The rally at Tulsa

Keep in mind that Brad Parscale, the President's campaign manager, has been paid lots and lots of money to do his job. Remember that when we look at the utter cluster%$#@ from last night. This link is the complete thread for all that follows, but I've selected a few highlight here.

How much of a disaster was it last night? Hoo boy!

Remember, the President is a malignant narcissist. These are "trigger words!"

Again, the President seems to be convinced that if you don't test for a disease, then everything will be okay. We had diseases for many millennia before we had tests for them.

Context for this clip: Aftermath from the brutal murder of George Floyd and 121k coronavirus deaths and this is what he talks about.

Oh, and there was racism, plenty of racism. Nothing overly blatant, just stuff like "kung-flu."

Campaign makes the wild, hysterical, utterly ridiculous charge that protesters blocked access to the rally. Really? There were no police there? Or the police put up with that? And also, uh, no video?

Ooh! NY Times asks "...has the MAGA rally lost its luster?"

As I mentioned months ago, any city that fails to get the Trump campaign to pay for everything up front is run by idiots. No sympathy for them. They'll never see that money!

The President's rich fantasy life

 

 The President sure has a rich fantasy life. This is from a recent tweet:

"The people that know me and know the history of our Country say that I am  the hardest working President in history. I don’t know about that, but I am a hard worker and have probably gotten more done in the first 3 1/2 years than any President in history."

Trump's fourth Press Secretary says:

"[White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows] looks at the president's schedule and he made the point the president is so busy and so hard at work, his concern is making sure he gets a bite to eat here and there, so you gotta put that in context."

Yet, Slate says:

...the wealthiest country in history cannot seem to provide basic medical equipment to doctors and nurses and lifesaving care to its citizens during an emergency.

Slate says the problem is the same as in Eastern Europe during the 1980s:

One of the most enduring images of 1980s Eastern Europe is people queuing up outside of stores for scarce goods. But people were resourceful; they leveraged personal connections to skip lines and made do with ersatz products when something simply wasn’t available.

What characterizes a "failed state?" More than any other one factor, corruption.

An extremely consequential example of corruption has been FEMA seizing medical supplies from those states and institutions that have ordered and paid for those supplies. When someone orders supplies from a vendor, it's because they've calculated that's what they need. When the Veterans Health Administration orders 5 million masks, it's because they've calculated that's what they need, not because "Hey, it'd be cool to have 5 million masks."

How well has the US responded to COVID-19?

Reported US coronavirus deaths on date:

Feb. 26: 0 deaths
Mar. 26: 1,195 deaths
Apr. 26: 54,856 deaths

Italy has been very hard hit and has suffered 26,640 deaths. Their death rate has declined to "only" around 400 a day. At their peak, they were around 750 a day, give or take 100. But Italy's daily death rate has been declining since late March. That of the US is still growing.

So yeah, it's a really nice idea that our President thinks he's working really hard, but he declared that COVID-19 was a crisis on 13 March, 46 days ago. Trump likes to grade his own performance as an A+, regardless of how well he actually does. I'd say his response to the coronavirus rates about a D-, at best.

Jon Voight and the President's record

The actor Jon Voight has a very high opinion of President Trump: "our country is stronger [&] safer... because our president has made his every move correct."

Stronger? Since 1976, views on pregnancy/abortion haven't changed much. The pro-choicers have consistently outnumbered anti-choicers by about 2 to 1, yet anti-choicers have been strengthened by this President (and by Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader who saw to it that the Supreme Court was not turned liberal by preventing the seating of Judge Merrick Garland) to the point where there are "soaring incidents of trespassing, disruption, and intimidation at abortion clinics." The President has gone all-in on supporting anti-choicers. How is this sort of divisive political action making us stronger?

Safer? Looking at a public opinion poll that examined international attitudes towards the US, there are only three countries that view the US in a more favorable light than they did at the end of the Obama Presidency, Israel, Kenya and Russia. The rest of the world, including long-time allies, view us less favorably.
Also, the US has an intelligence-sharing program with four other countries, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, that is now endangered by the President giving Attorney General William Barr complete authority to investigate how the Mueller Report originated.
How on Earth does any of this count as making us any safer?!?!?!

Bush speaks on Obama's Mideast policy

G.W. Bush “at first remarked that the idea of re-entering the political arena was something he didn’t want to do.” His first impulse was the correct one. He really should have stayed quiet.

