#it's so galling that these two men are the most recent + current president of the phwa like......

[larsnicklas]

we Need to Kill mark spector. and also seravalli while we’re at it

if i see them in victory plaza this round it's ON SIGHT!!!! tbh if i was a sign girlie (gn) i'd have a ♡ EURO SKILL GUYS ♡ sign with all the finns faces on it locked and loaded for game one. i'm not a sign girlie (gn) but somebody should do this probably

[fapangel]

Plato’s Republicans

Two thousand years ago, the Greek philosopher Plato penned The Republic; an argument for totalitarianism that's as terrifying in the clarity and honesty of its arguments as the day it was written. Plato argues that since many (if not most) people are too stupid to be trusted with full control of their own government, society should be controlled by “philosopher kings,” an aristocratic elite class of gifted geniuses. Inculcating obedience to this regime would be a children's tale to make the masses accept a system who's necessity they had not the wits to grasp themselves. Plato suggested a “noble lie” of origins, a creation myth of men born of mother Earth, most with copper-inlaid souls, fewer with silver, and the philosopher-kings themselves with scant and precious gold. Golden souls made the law, silver ones enforced it, and copper ones suffered it. The totalitarian vision of Plato would later be echoed by Rousseau, who advocated the same horrors but without the courage to look them in the face;  resorting to oxymorons such as “forcing people to be free” to justify the jackboots of the 'silver souls' and constant references to a philosopher-king “statesman” who, in his theoretically-infinite wisdom, might be required to tell the people what “their” will really was. The only substantive difference between Platonic tyranny and the founding principles of left-wing collectivism is the nature of their myths, with Plato being the more honest.

Which is precisely why you can open USA TODAY and find a “Republican” repeating the same elitist, anti-democratic arguments without the slightest hint of shame.

The GOP's disdain for democracy has been obvious ever since they backed a man who openly mocked the electorate as easily-manipulated fools as their last, best chance to stop the would-be destroyer of democracy. But even as I marveled at the scale of his disconnect, I still contextualized Cruz's statement alongside Hillary's “Basket of Deplorables” comment, or Romney's “$10,000 bet -” momentary slips from elitists who truly believed they controlled the masses, but still had to mouth a “noble lie” of democratic equality to keep them placated. But this can't be squared with the ongoing public proclamations of never-Trumpers, as exemplified by Tom Nichol's USA Today op-ed, which screams in its headline that he's a “Republican” that nonetheless wants to see the Republican party destroyed to expel the filthy proles and their “inane populist keggers” from power. Nichols isn't an aberration, but an anecdote of the larger group, as evidenced by the histrionic hissy fit Jeff Flake threw on the Senate floor after admitting his own constituents sided with the President, not him. If the Never-Trumpers great concern was for the welfare of America, they'd have heeded Dennis Pranger's plea to back Trump, as he was guaranteed to cleave closer to everything their political ideology says is good for the nation, whereas the alternative was the embodiment of everything they held detrimental to it.

Instead, they seek to defend a system, the structure that has embodied and preserved the power of their elite class, as one can see in their own arguments. Flake whined at length about Trump's temerity in attacking the sanctity of the establishment media, (and by extension the majority of the public) and Nichols has the astonishing gall to defend the likes of the FBI and CIA, despite a mountain of evidence detailing their betrayals of the public trust - and not just recent ones. The Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture's declassified summary describes a rogue CIA not only engaged in barbaric atrocities, but which actively concealed their crimes from Congress, the White House, the Department of Justice and their own Inspector General. If that wasn't enough, the Vault 7 leaks revealed  in great detail that the CIA had invested astonishing sums of money into duplicating the NSA's hacking abilities - a colossal waste of funds only explicable by a desire to avoid the public paper trails necessitated by ordinary inter-agency cooperation. Nor has conservative constituency forgotten the FBI's long history of failures, such as the FBI sniper who blew the head off a mother holding her baby in her arms during the Ruby Ridge “standoff,” or repeatedly being caught in lies about their 2016 campaign misconduct after months of bureaucratic stalling, which makes their current protestations of innocence vis a vis the Nunes Memo hard to credit. And indeed, the preponderance of evidence has had the predictable impact on public opinion.

Yet both Flake and Nichols - despite knowing full well that the electorate's opinion is stacked against them - declined to challenge the evidence and argue to the people (outside of some hot takes on Twitter.) Instead, they reserved their grand speeches and national-circulation op-eds to howl at Trump for attacking those institutions. Considering their open contempt for the electorate, it's not hard to see why - if the voters are stupid sheep, then blame belongs with Trump for using his demagogic power to turn them against the institutions usually relied upon to control them. Indeed, the shockingly open contempt Nichols stuffs into every paragraph of his op-ed documents a complete lack of concern regarding backlash from the peasant class - he refers to us as people throwing “inane populist keggers,” “bellowing drama queens,” drones in a “cult of personality,” “white welfare-statist” whores auctioning off our loyalty, reflexively angry fools who “drift in mindless rage and willful ignorance, the “New Know-Nothings” that must be purged. The astonishingly brazen contempt for the intellect of millions of American voters is proof positive that he thinks no more of it than a farmer discussing slaughterhouses in earshot of a cow. He wouldn't dare unless he truly believed that the people's agency didn't matter; that they could be brought to heel in short order if only the mechanisms to do so aren't demolished by the demagogic power of Trump.

