Definite Signs that Trump's Power is Waning

When I say that Donald Trump's power is waning, I don't just mean that he has lost control of the House of Representatives, and that Democrats may begin investigating him.

I mean that Republicans in Congress are becoming increasingly bold in disagreeing with him.  I mean that I am beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, if he shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue the Republican Establishment would not let him off the hook after all.

The signs are everywhere.  Losing the House is one, of course.  The possibility that our economy may be hitting a soft spot, and that Trump's popularity would suffer as a result is another.  But most significant is that Trump seems to be doing things that the Republican Establishment simply can't tolerate.  They seem to be breaking with him over at least three issues.

Saudi Arabia:  Trump hasn't shot anyone in the middle of Fifth Avenue yet, but his friends, the Saudis, have murdered a US legal resident in their consulate in Turkey and Trump seems determined to cover up for them.  Murder in a consulate is, in some ways, even less deniable than murder in the middle of Fifth Avenue.  If the murder had taken place in the middle of Fifth Avenue, the Saudis might have made at least some half-hearted attempt to disassociate themselves from it.  But when a murder takes place in a diplomatic facility under the sole control of a government, attempts to blame rogue operatives just don't pass the laugh test.  Senators who have seen the evidence have unanimously, across party lines, blamed the Saudis in general and the Crown Prince in particular.  Nor does it end with the murder of Khashoggi.  The murder of Khashoggi has made a lot of people sit up and notice that the Saudis are waging a very nasty war on Yemen, blockading the nation in an attempt to starve it into submission, bombing civilian targets, and so forth.  Yes, it may be hypocrisy not to notice this until after the Saudis killed someone more relatable, but better late than never.  There is a growing, bipartisan revolt in Congress against our support for Saudi Arabia in its Yemeni war.

Payoffs to mistresses:  Look, I agree it's ridiculous that of all the scandals surrounding Trump, the one that Republicans are finally taking seriously is payoffs to an ex-mistress, but there you have it.  I'm honestly not sure why.  Is it because with Cohen's testimony the evidence is so overwhelming that no denial is possible?  That Republicans are just touchy about sexual impropriety?  That after making attempts to conceal an affair a big deal for Bill Clinton and John Edwards, they are caught on their own hook?  Or because this is bad enough to dissociate yourself from Trump but not so bad as to be impeachable, which makes it the sort of scandal you can acknowledge.

Withdrawal from Syria:  The Blob is furious about Trump's decision to withdraw troops from Syria.  Washington Republicans, as members in good standing of the Blob, are outraged.  First the withdrawal of our 2000 troops in Syria meant that the entire Mideast would explode into all-out war and be taken over by Russia and/or Iran and/or ISIS.  Calming down a little, the story changed to okay, maybe not the entire Middle East, but our Kurdish friends would be slaughtered by the Turks.  And now it is beginning to look as though maybe the Kurds won't be slaughtered, but will cut a deal with Assad, which will hand the Middle East over to Russia/Iran.  Well, maybe not all the Middle East, maybe just one country in the Middle East, but still. 

Look, I'm sure there are good arguments to be made, pro and con, about withdrawing from Syria.  The Blob is opting for hysteria instead.  The best arguments for withdrawal ought to acknowledge that a better-managed, less precipitous withdrawal would be much better. And the best arguments for staying ought to acknowledge that really, 2,000 troops are not all that is holding back the forces of Armageddon. 

One final thought.  Clearly the issue that Republicans are most willing to break with Trump about is over foreign policy.*  On the bright side, that means that stories about Republicans being blackmailed by Russia seem most unlikely.  Republicans are most likely to confront Trump for being insufficiently confrontational toward Russia and its allies.  On the not-so-bright side, that means Republicans' biggest problem with Trump is that he isn't starting enough wars.  A lot of Democrats agree.  Such is the Blob.  Sigh!

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*That applies especially to Lindsey Graham, who has gone from one of Trump's fiercest critics to one of his leading defenders.

Some Very Unoriginal Comments on the Fed and Conservatives

I don't have anything very original to add on the subject of the Fed, but let me echo others.

Throughout the Obama Presidency, right wingers, Trump included, denounced Federal Reserve for its monetary expansion, which they claimed was solely intended to boost Obama's fortunes, and urged tightening.  Despite a depressed economy, they were certain that the Fed must tighten immediately or there would be out of control inflation.  They held up as their role model Paul Volcker, who tightened in 1981 to break an inflationary spiral (as high as 14%).  The applauded him for inducing a severe recession, bankrupting farmers, and sparking an economic crisis in Latin America.  That was the kind of Federal Reserve we needed!  Or else they applauded the 1920 Fed that slammed on the brakes when prices began to rise after price controls were lifted and induced a steeper decline and worse deflation (though shorter lived) than in any single year 1929-1932.  Why wouldn't the Fed today do that?  They seemed to take an outright prurient delight in the pain the Fed was inflicting and asked why the Fed was too chicken to do it now.

During his campaign for President, Trump argued that if the stock market was rising, it was a bubble, and that we were experiencing a false prosperity, buoyed up by artificially low interest rates and headed for disaster.  His campaign was characterized by near-apocalyptic warnings about the disaster that lay ahead when the whole house of cards came crashing down.

Of course, the minute Trump was elected, things changed altogether.  You know that bubble in the stock market?  It immediately filled in and all future gains became real.  And the false prosperity from artificially low interest rates?  When as soon as he was elected it became real.  He was even cynical enough to comment that he considered official unemployment figures fake so long as Obama was President and real for him.

And I was notably cynical about what to expect from Republicans on the subject of interest rates and tight money:

Once Trump is inaugurated, Republicans will regard tight money as a universal and timeless imperative that must be continued in good times and bad, in all economic circumstances. To propose any deviation from this moral imperative would show a lack of principle. No amount of human suffering can ever justify deviation from this universal and timeless imperative and, indeed, the more pain the Fed inflicts with tight money the better, since it will mean a richer reward down the road. So money must always be kept tight, without exceptions -- unless a Republican is in the White House and tightening might hurt his political fortunes, in which case we must be reasonable.

And sure enough, the economy is showing possible signs of softening, the stock market has fallen, and Republicans in general and Trump in particular are calling on the Fed to lower rates.  And an excellent case can be made that they are right.  It's just hard to have any interpretation but a cynical one in light of what they have said in the past.

Trump, I should add, is understandable.  He has no concept of the public good aside from his personal fortunes anyhow.  And looking at developments in the Russia investigation, he must be wondering if he will be indicted as soon as he leaves the White House.  So re-election has gained an imperative for him that it lacks for other incumbents.  (And what about when his second term expires?  I doubt very much that he thinks that far ahead).

But what excuse do the others have?

Trump in a Not-Even-a-Crisis

One of the biggest reasons I dreaded having Donald Trump as President (and one that liberals and conservatives should dread equally) was the thought of him in a crisis.  It was obvious that the best way to deal with Trump in a crisis would be to handcuff him, stuff something in his mouth, and lock him in the closet until it blew over.

And just to be clear, the latest stock market slide is NOT a crisis.  September 2008 was a crisis -- Fannie and Freddie nationalized, Lehman Brothers failing, Merrill Lynch surviving only by merger, AIG being nationalized, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs becoming bank holding companies to survive, and Washington Mutual Bank failing all in one month -- now that was a crisis!  And naturally the stock tanked, but falling stocks were a symptom, rather than a cause, of the crisis.

What we are seeing now is nothing like that.  It is, at worst, some softening of the economy, a reminder that the business cycle is still with us.  And, if we are lucky, it might just turn  out to be a needless panic.  A normal President would either keep quiet or  give some vague platitude that so long as all is well on Main Street, Wall Street will calm down.

And yes, I will admit it is unsettling to watch the stock market fall by triple digits day after day after day.  To see the stock market fall by 500 points in one day is familiar enough.  But it is usually followed by 200-300 point rebound the next day.  Even a general slide usually has interruptions.  So to see it fall by triple digits day after day with no relief is genuinely disturbing.

