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Book report

Thursday, February 21, 2019

I’ve mentioned in a couple of recent posts that I’ve been reading Jill Lepore’s These Truths, a history of the U.S. Given it’s subject, it’s a predictably long read, almost 800 pages not counting about 100 pages of footnotes. I’ve just finished it. I slowed down a bit toward the end, as, to be frank, it was a bit painful reading about times through which I’ve lived, knowing how they’ve turned out so far. There have been other times in our history when things have looked pretty bad, e.g.,1860, but not having been there, I can read about them with a bit more detachment.

My original statement that I highly recommend the book still stands, but I have to point out that the last chapters, documenting the years from Vietnam forwards, are a bit infested with an unwarranted and poorly documented both siderism, which sadly approaches the level of the “both sides are equally bad” meme spread by so many mainstream journalists.

Part of this meme arises from the idea that if there are two sides having trouble getting along and finding common ground, it must be the fault of both. This ignores the fact that if one side insists on a world view that dismisses real facts out of hand and insists on basing policy on “alternative facts”, e.g., denying global warming, denying the existence of racism, claiming tax cuts for the rich pay for themselves despite multiple such cuts that had no such effect, claiming that massive amounts of drugs are coming across the Southern border rather than ports of entry, etc., then it becomes impossible to find common ground, no matter how hard one tries. Obama spent about six years in a vain attempt to do just that, and look what it got him and us.

There is, in sum, such a thing as truth. If one side is insisting on adherence to truth, that is not the same as insisting on falsehood.

Additionally, just because one can identify some strain on the left that can be cast as a mirror image of something happening on the right, doesn’t mean they are actually equivalent. Being an academic, Lepore often “balances” descriptions of right wing extremism with some campus craziness like speech codes or claims of cultural appropriation. That claimed equivalence may make some people feel comfortable,but it ignores the fact that those campus movements have extremely little impact on society at large, while the right wing movements with which they are contrasted have a significant impact on public policy. The PC police don’t run the Democratic Party or have much influence in it; the latter day Nazis and racists most certainly have outsized influence in, and arguably control, the Republican Party.

In the world of the internet, for instance, it may be true that Tumblr is a left wing version of Reddit (I don’t read either), but there is no left wing equivalent to Infowars or the Drudge Report, nor do Democratic politicians take up any left wing fantasies equivalent to the right wing fantasies cooked up by the likes of Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh, nor do they, as Trump and other influential Republicans have done, give such fantasists credibility by genuflecting to them, as Republicans routinely do. No one, particularly no prominent Democrat, ever claimed, for instance, that Donald Trump is actually an android programmed to hand our foreign policy over to the Russians, though the evidence for that is stronger than the evidence that Obama was born anywhere but in Hawaii. Republican politicians either embraced that meme outright, or refused to dismiss it.

One paragraph particularly struck me. In one section of the book, Lepore discusses right wing internet fabrications at length, detailing them extensively. She concludes the section as follows:

Jaundiced journalists began to found online political fact-checking sites like PolitiFact, which rated the statements of politicians on a Truth-O-Meter. “I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books: they’re elitist,” the satirist Stephen Colbert said in 2005, when he coined “truthiness” while lampooning George W. Bush. “I don’t trust books. They’re all fact, no heart. And that’s exactly what’s pulling our country apart today.” But eventually liberals would respond to the conservative media by imitating them-two squirrels, chasing each other down a tree. (Emphasis added)

That’s the end of the discussion. After exhaustively documenting right wing media factual distortions and outright lies, she accuses liberals of doing the same thing, without specifying a single instance. None of the left wing squirrels are identified. I am sure if you dug deep enough you could find a left wing website that has spread lies, but I can’t think of one. Spreading the truth, larded with opinion, is not the same thing as spreading lies larded with opinion. If there is a left wing equivalent of InfoWars, I’m unaware of it, and I’m familiar with most of the left wing websites. You can probably find inaccuracies at both Daily Kosand Talking Points Memo, two of the most popular lefty on line sites, but you would be hard put to find anything that is simply made up, like Alex Jones allegation that Sandy Hook was a fake. Nor, again, will you find any Democratic politician lending credence to such a site or its creators. They’re too busy running away from their quite rational progressive base, so they don’t have the time to genuflect to extremists it would take them hours of research to find.

There’s no question in my mind, after reading her book, that Lepore would situate herself to the left of center if you asked her where she stood. It’s a shame she felt obliged to engage in an unwarranted both siderism.