This is the true nature of the “never-Trumpers;” true believers in Plato's vision of aristocratic totalitarianism - Plato's Republicans. Nichols is a particularly illustrative example not just for the sincere openness of his disdain, but because he's written an entire book devoted to the theme - “The Death of Expertise.” Assuming you've no wish to pay nine bucks to be called a knuckle-dragging retard over and over, you can read Nichol's Federalist feature to get the gist. Summarized, he resents the necessity to address arguments to the public as if they're competent human beings, capable of understanding a reasonable argument expressed in plain language. According to him, “the ordinary interlocutor in such debates isn’t really equipped to decide what constitutes “evidence” or to know it when it’s presented.” If the proletariat is this stupid, then arguments can only be judged by the credentials of the personages putting them forth; credentials bestowed by organizations and systems who's own credibility the proles are likewise incapable of judging. It's effectively an argument for oligarchy, with democracy a veneer of polite fiction at best. He offers lip service to this outcome being “terrible,” but says it's inevitable if citizens stay “imprisoned by their fragile egos and caged by their own sense of entitlement.” Clearly they need to sit down, shut up, listen to Daddy, and eat their peas. (To opine that “fragile egos” and “entitlement” is antithetical to democracy is to reveal either a disbelief in democracy, or utter ignorance of the human condition.)

Nichols has naturally anointed Trump the Anti-Expert, surfing to power on a tide of uncritical media institutions and an echo-chamber internet. It echoes Flake's slavish praise of the free press as the “guardian of democracy,” which should always be given the benefit of the doubt in any question of truth. Recall Chris Coumo's statements live on CNN; “it’s illegal to possess these stolen documents. It’s different for the media. So everything you learn about this, you’re learning from us.” You see, the educated journalism experts are “equipped to decide what constitutes evidence” in a way the filthy proletariat - I mean, “ordinary interlocutor” simply isn't. The establishment media's a perfect example of Nichol's argument in particular and the sentiments of Platonic Republicans in general; an institutional pillar of democracy, staffed by golden experts and devoted to lecturing the moronic masses.

It's also bullshit, as evidenced by the American Republic's lack of that pillar from the Founding till at least the Spanish-American war, with the first inklings of it only appearing in the 1830s. When the Bill of Rights was penned, partisan printing was the norm, with those who owned presses free to print anything they damn well pleased - and any jackass or cabal thereof with the cash to buy one, had one, experts be damned. Freedom of the Press was simply freedom to print; with no man able to lie louder or longer than another. The raw partisanship of those early American presses so resemble modern blogs that some academics have drawn the parallels directly. The ongoing disintegration of the “objective” establishment media and the simultaneous rise of partisan “alternative” news is simply a return to form. The openly feral, partisan hatred of today's media is just the final flowering of an insidious bias that the likes of Bernard Goldberg had started documenting a decade prior. (With years of industry experience and 12 Emmy awards, I believe he qualifies as an “expert.”) And yet, somehow, despite its absence for the first century of America's existence, and its worm-eaten weakness in recent decades, we're expected to hail it as an “essential pillar” of our democracy, a “fourth estate,” an undeclared branch of government, an additional check-and-balance.

I know this historiography, because despite being a “new Know-Nothing” Trump voter drifting in “mindless rage and willful ignorance,” I've also earned a bachelor's degree in Journalism and Political Science. From an actual four-year school that gave me a diploma on fancy paper, no less. Something else my formal education introduced me to was “low-information rationality,” the astonishing theory that so-called “low-information voters” don't need to read both candidates hundred-point plans to know  that between the two choices, the Republican will be more conservative than the Democrat. Building on that theory, and surprisingly high opinion-poll pluralities on distrusting media even before CNN started lying about fish feeding and hyperventilating over random white trucks, I offer this hypothesis: the American public can eventually figure out when they're being fed a line of steaming bullshit.

For Plato's Republicans and Never-Trumpers, a more personal formulation: if you believe you can piss on our legs and tell us it's raining, you're badly mistaken. We have swallowed your noble lies and myths for decades, and we've only the ruin of our great cities, the plight of our middle class and the poverty of our rural populations to show for it. With the destruction all around us, you cannot now tell us you still know best and expect us to believe it. And you, Mr. Nichols, most certainly cannot slander us as fools, castigate us for not slavishly obeying our self-proclaimed betters, and then think there is a place for you in this party, where you can stay “for now.” An expert of your intellectual caliber should be able to count, but since this seemingly escapes you I'll remind you that Trump won the elections, ergo, he won the electorate.

We are the party, now.

Don't let the door hit you in the ass.

[go-redgirl]

By Conrad Black Monday, 24 August 2020 05:55 AM Current | Bio | Archive

The opening two nights of the Democratic national convention last week produced the greatest deluge of monstrous political falsehoods in any two evenings of American television history.

The champion mythmaker was the venerable Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

After the usual fictions about "systemic racism," the most convenient way of ignoring this summer’s widespread urban terrorism, came the familiar pieties about climate change, an issue that, happily, has run largely out of steam during the coronavirus crisis.

Sanders then decried "the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression."

After four years of the Great Depression, unemployment was over 30 percent and there was no direct aid for those out of work.

This recent artificial dip was a response to a shutdown supported by a broad political and scientific consensus and has already shrunk through a reduction of unemployment in the last three months larger than the entire number of net new jobs created in the eight Obama-Biden years.

Sanders declared that Donald Trump is "leading us down the path of authoritarianism . . . greed, oligarchy, and bigotry."

He urgently assured the convention that the election was about "preserving our democracy," because Trump had "tried to prevent people from voting, undermined the U.S. Postal Service, deployed the military and federal agents against peaceful protesters, threatened to delay the election, and suggested he will not leave office if he loses."

