When I woke up this morning, I didn't have the slightest notion that today was the 15th anniversary of the Al-Qaeda hijackings that brought down the World Trade Center. It's not that I don't remember waking up in a Brooklyn apartment fifteen years ago, looking out the window to see blue skies with a toxic white streak across the middle, emanating from the still-standing towers. I looked down and watched tired people trekking east with the subway system shut down. We watched the towers fall on TV. We saw interviews with John Major and Shimon Peres about how Americans now know what terrorism feels like, barely containing their gloating. We went out for lunch in an Arab restaurant not yet covered in American flags. That was a bad day, but also one of the last days before we went to war. For make no mistake: Bin Laden may have wanted to provoke the US into an act of war, but Al-Qaeda didn't start the war. That was George W. Bush, with the nearly unanimous support of Congress, to the celebration of vast swathes of American media. They made a very rash and stupid decision back then, and much of the world has been suffering for it ever since. Indeed, Americans less than many other people, as was shown by my ability to wake up this morning without thinking of the date.
OK, so this is a typical day's news cycle in this election: Hillary Clinton commits a run-of-the-mill gaffe: Clinton Describes Half of Trump Supporters as 'Basket of Deplorables', by which she means "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it." Sort of true, but you're always on shaky ground when you start making generalizations about arbitrary groups of people, but that didn't stop her from making an appeal to the other half: "people who feel that government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures . . . Those are people who we have to understand and empathize with as well." Of course, coming from her that all sounds smug and condescending and, let's be realistic here, pretty hollow.
Of course, the Trump campaign tried to make what they could of this, partly because they don't have anything real to offer. Still, what did they focus on: well, putting people into baskets, of course. First, there was Pence Blasts Clinton: Trump Backers 'Are Not a Basket of Anything', then there's Trump Campaign Goes After Clinton for 'Basket of Deplorables' Remark. One thing for certain, you can't slip a metaphor past these guys. But they also have a point, which is that when you start dividing people into arbitrary groups and making gross generalizations about them you dehumanize and disrespect them -- and that is as true of the "other half" as it is of the "deplorables." (Contrast Trump's own description of his supporters: "millions of amazing, hard working people.")
Of course, in the Kabuki theater of American politics, every insult demands an apology, so whether she would or should not became the next anticipated story. Josh Marshall fired off This Is Critical: Hillary Can't Back Down, arguing:
Donald Trump has not only brought haters into the mainstream, he has normalized hate for a much broader swathe of the population who were perhaps already disaffected but had their grievances and latent prejudices held in check by social norms. . . . This election has become a battle to combat the moral and civic cancer Trump has [been] injecting into the body politic. (I know that sounds like florid language but it is the only fitting and valid way to describe it.) Backing down would make Clinton appear weak, accomplish nothing of value and confuse what is actually at stake in the election.
Clinton, of course, immediately apologized; see Clinton Regrets Saying 'Half' of Trump Backers Are in 'Basket of Deplorables', where she conceded, "Last night I was 'grossly generalistic,' and that's never a good idea. I regret saying 'half' -- that was wrong." In other words, she admitted to a math error, realizing (unlike Marshall) that it doesn't matter how many Trump supporters are racist, sexist, etc. -- a point she made clear enough by repeating "deplorable" a many times in the next paragraph, all directed squarely where they belong, at Donald Trump. She also said, "I also meant what I said last night about empathy, and the very real challenges we face as a country where so many people have been left out and left behind. As I said, many of Trump's supporters are hard-working Americans who just don't feel like the economy or our political system are working for them."
She still needs to find an effective way to communicate that, especially to people who are conditioned not to believe a single thing she says, who view her as deeply corrupt, part of a status quo system that is rigged against everyday people. Needless to say, these are problems that Bernie Sanders wouldn't be having.
PS: Just when Trump was enjoying this news cycle, this story pops up: Crazed Trumper Assaults Muslim Women in Brooklyn. I guess there are some Trump supporters who are . . . well, isn't "deplorable" a bit more polite than they deserve? Also note: Trump: Clinton Could 'Shoot Somebody' and Not Be Prosecuted. Trump previously said, "I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?" What's this obsession he has with shooting people?