Nonetheless, the book is worth reading. Like so many works of current history, it brings home the fact that at least in terms of historical writing, the North has finally won the civil war. When I learned American history in the ‘50s (I was a history fanatic early on) and ‘60s, it was a given that the “Radical” Republicans, who gave us the 13th through 15th Amendments (without which our democracy would have long since perished), were the bad guys, standing in the way of the reunification that the country so sorely needed. That meme, which sub silentiojustified the Klan, segregation, and the virtual re-enslavement of black Americans, has been overturned, and Lepore does a good job of dispensing with other myths that dominated the teaching of history in the past.

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A gang of idiots takes on a stable genius

Friday, February 15, 2019

When I was a mere lad, along with the comic books I bought religiously using the money I earned on my paper route, there was a monthly magazine I also bought religiously. I bought it because it was funny. Little did I suspect that I was being indoctrinated into the political ideology I profess today. Back then I couldn’t figure out why this magazine kept making fun of Richard Nixon, who had been beaten by JFK, and, I thought (though I was wrong), was a total has been. I left the magazine, along with the comic books, behind when I dropped my paper route, but the lessons I learned stayed with me. When Nixon made his comeback in ‘68 I knew him for the criminal snake that he was, and feared the worst, all due to the lessons I learned from this magazine and the left wing gang of idiots that churned it out every month. 

I’m sure I’m not the only faithful reader whose mind was shaped by the gang.

In the summer of 2017 I chanced upon an issue of this magazine, which is still in existence, and was delighted to see that it was savaging a certain stable genius. Such good work should be rewarded, I thought, so I subscribed on my Ipad. Truth to tell, I haven’t read it very often, but I feel I’m supporting a worthy cause, in the hopes that it is shaping the minds of a rising generation.

Today I pulled it up on my Ipad. It featured the 20 most horrible things that happened in 2018, about 16 of which involved a certain genius in one way or another. Here’s a sample.

 

Yes, Mad magazine survives. I don’t know if it anywhere near as popular with 10 to 14 year old boys as it was, but I hope so.

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Stockholm Syndrome afflicting the Democrats

Thursday, February 14, 2019

On Tuesday Paul Krugman pointed out,once again, Republican hypocrisy about the deficit:

Much of Donald Trump’s State of the Union address was devoted to describing the menaces he claims face America — mainly the menace of scary brown people, but also the menace of socialism. And there has been a lot of discussion in the news media of what he said on those topics.

There has, however, been little coverage of one of the most revealing aspects of the SOTU: what Trump said about the menace of America’s historically large government debt.

But wait, you may object — he didn’t say anything about debt. Indeed he didn’t — not one word. But that’s what was so revealing.

As always, it’s worthwhile reading, but Krugman fails to mention the extent to which Democrats have allowed Republicans to shape Democratic policy using this issue, while Republicans themselves have merrily had it both ways.

There’s something akin to the Stockholm Syndrome about the way in which Democrats have allowed the Republicans and the media to thwart their (proclaimed) policy objectives by catering to deficit concerns, when the Republicans have proven time after time that those concerns mean nothing to them when they themselves are in power and when the political payoff for deficit responsibility is, in a word, non-existent.

In theory, the Democrats are Keynsians, i.e., they understand that there are times when it makes perfect sense to run up deficits, particularly during economic downturns. It also makes sense to borrow money to, in effect, invest in the future. To put it in simplistic terms, it makes sense to borrow money to buy a house, but not to hold a party. Republicans borrow money to throw money at the rich, their equivalent of a party, and there is no blowback on that score from the media and precious little from the Democrats. When Democrats borrow money (not often enough, and when they do, they don’t borrow enough, e.g., Obama’s pathetic stimulus package) they borrow to invest.

Despite the fact that they are Keynesians in principle, in practice the Democrats have been bludgeoned into adopting only halfway measures which, like Obama’s stimulus, don’t achieve enough for anyone to notice. That is precisely the outcome the Republicans want, because they can then argue that government can solve no problems. This has happened so often that one must wonder whether Washington Democrats are all insane, since they continually do the same thing, and react in the same way, always expecting something different to result.

This brings us to the present Democrats. I think Nancy Pelosi has amply demonstrated that she was a good choice to lead the House Democrats. Trump can’t figure out how to bully her, and she has stood up for the members of the freshman class as they’ve been attacked. But she adamantly insists that the Democrats must continue with the insanity, refusing to consider ditching the pay-gorules to which only Democrats adhere. Fondly do we hope, and fervently do we pray (actually, I don’t pray, there being no god) that the new faces in Congress will ultimately prevail on this issue and that someday the Democrats will simply tell the hypocritical Republicans to shove it when they start moaning about deficits. This is particularly true now, when nothing substantive they pass in the House will ever become law anyway. Come 2020, voters will want to see what the Democrats have to offer and a bunch of halfway measures won’t be particularly attractive.

