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Random thoughts

Monday, November 23, 2020

A few days ago I noted, as I probably have in other posts, that Republicans are big on projection, which in this context I’m defining as accusing others of one’s own crimes. I thought I’d pass on a few more examples.

Here’s a good discussion at the Guardian of the decades old right wing talking point that the left is authoritarian, when in fact it is the right that likes them some totalitarianism. As with many other right wing tendencies, Trump has served to make their love for authoritarianism more open. And, of course, it continues to be the case that if you’re looking for voter fraud, look no further than the nearest Republican.

Voter suppression is the flip side of voter fraud, and it’s a Republican monopoly. One of the things that I’ve run into in reading about the Trump campaign’s attempted theft is the fact that there are signature matching requirements in many states. The first thing that occurred to me when I read about such requirements is that I could not cast a mail-in or absentee ballot in such a state, since the probability is overwhelming that my signature on my ballot would not “match” the signature on the record to which it was compared. I have horrible handwriting, and a host of signatures. When I really want my signature to be legible I have to work at it, but it would be ludicrously easy to claim that two such carefully drawn signatures didn’t match. It appears to be a recipe for voter suppression. What a surprise.

On a different subject (which is okay, because look at the title), here’s an interesting article at Scientific American about the prevalence of conspiracy theories and their adherents. It’s good, so far as it goes, though I searched in vain for any mention of the fact that people are likely to embrace conspiracy theories if they are fed a steady diet of such thinking by what they believe are reliable sources, such as Fox News or Rush Limbaugh. The latter source, especially, serves to reinforce such thinking, because so many of its older viewers simply segued from watching Uncle Walter to watching Fox, and they grew up believing that they could trust TV news. They transferred that belief to Fox, which is understandable to a certain extent.

The Scientific American article does engage in a weird bit of both siderism, in support of a claim that people on the political outs tend to be more inclined to adhere to conspiracy theories:

Recently in the U.S., a number of unproved conjectures have come from political liberals as conservatives have ascended to control the government. These include the charge that the White House coerced Anthony Kennedy to retire from the U.S. Supreme Court and the allegation that Russian president Vladimir Putin is blackmailing Trump with a video of him watching prostitutes urinate on a Moscow hotel bed.

As to the first, if it’s out there, it’s neither incredible nor widespread, and it fails one test cited in the article for recognizing a false conspiracy theory: it is not self contradictory. As to the second, the dossier, which has been found to be generally fact based, makes exactly that allegation, and as to the more general point, Mueller confirmed that Putin has leverage over Trump, and Trump’s own Director of National Intelligence suspected that Putin had compromising material on Trump. Hardly comparable to Pizzagate, but that’s both siderism for you.Moreover, it’s fairly clear from the last four years of our history, that if being on the political outs breeds conspiracy theories, those theories are likely to be stillborn compared to the theories that spring up within the ranks of those who adhere to the majority party.

Notice: Not that many are likely to care, but comments are not working on this blog at the moment. I’ll be putting this notice on posts until I get the problem cleared up. That will involve attempting to contact someone at my web hosting service, which is both time consuming and aggravating in the extreme, so I’ve been putting it off until I have a few hours I can spend on hold waiting for someone to talk to me.

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Something obvious but rarely mentioned

Friday, November 20, 2020

Just a short observation, prompted by this article in today’s New York Times, which details yet more criminal activity on the part of a pre-presidential Donald Trump. We learn from the article that Trump avoided taxes by diverting money to his daughter for “consulting fees”.

It is rarely mentioned that if we had a legal system that went after the rich for their criminal activity, we would never have had a Donald Trump presidency, since he would long ago have started serving a life prison sentence. He has, it is quite clear, run a criminal enterprise throughout his career, for the most part fairly openly, or, let us say, openly enough that it should have drawn the interest of prosecuters. But they would rather concentrate on processing petty criminals through the system, as it’s easier and is an effective way to keep the marginalized in their places. To be fair, it is also the case that at least as far as the IRS is concerned, it lacks the funds to go after the heavy hitters, so it concentrates on going after the little guy.

