#^d 2019-01-12 #^h Weekend Roundup
As actual voting is just around the corner, I've started to stray from my no-campaign pledge. Part of this is that my wife has gotten much more involved, and is regularly reporting social media posts that rile her up. She's strong for Bernie, and I've yet to find any reason to argue with her. Several pieces below argue that only X can beat Trump. For the record, I don't believe that is true. I think any of the "big four" can win -- not that there won't be momentary scares along the way. Trump has some obvious assets that he didn't have in 2016: complete support of the Republican political machine, which has been remarkably effective at getting slim majorities to vote against their interests and sanity; so much money he'll be tempted to steal most of it; and even more intense love from his base. On the other hand, he has a track record this time, and he's never registered an instant where his approval rating has topped 44%. Plus I have this suspicion that one strong force that drives elections is fear of embarrassment. Thanks to the Hillary Clinton's unique path to the nomination, that worked for Trump in 2016, but no one on the Democratic side of the aisle is remotely as embarrassing as Trump -- well, Michael Bloomberg, maybe. He's the only "major" candidate I can see Trump beating. Indeed, if he somehow manages to buy the Democratic nomination, I could see myself voting for a third party candidate. I'm not saying he would be worse than Trump, but a Democratic Party under him would never be able to right the wrongs of the last 40+ years.
One indication of the current political atmosphere is that Trump's "wag the dog" attack on Iran didn't budge public opinion in the least (except, perhaps, in favor of Bernie among the Democrats). Trump walked back his war-with-Iran threat, no doubt realizing that the US military had no desire to invade and occupy Iran, and possibly seeing that the random slaughter of scattered air attacks would merely expose him further as a careless monster. Still, he did nothing to resolve the conflict, and won't as long as his Saudi and Israeli foreign policy directors insist on hostile relations. He sorely needs a consigliere, like James Baker was to Bush Sr., someone who could follow up on his tantrums and turn them into deals (that could have been made well before). All he really needs to do to open up Iran and North Korea is to let the sanctions go first, to establish some good will, and let those countries be sucked into normalcy with mutually beneficial trade. Most other foreign policy conflicts could be solved without much more effort. And he has one advantage that no Democrat will: he won't have a psycho like Donald Trump constantly attacking him from the right, arguing that every concession he makes is a sign of weakness. The only deal he's delivered so far (USMCA) is a fair test case. It sailed through without serious objection because the only person deranged enough to derail it kept his mouth shut.
More links on Iran, war, and foreign policy:
Zack Beauchamp: Trump's "Mission Accomplished" moment?
Frank Bruni: Tucker Carlson is not your new best friend: "The Fox News host's antiwar stance doesn't erase all that other ugliness."
James Carden: Will this billionaire-funded think tank get its war with Iran? "The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies' militaristic influence on US policy toward Iran is working. Suleiman's assassination is evidence of that."
Jane Coaston: The Iraq War hawks are back: "Some of the biggest backers of the Iraq War sure have a lot of opinions on Iran."
Patrick Cockburn: The West is still buying into nonsense about Iran's regional influence.
Sean Collins/Jen Kirby: A Ukrainian plane crashed in Iran: What we know: "Iran has admitted to accidentally shooting down the plane."
Ryan Cooper:
Sarah Ferris: 'History has proven her right': Barbara Lee's anti-war push succeeds on Iran.
Karen J Greenberg: Killing Qassim Suleimani was illegal. And predictable. As this piece notes, America's history of assassinating foreign leaders goes back at least to 1960, with Patrice Lumumba ("success") and Fidel Castro ("failed"), but had been prohibited in 1976, and only returned to favor with GW Bush's Global War on Terror. I'd add that what really turned it into fashion was envy of Israel's "targeted killings," which really picked up in the 1980s.
Shane Harris/Josh Dawsey/Dan Lamothe/Missy Ryan: 'Launch, launch, launch': Inside the Trump administration as the Iranian missiles began to fall. Key point here is that Iran tipped off Iraq well before the missile strike, and Iraq passed the information on to the US, so as to minimize casualties. Zero casualties made it easier for Trump to stand down after the strike, which was evidently just for show. As I recall, Trump did the same thing, tipping Russia on a big US strike against a Syrian air base: another big show that did little effective damage.
