Saturday, February 10, 2024

Saturday, December 23, 2023

Whaddayacallit

I have my playwright friend Danny visiting from the UK for the holidays, and I often ask him, “Hey, what do you call [fill in the blank] in Britain?” Then I have to explain to him how our electoral system works.

Tuesday, December 5, 2023

The View From There

Nate White in the London Daily once explained why the British don’t like Trump.

A few things spring to mind. Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed. So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.

Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever. I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman. But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.

Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers. And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.

There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface. Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront. Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul. And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist. Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that. He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat. He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.

And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully. That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead. There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they are down.

So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think ‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:

• Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.

• You don’t need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.

This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss. After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum. God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid. He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart. In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump.

And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish: ‘My God… what… have… I… created?’ If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set.

Prat, git, wanker…

Sunday, October 15, 2023

Sunday Reading

The Impossible Dilemma of Gaza — Ruth Margalit in The New Yorker.

In 1956, a group of armed Palestinian and Egyptian men ambushed a young Israeli officer in the wheat fields of Nahal Oz, a kibbutz in southern Israel, near the border with the Gaza Strip. They shot him, dragged his body into Gaza, then returned it, mutilated, to the kibbutz. The next day, Moshe Dayan, the Israeli military’s chief of staff, delivered a short but searing eulogy, standing over the officer’s grave. “The quiet of a spring morning blinded him, and he did not see the stalkers of his soul,” Dayan said. Alluding to the Biblical story of Samson, he added, “Have we forgotten that this group of young people dwelling at Nahal Oz is bearing the heavy gates of Gaza on its shoulders?”

At 6:31 a.m. last Saturday, the heavy gates of Gaza tore open again. Some fifteen hundred Gazan fighters led by Hamas bulldozed the border fence, stormed into Israel, and perpetrated some of the worst atrocities in the country’s short but bloodied history. In Nahal Oz, a thirteen-year-old boy who had gone on an early-morning run returned home to find his parents and his two sisters slaughtered. Many neighboring families were murdered with similar brutality. Others were abducted and taken into Gaza, the injured displayed like spoils of war. At the nearby kibbutz Kfar Aza, the bodies of residents, including children, were recovered on Tuesday; there were “cribs overturned,” an eyewitness said. A scorched smell still hung in the air. “It’s something I never saw in my life, something more like a pogrom from our grandparents’ time,” an Israeli commander told reporters.

Within days, that trauma and outrage had come to coexist with a bombing of Gaza and an enormous civilian effort to provide survivors from the border communities with food and shelter. The Israel Defense Forces summoned roughly three hundred and sixty thousand reservists, and many more have volunteered for service—laying aside, for now, the deep divisions that have roiled the country since January, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist government introduced controversial steps to curb judicial oversight of its powers.

As Israel struck Gaza from the air in full force—and cut off all food, water, and electricity to the coastal strip—and as the fate of an estimated hundred and fifty hostages remained unknown, there were growing calls in Israel to “pulverize” Hamas, as one security analyst put it. The rage is understandable; the implications of such statements, less so. The newspaper Yediot Ahronot reported on Wednesday that Israel has been mobilizing for a possible ground invasion, under the command of a former head of its Gaza Division. Sixteen members of Netanyahu’s coalition signed a letter this week calling for “total Israeli control of the Gaza Strip.”

In 2005, after years of repeated attacks and violence, Israel withdrew its military from Gaza and uprooted Jewish settlements there. A military reoccupation now would only incur further mass casualties at a time when Israel is still counting its dead. It would also play directly into the hands of Israel’s archenemy—Iran—by taking an unimaginable toll on Palestinian lives. This could force Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, to enter the conflict, potentially dragging the wider region into war.

Israel faces an impossible dilemma: how to restore a measure of security and deterrence while also insuring the safe return of the hostages. But it risks falling victim to the optics of war by sending troops to reinvade Gaza, thereby creating an illusion of victory. As Israel’s former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett—hardly a dovish figure—put it on Tuesday, “We shouldn’t dance to the tune of Hamas, of Iran. We shouldn’t do the obvious.”

The problem is that, in Netanyahu, Israel has a leader who has repeatedly placed his own political survival above the good of his country. As Hamas launched its devastating assault on Saturday, it reportedly took him less than an hour to scuttle an offer from the opposition to form an emergency unity government. The Prime Minister did not visit the sites of the atrocities. He does not appear to have gone to the hospitals to comfort the grieving families, and he did not take responsibility for his part in the colossal intelligence failure. He did not mention that in the days leading up to the attack three military battalions had been diverted away from the southern communities and into the occupied West Bank, to guard Jewish settlers there.

Instead, Netanyahu sent an emissary to speak to the media—Yossi Shelley, the director-general of the Prime Minister’s office, a man few Israelis had heard of before. Asked to explain the government’s slow response to the attack, Shelley said that the attendees of a music festival in the desert—two hundred and sixty of whom were slain—had “contributed in a significant way to the chaos.”

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden spoke out forcefully against the atrocities. “Infants in their mothers’ arms, grandparents in wheelchairs, Holocaust survivors abducted and held hostage—hostages whom Hamas has now threatened to execute in violation of every code of human morality,” he said. The Pentagon ordered a Navy carrier strike group to the eastern Mediterranean, to protect Israel. Nadav Eyal, a columnist for Yediot, praised Biden’s speech for projecting what had been missing from Netanyahu’s response—empathy. The next day, Netanyahu finally agreed to the terms of a unity government with the centrist leader Benny Gantz. Those terms leave Netanyahu’s far-right partners in the government but create a war cabinet that includes only Netanyahu, Gantz, and Israel’s relatively moderate defense minister, Yoav Gallant. By day five, the Israeli military had retaken control of the last of twenty-two sites to have come under attack. Some communities had been entirely vacated, with surviving inhabitants saying that they’re not sure they will ever go back. In Kfar Aza, the scenes of massacre inside homes were belied by the picture of an idyll that somehow still prevailed outdoors: tidy lawns, strollers, picnic tables.

When Dayan delivered his eulogy in 1956, he warned kibbutz residents on the Gaza border against a false sense of complacency. “Beyond the furrow of the border, a sea of hatred and desire for revenge is swelling, awaiting the day when serenity will dull our path,” he said. It’s hard to imagine serenity ever returning to the area. But the desire for revenge should not overflow.

Doonesbury — Scan this.

Wednesday, August 30, 2023

Don’t Go There

The government of Canada is warning its citizens to be careful when it travels to hostile territory.

Canada has updated its travel advisory for the United States to warn LGBTQ travelers that they are at risk of being affected by state and local laws, amid a recent surge in state-level legislation targeting the community.

“Some states have enacted laws and policies that may affect 2SLGBTQI+ persons. Check relevant state and local laws,” Global Affairs Canada, a government department that oversees the country’s international relations, said in the advisory posted Tuesday. It used the abbreviation “2S” for “two-spirit,” a word used in Canada to describe a spectrum of genders among Indigenous people.

The page also links to broader advice on how LGBTQ people are subject to local laws at their travel destinations, “even if these laws infringe on your human rights.”