But there is nothing in the overall economy, nothing at all, to justify such a drop.  If our Tweeter-in-Chief would just SHUT UP, I'm sure the market would settle down and figure out that its freakout was unnecessary. 

A crisis is, to a considerable extent, a choice.  Presidents can decide, to a considerably extent, whether to respond to a development, like missiles in Cuba, or not.  Some leaders create foreign crises on purpose to boost their sagging domestic popularity.  But creating an economic crisis is generally not recommended.

And, just for the record, I don't think you can tweet your way into a crisis.  If all is well on Main Street, then I really do expect Wall Street to figure it out sooner or later and calm down.  I expect the slide to stop soon and a recovery to begin.  It will probably take some time to get back to the old high.  Stocks were becoming irrationally exuberant and needed some sobering up.  We may slip into a recession, but there is no reason to believe it will be a bad one.  So I fully expect the slide to stop soon, despite Trump's best efforts.  But it would have stopped a lot sooner without them.

UPDATE:  And right on cue, our President and Secretary of the Treasury shut up for one day and, sure enough, the stock market promptly recovers.

Americans are Unduly Afraid of Stock Market Crashes

At least we got a tax cut

Americans have an inordinate fear of stock market crashes, sort of like Germans' inordinate fear of inflation, and for much the same reason.  Just as the great inflation is a powerful German folk-memory, the 1929 crash leading to the Great Depression is a folk-memory with us.
The Germans need to get over it and so do we.  German inflation aversion played a major part in Europe's persistent economic crisis, as Germans refused to accept a little more inflation, instead pulling everyone else down.  As for our fear of stock market crashes -- well, Trump and Mnuchin are exhibits 1 and 2.

The stock market crash of 1929 was a financial crisis.  All financial crises are the same underneath -- the are the result of excessive leverage, i.e., debt-to-equity ratio.  As prices of collateral become inflated, debt builds up that seems well secured until collateral prices fall back to reasonable rates.  Then suddenly a lot of debt that seemed well secured turns out not to be at all.  Lenders are stuck with a lot of bad debt. Borrowers are stuck with a lot of unpayable debt.  And investors find that their investments are suddenly worth only a fraction of their former value -- with disastrous results for their budgets.  The stock market crash of 1929 was such a financial crisis.  The economy was heading for recession even without the financial crisis, but financial crises make recessions worse, and greatly slow recovery.

But guess what.  We responded to the 1929 stock market crash by instituting the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), barring commercial banks from issuing securities, insuring deposits, and other measures to prevent a repeat.  And it worked.  Since then we have had recessions and stock market crashes, but never again have we allowed a stock market crash to bring down the economy in the way that it did in 1929.

Our worst single day loss on the stock market in percentage terms (the best measure) was not in 1929 at all, but in 1987. On that day stocks fell by 22.6% -- nearly as much as the combined losses of the worst two days in 1929.  For anyone who has never heard of the 1987 crash, that's OK.  The various buffers put in place since 1929 worked.  The Fed lowered interest rates and the economy never so much as missed a beat.  (The stock market, seeing the real economy chugging along without it, got up, brushed the dust off, and resumed rising).

In 2008 we experienced our worst financial crisis since 1929 and, unsurprisingly, stocks dropped and the economy fell into its worst downturn since the 1930's.  But falling stocks were merely a symptom, not a cause, of the downturn.  The overpriced collateral that led to the crisis was real estate.  And, it should be noted, we instituted reforms following that crash to prevent banks from overextending themselves that appear to be working.

The one time since 1929 that a falling stock market really did damage the real economy was in 2000.  As the neighboring graph shows, the 2000 stock bubble (expressed in terms of price-to-earnings ratio) was immense -- great enough to dwarf the 1929 bubble.  Yet the downturn was mild (if persistent).

So really, folks, our economy has learned to weather stock market crashes.  To the extent that they are a symptom of underlying problems in the real economy, stock market crashes can be worrisome.  But we have insulated ourselves from stock market crashes to the extent that the worst one-day drop ever had no effect at all on the real economy and even a bubble as massive as the one that burst in 2000 caused only modest damage. 

So please, guys, a little worry is reasonable.  A total freakout is completely uncalled for.

A Sign that Twitter is Eating My Brain

Me, when Steve Mnuchin was appointed Secretary of the Treasurer.  "Oh, good.  He worked Goldman Sachs.  He understands how  money works.  (Unlike Goldman Sachs alum Steve Bannon) He won't blow up the world financial system just for thrills and giggles."

Me, when Steve Mnuchin's scandals started coming out.  "OK, so he's a repulsively corrupt cartoon plutocrat.  But at least he won't blow up the world financial system just for thrills and giggles."

Me today.  "Actually, Steve Mnuchin just might blow up the world financial system by pure incompetence."

Thoughts on George HW Bush

There have been enough eulogies of Bush Senior that there is not much left for me to add, but let me put in a few comments shaped by the others. 

Bush Senior has been compared to Eisenhower, both in the sense of being a moderate Republican and in that he was an eminently competent but never really got the chance to shine because he presided over good times.  But there is also a sense that, as with Eisenhower, Bush, Sr. deserved more credit for the good times than he got.

Eisenhower got us out of the war in Korea and resisted pressure to join the war in Vietnam, so he deserves credit for presiding over peace.

Bush, Sr. came into office just about a third of the nation's savings and loans were failing, the country had experienced two old-style bank runs, and people began to fear about the health of ordinary commercial banks.  The crisis was overrunning our ordinary ability to close banks and cover deposits.  The Bush Administration cleaned up the mess, prosecuted offenders, restored confidence in the financial system, and avoided serious economic fallout.*

He also undertook the last significant environmental initiative by a Republican -- measures to curb acid rain.  Sulfur emissions were acidifying rain and causing subtle but real environmental damage. As with global warming now, the relevant industries insisted that acid rain wasn't happening, that if it was happening it wasn't man-made, and that if it was man-made, it was beneficial, and besides, it couldn't happen because it was against their principles.  Bush, Sr. was ultimately convinced that acid rain was real but rejected direct regulations to curb sulfur emissions in favor of a cap and trade system that limited total emissions and allowed companies to decide how to limit emissions and permitted trading of "pollution units."  Once companies made cutting sulfur emissions a priority, it proved to be cheaper and easier than anyone had hoped, and an environmental crisis was averted.

But it was in foreign policy that Bush, Sr. most distinguished himself. 

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Bush, Sr. assembled a broad international coalition to drive the Iraqi forces from Kuwait, a war that (once again) proved much quicker and easier than anyone had hoped.  He then decided not to go all the way and remove Saddam from power.  I have seen some eulogies that saw this as his critical mistake, one that paved the way for his son's disastrous Iraqi invasion.  I disagree.  The disaster of the Iraq War proves just the opposite, that we should salute the senior Bush's wisdom in deciding not to go all the way.  Yet HW did make a serious mistake at the end of the war.  Instead of recognizing that Saddam was sufficiently weakened by his defeat not to be a menace, he committed himself to a policy of regime change, saying that Saddam was an intolerable menace no matter how much he was weakened.  It was that, and not the decision to leave Saddam in power, that paved the way for the future war.  This is not to deny that even a weakened Saddam would have been an adversary and a bad guy.  But we have lived with adversaries in power before and can do so in the future as well.

Bush Senior's greatest triumph was in his management of the end of the Cold War and the fall of Communism.  It has been commented that his skilled management of the fall of Communism made both his predecessor and his successor look better than they otherwise would have.  The meaning of this is clear for Clinton.  He benefited from a peaceful and secure time after the fall of Communism.  How can Bush, Sr. retroactively make his predecessor look better?  One can debate how much credit Ronald Reagan deserves for bringing down the Soviet Union and Communism.  But assuming he deserves full credit, it would look like an empty accomplishment if Eastern Europe had imploded into war and chaos.  That the end of the Cold War was followed, instead, by Eastern Europe democratizing and joining NATO makes the victory well worth winning.