Five-Thirty-Eight currently gives Clinton a 70.0% chance of winning, with a 3.5% edge in the popular vote and 310-227 in electoral votes. Iowa, which had a recent poll showing Trump leading, has inched back into Clinton's column, and she's less than a 60% favorite in North Carolina, Ohio, Florida, and Nevada. Meanwhile, the only red states where Trump is less than an 80% favorite are Arizona (65.7%), Georgia (73.0%), and Alaska (79.9%).
Some scattered links this week:
Chuck Collins: Long Live the Estate Tax: Wallace Stegner referred to the National Park Service as the nation's best idea. Collins argues that the estate tax (what Republicans like to call the "death tax") is a close second: "The estate tax is a fundamentally American notion, an absolutely democratic intervention against a drift toward plutocracy and extreme wealth imbalances." Of course, it would work better if it was stricter and stiffer -- if, for instance, the wealthy couldn't hide money in foundations. (Ever wonder why one-percenters down to the level of Bill Clinton have all those foundations? "For example, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson dodged over $2.3 billion in estate taxes using a complicated trust called a GRAT to transfer $8 billion in wealth to his heirs in 2013.") Reason enough to vote against him is that Trump has made abolishing the estate tax the centerpiece of his tax agenda. After all, he has billions, and three children who have proved unable to hold a job not on his payroll. How can you not feel for them?
John Judis: The US Treasury should be cheering the EU Case against Apple. It's not. The basic fact of the matter is that Apple cut a deal to run its European market operation out of Ireland, which claims several thousand jobs there, in exchange for Ireland capping Apple's tax liability to 2%, way below the going tax rate anywhere in Europe. In doing so Ireland violated EU regulations which prohibit special deals with individual companies like that, so the EU wants to collect the taxes Apple has thus far avoided paying. The Obama administration is backing the guys at Apple who contributed to their poilitical campaigns -- not necessarily "quid pro quo" but the sort of chummy alliances America's system of campaign finance breeds. However, we should be happy that Apple's scam is up, because for years now they've been cooking their books to make profits that should be taxed in the US vanish into their Irish tax haven. Judis doesn't mention this, but we should also similar regulations here in the US, to keep companies from auctioning their plants and to whichever state/local government gives them the sweetest tax deal. We run into this problem all the time here, and companies have gotten so spoiled that they never invest without first shaking down the local politicians. The most notorious case was Boeing, long the largest employer in Wichita but totally gone now that they've gotten more lucrative deals in Texas, Oklahoma, and South Carolina (after, by the way, shaking down Kansas for over a billion dollars, not counting the Feds building their main plant and an Air Force Base next door).
Dean Baker has a different approach to the same problem: The Simple Way to Crack Down on Apple's Tax Games.
David E Sanger/William J Broad: Obama Unlikely to Vow No First Use of Nuclear Weapons: US foreign policy is wrapped in a cloak of tone-deafness and hypocrisy as transparent yet as desperately clung to as the proverbial emperor's new clothes. By not disavowing first use of nuclear weapons, Obama is practicing exactly the same nuclear blackmail that American fears used as excuses for invading Iraq and sanctioning Iran and North Korea. America's foreign policy mandarins are incapable of seeing themselves as others see us.
The United States dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan at the end of World War II in 1945 -- the only example in history of a first use, or any use, of nuclear weapons in warfare. Almost every president since Harry S. Truman has made it clear that nuclear weapons would be used only as a last resort, so the pledge would have largely ratified unwritten policy.
Administration officials confirmed that the question of changing the policy on first use had come up repeatedly this summer as a way for Mr. Obama to show that his commitment to reducing the role of nuclear weapons in American strategy -- and thus the risk of nuclear exchanges -- was more than rhetorical.
But the arguments in front of the president himself were relatively brief, officials said, apparently because so many senior aides objected. Mr. [Ashton] Carter argued that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, could interpret a promise of no first use as a sign of American weakness, even though that was not the intent.