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GE to repay (sort of) bribe

Thursday, February 14, 2019

This story may make Dan Malloy’s day:

General Electric says it will reimburse the state for the massive incentive package that helped convince the company to move its headquarters here from Connecticut, as it looks to sell its future Fort Point headquarters property and scales back its ambitions.

The board of MassDevelopment — a quasi-public agency that owns part of the property — approved a plan on Thursday to jointly market the 2.7-acre site with GE. The sale proceeds will reimburse the agency for the $87.4 million in state money that has been used to acquire and prepare the Fort Point parcel.

GE, however, is not leaving Boston. The struggling company said it will still move into two brick buildings at Necco Court after renovations are completed, but won’t come close to creating the 800 jobs it originally promised.

GE didn’t leave Connecticut because of taxes, it left because it thought it could attract young workers because Boston is cooler than Stamford. It was and is a failing company, however, and would have eventually failed in Connecticut just as it will in Boston.

Here’s an odd thing. The above article was, as I write, just added to the Boston Globe’s site, but there was another article in the Globe this morning that I found a bit surprising. Guess who’s coming to Boston (or, more accurately, beefing up in Boston) without, apparently, getting a massive infusion of taxpayer money to do so?

Google on Wednesday confirmed long-rumored plans that it will fill a new Kendall Square office tower, giving the company room to double its workforce here.

The tech giant said it will lease most of a 16-story tower on Main Street in Kendall Square on which construction will soon begin — on the site of the four-story office building the company currently occupies. Eventually, Google’s Cambridge workforce could grow to as many as 3,000, from its current 1,500.

There’s no indication in the article that Boston or Massachusetts paid any bribe money to Google (ala New York’s ridiculous bribe to Amazon) to entice it to add to its Boston presence. Not only that, Google will add 1500 jobs, while GE was only going to add 800. That means, going by the cost per estimated GE job, that Google passed up a potential bribe of over $163 million. Of course, that’s chump change to Google, but that didn’t stop Amazon. It may make sense for cities in the Rust Belt to bribe these companies, but it seems pretty obvious it’s unnecessary for cities like Boston and New York. Still, I’ve a feeling that the Google situation will remain an outlier.

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A few thoughts on latter day mortal sins

Monday, February 11, 2019

I mentioned in a post yesterday that I’m currently reading Jill Lepore’s These Truths, a history of the US. Today I began the last section of the book, covering the period from the end of World War II to our own bleak times. Early in that period the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education. Lepore discussed each justice in turn, many of whom were initially inclined to rule against the plaintiffs. It was only the timely and fortunate death of Chief Justice Vinson, which brought Earl Warren to the court, that saved us from continued court sanctioned segregation. This sentence sort of jumped out at me:

Hugo Black, from Alabama, was one of the strongest voices in opposition to segregation, even though he himself had been a member of the Klan in the 1920s – a blot that he strained to scrub clean.

Hugo Black was a great justice. Hugo Black could never get on the Supreme Court today if he were nominated by a Democrat, but unreconstructed racists (William Rehnquist was a Supreme Court clerk at the time Brownwas decided, and he urged Justice Jackson to vote to preserve Plessy v Ferguson) nominated by Republicans breeze right through. So do sexual abusers, but we’ll get to one of them later.

The quote about Black brought to mind the situation in Virginia and like situations, and the question of whether an individual should be permanently barred from public office due to something he or she may have done in the past. I’m not expressing any particular view on Northam, though this articlein today’s Times certainly indicates that the issue there is more complicated than it might seem to some. But, of course, there’s the “indentured servant” thing, and that’s pretty weird. Anyway, I’m talking about the fact that when a Democrat has sinned, he or she is automatically consigned to political hell, by everyone (Democrats, Republicans and the press) while Republicans skate free to sin again.

There are very few people in this world who have done nothing shameful in the past. We Catholics were taught about confession and penance; confess your sins and a sincere act of contrition and sinning no more gets you right with the Lord and on track to go to heaven, until you sin again. Even a mortal sin can be forgiven, provided you are properly contrite, etc. I’ve got no brief for Catholicism anymore, but there’s something to that formulation (except the heaven part). It seems to me that we’ve seen a number of instances in which people of the Democratic persuasion have been subjected to a take no prisoners sort of “justice”, which essentially mandates that a past sin, be it venial or mortal, cannot be forgiven, and requires that the sinner be banished forever, despite what he or she may have done since committing his or her particular sin. They are not allowed, like Black, to strain to scrub the blot clean. “There is”, to quote Hamlet’s Uncle Claudius, “not rain enough in the sweet heavens to wash it white as snow”.