And now to more controversial matters.  Many Democrats never forgave HW for the nastiness of the 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis.  Many Republicans say that HW should have won in 1992 and that the polarization that followed is the result of Democrats playing dirty and winning.

What does it mean to say that Bush, Sr. "should" have won?  If it means that he would have made a better President, that is normal and perfectly acceptable partisan politics.  It may or may not be true. 

Certainly it seems fair to say that our problems with Russia today are the result of our failure to integrate Russia into the post-Cold War order.  That, in turn, is the result of the failure of the Washington Consensus, backed by Bill Clinton, on restructuring the Russian economy.  The Washington Consensus approach to ex-Communist countries was the assumption of the more pain, the more gain -- that we should shut down as much of the Russian economy as possible as quickly as possible and trust that something better would take its place.  The end of Communism was triumph for the US, a revival of hope for Eastern Europe -- and a disaster for the former Soviet Union.  Only by understanding just how great that disaster was can we understand why Vladimir Putin is the man he is and why he is so hostile to us. 

Bill Clinton supported the Washington Consensus that inflicted this disaster.  Two questions pose themselves.  One is, would Bush, Sr. have done otherwise.  Presumably he had some sort of plans and the people who worked with him in managing the transition know what they were.  So I am open to persuasion one way or the other whether Bush, Sr. would have acted otherwise.  The other question is whether Soviet society was so rotten that nothing good could possibly have emerged no matter how the fall of Communism was handled.  And that, I believe, is one of those counterfactuals that can never be answered.

And then there is the claim by some Bush, Sr. supporters that the ever-escalating polarization we have seen since 1992 is an understandable reaction by Republicans to the trauma of their defeat in 1992.  I concede that the ever-escalating polarization that troubles our country did become visible with the Clinton win in 1992.  And I am slightly more sympathetic than before of Republicans' claim that the loss was unfair and/or traumatic.  After winning the Gulf War, Bush, Sr. did, indeed, look invincible for the next election.  To see his overwhelming lead melt away in so short a time, all because of a minor recession must have been quite shocking.  And Democrats really had controlled Congress longer than was healthy for one party.  Republicans may has felt they had a stable equilibrium with Democrats controlling Congress and Republicans the Presidency.  To lose the Presidency as well carried the specter or being shut out of power altogether.

 But it doesn't quite hold.  The Reagan Administration began with a severe recession -- a painful but necessary measure to break the inflationary spiral that had reached 14%.  Once the inflationary spiral was broken, the Fed let up on the breaks and the economy bounced back.  There was an implied contract there -- endure the severe recession and double digit inflation will be gone permanently.  But many Americans saw another contract -- endure the severe recession and there will never be another.  When it turned out that the business cycle was still with us, many people felt that a promise was broken.  As for being locked out of Congress, in those less polarized times the Congressional minority was by no means as powerless as it is now and could expect to have its wishes taken into account.

Some Republicans seem to complain that it was particularly unfair to deny Bush, Sr. a second term, particularly given that he had been so successful in his first.  The implication here is that if only the Democrats had shown the decency to wait until 1996 to win, Republicans would not have felt the need to freak out. 

Look, to state the obvious, losing elections is partisan politics as usual.  Yes, granted, since the New Deal two term Presidencies have been the rule and one term the exception and usually the result of a particularly bad performance (see Jimmy Carter).  But that is just a generalization.  There is no particular norm that says in incumbent President must be reelected unless he has done something specifically wrong, otherwise we would not have serious reelection bids. 

Besides, if we are going to argue that defeating a successful incumbent President violates a norm, then it should be pointed out that the general rule since the end of WWII has been eight years of one party in power followed by eight years of the other.  If the Democrats violated a norm by winning in 1992 and should have waited until 1996, then Republicans violated a norm by winning a third consecutive Presidential term in 1988 -- the only time one party has won three consecutive Presidencies since WWII. 

And that is when we come to the unpleasant side of Bush, Sr.  At the outset of the 1988 election, it looked as though the country would, indeed, revert to the mean and switch parties after two terms.  This led to a complete freakout on the Republican side and all those lowdown, nasty ads that ultimately defeated Dukakis.  It showed an ugliness in the Republicans that hadn't been seen since Nixon's day.  It suggested that they wanted to replace the old norm -- each party holds power for two terms and then the other takes over -- with a new one -- only Republicans get to be President.  And if that is so, then it would follow that Republicans would not accept a Democratic victory in 1996 any more than they did in 1992.  Indeed, the longer Republicans held the Presidency, the more they would see it as a birthright and any Democrat as illegitimate. 

Certainly there was no sign of any of this in the way Bush, Sr. governed.  But there were other signs during the Bush, Sr. Presidency of the polarization that would follow.  Newt Gingrich, Roger Ailes, and Rush Limbaugh, three major drivers of the polarization, were on their way up.  We cannot know how well Dukakis would have handled the savings and loan crisis, acid rain, the fall of Communism, or the invasion of Kuwait.  Certainly he would be hard-pressed to do as well as Bush, Sr. did.  But the argument that Bush, Sr.'s defeat in 1992 was so outside the norm and so traumatic as to lead to all the polarization we have seen since is simply not convincing.  The seeds of polarization were there.  If the Democrats had won in 1988, it would have started four years earlier.  If they had won in 1996, it would have started four years later.  The underlying problem -- a party unwilling to accept defeat as legitimate -- remains regardless of the names at the top.

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*There was a mild recession in 1991 which cost Bush, Sr. the election, but it is by no means clear that it was related to the savings and loans.

Another Way of Putting It

So, to follow up on my last post, I concluded by saying:

Disagreements about policy are normal and will always be with us. But there ought to be areas that liberals and conservatives agree on, as well as disagree. The things I have cited above go to our whole system of government, law, and loyalty. And when they stop being priority, we have a very serious problem.

This article puts it much better that I could and offers a framework of understanding.  It offers the concepts of "common political knowledge" and "contested political knowledge."  "Common political knowledge" are that things that everyone agrees on.  "Contested political knowledge" are areas of disagreement.  The authors argue that every political system has both common and contested political knowledge.  No system can survive if everything is in dispute, nor can any system ever clamp down hard enough to erase all disagreement.  Rather, the stability of the system depends on what is common and what is contested knowledge.

As examples of "common political knowledge" in a democracy, the authors offer "how elections work: how districts are created and defined, how candidates are chosen, and that their votes count—even if only roughly and imperfectly."  "Contested political knowledge" means the policy disputes that drives elections and legislative debates, "how much of a role the government should play in the economy, what the tax rules should be, what sorts of regulations are beneficial and what sorts are harmful, and so on."  They go on to suggest that "common political knowledge" in a democracy is not just the basic framework of elections and government and the legitimacy of majority rule, but also common knowledge about who the political actors are, what the individuals and parties stand for, and the like.

The authors contrast this with autocracy, in which it is very much contested political knowledge who the adversaries of the government are, where they are, and how they can be contacted.  Turning this into common political knowledge is destabilizing to autocracies.  Democracy, by contrast, is undermined by turning common political knowledge -- such as the legitimacy of elections, the accuracy of the census, or the difference between real and fake news.

Which is another way of explaining the dangers that Donald Trump poses to democracy, why in a healthy system liberals and conservatives would agree that the danger transcends mere policy disputes, and why it is so alarming that many conservatives do not see it that way.

Simply put, we are seeing what is "common political knowledge" and what is "contested political knowledge" shift.  Traditionally we have had certain areas of consensus, i.e., "common political knowledge" between liberals and conservatives.  These areas have included:

• The losers of an election should concede to the winners
• The winners should respect the rights of the losers to contest the next election
• Changing the relations between difference branches of government is permitted, but a big deal not to be done lightly
• You are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts
• It is not legitimate to use one's office for personal enrichment
• Competence matters
• Foreign meddling in our domestic politics is deeply alarming

Within such a framework, there is ample room for policy debates.  