"Under this administration," Sanders said, "authoritarianism has taken root in our country . . . I will work to preserve this nation from the threat that so many of our heroes fought and died to defeat."

President Trump’s concern about huge numbers of ballots being mailed to nonexistent voters or to the wrong addresses and filled out and returned through the post office fraudulently by party organizers is well-founded.

He has appointed a postmaster general with a mandate to shape up the Postal Service, but there is no reason for optimism that in its present condition it could handle 75 million presidential election ballots coming and going.

The occasional deployment of federal marshals and national guardsmen has been to prevent urban guerrillas and hooligans from burning down federal buildings and destroying the monuments to America’s great men.

Trump expressed concern that the Democratic plan to flood the country with posted ballots and harvest them to their own advantage might provoke litigation that would not allow the winner to be identified by inauguration day. He has said that, of course, he would leave office on January 20 if he lost the election. This entire argument is an unutterable fabrication.

So is the allegation of “authoritarianism.” Not a scrap of illustrative evidence was or could be cited in support of it.

But the most odious assertion of all in this farrago of malignant calumnies was to assimilate Trump to the enemies of America whom generations of veterans fought and gave their lives to defeat. I am quite relaxed about political hyperbole, but the comparison of Trump to Nazism, which is what Sanders was implying, gave the entire proceedings what Tennessee Williams called "the stench of mendacity."

It is supremely irritating to have Democratic hypocrites call for unity and promise to "bring the nation together" while denouncing the incumbent president as akin to a Nazi all while failing even to mention, much less criticize, the urban mob violence they have helped provoke and have effectively condoned.

"By rejecting science," Sanders continued, the president "has put our lives and health in jeopardy, refusing to produce the masks, gowns, and gloves our healthcare workers desperately need."

In fact, Trump showed great executive ingenuity in producing those items in great quantities with astounding speed, emancipating the country from the absolute shambles in public health emergency response capability bequeathed to him by Obama and Biden.

Sanders pretentiously affected classical learning in saying "Nero fiddled while Rome burned; Trump golfs. His actions fanned this pandemic, resulting in over 170,000 deaths."

Nero was a self-adulatory psychopath with no aptitude to be emperor, a position he inherited. He was assassinated by his palace guard while he was attempting to commit suicide in recognition of his total failure.

Sanders was inexorable; Trump’s "negligence has exacerbated the economic crisis; instead of maintaining the $600 a week of unemployment supplement," he has unconstitutionally replaced it with "virtually nothing," in fact, he authorized a $400 weekly supplement so that the unemployed have an incentive to return to work. And, naturally, Sanders accused Trump of "threatening the very future of Social Security."

Providentially, Sanders added, "Joe Biden will end the hate and division Trump has created. He will stop the demoralization of immigrants, the coddling of white nationalists, the racist dog-whistling, the religious bigotry, and the ugly attacks on women."

An absolute majority of the sentences in Sanders’ bilious harangue were false.

It was an unintended profession of the total moral bankruptcy of the Democratic campaign; there were no positive suggestions, nothing but unexplained hatred of the president.

The one truthful sentence in all of it may have been the eerie triumphalism that his socialist "movement" had effectively taken over the Democratic Party.

Yet the pièce de résistance of Tuesday evening was from former first lady Michelle Obama. The fact that it was taped more than a week before in Martha’s Vineyard prevented her from inflicting the merits of the vice presidential nominee on us. But what we got was a lengthy avalanche of sanctimonious claptrap.

"A never-ending list of innocent people of color continue to be murdered; stating the simple fact that a black life matters is still met with derision from the nation’s highest office," she said.

[Americans] see people calling the police on folks minding their own business just because of the color of their skin. They see an entitlement that says only certain people belong here, that greed is good, and winning is everything because as long as you come out on top, it doesn’t matter what happens to everyone else . . . They see our leaders labeling fellow citizens enemies of the state while emboldening torch-bearing white supremacists. They watch in horror as children are torn from their families and thrown into cages, and pepper spray and rubber bullets are used on peaceful protesters for a photo-op.

Those who accuse their opponents of Nazi tendencies reinvent Goebbels' "big lie" adapted to squalid Alinskyite Democratic urban bossism. The cages were in fact comfortable simulations of McDonald’s outlets and were set up during her husband’s regime and the “peaceful protesters” had been rioting for hours, hurling projectiles at the police, and trying to tear down a statue of Andrew Jackson.

The walk to the "president’s church" the day after her peaceful protesters tried to burn it down may have been a photo-op, but it was an elegant gesture indicating that, unlike the Democratic Party, the administration would not tolerate unlimited violence, arson, assault, and vandalism from the mobs that the Democrats not only "coddled," but lionized.

Michelle Obama’s promise that "when they go low, we go high," was more galling than usual as the indictments of her husband’s administration begin, for the greatest outrage against constitutional presidential elections in American history.

Mercifully, the second evening closed with a tasteful, even encouraging, note with the gracious address of Jill Biden.

After all those who preceded her, she was a tentative reassurance that some sanity, decency, and integrity remain in that party, which has been hijacked by extremists.

One can only wish her well.

[battybat-boss]

Do Bullies Always Win?

Trump's bullying worked with Canada, has half-worked with Iran and North Korea, but has had nothing but malign impact on Israeli-Palestinian relations.

The news that Canada has caved on trade has me depressed. The glee with which Donald Trump has announced his latest “victory” is galling. Sure, he didn't force Mexico and Canada to do everything he wanted in the replacement for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). But he certainly can claim a public-relations coup. And his supporters in Congress are milking the moment for all it's worth.