If the genius does finally end up in prison, it will be solely because he put himself under the political spotlight. Had he stuck to being a TV reality clown, or just the clown he was before his TV show, he would not even today be subject to any criminal investigation.

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A few things to gloat about

Thursday, November 19, 2020

Just a few things to which we can look forward. You know, Schadenfreude. Mary Trump said recently that Donald will never have another good day, and we can look forward to a few things that will make those days even darker.

Barack Obama’s book will be number one on the best seller lists, and that will be because people are actually buying it to read, rather than bulk buying it to satisfy someone’s ego.

Dr. Fauci is a hands down lock to be Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, which will further destabilize a certain self proclaimed genius. I can’t wait for the melted down tweets after that happens.

And, of course, the electoral college will meet whether he likes it or not and make it official.

Republicans will start to abandon him, if not explicitly, so implicitly that it will provoke more tweetstorms.

He’s put us through a lot, so there is at least some satisfaction in knowing that he’s miserable and he’s due to get his ego crushed a few more times in the coming weeks.

By the way, speaking of Obama’s book, I’m reading it now. I usually steer clear of politician’s memoirs, but I decided to give this one a go. He’s a good writer.

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Projection much?

Thursday, November 19, 2020

Just passing along yet another instance of Republicans doing what they are accusing others of doing:

Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley has frequently railed against “coastal elites” in speeches. Last year, he sponsored legislation that would relocate thousands of federal workers from Washington to economically distressed areas in the heartland.

But a review of property records shows that the first-term Republican is no longer a Missouri homeowner and that he is registered to vote at his sister’s home in Ozark, Missouri, while he is in-between homes in the state.

Hawley owns a $1.3 million house in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., where he spends most of his time with his wife, Erin Hawley, and their three children.

Now, to be fair, they have to live somewhere while they’re in Washington, but the custom, so far as I’m aware, is that you maintain a residence in your home state. If the guy can afford a million dollar house in Virginia, clearly he can afford to at least rent a studio apartment somewhere in Missouri where he can pretend to reside in those rare instances where he returns from the coast to escape the elites. Using your sister’s address really doesn’t cut it.

Maybe Lindsay Graham can look more closely into this and see if he can get Hawley’s ballot disqualified.

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A look ahead

Monday, November 16, 2020

Toward the end of last year I posted my predictions about the coming year. Those that can be tested against reality have stood up fairly well, though I obviously did not predict the plague, and my prediction about Justice Ginsburg was negated by her death. But right now I’m thinking about this part of the prediction, specifically the part I’ve emphasized:

On January 21, 2020 Donald Trump will be consigned to the memory hole, like his most recent Republican predecessor, and the media will rush to proclaim that the Republican Party has been purged and is now, once again, the responsible party they knew and loved before the Trumpian aberration came along. Lindsay Graham won’t remember anything about the man. Both siderism, which has begun to be in a bit of a bad odor lately, will see a new rebirth.

When I wrote that prediction I was suffering from the delusion that Trump, like other ex-presidents, would go gentle into that goodnight. It’s obviously what the Republicans all want him to do, though only a few have the guts to say so.

I have no doubt that the Republican establishment would very much like to see that emphasized statement come true. I don’t watch Fox, but I do read Crooks & Liars so I think I’m somewhat aware of what’s going on at that network, and it seems that they are at least in some respects preparing to toss Trump into the memory hole, where they previously tossed George W, though folks like Lou Dobbs have not yet gotten the message. The questions are: Can they pull it off, and if they can’t, what effect will that have on national politics.

Over at the Palmer report, they’re telling us that we don’t have to worry about Trump post election, because he’ll be in jail. Would that were true. It may be more likely that he’ll be able to turn any New York indictment to his own advantage, as it will give him grifting opportunities with the base, the opportunity to get media attention, and the ability to play the victim card. That wouldn’t do him much good, maybe, if there were a substantial chance of him being convicted and doing time, but is it possible to pick a jury where die hard Trumpers are excluded? I didn’t practice criminal law, but my instincts tell me that it would be difficult to get a whackjob free jury, even in New York City, and that it would only take one to prevent a conviction. He could then turn that to his advantage, from a grifting point of view.