But right now we are seeking "common political knowledge" become contested and demands for contested political knowledge to become common.

To a hardcore economic royalist, there is no room for debate over "how much of a role the government should play in the economy, what the tax rules should be, what sorts of regulations are beneficial and what sorts are harmful, and so on."  The proper answer is, there is no legitimate role for government in the economy, there should be no redistributive taxes, and no economic regulations.  How best to achieve these goals is open for dispute -- including whether to respect democratic elections if the winner wants to extend the role of government in the economy.  And growing numbers of Republicans appear to believe that large sections of the population are not "authentic real Americans" and that their vote therefore does not count.*

And so Republicans at the national level split between the ones who are willing to support a President who neither knows nor cares anything about governing, with innumerable conflicts of interest and a career based on fraud, who sees the Justice Department as his private goon squad, and who has alarming ties to a hostile foreign power because he shares their economic royalist policies or their white rural identity -- and ones who are not.  Or, put differently, some see basic democratic norms as "contested political knowledge" and the success of their policies or dominance of their group as properly considered "common political knowledge."  Others see preserving the basic democratic framework as important enough to accept losing at least some of the time.**

These are the stakes.  There is no other way to put it.

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*And, incidentally, I do not think our side is entirely blameless.  We have tried to move same sex marriage and transgender rights from "contested" to "common" knowledge when they are deeply contested.  I am not suggesting that there is anything wrong with advocating for such views, merely  that we should accept that such views are controversial and that people of good will may disagree.

**And we are seeing the same thing played out at the state level in North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Michigan, where Republicans dismiss their defeat as illegitimate and respond by rigging the system.

Reasons for Conservative to Oppose Trump Even If He is an Economic Royalist

I want to revisit my past post on why some conservatives have warmed up to Trump and others have not.

This column explains why some Never Trumpers opposing him during the primaries and have changed their minds.  They feared that Trump was not an economic royalist.  It turned out that he was.  All reason to oppose him vanished.

In my personal opinion, fear that Trump was not an economic royalist is the silliest possible reason to oppose him.  Of course Trump is an economic royalist.  What else would he be?  No other ideology could possibly justify Trump, or allow him to pursue the career he has followed.  Of course he wants to remove all constraints on profit-making.  His whole life and being has been about worship of the almighty dollar.

But there are other eminently reasonable reasons for conservatives to oppose Trump, either before the election or now, even if he is an economic royalist.

Conservatives might fear Trump is not a social conservative.  (He isn't, but is willing to play one on TV for political advantage).

Or they might have feared that he would appoint someone like Judge Jeanine to the Supreme Court.  That particular fear did not pan out.  Trump has been completely orthodox in his judicial picks, but it was reasonable to fear that he might not.

Or they might have taken is talk about non-interventionism seriously.

Those were reasons to oppose Trump in the primaries, fears that he might not be a good Republican even if he was an economic royalist.  But there are other reasons conservatives might oppose Trump even after he won the nomination, and even to this day.

There are the reasons I gave before:

• That  he knew absolutely nothing about government or policy and showed no interest in learning.
• That he saw facts and evidence as things he could make up as he pleased, on the fly.
• That he had the attention span and impulse control of a small child.
• That his entire career was built on fraud.
• That he seemed to have no concept of the rule of law, or of the public good aside from his own personal interests
• That he appeared to think that if he won the federal government would be his own private property.
• That  he was blatantly appealing to hate and celebrating base impulses as "authenticity."
• His threats to use libel and anti-trust laws to silence his critics
• His encouragement of violence at his rallies.
• The prospect of such a man having his finger on the nuclear button.

And I can add other reasons that have come up since the election for conservatives to oppose Trump:

• His sons running his business empire while he runs the country.
• His appointment of his daughter and son-in-law to important positions of power that they showed no qualification for.
• The possibility that his foreign investments might create conflicts of interest.
• His apparent belief that the Justice Department is a tool to protect his allies and harass his opponents.
• The flagrant corruption of many of his nominees.
• His positive delight in alienating democracies and befriending dictators.
• The complete amorality of his foreign policy.
• His unwillingness to do any of the work involved in being a President.
• His disregard of the information resources available in favor of what he sees on TV.
• His lax approach to security.
• The whole disturbing Russia business.

Wait a minute, some conservatives may say.  Those the reasons that liberals oppose Trump.  Why should conservatives agree.

And I agree.  Those are reasons liberals oppose Trump.  They are also good reasons for conservatives to oppose him.  Liberals have other reasons to oppose Trump as well that conservatives do not share.  For instance:

• He is deconstructing the administrative state (as Steve Bannon puts it), otherwise known as wrecking the regulatory agencies by corruption and incompetence.
• His health plan, if it had gone through, could have stripped some 20 million people of their health insurance.
• He is still working at undermining Obamacare and stripping as many people of insurance as he can.
• His tax cuts are absurdly skewed to the top.
• His tax cuts threaten to precipitate a fiscal crisis and undermine Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
• He is stacking the federal bench with economc royalist judges.
• He wants to deport Dreamers and deny refuge to asylum seekers.
• He scapegoats immigrants and treats them with pointless cruelty.

But I get that to conservatives these (except perhaps that last) are reasons to support Trump.  They are policy matters.  Disagreements about policy are normal and will always be with us.  But there ought to be areas that liberals and conservatives agree on, as well as disagree.  The things I have cited above go to our whole system of government, law, and loyalty.  And when they stop being priority, we have a very serious problem.

A Note to the People of the Florida Panhandle

A note to the good people of the Florida panhandle.  As the good people of Louisiana could tell you:  If you are going to have a natural disaster, don't have it in the run-up to an election.  The elite media will be too distracted by the election to call attention to your situation, so help will not be on its way.

And a note to our elite media:  Come on guys!  I don't buy the argument that people in the New York to Washington corridor are less authentic and "real American" than the rest of us, but the rest of us really do exist and you have an unfortunate tendency to forget that fact.  Until you can remember it on a regular basis, and not just to scratch your heads over why Trump was elected, the rest of us will have legitimate grievances about you.

PS:  That does not mean that our elite media ignoring the hurricane is why Donald Trump was elected.  That would make sense only if he cared more about the hurricane than our elite media does, which I see no evidence to support.  In fact, Trump seems aware that the country exists at all only to the extent that it appears of Fox News.

How Much Are Crises a Choice?

With the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi, we may get a chance to see to extent to which crises are a choice.

Khashoggi is/was a Saudi citizen, a legal US resident, and a contributor to the Washington Post.  On October 2, he walked into the Saudi consulate in Turkey to pick up some divorce papers and has not been seen since.  Since he has given no evidence since of being alive and free, the only question can now be whether he is being held captive at the consulate, whether he has been forcibly taken to Saudi Arabia, or whether he has been killed.  The more time goes by without evidence that Khashoggi is alive, the stronger the suspicion that he was killed.

In other words, our putative allies, the Saudis at best kidnapped and more likely killed a US resident under our protection and contributor to a major US newspaper.  Under any other President, a diplomatic crisis would be underway.  Trump, who loves the Saudi government and hates the Washington Post, is doing his best to ignore the whole thing.

But our political and media establishment are in an uproar.  Members of Congress in both parties are demanding action.  Newspapers are publishing ever more embarrassing articles.  The pressure to have a crisis is growing.  We will see whether Trump can brazen it out or not.

What if Kavanaugh Had Gone the Contrition Route?