“While many in Washington claimed it could not be done, President Trump worked tirelessly to bring Canada to the table and negotiate a new trade deal that is better for American workers and consumers,” said Republican Representative Steve Scalise.

Yes, yes, I know: The arc of the moral universe is long and it bends toward justice. The problem is, how long is the arc and how big is the universe? In the shorter term, such as the span of a human lifetime, injustice seems more likely the norm.

I would like to believe that Trump's game of chicken on foreign trade is simply not going to work. But what if it does? What if China blinks? What if the European Union buckles? The game of trade is not simply won by those who can negotiate the longest or write the most detailed treaties. It's often won by those who use crude displays of power.

Geopolitics is not a game for the faint of heart. It's the perfect playground for bullies.

Bullies were on the ascendant even before America's top tyrant won the presidency in 2016. Vladimir Putin, Rodrigo Duterte, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Daniel Ortega: These leaders all believe that their might makes right.

But Trump brings it to another level. Russia, Turkey, Nicaragua and the Philippines all have rich histories of strong men imposing their wills on resistant populations. The United States lacks that tradition. The rule of law is supposed to keep the bullies in check.

Now Trump is bringing into government a whole club of likeminded pugilists. John Bolton and Mike Pompeo are running foreign policy. The god-awful Jeff Sessions is rewriting the rules of law. And now Trump wants to stuff the Supreme Court with frat boys like Brett Kavanaugh, someone who has never known the difference between right and wrong and, in his most recent testimony, tried to bully Congress into confirming his nomination simply because he's, well, entitled to it. Ruthlessness got him this far in his career - why shouldn't he stick with this tactic?

It reminds me of my first day in middle school, when an older boy picked me out of the crowd of incoming sixth graders to punch my arm, a display of power that he enjoyed so much that he turned it into a daily ritual. But the current situation is much worse than that. It's like going to school and discovering that not only is that gang of jerks that hates you still controlling the hallways during breaks. Not only are they still extorting lunch money from the weak at lunch. Not only that, but they've taken over the classrooms and the administration, they decide who gets into what courses and what colleges, and they want to make your entire day a living hell.

Bullying Tactics

Bullies are often, though not always, scared of a real fight. They pick on the weak and the easily intimidated. They talk big. Donald Trump has always talked big. And he seems never to shy away from a fight. But those are verbal battles - in the press or in the courtroom. As for actual fighting, he notoriously avoided the Vietnam War, not for moral reasons but because of supposed bone spurs in his heels.

Like most chickenhawks, Trump talks big about blowing up other countries and taking out their leaders. So far, however, he has only attacked some usual suspects - a few targets in Syria, a widespread bombing campaign in one of the poorest countries on earth (Afghanistan), and a continuation of the US drone program.

True, Trump might be gearing up for a war with Iran. He's being pushed in that direction by people inside his administration (like Bolton and Pompeo) as well as neocon hawks like Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (who recently called Trump a “Twitter tiger”).

But I suspect that Trump wants simply to bully Iran into submission. He has hit the country with the sanctions that the previous administration had removed as a result of the nuclear deal. Already, Iran's oil exports have dropped steeply by 870,000 barrels a day since April. The Trump administration has threatened to penalize any country that imports Iranian oil with secondary sanctions. As a result, South Korea and Japan have already stopped their orders. Meanwhile, US oil exports have gone up, in part to fill the gap.

Of course, not everyone has gone along with Trump. China in particular will continue to purchase Iranian products. And Europeans are openly defying Trump by crafting a deal with Tehran to preserve the nuclear deal and keep open trade and investment links. And oil prices are on the rise, which means more discontent at the pump in the US, particularly among Trump's carbon-guzzling supporters.

Trump says he wants a new nuclear deal. But really the end game is regime change in Tehran. For all but the craziest of neocons, the Iraq War has created a new kind of syndrome: maximum pressure, minimum military involvement. It's what some observers have cannily described as “regime change on the cheap.” So far, thanks to some powerful allies, Iran is hanging tough.

Big Stick, Then Talk

Perhaps if Kim Jong-un were Muslim or didn't have nuclear weapons or had made the supreme mistake of being nice to Barack Obama, Trump wouldn't be interested in sitting down to talk with him. As it was, Trump ratcheted up the rhetoric against North Korea in the first year of his term. Then he pivoted, against the advice of many in his administration, toward negotiations. The result was the Singapore summit in June, the first time a sitting American president met with a North Korean leader.

There have been a few interesting changes in the US-North Korea dynamic. The Pentagon agreed to suspend war games with South Korea last summer. Pyongyang has continued a moratorium on nuclear and missile testing as well as dismantled some non-essential parts of the nuclear complex. But the key problem remains the same. Who will make the first bold move?

Meanwhile, North and South Korea aren't waiting for Trump to get off the dime. They've already begun removing landmines from the Demilitarized Zone. At the last inter-Korean summit, North and South agreed to significant de-escalation, from a no-fly zone over the border to a transformation of the DMZ into a peace park. That's bold, and it's happening now.

As for Trump and Kim? They are apparently enjoying those early days in a romance when men's thoughts turn constantly to love. As Trump said at a recent rally in West Virginia: “I was really being tough and so was he. And we would go back and forth. And then we fell in love, ok? No really. He wrote me beautiful letters. And they're great letters. And then we fell in love.”

So, the two bullies have hit it off. No surprise there. But as in Romeo and Juliet, today's Montagues and Capulets haven't yet ended their generational conflict despite the love of the two principals. Such love affairs usually don't end well.

