IT'S A RESTLESS HUNGRY FEELIN' THAT DON'T MEAN NO ONE NO GOOD

This morning, my wife reminded me that we’d been scheduled to spend today on a series of planes, flying home from Amsterdam.  Amsterdam to London, London to Chicago (business class for the transatlantic portion of the trip, doggone it), and Chicago to Tucson, arriving home just before midnight.  

We never made it to Amsterdam, of course; and in theory, we’ll either get rescheduled or get a refund.  But there’s no predicting the wave of bankruptcies and bailouts coming down the pike, so who knows?  Hey, I’m alive, and virus-free as far as I know.  I’m not complaining.  Well, maybe a little.

But some folks are complaining a lot.  Egged on by people who know better, armed thugs now demand that governors rescind pandemic closure orders.  They seem to believe if the governor would only give the word, things would magically return to normal.  Donald Trump seems to think he possesses similar powers, although he’s been reluctant to use them. 

I’m here to help.  There is one thing Donald Trump could say that would jump-start the economy immediately: “I quit.”

Trump was briefed on the virus in November, but daily intelligence briefings are boring, so he ignored them.  When spin didn’t solve the problem, Trump was stuck without a Plan B.  Or at least a Plan B that involved Trump using some of that unfettered authority he claims to have.  Instead of “the buck stops here,” the buck now stops in 50 different places.  And then, instead of getting out of the governors’ way, Trump and his surrogates muddied the waters by touting bogus cures, withholding supplies, and claiming that the governors inflated the numbers of COVID-19 fatalities. 

That was the bat signal that people further down the Republican food chain were waiting for.  Astroturf demonstrations, ostensibly focused on the necessity of re-opening the economy, sprang up overnight.  Maybe it’s just me, but as long as these protests are led by yahoos with confederate flags, swastikas, and assault rifles, I’m going to believe that their top priorities might not be economic.

Still, it’s important to separate the bluster of semi-professional Deplorables from the concerns of millions of regular folks who just want their lives back.  I’m one of those.  

I’m retired, so I don’t have a job to go back to.  But the investments that were supposed to allow us to live comfortably into our 90s have – at least for the moment – taken a hit.  We own our home, so we don’t have to worry about making mortgage payments.  But we still pay rent on a yoga studio that’s been standing empty for nearly two months; the income stream has stopped, but our rent and utility payments have not.  I need a haircut.  I miss my gym and my favorite restaurants.  I’d like to spend time with my friends.

All this is to say that I want this to be over with.  I’m a lot better off than many folks are, and I’m grateful.  But I’d love to resume some semblance of my pre-virus life.

And having said that, I don’t want to die, either.  Or to be inadvertently responsible for someone else’s death. 

Arizona’s governor has begun to lift restrictions, and I assume Tucson’s mayor will follow suit before long.  I have also read that – outside the early hotspots which are now declining – the rate of infection is not falling, and that June could turn into a bloodbath.  I hope those projections are wrong.  I’d love it if stores can reopen soon, and schools can reopen in the fall.  But my plan is to let others test the waters before I jump into the deep end of the pool.  If there are sharks in the water, I’d just as soon let Republicans find out first.

THE EFFECT OF GAMMA RAYS ON MAN-IN-THE-MOON MARIGOLDS

Could it be that, as a nation, we are simply unworthy of our Very Stable Genius?  Every press conference brings a new medical breakthrough, courtesy Donald Trump.  It’s just too bad our doctors and scientists can’t keep up with him.  You almost feel sorry for Deborah Birx, who is clearly out of her depth in the presence of a man who ranks with Pasteur, Salk, and even Hippocrates himself.

Unlike Donald Trump, I’m not qualified to opine about medicine.  But patent medicine?  That’s a different story.  Patent medicines free us from the tyranny of science and empower everyone to be their own experts.  Is it possible that a long-forgotten nostrum from the middle of the previous century holds the key to defeating COVID-19?  I report, you decide.

The best thing about patent medicines is that they usually don’t kill you.  That seems kind of important.  When you’re trying to decide whether to drink a Clorox cocktail or do a Lysol enema, your odds of survival should be part of the equation.  It’s that old “cure worse than disease” thing.

And with that in mind, it’s time for another trip down memory lane.  My memory lane, anyway, though perhaps not yours.  The time:  1950.  The place:  Louisiana.  The problem:  the populace needs more pep, and the hustler needs more money.  The solution:  Dudley J. Le Blanc, a minor league politician and major league con man, marketed an alcohol-based patent medicine he called Hadacol.  LeBlanc was a lot like Donald Trump, only smarter. 

LeBlanc sold Hadacol as a “tonic” to boost vitality.  It turned out that the folks whose vitality needed boosting the most tended to be southerners who lived in a dry state or dry county.  LeBlanc beat the prohibition against selling alcohol by adding vitamins and herbs to his formula.  But the thing that proved he was a marketing genius was that he made Hadacol taste bad. 

That’s right.  By all accounts, Hadacol tasted awful.  Why was that a feature rather than a bug?  Because then your nosy neighbors couldn’t claim that you were drinking alcohol for enjoyment.  After all, it’s not a sin if you don’t enjoy it, right?  Hadacol’s terrible taste insured that no one would drink it for pleasure.  Nod, nod, wink, wink. 

LeBlanc turned a $3.6 million profit in 1950, which was serious money in those days; and he was just getting warmed up.  In 1951, LeBlanc launched the Hadacol Goodwill Caravan, an old-fashioned medicine show that toured the south with headliners like Bob Hope, Lucille Ball, Judy Garland, and Hank Williams.  The price of admission was a Hadacol box top, and the Caravan drew crowds of 10,000 or more at many stops. 

In a radio interview, Groucho Marx asked LeBlanc what Hadacol was good for. "It was good for five million dollars for me last year," LeBlanc shot back.  That answer would have made complete sense to Donald Trump.  Trump would have understood intuitively that Hadacol was some kind of scam.  Like Trump, LeBlanc calculated that he could make more money if he didn’t pay his suppliers.  He cashed out just in time to leave someone else holding the bag.  Well played, we can imagine Trump saying.

Donald Trump campaigned in 2016 on reviving moribund industries.  I propose adding Hadacol to that list. For medicinal purposes only, of course.  Because if alcohol kills the virus on external surfaces, why wouldn’t it do the same internally?    

After all, we don’t know for sure that Hadacol doesn’t work against COVID-19, and that’s almost the same as saying that it does work.  Our new Hadacol barons will have to tweak the formula, though.  The original 12% alcohol by volume isn’t strong enough.  When the Hadacol factories re-open, they’ll need to pump out bottles that are 70% alcohol.  At 140 proof, this new, improved Hadacol would be among the most potent liquors on the market.  It would pack quite a punch.  Luckily, the dosage – 4 tablespoons a day – is relatively low.

As a bonus, we must not forget the beneficial effects of a good placebo response.  A couple of tablespoons of 140 proof Hadacol would encourage a nice warm, fuzzy placebo effect. 

I’ll kickstart the project by drafting an advertising campaign:  some pep in your step.  Put some pride in your stride.  Drink Hadacol – it may not kill the virus, but it won’t kill you, either.”  Let’s run it up the flagpole and see who salutes.

HAD REPORTERS TAKIN' PICTURES OF HER WALKIN' OUT OF CENTRAL HIGH

On September 4, 1957, Elizabeth Eckford and eight other Black students showed up for the first day of classes at Little Rock’s Central High School.  That’s her in the forefront of the photo that accompanies this post. 

Central High had previously been all-white, and quite a few of the white locals wanted to keep it that way.  Some of them turned out to protest “race mixing,” as they called it.  Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus was on their side, and called out the national guard to keep Black students from entering the building.  President Eisenhower wasn’t thrilled about what he had to do, but he knew what his responsibility was.  He federalized the Arkansas National Guard, and sent the Army’s 101st Airborne Division to make sure that the school was integrated as peacefully as possible.

In the meantime, though, that photo (taken by Wil Counts) had become famous, and much of the attention was focused on the young white woman behind Eckford, the one with the open mouth.  Her name was Hazel Bryan.  She was yelling the N-word and “Go back to Africa.”  Her parents were freaked out by the sudden notoriety and pulled Hazel out of school.  She soon got married and began a family.  As time passed, and the Civil Rights movement picked up momentum, she began to pay attention to the words of Martin Luther King Jr.  She came to regret what she’d done.  What’s more, she apologized to Eckford, and eventually became something of a peace activist and social worker. 

I wonder whether the Branch Covidians who have been protesting pandemic closure orders will have a similar “come to Jesus” moment at some point.  Most of them probably believe that they’ve already come to Jesus – one woman at the protest in Austin claimed she didn’t need a mask or other protective equipment because she was “covered in the blood of Jesus.” 

The rage of the Arkansas segregationists was genuine, albeit misguided.  I’m not so sure about the MAGA “liberators.”  These demonstrations did not spring up spontaneously.  The bat signal went out from someone connected to the DeVos family, and Fox News helped spread the news.  In Michigan, the demonstrators were egged on by Republican state legislators – none of whom attended the demonstration in person.  I’m sure they sent plenty of thoughts and prayers, though. 

I don’t doubt these protestors are pissed off about a lot of things, but it’s also obvious that they enjoy being pissed off.  I’ll bet a lot of them are preppers who’ve been hoarding food and weapons in their underground bunkers.  You might think that they’d relish the chance to put all that planning to use.  Nah.  Turns out they were just owning the Libs.    

They fought valiantly in the Bowling Green Massacre and drove back Obama’s hordes in Operation Jade Helm.  But against what their Dear Leader is now calling the Invisible Enemy, they developed an acute need to mingle.  Maybe it’s just me, but screaming and cursing because they can’t get their hair colored, or buy a rose bush seems a wee bit over the top.  There’s a strong performative element not far beneath the surface, like a toddler throwing a tantrum and checking periodically to see if his parents are paying attention.  I’d advise them to be a bit more circumspect when photographers are around.  There’s something about a face contorted with rage that doesn’t look good in the history books.

Speaking of history, let’s set the Wayback Machine to the 1980 presidential campaign, when Ronald Reagan posed the question that arguably won him the presidency:  Are you better off now than you were four years ago?  In one form or another, that question is at the heart of the 2020 election. 

You might think that Donald Trump’s fans would have a tough time answering in the affirmative, but the MAGA cult is a helluva drug.  Unless and until there’s a mass die-off in Red States, the Deplorables will hang in there.

What’s weird to me is that every poll I’ve seen indicates overwhelming support for sheltering in place, and disapproval of the MAGA protestors.  Trump is doubling down on the Big Lie principle – lie big and  lie often.  Keep repeating the lie, and sooner or later, some folks will buy it.  Maybe even enough of them to swing the presidential election.   