So there’s a good chance that Trump will climb out of the memory hole, and the Republican Party will have to deal with that reality. Having constructed a party of propagandized zombies, totally impervious to facts, programmed by Fox et. al. to vote against their own interests, the Republican Party will once again find itself in the position of having to cater to a base that it can no longer completely control. That base will still be willing to vote against its own interests, but only if it is fed ever redder meat, preferably from Donald Trump. He may very well be an omnipresent reality with which Republicans must deal. They may be stuck between the Scylla of pleasing the base and the Charybdis of the sane majority, who will, if anything, despise Trump even more. Among other things, that means they will be wedded to the obligation to parrot the claim that Biden stole the presidency.

So my guess is that Trump will not disappear like W. He will be omnipresent for the foreseeable future, even running for president again if he thinks he can turn that to his financial or personal advantage.

Next question: how does that affect the state of politics for the next four years.

Let’s start out by acknowledging that Trump doesn’t really care about policy. But he knows what sells to the griftees, so he’ll attack any movement the Republicans may make toward any sort of compromise with Biden. Mitch will likely be quite comfortable with that, as his natural tendency is to oppose anything and everything a Democratic president tries to do. As I’ve said before, in many ways Republicans prefer to be in the minority. Fox gets to attack the entire government and the Republicans get to raise money and frustrate effective government action while manipulating the media into giving credence to their claims that it’s Democratic failures that are causing the nations’s problems.

I said in the post to which I linked above that the Democrats were even likely to take the Senate. That’s no longer true, but even if they do take both Georgia seats, Joe Manchin has promised to hand effective control of the Senate to Mitch McConnell by voting against any attempt to stop the filibuster. Even if Joe Biden is willing to sign progressive legislation, it will never reach his desk. Trump’s continued presence in the national conversation will quite simply reinforce the natural tendencies of Republicans. We must, after all, bear in mind that Trump was a natural outgrowth of Republicanism, he is not some sort of sui generis political freak.

It would be nice to think that Republican insistence that Biden is an illegitimate president would hurt their electoral prospects, but that’s unlikely. Bear in mind that they have more or less implicitly claimed that every Democratic president since Clinton was illegitimate. They’ll just be more out in the open about Biden, which is a bit ironical, since his victory was so overwhelming, but we are now living in a fact free world.

At first blush one would think that an insistence that Biden’s victory was stolen, in the teeth of mountains of evidence, would be enough to turn away the majority of voters almost anywhere. But that happy outcome would depend on the reactions of two major players: The Democrats and the Press.

Bear in mind, if you read further, that a lot of people, those who are not politically engaged, have not really come to terms with the fact that the Republican Party is a fascist party. They still think of the Republican Party the way we thought of it in the 60s: one of two relatively sane political parties, each with their good guys and their bad guys. If Democrats want to win, they have to break through to these people and show them the reality.

I’ve already mentioned that one of their own, Joe Manchin, is prepared to prevent the Democrats from achieving anything even if they do take the Senate. Actually delivering concrete accomplishments, such as an effective pandemic response, both medically and fiscally, would go some way toward turning the non-zombies into loyal Democratic voters. That won’t happen. With Manchin’s help, if needed, Moscow Mitch will prevent anything good from passing the Senate. He will then blame the Democrats for inaction. The press will both sides that claim.

The Democrats also have to step up their game when it comes to messaging. It really shouldn’t be hard: come up with some catchy phrases that capture the reality of the situation and repeat them endlessly. You know, just like the Republicans do, except the Democrats could tell the truth instead of lie. The Democrats used to have this capability. I remember that the Democrats were still running effectively against Herbert Hoover when I was a kid, but they have long since lost the ability to control the narrative. If they don’t work on that, they will lose big-time in 2022. They are obviously still blissfully unaware of this lack. Where, after all, is the cacophony of abuse and ridicule that they should be hurling at Trump for his infantile refusal to accept the election results? By not endlessly mocking him and his enablers, they are, to a certain extent, legitimizing his claims.