But let's say that it does, and the mutual bullying works. In reality, the détente between Washington and Pyongyang will have more to do with the patient negotiations of the quintessential anti-bully, South Korea President Moon Jae-in.

Stomping on the Palestinians

Trump has promised a brand new deal for Middle East peace. That's the fraudulent businessman at work. He's slapped a “new and improved” sticker on a product that is demonstrably inferior to its previous versions, and somehow he thinks the world will buy it.

The Trump administration has put maximum pressure on Palestinians to negotiate from a progressively weaker position and minimum pressure on Israel to make any concessions at all. Trump has moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem (a major Israeli demand), zeroed out $200 million in bilateral assistance for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, cut US financial support for a UN agency that has long helped Palestinian refugees, and closed down the Palestinians' de facto embassy in Washington, DC.

The proper response to this bullying is, of course, to tell the Trump administration to shove its “deal of the century” right up its Foggy Bottom.

And it's not just Palestinians and liberal American Jews who feel this way. Here's what former Israeli military spokesman Peter Lerner has to say: “While it is Trump's prerogative to pick and choose whom to support, and how to support them, the ramifications of these abrupt steps will only empower the radicals. The deal of the century can't be made with Israel alone, and hardballing the Palestinians into submission is likely to blow up on Israel's doorstep.”

It's one thing bullying Iran and North Korea. These countries might be backed up against a wall, but they have choices. The Palestinians, after losing so much and then losing even more under Trump, basically have nothing left to lose - except their dignity. Why should they come to the negotiating table to trade this last resource for a manifestly unfair deal?

So, in the four examples cited, bullying worked with Canada, has half-worked with Iran and North Korea, and has had nothing but malign impact on Israeli-Palestinian relations.

Unfortunately, for Trump and his minions, bullying isn't just a tactic, it's a way of life.

The Comeuppance?

If life imitated Hollywood, the bullies would either experience a life-affirming conversion or get their just desserts.

Let's forget about the first option. Donald Trump, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo: These guys are not going to pull a David Brock and suddenly realize the many errors of their ways. Then what about option two? I'd love to see Trump and his crew escorted from the federal government to the federal penitentiary. But how many members of the George W. Bush administration faced prison time for the mishandling of the Iraq War, the torture policy and the other disasters of US foreign policy? Only one: Lewis Libby, for his role in the Valerie Plame affair. And how many members of the financial community went to prison for their role in the banking crisis of 2008? Again, only one.

It may turn out that a couple more Trumpsters have to face jail time as a result of the Mueller probe. Maybe even the president himself will be Caponed over his myriad tax scams. But I have my doubts that the aftermath of the 2020 elections will provide us with the grand spectacle of a mass perp walk from the White House.

Unfortunately, the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 election disproved the adage that “cheaters never prosper.” Indeed, his whole life stands testament to the grim truth that cheaters, if they cheat on a truly grand scale, can get away with it. The same, alas, applies to bullies.

But not always. The #MeToo movement is only the latest reminder that organized resistance can bring down very powerful bullies. It's not exactly a Hollywood ending - not until they make a movie about Harvey Weinstein's rise and fall - but it's a whole lot better than suffering in silence. As for the Trump administration, well, I don't know about you but I'd like to shorten the arc of the moral universe and bend it a lot more acutely toward justice.

*[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer's editorial policy.

The post Do Bullies Always Win? appeared first on Fair Observer.

[nothingman]

John Feffer | (Foreign Policy in Focus) | – –

The evidence is in: The “adults in the room” at the White House have enabled Trump’s worst impulses, not checked them. <

In the middle of September, Harvard University announced that it was inviting two controversial new fellows to the Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School: former Trump administration spokesman Sean Spicer and whistleblower Chelsea Manning. At the august institution, they would be joining Corey Lewandowski, one of Trump’s campaign managers, along with several Democratic Party operatives.

But it was not to be. Within a day of the announcement, Harvard rescinded Chelsea Manning’s invitation because of “controversy” attending the offer. Dean of the Kennedy School Douglas Elmendorf had this to say: “I see more clearly now that many people view a Visiting Fellow title as an honorific, so we should weigh that consideration when offering invitations.”

Strangely, the invitation to the thoroughly dishonorable Lewandowski did not seem affected by this rationale.

Harvard snubbed Manning in part because people like Mike Pompeo, current head of the CIA, cancelled an appearance at a Harvard forum, saying that “I believe it is shameful for Harvard to place its stamp of approval upon her treasonous actions.”

I’m not a big fan of WikiLeaks — even before its conduct in the 2016 elections — but I’d still be interested in hearing Chelsea Manning interact with other folks at the Kennedy School on questions of public service and morality. So, I’m upset at Harvard’s retraction of the invitation.

But what really bugs me is Harvard’s pandering to the Trump crowd as if they were legitimate political actors. They’re not. They’re collaborationists. They may or may not have collaborated with a foreign power against the United States (let the various investigating committees determine that). But I’m expanding the term here to mean that they are collaborating with a political figure — Donald Trump — whose behavior is inimical to American democracy.

Even if they aren’t ultimately thrown into jail for a variety of improprieties, the Trump collaborationists should be frozen out of the mainstream. Obviously I’m thinking about the future, since places like Harvard are always kowtowing to those in power in the present. But I’m looking forward to a day after, say, 2020, when America goes through its own de-Baathification process, and the leading lights of the Trump administration are purged from public life.

Okay, maybe you don’t want to go that far. De-Baathfication, after all, had lousy consequences for Iraq. Then let’s just use Harvard’s language but apply it more appropriately. “Many people view a Visiting Fellow title as an honorific, so we should weigh that consideration when offering invitations,” Elmendorf said. Those who collaborated with the Trump administration — those who served in high positions and profited materially and professionally from those positions — should simply not be honored. Even if a departing Trump pardons all his cronies, they should feel the sting of public exclusion.