Here is a tale of two democracies, South Korea and the United States.  South Korea is smaller, of course, both in terms of population and area.  By the numbers, they have 52 million people, compared to 331 million for the U.S.  The U.S. has almost seven times the population of South Korea, in other words.  So all things being equal, you’d expect the COVID-19 data to be roughly proportional. 

Spoiler alert:  it’s not.  Apparently, all things are not equal.

What might account for the difference?  Could it be experienced leadership?  I’m writing this on April 20.  Three months ago, on January 20, Donald Trump had been president exactly three years.  The new South Korean Premier Chung Sye-kyun had been in office less than a week.  That would seem to give the United States an advantage in experience.  (OK, stop laughing.)

A month later, on February 20, neither the United States nor South Korea had suffered any deaths from COVID-19.  But the two democracies had already embarked upon divergent paths, although it took a while for the results to come in.  On March 20, South Korea reported a total of 100 fatalities from COVID-19 while the U.S. reported 150.  We looked pretty good in comparison, given the population discrepancy between the two countries. 

But the virus moves through the population silently at first, and the March 20 numbers were the tip of the iceberg. 

South Korea had launched an aggressive campaign of testing, treatment, and social isolation.  Meanwhile, back in the land of the free and the home of the brave, Donald Trump tried happy talk.  He denied there was a problem and did essentially nothing to stop the virus during those fateful weeks. 

As of April 20, South Korea had 236 fatalities.  American fatalities now exceed 40,000 and still climbing fast.  Maybe happy talk wasn’t a great idea.  

Republicans wish that they could point to some X factor that would explain why there have been so few South Korean fatalities.  It can’t be population density, since South Korea’s population density is much higher than ours.  That ought to drive the contagion up, not down.  It didn’t.  OK, what about some sort of racial immunity?  That’s an interesting question, because race does seem to be a factor in the lethality of the virus.  Sadly for those floating this theory, though, according to U.S. data, Asian Americans have a higher COVID-19 fatality rate than white Americans. 

It looks to me like South Korea’s secret was that they didn’t waste time blaming China, or political opponents, or local authorities.  They followed the advice of their public health experts. 

Meanwhile, back in the states, Donald Trump did an end run around Ivanka’s Imperial Council to Make America Open Again with a series of tweets encouraging his followers to “LIBERATE” their states.  As he put it in his Sunday press conference, "It was hard to get it aroused and it is hard to get it aroused but we got it aroused."

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp was certainly aroused.  Kemp fired the opening shots in the war against the Invisible Enemy, announcing an aggressive reopening campaign.  Florida and the rest of Dixie won’t be far behind.

I fear that these actions are premature, but for my part, I’m willing to let the “heritage not hate” people be the guinea pigs.  I want to see what the death toll looks like on May 20. 

HEY 19, NO WE CAN'T DANCE TOGETHER

What’s in a number?  Does 13 “trump” 19? 

The 19 part of COVID-19 is giving Trump supporters fits.  Voices from the Ministry of Propaganda – Rush Limbaugh and Kellyanne Conway – have tried to convince their most gullible followers that it’s an ordinal number – the 19th COVID.  Which, they imply, means there had to have been 18 earlier COVIDS, and we didn’t shut the whole country down for them, did we?  That 19 must haunt their dreams. 

Trying to fight fire with fire, they’ve now enlisted the help of the number 13, as in MS-13.  They’re betting, or at least hoping, that lightning will strike twice, and that an encore of their greatest hits from 2016 will top the hit parade again in 2020.  His campaign has generated a transparently phony Biden ad featuring heavily tatted members of MS-13 glowering at the viewer while the text claims that Biden pledged not to deport them.   

I suspect that Trump has gone to the well once too often on the MS-13 thing.  Remember all those fearsome caravans shambling up from Mexico towards our sacred southern border?  To the casual observer, it appeared to consist mostly of women with children – aspiring welfare queens, no doubt, but nothing that looked particularly scary.  Ah, but hidden among them were MS-13 gang members and ISIS terrorists.  It’s an image that sends delicious shivers up the spines of the MAGA crowd, but it leaves most of the country curiously unaffected.  After all, that was supposed to be their ace in the hole for the 2018 mid-terms.  It didn’t work then, and I doubt it will work now.

Besides, aren’t the Chinese supposed to be the bad guys this time around?  The MS-13 ad shows a lack of message discipline. 

Fortunately, I’m here to help.  “Build the wall” worked so well in 2016 that it deserves another shot in 2020.  When he accepts his party’s nomination at the Republican National Convention, Trump should demand that China build a wall to keep its viruses contained.  A second Great Wall – a Greater Wall, if you will – would make for the best Infrastructure Week ever.  The Greater Wall would be built on China’s eastern border, which happens to be the Pacific Ocean.  Build the Wall, coat it with hydroxychloroquine, and bingo, the virus can’t escape.  COVID-19 (and all future COVIDs) will be forced to head west.  Unless it goes north towards Russia or south towards India.  Modi and Putin might be annoyed, but all’s fair in love and re-election campaigns.  It’s not that much of a stretch to demand the same level of preparedness from foreign despots as we do from our own elected governors. 

And the beauty part is that, because Donald Trump is the world’s greatest salesman, China will pay for the wall!

OH HELP ME, PLEASE DOCTOR, I'M DAMAGED

Barring a miracle, Donald Trump will be president for at least nine more months, so it may be premature to call something his worst failure in office.  But his bungling of America’s COVID-19 response will be hard to top.

Trump and his defenders have settled on three fairly transparent counterattacks:  mount straw man arguments to keep critics off balance, move the  goalposts, and blame your opponents for everything that goes wrong. 

The principal straw man arguments I’ve seen are these. 

1.      Trump started the virus.  No serious person makes this claim.  Everyone knows that the virus originated in China. 

2.      The press refuses to criticize China for its handling of the initial outbreak.  No serious person denies that Chinese authorities did their best to cover up the initial outbreak, and no one insists that the data released by the Chinese is trustworthy.  Except for Donald Trump (not that he’s a serious person).  He was warned – repeatedly – that something was seriously wrong, but he chose to ignore his briefings and trust President Xi.

3.      A better president could have kept the virus out of the US.  No serious person believes that, once the virus spread outside of Wuhan, it would have been possible to keep it out of the United States.  The only one who made those sorts of claims was Trump himself, who boasted that the caseload would be down to zero in a matter of days.

We were almost totally unprepared for the pandemic on January 20, 2020, the date of the first known COVID-19 case in the United States.  If someone makes that point on social media, a swarm of Maga trolls descend, asking quite literally, OK if you’re so smart, what would you have done?  Here is my answer – a dozen things a smart president would have done differently to fight the pandemic.

A smart president would:

1.      Anticipate the crisis before it happens.  Trump failed to do that.  Worse, he ignored pandemic response plans that his predecessors had prepared for him. Then he ignored briefings from his own people. 

2.      Assemble a team of experts.  Trump failed to do that.  He appointed cronies, grifters, and Jared Kushner, who’s in a class by himself.

3.      Listen to the experts and follow their advice.  Trump failed to do that.  Instead, he listened to Fox News.  And Jared Kushner, who’s in a class by himself.

Trump essentially ignored the crisis for months.  When he thought about it at all, his concern was how it would impact his re-election chances.  He was criminally negligent, and we lost the chance to minimize our losses.  Here are some specific flaws in Trump’s pandemic responses since then.

4.      His so-called “travel ban” against China not only came too late; it was also ineffective.  It was ineffective because the ban only applied to Chinese nationals, and then only to Chinese nationals arriving in the U.S. on flights originating in China.  Chinese nationals who transited through another country weren’t affected.  Nor were Americans and foreign nationals coming from China. 

5.      He can’t make up his mind about China.  One day, he’s had a beautiful conversation with his dear friend President Xi, who’s working very, very hard on the problem.  The next day, he rages against the “Chinese virus,” and claims that China is lying to him.

6.      He never prioritized testing for the virus, which is essential information in fighting it.  Our per capita testing is shockingly lower than that of countries who’ve been fighting the virus effectively.

7.      He has the authority to order private companies to produce needed pandemic supplies, and he refuses to do it.

8.      His constant need to be the center of attention has turned the daily information briefings into a sideshow.  He toggles between insulting the press, bragging about his medical knowledge, and introducing misinformation into the public sphere.  He contradicts his own medical experts, even though he doesn’t know the difference between germs, bacteria, and viruses.  He thinks COVID-19 is smart.  (And compared to him, it sure is.)

9.      He’s bungled the federal government’s role in emergency management so badly that – even a month after he finally conceded that there was a serious problem – no one has a reliable inventory of critical supplies.  He has forced states to bid against each other because of these shortages.

10.   He’s politicized the pandemic response, treating known stockpiles of emergency equipment as his personal property, favoring Republican states and insisting on fawning praise as the price for responding to legitimate requests.

11.   He accepts no responsibility for the progress of the virus in the United States.  Instead, he blames everyone else.  Blame the Chinese, Obama, governors, Democrats, or the press.  Or blame all of them – a scapegoat for every occasion.

12.   Since the only thing he really cares about is his own reputation, he keeps moving the goalposts on what constitutes success.  If we get through this with fewer than 200,000 deaths – avoidable deaths – Trump will claim he did a great job.

And now the Very Stable Genius is working on his next act: Make America Open Again, or something like that.  He’s appointed a “Council to Re-Open America,” and it has plenty of star power.  Jared Kushner is in a class by himself, so his presence on the Council is de rigueur.  And no one knows more about economics and medicine than Ivanka.  She didn’t exactly write the book, but she knows how to Google!  The other members of the Council are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death. 

Meanwhile, the God-Emperor himself has asserted that "When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total."

Oh really?  Did President Obama have the authority to ignore the 2nd amendment and confiscate everybody’s arsenal?  I wonder why he didn’t do that.  Would President Biden have total authority, after he’s sworn in next year, to have Donald Trump arrested and dragged out of Mar A Lago in chains?  Maybe there’s something to this total authority thing after all.

But if Donald Trump has total authority, I wonder why he doesn’t use it more effectively.  Instead of working to solve the COVID-19 problem (and just shutting up and getting out of the way would work wonders), he put his energy into making excuses. 

There was a time when he knew better.  Or pretended to.  On November 8, 2013, he tweeted, “Leadership: Whatever happens, you’re responsible.  If it doesn’t happen, you’re responsible.”

WHAT A BEAUTIFUL WORLD THIS WILL BE, WHAT A GLORIOUS TIME TO BE FREE

Francis Fukuyama postulated that the breakup of the Soviet Union signaled “the end of history.”  History, of course, had other ideas.

In the three decades since the old world order disintegrated, a lot of different poop has hit a lot of different propellers.  It’s hard to see patterns that make sense.  But hey, the internet is full of folks (including me) who’ll see patterns for you, or impose them where none exist if necessary. 