Although the advisory did not list any particular state laws or policies, a department spokesperson pointed to legislation passed this year in certain U.S. states “banning drag shows and restricting the transgender community from access to gender affirming care,” among other restrictions, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reported.

I was going to say, “Well, at least they don’t execute you for being gay like they do in Uganda,” but then I remembered the woman in California who was murdered for hanging a pride flag outside her store.

Wednesday, March 15, 2023

Foreign Entanglements

Ron DeSantis is a big seller of his bullying and bazz-fazz here in Florida and some rallies in Iowa (gee, what’s he doing there?), and he finds nodding agreement with his ignorance-based “anti-woke” snake oil among the folks like the two old gaffers I overheard at the diner yesterday morning solving all the world’s problems thanks to two cups of coffee and grits.  As George Burns noted, it’s too bad that the only people who really know how to run the country are driving cabs and cutting hair.  Anyway, Mr. DeSantis was on Tucker Carlson the other night and was asked about Ukraine.

“While the U.S. has many vital national interests — securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness with our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural and military power of the Chinese Communist Party — becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them,” DeSantis said in a statement.

This is at odds with most of the rest of the GOP, but it’s right up Carlson’s — and Trump’s — alley: they’re basically America First isolationists, more worried about starving and desperate brown people trying to cross the Rio Grande on foot than they are about an army with tanks and hyper-sonic missiles invading a sovereign country in Europe.  And he’s also at odds with himself.  In 2015 when he was a back-bencher in Congress, he spoke out against the Obama administration’s “weakness” on supporting Ukraine against the menace of Russia.

“We in the Congress have been urging the president, I’ve been, to provide arms to Ukraine. They want to fight their good fight. They’re not asking us to fight it for them. And the president has steadfastly refused. And I think that that’s a mistake,” DeSantis said in a 2015 radio interview with conservative talk radio host Bill Bennett, which was recently unearthed and reported on by CNN.

What’s changed?  Well, he’s now running for president, and he’s trying to suck up to the base of the party that he thinks will hand him the nomination.

What it really proves is that while he may have been re-elected by a wide margin in Florida (although he basically ran unopposed; sorry, Charlie), that doesn’t endow him with a great deal of insight into foreign policy, and his understanding of geopolitics is limited to what he thinks he needs to say to get on Fox News so he can have a gig when his term is up and he’s in the GOP loser ranks with Scott Walker and Tim Pawlenty.  (Who?  Exactly.)

He also may want to remember that politicians who thought “territorial disputes” were not our business once said the same thing in 1939.  How’d that turn out for Poland, Belgium, and France?

Wednesday, February 15, 2023

Off Course, Of Course

Josh Marshall at TPM tells us what really happened with that Chinese balloon.

After a lot of heated speculation and a bunch of scrambled jet fighters over Canada and the far North of the United States we’re finally getting a credible explanation of the Chinese balloon saga. According to a new report from The Washington Post the United States is now examining the possibility that the People’s Liberation Army simply lost control of the balloon intended to surveil Guam. The US was monitoring the balloon since it went aloft from Hainan Island along China’s south coast. It was tracking along a path to Guam but then seemed to veer north until reaching Alaska.

[…]

The idea that China was going to fly a visible-from-the-ground surveillance balloon across the entire breadth of the United States snapping pictures of military bases routinely photographed by satellites was always borderline absurd. Sure, high altitude balloons might conceivably have some advantages over satellites, specifically in radio signals surveillance. But the intelligence bang for the buck would have to be minimal compared to the immensely provocative and easily detectable nature of the effort. Since the US was watching the balloon the whole time they were apparently, as administration officials said at the time, able to have the bases go dark whenever the balloon came close to them on its slow and loping journey.

The Chinese reaction also fits with this explanation. They began by apologizing and insisting the balloon was merely for meteorological research – mostly meteorological research. They then lashed out at the US for overreacting to the incident and then finally refused to engage through military to military channels after the US shot the balloon down off the coast of South Carolina. The Chinese foreign ministry also appeared unprepared and chagrined by Tony Blinken’s decision to cancel his trip to Beijing.

That’s how Professor Marvel ended up in Oz, after all.

Monday, January 2, 2023

Frontsies

Lizette Alvarez in the Washington Post:

I want to publicly thank the U.S. government and its taxpayers. Why, exactly? Because this country turned my Cuban family and the 2.3 million other Cuban Americans — migrants or their descendants — into the beneficiaries of the single most generous immigration policy in U.S. history.

Unfortunately, six decades of unparalleled government largesse — via laws, orders, regulations and accommodations — don’t often feature in the Cuban American origin story of hard work, professional know-how and university pedigrees. Yet these considerable advantages played a crucial role in helping Cuban Americans become a powerful Latino community.

So I now plead with my fellow Cuban Americans: Never forget just how fortunate our community was, and mostly still is, in the face of the terror and hardship experienced by so many Cubans after the 1959 Cuban communist revolution.

The United States granted us a gilded haven.

Please remember that fact in the narratives we tell each other and others, especially as Haitians, Venezuelans, Salvadorans and Hondurans are shoulder-to-shoulder with Cubans in their quest to cross the border. And the Cuban exodus continues: Some 250,000 Cubans have entered the country this year, according to U.S. government statistics — most of them crossing over from Mexico after flying to a third country, such as Nicaragua.

Despite our good fortune, far too many Cuban Americans in South Florida heartlessly espouse MAGA-fueled anti-immigration sentiments toward equally worthy refugees. Too often, my fellow Cuban Americans let their sense of exceptionalism cloud their hearts. Have decades of comfort snuffed out their empathy?

Instead, they should be arguing that their own story is the template for how other refugees should be treated, regardless of whether the pain is caused by left-wing or right-wing governments.

Yet, this month, Cuban Americans publicly pilloried author and academic Susan Eckstein, who came to Miami to discuss her book, “Cuban Privilege: The Making of Immigrant Inequality in America.” The title lit the fuse, “privilege” being dismissed by critics as “woke.”

A Miami-Dade commissioner called the book “hate-filled” and “anti-Cuban.” Other public figures attacked the author as a bigoted lefty. The event drew so much attention, it was moved to Florida International University, a sponsor of the talk. Protesters and police greeted Eckstein’s arrival. A rebuttal speaker was added to the roster.

At the talk, Eckstein’s critics made clear that they believe Cubans still deserve special treatment because they fled, and still flee, a repressive, one-party communist state, a mere 90 miles from the United States, that deprives citizens of civil liberties. In other words, Cubans are exceptional because their suffering is exceptional.

Except it isn’t. Just ask Haitians in Miami who have long suffered under terror and misrule, or ask the Central Americans who fled civil wars.

As Eckstein observes in her book, the entitlements that our Cuban community has received are legion, unique and should be applied to others as well. Let’s start with the crown jewel of America’s pro-Cuban immigration policy — a 1966 Cold War relic called the Cuban Adjustment Act.

The law allows most Cubans who meet certain requirements to become permanent legal U.S. residents after a year and a day. It has been the pathway for the overwhelming majority of Cuban Americans who have built their lives in the United States, even though policy changes by the past two administrations have made it more difficult but far from impossible.