Call it an anti-Trump blacklist, a political boycott comparable to the economic boycott of Trump products. Perhaps, you’re wondering, why I’m focusing on Trump. Many of his policies resemble those of previous administrations like those of Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush. Why not expand the boycott to include all the neoconservatives responsible for the Iraq War, among other catastrophes? It’s equally galling to see a war criminal like Elliott Abrams still accepted in polite company (and the Council on Foreign Relations).

I certainly disagreed with those figures and their policies. But this administration is different. Donald Trump has crossed the line on so many fronts. To ensure that his “innovations” in the realms of racism, misogyny, militarism, deception, secrecy, and the “deconstruction of the administrative state” do not become institutionalized in U.S. society requires not only broad-based condemnation but, eventually, public exclusion as well.

Adults in the Room

Shortly after the 2016 election, I was on an NPR program making my case for non-engagement with the Trump administration. The host was aghast: Didn’t I acknowledge the important of “adult supervision” in the White House? Wouldn’t it be better to have some sensible people near Trump to prevent him from flying off the nuclear handle?

And who would these adults be exactly, I retorted? Steve Bannon? Michael Flynn? I doubted that anyone who made it through the vetting process would necessarily qualify as an adult — at least in the sense that the NPR host meant — and even if such a grey eminence managed to get into the administration, he or she would likely be brought down to Trump’s level, not the other way around.

In a recent article in The New York Review of Books, James Mann traces the origins of the phrase “adults in the room” and its associated phrase of “adult supervision.” “Before Trump, this Washington lingo was usually a cover for policy differences,” Mann writes.

The “adults” were usually those who didn’t stray too far from the political center, however that was defined at the moment. Bernie Sanders has never qualified as an “adult” in the Washington usage of the word, although he is old enough to collect Social Security; nor did Ralph Nader; nor did Rand Paul, though he is old enough to perform eye surgery. What made them deficient was not their character or their immaturity, but their views.

Now, however, the phrase refers less to ideology and more to behavior. “For the first time, America has a president who does not act like an adult,” Mann continues. “He is emotionally immature: he lies, taunts, insults, bullies, rages, seeks vengeance, exalts violence, boasts, refuses to accept criticism, all in ways that most parents would seek to prevent in their own children.”

And thus, America is supposed to breathe easier because a trio of military men (John Kelly, James Mattis, H.R. McMaster) and an oil company executive (Rex Tillerson) are in place to rein in Trump’s more infantile impulses.

Moreover, a rogue’s gallery of non-adults have already departed the administration as a result of scandal or sheer incompetence: the aforementioned Sean Spicer, his almost replacement Anthony Scaramucci, Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, Tom Price, Reince Priebus, Mike Flynn. Some, like Trump’s pick to head the Drug Enforcement Agency, withdrew from consideration even before he had to face withering questions about his support for the pharmaceutical industry. Surely the process works if it ejects such ridiculous figures as if they were tainted food in the political digestive tract.

Poking fun at this list of not-so-dearly-departed administration officials is too easy. More important is to demonstrate that the so-called adults are doing as much if not more damage to this country than the people who didn’t spend enough time in their jobs to screw things up royally.

So, before assigning blame on specific issues, let’s take a look at exactly how “adult” U.S. foreign policy has been over the last ten months. The United States has come close to tearing up the most important arms control deal of the last 25 years and edging closer to war with Iran. It has escalated the conflict with North Korea, which has raised the risk of a nuclear exchange. It has extended the longest American war by sending thousands more troops to Afghanistan. It has continued a misguided “war on terrorism” by supporting the Saudi devastation of Yemen, expanding the CIA’s capacity for conducting drone strikes, and helping to create the next generation of anti-Western jihadists in Syria and Iraq.

Beyond war and peace issues, it has pulled out of the Paris climate accord, withdrew from UNESCO, and reinstituted the “global gag rule” on abortion that will affect nearly $9 billion in U.S. funding of health initiatives around the world. It has continued to push for the building of the infamous wall on the border with Mexico, implemented several travel bans that disproportionately target Muslims, and gone after the Dreamers. It has proposed slashing foreign aid and State Department funding more generally. It has driven a stake through the heart of multilateralism.

What exactly is “adult” about this rash and destructive foreign policy? Yes, the world hasn’t been destroyed (yet) by nuclear war. But that’s a pretty low bar for the administration’s accomplishments.

Nor is it possible to argue that Trump himself is solely responsible for this foreign policy. Trump has only a vague grasp of foreign policy to begin with. His impulse is to oppose whatever the Obama administration put together — the Iran deal, participation in the Paris accords, various trade deals — even where there might be bipartisan support. To get any of these concrete policies implemented, Trump needs foreign policy professionals who can, at the very least, spell words correctly and use the proper names of foreign leaders. Trump relies on these “adults” not to restrain him but to implement his craziest ideas.

So, the only conclusion is that Tillerson, Mattis, McMaster, and Kelly have at least some, if not sole, responsibility for Trump’s foreign policy. Tillerson has presided over the destruction of the State Department — its personnel cuts, its circumscribed influence. Mattis has facilitated the significant budget increases for the Pentagon. McMaster has called the president’s tweets on North Korea “completely appropriate” and shares the president’s distaste for the Iran nuclear deal. John Kelly, in his former role as head of Homeland Security, was a big booster of the travel ban.