It’s not exactly pattern recognition, but Bill Kristol recently noted an interesting historical coincidence on two Christmases, thirty years apart.  On Christmas Day in 1989, shortly after the Berlin Wall was first breached, Leonard Bernstein played a free concert at the Brandenburg Gate.  On Christmas Day, 2019, Li Wenliang, a doctor in Wuhan, China, told reporters about a new and mysterious disease he’d encountered.  (Characteristically, he was reprimanded by political authorities for rumormongering, and died a short time later, ostensibly from the virus.)

Kristol argues that those two events, exactly thirty years apart, can be viewed as the beginning and the end of an interregnum, a period between two eras, when the world order was in flux.  I like using Christmas as a framing device (especially now that it’s legal to use the word “Christmas”), and I don’t mind the interregnum concept.  I just don’t see that it’s over.  What’s the new pecking order?  Who’s the new boss?  Same as the old boss? 

I guess we were the old boss, or at least we thought we were.  Since the end of World War II, through 13 different presidents, in war and in peace, in good times and bad, we’ve clung to a sense of American exceptionalism.  We’re different.  We’re better.  Just ask Hitler, Tojo, and Gorbachev.  (Pay no attention to that Ho Chi Minh fellow.  Nobody likes him anyway.)

In his inaugural address, President Kennedy said, “we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty."  It sounded good at the time, but when we moved from theory to practice, things didn’t work out quite as expected.  Kennedy sent a few military advisors to Southeast Asia.  What could go wrong?

Quite a lot, as it turned out.  Southeast Asia became a killing field, with a death toll that eventually exceeded 3 million people.  By 1970, Richard Nixon was president, and he was worried.  Not about the death toll.  No, he worried that America was turning into “a pitiful, helpless giant.”  If we refused to fight tyranny, he said, “the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.” 

Fighting tyranny sounds nice.  I wish we knew how to do it.

Americans have many virtues, but we are a restless people with a combative streak.  Humility and restraint are not our long suits.  We read in our Bibles about David and Goliath, and we identify with David, the plucky underdog with God on his side.  But we usually act like Goliath. 

Our futile attempts at nation-building in the Middle East were typical Goliath moves.  And while we were thrashing about ineffectually, Vladimir Putin was doing some nation building of his own.  With the help of the Russian maffiya, he rebuilt Russia from a failed state into a successful transnational crime syndicate.

One theory about the collapse of the Soviet Union is that they bankrupted themselves trying to keep up with us militarily.  If this is true, it’s ironic.  Our vaunted military superiority has become less and less useful in protecting us from 21st century threats.  Sure, America can still win battles, assuming we can find anyone willing to fight us.  But those who wish us ill have learned that they no longer need to defeat us on battlefield.  Hackers are cheaper than soldiers, and more effective – at least against us. 

Give Putin credit.  Instead of trying to out-Goliath us, and decided to be David.  He invested relatively small sums in bribing and blackmailing western politicians, and in planting disinformation on social media platforms.  And he hit the jackpot.  First Brexit, and then Trump.  The EU is coming apart, Trump is dismantling our civilian and military national security apparatus, and leaders of our former allies are laughing at us.  All we needed was a plague, right?

Now who looks like a failed state?  Fifty years after Richard Nixon first uttered the phrase, Donald Trump is doing his best to turn us into a pitiful, helpless giant. 

We’ll learn whether the condition is permanent on November 3.  I don’t care so much about regaining giant status, but it would be nice not to be pitiful and helpless.  Right now, though, I’m just amazed at how far and how fast we’ve fallen.

THROWING ALL MY MEMORIES IN A DITCH SO DEEP

Bob Dylan released a new song on Thursday.  It’s title is “Murder Most Foul,” a phrase originally spoken by ghost.  It comes from HAMLET, where  Shakespeare gave the phrase to the Ghost of Hamlet’s father, who demands that his son avenge his death.  Dylan’s voice – his characteristic 21st century croak – sounds a bit like it’s coming from beyond the grave, as one of his “voices in the night trying to be heard.”  But the mood of the song is elegiac rather than vengeful.  To borrow a line from the Grateful Dead, Dylan seems to be meditating on “what a long, strange trip it’s been.”

This particular trip began in Dallas on November 22, 1963.  Dylan looks back at American history and sees everything that led up to the Kennedy assassination, and everything that came after as well.  And everything reminds him of a song.  That really resonates with me. 

The two songs sound nothing alike, but in its narrative strategy, “Murder Most Foul” reminds me of Don McClain’s “American Pie.”  A life-changing event happens, and dominoes begin falling.  There are cryptic references to decipher – “the Jester on the sidelines in a cast” – that keep your interest up.   

What I find fascinating about “Murder Most Foul” is that Dylan name-checks at least 74 songs in the lyrics.  He can do that because the new song clocks in at just under 17 minutes (or almost twice as long as “American Pie”).  Maybe that sounds off-putting, and if you’re sheltering in place while trying to work from home and take care of your family at the same time, free 17-minute blocs are probably hard to find, and perhaps better spent in napping.  Otherwise, it’s well worth your time.

https://www.npr.org/2020/03/27/822413049/bob-dylan-releases-epic-new-song-murder-most-foul

BEFORE I'LL BE A SLAVE, I'LL BE BURIED IN MY GRAVE

I was heartened by the news that Rand Paul was the first senator to test positive for COVID-19 – after exposing several of his colleagues to the virus.  The Republican Party is a raging dumpster fire, and Rand Paul isn’t even the worst Republican senator from Kentucky.  But he may well be the Senate’s biggest jerk. 

Ayn Rand preached rational self-interest.  I don’t see how putting your colleagues at risk for a deadly disease because you wanted to go swimming is in anyone’s rational self-interest, but that’s just me.  Paul probably sees himself as a cross between John Galt and the narrator of Invictus.  He is the master of his fate, the captain of his soul – his unconquerable soul, by jingo.

“The New Possibility” is a phrase coined by Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich to convey the transformative impact of the birth of Christ.  For millions of Americans, Donald Trump also represented a new possibility – the possibility that they could ignore laws (and even commandments) and not become pariahs. 

For Republican Evangelicals, Trump is the New Cyrus, “the chosen one.”  The Old Testament Cyrus the Great ended the Babylonian Captivity.  Trump ended the Barackobamian Captivity.  Practically the same thing.

The original Cyrus conquered Babylon, freed captive Judeans, and sent them back to their homeland.  Trump wants to declare victory over COVID-19, free Americans who are captives in their own homes, and send them back to building shareholder equity.  Again, practically the same thing.  Who’s to say that Trump’s plan to call the virus’ bluff on Easter Sunday isn’t precisely what Cyrus the Great would have done?

And for Republicans who lean libertarian, Trump is the new John Galt, ignoring all the rules of collectivist society and winning anyway.  In fact, winning precisely BECAUSE he ignored the rules of collectivist society.  Rules are for losers. 

An earlier draft of this post tried to make the tongue-in-cheek point that Trump could be viewed as a reformer, bringing Jesus and Ayn Rand into the 21st century.  But Trump’s guiding philosophy seems closer to that of an early 20th century philosopher, who taught that, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”  What if Donald Trump isn’t the New Cyrus, but the New Aleister Crowley?  The Occult-American community turns its lonely eyes, etc.

Whether you despise Donald Trump or merely loathe him, he obviously has one superpower.  He has an uncanny ability to bring out the worst in people.  Leading by example, he’s shown the world that it’s possible to behave badly and get away with it.  He has given his followers permission to be their worst selves. 

Christians in his orbit turn into idolaters.  Libertarians who find that rational self-interest is too labor-intensive get to skip the rational part and focus on pure self-interest.  Maybe idolatry and selfishness aren’t the best long-term strategies for a happy life, not to mention a happy afterlife.  But the afterlife is a crapshoot anyway, and who’s thinking long-term nowadays?

Rick Wilson wrote a best-seller called EVERYTHING TRUMP TOUCHES DIES.  I bought the book and approved of the metaphor.  Sadly, it’s now more than a metaphor.  And his victims are no longer limited to the endless pool of grifters and toadies who work for him voluntarily.  Trump once bragged that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and keep the support of his base. 

Four years later, he may not be using a gun, but he’s killing people just the same.  The death toll in the United States is already over 1000, with worse to come. 

Let me close by circling back to Rand Paul.  He’s been savaged on social media, with opinions that run from “serves him right” (understandable) to “I hope it kills him” (which I think goes too far).  I hope Rand Paul’s virus is severe enough to bring him to his senses.  Let him get well, and then devote the rest of his life as an advocate for science-based public health. 

I’m not going to hold my breath in anticipation of that outcome. These days, every breath is precious. But I can spare a moment for a few thoughts and prayers.  I have a lot of time on my hands these days.

THE OLD FOLKS AT HOME

Harry Truman famously said, “The only thing new in the world is the history you do not know.”  Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, to a time when powerful natural force put American lives in danger – and incompetence at the top of the chain of command led to disaster. 

I’m talking about the World War II incident that inspired Herman Wouk’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1951 novel, THE CAINE MUTINY, and the Humphrey Bogart film three years later.  Wouk based his story on a near-mutiny aboard the USS Hull in December 1944.  In Wouk’s fictionalized account of the Hull tragedy, the crew does indeed mutiny, but they’re acquitted when the mentally unstable Captain Queeg has a breakdown on the witness stand.

The real story is much worse.  It began when Lt. Commander James Marks was placed in command of the Navy destroyer USS Hull in Seattle in the fall of 1944.  Marks’ reputation for bad judgment preceded him, and as many as twenty sailors reportedly jumped ship in Seattle rather than sail to the South Pacific under his command. 

Marks’ leadership issues were compounded by those of Admiral “Bull” Halsey, who had been tasked with deploying the Navy’s Third Fleet in support of General MacArthur’s imminent invasion of the Philippines.  December 17, 1944, Halsey decided to test his officers, to “see what they were made of.”  He ordered the Third Fleet, including the Hull, to hold their positions in the Philippine Sea, despite the approach of a massive typhoon.      

Typhoon Cobra (or Halsey’s Typhoon, as it became known) featured wind gusts of 140 mph and 70-foot waves.  To make matters worse, the USS Hull had been retrofitted with 500 tons of additional armament and equipment, rendering it top heavy.  When the Hull crossed paths with the typhoon, it began to roll. 

The Hull’s crew begged their officers to relieve Marks of his command.  But none of them were willing to preside over the first mutiny in the history of the U.S. Navy.  The Hull and two other destroyers capsized and sank.  Of the Hull’s crew, 41 were rescued, while over 200 were lost.  The overall death toll was 790 men.  The Navy held a court of inquiry, and Halsey came in for some mild criticism.  He kept his command, though. 

That was all long ago and far away.  I bring it up now because I have a feeling that Donald Trump is getting the urge to see what the rest of us are made of. 

Trump has run out of patience with safety measures that hurt the stock market (and thus his re-election chances).  “We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself.”  Yesterday, he targeted Easter, April 12, as the day he’ll likely declare the COVID-19 emergency over.

