The Commentariat -- May 31, 2016

Afternoon Update

Nora Kelly, in the Atlantic, wonders where Donald Trump sent all the money, including his own, he claims to have raised for veterans, a couple of days after he hijacked an event for veterans for his own self-aggrandizement. Very strange..."Donald Trump has a problem following through. He advocated for banning Muslims from U.S. soil, before qualifying all his policy proposals as 'a suggestion.' He campaigned on the premise he would self-fund his race, before deciding to raise money after all. So when news reports suggested Trump hadn't donated all $6 million he said he raised for veterans' groups at an event this past winter, the revelation seemed to follow his pattern....Trump repeatedly blamed the 'dishonest' and 'unfair' political press on Tuesday for misconstruing the donation process."

...Akhilleus: Drumpf knows all about dishonesty and unfairness. They constitute the core of his being.

The Turtle is Right! Leah Barkoukis, at the Confederate toilet paper site, Town Hall: "Speaking with radio host Hugh Hewitt Tuesday morning, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell reassured listeners that Donald Trump will not change the nature of the Republican Party.... Trump is not going to change the institution. He's not going to change the basic philosophy of the party."

...Akhilleus: Quite right. Trump won't change the party. McConnell and the rest of the cynical, anti-American, anti-democratic calculators have already done that. Trump has merely watered the seeds they have sown. But it's a hoot to watch the Turtle Man pretend that he's still in charge. He's the Maginot Line of the Republican Party, and here come the Trump Panzers. Buh-bye, Mitchy.

*****

Julie Davis of the New York Times: President "Obama, who has made a point of speaking out against anti-immigrant sentiment..., has instructed his top advisers that they must not fall short of meeting his goal to admit 10,000 Syrian refugees to the United States by the fall. But an onerous and complex web of security checks and vetting procedures, shared among several government agencies, has made the target difficult to reach." -- CW

Adam Edelman of the New York Daily News: "Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder thinks fugitive leaker Edward Snowden actually performed a 'public service' when he passed on classified NSA secrets to journalists. 'We can certainly argue about the way in which Snowden did what he did, but I think that he actually performed a public service by raising the debate that we engaged in and by the changes that we made,' Holder told David Axelrod on his CNN-produced podcast 'The Axe Files.'" -- CW

Presidential Race

Ruby Cramer of BuzzFeed: "In a memo to top supporters, Hillary Clinton's top official sought to clarify the campaign's response to a new report from the State Department inspector general and move past a controversy that has dogged the candidate now for 15 months. The 600-word letter from John Podesta, Clinton's chairman and longtime adviser, addresses the IG report;s various findings, but comes back to a single point again and again: that Clinton knows the use of a personal email server was a 'mistake.'" -- CW

Paul Waldman: "For all her many skills, Hillary Clinton is just not that good at running for president. That doesn't mean she won't be good at being president, and it's a reminder that the two are not the same thing.... A different candidate would probably be farther ahead of Trump.... Clinton is also simply not very good at ... delivering speeches.... Clinton ha[s] yet to come up with a resonant theme for her campaign." -- CW ...

... Rebecca Traister of New York: On the campaign trail, "I watched [Hillary Clinton] do the work of retail politics -- the handshaking and small-talking and remembering of names and details of local sites and issues -- like an Olympic athlete. Far from seeing a remote or robotic figure, I observed a woman who had direct, thoughtful, often moving exchanges.... The dichotomy between her public and private presentation has a lot to do with the fact that she has built such a wall between the two. Her pathological desire for privacy is at the root of the never-ending email saga, to name just one example.... [Clinton's] pervasive defensiveness ... gets in the way of her projecting authenticity, an intense desire for privacy that keeps voters from feeling as if they know her -- especially problematic in an era in which social media makes personal connection with voters more important than ever." CW: This is a fullblown profile of Hillary, & it's a pretty good read.