The evidence is in. Engagement at the very highest levels with the Trump administration has not tempered its worst qualities. If anything, these “adults” have been the chief enablers of this most reckless of presidents. They’ve given him the thinnest frosting of legitimacy. Moreover, even these so-called adults don’t rescue the Trump administration from being outside the norms of democratic discourse in this country.

The Politics of Lustration

In Eastern Europe, after the changes of 1989, the successor governments considered laws that would prevent those who collaborated with the Communist apparatus from serving in public office. These were controversial laws. It was often difficult to determine who had collaborated (as opposed to simply been accused of collaborating), and the process was quickly politicized by various political parties. Also, what constituted collaboration: membership in the Communist Party, working in the secret police, or just communicating with the secret police?

Still, lustration served as a way of distinguishing one era from another, of drawing what the Poles called a “thick line” between unacceptable collaboration and legitimate politics.

Lustration, like de-Baathification, was a deeply flawed process. But I’m attracted to the idea of eventually drawing a thick line between acceptable democratic practice and what the Trump administration has attempted to do in this country. I’m not talking about going after civil servants or low-level appointees. I’m certainly not talking about Trump voters. No, only the topmost officials in the administration, including his Cabinet of Horrors, should be subjected, post-2020, to an informal ban on further public service or the receipt of anything that might be construed an honor at a major institution.

Let me be clear. I’m not talking about Republicans. Many Republicans have already taken strong stands against Trump’s excesses, and many more will do so over the next three years. No, this campaign against collaborationists must be bipartisan. And the targets should certainly include registered Democrats like chief economic advisor Gary Cohn.

It won’t be a witch hunt. These people are extraordinarily rich and powerful. Their wealth and power will survive public shaming. But such a process will be absolutely important to discredit Trumpism not just as a belief system but as an ideology of power in which all methods of achieving wealth and position are legitimate.

We can’t put Trump and his claque into the stockade like in Puritan America. We can’t ostracize them — send them into foreign exile for 10 years, as the ancient Athenians did. But we can declare the collaborationists, including the “adults in the room,” an affront to human dignity and threaten to resign from, boycott, or malign any institution that dares to hire them, honor them, or work with them.

It’s something to look forward to during the long political winter ahead.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus and the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands.

The Young Turks: “John Kelly Lies To Cover For Trump”

via Informed Comment

[go-redgirl]

Bill Hagerty Is No Mitt Romney (and That's Fine by Trump)

From a distance, Bill Hagerty seems eerily familiar.  

The businessman made his money in private equity, turned his mind to foreign affairs, and now talks about his faith, his family, and the international threats to his country. All of it in the sincere but calculated tones characteristic of a business consultant. Minus the impeccably coiffed hair and the trademark Donald Trump skepticism, one might mistake Hagerty for Utah Sen. Mitt Romney.  

But again, from a distance.  

After business pedigrees and foreign policy expertise, the similarities end. Hagerty is one Republican that the leader of the GOP desperately wants in the upper chamber, so much so that the president endorsed Hagerty before he announced his U.S. Senate bid. If Hagerty wins the race in Tennessee, squint a little and he may start to look a little like a #MAGA version of Mitt.

For the Senate run to happen, Hagerty first had to quit a job he was quite good at. Trump appointed him ambassador to Japan, a post he held for two years as he became arguably the most effective of the administration’s diplomats. Hagerty helped hammer out an international trade deal with Japan and assured the Japanese government of U.S. steadfastness as ballistic missiles from North Korea blasted over the island nation. All the while, Hagerty monitored closely the actions of China. Trump and Hagerty evidently became close, but eventually the president wondered if his ambassador would consider serving him closer to home. Sen. Lamar Alexander had said he would not seek another term. Would Hagerty run?

“It had come up actually during golf,” Hagerty told RealClearPolitics hours before attending a Christmas party at the White House and before clarifying that there were several conversations off the fairway. “He just knew my heart, and he knows how much I love Tennessee. In fact, that’s how he opened his endorsement.”  

This is true. “Tennessee loving Bill Hagerty, who was my Tennessee Victory Chair and is now the very outstanding Ambassador to Japan, will be running for the U.S. Senate,” Trump tweeted out of the blue one afternoon. “He is strong on crime, borders & our 2nd A. Loves our Military & our Vets. Has my Complete & Total Endorsement!”  

The endorsement came on July 12. Hagerty announced he would resign four days later, on July 16; he officially launched his campaign on Sept. 9.  

In Hagerty, the president sees a future senator whose loyalty he can count on. “He wants somebody that is capable of working closely with him to secure our borders, to stand strong against crime, and all the things he said about me in his endorsement,” Hagerty said.  

“The president reminded me of this the other day,” he said with pride. “I am the only member of his administration who he has endorsed to be on the ticket with him in 2020 -- I am the only member of the executive branch.”  

Hagerty helped deliver a 26-percentage-point victory for the president in Tennessee as Victory chair for Trump. He then joined the transition team, working with Trump “to help him select his Cabinet.” After Trump settled into office, the nod came for ambassador.  

Hagerty had to handle the journey delicately, even diplomatically, because, like so many other Republicans, Trump was not his first choice. He had served as a Jeb Bush delegate before throwing his support behind Sen. Marco Rubio when the other Floridian flamed out. Was there something that those two had that Trump did not? Perhaps they had better foreign policy chops than a real estate tycoon from New York?  

“My focus early on was on winning this election for Republicans. I have always supported our nominee and, as soon as it became clear that Donald Trump had what it took to win, that’s when I came on board,” Hagerty said, sidestepping a question about policy to give an answer about party loyalty. That trait has continued in the Trump era. If the two men see the world differently, the former ambassador won’t say. He has a clear definition of the diplomatic duties of an ambassador, and it doesn’t include public disagreements with the president.  

