be right to be concerned.  

"That's not who we are"

Culture is not always monolithic. Think of a cluster analysis. At some level all nodes are in a single cluster; but change the criteria for links and different cliques emerge. If the criteria for ties is language you get one picture; if similar attitudes towards foreigners and immigration is the tie a different picture will emerge. That's the clustering that has emerged, in large parts due to Fox and Trump over the last three years.

So it is worth considering the differences between two broad cliques; those who are fearful of (non-nordic / anglo-saxon) foreigners and those who aren't. They are probably more conservative, more likely to support traditional social policies and oppose liberal ones. One group (and this is just based on impressions, not data) is strongly libertarian, self-reliant, independent, deeply suspicious of outsiders, and fearful of the future.  The other embraces diversity, welcomes strangers, is unafraid of change.

So, when politicians react to mass shootings, hate crimes, and white nationalist / supremacist rhetoric with the now hackneyed response of "that's not who we are", first one has to ask who are "we". If the clustering is all Americans then sadly, yes, that is who "we" are. If we weren't, this wouldn't keep happening at rates reminiscent of a "shit-hole" countries like Sudan or Zambia (adjacent to the US in the per-capita homicide league table), or seventh in the world in total annual homicides.  Viewed from the perspective of these two cultural cliques, then those saying "that's not who we are may be confused about which group they belong to. It's not who the members of their cluster are, but it is who the other cluster is. 

"Thoughts and prayers" the Republican equivalent of "talk to the hand", has worked well for 20 years in shutting down discussion of the antecedents of gun violence, generally coupled with "now is not the time"; and of course for Republicans that time is never. In part its because their base is largely drawn from one of these two cliques.  Indeed, the divide between the two camps' values is increasingly aligned with both geography and party politics, exacerbating the disconnect between the two network cliques as opportunities for cross-cutting ties wane.  That in turn leads to a hardening of extreme views that become self-reinforcing within the clique. Social media helps reinforce this process.

Perhaps this time, with two incidents separated by less than 24 hours in which 30 people were killed, perhaps this time it will be different. But if the past is any indication, it probably won't be. A chronic inability to face a serious domestic problem - that's who we are.

If...

If there were justice in such things, Donald Trump would be held accountable at the end of four years for the jobs he promised to bring back from China (jobs which the Chinese are themselves losing to automation according to a recent Economist article).

He would be asked why the wall isn't built, let alone paid for by Mexico.

Why are more people without health care than before Obama took office?

Why are we not funding fundamental medical research?

Why are hate-crimes up by 200%?

What about the mess in Syria? Has he cleaned that up?

Has North Korea relinquished it nuclear weapons?

Is the deficit lower?

Why are our newly paved roads and rebuilt bridges, paid for with our tax dollars, now private tolls roads / bridges?

Why are Muslim Americans being harassed, threatened, beaten and shot?

Why are police shootings on the rise? 

Why is discrimination against the LGBT community now legal?

If there were justice in such things, the opposition party and the serious news media would ask these questions and not put up with the BS answers that they will inevitably elicit. But there is little hope that the world is just or fair; at least in the political realm, its just crooked.   

Fiscal hypocrisy

Republicans, after years of screaming during Obama's presidency that sky will fall if the budget deficit isn't closed, are suddenly quite happy to let it balloon with tax cuts and spending increases.  If the Democrats are a "tax and spend" party, Republicans have become the "don't tax and but still  spend" party, ironically making the Democrats look more fiscally responsible. So much for the down-home kitchen table family budgeting Republicans were so keen to apply in Washington a decade ago.

What explains this about-face. There seem at least two plausible theories. The first is caving to Trump. He has taken such a firm grip on the Republicans base and is completely ruthless in exploiting that for his own ends that Republican law makers are terrified of being destroyed by a Trump tirade; their job security suddenly takes precedent over their erstwhile principles.

There is, however, another possible explanation; that they were never really serious about fiscal rectitude - it was simply a political device with which to attack the Democrats and Obama. Indeed it is plausible that Republicans are simply all about power and not principle. One has only to look at the willful ignoring of the violations of family values Trump represents to realize that its not just their position in budget debate that was a sham. And their pathetic defense that "Trump isn't someone I'd hang out with but he's getting the job done", is testimony to their shameless "the end justifies the means" philosophy. 
  

Chernobyl vs Deep Water Horizon

This is not, as the title might suggest, about the relative magnitude of the two man-made environmental disasters, but a comparison of the two films made about them, and in particular their different dramatic cadences.

Deep Water Horizon builds with a view of the tensions in the control room as the drilling operation is pushed forward while safety issues are misread or ignored by an overconfident manager wanting to meet a target. Chernobyl opens, after a short prelude, in much the same way.  Both lead up to the focal event, an explosion.

But then the two diverge, dramatically, both metaphorical and literally. Deep Water Horizon has a relatively linear time line that leads to a smulchy ending. Chernobyl has an geometric timeline that allows a much broader exploration of the  consequences of the explosion. Moving beyond the intensity of the first few hours allows the film to explore a more interesting set of issues, social, political and psychological.

Chernobyl then very neatly brings back the drama of the explosion by incorporating it into the courtroom drama in the of the final episode. This device not only allows the viewer to regain the excitement and tempo of the initial episode having explored widely in between, but fills in some important details, that one only realizes were missing when they are brought into focus at the end.

Chernobyl is an outstanding piece of gripping and engaging film-making, while Deep Water Horizon, cy comparison, is simply a mundane, cliched disaster movie.