No sane person thinks the emergency will be over by Easter, but with Donald Trump, sanity isn’t part of the calculus.  He’ll fall for any outlandish scheme that the talking heads on Fox can dream up.  The Outlandish poster boy du jour is Dan Patrick, the Lt. Governor of Texas, who suggested that old people should just go ahead and die so that their grandchildren can have a healthy stock portfolio. 

Right.  And if that doesn’t work, we can go Old School and toss a few virgins into volcanos.  Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Friends, please believe me when I say that I like a healthy stock portfolio as much as the next guy.  That’s where I parked the money I expected to live on for the rest of my life.  But the trial balloon that Lt. Governor Patrick floated represents a false choice.  Lots of elderly will die, he got that part right.  But a mass sacrifice of Boomers and Silents won’t bring back the boom economy of 2019. 

Even if you’re a hard-nosed, data-driven kind of no-nonsense Very Stable Genius who isn’t inclined to let mere sentiment mess up your bottom line, the fact is that we don’t know enough about the virus to make a rational cost-benefit analysis.  Trump’s failure to begin testing in a timely manner means that we don’t even know how many people are infected, which in turn means that we can’t project fatality rates.  His failure to acquire or manufacture the equipment needed to fight the virus means that its impact will be more severe than it might have been under, say, President Hillary Clinton.

Even well-known radical Liz Cheney, Wyoming’s Republican Congresswoman, is alarmed:  “There will be no normally functioning economy if our hospitals are overwhelmed and thousands of Americans of all ages, including our doctors and nurses, lay dying because we have failed to do what’s necessary to stop the virus.” 

If the economy bounces back at all from a premature attempt to restore normalcy, the recovery will be short-lived, and it will play out over a soundtrack of a few hundred thousand old geezers like me gasping for our last breaths.  Remember when Republicans pretended to believe that Obamacare meant setting up death panels to take health insurance away from grandma and grandpa?  Trump’s death panels will be all too real, as exhausted doctors will be forced to decide who gets treated for the virus, and who gets to die. 

Here’s a rhetorical question.  If Trump and his enablers were actively trying to spread COVID-19, what would they do differently?  The allegedly pro-life Republican Party should admit that it just a death cult with a fetus fetish.  (But if they really cared about fetuses, they’d insist on isolating pregnant women for as long as a threat from the virus remains.) 

Trump is still trying to talk his way out of the crisis, although it doesn’t appear that the virus is listening.  He may not realize that he doesn’t have the authority to open or close schools, factories, and theaters.  His political strategists get it, though, and it’s clear that their strategy is to give Trump credit for anything that goes right, and blame local authorities – governors and mayors – for anything that goes wrong.  You can bet that Trump is furious because people are praising New York’s Governor Cuomo crisis leadership.  It wouldn’t shock me if we started hearing references to “the New York virus” pretty soon.  Turning the pandemic into another Red State/Blue State battleground would be entirely consistent with Trump’s divide and conquer philosophy.

At the height of the Dust Bowl, California set up barricades at its borders to discourage Okies and Arkies from overwhelming the state’s infrastructure.  Woody Guthrie wrote a song about it: “the police at the port of entry say, you’re number 14,000 for today.”  My father was one of the “discouraged,” which is why I grew up a Kansan rather than a Californian. 

I wonder if Blue State governors will try something similar in order to keep Red State travelers from importing the virus.  If states begin setting up armed checkpoints with guards in hazmat suits taking everyone’s temperature and ordering everyone with a fever to turn back – well, you read it first here.  Unless you read it first somewhere else.

There are better ways to get through this, and here’s one of them.  First, stop framing the issue as a choice between health and wealth, or between the lives of the young and the lives of the old.  This doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. 

The questions we should be asking are, what can we do now to minimize the economic fallout while we get through the pandemic, and what can we do then to make people whole again?  People mutter darkly about “throwing money at problems,” but when the problem is that people are out of money, then the judicious application of cash seems like a reasonable first step. 

I’d start by sending everyone $2000.  Even Donald Trump.  Establishing a means test would require Congress to debate where the cutoff line should be, and then build a bureaucracy to administer the process.  We don’t have time for that.  People need money now.  Give them money now, and then re-assess in two or three weeks.  If people need more money, give them more, until the crisis has passed. 

Once people are free to congregate again, some bills will come due.  Then it will be time to tax the rich. 

And that means taxing me.  Bring it on, please!  I’m enthusiastic about paying taxes to build a better society.  My goal is to live long enough to pay those taxes.

SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO?

Daniel Defoe published the ultimate social isolation novel, ROBINSON CRUSOE, in 1719.  His uncle lived through the Great Plague of London in 1665-66, and when another epidemic of plague broke out in the warring Baltic states in 1721, London was worried.  Defoe published A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR the following year, based on his uncle’s recollections.  It’s a novel, but historians view it as an invaluable look at a time when a quarter of the population of London died of the bubonic plague. 

Like COVID-19, London’s plague was most contagious before its carriers began to feel sick.  “It was very sad to reflect how such a person as this,” Defoe wrote, “had been a walking destroyer perhaps for a week or a fortnight before that; how he had ruined those that he would have hazarded his life to save, and had been breathing death upon them, even perhaps in his tender kissing and embracings of his own children.” 

Then as now, social isolation saved lives.  I was raised by worriers, and I can easily locate any given set of symptoms for the disease du jour.  But that two weeks of silent contagion really makes me crazy.  Am I sick already and don’t even know it?  Who gave it to me?  Who might I have given it to?  When I leave the house, it feels a bit like playing Russian Roulette – only I’m not just putting myself at risk, but also all the people I encounter as well.  In Defoe’s words, I could be a walking destroyer.

All that is by way of saying that my wife Vicki and I have cancelled classes at our yoga studio through the end of the month, in accordance with Mayor Regina Romero’s proclamation yesterday (which, remarkably enough, specifically mentioned yoga studios).  At our studio, classes are small, everyone’s a regular, and I trust them to stay away if they experience COVID-19 symptoms.  But those first two weeks of asymptomatic contagion make it impossible to evaluate your own risk, much less anyone else’s.  On Sunday,  Arizona Governor Doug Ducey ordered schools to close, but declined to order the closure of non-essential businesses.  On Tuesday, Mayor Romero’s proclamation plugged that gap in this part of the state, and even though it will leave our studio on precarious financial footing, it was the right thing to do.  (One of those two politicians is a Republican, while the other is a Democrat.  I’ll let you guess which is which.)

The only social activity that I haven’t distanced myself from is my work as a volunteer driver for Lend A Hand (LAH), a non-profit that helps elderly and infirm folks get to medical appointments and suchlike.  Social isolation is the default condition for many LAH clients, some of whom live alone and have few visitors.  In terms of contagion, a trip to the doctor or the grocery store is probably the riskiest part of their week.  But our clients have little choice, because in addition to being elderly and infirm, many of them are also poor.  They couldn’t be hoarders if they wanted to, because they can’t get to stores on their own, and they don’t have enough money to buy more than a few days’ worth of necessities anyway.

The best advice I’ve seen on responsible behavior during an epidemic came from Martin Luther.  In 1527, there was an outbreak of the plague in Wittenberg.  The university shut down, and some residents asked Luther, the town’s most prominent citizen, for advice.  Luther’s response took the form of a 16 page open letter that has come to be known as "Whether One May Flee From a Deadly Plague."  This is the heart of his message.

“I shall ask God mercifully to protect us. Then I shall fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine, and take it. I shall avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed in order not to become contaminated and thus perchance infect and pollute others, and so cause their death as a result of my negligence. If God should wish to take me, he will surely find me and I have done what he has expected of me and so I am not responsible for either my own death or the death of others. If my neighbor needs me, however, I shall not avoid place or person, but will go freely.”

Holler if you need help.  And if you have extra time on your hands these days, the full text of Luther’s letter can be found here:  https://blogs.lcms.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Plague-blogLW.pdf

YOU COULD HAVE DONE BETTER, BUT I DON'T MIND

Over a year ago, as Democrats began to declare their intention to run for president, I wrote that I hoped to be able to vote for a candidate younger than I am, and preferably one with two X chromosomes.  Maybe next time. 

Nevertheless, my fellow Democrats have chosen a candidate who is far superior to Donald Trump, and I’m happy to support Joe Biden in the general election.  I was impressed by both Joe Biden’s victory speech and by Bernie Sanders’ concession speech.  Good on both of them.

But out of the large cast of characters who have come and gone since the race began, the two people who impressed me most were women.  I believe that Elizabeth Warren was the best candidate in the field, and I’m sorry that relatively few Democratic voters agreed with that assessment.  And among the non-candidates, I was particularly impressed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is a savvy enough politician to advocate effectively for Bernie Sanders without burning bridges to his rivals.  I like her “mission before position” attitude – she cares about getting stuff done, but she doesn’t need to lead the process.  People like that are the ones who make good leaders, and I hope I live long enough to vote for her some fine day.

In the meantime, there’s work to do right now.  “Electability” was one of the major themes of the primary season.  Is Joe Biden electable?  Who knows?  November 3 is a bit over seven months away, and it’s been fifty years at least since a presidential election took place in the middle of this much chaos.    

(As usual, I can’t resist a brief stroll down memory lane.  In case you’re too young to remember, 1968 was the year a sitting president decided not to run for re-election, the two most prominent progressives in America were both assassinated, more than 16,000 American soldiers were killed in Vietnam, and there were ten riots in American cities that were major enough to have their own Wikipedia page.  Good riddance to 1968.)

Returning to the matter of Biden’s electability, my answer is that it’s largely up to us – Democrats and everyone else who wants to get rid of Trump – to make him electable.  Joe Biden’s not an angel, and he’s not a devil.  He’s a career politician, and his positions have evolved over the decades.  I’m glad, because some of his earlier positions were wrong.  He’s also gaffe-prone, and has been for decades.  And none of that matters much to me.  For all his faults, Joe Biden would make a far better president than Donald Trump, who will continue as president if we fail to make Biden electable.

As I see it, the logical first step in getting rid of Donald Trump is to avoid trashing the only candidate who has a chance to beat him in November.  Instead of using phrases like “lesser of two evils” and “hold my nose and vote for him,” consider saying something like this.  “He wasn’t my first choice, but it’s imperative that we get Donald Trump out of the White House, so I’m voting for him, and I hope you do too.” 

Republicans and their allies in the Green Party will keep up the drumbeat of attack ads.  We’ll relive Biden’s gaffes, old and new.  They’ll bring up questionable votes, and try to do a Benghazi number on Hunter Biden. 

If you’re a Democrat, the proper response is, “OK, now do Trump.”  