Of course, Putin and Kim could just as well view "no first use" as a sign of sanity, one that encourages the notion that they might resolve their differences with the US through rational dialogue instead of macho posturing. But the "madman theory" has been a cornerstone of American foreign policy since Nixon, and no subsequent American emperor wants to be viewed as less crazed. It is, after all, a theory of self defense that has been proved to work against subway muggers. What further proof of its efficacy do you need?
By the way, Obama is missing a nice political play here. If he made "no first use" official policy -- he should also end the current "launch under attack" policy and adopt some sort of checklist where key subordinates can veto a presidential decision to use nuclear arms -- Trump would throw a fit and vow to reverse Obama's policies, revealing himself as a dangerous maniac. Sounds like win-win to me.
Matt Taibbi: How Donald Trump Lost His Mojo: It's that teleprompter:
The primary-season Donald Trump would never have been able to remember five things. Even more revealing is his rhetorical dismount: "But these examples," he shouts, "are only the tip of the Clinton-corruption iceberg!"
The real Donald Trump does not speak in metaphors, let alone un-mixed ones. The man who once famously pronounced "I know words, I have the best words" scorched through the primaries using the vocabulary of a signing gorilla ("China - money - bad!").
The funny thing is despite "losing his mojo" Trump's poll numbers have actually inched up. This is mostly because the "Clinton = corrupt" meme isn't something most people can dismiss out of hand -- unlike, say, his "what do you have to lose?" pitch to African-Americans, a people who through supporting politicians unlike Trump have escaped from slavery, Jim Crow laws, and ad hoc lynching. But it also helps that Trump set the bar so low all he has to do to "look presidential" is read from a teleprompter -- indeed, he's becoming almost Reaganesque.
Miscellaneous election links:
Katherine Krueger: NYT Scrambles to Rewrite Botched Story on Trump's Immigration Speech: Evidently the New York Times decided to get a jump on Trump's Phoenix "immigration speech" and report what they expected (or wanted) to hear: they "hailed Trump's address as 'an audacious attempt' to transform his image and reported that he shelved his proposal for a massive effort to deport immigrants who are in the country illegally." Of course, the actual speech baldly reiterated Trump's previous hard-line stands, suggesting that the rumors of a "softening" were nothing more than hype for the speech.
Annie Rees: In NYT's Hillary Clinton Coverage, An Obsession With 'Clouds' and 'Shadows': Not sure whether this is just blatant anti-Clinton prejudice or just really hackneyed writing -- Adam Nagourney, who made it to the round-of-four in Matt Taibbi's 2004 Wimblehack, was one of the writers called out here, as was Maureen Dowd. But casting every rumor as a "shadow" suggests an explanation as to why Clinton is continually dogged by "scandals" that never seem to afflict other politicians.
Paul Krugman: Hillary Clinton Gets Gored: Given a choice between reporting on a Trump scandal or a Clinton scandal, much of the press jumps at the latter, even though time and again there's been virtually nothing to it. Same for "lies." And as for innuendo, why tar Hillary as a self-seeking, egomaniacal greedhead when she's running against Donald Trump? Krugman's seen this kind of media bias before, in 2000:
You see, one candidate, George W. Bush, was dishonest in a way that was unprecedented in U.S. politics. Most notably, he proposed big tax cuts for the rich while insisting, in raw denial of arithmetic, that they were targeted for the middle class. These campaign lies presaged what would happen during his administration -- an administration that, let us not forget, took America to war on false pretenses.
Yet throughout the campaign most media coverage gave the impression that Mr. Bush was a bluff, straightforward guy, while portraying Al Gore -- whose policy proposals added up, and whose critiques of the Bush plan were completely accurate -- as slippery and dishonest.
Of course, there are big differences between Bush and Trump, just not important ones. Bush at least worked hard to conceal his agenda, describing his conservatism as "compassionate" and disavowing any efforts at "nation building." Indeed, many of the programs he got passed were clever cons, like "no child left behind." On the other hand, Trump makes so little effort to gloss over the sheer meanness of his policy bullet points that many people can't imagine how awful life under him would be. He's like the Douglas Adams concept of the SEP ("someone else's problem," a thing so hideous the only way you can cope is to pretend it doesn't exist). Or the mantra of a guy I used to work with: "if you can't dazzle them with logic, baffle them with bullshit."