Bush relied on an old friend, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), for advice on how Obama should have dealt with the Iraqi insistence that the US should have stuck to the originally schedule of withdrawal by the end of 2011, as the agreement Bush and the President of Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, specified back in 2008. Bush suggests that Obama could have renegotiated that agreement to allow a least a substantial contingent of US troops to remain. But Global Policy cited three works, all from 2006, showing that Iraqis in general had a very negative opinion of seeing permanent US bases in Iraq. It's highly unlikely that Iraqis would have changed their minds by 2011 as US troops had made themselves very unpopular during their stay there and the Iraqi people were given no reason to want to see them staying on. Did the surge have a dramatic effect on convincing Iraqis that Americans were good guys? No, the surge temporarily quited things there, but there were no serious political changes afterwards.

Also, reconstruction was a complete and utter bust. Just a few months after the war of 1991 with the US and a coalition of nations, the evil dictator Saddam Hussein completed “bubble-gum and scotch-tape” repairs to his country's infrastructure, but the American reconstruction effort after the invasion of 2003 was a complete waste.

Virtually every senior Iraqi, in sharp contrast, said the decade-long U.S. occupation was beset by huge misspending and waste and had accomplished little. The biggest footprint Americans left behind, most of these Iraqi officials said, was more corruption and widespread money-laundering. Such a huge investment "could have brought great change in Iraq," Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said, but the gains were often "lost."

How reliable is Graham for policy analysis? Well, in November 2014, CNN asked him to respond to the report on Benghazi put out by the Republican House Intelligence Committee. Basically, the report said he was completely wrong on everything he had said about the case. He got very heated about a very secondary issue concerning talking points that were put out later and made stern and angry pronouncements based on that. This is hardly unusual for Graham, as in his public career, Graham has rarely been correct on any matter of substance.

Bush said he views the rise of the Islamic State [IS, ISIL or ISIS] as al-Qaeda’s 'second act' and that they may have changed the name but that murdering innocents is still the favored tactic.

First off, “murdering innocents” is hardly a tactic unique to al Qaeda. That alone does nothing to connect the two groups. As a blogger points out in Informed Comment:

Like Al-Qaeda and other militants, ISIS offers a militant warped and distorted Salafi ideology/religious rationale or rationalization to justify, recruit, legitimate and motivate many of its fighters. Much of what they do violates Islamic law, its unabashed acts of terrorism: slaughter of civilians, savage use of beheadings, killing of innocent Muslims and Christians. While there are similarities between ISIS and other terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda in their ideological worldview and tactics, there is also distinctive difference. ISIS seeks to create a state, to occupy and control areas, to govern, not just to dream of or speak of but to create and impose their version of a transnational caliphate, with its harsh version of law and order. At the same time, they are far more ruthless in driving out, suppressing and executing Shiah and Kurds, Sunni imams/religious leaders and others who disagree, as well as minorities such as Christians and Yazidis, demanding conversion to their warped and extraordinarily violent brand of Islam. Having populations forced to publicly pledge their allegiance (baya) to the caliphate in exchange for which they are offered security, a mafia like version of “protection” and social services.

So no, ISIS is a very distinct and separate group from al Qaeda.

Yes, under Bush, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad was captured. But,

...where Bush officials brazenly dismissed law as an inconvenient obstacle and sought to deal with suspects outside the law, Obama has said that the struggle with Al Qaeda must adhere to our nation’s first principles. He argues that the rule of law lends our struggle legitimacy and helps to isolate and defeat our enemies.

Obama has fallen short on applying these principles, but he has adhered to them far better than Bush ever even tried to.

Did Bush's policies decrease terrorism around the world? Actually, according to the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law, terrorism increased under Bush sevenfold. Plus, if one is interested in holding back Iran and keeping Iran from territorial expansion, taking out Saddam Hussein of Iraq was a pretty terrible move. For all of Saddam's faults, and he had many, Iraq was a stable state that stood fast against Iran. Now, of course, the need to combat ISIS has opened up room for Iran to operate in Iraq. In a piece about a proposed bill to aid forces in Iraq that are friendly to the US, The Guardian points out that

Those Shia militias, many of which are sponsored by Iran, have played key roles in fighting Isis, to include spearheading the recent monthlong battle to retake the Sunni city of Tikrit.

Here's an interesting comment:

[Bush] said that if you have a military goal and you mean it, “you call in your military and say ‘What’s your plan?’ ” He indirectly touted his own decision to surge troops to Iraq in 2007, by saying, “When the plan wasn’t working in Iraq, we changed.”

So Bush says that leaders should listen to the military, which is all very fine and well, but Bush's military leaders actually disagreed with the surge. As Commander in Chief, Bush insisted on it anyway, as was his right, but this is a case where Bush very clearly departed from his own advice. Reporter Bob Woodward reported that, on “60 Minutes” in September 2008, "The records of the joint chiefs show that the idea of five brigades came from the White House, not from anybody except the White House."