The law basically presumes they are refugees without requiring them to be judged case by case. And, unlike a handful of other similar laws for other migrants from other places, it has no expiration date. Quick residency also means quicker citizenship, which Cuban Americans have wisely parlayed into voting power. When Florida was a swing state, until recent years, Cuban Americans wielded outsize political influence on Cuba-related U.S. policy. Now that the state leans Republican, the influence remains intact with politicians who want to keep it that way.

The advantages for Cuban migrants have extended well beyond the Cuban Adjustment Act. My mother, sister and brother arrived in Miami in 1961, and my father, a pilot, arrived three weeks later after commandeering the plane he was flying. They received government benefits and work authorization like most of the other Cubans who followed.

Other Cuban arrivals, depending on the year, havereceived low-interest loans for small businesses and college (my brother attended college on one) and cash assistance, food and clothes (all of which my family received). Those who had been doctors or lawyers in Cuba got help when they sought recertification to work in the United States.

And this is a partial list.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), whose parents left Cuba before the revolution, has bemoaned the fact that Cuban Americans now seem to come here strictly for economic reasons, not political ones, given their frequent visits to the island. Yet they still receive myriad U.S. benefits unavailable to other economic refugees.

In the new year, as the border crisis is sure to worsen, I urge my fellow Cuban Americans to lead by example and demand that migrants from other nations be given the same opportunities that the U.S. government has showered on us.

As a white Anglo living in Miami, I’ve been aware that the Cuban immigrants have always been given special treatment compared to immigrants from other Latin American countries.  But every time I’ve politely suggested to my Cuban friends that it’s not quite fair, I’ve gotten various degrees of push-back, ranging from polite assurance that it’s a relic of the Cold War to spittle-flecked shrieking that I’m a communist and have no idea what they went through.  I usually come away from these discussions with the impression that those hard-core folks believe that they are, if not better than those other immigrants, entitled to what they were given.  In other words, they get to take frontsies because Cubans are not everybody else.

It also reaffirms my belief that they fled a dictator they hated because he overthrew a dictator they liked, and their affection for the MAGA mindset is that it conforms with their affinity for authoritarian government.

Monday, September 12, 2022

“And The Realms Across The Seas”

Now that Queen Elizabeth II has died and her successor is in place, the various members of the Commonwealth, which is the remnants of what was once the British Empire, are thinking about letting go of their ties to the British crown, at least as far as having the monarch as their head of state.  From the Washington Post:

For many First Nations people, the monarchy is an institution at the center of a vexed, often traumatic, reckoning with their colonial past. During Black Lives Matter protests around the world, statues of Queen Elizabeth II were among those toppled by protesters.

For others, the death of Queen Elizabeth marks an opportunity to move ahead on an issue that has long been debated.

Soon after Charles was confirmed as king of Antigua and Barbuda, the Caribbean nation’s prime minister, Gaston Browne, said in a television interview that he planned to hold a referendum on the country becoming a republic within three years. In Australia, where the debate about becoming a republic has continued even after a 1999 referendum saw a vote against the change, some lawmakers are again pushing for a republic (to replace its monarch — now King Charles — with a president).

“We need Treaty with First Nations people, and we need to become a Republic,” tweeted Adam Bandt, leader of the environmentalist Greens party, after news of the queen’s death. (Lidia Thorpe, an Aboriginal senator for the party, improvised an extra clause into her swearing-in ceremony last month, adding the word “colonizing” as she swore allegiance to Queen Elizabeth, then the head of state, in a sharp public rebuke of Australia’s colonial past.)

“Condolences to those who knew the Queen. I cannot mourn the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonised peoples,” Mehreen Faruqi, the Greens deputy leader, wrote Friday in a post that garnered more than 4,500 likes.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, in a Monday television interview, appeared to rule out a referendum on becoming a republic during the political term, however, saying his immediate priority was a referendum to recognize Indigenous Australians in the country’s constitution. “Now is not the time to engage in that debate. The Queen’s funeral is being held next Monday,” he said.

Far be it from me, a citizen of a country that has its own imperial/colonial explaining to do, to sit here and tut-tut the British for holding on to the remnants of their well-documented and often-times brutal past of conquering other countries and imposing their rule, way of life, and plundering while they did so. But over the last one hundred years, the empire has dwindled; independence has been granted, willingly or not, to nations that were once a part of the empire, and since the end of World War II, what is left is a business arrangement. The British monarch shows up in places like Australia, Canada, and the Caribbean islands as a face on the currency, and with as much impact as that of those faces on our own currency (quick, who’s on the fifty?).  But those countries are managing on their own, thank you.

This move towards small-R republicanism (Dog forbid they should take up the mantle of the example of the current Republicans in the U.S.) has been moving slowly through the Commonwealth, and perhaps with the new king in London it may well accelerate.  That is up to them, both the British and the countries still with the monarch as the head of state.  And with it should come some reckoning and reconciliation, acknowledging the past forthrightly and bracing for the future.

Then we can talk about Puerto Rico.

Friday, July 1, 2022

Wednesday, March 2, 2022

SOTU Follow-Up

I watched the last forty minutes of President Biden’s State of the Union speech, and while I don’t think he has the oratory skills of FDR, JFK, or even Ronald Reagan, it was pretty solid for a guy facing down fascism both home and abroad.

SOTU’s are usually wish-lists of the current administration’s agenda, not unlike the Queen’s speech at the opening of Parliament.  In this case, however, the president isn’t a constitutional figurehead reciting lines written by the government.  Last night, the president needed to make the case for our support for NATO and the people of Ukraine, putting it in terms that even the viewers of Fox News could grasp: Putin is bad and we should stop him.  Only the lackeys and lapdogs of authoritarians would object to that.

As for the domestic agenda, at least one conservative commentator dismissed it as a re-run of what President Biden and most of the Democratic Party have been pushing.  That’s because he wasn’t necessarily talking to the people in the room; he was shouting over their heads to the coal miners and their families in West Virginia who need prescription drug price controls for their black-lung disease treatment and child care subsidies for the working mothers.  As for inflation, it is one of those realities of economics that comes after every global interruption such as war, plagues, and Republicans cutting taxes to the bone and encouraging greed on the part of corporations who are showing record profits but still claim they need to raise prices.  Republicans are very good at setting the trap for inflation and then blaming someone else when it happens.  For example, gasoline prices are set by a series of factors: supply, transportation, corporate structure, and marketing.  Any change to any of those will effect the price of a gallon of gas at the pump, but notice that none of them are controlled by the President of the United States.  If you think they are, you’re thinking of the wrong president.  That would be Vladimir Putin, for one.

At any rate, I think what we heard last night was a forceful defense not only of an administration’s record and its plans, but a clearer picture of who and what this country could be.  Notice that Mr. Biden did not attack his predecessor nor his minions, nor the insurrectionists who tried to prevent him from being able to speak last night.  I think he knew what really matters isn’t the shouting because you really can’t get any work done if that’s all you’re doing.

Wednesday, February 23, 2022

Putin’s Bitch

No surprise here: The Former Guy is all over Putin.