John Hudson/Missy Ryan/Josh Dawsey: On the day US forces killed Soleimani, they targeted a senior Iranian official in Yemen. They missed, but they did hit someone. For more, see: Alex Emmons: US strike on Iranian commander in Yemen the night of Suleimani's assassination killed the wrong man.
Sean Illing: The case against killing Qassem Soleimani: Interview with Dina Esfandiary. Vox paired this with The case for killing Qassem Soleimani, where Alex Ward interviewed Bilal Saab. Both are so-called experts (Saab a former Trump flunky), sharing a lot of DC groupthink about Iran (and the US -- the "against" case regards Iran as every bit as evil and duplicitous as "for" does). No one dares venture that a reason to argue against the killing is that it's bad (both practically and, dare we say?, morally) for any country to go around killing people in other countries.
Fred Kaplan:
Samya Kullab/Qassam Abdul-Zahra: US dismisses Iraq request to work on a troop withdrawal plan.
Eric Levitz:
Michael McFaul/Abbas Milani: The minimal value of Trump's 'maximum pressure' on Iran. I wrote some about sanctions under Nichols below, but left out one point: even when sanctions have devastating impact on the target nation's people, they are rarely effective at deposing political leaders or toppling their governments. The obvious example is that the only communist countries to hold fast after 1989-92 were the ones the US subjected to the most vindictive pressure: North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, and China.
Meridith McGraw: Bush's Iraq hawks had Trump's back this week.
Melody Moezzi: Trump's Twitter threats against Iran cultural sites borrow from the ISIS playbook: Could also have mentioned the Taliban's destruction of ancient Buddhist monuments in Afghanistan.
John Nichols: Sanctions are economic warfare. There's an unnecessary word in that title: Sanctions are warfare, meant to impoverish an "enemy," to cripple their economy, ultimately to impose widespread suffering on all of the people in the target country. The most extreme sanctions are literally designed to starve the "enemy" into submission. Americans (like Trump) like them, not just because they are effective in imposing pain, but because they are asymmetrical. The economies of the US and its "allies" (some should be called "co-conspirators"; others are more like hostages) are so large that they can easily absorb the pain of not dealing with the target country, while the target is prevented from engaging in normal trade with much or most of the world. This size difference means that no proportionate response in kind is possible. That's why long-term victims of US sanctions like North Korea and Iran wind up seeking other countermeasures, such as developing nuclear weapons -- as we've seen, the only measure that seems to get American attention. Trump didn't back down from starting a war with Iran last week. He actually escalated on ongoing war -- one that won't end until the US suspends its sanctions against Iran, and permits Iran to normalize its relations with the rest of the world.
Ella Nilsen: Trump's conflict with Iran exposed the real difference between Biden and Sanders. Good chance this has something to do with Sanders' recent poll advances. First thing Laura told me after the Soleimani assassination was "Trump just elected Bernie president."
Nathan J Robinson: How to avoid swallowing war propaganda. Robinson also has a recent book out, Why You Should Be a Socialist, as well as an earlier one, Trump: Anatomy of a Monster (2017). Here's an interview by Teddy Ostrow. The interview piece offers links to highly critical pieces he wrote about Pete Buttigieg (All About Pete) and Joe Biden (Everybody's Chum). He turned me off a while back with a piece I don't recall well enough to look up now -- possibly something snippy about Bernie Sanders, but his latest thoughts on the campaign are worth reading: Everyone is getting on the Bernie train. For example:
We need a candidate who fully understands the stakes. They need to know the source of what has gone wrong and have a radical alternative. . . . They can't capitulate before the fight starts. They need to have a moral seriousness that shows they take the pain of others seriously. They need to fill people's souls, to assuage their fears, to challenge them to be their best selves, and to present a vision of the beautiful world that could be if humanity got its act together, versus the horrendous world that will be if we allow the deadly logic of nuclear weapons and climate change to continue unfolding. This moment demands something, a kind of power, we have never before mustered, a resolve we have never before felt, a breadth and depth of vision we have never before dared to pursue.