I get why Republicans are applauding Trump for not withdrawing the Kavanaugh nomination.  They see it as standing up for bullies (a thing that would be more admirable if they didn't so often express admiration of Trump for being a bully).  They also feared that any replacement would walk into the same buzz saw.  And they are certainly right the Democrats would have been even more outraged -- and even some Republicans might have disassociated themselves from him -- if Kavanaugh had directly attacked Christine Ford right after her compelling testimony.  (That has not stopped some from doing so as the memory of her testimony becomes more distant).  And I have considerable sympathy with the view that the statute of limitations has run on youthful indiscretions, and that if we make a spotless adolescence a requirement for office we are going to shrink the pool of candidates inordinately.

I suppose I should also give Kavanaugh a little grudging respect for knowing not to go too far.  Saying:

This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit fueled with apparent pent-up anger about president trump and the 2016 election, fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record. Revenge on behalf of the Clintons and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups. This is a circus. The consequences will extend long past my nomination. The consequences will be with us for decades. This grotesque, character assassination will dissuade confident and good people of all political persuasions from serving our country and as we all know in the political system of the early 2000s, what goes around comes around.

is utterly inappropriate in a Supreme Court nominee, but it fires up the Republican base.  If he had thrown in comments about Soros or the Deep State, some moderate Republicans might have seen belief in paranoid conspiracy theories as disqualifying.

But Republicans are wrong to say that attacking the Democrats, attaching Ford, or withdrawing from the nomination were the only options.  Another option is what might be called the Clarence Thomas option -- same anger, but minus the partisanship.  Can't find the link, but that appears to have been what the first draft of Kavanaugh's speech did.  He later reworked it to make it more partisan.  Would Democratic reaction have been any different if Kavanaugh had expressed the anger minus the partisanship?  I'd guess the outrage volume would have been a little lower, but not a lot.

What if he had gone the contrition route?  What if he admitted the obvious, that he did binge drink in high school and college, and that he did engage in the sort of rowdy behavior that binge drinking is mostly an excuse for?  What if he acknowledged that his drunken rowdiness did involve sexual horseplay of the kind Christine Ford and Deborah Ramirez described, and that it was most certainly in bad taste, but never malicious and, so far as he was aware until Dr. Ford came forward, always consensual.  What if he had described -- in extremely delicate terms so as not to seem to be victim-blaming -- the sort of women who were regular parts of that scene, and who thought horseplay of that kind was harmless fun.  Acknowledge that it was juvenile and selfish never to consider that there might be women who did not see his horseplay in such terms.  Emphatically deny any attempt to harm or coerce anyone and offer profound apologies if any women mistook his intentions.*  Unleash all his understandable anger on Michael Avenatti for promoting outrageous lies.  (That probably wouldn't alienate Democrats too much; many of them have been quite critical of Avenatti as well).

Then explain that he came to recognize how juvenile and offensive his behavior had been, even if he did not realize it had actually harmed anyone.  Explain that he made up for it by showing extra respect for women during his mature career.  Point out that there are zero complaints about his behavior as a lawyer or judge.  Angrily declare that the statute of limitations has run on youthful indiscretions and that stigmatizing forever anyhow who engaged in them is too harsh and unforgiving a standard for one whose adult conduct has been exemplary.

What would have happened in that case?  Well, Kavenaugh would have been confirmed.  I have no doubt that it would have secured the vote of every Republican in the Senate, along with Joe Manchin and probably several other red state Democrats.  The confirmation margin would have been narrow but respectable.  This is not to say that all Democrats would have been satisfied.  Many would have expressed outrage that Kavanaugh couldn't tell consensual from non-consensual horseplay and some would accuse him of blaming the victim.  But I have no doubt he would have been confirmed, with more Democratic votes that he got now.

But that wouldn't polarize and inflame partisan tensions the way Kavanaugh's actual speech did.  Which I assume is the real point.

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*And I will add here that I do think this is the most likely explanation of what happened.  Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh were stronger than Christine Blasey and they outnumbered her two to one.  If they had really meant business, I don't think she would have gotten away so easily.  But if she was 15 and not used to that scene she might very well have thought they meant business.  Kavanaugh's failure to remember this episode is probably not so much an alcoholic blackout as simply that similar horseplay incidents were so common -- and usually consensual -- that he can't be expected to remember them all.  That his memory was clouded by alcohol was probably also a factor.

Hope and Despair in the Age of Trump

Not so much the Kavanaugh appointment as Republicans' reaction to it has left me despairing about our future more than anything else.

On the one hand, there is cause for optimism.  It appears that the country can survive a Trump presidency.  The economy is booming, international crises have (mostly) been avoided, trade wars can be averted by putting a few tweaks on old agreements, and even Obamacare is limping along.

Granted, this is partly because in the early phases of his Presidency Trump had to be saved from himself.  He wanted to blow up NAFTA, destroy the healthcare system Obamacare created, and possibly start a war with North Korea.  Cooler head prevailed.  And Trump and his circle appear to have matured enough to avoid such disasters in the future.

So why despair?

Well, for one thing, Trump is a bully, and a major reason he has been successful is that his bullying tactics have worked.  For people who like me who oppose bullying tactics, this is rather depressing.

But above all, because it is increasingly obvious that the Republican Party, Never Trumpers included, love these bullying tactics when applied to domestic policy.  Right now Republican are applauding Trump for making the Kavanaugh nomination unabashedly partisan and really more about defeating liberals than anything else.  They are proudly proclaiming that finally we have a President who is standing up to those Democratic bullies and character assassins who have so intimidated Republicans up till now. 

And now we have Republicans declaring Democrats to be an intolerable threat to liberty and the rule of law, Republicans calling protesters paid Soros shills, and even Rudy Giuliani retweeting a call to freeze Soros' assets.  Republicans have been trying to delegitimize the Democratic Party for some time, but this latest outburst ramps it up many-fold.

The real value of Democrats winning the mid-term elections is not legislation.  There is no possibility of Democrats winning enough votes to beat a Senate filibuster, let alone override a Trump veto.  And Republicans seem to have given up on passing any seriously controversial legislation, so there is no real need to block them.  The real value in Democrats winning one or another chamber of Congress is to hold real investigations of what Trump has been up to.  But the events surrounding the Kavanaugh nomination are making clear that no matter what such an investigation reveals, Republicans will simply dismiss it as persecution.  Republicans wouldn't turn against Trump if he shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue.  Indeed, I am reaching the point that it wouldn't surprise me for Trump to shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue just to piss off liberals and therefore rally his base around him.

And so here is where my despair really comes from.  Donald Trump is increasingly applying his bullying tactics to domestic politics.  The evidence thus far seems to indicate that bullying tactics work.  The nation and the world can survive Trump's bullying tactics.  But democracy and the rule of law can't.

Note to Graham: Sexual Misconduct Knows No Party Lines and Neither Do Accusations

And I hope to move a little away from the toxic sludge sewer but not too far to take a minute to commend on Lindsey Graham's comment that Democrats are never accused of sexual misconduct.

And just to be clear, he is by no means the only one to say it.  I hear that alleged often enough on Twitter (admittedly an unrepresentative cross section) to conclude that it must be believed in wide stretches of the right wing.  It's something I truly can't wrap my head around.

What about Bill Clinton?  He was actually impeached for sexual misconduct.  In fact, Lindsey Graham himself served on the House Justice Committee at the time and Brett Kavanaugh was on Ken Starr's legal team.

I would also throw in John Edwards, Democratic Senator from North Carolina, some-time candidate in the Democratic primaries and John Kerry's running mate.  He saw his career end over an affair with a staffer and was indicted for using campaign funds to make payments to his mistress.

And Anthony Wiener, one-time rising liberal light in the House of Representatives who was hounded from office for sexting, hounded from an election for Mayor of New York for same, and eventually prosecuted for sending graphic pictures to a minor.  In fact, it was the discovery of Hillary Clinton's e-mails on his laptop (he was married to her chief of staff) that led to James Comey's fatal announcement that the Clinton investigation was being reopened.