“Our job as his representative and the representative of the United States is to carry that policy forward. He is the commander-in-chief of the United States,” he explained. “Were we to differ on issues, I know how to do that and it’s by speaking with him directly, not by issuing a press release or going on TV to voice my differences but to have a direct conversation.”  

This approach didn’t lend itself to splashy headlines. For most of his time in Tokyo, Hagerty flew under the media radar. But abroad, the ambassador was very much in the middle of several tense international moments of the Trump presidency. After North Korea launched a pair of intercontinental ballistic missiles and detonated a hydrogen bomb, Hagerty traveled to the Hermit Kingdom with his family.  

With his wife and four children watching, Hagerty crossed into the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea in January of 2018. The message to the Japanese, the only people to ever be on the receiving end of a nuclear weapon, was deliberate: “I was able to say with complete confidence that the men and women of our U.S. military are capable of protecting and defending me and my family,” he said, “just like they are capable of protecting and defending that peninsula and just like they are capable of protecting and defending the people of Japan.”  

A year and a half later, Trump became the only sitting U.S. president in history to step on North Korean soil. Hagerty praised that visit as “brilliant.” Although he cautions that “we still aren’t where we want to be,” he insisted to RCP that the presidential courtship of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un “has completely changed the dynamic.” After RCP's interview with Hagerty, however, North Korea said publicly that it sees no reason to continue its self-imposed moratorium on nuclear testing and promised that the world would soon see it unveil “a new strategic weapon.”  

Developments in Japan have been more positive, as the country with the third largest economy in the world recently signed a trade deal with the United States. The agreement cuts tariffs on agriculture and manufactured products, easily making it the crowning achievement of Hagerty’s tenure in Japan.  

“My effort for a year and a half -- and I worked my heart out on this -- was to get the Japan trade deal through. A big aspect of that agreement is agriculture, and what I articulated to the Japanese is that our farmers were carrying the brunt of the trade war with the Chinese,” Hagert recalled. “I asked the Japanese to please step up and help us because they are going to benefit too.”

It was particularly good news for Tennessee, where farmland makes up over 40% of the landscape. A trade deal offers some much-needed relief for those who make their living in agriculture, the first casualties of the Trump trade war with China.  

Send him to the Senate, he says, because his experience with Trump and his business background will enable him to hit the ground running -- “no on-the-job training required.” He wants to “build the wall,” defend the Second Amendment, and “stand strong on crime.” He also wants to “stand up against radical Islamic terrorism,” “stand up to China,” and “certainly stand with Israel.” Meanwhile,  Hagerty promises to stand with Trump.  

The former ambassador is galled by the impeachment effort, which he says complicates diplomacy abroad. “Any time we create a sense in the minds of our negotiation partners that there is a chance of removal other than an election, it weakens us,” he said. His frustration isn’t reserved for House Democrats, who voted to impeach Trump just five days after the interview. He can’t abide disloyalty to Trump from his party’s own ranks.  

“The norm is Democrats, but when Republicans join into that discussion in any way, it causes significant further deterioration in our negotiation posture. This is what has upset me when I’ve seen that behavior,” Hagerty said.

Anyone in particular?

“When Mitt Romney talks about impeachment, he falls into that rhetoric,” Hagerty replied. “I think that is damaging for our interests overseas.”  

It is an answer consistent with his own political persuasions, and one that might play well with voters already inclined to support the president. It is also a little awkward, as Hagerty served as a national finance chairman for Romney's 2008 presidential campaign.  

The former presidential nominee has become a pariah to the current president. Romney interviewed unsuccessfully for the job of secretary of state and, after that fell through, won his Senate race in Utah. Now one of the Republican Party’s most vocal critics of Trump, he recently rebuked Trump for his “brazen and unprecedented appeal to China and to Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden.” Trump responded by calling Romney “a pompous ass.”

A Romney spokeswoman declined to comment for this story, but if Hagerty wins his race the two men would be Senate colleagues. Some awkwardness would be inevitable, especially after Hagerty promised to make a priority of opposing “the Republicans who tend to side with Democrats from time to time against our president.”  

Making a senator out of one of his former ambassadors would no doubt delight Trump. He would have a foreign policy voice in the upper chamber, one with sterling credentials and, this time, unfailing political loyalty.  

_______________________________________________________________________

OPINION:  Well, its good news to hear that Bill Hagerty is no Mitt Romney because Mitt Romney is a ‘traitor’ to the Republican Party and not to mentioned that he’s a weak human-being.

The sooner Mitt Romney is voted out of the Republican Party it will become stronger than the party has been over the past few years.  

No Republican in this country should ever vote for Mitt Romeny because he’s weak, a traitor to the Republican Party and cannot be trusted.  Never, ever allow Mitt Romney to be in any meetings withe the Republicans when you’re meeting on highly confidential and sensitive information.  Because Mitt Romney will surely ‘leak’ it to the Democrats.  

In fact, never allow Mitt Romney to even know that the Republicans are having a meeting, because he just may be wearing a ‘listening devise’ so that his Democrat buddies can listen in on the confidential information.

In fact, just exclude Mitt Romney from all Republicans meeting and that along, will seal up all the ‘leaking’ to his Democrat Buddies.  In fact, Mitt Romney could be an inside ‘spy’ for the Democrats.

Don’t trust Mitt Romney even if you’ll looking directly at the ‘weasel’ of a human being.