“I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, ‘This is genius,’ ” Trump continued. “Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine — of Ukraine. Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful. So, Putin is now saying, ‘It’s independent,’ a large section of Ukraine. I said, ‘How smart is that?’ And he’s gonna go in and be a peacekeeper. That’s strongest peace force … We could use that on our southern border.”

He continued to praise Putin a bit later.

“Here’s a guy that says, you know, ‘I’m gonna declare a big portion of Ukraine independent’ — he used the word ‘independent’ — ‘and we’re gonna go out and we’re gonna go in and we’re gonna help keep peace,’ ” Trump said. “You gotta say that’s pretty savvy. And you know what the response was from Biden? There was no response.”

[…]

Few people better encapsulate the right’s mixture of respect for Putin’s autocratic tendencies and the perceived embarrassment of Democratic presidents that results than Donald Trump. When Putin seized Crimea in 2014, Trump declared that “Putin has eaten Obama’s lunch” and pretended to worry that President Barack Obama would do something “very foolish and very stupid to show his manhood.” This, of course, came less than a year after Trump wondered if Putin would become his “new best friend” when the Miss Universe pageant was held in Moscow.

There’s little need to articulate the extent to which Trump flirted with Putin and Russia during his 2016 campaign and his presidency. Remember when he invited Russia’s foreign minister to the Oval Office the day after he fired FBI Director James B. Comey for pressing forward on the Russia probe? Remember when he met with Putin in Helsinki and then emerged to take Putin’s side on Russia’s 2016 election interference? Remember his repeated insistences that he thought it was important to get along with Russia, by which he meant it was important to get along with Vladimir Putin — someone who was not his enemy but might still turn out to be a friend?

Remember when he said that Putin said he was brilliant, which Putin didn’t really say but which helped fuel months of Trumpian enthusiasm about how he and Putin might end up as pals? Remember, too, how Putin was just one of a contingent of authoritarians (Turkey, China, North Korea) who Trump enjoyed being around, preferring being stroked by America’s enemies to being challenged by our allies?

So, without even being asked to take sides in the power struggle between our country and Russia, Trump took sides. Putin was clever and wily, and Biden inept and toothless. There are ways to criticize Biden without explicitly praising the Russian authoritarian actively seeking to reorder democracy in Europe — see the example of every vocal Republican in the Senate — but this was not the path Trump chose to follow.

Of course he’s going to suck up to Putin and the Russian oligarchs. They’re the ones who got him into office in the first place.

Friday, December 31, 2021

Looking Back/Looking Forward

From a year ago:

I’ve been wondering how I would do this post for a long time. I even debated doing it at all, sure that everything I predicted for this year would be out the window and over the fence because once I write it, I don’t look at it. So, let’s open the time capsule and see what’s inside.

I feel even less sure about doing this now, but I’m not above looking back at what I wrote then to see how it landed this year.

Trump will not go quietly; he may even announce his run for 2024 as they give him the bum’s rush, literally or figuratively, as Joe Biden is being sworn in. But by March, if not sooner, he’ll be old news and as much a distant memory as “Pink Lady and Jeff.” (Look it up.)

Half-right but boy howdy really wrong on the second part, proven horrifically wrong a week after I wrote that.

The Republicans will do as much as they can to throw squirrels in the wood-chipper for President Biden like they did with President Obama, but I have a feeling it won’t happen. For one thing, Joe Biden isn’t Barack Obama, and second, this country is so fucking tired of noise and fury and discombobulation that the GOP will find little patience for the MAGA noise.

Once again, half-right because it was easy; past is prologue.  As for the GOP, they’re 99% on board with being Trump’s bitch.

Every executive order signed by Trump will be rescinded by President Biden.

Not every one, but close.

Relations with Cuba, put on ice by Trump, will resume its thaw under Biden, and los historicos in Miami can lump it.

We didn’t get back to where we were when President Obama went to Cuba, but it didn’t get any worse.

The pandemic will be under control by June — just in time for my trip to Alaska — and the masks and restrictions will slowly and cautiously be going away by Labor Day. The final casualty count, though, will be over 500,000 deaths. I wish I could say there will be a reckoning for those who could have prevented it, but I doubt it.

Fully 100% wrong because the fucking anti-vaxxers and idiots like Gov. Ron DeSantis actively fought against controlling the spread.  The death count passed 500,000 last summer.  I hate them all.

Racial and social justice will continue to make strides forward, and it is to be hoped that with an administration that is not actively opposed to it and supporting racism, overt or otherwise, we will be further along than we are now.

Not strides; more like baby steps.  But the conviction of the officer responsible for the murder of George Floyd and the racists in Georgia who chased down and shot a jogger is a glimmer of progress.  Many miles yet to go.

The economy will slowly recover as the pandemic gets under control and people emerge from isolation. The Republicans will suddenly remember that they hate deficits, something they never seem to worry about when they’re in the White House.

You wouldn’t know it for all the hypocrisy from the Republicans, but the economy is doing a lot better than even the Democrats would hope.  The supply chain issues have largely been resolved, and inflation — a natural after-effect when an economy has been through a trauma — hasn’t deterred record spending for the holidays.  Once the infrastructure bill spending starts, expect a boom… in a good way.

Obamacare will survive in the Supreme Court because the case brought by Texas is flawed. Even the conservatives on the court seem skeptical during oral arguments in November.

Nailed that.

Foreign relations will improve now that the bully has been sent packing. Suddenly France, Germany, and the EU will be more willing to work with us, and although my expertise in foreign affairs is limited, I think we’ll be better off with China and Japan than we are now. Russia will still try to mess with us, but at least they won’t have an ally in the White House.

We’re not at war with Russia or China, so I’ll take that as getting that one right.

We will still have soldiers in harm’s way overseas a year from today.

Despite the clustastrophe that was the withdrawal from Afghanistan, we are marginally at peace.  For now.

On a personal level, I will strive to keep up my writing. I have made many connections during these uncertain times, and they will grow.

I wrote twelve plays this year of various lengths, including two full-lengths.  One, Dark Twist, was published, and the other is still in progress.  I went back to the Valdez Theatre Conference last June, and I’m planning on that again, as I am with the Kennedy Center Intensive, perhaps in person.  I will return to the William Inge Theatre Festival in April for the first time since 2019, and back in November I set up a website, Philip Middleton Williams – Playwright, to shamelessly self-promote my work.

On a broader level, I still have my part-time jobs and keeping busy with them.  I still have my health, the Pontiac is still running, I still have my family, and while I have lost friends near and far, I cherish the ones who are still alive and well.

As for predictions, given my shoddy track record this past year, I’m not going to even attempt specifics because never in my wildest and worst dreams could I get it right.  For the first time in my life, I am afraid of what will happen to this country if the Republicans win control of the House and Senate in the 2022 mid-terms.  I used to think it was alarmist to either say or think that “it can’t happen here.”  But last January 6 was a warning and a dire one at that, and were it not for the sheer incompetence of the traitors, it could have ended far worse.  As it is, should the seditionists win, I will be looking for a place of refuge somewhere else.  I hear retiring to Antigua has its charms.