Well, OK, Graham and company may say, but they beat the rap.  Republicans never beat the rap.  It is true that Clinton was impeached by the House but acquitted by the Senate, and that Edwards was indicted by also acquitted.  Anthony Weiner, on the other hand, is currently serving time.  And Republicans have been known to beat the rap as well.  Anita Hill's allegations didn't keep Clarence Thomas from being confirmed to the Supreme Court.  And numerous women coming forward to accuse Donald Trump of sexual assault didn't keep him from being elected President.

Ancient history, they may say.  Even the 2016 election is ancient history.  They are referring to the Me Too movement, which they would presumably call a blatantly partisan movement in response to the election of Trump to bring down Republican politicians.

Aside from the awkward fact that it isn't.  I don't doubt that the election of Donald Trump played a major role in inspiring Me Too.  But what immediately sparked the movement -- it's Archduke Ferdinand moment, if you will -- was the expose on Hollywood director and Democratic donor Harvey Weinstein.  Up till then, our side had been smugly complacent.  Donald Trump's "pussy" tape and the firing of Roger Ailes and Bill O'Reilly from Fox News had convinced our side that this was a conservative issue, born of retrograde ideas about women.  Revelations about Harvey Weinstein, soon followed by Kevin Spacey and Charlie Rose, showed how misplaced that complacency was.  And it proved that sexual misconduct cuts across partisan and ideological lines.  And the Me Too movement was out to show that it made no such distinctions.

It brought down John Conyers, described by Nancy Pelosi as an "icon."  It also forced the resignation of Al Franken, Lindsey Graham's own colleague on the Senate Justice Committee.  And Eric Schneiderman, the Democratic Attorney General of New York, who many were counting on to continue the investigations if Trump shuts down the Mueller probe.

To look for the balance, I did what people do these days and looked it up on Wikipedia.  Beginning with the Me Too Movement, it lists Al Franken as the only sitting U.S. Senator forced out by allegations of sexual misconduct, although Roy Moore lost an election based on similar allegations.  It lists allegations against seven members of the House, four Democrats (one of them gay) and three Republicans.  It also gives the following tallies for states:

Alabama -- One Republican (Roy Moore)
Alaska -- One Democrat
Arizona -- Two Republicans
California -- Six Democrats (including two women) and one Republican
Colorado -- Three Republicans, one Democrat (gay), and one party switcher
Florida -- Two Republicans, one Democrat
Hawaii -- One Democrat
Idaho -- One Republican (who committed suicide)
Illinois -- One Democrat, one Republican
Indiana -- One Republican (the Attorney General)
Iowa -- Two Republicans
Oklahoma -- One Republican
Kentucky -- Six Republicans
Louisiana -- One Republican
Massachusetts -- One Democrat (gay)
Minnesota -- Two Democrats, including Keith Ellison, deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee and US Representative (I am not clear why he is not listed in the US House) and one Republican
Mississippi -- One Republican
Missouri -- One Republican (the Governor)
New York -- Three Democrats (including the Attorney General), one Republican
Ohio -- One Republican
Oregon -- One Republican
Pennsylvania -- One Democrat
Rhode Island -- One Republican
Texas -- Two Democrats
Utah -- One Republican
Wisconsin -- One Democrat
Wyoming -- One Republican (the Secretary of State)

Adding up, I get 40 Republicans and 30 Democrats at the state level, although human error is possible here.  This does suggest somewhat more state Republicans accused than Democrats, but then again, Republicans dominate more state governments than Democrats.  At the federal level, Democrats hold a slight edge.

It is true that the only federal judges named are Republicans Alex Kozinski and Brett Kavanaugh.  Add to that Clarence Thomas, even though that was in 1991, and I will concede that (so far) only Republican federal judges seem to be accused of sexual misconduct.  I will also point out that of the last four Democratic nominees to the Supreme Court, three have been women.

And one of the reasons Democrats are running so many women for office this year is to avoid any nasty surprises.

Another Norm Shredded, Supreme Court Edition

OK, so maybe I'll dip my toe in the toxic sludge just a little.  I just want to point out that Trump, indirectly in this case, has managed to shred yet another norm in our politics.

Let's face it.  Not to be cynical, but underneath all fancy theories of what the Supreme Court should do, everyone really wants it to do the same thing.  Rule in their favor.  It's just that up until now most of us have managed to rationalize it.  We claim that if the Supreme Court would just adopt the right theory of jurisprudence and be strictly impartial, we would always win, or at least almost always.

John Roberts claimed that he would be a neutral arbiter, just calling strikes and balls.  Gorsuch assured us that he would implement the vision of the Founding Fathers.  That the vision of the Founding Fathers looked a lot like the Republican Party platform simply meant that the Republican Party was in perfect alignment with what the Founding Fathers wanted.  The fact that a neutral arbiter calling strikes and balls always seemed to side with big money interests might be written off as coincidence.  Indeed, I have heard conservatives proposing views of the Supreme Court so mechanical that it sounded like a sort of supercomputer.  Program it with the law, key in the specific facts, and it would spit out the one right answer as reliably as a mathematical equation.  (Then why bother having judges at all, one wonders).

This is not to claim innocence for our side.  Conservatives at least claimed that the proper role of the Supreme Court was to pretend we still lived in 1787 and ignore all evidence to the contrary.  Liberal theories were often so incoherent as not to be theories at all so much as wish lists. 

But up until last week, Republicans could pretend, even to themselves, that they wanted a neutral arbiter and were convinced they would win any case before the Supreme Court based on the sheer merits of their case.  Then Kavenaugh came out swinging, making an intemperate partisan speech and promising (in effect) to be an openly partisan judge.  And Republicans suddenly realized that was what they had really wanted all along.

Without Trump in office, it would never have happened.

And so another norm is lost.

A Few Comments on the Kavenaugh Nomination

Up till now I have done my best to avoid the subject of the Kavenaugh nomination on the theory that if I don't absolutely have to wade through a sewer full of toxic sludge, why would I do it voluntarily?  But since the subject has taken up all the oxygen today, I might as well make a few comments.

I am reasonably confident that Brett Kavenaugh could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and the Republicans would still confirm.  This is the absolute most important thing to them.  I recall someone suggesting to Flake or Corker that they block Trump's judges as a way of pressuring him to cooperate and Flake or Corker dismissed that as cutting off their nose to spite their face.  This is quite right from a Republican perspective.  Ultimately Trump doesn't care about judges, except to the extent that he is praised for his choices.  Republicans, on the other hand, care about judges more than anything.  It logically follows that the proposal is absurd.

In pre-Trump days, a nominee could survive allegations like Kavenaugh is facing, but only by going the contrition route.  He would acknowledge that he did binge drink in his youth, that he did drink to the point of blacking out, that he could not say with certainty what happened during the blackouts.  He was out of control when it happened, but since he chose to drink so much he is responsible.  And then he could present himself as a reformed man and discuss how he put all that behind him.  No more.  In the Trump era, the way to survive such allegations is to lie through your teeth about everything and accuse your attackers of being a partisan conspiracy.  This is very much a Bad Thing, although I suppose we should be glad that at least he left out the Deep State and Soros money as being a little too paranoid.

It is also depressing that people on opposite sides of the partisan line watched the same testimony and saw completely different things.

Finally, does this show that Democrats made a mistake in eliminating the judicial filibuster?  I would still say no.  I also highly recommend this article on the subject.  The whole idea that requiring a super majority is the norm and passing anything with a simple majority is an extraordinary event is a recent development.  Traditionally, passing legislation by a simple majority was the norm and filibusters were an extraordinary event, reserved for the most controversial legislation.  Filibusters of nominees were unheard of.  Clarence Thomas was confirmed by a vote of 52-48.  While many things about the nomination were controversial, no one questioned the use of a simple majority to confirm him.  The article blames Democrats for beginning the practice in 2003.  It was at that time that Mitch McConnell called eliminating the judicial filibuster the "nuclear option," suggesting that it was a very radical measure indeed.  Judicial filibusters were suspended for a while, but began to creep back in.  Under the Obama Administration, Republicans began to filibuster all nominees for the D.C. Circuit court, refusing to confirm any regardless of the merits. It was this that inspired Harry Reid to end the judicial filibuster.  To believe that Republican would have allowed Democrats the same privilege once a Republican was elected is extraordinarily naive.