Paul Krugman cited this piece, adding:
Matt Lauer may have done us all a favor with his catastrophically bad
performance. By devoting so much time to emails and rushing through
Clinton on ISIS, on one side, while letting Trump's Iraq lie slide by
unchallenged, on the other, Lauer offered a demonstration of the
prevailing double standard so graphic that it was hard to ignore. But
it wasn't just Lauer: I think the accumulation of really bad examples,
of failing to cover the Bondi bribe, of making an unsuccessful request
for passports -- to rescue imprisoned journalists! -- a supposed scandal,
even some of the botched initial reaction to the Lauer debacle, may have
finally reached a critical mass.
Maybe I'm just cynical, but I doubt that collective embarrassment
has had any effect on how the media covers Trump and Clinton. More
likely is that when Clinton surged so far ahead, they feared they
might lose their horse race coverage so tried to even things up. Now
that the race is more even they be having second thoughts. I mean,
they can't be so stupid they want Trump to win?
Paul Waldman: Trump's history of corruption is mind-boggling. So why is Clinton supposedly the corrupt one? Without reading the article, I'm tempted to say it's the same reason prostitutes are more likely to be busted than Johns. Or that we expect our politicians to be selfless public servants, while we expect our businessmen to be voracious wolves, whose greed is part of their charm. Still, markets for influence, like sex, only exist because there are both buyers and sellers. The article includes the usual list of Trump's scandalous behavior. It's hard to tell whether he's exceptionally vile or just par for the course, because we don't usually look that closely at how the rich got on top. Otherwise we might have second thoughts about what kind of people they are.
Michelle Goldberg: Why Isn't It a Bigger Deal That Trump Is Being Advised by Sadistic Pervert Roger Ailes? Well, there are so many "big deals" about Trump that they all sort of diminish proportionately, if not in some objective measure of import at least in our ability to get worked up about them. "Perhaps the involvement of a disgraced sexual sadist is low on the list of things that are wrong with the Trump campaign. That's not a reason to ignore it."
Jamelle Bouie: What Trump's Black Church Appearance Is Really About: "A leaked script reveals his intended audience: white Republicans."
Peter Beinart: Fear of a Female President: This makes me wonder how a more overtly racist Republican would have fared against Obama -- at least with Trump we can't say that prejudice isn't getting its chance:
Why is this relevant to Hillary Clinton? It's relevant because the Americans who dislike her most are those who most fear emasculation. According to the Public Religion Research Institute, Americans who "completely agree" that society is becoming "too soft and feminine" were more than four times as likely to have a "very unfavorable" view of Clinton as those who "completely disagree." And the presidential-primary candidate whose supporters were most likely to believe that America is becoming feminized -- more likely by double digits than supporters of Ted Cruz -- was Donald Trump.
The gender backlash against Clinton's candidacy may not defeat her. But neither is it likely to subside if she wins.
Indeed, one might argue that America has become more overtly racist after two terms of a black president, and that a female president is likely to produce a similar backlash. I doubt that will be true in the long run. Right now it seems to mostly be the result of the right-wing media, which deliberately or not has encouraged blind partisan hatred among small numbers already so inclined. On the other hand, maybe having a candidate as repugnant as Trump will discredit such backlash.
Adam Davidson: Trump and the Truth: The Unemployment-Rate Hoax: "A few of Donald Trump's claims about the labor force might generously be considered gross exaggerations, but the unemployment numbers he cites appear to be wholesale inventions." The latest in a series that include Eyal Press: Immigration and Crime, and David Remnick's Introducing a New Series: Trump and the Truth.