I leave this post with much the same thoughts as I had a year ago: I am glad 2021 is over.  But in reality, the date on the calendar doesn’t matter; it’s up to all of us to make this year as good or as bad as we can.  Who knows what tomorrow will bring.  I just hope we’re all here to find out.

Monday, October 25, 2021

Sitcoms To The Rescue

From CNN via Balloon Juice:

The Biden administration is taking an unprecedented step to resettle the 55,600 Afghan evacuees from the US military bases where they’ve been living for weeks and into permanent homes, an official leading the effort told CNN.

The move marks the biggest change to the resettlement program since 1980, when the modern-day infrastructure for admitting refugees was put in place.
The resettlement challenge has dogged the administration since the frenzied evacuation from Afghanistan in August: resettling tens of thousands of people — many of whom worked with or on behalf of the US — within only weeks or months. The abrupt arrival of evacuees strained already-overwhelmed refugee resettlement agencies and left both the administration and organizations scrambling to find permanent homes in a housing crunch.

Now, to increase options to evacuees, the Biden administration is launching a program that would allow veterans with ties to Afghans, as well as others, the opportunity to bring them to their cities and serve as a support network as they get their lives started in the US, former Delaware Gov. Jack Markell told CNN.

Last spring, CBS launched a series called “United States of Al.” It’s your standard cookie-cutter formula half-hour sitcom with all of the elements that go back generations: a suburban family takes in a visitor from another place and the laughs come from the newbie adjusting to life. However, this time the visitor is not ALF from the planet Melmac or Mork from Ork, or even the distant cousin from Europe (“Perfect Strangers”). The situation, as IMDb explains, is about “[t]he friendship between Riley, a Marine combat veteran struggling to readjust to civilian life in Ohio, and Awalmir, the Afghan interpreter who served with his unit and has just arrived to start a new life in America.” It has all the requisite characters: the grumpy dad, the cute daughter, the ex-wife and her ditzy boyfriend, and, in one episode, an adorable dog.  Just another in a long line of shows that come and go.

Except this time it’s a little different.  Riley, played by Parker Young, isn’t adjusting so well to civilian life.  He has bouts of PTSD, his relationship with his family shows genuine tension and the side effects such as excessive drinking, and early on the series addressed head-on the issue of the Afghan interpreters left behind to the point that at the end of several episodes, the cast broke the fourth wall and put up a link to agencies that were assisting the emigration of the interpreters.  Meanwhile, Awalmir, known as Al, played by Adhir Kaylan, has his own issues about adjusting his strict Muslim upbringing and customs to life in suburban Ohio.

It became all the more urgent in August when the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban swept into power, putting the lives of Afghanis who had aided the American forces at risk, as well as their families.  This brought some urgency to the situation for the TV series, and they dealt with it with the seriousness that it deserved.  The season premiere episode, done without a laugh track, followed the escape of Al’s sister from Kabul, bringing a level of reality that isn’t usually seen in half-hour shows, much less a sitcom.

It also brings an arguably political story line to a venue that is normally devoid of such issues.  More importantly, it’s bringing it to people who may not be paying much attention to CNN or the coverage of the plight of the interpreters and other refugees whose lives are at risk.  And while it has yet to be shown that a half-hour sitcom has directly reflected current events — at least not since the days of “All In the Family” or “Murphy Brown” — perhaps something good can come from a TV show that once in a while breaks the cookie cutter.

Wednesday, October 13, 2021

Welcome Back, Snowbirds

From the Washington Post:

The White House announced late Tuesday that it will ease pandemic-related restrictions on overland border crossings from Canada and Mexico for foreign nationals.

Starting in early November, people engaged in nonessential travel who provide proof of coronavirus vaccination may enter the United States for reasons such as tourism or visiting family, according to White House officials. In January, all travelers across the land border, including those traveling for reasons deemed essential, must be vaccinated.

The move is a mostly noncontroversial — though some critics would say long overdue — easing of a policy put in place as the United States and other nations sought to safeguard their populations during a global pandemic.

As conditions have improved, along with the availability of vaccines and mitigation measures, business leaders, lawmakers and mayors of border towns have pressured the federal government to ease travel restrictions.

Last month, the White House announced that it will relax air travel restrictions on foreign travelers who have been fully vaccinated starting in November. This week’s announcement brings requirements for people crossing by land in line with those flying into the country.

A large portion of the South Florida tourism population comes from Canada. You’re just as likely to see cars with plates from Ontario and Quebec stuck on the Palmetto Expressway as you are likely to see the plates with the orange balls. In certain communities, you’d hear French as well as Spanish and English on the streets.  This is a slow crawl back to normal, and welcome along with the cooler temps and lower humidity.

This will be a godsend to the tourism industry, which is the lifeblood of the economy down here, not to mention the tax collector. Florida has no state income tax; the state relies on tourists to pay the tab for essentials. The state and counties make up the difference through real estate taxes as well, knowing that a lot of people from somewhere else also own property here, which means they can be soaked for paying for living here even when they don’t.  And we’ll return the favor next summer when Floridians flock to Lake Simcoe, cottage country, and Stratford.

Thursday, December 31, 2020

Looking Back/Looking Forward

I’ve been wondering how I would do this post for a long time.  I even debated doing it at all, sure that everything I predicted for this year would be out the window and over the fence because once I write it, I don’t look at it.  So, let’s open the time capsule and see what’s inside.

Trump will survive impeachment.  The fix is in.  Revelations about his corruption will keep on coming, and yet the Republicans will cower with him.  It will be his big campaign rallying point.

That was an easy one.

I have no idea who the Democratic Party will nominate for president, and neither do you, but whoever it is will beat Trump in November despite the best efforts of the Kremlin.  I hope it is by such a margin that even Fox News will call it a blowout.  Trump will scream and carry on about it being rigged, but by this time in 2020, he’ll be doing everything he can to trash the place on the way out the door with pardons and lame-duck appointments of Nazi sympathizers and pedophiles.  (If I’m wrong on this and Trump is reelected, I’m moving to Montserrat.  It’s safer to live on an island with an active volcano.)

Wow, I’m impressed how I nailed that one.

Obamacare will survive in the Supreme Court but by a 5-4 ruling.

They haven’t ruled on the latest attempt to kill it, but it sounds like it will survive based on the weakness of the case brought by Texas.

There will be more restrictions placed on reproductive rights, but Roe v. Wade will not be struck down.

Still with us. I give it even odds with the new court in the future.

The Democrats will take back the Senate by one seat and all that bottled-up legislation will finally get through in time for the House, still under Nancy Pelosi, to pass them all again and get them signed by the new president.

Close but no cigar. We’ll know the outcome of this one next week.

The economic bubble will burst, the trade deals with China and Europe will screw over the American consumer, and it’s going to look like one of those 19,000 piece domino videos.  Trump and Fox will blame the Democrats for the monster deficit and carry on about how we need to cut more taxes and destroy Social Security and Medicare to save them.

And it did, thanks to Covid-19. More on that later.