Let's face it.  We, as a country have reached the point that Republicans will not confirm any judge who is not approved by the Federalist Society and Democrats will not confirm any judge who is approved by the Federalist Society.  In effect, we have reached the point that judges cannot be confirmed unless the President and the Senate are controlled by the same party.  The last thing we need is to be unable to confirm judges unless the President has a super-majority in the Senate.

Syria and Yemen; Cambodia and East Timor

When I first started to read Noam Chomsky, I noticed that he had a most disconcerting habit.  He responded to any mention of Khmer Rouge atrocities in Cambodia by downplaying them and by changing the subject to East Timor. 

What is East Timor?  East Timor is an island belonging to the same archipelago as Indonesia, but a former Portuguese colony, whereas Indonesia was a former Dutch colony.  While Indonesia gained its independence following WWII, East Timor remained a Portuguese colony until 1975, at which point it attempted to establish itself as an independent republic.  Indonesia did not take kindly to the attempt and invaded.  Its bloody attempt to subjugate East Timor continued at least ten years, and the occupation did not end until 1999.

At the time, invariably changing the subject from Cambodia to East Timor seemed like a case of "whataboutism."  Chomsky was wrong to dismiss or minimize atrocities in Cambodia which were, in fact, on a greater scale than the ones in East Timor.  He did, nonetheless, have a point.  In the end, there was not much we could do about the Khmer Rouge.*  Indonesia's atrocities, by contrast, were being committed by an allied government that we were arming and therefore actively abetting.  Furthermore, no US interest was actually served by Indonesian's actions, so it would cost us nothing to restrain our ally.  We did not.

This comes to my mind whenever I read Daniel Larison.  Larison differs from Chomsky in accepting that it is reasonable and acceptable for the US to pursue its interests (Chomsky considers it evil an illegitimate).  Nonetheless, he responds to all talk about atrocities in Syria by changing the subject to Yemen.  Yemen is a country on the southern end of the Arabian peninsula that is experiencing a civil war between pro-Saudi and pro-Iranian factions.  The pro-Iranian faction seized power in 2014.  Saudi Arabia has been attempting to restore its faction since 2015.  Saudi Arabia has been blockading Yemen, leading to famine and disease, and at least sometimes bombing civilian targets.

The situation Syria/Yemen is not unlike Cambodia/East Timor.  Two bloodbaths are going on.  The more severe is being committed by a hostile power.  We are passively allowing it to take place.  On the other hand, stopping it would require military intervention with uncertain prospects of success and the real risk of a super power confrontation.  The lesser one is being committed by an ally, armed and equipped by us, but not serving our interests in any meaningful way.  We could, presumably, put an end to it by refusing to abet it any further.

Which should be our priority, the worse bloodbath, or the one that we can more easily stop?

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*And, ironically enough, when the Khmer Rouge was finally swept from power by the pro-Soviet Vietnamese, our response was to support it as a resistance in the name of resisting Soviet power.

Trump, Syria, and the Blob

Back to accounts of Trump's staff thwarting him.  Among the plans they allegedly thwarted  were trade war with China (now underway), withdrawal from NAFTA, withdrawal from a free trade agreement with South Korea, withdrawal of our troops from South Korea, a preemptive military strike on North Korea, invading Venezuela, cutting off all aid to Pakistan, and a large scale intervention in Syria.

All but one of these are more or less unanimously seen as really bad ideas.  The exception is Syria.  The book reports that when Bashar Assad launched a chemical attack in Syria, President Trump said, “Let’s fucking kill him! Let’s go in. Let’s kill the fucking lot of them.”  Secretary of Defense James Matthis agreed and then promptly did not even make contingency plans for such a possibility, but proceeded with a pinprick strike on the one runway that launched the attack.  The Blob applauded, saluted Trump for restoring the US credibility that Obama had squandered in not launching such an attack at the time of the first chemical attack, and pointed out that, since the attack did not lead to escalation, there was no reason for Obama not to have done so earlier.  Apparently unnoticed was that the pinprick strike had no effect whatever on the war, except to temporarily deter further use of chemical weapons.  When Assad used them again, the Trump Administration launched pinprick strikes on three sites, as strategically meaningless as the first attack, but just as pleasing to the Blob.

Before getting into the details of any proposed large-scale intervention, can we dispense once and for all with the most common justification given for such an intervention.  The argument is that since Obama made a threat to intervene, the threat must be followed through or US credibility is lost forever.  Implied here as that this was the first time in the entire history of the US that a President ever made a threat and failed to follow through.  But, in fact, Obama's threat was not as clear as many have read into it.  His actual words were:

We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. . . . That would change my equation. . . . We’re monitoring that situation very carefully. We have put together a range of contingency plans.

That is a threat, of sorts, but one that leaves a lot of wiggle room for anyone who wants wiggle room.  The Blob obviously did not.  This thread, for instance, gives other threats made and not kept, many of the involving North Korea.  And, most famously of all, Donald Trump made his "fire and fury" threat, not not one member of the Blob seems to believe that had no choice but to actually start a war with North Korea, or we would lose all credibility.  In short, the Blob is so insistent that Obama should have intervened in Syria because it favored such intervention on the merits, not because it was convinced that all threats must be carried out.

So what are the merits here?  What it comes to, as far as I can tell, is a conviction that if only we had intervened earlier or more forcefully, we could have toppled Assad.  What would have happened next never gets addressed.  This article is a fine example:

Instead of implementing what had sounded like the commander-in-chief’s directive [to overthrow Assad], the State Department was saddled in August 2012 by the White House with a make-work, labor-intensive project cataloguing the countless things that would have to be in place for a post-Assad Syria to function. But how to get to post-Assad? The White House had shut down the sole interagency group examining options for achieving that end.

In other words, the author thinks we should have toppled Assad now and worried about what would follow later.  We tried that in Iraq and Libya.  It didn't go so well.  The usual response is that this time we didn't intervene and it went even worse.  Often also present is the insistence that the moderate opposition (as opposed to ISIS and other Islamist fanatics) would have prevailed if we had intervened sooner, and that the worst atrocities happened only after the Russians intervened, and that we could have prevented them by toppling Assad sooner.  Consider this article, which takes for granted that we could have safely intervened to topple Assad in 2011 (when the revolt first broke out), in 2013 (the whole chemical weapons "red line") or even as late as summer of 2015, when Assad's army was shattered, but that delay led to Russian intervention just a few weeks later. 

An alternate interpretation is obvious -- the Russians intervened to prevent the overthrow of their ally, Assad.  There was not some magical intervention date in 2015 that could have been avoided by toppling Assad earlier.  Rather, the Russians, after seeing their ally Qaddafi toppled, had no intention of allowing it to happen again.  They intervened when they saw Assad was in real danger of falling.  If Assad had been in danger of falling earlier, the Russians would simply have intervened earlier. 

But suppose we had intervened more aggressively, to the extent that the Russians would have risked a direct military confrontation with us if they had intervened.  Perhaps then we would have toppled Assad.  But then what?  No one in the Blob appears to have thought that far.  In all probability, the rival factions would have been at each other's throats and an imploding failed state with endless civil war would have ensued.  Certainly there were plenty of extremely nasty Islamist factions out there, including ISIS.  Well, what of the "moderate" opposition we backed in 2011?  The so-called "moderates" proved remarkably difficult to find and arm even at the beginning, and nice guys go down fast during civil wars. 