Now I can hear my Republican friends (actually, I have no Republican friends) saying that I didn’t make the same argument about Kavanaugh. But in that case, the circumstances didn’t warrant it, because while Kavanaugh (a “devout” Catholic no less) had obviously committed the sin in question, he neither admitted to the sin nor expressed any contrition. In fact, he broke the eighth commandment repeatedly during his testimony, except while professing his fondness for beer. Had he admitted his error and expressed contrition, the situation might have been different. Instead, he committed what was, under the circumstances, yet another mortal sin, for which he cannot be forgiven so long as, like the aforementioned Claudius, he is “still possessed of those effects for which” he bore false witness.

Part of the dynamics in these incidents has to do with the press wanting to bring someone down. It only works on Democrats because IOKYAR. Not only does the press not let up on Democrats (consider the fact that they are amplifying the stupid Indian meme about Elizabeth Warren) but it rapidly consigns Republican sins to the memory hole.

Some examples from the recent past: Some Republicans voiced some pallid objections to Roy Moore, but only the voters actually rejected him, and had his sin been merely racism (he is a racist after all) rather than molesting young white girls, he’d be a senator right now and no one would be talking about him. In fact his racism was hardly mentioned during the campaign. It was a given. Consider Cindy Hyde-Smith, the newly elected Republican from Mississippi, who is, like Moore, currently and without question a racist. I mean, I don’t know how you rank these things, but I think dressing up in black face 30 years ago, but being a relatively decent person since then, is not quite as bad as wanting to go to a lynching in the here and now. Or consider the irony that the guy who would become governor if the beleaguered Democrats in Virginia all resign edited a yearbook full of racist stuff and currently teaches classes at William & Mary in which he both acts in a racist fashion and promotes racism. He hasn’t changed, but we all know he’ll skate free, even if Northam and the other Democrats all resign. In truth and in fact (as we lawyers like to say) the Republican Party is now the home base for racists, and that fact goes unacknowledged by some of the same forces that go after folks like Northam. The only rule, so far as Republicans are concerned, is that you can’t publicly, proudly, and explicitly admit to being a racist (see, e.g., Steven King, who forgot to talk in code) and even if you do, you’re not pressured to resign, you just lose your committee assignments.

Again, I’m not excusing what Northam did. What I’m saying is that the fact that someone (always a Democrat) did something wrong years ago should not automatically and unquestionably disqualify them from holding public office forever. We have already lost some good people (e.g., Al Franken) and will undoubtedly lose more in the future if this kind of thing isn’t tempered by some sort of due process and sound judgment, while the real bad guys on the right will just keep on keeping on.

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A bit on both sides

Sunday, February 10, 2019

So, I know that Bill Maher is a little problematic, but when he’s right, he’s right, so I’ll pass on this brilliant takedown of both Howard Schultz and the both-siderism that he’s selling. I wish I could embed the video, but try as I might, I can’t make the embed code work.

I’m sure Maher has pointed this out before, but I think we may be seeing a bit of movement in the media to start rejecting the both sides meme. Trump is horrible, but he may have accomplished that. It’s getting harder and harder for the punditry to claim that both sides are equivalent in light of his criminality, ignorance, and incompetence.

On a related subject, I want to pass on something I just read in Jill Lepore’s These Truths, a book I highly recommend. It’s a history of the US, which shines a light on a lot of dark corners of American history.

Anyway, Lepore relates that in the late forties and early fifties political scientists bemoaned the fact that the political parties had become so similar that it was often hard to tell the difference between the two. They warned, believe it or not, that democracy was in trouble unless the parties became more polarized. Well, we all know how that worked out, but get a load of what Thomas Dewey had to say at the time, both remarkably prescient and remarkably wrong:

[The political scientists] want to drive all moderates and liberals out of the Republican Party and then have the remainder join forces with conservative groups of the South. Then they would have everything neatly arranged, indeed. The Democratic Party would be the liberal-to-radical-party. The Republican Party would be the conservative-to-reactionary party. The results would be neatly arranged, too. The Democrats would win every election.