Even with the Democrats taking over in 2020, they won’t be in office until January 2021, so I’ll save predictions for what they’ll come up with in terms of health care, gun safety, and climate change until this time next year, assuming my house in the suburbs of Miami at 10 feet above sea level is still on dry land.

See below.

As for me, my playwriting and productions thereof will continue.  I’m planning on my 29th trip to the Inge Festival in May and hope to be invited back to Alaska in June.  As I’m writing this, the novel that I started twenty-five years ago tomorrow is on the glide path to land by the time I go back to work next week.  I can predict that it will never be published because I never meant it to be.

This was a productive year for me as a playwright: 23 new plays written since this time last year: 4 full length, 1 monologue, 2 one-acts, 1 one-minute, and 15 ten-minutes. I compiled 2 anthologies. Four of them were produced via pixels. Covid-19 postponed Inge and Valdez to 2021, and plans are in the works to return with the vaccine swimming in my bloodstream. I signed with Smith Scripts to publish and license seven plays and two anthologies. And I did finish “Bobby Cramer” on January 10, 2020.

As for hopes for the new year, I hope for continued good health and fortune for my friends and family.  I can’t ask for more than that.

I remain in good health, so far. Regular readers know that my father died on May 25 from Covid-19. My mom, aka Faithful Correspondent, is in assisted living and spending a lot of time doing a lot a reading. She passes on her best wishes to her faithful readers.

Now on to my fearless predictions for 2021.

  • Trump will not go quietly; he may even announce his run for 2024 as they give him the bum’s rush, literally or figuratively, as Joe Biden is being sworn in.  But by March, if not sooner, he’ll be old news and as much a distant memory as “Pink Lady and Jeff.” (Look it up.)
  • The Republicans will do as much as they can to throw squirrels in the wood-chipper for President Biden like they did with President Obama, but I have a feeling it won’t happen.  For one thing, Joe Biden isn’t Barack Obama, and second, this country is so fucking tired of noise and fury and discombobulation that the GOP will find little patience for the MAGA noise.
  • Every executive order signed by Trump will be rescinded by President Biden.
  • Relations with Cuba, put on ice by Trump, will resume its thaw under Biden, and los historicos in Miami can lump it.
  • The pandemic will be under control by June — just in time for my trip to Alaska — and the masks and restrictions will slowly and cautiously be going away by Labor Day.  The final casualty count, though, will be over 500,000 deaths.  I wish I could say there will be a reckoning for those who could have prevented it, but I doubt it.
  • Racial and social justice will continue to make strides forward, and it is to be hoped that with an administration that is not actively opposed to it and supporting racism, overt or otherwise, we will be further along than we are now.
  • The economy will slowly recover as the pandemic gets under control and people emerge from isolation.  The Republicans will suddenly remember that they hate deficits, something they never seem to worry about when they’re in the White House.
  • Obamacare will survive in the Supreme Court because the case brought by Texas is flawed.  Even the conservatives on the court seem skeptical during oral arguments in November.
  • Foreign relations will improve now that the bully has been sent packing.  Suddenly France, Germany, and the EU will be more willing to work with us, and although my expertise in foreign affairs is limited, I think we’ll be better off with China and Japan than we are now.  Russia will still try to mess with us, but at least they won’t have an ally in the White House.
  • We will still have soldiers in harm’s way overseas a year from today.
  • On a personal level, I will strive to keep up my writing.  I have made many connections during these uncertain times, and they will grow.
  • As for hopes for the new year, I hope for continued good health and fortune for my friends and family.  I can’t ask for more than that.

I am glad 2020 is over.  But in reality, the date on the calendar doesn’t matter; it’s up to all of us to make this year as good or as bad as we can.  Unpredictable things will continue to happen: a year ago, “coronavirus” was a crossword puzzle clue, “wear a mask” was a Halloween suggestion, social distancing was for introverts, and Zoom was a brand of hot cereal.  Who knows what tomorrow will bring.  I just hope we’re all here to find out.

Thursday, October 1, 2020

How Others Saw It

Even though the “debate” Tuesday night was for the American voters’ consumption, others were watching.

Nick Bryant, the BBC’s New York correspondent, has some thoughts.

When the first televised debates were held in 1960, the world watched two young candidates, John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon, respectfully engage in an intelligent and elevated discussion.

Mostly we remember those inaugural encounters for Nixon’s flop-sweat and clumsily applied make-up.

But in the midst of the Cold War, as the ideological battle raged between Washington and Moscow, the debates were seen as a thrilling advertisement for American democracy.

Speaking in the spirit of patriotic bipartisanship that was such a hallmark of US politics in the 1950s and early-1960s, Kennedy opened the first debate with an eye on how it would be viewed by international onlookers:

“In the election of 1860, Abraham Lincoln said the question was whether this nation could exist half-slave or half-free. In the election of 1960, and with the world around us, the question is whether the world will exist half-slave or half-free, whether it will move in the direction of freedom, in the direction of the road that we are taking, or whether it will move in the direction of slavery.”

Tuesday’s vicious encounter, more cage-fight than Camelot, spoke of a different era and a different country: a split screen America, a nation of unbridgeable divides, a country beset by democratic decay.

Two elderly men, both of them in their 70s, traded insults and barbs, with a sitting president once again trashing in primetime the norms of conventional behaviour.

If there is such a thing as a heavenly pantheon of former presidents, an Oval Office in the sky, Abe Lincoln and Jack Kennedy must have peered down like baffled ghosts.

To many international onlookers, to a large portion of Americans as well, the debate offered a real-time rendering of US decline.

It reminded us once more of how American exceptionalism has increasingly come to be viewed as a negative construct: something associated with mass shootings, mass incarceration, racial division and political chaos.
Media caption”Shut up, man” and other insults and interruptions

Germany’s Der Spiegel called it “A TV duel like a car accident”.

“Never had American politics sunk so low,” lamented Italy’s La Repubblica’s US correspondent.

Le Monde, the French newspaper that declared “nous sommes tous Américains” – “we are all Americans now” – in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11th, called it a “terrible storm”.

But storms pass. What the debate showed last night was America’s permanent political weather system.

At a time when geopolitical soft power has assumed such importance, and where influence is intertwined with international image management, the 21st Century has produced some searing images of American self-harm.

The Florida election debacle in 2000, when we woke after Election Day to polling stations sealed off with yellow police tape, presented a sorry democratic spectacle.

At one point, as the recount became ever more farcical, the Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe even offered to send over election observers. When the conservative-leaning Supreme Court intervened in favour of George W Bush, it looked like an electoral smash and grab.

Then there was the damaging imagery of the Bush administration’s war on terror – the watchtowers of Guantanamo, the horrors of Abu Ghraib and the imperial hubris of that “Mission Accomplished” banner, the backdrop for the made-for-television moment when George W Bush prematurely claimed victory in an unfinished war that ended up haemorrhaging so much American blood and treasure.

Future historians will place Tuesday night’s television horror show in that same picture gallery of national embarrassment.

Many international viewers also comprehend the analytical prism through which the debate has to be viewed – that Donald Trump’s base sent him to Washington precisely because of his unconventionality, and that supporters will regard criticism of the president’s aggressive style as elite condescension.