It’s become clear to anyone with eyes, that the party’s leadership (at the DNC, the DCCC, the DSC) must be replaced, as it is dominated by the far right of the Democratic Party, which spent this last election season protecting right wing incumbents from primary challenges rather than fixating on beating Republicans. It is also dominated by a group think that the way to win over red-state voters is by offering a Republican-lite Democratic Party, a strategy which, repeatedly, hasn’t worked, while emphasizing Democratic issues that have wide support (e.g., minimum wage increases, taxing the rich, taking money out of politics, Medicare-for all (yes, really)) promises far more success.

On another front, the Republicans have become masters at working the refs. As a result, the press bends over backwards to be “fair” to Republicans. As Oliver Willis points out here:

The New York Times even devoted time to profiling Nazis, in a story originally headlined, “In America’s Heartland, the Nazi Sympathizer Next Door.”

Democrats, of course, are loathe to criticize the press, so the net effect is that we have a press environment where Republicans are expected to lie and cheat, which gets only passing notice as it is considered normal, while Democrats are held to a far higher standard. One of my favorite examples of that on a local level was a New London Day editorial endorsing highway tolls, which explained that the Democrats alone had to carry the ball on the issue, because, as the editorialist matter of factly pointed out, without a hint of reproof, Republicans were going to play politics with it.

We can expect the diner visits to continue, but no one will be visiting Biden voters, or trying to “understand” them. If Trump maintains a presence, we can expect the press to do no more than give us more stories about his supporters, perhaps sprinkled with disclaimers that he has “falsely stated” (the shorter word “lie” is still verboten) this or that. The Democrats must learn to attack the press for their false equivalencies. Again, it couldn’t be too hard to come up with some pithy phrases to throw out each and every time a David Brooks attempts to equate a campus brouhaha with a full blown fascist movement.

Democrats must put the press on the defensive. Editorial endorsements are insufficient if press coverage itself refuses to acknowledge basic truths about the two parties.

So, as things stand now, I’m afraid my year end prediction may prove untrue, though on balance I hope it doesn’t. Who knows, maybe the Democrats will wake up and learn to play the game. They have the advantage of offering a program people like, if only they would break out of the defensive crouch they’ve been in since 1972.

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A hopeful sign?

Friday, November 13, 2020

Maybe I’m engaging in a little wishful thinking, but this gives me reason to hope:

Sixteen U.S. Attorneys, all of whom were specifically assigned to monitor the 2020 election, have sent Bill Barr a letter confirming that there is no evidence of any election irregularities. In other words, all that Barr has done is to cause even more public officials to come out of the woodwork to confirm that Donald Trump’s election defeat was entirely legitimate. This was never going anywhere to begin with, but now it’s over.

This was in response to Barr’s announcement of a probe into election irregularities. Am I wrong to think that this was their way of telling Barr to shove it up his ass?

Trump often complains about the “deep state”, and he has a point. People within the federal government often resist violations of norms. Some of them want to do the job they were hired to do, rather than serve a political agenda or, in the case of Trump, sign on to a cult of personality.

It’s likely true that Barr did what he did mostly to satisfy Trump, and maybe to keep his hopes for a Fox gig alive. In any event, it seems clear his investigation is going nowhere, and we can thank these U.S. Attorneys for helping to make sure of that.

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But of course

Thursday, November 12, 2020

It is practically a law of nature. If Republicans accuse Democrats of some heinous activity, they are surely doing it themselves. This is funny, but also entirely what you would expect:

As ballots across the country continue to be counted, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said he’s offering a $1 million reward for evidence of voter fraud.

Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman took up the Texas lieutenant governor’s offer on Twitter.

However, he didn’t want the reward in cash.

“Hey, Governor Patrick- it’s your counterpart in Pennsylvania,” Fetterman tweeted. I’d like to collect your handsome reward for reporting voter fraud. I got a dude in Forty Fort, PA who tried to have his dead mom vote for Trump.”

Rather than take the cash reward, Fetterman requested the reward be in Sheetz gift cards.

While the tweet was lighthearted, it was not without evidence.

Fetterman shared a story on his Twitter account from Luzerne County where a man was arrested for requesting an absentee ballot for his dead mother in order to vote for President Trump.

Original story at KDKA in Pittsburgh.