Whatever your opinion of Biden as a candidate, one point in his favor is that Donald Trump is afraid of him.  That’s why he had Bill Barr and Rudy Giuliani tramping around in Ukraine, twisting the arms of local politicians for dirt on Biden’s son.  That’s why this week, he tried to concern-troll Democrats with tweets about poor Bernie being cheated out of his rightful nomination.   

I know that many Sanders supporters are devastated right now. I get it.  I myself have a history of making emotional investments in losing candidates, beginning with the first election I was old enough to vote in.  Well, that guy didn’t exactly lose.  Bobby Kennedy was murdered on the night he won the California primary.  I was shocked when Richard Nixon beat George McGovern badly in 1972.  I was outraged that Republicans stole the 2000 election from Al Gore.  Anyone who feels shock, outrage, and grief over Bernie’s loss should take time to grieve. 

But I hope they never lose sight of the fact that the alternative to Joe Biden is no longer Bernie Sanders.  It’s four more years of Donald Trump.  If you think that actively or passively helping Trump win re-election is the best way to avenge Bernie Sanders – boy are you reading the wrong guy.

For everyone else, my advice is simple.  Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, and don’t mess with Mr. In-Between.

LIKE THE GREAT NATIONS OF EUROPE IN THE 16TH CENTURY

The phrase “may you live in interesting times” may be a curse, but apparently it didn’t originate in China.  Nevertheless, we’re seeing interesting times in China, and they’re spreading around the world rapidly. 

My wife and I have a nephew who lives in Beijing.  He went there to make a little money teaching English to the locals in advance of the 2008 Olympic Games, met a Chinese lady and married her.  They have two pre-teen sons. 

Thanks to the coronavirus outbreak, my nephew and his family have been restricted to their small apartment for weeks.  Well, they’re not exactly forbidden to leave, but there are guards at each entrance, armed with medical thermometers.  They take the temperature of everyone who leaves and enters.  If anyone has fever, the police will escort them to a quarantine facility for the duration. 

Nothing like that could happen here, of course – not with Donald Trump on the job.  Surely we can take comfort in his appointment of Mike Pence as America’s Coronavirus Czar, right? 

Unless this is the same Mike Pence who used to be Governor of Indiana.  Then we’re screwed, because that Mike Pence failed his only public health crisis so far.  First, he cut public health spending in 2013, resulting in the closure of the only HIV testing facility in Scott County, Indiana. 

You’ll never guess what happened two years later.  In the most unpredictable coincidence of all time, there was a sizeable outbreak of HIV in that very Scott County, mostly from drug users’ dirty needles. Medical experts say that the death toll might have been cut by half or more had Governor Pence rushed to adopt a needle exchange program, as medical experts recommended.  Instead, Mike Pence promised to “go home and pray on it.” 

Get ready for a lot of thoughts and prayers during the coming coronavirus epidemic. 

Maybe you’ve seen some of the data on current coronavirus cases, and are relieved that the fatality rate is currently only c. 2%.  Besides, the fatalities disproportionately come from cases involving the old and infirm.  I can understand while people find that last data point reassuring, although personally, as a member of the Old & Infirm American community, I’m still a little nervous.  Call me a hypochondriac. 

But before we get too complacent, it would be smart to watch what happens when quarantines spread to places that America relies on to keep our farms and industries going.  Supply chains will be disrupted.  Manufacturers won’t be able to get parts.  Which might not even matter, because a lot of factories will probably suspend operations, at least temporarily.  Schools will close – and instead of spending their free time at the movies or roaming around a shopping mall, kids will have to stay home.  Malls and movie theaters will likely be closed anyway.  Ditto for factories, public transportation, sports and entertainment venues, and other places where contagion could spread rapidly.  As the economic disruption spread, the stock market will react negatively, as it has already begun to do.  Maybe stuffing cash in a mattress isn’t such a crazy idea after all.

Donald Trump doesn’t care about anything that doesn’t affect him personally.  But I suspect that his handlers have made him aware that a stock market crash would hurt his re-election chances.  His handlers must also know that the poop is going to hit the propeller no matter what we do.  From that perspective, it looks to me like Mike Pence is being set up to be the scapegoat when things go south. 

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a 1999 Randy Newman song called “The Great Nations Of Europe” (link below).  Newman deflates the Age of Conquest by identifying the conquistadors’ secret weapons – “TB and typhoid and athlete’s foot, diphtheria and the flu.”  He left out smallpox, but who’s counting?  All’s fair in love and biological warfare. 

In his last verse, Newman posits a turning of the tables – “some bug from out of Africa might come for you and me.”  He was thinking about AIDS when he wrote the song, but substituting “some virus out of China” would bring it right up to date.

The best advice I’ve seen about preparing for the coronavirus is to start planning now.  You don’t have to go full prepper, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea to stock up on two or three weeks’ worth of supplies just in case.    

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxNQxu7PWKM&pbjreload=10

HIGH SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL

HIGH SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL:  I’m not watching the Democratic debates.  I know it’s fun for the Chuck Todds of this word to make Democrats fight amongst themselves instead of keeping the focus on Donald Trump, where it belongs.  But I’m going to have to vote for one of these folks, so I’ll pass on the spectacle of candidates squabbling – even if a lot of the criticism is valid.

By all accounts, though, the new guy had a pretty rough go of it.  My social media timelines were full of people dunking on Mike Bloomberg.  Someone dug up his high school picture, and the mockery began to flow.

That’s OK, I guess.  High school photos are usually good for a laugh.  But as I scrolled through the insulting comment threads, I was a little surprised to find that no one mentioned the comparison that struck me immediately.

To my eyes, teenage Bloomberg looked a whole lot like another Jewish kid born in 1942.  The fellow on the right in this photo is Lewis Allan Reed, much admired by hipsters (and cool people everywhere). 

I’m not impressed by opposition research (professional or amateur) that probes obsessively for decades-old dirt.  Four years ago, there was a rumor that Hillary Clinton had voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964.  That’s demonstrably false – she was 17 on election day, 1964, and the legal voting age back then was 21.  But even if it were true, it had nothing to do with her views 52 years later.  It was just fuel for the next day’s two minutes of hate.    

There are plenty of reasons to criticize Mike Bloomberg.  His high school yearbook photo isn’t one of them.

(And yes, I will vote for Mike Bloomberg if he’s the Democratic nominee.  I’d rather vote for Lou Reed, but it doesn’t look like he’ll be on the ballot.  Lou Reed would make a better president than Donald Trump, even in his present condition.)

WE'RE DESPERATE, GET USED TO IT

In Berlin, in 1987, Ronald Reagan demanded that Mikhail Gorbachev “tear down this wall.”  By 2016, though, Republicans were ready to embrace both walls and Russian dictators.  Now it’s “build the wall” and “Russia, if you’re listening.”

For a while, it looked like there might be a different outcome.  In the aftermath of Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama in 2012, members of the Republican Party establishment conducted a self-examination and concluded that they’d allowed their base to become too narrow.  They were still fixated on Ronald Reagan long after the Gipper was dead and buried.  “Morning in America” turned into Groundhog Day.  Reach out to minorities and gays, they said.  We’ve got to be more than just the party of old, wealthy white people.

Not so fast, the old, wealthy white people said.  Whose money made the modern Republican Party possible?  Over and above campaign donations, they funded think tanks, lobbying firms, publishing houses, and even media empires – all of which offered part- or full-time income streams for good Republican foot soldiers.  They weren’t about to go gentle into that good night.  They made their peace with Donald Trump.  And with Putin.  Russia was indeed listening, and they helped the Republican Party sweep the presidency, the House, and the Senate.

So we know that Republicans cheat.  But why?  Why did they choose blatant oligarchy over even a small number of mostly cosmetic compromises?    

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, authors of HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE, offer an answer.  Last September, they wrote a New York Times op ed piece entitled “Why Republicans Play Dirty” (link below), and this is the heart of their argument. 

“For parties to accept losing, two conditions must hold. First, they must feel secure that losing today will not bring ruinous consequences; and second, they must believe they have a reasonable chance of winning again in the future. When party leaders fear that they cannot win future elections, or that defeat poses an existential threat to themselves or their constituents, the stakes rise. Their time horizons shorten. They throw tomorrow to the wind and seek to win at any cost today. In short, desperation leads politicians to play dirty.”

In other words, Republicans saw the writing on the wall, and decided to tear down the wall. 

OK, that’s good to know, but then what?  When one side plays dirty and wins, what’s the other side to do?  In the five presidential elections in this century, Democrats won the popular vote four times.  In two of those elections, though, the structural inequities built into the Electoral College (plus some blatant cheating) handed the White House to a Republican.

Maybe the most important question isn’t why Republicans play dirty.   Maybe we should be asking why Democrats DON’T play dirty.  And what would happen if they did?  

What if Democrats went full-on Republican dirty, including a “China, if you’re listening” appeal for help in countering hacks from Grand Old Putin.  What if Yang, Bloomberg, and Steyer, for instance, decided to pool 10% of their wealth and create a bizarro world Fox News, dedicated to lying about the Right like Fox lies about the Left?  Not a legitimate news service, but a fake news propaganda outlet?

Mainstream media would probably scream.  Their worldview sees Republicans as hard-nosed realists.  Republicans will do whatever it takes to win, even if they have to play dirty.  What else would you expect from hard-nosed realists? 

But they’ve assigned Democrats the role of earnest but inept do-gooders.  Well, that and occasional comic relief.  The mostly male pundit brigade must be amused at all those Democratic women who persist in running for president.  It’s like they haven’t figured out that the game is rigged, that talking heads will call them shrill, mock their appearance, and question their electability.

NBC and the Wall Street Journal took it up a notch earlier this week, ghosting Elizabeth Warren entirely.  They commissioned a series of head to head polls, pitting five of the six top Democratic candidates against Donald Trump, both nationally and in several key swing states.  Guess which candidate they left out?  I’ll bet the old boy network got a good chuckle out of that.

So while I’m convinced that Levitsky and Ziblatt are onto something, I think it’s important to address the implications of their thesis.  Republicans hold power by playing dirty.  No serious observer disagrees.  But if Levitsky and Ziblatt are correct, it means that a major role reversal has taken place.  Voting models show that Trump has a path to victory in the Electoral College, even if he loses the popular vote by 5 million.  If that happens, desperation will set in real soon.  Then what?

I don’t want Democrats to play dirty.  If I wanted to belong to party that played dirty, I’d be a Republican.  But neither do I want a system of sham elections in which my side has to follow rules and the other side doesn’t. Ivanka and Don Jr. are tanned, rested, and ready.

The 18th century Irish orator John Philpot Curran could have been talking about Donald Trump when he said, "In this administration, a place can be found for every bad man."  But Curran’s most urgent message to 21st century Americans came in a speech in Dublin in 1790: “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.”

It’s too bad we can’t be vigilant retroactively, because I fear that we’re approaching the point of no return.  We have an uphill climb ahead of us in the best of circumstances.  But if we keep acting like Charlie Brown, letting Lucy fool us yet again, we may not get another chance. 