Fans of his destructive energy tuned in to watch a political WrestleMania, the smack-down of Joe Biden. That now is widely understood.

But his failure to explicitly condemn white supremacists, and his strange words of advice to the far right group The Proud Boys, “stand back and stand by”, still shows his capacity to shock.

After the inaugural television debates in 1960, there was a 16-year pause before we saw them return again.

Then the first debate between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter was marred by a technical failure, which killed the audio for 27 minutes – something that would have provided a welcome breather last night.

Now the format and even the future of these debates has come under renewed scrutiny, with the Commission on Presidential Debates announcing that “additional structure should be added to the format of the remaining debates to ensure a more orderly discussion”.

Over the years, the presidential debates have become as much about entertainment as elucidation. As journalists we hype them like Vegas world heavyweight boxing bouts beforehand and score them like TV critics afterwards.

The highlights, inexorably, are the moments of combat and comedy. The prefabricated zingers. The caustic one-liners. The “knock out punches” – we have even adopted the vocabulary of ringside commentary.

Ever since Ronald Reagan mastered the genre, the debates have tended to reward star power over expertise.

Presidential debates increasingly have come down to who can deliver Reagan-style one-liners, the jokes or putdowns that are rerun endlessly on the news in the days afterwards.

Star power has come to be valued more than expertise. What is supposed to be a job interview has become more like an audition for the role of leading man.

Into this charisma trap have tumbled a long line of qualified but losing candidates – Walter Mondale, Bob Dole, Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, Mike Dukakis, Al Gore.

All of them were more accomplished administrators than actors.

Nor is it a coincidence that the only one-term president of the last 40 years, George Herbert Walker Bush, was terrible on television. Tellingly, the moment his time was deemed to be up was when he glanced impatiently at his wristwatch in the midst of a televised debate with Bill Clinton and Ross Perot.

That 1992 debate, the first ever to be held in the town hall format, showed how Bill Clinton, a telegenic young governor, had mastered the medium.

Effortlessly fielding questions from the audience, he displayed the stagecraft of Elvis and the empathy of Doctor Phil. In the age of Oprah, those all-important debate optics helped him win. Like Reagan, he became another performative president who understood the theatrical requirements of the part.

So as well as dramatising the electoral process, the televised debates have arguably ended up dumbing it down. Tuesday night hit rock bottom.

The cliché trotted out afterwards serves also as a truism: America was the loser.

I’ve never really bought into the trope that America is the “greatest country in the world.” It’s just too much hubris and bravado (not to mention tempting karma) to it put out there without recognizing our inherent human flaws, and besides, it’s becoming increasingly dicey to say it because it’s demonstrably false on a number of points, including health care, education, and basic human rights.

What we should say is that we aspire to be the best we can be. We all want that. But that means we need to strive to achieve it, not beat the crap out of anyone who suggests that we can do better or that they have different ideas about how to achieve it.

Sunday, July 5, 2020

Sunday Reading

Speaking of Shithole Countries — Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic.

There is a lot of learned material written about nationalism—scholarly books and papers, histories of it, theories of it—but most of us understand that nationalism, at its heart, at its very deepest roots, is about a feeling of superiority: We are better than you. Our country is better than your country. Or even—and apologies, but this is the precise language deployed by the president of the United States: Your country is a shithole country. Ours isn’t.

In this sense, nationalism is not patriotism, which is the desire to work on behalf of your fellow citizens, to defend common values, to build something positive. Nationalism is not community spirit either, which seeks to pull people together. Nationalism has nothing to do with democratic values: Authoritarians can be nationalists; indeed, most are. Nationalism has nothing to do with the rule of law, justice, or opportunity. At its core, nationalism is rather a competition, an ugly and negative competition. There’s a reason nationalists build walls, denigrate foreigners, and denounce immigrants: Because our people are better than those people. There’s a reason nationalism has so often become violent in the past. For if we—our nation—are better, then what right do others have to live beside us? Or to occupy land that we covet? Or even, maybe, to live at all?

Sure, people pretend otherwise. We’re just defending our right to be unique! We just want everyone to stay in their own country! We just like our own culture! But that’s not really what nationalists think, and everyone knows it. They can nod and wink at equality among nations, but really they are motivated by, driven by, addicted to a feeling of superiority. Our county is better than your country. So stay out.

I hear this when Donald Trump uses the slogan “America First”: This is why he needs a physical wall at the Mexican border; this is the source of his dislike for immigrants, for people with unfamiliar surnames or different skin colors. He regards all of them as lesser, inferior people who somehow got inside our borders and made our country worse. He and the claque who support him repeat these things over and over again because this kind of nationalism requires reinforcement. It thrives on stories and pictures, songs and chants, repetition. It needs a constant stream of evidence, constant proof of superiority.

But what happens when the stream stops? What happens when the stories and pictures no longer match? More to the point, what will Trump do, what will his followers and admirers do, when their understanding of the world is flipped on its head? What will happen when they realize that other countries are building walls between them and the United States?

Here it’s worth pointing out a genuine oddity: The world in the age of the coronavirus should be a nationalist’s paradise. Borders have slammed shut. Countries have fallen back on their own resources. Multiple international institutions have failed, in major and minor ways, starting with the World Health Organization, the one group that was explicitly created for this moment, and continuing on to the G-7, whose members can’t even manage to meet for coffee.

And yet, has there ever been a more global moment? Everyone in the world is living in the same isolation, with the same fears. Everyone is working on the same vaccines, exchanging notes about the same cures. Everyone is trying to solve the same medical, psychological, and economic problems. Everyone is dealing with a virus that seems completely uninterested in the national origins of the people it infects. More to the point, everyone can look at everyone else’s country, read its media and social media, see how its institutions are coping with the crisis. We can’t leave our houses, but we can meet in cyberspace, where we can keep talking.

While we are there, we can see how other countries are dealing with the pandemic. Some are doing well, especially those that have decent bureaucrats, respect for science, and high levels of trust: South Korea and Taiwan, Germany and Slovakia, much of Scandinavia, New Zealand. Some countries are not doing well, especially those run by divisive populists on both the left and the right: Russia, Brazil, Mexico, and, of course, the United States. But even within this latter group, we stand out. Out of all these countries—out of all the countries in the world—the U.S. has the largest number of cases and the highest death toll. The U.S. isn’t merely suffering; the U.S. is suffering more than anybody else.

The numbers of American sick and dead are a source of wonder and marvel all over the world. They also inspire fear and anxiety. The European Union has decided to allow some foreigners to cross its borders now, but not Americans. Uruguayans and Rwandans can go to Italy and Spain, but not Americans. Moroccans and Tunisians can go to Germany and Greece, but not Americans. For the first time in living memory, Canada has kept its border closed with the United States. On July 3, the governor of the Mexican state of Sonora delivered the coup de grace: She announced the temporary closure of the border with Arizona and banned Americans from Sonoran beaches.

How will American nationalists cope with this new situation? I’m guessing many will pretend, like the president, that this isn’t happening: Months into the crisis, he has once again expressed the belief that the virus will magically “disappear.” But for some, it will be difficult to prevent the intrusion of reality: The stupid and pointless competition among nations continues in their heads—and they are losing. A major reckoning is coming. It can’t arrive too soon.