For the record, I don’t get the joke about Sheetz, but there must be one.

There’s no question in my mind, but that if you could somehow identify the very isolated instances of fraud, almost all of them would be the work of Republicans.

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A bit of history

Tuesday, November 10, 2020

I have never listened to the music of Hamilton, much less seen the Broadway show, but my reaction to what I heard about the play was always pretty much the same as that of Eric Loomis, over at Lawyers, Guns & Money. I was both mystified and irritated that anyone would portray Hamilton as some sort of hero of the people, when in fact he was a servant of the elite. If he’d had his way, we might have gotten a king along with the Constitution, and he certainly used all his influence to fashion a government that put a substantial buffer between the will of the people and the power structure in this country. His mistrust of democracy was never concealed, and his preference for monarchical or aristocratical rule was an open secret.

Apparently the play also portrays him as some sort of abolitionist, but while that’s hitherto been a subject of debate, it’s now more than subject to debate, as this New York Times article to which Loomis links establishes:

Some biographers have gingerly addressed the matter over the years, often in footnotes or passing references. But a new research paper released by the Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site in Albany, N.Y., offers the most ringing case yet.

In the paper, titled “‘As Odious and Immoral a Thing’: Alexander Hamilton’s Hidden History as an Enslaver,” Jessie Serfilippi, a historical interpreter at the mansion, examines letters, account books and other documents. Her conclusion — about Hamilton, and what she suggests is wishful thinking on the part of many of his modern-day admirers — is blunt.

“Not only did Alexander Hamilton enslave people, but his involvement in the institution of slavery was essential to his identity, both personally and professionally,” she writes.

“It is vital,” she adds, “that the myth of Hamilton as ‘the Abolitionist Founding Father’ end.”

The evidence cited in the paper, which was quietly published online last month, is not entirely new. But Ms. Serfilippi’s forceful case has caught the eye of historians, particularly those who have questioned what they see as his inflated antislavery credentials.

Annette Gordon-Reed, a professor of history and law at Harvard and the author of “The Hemingses of Monticello,” called the paper “fascinating” and the argument plausible. “It just shows that the founders were nearly all implicated in slavery in some way,” she said.

Joanne Freeman, a professor of history at Yale and editor of the Library of America edition of Hamilton’s writings, said that the detailed evidence remained to be fully weighed. But she said the paper was part of a welcome reconsideration of what she called “the Hero Hamilton” narrative.

Hamilton married into the elite Schuyler family, and many of his papers are preserved at their mansion where they had many “servants”, their code word for slaves.

Aaron Burr is usually portrayed as the bad guy, as if Hamilton wasn’t perfectly willing to kill Burr if it had worked out that way. But between the two, Burr would have been the better choice if one had to choose. Burr was really anti-slavery, and he was even an advocate for woman’s rights.

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You know, the constitution isn’t really all it’s cracked up to be

Tuesday, November 10, 2020

I know I should still be celebrating Biden’s victory, but, along with John Fogarty, I see a bad moon rising.

Kurt Gödel, he of the incompleteness theorem, came to this country from Germany in the thirties, to Princeton, where he was pals with Albert Einstein. When he became a citizen he was anxious to explain to the magistrate taking his oath that he had found a contradiction in the Constitution that left the country vulnerable to a dictatorship. Einstein and others counseled him to keep his mouth shut and just take his citizenship oath, and we still don’t know precisely what Gödel meant, but there’s no doubt that his basic point is valid: the constitution contains the seeds of its own destruction, which seeds have now taken root.

Krugman deals with the immediate prospects here, in a column well worth reading, as opposed to the David Brooks column of the same date, which I am still waiting for Driftglass to deconstruct. And here’s yet another, where Krugman very delicately points out that our problem is with stupid uneducated people who believe everything they see on Fox News or hear from Rush Limbaugh.

One of the many ironies about the Constitution’s flaws is that we were taught, and to the extent anyone teaches social studies anymore, kids are probably still taught, that those very flaws were master strokes of compromise by those fonts of wisdom, the sainted Founding Fathers.

