No real time for this today, so I'll just try to note a few brief links without providing much in the way of commentary. Main thing that chewed up time today was my sister's birthday. She wanted a party in the new/very old house, although circumstances pretty much restricted us to the living room (repainted bright blue, wood floors refinished). She set up a table on my sawhorses, and I brought over a large pot of jambalaya and a spice cake -- two old never-fail standbys. Only work on the house today was to reinstall the toilet, but after rebuilding the bathroom floor and covering it with vinyl sheet that feels like a milestone.
One minor piece of housekeeping: Laura Tillem urged me to send an excerpt from last week's Blowing Smoke post on Hiroshima and Obama, and something like it was published in the Wichita Eagle's Letters to the Editor today:
Columnist Leonard Pitts Jr., who normally is sensitive to racial affronts, insists that we not apologize for killing 200,000 Japanese with atom bombs -- the only time such weapons have been used on civilians -- because it was war ("Obama not apologizing for Hiroshima, nor should he," May 16 Opinion). So war means never having to say you're sorry?
I get that "war is hell," but I don't see that one should deny regrets after a war, or that there's no value in the simple decency of an apology, however paltry.
I fear that refusing to apologize for Hiroshima implies that atomic bombing of cities is something we can excuse doing again -- that it's one of those "options" that our political leaders insist they won't ever "take off the table." Indeed, current plans to spend more than $1 trillion to upgrade America's nuclear arsenal suggest that America's leaders are more committed than ever to threatening what we're repeatedly told is "a dangerous world" with instant destruction.
On the other hand, if we started to apologize for the atrocities that even Pitts admits America committed, maybe we'd be less prone to repeat them going forward.
OK, one big piece and long quote and comment:
Matt Taibbi: RIP, GOP: How Trump Is Killing the Republican Party: Just riffing on the headline, my initial reaction is that he's got it totally wrong. The Republican Party has been intellectually and morally dead for some time now. The Bush administration proved that any pieces of their agenda that they managed to implement rebounded disastrously, they've continued to perform similarly awful at the state and local levels, and under Obama congressional Republicans (even with their recent majority control) have failed to offer a single constructive proposal -- all they seem capable of doing is jeering and obstructing. So they're already brain dead, not that the media -- so fascinated with their spastic twitching -- has noticed let alone certified. Still, one thing Trump has going is that he's pretty clearly not implicated in their past failures, so how can one accuse him of killing the party? The more apt metaphor is that the party is already dead, and Trump is reanimating it, much like Dr. Frankenstein animated his monster. (I'm not current enough on the relevant pop culture to judge whether some sort of zombie trope might fit better, but John Quiggin's critique of "zombie economics" -- "how dead ideas still walk among us" -- applies to most of the rare occasions when Republicans attempt to present us with their version of thinking.)
The main argument against the death of the Republican Party is that Republicans keep polling well and winning elections, despite a track record of unmitigated horror. While some pundits argue that Trump is so repugnant and reviled that he may drag the whole party down to a calamitous defeat this fall, I don't see how adding palpable energy (and a soupçon of deniability) hurts the GOP. Taibbi's article is more nuanced than his headline, partly because it's more about Ted Cruz's failures than Trump's successes:
This led to the hilarious irony of Ted Cruz. Here was a quintessentially insipid GOP con man culled straight from the halls of Princeton, Harvard, the Supreme Court, the Federal Trade Commission and the National Republican Senatorial Committee to smooth-talk the yokels. But through a freak accident of history, he came along just when the newest models of his type were selling "the Republican establishment sucks" as an electoral strategy.
Cruz was like an android that should have self-destructed in a cloud of sparks and black smoke the moment the switch flipped on. He instead stayed on just long enough to win 564 delegates, a stunning testament to just how much Republican voters, in the end, hated the Republican kingmakers Cruz robotically denounced.
All of these crazy contradictions came to a head in Indiana, where Cruz succumbed in an explosion of hate and scorn. The cascade started the Sunday night before the primary, with a Cruz stump speech in La Porte that couldn't have gone worse.