Doonesbury — Paying for it.

Tuesday, June 30, 2020

Fatal Ignorance

Of course he was told about the Russian bounties.

American officials provided a written briefing in late February to President Trump laying out their conclusion that a Russian military intelligence unit offered and paid bounties to Taliban-linked militants to kill U.S. and coalition troops in Afghanistan, two officials familiar with the matter said.

The investigation into the suspected Russian covert operation to incentivize such killings has focused in part on an April 2019 car bombing that killed three Marines as one such potential attack, according to multiple officials familiar with the matter.

The new information emerged as the White House tried on Monday to play down the intelligence assessment that Russia sought to encourage and reward killings — including reiterating a claim that Mr. Trump was never briefed about the matter and portraying the conclusion as disputed and dubious.

But that stance clashed with the disclosure by two officials that the intelligence was included months ago in Mr. Trump’s President’s Daily Brief document — a compilation of the government’s latest secrets and best insights about foreign policy and national security that is prepared for him to read. One of the officials said the item appeared in Mr. Trump’s brief in late February; the other cited Feb. 27, specifically.

Moreover, a description of the intelligence assessment that the Russian unit had carried out the bounties plot was also seen as serious and solid enough to disseminate more broadly across the intelligence community in a May 4 article in the C.I.A.’s World Intelligence Review, a classified compendium commonly referred to as The Wire, two officials said.

A National Security Council spokesman declined to comment on any connection between the Marines’ deaths and the suspected Russian plot. The White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, did not answer when pressed by reporters on Monday whether the intelligence was included in the written President’s Daily Brief, and the National Security Council spokesman pointed to her comments when asked later about the February written briefing.

Well, there’s the problem: they put it in writing. Unless it’s on Twitter from the Klan or Fox News, he doesn’t hear about it. Or want to hear about it.

And it’s not like it’s breaking news.

Top officials in the White House were aware in early 2019 of classified intelligence indicating Russia was secretly offering bounties to the Taliban for the deaths of Americans, a full year earlier than has been previously reported, according to U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the intelligence.

The assessment was included in at least one of President Donald Trump’s written daily intelligence briefings at the time, according to the officials. Then-national security adviser John Bolton also told colleagues he briefed Trump on the intelligence assessment in March 2019.

The White House did not respond to questions about Trump or other officials’ awareness of Russia’s provocations in 2019. The White House has said Trump was not — and still has not been — briefed on the intelligence assessments because they have not been fully verified. However, it is rare for intelligence to be confirmed without a shadow of a doubt before it is presented to top officials.

Bolton declined to comment Monday when asked by the AP if he had briefed Trump about the matter in 2019. On Sunday, he suggested to NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Trump was claiming ignorance of Russia’s provocations to justify his administration’s lack of a response.

“He can disown everything if nobody ever told him about it,” Bolton said.

The revelations cast new doubt on the White House’s efforts to distance Trump from the Russian intelligence assessments. The AP reported Sunday that concerns about Russian bounties were also included in a second written presidential daily briefing earlier this year and that current national security adviser Robert O’Brien had discussed the matter with Trump. O’Brien denies he did so.

It’s one thing to be clueless about the intricacies of how things work.  It’s another thing to ignore the news because it makes you look bad or threatens your chances for re-election.  And when people are dead because of your willful ignorance, that’s criminally negligent homicide.

To reaffirm what I said yesterday, compared to this, impeaching him over Ukraine was like arresting him for double-parking. This fits the the Constitution’s requirement for treason.

Thursday, April 16, 2020

Lessons Learned

Here’s a good article from CNN International about how four countries — Taiwan, South Korea, Iceland, and Germany — got their coronavirus response right.

Like a line of dominoes, country after country has been shut down by the novel coronavirus. Despite signs the threat was making its way across the globe, there was a clear pattern of response in many parts of the world — denial, fumbling and, eventually, lockdown.

In our globalized world, it’s puzzling that so few lessons were learned in the early weeks of each country’s outbreak, when the chances of containing and stopping the virus were highest. Now the focus is on flattening the curve, or slowing the virus’ spread, to keep death tolls from climbing further.

As much of the world mulls gradually lifting lockdowns, there are still lessons to be learned from these four places that got it right.

Another lesson we’re learning is that the folks who have been screeching about the sanctity of life and worrying endlessly about the unborn really don’t care about what happens to people once they’re born.  In fact, they’d rather let the old people die because it’s more important for the economy to reopen.  It’s a sick version of the old Jack Benny skit: when confronted by a mugger who demands “Your money or your life!”, Mr. Benny replies, “I’m thinking it over!”

Here’s one of those “pro-lifers”:

Reopening the economy is preferable to preventing a new wave of coronavirus deaths, a member of Congress from Indiana said Tuesday.

“It is policymakers’ decision to put on our big boy and big girl pants and say it is the lesser of these two evils,” Republican Rep. Trey Hollingsworth told radio station WIBC-FM of Indianapolis. “It is not zero evil, but it is the lesser of these two evils, and we intend to move forward that direction.”

There’s one simple fact of economics that he and his greedy bastards forget: it doesn’t do any good to reopen an economy if there’s nobody alive to buy things.

And then there are those rabid ight-wingers who are going out and protesting against strict social distancing orders.

Thousands of demonstrators descended on the state Capitol in Lansing, Michigan, on Wednesday to protest Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s restrictive stay-at-home order, clogging the streets with their cars while scores ignored organizers’ pleas to stay inside their vehicles.

The protest — dubbed “Operation Gridlock” — was organized by the Michigan Conservative Coalition and the Michigan Freedom Fund, a DeVos family-linked conservative group. Protesters were encouraged to show up and cause traffic jams, honk and bring signs to display from their cars. Organizers wrote on Facebook: “Do not park and walk — stay in your vehicles!”

Many ignored the demand. Demonstrators, on foot, were seen waving American, “Don’t Tread on Me” and Trump campaign flags. At least two Confederate flags were spotted.

I don’t want to wish ill on anyone, but the more these useful idiots hang around out in the open with their like-minded friends, the more they’re going to get sick and probably die, thereby proving that Darwin was right.  And when they get sick, they’re going to be crying, with their labored breath, for free healthcare.  As for the rest of us, keep your distance.  Shawn Windsor in the Detroit Free Press:

For those who drove to Lansing out of fear of losing home and pantry, and stayed in their vehicles, that’s understandable. Let it out. Say your piece.

But for those who caravanned to the state capital to play militia? To wave a Confederate flag? To argue that social distancing is the gateway to the end of the Second Amendment?

Stop. Please. For your sake. For everyone else’s.

No one is coming after our guns. Or our right to protest. Or our right to affix a sign to our car comparing watching Netflix to prison.

We just can’t go pontooning. Or barbecuing with our neighbors. Or visit the pro shop at the local golf course.

You want to protest that?

Fine.

Next time stay in your vehicle. And wear a mask if you step out of it.

Stay safe, stay well, stay home.

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