Regrettably, the latter prediction hasn’t proven true, and the radical part of the Democratic Party appears to be missing in action, as is, when you come right down to it, the “conservative”, wing of the Republican Party, if we harken back to the meaning of the term as Dewey understood it. 

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Told you so

Friday, February 8, 2019

Almost two weeks ago (ages in Trump time), I observed that although Trump’s followers would never admit they were scammed, they’d be more than willing to admit that they’ve been betrayed. Betrayal is, of course, exactly what happens to you after you’ve been conned, but it’s easy to talk yourself into believing there’s a distinction, which relieves you of any responsibility for falling for the con man in the first place.

I like to point out when I’m right, so I direct your attention to this column in the New York Times, the subtitle of which is If Trump betrays his most loyal supporters, he’ll deserve his fate, in which that point is made with reference to Trump’s soon to be final failure to get the wall. As a side note, the fact that the wall, even if built, will not be paid for by Mexico is never mentioned as a betrayal, though it was clearly part of the con.

Another issue is raised by this column, to wit: why is this mendacious word salad occupying space in the editorial pages of the New York Times? You can find the answer to that question here.

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He ain’t leaving

Thursday, February 7, 2019

Here’s an article titled SNDY May Soon Indict Trump’s Kids to Force Him Out of Office. 

I’m not disagreeing that there’s a real possibility that Erik and Don, Jr., even (oh please God!) Ivanka, will soon be indicted.

I just don’t buy into the “force him out of office” logic.

We all know enough about Trump to know that he is totally narcissistic and cares only about himself. Sure, he’d probably ratherthat his kids weren’t in jail, but if it’s him or them, then it’s him. So this means there are two possible Trump reactions to such indictments.

First, he could issue a wholesale pardon. I’d put this at a 40% probability, as it puts him at risk.

Second, he could bloviate about the unfairness of the unfounded persecution of his family and do nothing else. I’d put this at a 60% probability.

That adds up to 100%. The chance of him resigning in some sort of deal that gets his kids off the hook: 0%.

If he does pardon them, and the charges are handed off to state authorities, then he is left with two options: cut a deal or let his kids rot in jail. Odds that he chooses “let them rot”: 100%.

The above presumes no indictment of Individual-1 himself, or any clear cut indication that such an indictment will be handed down on January 21, 2021. If he is capable of absorbing the fact that he might face prison himself after that date he might work a deal that also gets his kids off the hook, as long as he is dehooked in the process.

That raises the question of whether the prosecutors should cut such a deal. I am willing to give Gerald Ford the benefit of the doubt. I think he thought his Nixon pardon would heal the nation’s wounds, etc. I never believed it, but I think he really did. But time has proven beyond doubt that it was the wrong thing to do, since it taught the right that the consequences of political crimes were not significant enough to deter the crimes. Sort of like the fact that the banks never learned anything from tanking the economy in 2008, given that they got a pardon in the form of a bailout.

It remains my firm opinion that the genius is more likely to die in office than resign or be impeached. The question is: what will he do to distract from his crimes over the course of the next two years. If we can avoid a pointless war we’ll be lucky indeed. 

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There’s a word for that

Monday, February 4, 2019

Erik Prince is once more in the news. One must truly wonder about how any given two parents could raise siblings as loathsome as he and Betsy DeVos, but pondering that is for another day.

This time he’s been caughttrying to make money by helping China persecute Muslims:

But Mr. Prince scrambled on Friday to distance himself from the latest announcement: that his company, Frontier Services Group, had struck a deal to build a training camp in the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang, where hundreds of thousands of Muslims have been detained in indoctrination camps that have drawn condemnation in Washington and abroad.

My beef is with the New York Times. (What else is new?) Why, when dealing with right wingers, does the Time feel the need to airbrush things? Prince made a name for himself, we are told, as “a private military contractor”. He has “employees”. There’s a perfectly good word that the Times avoids as much as it avoids the word “lie” when talking about a certain genius. The word is “mercenary”. Look it up in any dictionary. It says it all and obfuscates nothing.

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Count your blessings, always look on the bright side of life, and every time it rains it rains pennies from heaven

Monday, February 4, 2019

The fact that Trump spends all his time watching television instead of working is once again in the news. 

What I can’t understand is that people seem to think it’s a bad thing that the genius spends so little time presiding. As I’ve pointed out every Good Friday since this blog started, one should always look on the bright side of life. So I say, just imagine how much harm he could do if he was more engaged. Sure, it would be nice, and a lot less harmful, if he watched cartoons instead of Fox and Friends, but one can’t have everything.

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