In the same month, presidential candidate Barack Obama admitted that the surge was indeed succeeding. What was clear was that a reduction in violence was occurring. But why that reduction was occurring had to do with the Sunni Awakening (Al Qaeda was overdoing the violence and alienating Sunni Iraqis), Muqtada al-Sadr decided that his Mahdi army should cease operations and the US was paying many groups of guerrillas to fight on the side of the US. Unfortunately, the whole political purpose of the surge was never carried out and no political transformation ever took place during the “breathing room” that the addition of five brigades were supposed to have secured for Iraq's leadership. Thus was set the stage for the rise of ISIS.

Putin’s domestic popularity comes from his control of Russian media, according to Bush. "Hell, I'd be popular, too, if I owned NBC news," he said.

Actually, Bush claimed in 2002 that Saddam Hussein had kicked out UN arms inspectors in 1998. What actually happened was that Clinton wanted to bomb Iraq, told the UN inspectors to leave for their own safety and, when the bombing was over, Saddam refused to let inspectors back in. Pretty much the entire US media dutifully repeated Bush's lie that Saddam had kicked out the inspectors, which of course, had the added advantage of making Clinton look weak and helpless in retrospect. Bush may not have formally controlled the media, but he had virtual, de facto control anyway.

After it became clear that Iraq didn't have any weapons of mass destruction, Bush claimed several times that Saddam Hussein was given a choice prior to the invasion of 2003, to let in weapons inspectors or to be invaded. Bush maintained several times that Saddam refused to let the inspectors in and so sealed his fate. But everyone knew that wasn't true. Inspectors came into Iraq and inspected everything they wanted to. But the press corps permitted Bush to lie unchallenged.

So I'm really not sure what Bush's problem with the press corps is. They permitted many lies to go unchallenged. Their discipline did break a few times, notably in the case of Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans, but by and large, they maintained a rigid, lock-step discipline and didn't permit themselves too much independence.

No, if Bush became unpopular, that was due to his staggering ineptitude and horrible policies, not because the press was biased against him. I remember reading back in early 2009 that several Bush Administration members got together and talked over old times. They identified four disasters, 9-11, the invasion of Iraq, New Orleans/Katrina and the collapse of the housing bubble that resulted in the Great Recession. Problem is, in all four cases, Bush and his people had a great deal to do with either initiating the disaster or in not responding properly. In none of the cases could they plausibly claim to have been innocently taken by surprise. No, if Bush is regarded today as something you'd scrape off of the bottom of your shoes, his own actions had everything to do with that.

We appear to be on the road to imperial decline

Alfred W. McCoy, author of the 1972 The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, has written a very depressing, but probably quite accurate view of the near-future collapse of the American empire (Probably by 2020 or 2025). With two active wars, around 800 military bases arounthe globe, but a declining economy accelerated by the Republican/Blue Dog Democrat/Tea Party refusal to allow government stimulus measures to pull America's non-wealthy out of the sharp economic downturn that began in late 2007 with the collapse of the housing bubble (The wealthy are doing splendidly, thank you very much), America appears to be very solidly set upon a path to national decline and "imperial overstretch."


McCoy considers the invasion of Iraq to be the crucial event that future historians will compare to the Athenian attack on Sicily and the joint British-French-Israeli attack on the Suez Canal. These were the events that sounded the death knell for their respective empires. Of course, Athens and Britain continued long after their empires disintegrated, so naturally, the US wil survivie any approaching cataclysm. The anti-war left in the US considers the beginning of the Iraq War to be a good, universally-agreed-upon time to protest the Iraq War at least once a year. That date may one day be regarded as the beginning of the end of American supremacy over the rest of the world.


What's curious is to see all the yelling and screeching and beating of chests over the US budget deficit, with no thought of, perhaps, reducing America's military commitments. Very bizarrely, with states struggling to make ends meet and to keep citizens from falling into poverty and starving, the President and Republican opponents have agreed to extend tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. Unfortunately, as with the political fight over the public option in the Affordable Care Act, it's pretty clear that the President isn't really on the progressive
side, despite his many earnest-seeming protestations.

The GWOT and social progress

It's difficult to add much to this post on Charles Krauthammer's Weekly Standard piece on why President Obama is allegedly hastening America's decline, but I'll make a few extra comments anyway.