I cut a line from that paragraph: the one that starts "they can't be some tepid compromiser." He's talking about Elizabeth Warren, and I've been deluged today from her supporters taking umbrage that one of Sanders' staffers suggested that she is the "second best" candidate, so I figured we could do without the side-swipe. But I will note that Robinson has a long paragraph on Warren that is pretty devastating: look for the one that starts, "Personally I have long believed that Elizabeth Warren would be a disaster against Donald Trump." Some of his points don't bother me much, but "She is evasive where Bernie is frank" does cut to the quick.
Gabor Rona: Iran plane crash likely caused by violations of international law -- by both Tehran and Trump.
Aaron Rupar:
Andrew Sullivan: Donald Trump is the war crimes president. In his dreams, maybe. He certainly lacks the elementary sense of right and wrong to steer clear of war crimes, but neither does he have the track record of GW Bush, let alone a Richard Nixon, and he still ranks well behind others, notably Harry Truman (still the only person in history to order the use of nuclear weapons on cities). On the other hand, those presidents used larger wars to camouflage their crimes, and probably didn't feel much kinship with the soldiers who carried their directives out, let alone those who exceeded their orders. Trump, on the other hand, has probably caught up with his reviled predecessor Obama, who himself set records for "targeted killings." Moreover, Trump's pardon of "Navy SEAL Commander Eddie Gallagher, a rogue soldier who routinely shot civilians in Iraq for the hell of it, and finally stabbed to death a barely conscious captive young ISIS fighter who was the lone survivor of a missile hit on an enemy house," shows a personal bloodlust beyond any president I can recall.
Alex Ward:
The US killed Soleimani. What will Iran do next? Pure speculation, which usually tells you more about the speculator than the unknowable subject. However, for Iran the core problem remains: US-imposed sanctions that have been fairly successful at hamstringing the Iranian economy, perhaps even to the point of undermining the popularity of the ruling government. This is a huge problem for Iran, one to which Americans are largely indifferent. Iran has tried a variety of "carrot" and "stick" approaches, and will no doubt continue to do so. Probably more sticks than carrots for the near term, at least as long as Trump is president and continues to sublet control of US policy toward Iran to Israel and Saudi Arabia.
"Probably the worst briefing I've seen": Inside the disastrous congressional Iran meeting.
Matthew Yglesias: The administration's deceptions about the Soleimani strike are a big deal.
Li Zhou: The House sent a major message about checking the president's war powers on Iran. Now why don't they follow it up with another impeachment article? By the way, this time it appears that Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo are also equally culpable, so why not name them too?
Some scattered links this week:
Katelyn Burns:
The Trump administration is still struggling to get its story straight on why it killed Soleimani. Some curious phrasing, from Defense Secretary Mark Esper: "What the President said with regard to the four embassies is what I believe as well."
Nancy Pelosi explains what Democrats gaind by holding onto the articles of impeachment.
Another earthquake hits Puerto Rico, with aftershocks expected: A 6.4 on Tuesday, then a 5.9 on Saturday, with many aftershocks (45 and counting of at least 3.0).
Trump has created a loophole to allow pipelines to avoid environmental review. Refers to the Lisa Friedman article, below. When I first read reports about this rule change, it was phrased vaguely in terms of generic infrastructure projects, like bridges and roads, and meant to cut through costly bureaucracy on projects where the environmental impact was obviously limited. Pipelines are another story. They leak, and the environmental impact of leaks is enormous. And at this point, it's probably impossible to argue that a new pipeline won't increase global warming, so eliminating that consideration is a life-and-death matter to pipeline developers.
Edward Cavanough: As Australia fires kill animals and destroy property, costs of climate change become clear: "For those spuriously claiming climate ambition comes at a cost, let Australia's black summer serve as a potent reminder that inaction does, too."
Jonathan Chait:
Trump cited GOP Senate impeachment pressure as reason to kill Soleimani: "You're not supposed to use foreign policy that way." Not that such scruples stopped Bill Clinton when he was impeached.