Maryalice Parks of ABC News: "Five animal rights protesters jumped over barricades and rushed the podium at a Bernie Sanders rally in East Oakland, California, on Monday night, prompting the Vermont senator's Secret Service detail to intervene. One of the protesters appeared to be hit by one of the security member's baton, while another was carried out of the venue by his arms and legs. For his part, Sanders did not seem rattled." -- CW

International Man of Misery. Farah Stockman & Keith Bradsher of the New York Times: "Donald J. Trump ... often portrays himself as uniquely capable of wringing concessions out of China through hard-nosed business tactics he has honed over the years. 'I beat China all the time,' Mr. Trump declared in a speech the day he announced his candidacy. 'I own a big chunk of the Bank of America building at 1290 Avenue of the Americas that I got from China in a war. Very valuable.'... Court documents and interviews with people involved in the deal tell a very different story of how he ended up with it." CW: Naturally. It reads as if some Hong Kong billionaires made a chump of Trump. That dinner with the fish heads? Definitely designed to discomfit the Ignorant Abroad. -- CW ...

... Kevin Sullivan of the Washington Post: "If elected, Trump would be the first U.S. president to preside over a global business empire, one that includes seven resorts, hotels and other projects in foreign countries, 11 more under construction and plans for many more. Among them are properties in nations where the United States has important economic and national security concerns -- such as Turkey, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates and Azerbaijan -- that could put Trump's personal business interests on a collision course with the duty of a president to act solely in the best interest of the United States." In Azerbaijan, his business partners are mafia-like despots. -- CW

Ed Kilgore: "Veteran journalist Ron Brownstein looked at the internals of some recent general election polls and found that adding gender to education levels among white voters produced a shocking gap between the two candidates.... Brownstein argues that each candidate is reaching or in some cases exceeding the all-time records for their party in these demographics -- which means the gap could be larger than ever, too.... If the election does come down to a contest between women and men of any race or level of educational achievement, a Clinton victory would be not only historic, but a demonstration of the power of sisterhood against an opponent who's a cartoon-character representation of The Man." --safari

Emma Green of the Atlantic: "Predictions are dangerous business, especially in the hall of mirrors that American politics has become. Suffice it to say, no one called this U.S. presidential election cycle notTrump, not Sanders, not any of it. Except, perhaps, in a round-about way, a 1979 book about the presidential-primary system [by] James Ceaser, a University of Virginia professor. I spoke with Ceaser about Trump and the unintended effects of trying to make democracy more democratic." Includes interview. --safari (Thanks to PD Pepe for the link.)

Michael Gerson, the WashPo's mild-mannered conservo-columnist, is very, very upset with Little Marco & Paul the Weasel Ryan: "Some Republicans keep expecting Trump to finally remove the mask of misogyny, prejudice and cruelty and act in a more presidential manner. But it is not a mask. It is his true face. Good Republican leaders making the decision to support Trump will end up either humiliated by the association, or betrayed and attacked for criticizing the great leader. Trump leaves no other options." CW: It is good to see a Republican-in-Good-Standing willing to write, "The GOP has selected someone who is unfit to be president, lacking the temperament, stability, judgment and compassion to occupy the office."

Seung Min Kim of Politico: "Donald Trump and his incendiary immigration rhetoric was supposed to send Latino voters to the polls in droves for Democrats this fall. But the Obama administration's controversial immigration raids are threatening to weaken the Democrats' advantage." --safari

Daniel Politi of Slate: "Donald Trump did not wait to reply. Less than two hours after Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol sent out a tweet that said there would soon be news of an 'impressive'independent presidential candidate, the presumptive Republican nominee went on the attack. In a series of tweets, the real estate mogul called Kristol a 'dummy' and an 'embarrassed loser.' He then said Republicans can 'say good bye to the Supreme Court' if an independent contender does materialize." --safari

Beyond the Beltway

Prisons vs. Prisoners. Rachel Poser of the New Yorker: "The P.L.R.A., [a Clinton-era piece of criminal-justice legislation known as the Prison Litigation Reform Act (P.L.R.A.)] passed by Congress in 1996, was designed to reduce the number of lawsuits brought by inmates against prisons....Prisoners' advocates have argued for years that the P.L.R.A. makes it nearly impossible for inmates to get a fair hearing in court, and that it has crippled the federal judiciary's ability to act as a watchdog over prison conditions...the number of federal lawsuits by inmates against prisons has fallen by sixty per cent in the twenty years since the P.L.R.A.'s passage...[I]n practice, critics say, these systems create a tangle of administrative procedures that discourage or disqualify inmates from filing lawsuits." --safari

