January 22, 2019--Democrats: How's It Looking So Far?

How's the 2020 campaign shaping up for you now that five or six of the 35 Democratic candidates who will eventually join the race are announced, sort of announced, are out and about in Iowa, or haunting CNN and MSNBC?

I just listened to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand who was being interviewed by Jake Tapper. He popped the Roger Mudd question--the one in which Mudd asked candidate Teddy Kennedy, "Why do you want to be president?" Kennedy's stumbling response ended his candidacy on the spot. 

Gillibrand said, she's a mother of young children and wants all children in America to have the same opportunities as hers. So she's the Mommy Candidate.

Earlier in the week Chuck Todd asked former HUD secretary Julián Castro the same question. He said he wanted all Americans to have the same opportunities he had. He has children and wants the same for them. So he's the Daddy Candidate.

Beto O'Rourke is on some sort of Jack-Kerouac stream-of-consciousness road trip from which he occasionally sends out videos. One was while he was having his teeth cleaned. Another where he said he's doing this to "clear my head." Explitives included. I guess he's the Existential Candidate. 

Let's see, who else? Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown got a new, very kempt-looking haircut. His signature tousled mop some consultant must've convinced him didn't look presidential. Senatorial? Fine. But Oval Office? Not so much, especially considering the hair mess currently occupying it. So he's looking lean and all moussed up.

Three candidates last week who are on the Senate Judiciary Committee--Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris--had opportunities to demonstrate gravitas when questioning Attorney General designee Robert Barr during his confirmation hearing.

Each had prepared written questions and mumbled them, not able to look up from their papers and pretty much all failed to make eye contact. So he came off feeling more presidential than they.

Then poor Bernie Sanders is under pressure not to run--he had his turn, some are saying, and should turn his supporters over to 69 year-old Elizabeth Warren, who wasn't impressive last week while trying to look comfortable away from the Harvard Faculty Club when out in Iowa hanging with "ordinary" Americans. 

Bernie was forced to be in Vermont for three days of confrontational meetings last week about how his campaign is apparently riddled with sexual abuse. That should finish him off especially since, oblivious, he seemed to be hearing about this for the first time.

I don't know about you but thus far I am not impressed. 

Am I missing something? Does 100 year-old Joe Biden feel like our best option? Or will this gaggle of undistinguished candidates encourage John Kerry, Al Gore, and Hillary to jump into the race? That way there could be a subset of geriatric candidates while Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and her gang of Furies (too young to run) bop around the Capital in search of Mitch McConnell. I know he's looking forward to hosting them. At the moment, though, he's hiding from them and Trump.

March 13, 2018--Spatting With Friends

I'm spatting again with some of my liberal friends. 

This time about the potential meeting between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un.

They are sharply critical of Trump for so impetuously agreeing to meet while I, though I too have my reservations, have been asking them what are the better alternatives--Not talking? Exchanging insults? ("Little Rocket Man," "Dotard") Saber rattling? All-out war where everyone agrees hundreds of thousands would die within minutes?

Most frequently, my friends, though they generally feel direct talks are ultimately a good idea, contend it is premature for Trump to agree to meet before traditional forms of negotiation and diplomacy prepare the way for a presidential meeting.

As one put it, "Countries such as North Korea, rogue countries seeking the imprimatur of legitimacy, see being invited to a face-to-face encounter in itself to be a major goal. Trump meeting with Kim would be a sign of welcoming him and North Korea into the company of credible nations. Kim craves a seat at that table. And so for Trump to trade it away, getting nothing substantial in return, is not the way to make a deal with the likes of Kim."

All good points, I concede but continue to ask what are the alternatives. My friends say, "None of the above."

So again I ask, "What should we do?"

My friends continue to say have Secretary of State Tillerson and what little staff he has work on what they would discuss when meeting, preparing the way for it, very much including what the two leaders will say and do when they finally get together. What agreements they can endorse and literally sign off on. Come up with agreements about step-by-step plans for the North that include ratcheting back their nuclear program while we agree to drawdown our military forces that are stationed in South Korea. 

And, of course, my friends say, to make sure before Kim and Trump meet that there will be verifiable stipulations regarding how the various drawdowns will be verified. To quote Ronald Regan when dealing with the Soviet Union, "Trust, but verify." In Russian, Doveryay, no proveryay.

"Sounds good," I say, "But the sad reality is that Trump does not have a diplomatic team in place or anyone for that matter in his administration who knows anything about East Asia much less Korea. We don't even have an ambassador to South Korea. And so, considering all of this and the reality of North Korea's nuclear weapons and ICBMs, what's the best way to proceed?"