Maybe nominating Michael Bloomberg for president isn't a crazy idea: Chait's reasoning is that "only [Bloomberg] can outspend Trump five to one." That's putting a lot of faith in the power of money to buy elections, especially through lavish spending on TV. How's that working out? See: Bloomberg and Steyer $200m spend on TV ads: "Steyer's spending in South Carolina is beginning to slowly move the polls: he is now placed fifth with 5% of projected Democratic voters." However, he's stuck at 1.5% nationally. Bloomberg is supposedly doing better nationwide -- I've seen polls as high as 7% -- but he's not even in the race for Iowa or New Hampshire, nor has he qualified for a single debate, so all he has going is his TV ad buy, and even there his selling point is "Trump = bad," not Bloomberg offers unique hope for the real problems the country faces. (Also see: Michael Bloomberg outspent the entire Democratic field in TV ads last week.) Sure, it might be nice if the Democrats could draw on Bloomberg's deep pockets, but Bloomberg himself is by far the most reactionary, elitist, offensive candidate in the running (a list which, by the way, still includes John Delaney). [PS: Also see: Michael Bloomberg is open to spending $1 billion to defeat Trump, "even if the nominee was someone he had sharp differences with, like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren."]
Jonathan Cohn: Iraq War at 154: Who voted for it, who didn't, and where are they now?
Adam Davidson: Donald Trump's worst deal: The shady story of Trump Tower Baku.
Miriam Elder/Ruby Cramer: Donald Trump is starting to fixate on Bernie Sanders.
Tom Engelhardt: The global war on error: "No, that's not a typo." And yes, error is winning, handily.
Lisa Friedman:
Kathleen Geier: What an Elizabeth Warren presidency would look like. This is paired with Daniel Denvir: What a Bernie Sanders presidency would look like. Both are pretty good, although I'd give Sanders the edge for a foreign policy which is based on principles of justice for all, and a political strategy which promises to venture out to states beyond the "blue wall." I don't think Warren is opposed to either point, but her instincts for landing on the right side are less sure. The other thing about Warren is that her appeal hasn't spread beyond college-educated professionals. That should change if she's nominated, much like Buttigieg will wind up with strong support from blacks if he makes it to November, but Bernie has so far done a better job of broadening his base. In These Times and didn't bother attempting to assay other Democratic Party candidates. I doubt anyone really has a clue what a Buttigieg presidency might look like. On the other hand, we can picture a Biden one all too well.
John F Harris: 'He is our OJ': "Readers explain why they're standing with Trump during impeachment." Author also wrote: Impeachment and the crack up of the conservative mind.
Umair Irfan: As Australia burns, its leaders are clinging to coal.
Sarah Jones:
Natalie Kitroeff: Boeing employees mocked FAA and 'clowns' who designed 737 Max. As one internal email put it, "this airplane is designed by clowns, who are in turn supervised by monkeys." Reminds me of a friend who worked for Boeing, telling me of a company meeting where a manager bragged, "this isn't your father's Boeing any more." For the record, my father retired from Boeing as soon as he could draw his pension, and refused to ever fly in a Boeing airplane.
Elizabeth Kolbert: What will another decade of climate crisis bring?
Michael Kruse: Trump's art of the steal: "How Donald Trump rode to power by parroting other people's fringe ideas, got himself impeached for it -- and might prevail anyway."
German Lopez: Study links Medicaid expansion to 6 percent reduction in opioid overdose deaths.
Dylan Matthews: A new study finds increasing the minimum wage reduces suicides.
Mark Mazzetti/Ronen Bergman/David D Kirkpatrick: Saudis close to Crown Prince discussed killing other enemies a year before Khashoggi's death.
John McPhee: Tabula rasa: Volume one. Part of his "old-person project" -- writing about what he never got around to writing about. I'm a big McPhee fan, but this isn't especially promising.
Ian Millhiser: The Trump administration's subtle, devious plan to dismantle abortion rights: "The Supreme Court could quash the right to an abortion entirely through procedural shenanigans."
Nicole Narea: The Trump administration has finalized an agreement to deport asylum seekers back to Honduras.
Anna North: Trump tried to get E Jean Carroll's lawsuit dismissed. It didn't work.
Evan Osnos: The future of America's context with China: "Washington is in an intensifying standoff with Beijing. Which one will fundamentally shape the twenty-first century?" Reminiscent of the 19th Century's "Great Game" between Britain and Russia -- a contest which said much about the self-absorption of so-called great powers, not least their inability to consider that the rest of the world might have other plans.