Alexia Fernández Campbell of The Atlantic: "Girl Scouts has been losing members for more than a decade as it struggles to reach the new American girl, who is more likely than ever to be an ethnic minority or come from poor, immigrant families. Even though the organization's researchers have highlighted the need to reflect the 'changing face of girls' in America, Girl Scouts are still mostly white. The percentage of Latina scouts (12 percent) and African American scouts (11 percent) has hardly budged in the past four years. Meanwhile, nearly half of girls aged 5 to 17 in the United States are now ethnic minorities, up from 38 percent in 2000...[W]hy this recruitment failure matters: Many of these girls, who already face so many obstacles, are missing out on a program that has given millions of others the confidence and some of tools they need to succeed." --safari

Way Beyond

Marina Koren of The Atlantic: "Hissène Habré, the former dictator of Chad, has been found guilty of crimes against humanity committed during his eight-year-rule and sentenced to life in prison. Habré was convicted Monday of crimes against humanity, war crimes, and rape, the BBC reported, nearly a year after his trial began...The trial was a landmark event in international criminal justice. In Africa, it marked the first time in which the courts of one country prosecuted the former ruler of another for alleged human-rights abuses." --safari

Tim Radford of the Guardian: "One in three children in Europe between the ages of six and nine are either overweight or obese, according to a report that also warns that by 2025 the number of under-fives worldwide who are overweight will have risen from an estimated 41 million now to 70 million.... The cost of treating disorders related to obesity now amounts to a tenth of total healthcare costs in Europe, and, according to the report, threatens the sustainability of public health services in all nations." --safari

Michael Klarein Salon from TomDispatch.com: "Pity the poor petro-states. Once so wealthy from oil sales that they could finance wars, mega-projects, and domestic social peace simultaneously, some of them are now beset by internal strife or are on the brink of collapse as oil prices remain at ruinously low levels. Unlike other countries, which largely finance their governments through taxation, petro-states rely on their oil and natural gas revenues.... Now, with oil below $50 and likely to persist at that level, they find themselves curbing public spending and fending off rising domestic discontent or even incipient revolt.... In 2016, one thing is finally clear, however: the business model for these corporatized states is busted." --safari

Comments

[Patrick]

Maybe Marie or someone else already flagged this Salon article from last week, if so my apologies. It wonders whether DJT may be suffering from some physical brain problem, like Alzheimer's onset. This supports Marie's contention that there is something physically wrong with the GOP candidate.

http://www.salon.com/2016/04/25/maybe_donald_trump_has_really_lost_his_mind_what_if_the_gop_frontrunner_isnt_crazy_but_simply_not_well/

Also, after reading of DJT's very out-of-tune address to the faithful at the Rolling Thunder venue on Sunday, it occurred to me that the "J" in DJT really stands for "Jody." You can Google that, but in brief "Jody" is the guy who steals your girl while you're in the military and unable to do anything about it, the subject of many fine marching cadences in basic training.

[Akhilleus]

Trump and the Ring of Gyges

Having need to dip into Plato's "Republic" this weekend, I was reminded of the challenge Glaucon sets for Socrates, pretty much right up front, which is to prove that being just is a better condition than that of being unjust. His underlying thesis is that justice and morality are rather flimsy abstractions created by society to keep people in line. As part of his argument, Glaucon tells the tale of the Ring of Gyges. In short, Gyges, a simple man, discovers a magic ring that will make him invisible. He is now able to indulge in all manner of injustice and excess in order to enrich himself and have a grand old time, all at the expense of others since he has enacted his perfidies under cover, so to speak, and cannot be held liable, ie, arrested, tried, and convicted, for anything. Kills the king, marries the queen and he's rich, fat, and happy. Glaucon posits that he could give this ring to any good individual and quicker than you can say "Art of the Deal", they'll be doing the Injustice Tarantella on your dome.