At this point conversation begins to lose velocity with my friends and I at least agreeing that there are no precedents to draw upon and, considering the type of leaders they and we are afflicted with, maybe we have no choice but to try it Kim's and Trump's way--roll the dice and hope for the best. 

With that hope based precariously on the very fact of who are our leaders. One, in Kim, whose favorite American seems to be the preposterous Dennis Rodman while those most on our president's mind also come from the media and popular culture--"Alex" Baldwin and Chuck Todd. 

Before we move on, to underscore why I am attempting to cling to hope, I ask my friends why they believe with a Kim and a Trump traditional approaches, traditional forms of diplomacy have any chance of succeeding. Even if there were the usual Republican foreign policy folks serving in the Trump administration or, for that matter, if Hillary Clinton had been elected and with her there was the usual army of Democratic foreign policy experts, with Trump and Kim why would we expect any of the traditional approaches to foreign policy to work.

"Didn't we try that?" I ask, "Republicans as well as Democrats, when they or we were in power? What evidence of success can we point to from the approaches of the previous four presidents, who, over more than 25 years, tried various strategies, from cajoling and threatening to buying-off (bribing) the North Korean leadership?" 

Pressing further, I also ask, "What did George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, or Barack Obama for that matter accomplish with regard to North Korea?" 

And concluding, I say, "During those two-plus decades the North Koreans became a major nuclear power. That's what got accomplished."

One more troubling thing--a friend, who I suspect represents a somewhat widespread feeling in progressive circles, acknowledged that a big part of him doesn't want this approach to work because he doesn't want anything positive to happen during Trump's presidency. Not to the economy and not in world affairs.

"So," I said, "If Kim and Trump roll the dice and that fails won't we then wind up going to nuclear war? If this is where we're already headed, maybe, just maybe . . ."

December 2, 2015--Lies: The New Facts

Among the many intriguing things about Donald TRUMP's pursuit of the GOP nomination is the fact that he doesn't seem to get hurt in the polls when he lies.

As when he tells big ones like having seen "thousands and thousands" of Muslims in Jersey City celebrating at tailgate parties as the World Trade Center "came tumbling down." And then doubling and tripling down when confronted with the "facts"--that there is no documentable evidence that such a monstrous thing occurred.

Traditional candidacies would have already collapsed under the weight of lies of that magnitude, much less been able to survive after the things he said about illegal immigrant Mexican "rapists," Carly Fiorina's "face," and Fox News' Megyn Kelly's loss of journalistic objectivity because "blood was coming out of her wherever."

If anything, the more outrageous he behaves, the more he lies, the more his supporters love him and the better he does in the polls. (See, for example, today's Quinnipiac national poll where he has a 10 point lead.)

He left Chuck Todd sputtering Sunday morning on Meet the Press when Todd pressed him about the importance of the president telling the truth and TRUMP refused to budge or recant some of his whoppers.

As quoted in This Week, the exasperated Todd said, "Just because somebody repeats something doesn't make it true. You're running for president of the United States. Your words matter. Truthfulness matters. Fact-based stuff matters."

TRUMP continued to hold his ground, refusing to back down, act contrite, or much less show embarrassment. In effect reversing reality by propounding that it's the liberal media that does the lying. It is as if he is saying, "If I believe it to be true, if I say that it's true, it's true and more reliable than anything coming from biased broadcast outlets such as Meet the Press."

For decades now, the right-wing alternate media system of conservative talk shows and Fox News have been peddling lies as truth. And like TRUMP savaging what they see to be the progressive, socialist agenda of the "mainstream media."

This assault on the truth, where lies become the new truth, sets the table for a candidate such as TRUMP who is comfortable living in a world of lies masquerading as facts.

Thus poor Chuck Todd's frustration. He lives and operates in a universe where, as he put it, fact-based stuff matters. He is uncomfortable in a world where this is no longer true, where people make up facts, especially facts fabricated from lies that are so elaborate--like "seeing" thousands of jihadists partying in New Jersey--that to the predisposed can only be true.

The most influential of the new media operatives, Rush Limbaugh, when discussing climate science, said--

If you know what's good for you, if you know they're leftists, you won't believe anything they say any time, anywhere, about anything. . . . So we now have the Four Corners of Deceit, and the two universes in which we live--the Universe of Lies, the Universe of Reality, and the Four Corners of Deceit: government, academia, science, and media. These institutions are now corrupt and exist by virtue of deceit.

So there you have it--the context in which TRUMP is operating. A culture in which the former sources of truth are now fully compromised and untrustworthy.

It may be that because of this delusional strategy he will not be able to defeat Hillary Clinton in the general election where for the majority of the full electorate facts do count, but with so many Republicans living in the world in which embraceable lies abound, lies that confirm their own biases--like jihadists dancing in the streets of America--he to me is still looking like the most likely GOP nominee.