Alex Pareene:
The most popular crook in America: Larry Hogan, the "very popular" Republican governor of Maryland. For more, see Eric Cortellessa: Who does Maryland's governor really work for? Pareene writes:
I've argued that, in many respects, the presidency of Donald Trump is more "normal" than some people would like to admit. That is, it's a logical end point of where conservatism has been moving, rather than an inexplicable break from a system that was working as intended. But even so, in his personal behavior and incendiary rhetoric, Trump is aberrant -- and, it should always be noted, he is deeply unpopular. The country, by and large, doesn't want what Trump has wrought. His election was both overdetermined and something of a bizarre fluke, which would, arguably, not have happened had it not been for geography and our illogical modern interpretation of archaic founding documents.
Hogan, on the other hand, is exactly the "normal" to which politicians like Joe Biden promise to return us when they try to speak into existence a Republican Party that they can "work with."
How political fact-checkers distort the truth: "Glenn Kessler and his ilk aren't sticking to the facts. They are promoting a moderate dogma."
Martin Pengelly: How to dump Trump: Rick Wilson on Running Against the Devil. Wilson is "a top Republican strategist with 30 years' experience," and that's the title of his new book, a sequel to his 2018 book Everything Trump Touches Dies.
Charles P Pierce: He writes more than a dozen short posts a week, many interesting, although for me it gets tiresome to delve through all of them when I usually have some other source for the same story (usually covered in more depth). Still, some titles that caught my eye this week:
Andrew Prokop: Pelosi: House will send impeachment articles to the Senate next week.
Frank Rich: What will happen to the Trump toadies? "Look to Nixon's defenders, and the Vichy collaborators, for clues." Steve M. has his doubts: Frank Rich's delusions of cosmic justice.
Joshua Rothman: The equality conundrum. Much nitpicking, not sure he comes up with anything useful.
Aaron Rupar:
Trump's climate change reading material is beyond parody. He claims he plans on reading a book on the subject. The book? It's by Ed Russo, with a title calculated to appeal to an audience of one: Donald J Trump: An Environmental Hero. Steve M. has more here: Our green president.
Dylan Scott: Kansas has reached a deal to expand Medicaid, covering 150,000 people. Not a "done deal," as there are still Republicans who will fight it.
Amy Davidson Sorkin: In Ohio, Trump lists the sacrifices he makes for the nation.
Matt Stieb:
Matt Taibbi:
Matthew Yglesias:
Installing air filters in classrooms has surprisingly large educational benefits.
Elizabeth Warren's new plan to reform bankruptcy law, explained
Bernie Sanders can unify Democrats and beat Trump in 2020. Surprised to see this, given that Yglesias last tried his "electability" argument to push Amy Klobuchar, and more generally given his designation as the 2019 "neoliberal shill of the year." This is supposed to be the "first in a Vox series making the best case for each of the top Democratic contenders," but I haven't noticed any of the others yet. Meanwhile, there's Katelyn Burns: Sanders tops latest Iowa poll, but the 2020 Democratic primary is still a four way race.
The US-Saudi alliance is deeply unpopular with the American people.
The strong economy is an opportunity for progressives. Claims that "voters are happy with the economy," citing a CNN poll where 76 percent of voters rate economic conditions as either "very good" or "somewhat good." Includes a chart that shows that "pick-up in wage growth has come from low-wage industries" -- something I've seen others cite, but what I haven't seen is a chart that distinguishes between low-wage workers who got raises due to minimum wage increases compared with purely economic effects on the labor market. There's no reason to attribute the former to Trump or the Republicans -- just the opposite. And while raises for low wage workers help, the poor are still poor, and prices -- Yglesias cites child care as a major concern -- eat up a good chunk of income. But even if Yglesias is right that most people are no longer worried about the economy, he's also right that Democrats have other issues to run on:
But one nice thing about a strong labor market is that it creates political space to finally pay attention to the myriad social problems that can't be solved by a "good economy" alone -- things like child care, health care, college costs, and environmental protection -- that during, the Obama years, tended to be crowded out by a jobs-first mentality.
Good times, in other words, could be the perfect opportunity to finally tackle the many long-lingering problems for which progressives actually have solutions and about which conservatives would rather not talk.