Steve Chapman: The worst case for Republicans: Donald Trump wins: Well, sure. For example, when Barry Goldwater lost in 1964, Republicans could forget about him practically forever instead of having to live with his legacy, as the Democrats did with Lyndon Johnson's stupid war. But the people who nominated him didn't disappear: they kept coming back in other guises, supporting Reagan, Bush, some even Trump (e.g., Phyllis Schlafly, who died last week at 92). Orthodox conservatives, through their donor network, think tanks, and media outlets, thought they had the Republican Party in their pocket before Trump roused their sheepish followers to revolt. If Trump loses they figure they'll resume control, their own dysfunctional ideology still untested so not yet discredited. On the other hand, if Trump wins, he'll turn their dream agenda into a flaming disaster, either by rejecting it or by implementing it (hard to know which would be worse for them). On the other hand, one could write pretty much the same piece about the Democrats. If Clinton loses (to Trump no less!) the dynasty is finished, the enemy becomes crystal clear, and the Democrats sweep Congress in 2018, which frankly I find a lot more exciting than slogging through eight years of an ineffective, powerless Hillary Clinton as president saddled with Republicans in control of Congress, holding the whole country hostage.
Zaid Jilani/Alex Emmons/Naomi LaChance: Hillary Clinton's National Security Advisers Are a "Who's Who" of the Warfare State: Despite which, they are on average markedly saner than Trump adviser Gen. Michael Flynn.
Andrew Kaczynski/Christopher Massie: Trump Claims He Didn't Support Libya Intervention -- But He Did, on Video: Makes me wonder if there has ever been an instance when the hawks tried to lure the US into a foreign war that Trump didn't buy into? What makes Trump so representative of today's Republican Party is how readily he falls for any crazy scam the party's propagandists put out. He isn't any sort of leader because that would require independent, critical thought. He's a follower, and you never know who's yanking his chain, or where they're dragging him.
Also, a few links for further study (briefly noted:
Patrick Cockburn: Turkey May Be Overplaying Its Hand with Syria Ground Offensive: One side-effect of the failed coup in Turkey is that it's allowed Erdogan to purge the army not only of plotters but of officers who might resist his designs on Syria. Hence, Turkey has escalated its interference with Syria, like the United States choosing to fight both Assad and Assad's enemies, although not necessarily the same anti-Assad forces the US is schizophrenically warring. As usual, Turkey's primary consideration is their own domestic Kurdish problem, which their warmaking is only likely to exacerbate. And as usual, the US is too caught up in weighing pluses and minuses to confront a nominal ally on the principle of the thing, or what blowback it's likely to cause.
Tom Engelhardt: A 9/11 Retrospective: Washington's 15-Year Air War: "Perhaps this September 11th, it's finally time for Americans to begin to focus on our endless air war in the Greater Middle East, our very own disastrous Fifteen Years' War. Otherwise, the first explosions from the Thirty Years' version of the same will be on the horizon before we know it in a world possibly more destabilized and terrorizing than we can at present imagine."
Robert Fares: The Price of Solar Is Declining to Unprecedented Lows: "Despite already low costs, the installed price of solar bell by 5 to 12 percent in 2015." Indeed, it's been doing that pretty regularly, as is clear from the chart (2010-15). Furthermore, there is no reason to think this trend won't continue for decades. The result will be that solar will take an ever larger chunk of the energy market, diminishing the demand for fossil fuels. Another consequence is that oil and coal companies will become even more desperate to exercise political power to hang on to their declining market shares and stock prices -- indeed, Trump's emphatic support for coal companies seems to be their final great white hope. Political influence may nudge the trend a bit up or down, but it won't change it. The article sees a "tipping point where [solar] becomes more economical than conventional forms of electricity generation."
Rebecca Gordon: Making Sense of Trump and His National Security State Critics: Background on many of those 50 prominent Republicans who signed a letter declaring Trump unfit to be president, by a writer who's been studying them and their friends for years, researching her book American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes.
Corey Robin: Phyllis Schlafly, 1924-2016: I suppose if I wanted to read anything on the late, "longtime conservative anti-feminist," I'd start with the author of The Reactionary Mind. Just not ready to yet.
Ron Unz: Did the US Plan a Nuclear First Strike Against Russia in the Early 1960s? Uh, yes, specifically in July 1961. James Galbraith, who has written about this before, adds a comment here that President Kennedy "would have never considered accepting the nuclear strike plan presented to him" and that Lyndon Johnson later held as "a first consideration . . . to prevent any situation from arising -- in Vietnam especially -- that might force the use of nuclear weapons." Of course, neither nor any subsequent US president has publicly disavowed first use of nuclear weapons -- evidently preferring to keep possible enemies wondering whether or not we're really insane.