Krauthammer feels that "decline is a choice" and that America can remain the world's top dog if it wants to. I'm not so sure about that because the problem with the US remaining dominant is more than just the single nation of China. It's that before World War II and the following decolonization, the non-Western world was easily dominated by the advanced weaponry and advanced way of organizing their armies that the rest of the world simply couldn't match. We saw in Iraq, however, that Third World people are now able to do so. Nir Rosen authored a series in Asia Times back in 2005 that examined the Iraqi resistance to the American occupation. He shows us not just a stubborn and determined group of fighters, but a canny and sophisticated group that made good use of whatever technology they could get their hands on. The easy domination over other nations that Western powers enjoyed from around 1500 to roughly 1950 is over.

No, I disagree with his statement that "Decline--or continued ascendancy--is in our hands."

The current foreign policy of the United States is an exercise in contraction. It begins with the demolition of the moral foundation of American dominance.

Is it the statements made by President Obama that are demolishing the "moral foundation of American dominance" or is it actions like the tortures that took place at Abu Ghraib? Keep in mind that these tortures were justified by low-level functionaries like Judge Jay Bybee and John Yoo, they weren't simply the rogue actions of some out-of-control people indulging their own twisted desires. These were people who were carrying out official US policy.

Obama didn't just say "America's been bad," he instead went over many actions that the world already knew about and that it clearly and loudly disapproved of and he agreed "Yeah, these actions are wrong."

What happens if the US is no longer dominant?

But that leads to the question: How does this new world govern itself? How is the international system to function?

I would suggest that perhaps the rest of the world probably doesn't need a world sheriff or a daddy figure or an administrator. I would further suggest that liberals refuse to view US power and dominance as inherently good things not because the US is fundamentally bad but because all nations are fundamentally bad. In other words, liberals view competing international powers in much the same way our Founding Fathers viewed competing domestic political interest groups back in the day.

The UN may not be up to snuff today, but that hardly means that the liberal experiment in world government is a failure. Clearly, the countries of the world won't be able to get rid of armies and weapons tomorrow, but Europe is doing a pretty good job melding all their different countries into one framework. It is not the United States of Europe and may never be, but it's grossly premature to say that the experiment will never succeed.

Demonstrators are shot in the streets of Tehran seeking nothing but freedom, but our president holds his tongue...

Krauthammer ignores the very sound and sensible reason that Obama "holds his tongue" and refuses to interfere. It's because the Iranian opposition has asked America to keep its distance. The last thing Iranian supporters of a democratic Iran want is the US throwing its weight around, trying to "liberate" them. Partly because the Iranian opposition may (quite reasonably) fear that the US may seek to do so for the exclusive purpose of liberating Iran's oil fields, but mostly because Iranians consider democratization to be an internal affair that outsiders cannot effectively steer. It's not that the US specifically can't effectively usher Iran towards democracy, it's that no outsider can do so. Iran's opposition figures that democracy has to be something Iranians gain in their own way, on their own timetable.

Krauthammer seem quite upset that "there is no more 'Global War on Terror.'" Well, that's right. Maybe because the GWOT was a complete, total and unqualified failure. First of all, the GWOT has been extraordinarily expensive to parts of the Mideast:

As of April 2009, in the Occupied Palestinian, Iraqi and Afghan Territories post-invasion non-violent excess deaths total 0.3 million, 1.0 million and 3.2 million, respectively; post-invasion violent deaths total about 10,000, 1.3 million and 2-4 million...

The same piece estimated US deaths from terrorism (Including the 3,000 killed on 9-11) at about 10,000. Bit of a disproportionate response, I would think. The GWOT has also been very expensive as far as civil liberties are concerned, with citizen protections against overly-intrusive surveillance being especially hard-hit. And what did America get for it's money, time and effort? The chart here only goes to 2006, but it's rather obvious that the GWOT was having the exact opposite of its intended effect. Deaths and injuries due to terrorism steadily increased.

A recent piece in the Boston Globe shows that continuing along the course advocated by those who would like continued war in Afghanistan could very easily end up having the same corrosive effect on social progress in the US that the Korean War had under Harry Truman and that the Vietnam war had under Lyndon Johnson.

Krauthammer follows with a "parade of horribles" where it's rather difficult to see just what the US has lost that's of any value. My concern with these examples is not that Krauthammer is being at all untruthful, but that in all cases he's only telling part of the story, that he's only giving us a very partial and limited view of what's actually going on with these issues.

So when Krauthammer reaches the preliminary conclusion that:

The express agenda of the New Liberalism is a vast expansion of social services--massive intervention and expenditures in energy, health care, and education--that will necessarily, as in Europe, take away from defense spending.

My response to that is "And your problem with this is...?"