Socrates' rebuttal of Glaucon's conclusion takes quite some time, and it gets a bit complicated, but his bottom line is that justice is its own reward. Glaucon posits that the person (if such a one could be found) who remained untouched by the lure of the ring, that is, who could refuse the offer of supreme power, would be considered a fool by all, they feeling that it would be ridiculous not to make full use of such an advantage. Steal, lie, cheat, pile up the greenbacks, and never face or pay the consequences. Who could argue with that?

Then it hit me: This is Donald Trump. He's the guy Glaucon was talking about. But even worse. Glaucon's best test was to give the ring to an honest, decent man. Trump, if he ever was honest and decent, hasn't been since he was in short pants. He's possessed a less powerful model of Gyges' ring all his life. But now Republicans and his fascist supporters--even the ones who know first hand what a dangerous idiot he is--are lining up to hand him the real McCoy.

Which brings us to Plato's argument in favor of philosopher kings. Socrates informs us that, yes, Justice is its own reward. It is a straight shot to The Good (Plato's non pareil). But, he goes on to say, The Good is not always clearly evident. It would require a gifted philosopher to see through the fog of life's uncertainties to discern The Good and thus gain access to the ability to make decisions for the benefit of all irrespective of enriching oneself.

Sound like Trump?

It's not for nothing that only one person in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth, a simple, lowly Hobbit, was able to bear the Ring of Power without becoming instantly and fatally corrupted, although the ring nearly did him in at the end (as far as I've been able to ascertain, Tolkien has never referenced Glaucon's tale, which, of course, doesn't mean he wasn't aware of it, or similar stories. He was, after all, steeped in mythology). Trump's reaction to the Ring might be more like this.

In Glaucon's eyes, we only behave justly because bad things could happen if we don't. It's a little like Pascal's Wager. Pascal, considering whether it would be better to act decently than not, depending on whether or not eternal judgment awaited, decided in favor of being a good boy since, if he lived life as a raging asshole (Trump, eg), and there WAS an afterlife in which bad behavior might be rewarded with one's very own studio apartment three doors down from Lucifer, fire and brimstone included, it might be prudent to act decently. This, as an aside, seems to be the way many Christianists see life. Be good or God'll get you. Socrates sees it much differently. He sees a love of justice and a striving for the Good as the ultimate goal of life. But he (or Plato) acknowledges the difficulty of achieving such a state.

I have no doubt, at this point, that Socrates/Plato would point at Trump and say "See? That's what I'm talkin' 'bout." Trump is more like the Harry Lime character in "The Third Man", the one who suggests that democracy, peace, and brotherly love are for "losers" and have about as much value as a cuckoo clock (although it's highly doubtful that Trump gives a tinker's toss for Michelangelo, Da Vinci, or the Renaissance). And remember, as educated and debonair as Harry Lime seems (Orson Welles, perfectly cast), he makes his money by deforming and killing children with bathtub penicillin. Remember Matt Taibbi's quote about what Trump would do to a child in a lifeboat...

Hillary Clinton has had her own tussles with the Ring of Gyges, especially her fondness for invisibility (secrecy), but I do believe she has not been as thoroughly corrupted as Trump, who pretty much started out corrupt. If you're a fascist douchebag when you're 14, what the hell will you be when you're 64? For Trump, morality and justice don't even rise to the level of flimsy abstractions. They have no monetary or aggrandizing value. He could not care less, which makes him even worse than Glaucon's example of a good man breaking bad.

Trump, or characters like him, is the reason Plato got into philosophy in the first place. His advice? Avoid these fucking guys like the plague (I think that's an actual quote). Because once ultimate power (the Ring of Gyges) is handed over, it could be years before we get it back from them and we, not they, will pay the price for their depraved indifference to justice and the Good.