Things went sideways as Cruz was working his way into a "simple flat tax" spiel, a standard Republican snake-oil proposal in which all corporate, estate and gift taxes would be eliminated, and replaced with a 10 percent flat tax and a 16 percent consumption tax. Not because the rich would pay less and the poor would pay more, but because America and fairness, etc. He was just getting to his beloved money line, claiming, "We can fill out our taxes on a postcard," when a 12-year-old boy interrupted with cries of "You suck!" and "I don't care!"
Cruz couldn't quite handle the pressure and stepped straight into the man-trap the moment presented. He lectured the kid about respecting his elders, then suggested the world might be a better place if someone had taught a young Donald Trump that lesson. It was a not-half-bad line of the type that the Harvard lawyer is occasionally capable. But Cruz couldn't help himself and added, "You know, in my household, when a child behaves that way, they get a spanking."
Boom! Within hours the Internet was filled with headlines about how Ted Cruz had suggested spanking someone else's 12-year-old for telling him he sucked.
This was on top of the ignominy of having already called a basketball hoop a "ring" while giving a speech on the gym floor in Knightstown, the home of the fictional Hickory team from Hoosiers. No American male would call a basketball hoop a ring, and even a French immigrant would know better than to do so in Indiana, but this was the kind of run he was on.
The rest of the race was a slapstick blowout. Carly Fiorina fell off a stage, and Cruz's wife, Heidi, actually had to answer a question from a Yahoo! reporter about her husband being called the Zodiac Killer. Heidi Cruz calmly responded that she'd been married to Ted for 15 years and "I know pretty well who he is." This, of course, was exactly what the wife of the actual Zodiac Killer would say, making for a perfectly absurd ending to a doomed campaign. [ . . . ]
Finally, on the morning of the Indiana primary, Cruz woke up to hear opponent Trump babbling that Cruz's own father had been hanging out with Lee Harvey Oswald before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a bizarre take on a ridiculous National Enquirer story that Trump, of course, believed instantly. Trump brought this up on Fox and Friends, which let him run the ball all the way to the end zone. "I mean, what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald, shortly before the death -- before the shooting?" Trump asked. "It's horrible."
American politics had never seen anything like this: a presidential candidate derided as a haggardly masturbating incarnation of Satan, the son of a presidential assassin's accomplice, and himself an infamous uncaptured serial killer.
Despite the media humiliations, Cruz talked passionately of his supporters' resolve. "Just a few days ago, two young kids, ages four and six, handed me two envelopes full of change," he said. "All of their earnings from their lemonade stand. They wanted the campaign to have it."
The crowd cooed: Awwww! There was no way he could quit now and let those kids down. Except that moments later, Cruz did just that, announcing he was suspending his campaign because "the path to victory has been foreclosed." Then he fled the stage like he was double-parked.
Didn't initially plan to quote all of that, but it kept coming, and helps explain why Cruz, who had long been favored to win Indiana, and who supposedly cinched the win with a deal to get Kasich to skip the state and not split the anti-Trump vote, imploded so suddenly. But the key word there was "foreclosed": precisely the sort of word a Harvard lawyer would choose to indicate that he was quitting not because he had lost face with the voters or had decided that the principled differences he claimed against Trump had ceased to matter; rather, the moneyed interests behind his campaign decided to cut their losses and live with the consequences. Then, less than a week later, Kasich -- who after his deal with Cruz had nothing riding on the Indiana results -- dropped out as well, conceding the nomination and obviating the rest of the primary schedule. Clearly, the folks with the money decided that whatever uncertainty Trump posed wasn't enough of a threat to keep fighting against.
And a few real brief links:
Mike Konczal: Monopoly Power Is on the Rise in the US. Here's How to Fix That.
Rick Perlstein: The Chicago School: No, not about Chicago's notorious economists -- more about Chicago's charter schools and Rahm Emmanuel.