The worst still relevantcompromise is often, at least around here, known as the Connecticut Compromise, for it was allegedly Roger Sherman’s bright idea to give each state equal representation in the Senate. I was taught to believe this was an incredible act of statecraft whose wisdom could not be overstated. Yet…We now have a situation in which California, the most populous state, has 2 blue Senators representing a population likely equal to the combined population of 8 or 9 red states, which would therefore have a total of 16 or 18 senators. A person from Wyoming has something like 20 times the representation of a Californian. The situation is the same if you take a look at the generally blue states vs. the red states. Our population is greatly underrepresented in the Senate, and will continue to be even if lightning strikes in Georgia.

The wise men of Philadelphia then went on to compound the problem by creating the electoral college which is deeply infected by the lopsided representation in the Senate. Presidents were supposed to be chosen by the wisest among us, who would be members of the electoral college. It hasn’t quite worked out that way, and it is an historical fact that when the popular vote has disagreed with the electoral college, it has been the choice of the majority that was the superior candidate. Imagine an America that had not had to live through eight years of W and four of the orange one, and imagine further that the Senate was a truly representative body during those periods instead of the plaything of Moscow Mitch.

To cap it off, the wise Founding Fathers made it virtually impossible to meaningfully change the constitution without having a civil war first, since a) any changes that would meaningfully rectify the issues I’ve identified above would reduce the power of the sparsely populated states, and 2) the sparsely populated states have more power to block a constitutional amendment than they do to block meaningful Senate action. This was part and parcel of their concessions to the slave states, whose slave owners, in essence, got extra representation due to their human property.

If we succumb to fascism, which we may have only temporarily done, it is because our sainted Founders did this to us. A truly representative system would be vastly different than what we have. Besides ducking fascism, we’d likely have national healthcare, systemic racism would not be quite so systemic, and we’d be doing something about climate change, to mention just a few things that come to mind.

Of course, the above only scratches the surface. Alexander Hamilton (about whom more in my next post) and his ilk were determined to make sure that the people had as little say in their government as possible. The point was to preserve the position of the elites and the excuse was that if the majority ruled, that majority would get captured by dangerous demagogues. It has worked to a certain extent; the people don’t have that much say, but oddly enough, the elites have learned to retain their power by harnessing the power of demagoguery to get the overpowered minority to vote against their own self interest. They hadn’t predicted that, but then they couldn’t anticipate our forms of mass communication.

Gödel’s conclusion was right, though we will never know his reasoning. The constitution’s flaws will bring us down, sooner or later, and some of those flaws will make it impossible to do anything about it.

We can only hope that when that time comes, we can peacefully agree to break up the union, and the sane states can band together to form a more rational system.

End of rant.

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An easy prediction

Saturday, November 7, 2020

I’ve mentioned before that The Palmer Report is a guilty pleasure of mine. They usually get their facts right, though the conclusions they draw from those facts are often subject to doubt, though I will say that they their analysis of the election results has been right on. But I must take issue with this piece of reporting:

In the end, Attorney General Bill Barr turned out to be as much of a paper tiger as Palmer Report had come to suspect he was. After he tried and failed to meddle in the Flynn, Stone, Cohen, Lev, Igor, and Bannon cases, he spent the final several weeks of the election cycle simply hiding.

…

This means, along with everyone else in this wretched administration, Bill Barr is now out of a job, as of January. The question now is whether Donald Trump fires him immediately out of frustration, or if Trump reluctantly keeps Barr around to try to help him with endgame pardon antics and such. But either way, Barr is a goner along with Trump before much longer

Would that the second quoted paragraph were true (Credit where due: they turned out to be right about the stuff in the first paragraph). But my guess is that come shortly after January 20, 2021 we’ll be seeing Bill Barr pulling down big bucks on Fox telling us that Joe Biden is abusing the powers of the presidency and that Biden’s attorney general, whoever that may be, is politicizing what should be a non-political position. Not an eyebrow will be raised. I put the odds of this at about 90%, with the odds of his also getting a CNN gig at 70%.

Caveat: In my last post I said I was working on a downer post that I’m putting off completing to leave time for celebration. This is not that downer post. This is just an observation. I’m still celebrating.

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