[Akhilleus]

I'm still hearing rumbles from the Never Trump Republicans and Bill (Always Wrong) Kristol, that the Anti-Trump candidate will be unveiled any day now. I've also been hearing the name of far rightwing religious loon Ben Sasse thrown around in conjunction with this hallucination. And while we're talking a little philosophy, I'd like to remind you of something we discussed a while back, a little philosophical exercise called the Trolley Problem. It appears that unity amongst the savages has not yet reached escape velocity, at least not for those in "leadership" positions, when considering the above mentioned loon, who has Sarah Palin and Lyin' Ted Cruz on his side:

"There’s an old thought experiment in ethics known as the 'Trolley Problem.' There’s an out-of-control trolley car speeding toward a collision in which dozens of people would die. There’s also a spur onto which the trolley could be diverted, but there’s a man standing on the tracks. You can either do nothing and let the collision happen or flip a switch and certainly kill the man on the spur. This is a problem that has given ethics students fits for years. If the man on the spur were Ben Sasse and the people in the trolley car were the Nebraska Republican leadership . . . well, it would seem like a lot less of a dilemma in that case."

There now. How's that for unity?

I used to complain (with a teensy bit of grudging admiration at times) that Republicans demanded, and received, instant obedience on the part of everyone up and down the chain, no breaks in the line, so to speak; unlike Democrats whose commitment to sticking together in order to win elections was reminiscent of Grand Central Station at rush hour. But Republicans' courting of loons like Sasse seems as if it has brought an end to top down marching orders animating battalions of wingers in one direction.

Lovely.

[Akhilleus]

The New York profile of Hillary Clinton (thanks, Marie!) actually makes me like her a lot more. It's a case study of how lazy reporting and copy-machine writing, recycling the same tropes and presenting old crap wrapped in new, but just as crappy paper, diminishes the polity by spitting out the same old memes every day for years. I like to think of myself as pretty well read and reasonably up to date on what's happenin', but articles like this point out the lacunae in my own lagging sensibility which makes me wonder how much worse it is for voters whose only knowledge of HRC comes from Fox or, for that matter, Jonathan Karl or David Brooks or Upchuck Todd.

I'm even guessing there's a lot more to Donald Trump. The problem is, the stuff I already know about that guy is so odious, so repellent, I would require a revelation on a par with an appearance of a burning bush and a big booming voice from the sky about how the Donald once personally rescued a boatload of orphans and is paying for their housing and education for the next 20 years to get me to seriously consider updating my knowledge base on this prick.

Nonetheless, I don't expect that the narratives of the two candidates (sorry, Bernie) that have coagulated, Trump the billionaire outsider maverick, unafraid to speak his mind, ready to make America great again, and Hillary, the wicked witch of the west who has people killed if they piss her off, will change one iota.

But then again....Ed Kilgore is thinking that the joy ride of the Orange Headed Clown might be near the end:

"if the worm ever turns on Donald Trump's immensely lucky 2016 campaign, it's likely to turn fast and hard. Much of his party will abandon him in a heartbeat if that's the best way to preserve Republican control of Congress and state governments. The media folk he despises and seeks to threaten and intimidate will be unforgiving if he begins to stumble. It could get very ugly very fast."

Maybe.

He's asking a lot of the media though. I'm betting plenty of them have already written their day after election stories. The better to be able to take plenty of naps between now and then.

[PD Pepe]

Been gone all day but have come back to Reality (check) and just finished reading Rebecca Traister (one of our finest, I think) whose portrait of Hillary was worth a big bouquet of spring flowers. And for my money, or flowers in this case, the paragraph below sums up a whole lot:

"Or, as Joe Scarborough put it recently, “You want to go to sleep tonight? Go to Hillary Clinton’s website and start reading policy positions.” [Unbeknownst to Joe he was actually praising Hillary––Morning for Joe might be just a tad tiring]

It’s not uncommon for women to be tagged as dull pragmatists in this way. The history of politics and of progressive movements, after all, is one of women doing the drudge work and men giving the inspiring speeches. It wasn’t Dorothy Height or Rosa Parks or Pauli Murray or Diane Nash or Anna Hedgeman — hardworking activists and lawyers and organizers — who gave the big speeches on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Before she finally decided to run for office, Shirley Chisholm once said, she had “compiled voter lists, carried petitions, rung doorbells, manned the telephone, stuffed envelopes, and helped get voters to the polls. I had done it all to help other people get elected. The other people who got elected were men, of course, because that was the way it was in politics.”