I’ve been thinking about “The Second Coming.”  Not the one in The Book of Revelation, but the poem by William Butler Yeats, in which “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”  It gets worse from there.  Let’s turn this battleship around before it’s too late.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/opinion/republicans-democracy-play-dirty.html

I’M YOUR YANKEE DOODLE DANDY IN A GOLD ROLLS ROYCE

I want the Democratic presidential candidate, whoever it may be, to win in November.  As in, becoming the next president, living in White House for at least four years, reversing as much Trump damage as possible, and all that good stuff. 

I intend to vote in the March 17 Arizona Democratic primary, and electability – the candidate with the best chance of beating Donald Trump – will be my primary criterion.  The map that accompanies this post comes from The American Prospect, and it illustrates the challenge that Democrats face.  The Democratic nominee, no matter who it turns out to be, will almost certainly carry California, thereby earning 55 electoral votes.  But the number will stay at 55 whether the Democrat wins by a million votes, or by just one. 

Running up big popular vote majorities in deep blue states is nice, but it didn’t make Hillary Clinton president in 2016.  The path to the White House runs through the Electoral College, and the magic number is 270.

Republicans have some deep red states they can count on through thick and thin.  Accepting, for the moment, The American Prospect’s estimates, it looks like Trump 139 EC votes locked up, with another 66 leaning Republican.  That’s 207 out of the required 270.

The generic Democrat, on the other hand, can count on 179 solidly blue votes, with another 58 leaning towards the good guys.  That’s 237 Electoral College votes – tantalizingly close, but still short of victory.  The candidate that can compete successfully for the 110 electoral votes in the remaining nine states will be our next president.    

My current assumption is that Sanders, Warren, and Buttigieg will still be viable candidates when the Arizona primary rolls around on March 17.  Biden and Klobuchar look possible but less certain.  Bloomberg is kind of a wild card, but we know he has enough money to stay in the race as long as he wants. 

I’ve already written that policy differences between the Democratic candidates don’t matter much to me, and won’t likely play a role in my choice on March 17.  Donald Trump is the issue I care about most.  Getting rid of him is job one.  My primary vote will go to the candidate who, in my estimation, has the best chance of getting to 270 electoral votes in November.  And I’ll try to assess the situation candidate by candidate, and state by state, for the states that are in play.  I won’t ask that the Democrat beat Trump in Mississippi.  But I do expect them to hold on to traditional Democratic states and compete successfully in enough swing states to get to 270 electoral votes.

That means I’ll be asking questions like, could Sanders carry Arizona?  Could Bloomberg carry Wisconsin?  Could Warren carry Florida?  And so on.   

I’ve also written about my hope that the eventual Democratic nominee will be younger than I am.  Remarkably, the three oldest candidates are still in the race.  I’ve criticized those three members of the Silent Generation on other grounds as well.  I’ve noted that some (not all!) of Sanders’ supporters are the mirror image of Trump’s Deplorables.  I’ve scoffed at Biden’s insistence that once Trump is gone, Republicans will magically turn into responsible citizens.  And of Bloomberg, I wrote that no billionaire will win the Democratic nomination. 

But because getting rid of Donald Trump is job one, if one of those gentlemen should happen to win the nomination, I promise to overlook their age, their obnoxious supporters, their naivete, and/or their wealth.  Ditto for whatever drawbacks the younger contenders might bring to the table.  If I made a list of everything I disliked about each Democratic contender, and then added all those negatives together, the whole mess would pale in comparison to the alternative, which is four more years of Donald Trump.

For me, it’s Blue, no matter who.  If Bernie Sanders is the Democratic nominee, I’ll send him money, I’ll urge everyone within earshot to support him, and I’ll vote for him enthusiastically.  Same for Amy Klobuchar, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and Mike Bloomfield.  

OK, I might not send money to Mike Bloomberg, because he has enough already.

DON'T MOURN. ORGANIZE.

Well, maybe mourn a little.  But not at the expense of organizing.  This post is about the Senate impeachment trial, although given the news out of Iowa, it also applies to the caucus snafu.  Unproductive conspiracy mongering is one symptom of the Left’s circular firing squad mentality, and it could wind up re-electing Donald Trump.

The reporting problems in Iowa are still being unraveled as I write this, but conspiracy theorists are out in full force.  As I understand it, the Sanders camp asked for, and got, a new voting system, which turned out to be significantly more complicated than the old one, so it’s taking longer to get results out.  There have been no credible reports of hacking, or cheating.  Until such time as there is confirmation for those dark suspicions, I’ll assume the rumors are mostly Russo-Republican disinformation efforts. 

But for crying out loud, Iowa.  Drop this caucus thing and just vote.  And use paper ballots.

Meanwhile, back at the Senate, I want to offer a few words in support of the Democratic effort to impeach and remove Donald Trump.  Conviction and removal were always unlikely, but that doesn’t mean it was a waste of time.

Inevitably, the Guardians of Conventional Wisdom (i.e., center-right pundits) and the Arbiters of Progressive Purity (i.e., influencers and would-be influencers on the left) argue that the Senate’s vote to refuse additional witnesses proved that Democrats miscalculated in bringing impeachment to the Senate in the first place. This is an example of magical thinking common inside the Beltway, where Democrats must always be held responsible for Republicans’ mistakes as well as their own.    

In fact, there’s a much simpler explanation.  Logic and eloquence won’t turn partisan hacks into statesmen.  Truth, justice, and the American way were 20th century concepts that are no longer relevant to contemporary Republicans.

No, Trump and McConnell kept their minions in line in an even more old-fashioned way – with threats and bribes.  Your head on a pike if you cross Trump, or generous campaign contributions if you follow orders.  

It is possible to quibble about the timing of the impeachment hearings.  But no one knows how long it would have taken for a final decision if the Democratic leadership had opted to take Bolton, Mulvaney, etc., to court to compel their testimony.  What we do know is that Trump’s go-to tactic in lawsuits is to drag them out as long as possible.  Imagine the chaos if a Supreme Court ruling was delayed until right before the election.  Or until after the election.

As best I can tell, Democratic leadership played the hand they were dealt effectively.  Using the evidence available to them, they established Trump’s guilt so well that Trump’s motley crew of legal eagles had no answers.  They spouted nonsense and tried to change the subject.  By Friday’s vote on seeking additional witnesses, even some Republican senators were reduced to arguing, “OK, he’s guilty as charged, and so what?  He did what they say he did, and we don’t care.”.  They just wanted to get it over with, so they opted for jury nullification. 

Which again begs the question, why bother?  Why, since the outcome was predictable, did Democrats invest so much time and effort in a losing cause?  Why not get on with the presidential campaign, pick a nominee and duke it out at the ballot box in November?

Well, for one thing, Congressional Democrats swore to protect the Constitution.  I’m glad that at least one political party opted to obey their oath of office.  It’s also worth noting that impeachment is popular.  The best available polling last week indicated a significant majority in favor of calling witnesses, and at least a plurality in favor of conviction and removal. 

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell points out that the (mostly Democratic) senators who voted “yes” on calling witnesses represent 19 million more people than the 51 senators who voted no.  How could that  be?  Here’s an example.  California has a population of 55 million.  Its two Democratic senators voted to hear witnesses.  Meanwhile, Arkansas, Mississippi, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Nebraska, and Kansas ADDED TOGETHER have fewer than 19 million people.  The 20 senators from those ten states all cast bright red votes against calling witnesses.  That’s how representatives of 19 million people can outvote representatives of 55 million.

Yes, there are some larger red states (e.g., Texas and Florida), and some smaller blue states (e.g., New Mexico and Hawaii).  But overall, the concessions that the Founding Fathers made to win the support of smaller states have, 244 years later, given the Republican Party a path (via the Senate and the Electoral College) to impose minority rule on the rest of the country.  The Senate used to be known as the world’s greatest deliberative body.  Now it’s overrun by grifters whose highest ambition is to supplement their income with campaign contributions until it’s time to become a lobbyist or a Fox commentator. 

I also want to be sure to mention Adam Schiff’s closing argument, in which he made it clear that the Senate, as well as the president, was on trial, and that history would judge the cover up as harshly as the original crime. 

Obviously, Democrats would have preferred to win the vote and call witnesses.  But if they had to lose the witness vote, the ideal loss would be by a single vote.  Which is exactly what happened. 

Not only were 51 Republican senators collectively responsible for abetting Trump’s cover up.  Individually, all 51 will also have to live with the burden of being the deciding vote.   

History will judge them, but let’s not wait for history.  We can hasten the process along by voting some of them out of office next November.  My unelected junior senator was one of the Filthy 51, and I’m looking forward to voting for Democrat Mark Kelly.  (This has been an unpaid political announcement.)  Don’t forget those down-ballot races!

WHO READS YESTERDAY'S PAPERS?

Georges Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I hope that my readers find my posts useful, or at least entertaining.  But I’ve always assumed they had a limited shelf life – not ephemeral, exactly, but definitely focused on the events of the day. 

That’s why I was more than a little surprised last week, when a post I wrote back on August 6, 2018, suddenly drew comments from two people I’d never heard of.  They appear to be Trump fans, and they took issue with my criticism of the Dear Leader. 

Reader, I am condemned to repeat it.  And to elaborate on it.

I wrote that at the height of the post-war Red Scare, Americans were encouraged to believe that communist spies were everywhere.  Why, any of your co-workers, any of your neighbors, maybe even a member of your own family, might be on the Kremlin’s payroll.  If mommy is a commie, then you gotta turn her in.

I went on to argue that, in retrospect, the Soviet Union’s Boris-and-Natasha style agitprop was never likely to seduce American public opinion to any significant degree.  Sure, the Soviets were powerful.   But few Americans wanted to be like them.  Let the commissars boast about the record-breaking beet harvests and doubling their tractor production quotas.  America had TV and Elvis Presley.  We were cool.  They were ... the opposite of cool.

I also wrote that “When the Soviet Union broke up, and Russia no longer felt obligated to promote its ideology, they began to think more clearly about how to sabotage their chief geopolitical rival. Sabotage was much easier than conversion, and as the events of 2016 proved, it wasn’t difficult to introduce confusion and discord into the American political system.”

And, I might have added, into the UK, and elsewhere in Europe.  The so-called “American Century” is over, both literally and figuratively.  To be honest, maybe it’s for the best.  We meant well, at least most of the time.  But we got cocky.  We thought we could get away with interfering in the affairs of other countries.  And since it took a while – years in some cases, decades in others – for events to unfold, we could tell ourselves that everything would turn out OK. 

And yet somehow, things haven’t turned out OK.  In Asia, in Latin America, and in the Middle East, we’ve thrown our weight around since the end of World War II, with little to show for it except ill-will on all sides.  They resent us for casually interfering with their lives, and we resent them for resenting us.  And Vladimir Putin chuckles.  

I’m grateful to my two Deplorable critics for drawing my attention to that old post, because it foreshadowed a more recent observation by science fiction writer David Brin (link below) that I’ve intended to call to your attention.  Brin connected a couple of dots that I overlooked.  He wrote:

“After 70 years spent futilely trying to suborn the U.S. left, which generally saw through all the faux-egalitarian Leninist crap, Putin and his fellow commissars and KGB agents just dropped all the hammer-sickle stuff and re-branded themselves as billionaire-Christian mafia-oligarchs. And that was all it took, in order to hypnotize the entire U.S. right.”

After all, if you can’t trust billionaire-Christian mafia-oligarchs, who can you trust? 

I think it’s a little more complicated than that.  Putin understood the importance of creating dissension on the Left.  His 2016 fake news operation cost Hillary Clinton some progressive votes, and – with the American Right now subjugated – the Left will be the primary focus of Russia’s disinformation campaign this year.  I’ll write more about that soon.  In the meantime, you can read Brin’s full post here.   

http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2020/01/at-heart-of-matter-ukraine-rapture-and.html

STOP MAKING SENSE

I’ve been lucky enough to have had a lot of great teachers over the years, and I try to use things they’ve said to make sense of our current crisis.  Lately, I’ve been thinking about Frank Nelick, an English professor at the University of Kansas.  I can’t remember the text we were studying, but one day the classroom discussion turned to the topic of lying.  Dr. Nelick offered a practical reason to tell the truth rather than a lie.  A lie, he said, complicates your reality.  The more lies you tell, the better your memory has to be, just to keep your stories straight. 

But that was long ago and far away.  Recent breakthroughs in the art of prevarication threaten to render the concept of truth irrelevant, at least in the realm of public policy.  Donald Trump has been surprisingly effective in eliminating the distinction between fact and fiction.  It’s the one thing he’s turned out to be good at. 

Trump spent a lifetime learning how to lie.  And equally as important, learning who to lie to.  He began his career as a liar in fields like real estate in New York and Florida, casinos, and reality TV, where a certain amount of dissembling is taken for granted.  By 2015, Trump was a nationally known “character,” and Mainstream Media didn’t take him seriously at first.  That gave Trump some extra time to practice his con on a brand-new set of marks.  When he won the nomination, he was ready to lie to the world.  Let Democrats practice “honesty is the best policy” and see how many elections they win.

Trump told his Deplorables what they wanted to hear:  Your problems aren’t your fault.  Those college educated coastal elites, the Democrat snobs who think they’re better than you?  Everything is their fault.  Lost your factory job to automation?  Blame Democrats.  Kid got a drug habit?  Blame Democrats.  Overheard someone in the supermarket speaking Spanish?  Blame Democrats.  PTSD from a tour of duty in Afghanistan?  Blame the Clintons, blame Obama, blame the press, blame anyone but Donald J. Trump.  Because any criticism of Trump is really an attack on you. 

It worked, and it’s still working.  He praises them as winners one minute and pities them as victims the next.  As long as Trump bashes their enemies and tells them he’ll make everything all right, they’ll stick with him.  Dishonesty is the best policy.

It’s also the only real “policy” Donald Trump has.  It got him elected, and it might be enough to get him re-elected.  And that, in turn, is why I can’t work up any enthusiasm for all those great policies being offered by Democratic candidates.  Or rather, it’s one reason why.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m glad the candidates are thinking about issues and developing ways to address them.  I’m not criticizing any candidate who has thought deeply about important issues and shared their conclusions on the campaign trail.  The point I’m trying to make applies to all the entire field, and to their supporters as well. 

I’m arguing that getting bogged down in policy specifics is a counterproductive way to campaign.  Who are all those details for, anyway?  Most voters aren’t policy wonks.  They aren’t going to choose a candidate based on a comparison of rival spread sheets. 

Besides, developing policies is the easy part.  Implementing them is harder.  Can the candidate with all those great policies win a national election?  Can they, in other words, convince 70 million people to vote for them?  And if they win, do they know how to turn their ideas into legislation?

Another annoying thing about a detailed policy proposal is that, if it comes from a Democrat, it will trigger an immediate chorus of “how are you going to pay for that” from Beltway pundits.  Oddly enough, many of the very pundits who fret about fiscal responsibility under a Democrat look the other way when Republicans are in charge.  The Guardians of Conventional Wisdom didn’t badger George W. Bush about how he intended to pay for the war in Iraq.  They watched with straight faces while Paul Ryan touted the Laffer Curve as proof that tax cuts for billionaires would pay for themselves. 

The moral of the story?  Magical thinking is fine when it comes to paying for wars and tax cuts, but when progressive policies are under discussion, it’s strictly cash on the barrelhead.

Here’s what I think.  If we’re lucky enough to elect a Democrat in 2020, our new president will be in for a rough ride.  He or she will inherit several simultaneous crises.  They’re all real, they’re all urgent, and they’ll all be Democratic problems as soon as the last line of the oath of office is spoken. 

Other new presidents have inherited problems from their predecessors.  But Donald Trump made things worse by introducing the concepts of fake news and alternative facts into our political discourse.  He made it nearly impossible for Americans to talk to each other about politics.  It’s not just that Democrats and Republicans don’t trust each other, although they don’t.  It’s that they live in different realities. 

I monitor discussion boards on the Right.  Not the overt wingnut sites, but articles and reader comments from “respectable” conservative sites like NATIONAL REVIEW and THE RESURGENT.  They’re full of Trump fans spouting complete gibberish.  I mean, literal nonsense.  It would be amusing if it weren’t so scary.  These people will deny the legitimacy of any election that Trump loses.  Not all of them, certainly, but millions for sure.  They’re furious already, and Trump will see to it that they stay furious through election day.  And after, if he loses.

What Democrats need most is a nominee who understands that well-crafted policies and superior debating skills are irrelevant to beating Donald Trump.  In the unlikely event that Trump bothers to show up at one of the scheduled debates (I have my doubts), it won’t be to debate.  It will be to put on a show for his base.

I want the Democratic nominee to be able to counterattack effectively– not by responding in kind, but calmly, and with humor.  Stay out of the weeds on policy and keep the focus on Donald Trump’s dishonesty, his cruelty, and his incompetence. 

More free advice for Democratic presidential candidates.  Yes, Trump is a monster.  But calling him a monster builds him up in the eyes of his followers.  Luckily, Trump is also a fool, and he’s left an extensive trail of video evidence to prove it.  Use his own words in your ads to make him look silly.  Show clips from his rallies, where he babbles incoherently.  Show clips of his supporters being deplorable.  Show clips of world leaders mocking him.  The Democrat’s message should be: “Seriously? Do you want four more years of this?  Tantrums and tweet storms are no substitute for competence.  Let’s ratchet down the crazy and get back to work.” 

Trump is the enemy.  Attack him, not your Democratic rivals.

WHAT'S IT GOOD FOR? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!

And speaking of nothing, nothing about our brief (so far) war with Iran makes sense to me.  So I waited for further developments, which indeed, kept coming.  But they have yet to add up to anything logical (which means that it’s of a piece with the last three years of craziness).  If there’s a moral to the story, it might be, don’t push your luck.

Donald Trump, after apparently dodging the Mueller bullet, pushed his luck when he tried to extort the government of Ukraine.  He got busted and then impeached.  Naturally, he’d like to change the subject.   But how?

Iran also pushed its luck, launching a raid in Iraq that resulted in an American casualty.  Trump apparently felt like he had to respond quickly, to avoid looking weak.  But how?  One early leak suggests that Trump’s top military advisors give him a list of options, with one crazy outlier – assassinate the second most powerful man in Iran.  They claim to have been surprised that he opted for the assassination.  If that’s true – and very little in the official story has been true so far – then those advisors are idiots.  Everything about Trump’s public behavior since 2016 suggests that he always doubles down on crazy.  So Trump issues the kill order, and Soleimani was terminated with extreme prejudice.  It was the one aspect of the whole affair that seems to have gone according to plan.

(Even if it was an old plan.  Today comes a report from the New York Times that Trump issued the hit on Soleimani seven months ago.  Which would mean that the raid in Iraq had nothing to do with the assassination.  Possible.  Even plausible.  But it drives the last nail in the coffin of the administration’s claim that they acted in the face of an imminent threat.)

Soleimani’s assassination took the Iraqi government by surprise, and they began to get nervous.  Iraqi leaders began to wonder if maybe they could work with Iran more effectively without having to worry about Donald Trump mucking things up.  It was quite a remarkable development, considering that the two cultures have been bitter rivals since 539 BCE, when the Persian emperor Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon.  The two countries fought a bloody eight-year in the 1980s.  But with Donald Trump as the alternative, Iraq is apparently willing to let regional bygones be bygones. 

The United States responded to the eviction notice by having some unknown government functionary draw up a plan, which was summarized in a memo.  It was short on specifics, but it clearly referred to the prospect of an American troop withdrawal.  Oopsie!  The memo turned out to have been just a draft!  “An honest mistake,” as General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, put it. 

The Trump Administration specializes in mistakes, but honest ones are rare.  Let us pause for a moment to recognize the achievement.

(Milley is the gruff soldier whose job it is to stay close to Donald Trump and look dyspeptic.  I can sympathize.  After all, I’ve made an honest mistake or two myself.)

Meanwhile, the world waited for Iran’s response.  It wasn’t long in coming.  Or was it?  On Tuesday, Iran fired some missiles in the general direction of an American base in Iraq.  Damage was minimal, and Trump tweeted an all-clear.  I’m skeptical.  Trump is always about instant gratification. Iran plays a long game.  I worry that Iran’s seemingly inept response to the assassination of a top government official was designed to give Trump a way to save face while de-escalating the immediate crisis.  If Iran is plotting revenge, it will come at a time and place of their own choosing. 

Of course, America will be unprepared for this development, because Donald Trump has left a lot of senior security positions unfilled, and populated the rest with cronies, hacks, and grifters.  Conservative Iran experts were particularly anathema, since most of them publicly opposed Trump’s nomination.  Better to rely on the advice of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a man with firm views on the Rapture, but minimal experience in foreign policy.    

I suppose it’s time to weigh in on the ritual denunciation of General Qasem Soleimani.  By all accounts, he was good at his job, which was to make life unpleasant for Americans, up to and including killing some of us.  Yes, he had blood on his hands.  No, that didn’t make it strategically smart to kill him. 

For a hundred years at least, European powers have inserted themselves into the affairs of the peoples of the Middle East.  First the British and French carved up the Ottoman Empire after World War I.  They drew the proverbial lines in the sand, creating artificial countries with no regard for history, or for the ethnic rivalries that inevitably developed.  America was admitted to the Great Powers club after we smashed the Axis in World War II.  We’ll show those tired old Europeans how to treat sovereign nations like pieces on a chess board.  How hard could it be to outsmart resource-rich third world countries? 

Spoiler alert:  it was harder than we thought. 

We usually met with early success, but sooner or later, the chickens came home to roost.  Our liberating army always turned into an occupying army, and what looked like an easy victory became a stalemate, or an outright defeat. 

It’s fitting, perhaps, that we’re now flexing on Iran, because Iran was the place where we began our career as post-war imperialists. In 1951, Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, nationalized the country’s petroleum reserves.  Well, we can’t have that, can we?  Dwight Eisenhower was no Trump, but they did share one priority:  take the oil. 

Thus it was that, in 1953, we supported a coup that gave power to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.  We went back to business as usual.  Money was made.  Who could have guessed that it wouldn’t go on forever?      

Hey, in 1953, America was riding high.  We’d just inaugurated a new president – a war hero, no less – and we were ready to embark upon the fun adventures that awaited us in Vietnam.  And in Cuba, Nicaragua, Chile, the Dominican Republic, and so on.  You never ask questions when God’s on your side, so instead of learning from our mistakes, we kept repeating them.  It was inevitable that we’d find ourselves back in the Middle East, where it all started.  

None of the countries we picked fights with could beat us on the battlefield.  America is good at winning wars.  We just have no idea what to do next.  We suck at being an occupying army, and our adversaries have figured us out.  They understand that the best way to get rid of us is to bleed us to death, one booby trap at a time. 

Better men than Donald Trump have failed because they were overconfident about their ability to predict and control events.  Now he’s knocked over a very large domino, and we have no idea where the trail of destruction will lead.

Well, we know one place it led.  Trigger-happy Iranian military forces shot down a commercial plane near Tehran.  They bear the primary responsibility for the deaths of the 176 victims.  But before we get too cocky about Iran’s deadly screw-up, Americans would do well to remember that in 1988, we were responsible for a similar disaster.  The U.S. Navy mistakenly shot down Iran Air flight 655 over the Strait of Hormuz, killing all 290 aboard.  Ronald Reagan was president then, but I’m sure Republicans will soon launch an investigation that will reveal secret evidence implicating Barack Obama and the Clintons.

Still, although he doesn’t bear the lion’s share of responsibility for the lives lost in Ukraine Airlines flight 752, Donald Trump isn’t blameless in the matter.  He chose to dial the tension with Iran up to maximum.  Trump created the conditions for this tragedy, and he too has blood on his hands.  

How much blood, we don’t know, because it’s gradually becoming clear that this wasn’t a one-off assassination.  It turns out that an attempt to kill a second senior Iranian military official in Yemen failed.  We don’t know how many other missions Trump authorized, or whether they were successful. 

The only thing we know for sure is that we can’t trust anything the Trump administration says.

In the absence of truth, what we’re left with is irony.  We have irony to spare.  The mass protests in Tehran are aimed not at Trump or America, but against the Iranian government.  Iranians are furious about the destruction of Ukraine Airlines 752, and the three days of official cover-up before the regime confessed to being responsible.  In a single stroke, Iran lost the high ground even among its own citizens.  Instead of rallying around their country’s leadership, Iranians are calling for regime change.

And then there’s the strange-bedfellows story of Qasem Soleimani and Ivanka Trump.  Between 2011-2015, Ivanka and Soleimani were indirect partners in a business deal in Azerbaijan.  For reasons that remain officially mysterious, the Trump Organization wanted to build a hotel in Baku, the capitol city, in a neighborhood that is not known for its grand hotels.   

Ivanka’s immediate local partners included the Mammadov family, who could bring influence to bear in the political arena as well as in extra-legal activities.  FOREIGN POLICY magazine called the Mammadovs “the Corleones of the Caspian.” The Mammadovs have ties to the Darvishi family in Iran, who in turn are connected to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.  The Quds Force is the strategic arm of the Revolutionary Guard, and it was led by Qasem Soleimani.  He would certainly have been briefed on Trump Tower Baku. 

Considering all the shady characters involved (definitely including the Trumps), plus the inauspicious location of the hotel, it makes sense to me that the owners expected to recoup their investment not via a tourism boom in Azerbaijan, but as a regional go-to site for laundering dirty money generated by the mining, oil, and construction activity.  And why not, since laundering mob money had become the basis of the Trump family fortune.  As long as they get their cut, the Trumps aren’t squeamish about where money comes from, or where it goes. 

Donald Trump, who claims to be above the law, is about to meet the law of unintended consequences.  All we can do is pray that the worst consequences fall on him.

WHAT ROUGH BEAST, ITS HOUR COME ROUND AT LAST, SLOUCHES TOWARDS BETHLEHEM TO BE BORN?

Fifty years ago this month, the Rolling Stones released their last album of the Sixties.  It was a fitting coda to the decade, opening with “Gimmie Shelter,” and closing with “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”  Hold that thought. 

Of course, I approve of the House’s vote to impeach Donald Trump.  One branch of the American government is on record as condemning Trump’s disgraceful record.  That’s important, even if a Senate trial results in acquittal.  It’s important even if Mitch McConnell refuses to hold a trial.

Besides, Trump gonna Trump.  As winter turns to spring, we’re likely to see revelations of more past wrongdoing.  And it’s almost inevitable that Trump will commit new high crimes and misdemeanors along the way. He can’t help himself. 

Meanwhile, in less than eleven months, American voters will collectively decide whether America will remain an independent democracy, or instead join the ranks of what Sarah Kendzior calls a "transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government."

In Congress, Republicans are reduced to spewing word salad in defense of the Donald Trump’s criminality.  What they say makes little sense, but they say it loud and fast, and their soundbites wind up on Fox News.  I’ve read speculation that some of these grifters are auditioning for a job with Fox after the election. 

I think they’re auditioning, all right, but I suspect they’ve set their sights higher than Fox.  I’m cynical enough to believe that their target audience is Vladimir Putin.  A few of them may see themselves as a potential successor to Trump himself, once the Chosen One either steps down or is carried out of the White House feet first.  Others probably just want to make sure that they’re at the head of the line when Russia begins to pump laundered money into the campaign.   

The dishonesty is now so blatant that even compulsively even-handed pundits, who’ve made careers out of looking the other way when prominent politicians tell them obvious lies, have begun to realize that the Republican Party has mutated into something unrecognizable.  Occasionally, one of them will express outrage at the cowardice of Republican politicians, and even call out the lies of Trump’s most vocal enablers to their faces. 

Sadly, I’m afraid it’s too little, too late.  If they’d called out the gang of lying liars from the get-go, they might have had some effect.  Now, they’re reduced to lamenting the lack of statesmanship, and urging Republican congressmen to examine their consciences.

And those are the party professionals.  As for rank and file Republican voters – those salt-of-the-earth bastions of morality – conservative writer David French points to this language from a resolution passed by the Southern Baptist Convention: “Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment.” 

Of course, they passed that resolution way back in 1998, and they were talking about Bill Clinton’s blowjob.  Twenty years later, the God that Southern Baptists worship has apparently loosened up a bit.  For Trump Christians, the Ten Commandments have become the Ten Suggestions.

As Trump supporters cheer his unrestrained immorality and lawlessness, all that post-election analysis of the role of economic stagnation in the heartland rings hollow.  Instead, it’s becoming obvious that what most Trump voters wanted all along was white nationalism. 

In the early 21st century, there were racists, know-nothings, religious zealots, and just plain mean people all over the country who were looking for a leader.  They tended to gravitate to the Republican Party, and goodness knows the Republican establishment was eager to harvest their votes.  But John McCain and Mitt Romney weren’t the Chosen Ones.  The Deplorables-in-waiting liked Sarah Palin’s style, but McCain’s presence at the top of the ticket kept her from really soaring. 

Then the Chosen One arrived on a golden escalator to liberate the GOP from its stodgy principles.  Donald Trump was the full-blown embodiment of the Republican id.  It turns out that, despite all their talk about fiscal responsibility and family values, what most Republican politicians really wanted was to be rich and racist (and promiscuous, too, if they could get away with it).  Republican voters, for their part, would settle for being allowed to discriminate against people different than them.

But reporters, pundits, and talking heads couldn’t bring themselves to say that.  As Jay Rosen noted before the 2016 election, “Asymmetry between the parties fries the circuits of the mainstream press.” 

It means that everything they know is wrong.

And they’ve been wrong for a while.  Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein wrote about it in 2012, in a book called IT’S WORSE THAN YOU THINK.  Money quote: “The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.”

More Jay Rosen: “Now imagine what happens when over time the base of one party, far more than the base of the other, begins to treat the press as a hostile actor, and its own establishment as part of the rot; when it not only opposes but denies the legitimacy — and loyalty to the state — of the other side’s leader; when it prefers conspiracy theory to party-friendly narratives that at least cope with verified fact; when it is scornful of the reality that in a divided system you never get everything you want.”

Three years later, we don’t have to imagine what such a world would be like.  We’re living in it.

Mann and Ornstein not only analyzed the situation presciently; they also correctly predicted the outcome: “it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.”

That’s another thing that the pundits can’t bring themselves to admit.  All they have left is whiny-sounding appeals to the patriotism and conscience of Republican politicians – who have all abandoned those virtues in return for money and power. 

There are allegedly twenty or so Republican senators who despise Donald Trump but are too scared to say so out loud.  I don’t know if those numbers are real, but I’m pretty sure that generic criticism won’t get the job done. 

I’m waiting for an influential member of the media, print or electronic, to call out specific senators – and especially those who enjoy reputations as moderates – by name: “Shame on you, Susan Collins.  You took an oath to protect the Constitution.  Do your job.”  But no doubt that would piss Susan Collins off mightily.  Heaven forfend that a pundit would lose access to Collins’ off-the-record expressions of “concern” about Donald Trump’s “troubling” behavior. 

Instead, my prediction is that most of them will pivot to concern-trolling Democratic impeachment efforts.  Rather than keep the attention on Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors, they will nit-pick process issues.  They will absorb Russo-Republican talking points and suggest that impeachment actually helps Donald Trump.  Never mind that similar predictions that Robert Mueller’s investigation would hurt Democrats in the 2018 mid-terms turned out to be spectacularly wrong. 

Another tiny clue is the fact that neither Mitch McConnell nor Donald Trump himself are acting like impeachment is good for them.  And Rep. Mark Meadows, chair of the Freedom Caucus?  He’s so confident that Trump will lead Republicans to victory in 2020 that he’s retiring from Congress. 

I’m not pessimistic about a Democratic win next year.  But I’m having trouble imagining what comes next. 

Republican rhetoric has turned apocalyptic.  The GOP looks like nothing so much as the latest embodiment of William Butler Yeats’ nightmare vision of a rough beast, slouching towards Bethlehem.

At this point, I’m caught between dueling quotations.  As Ramsay Bolton put it (Game of Thrones, Season 3): “If you think this has a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention.”

On the other hand, as the Rolling Stones sang fifty years ago, “if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.”