Well, some people have said, even that would be better than what we have now.  Libya is a mess, but the death toll has been a lot lower than in Syria.  But Libya at least is fairly peripheral to the Mideast's great power struggles.  Libya can burn to the ground for all US and Russia, Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia care.  Syria, on the other hand borders with Turkey and is only one country away from Iran and Saudi Arabia.  If Assad had fallen, all parties would be arming one faction or another, escalating the civil war.  Anyone who does not think Russia would have found someone to back, if only to stir up trouble, is being uncommonly naive.

Well, what of diplomacy backed by force?  There are some (including, as I understand it, John Kerry) who believe we might have successfully negotiated an end to the civil war if we had been willing to back our diplomacy with force.  I would be all in favor of that.  However, so long as we made Assad's removal a non-negotiable condition and Assad, with his Russian and Iranian backers, made Assad staying in power a non-negotiable condition, the chances of a negotiated solution seem fairly close to none.

And now Assad and his Russian and Iranian backers are gearing up for the final battle and a potentially massive humanitarian catastrophe.  And some are calling for a last US stand.


The Blob is not truly as uniform as sometimes implied.  The first time the Assad regime used chemical weapons during the Trump Administration, Mathis prevented a large-scale intervention.  Some members of the Blob disagreed.  Some are still calling for a last-ditch attempt.  But I agree with this critic of both Obama and Trump:

The “red line” retreat was a humiliating moment for U.S. power but I’ve never understood how an alternate course wouldn’t have ended in retreat anyway. If O had hit Assad, Assad almost certainly would have defied him afterward by using chemical weapons again. That’s what he did to Trump, after all, after the first U.S. strike on him in April 2017. What would Obama have done then? Another token bombing run, a la Trump? A small contingent of troops? The insuperable obstacle for every president on Syria is that Americans don’t understand what national interest is at stake and have had their fill of Middle East adventures over the past 20 years. There’s always support at the beginning of hostilities for punching a bully in the eye, but if the bully’s going to ignore you and keep doing what he does, you’re forced to either keep punching or to acquiesce and walk away. Trump was willing to throw a couple of jabs, Obama was willing to throw none, but neither one was going to commit to a sustained fight for purely humanitarian reasons. And so the question: If Obama had hit Assad in 2013 and then ended up retreating after Assad shook it off and kept gassing people, wouldn’t we have paid a price in lost credibility anyway? What price in terms of American lives lost might we have paid if Obama had committed to a McCain/Graham-style strategy of perpetual escalation to preserve American prestige?

I, for one, and glad that James Matthis avoided a large-scale intervention in Syria, and I suspect most Americans would agree with me.  But some members of the Blob may not.

The Steele Dossier and the Page Warrant

People arguing that the Steele Dossier was an elaborate Russia/Steele/Clinton campaign/Deep State plot to frame Trump run into the awkward question of why neither the Clinton campaign nor the Deep State ever published the information they allegedly went to such lengths to fabricate.  The usual counter is that even if none of these entities published the dossier before the election, but FBI did use it to obtain a warrant to spy on a member of the campaign.

Actually, Page had left the campaign at the time the FBI applied for the warrant.  This is significant because it means the FBI was not spying on an ongoing campaign.  Spying on a former campaign adviser could ultimately lead to incriminating information on the campaign, so the warrant was politically significant.  But it was not an attempt at real-time information on the political moves of an opposing campaign.

Still, regardless of whether he was part of an ongoing campaign, Carter Page should not have been wiretapped without probable cause, as properly established.  The Republican contention is that the warrant was improper because it was based on opposition research, and because the FISA court was not informed of the source's origins.

The Steele Dossier alleges three main incidents.

First and most notoriously, it alleges that during Donald Trump's November, 2013 visit to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant, he hired some Russian prostitutes to urinate on the Obamas' bed in the Moscow Ritz Carlton, and that the Russian intelligence filmed the incident and used the film to blackmail Trump.  The only part of this that has been established is that Trump was in Moscow in November, 2013 for the Miss Universe pageant, and that he stayed at the Ritz Carlton.

Second, it alleges that during Carter Page's July, 2016 trip to Moscow to address the New Economic School he met with Igor Sechin, CEO of Rosneft oil company to discuss lifting sanctions on Russia.  In return, Sechin offered, "the brokerage of up to a 19 per cent (privatised) stake in Rosneft."  Page showed interest but remained non-committal.  Page is also alleged to have met with Russian official Igor Divyenkin, who said that Russia had damaging information on Clinton, and broadly hinted that they had it on Trump as well.  This information allegedly came from "a trusted compatriot" of "a close associate" of Sechin.  In other words, it is a third-hand rumor.    (Memo 94, pp. 9-10 and Memo 134, pp. 30-31).  Nonetheless, there is at least some verification here.  Page's trip to Moscow at this time is a matter of public record.  Rosneft really did privatize a 19% interest.  And a close associate of Sechin turned up dead under suspicious circumstances.  (Nothing can be said of his "trusted compatriot.")

Finally, it alleges that Michael Cohen met with a Russian operative in Prague in August or September of 2016 to work on the coverup.  Cohen produced an apparent alibi to this meeting; Robert Mueller is working to break it.

The warrant against Page deals with this second alleged incident.

Republicans appear to be right about one thing at least.  The Steele Dossier really does appear to have been the primary source in applying for the warrant, as evidenced by the application (starting page 15) referring to Steele as "Source #1." 

Keep in mind this does not mean that the Steele Dossier was the primary source in the entire counterintelligence investigation, only that sub-portion of it that involved obtaining a FISA warrant against Page.  This is a distinction that Republicans like to blur, but it is real nonetheless.

Furthermore, the reference to Steele as "Source #1" implies that there are other sources as well, but does suggest that they are less important and are merely used as corroboration of the primary source.  Still, let's give at least part of a point to Republicans on that at least.

Republicans are outraged that the application does not say that the dossier was prepared as opposition research for the Democratic Party.  Democrats have essentially three responses.

First of all Steele was simply doing work for a dirt-digging firm.  He didn't know who the firm's client was.  Thus he didn't actually know that he was working for Trump's political opponents, although it seems most improbable that that Trump's allies would be funding the investigation.

Second, the application (page 16) makes clear that, although "Source #1" did not know who the client was, the FBI speculates that the research was probably being done to "discredit Candidate #1's campaign."  In other words, opposition research by Trump's political opponents.

Third (an rather caustically), although the FBI says that it believes Steele was doing opposition research for Trump's opponents, Republicans seem to be complaining that the application does not specifically name names.  This is remarkably hypocritical, given the uproar they made about inappropriate unmasking.  Apparently only Republicans should be shielded from unmasking.

Finally, although Republicans are outraged that the application relies on a hostile and biased sources, doing so is absolutely routine in warrant applications, and for obvious reasons.  Friends and allies of the target are usually not going to give the sort of information that can be used to establish probable cause.  Truly neutral and impartial parties generally just don't know that much.  Establishing probable cause generally means digging around in some sordid business because that is where the information is.  All of this really should draw a collective duh!

But so far as I understand it, Republicans' response is that if Steele didn't know who is ultimate employer was, then it was the FBI's responsibility to investigate and find out.  While acknowledging that the ultimate employer was most unlikely to be friendly to Trump, they maintain that it might have been a business rival, or a jilted ex-mistress (presumably with a new sugar daddy to pay for the research).  If the animosity had been purely personal or commercial, Steele's memos would have been fine, but knowing that the ultimate employer was a political rival hopelessly taints them.

I really don't see it.  The application goes on to say that Page and Sechin discussed "future bilateral energy cooperation" and lifting sanctions.  It also says that Divyekin discussed the possibility of releasing damaging information on "Candidate #2."  That does not sound like the sort of thing a business or romantic rival would be looking for.  It sounds very much like research for a political rival.  Just how much digging is the FBI expected to do into which political rival, and why does it matter?

What obviously is important is whether any of Steele's allegations have been verified. Milking the rumor mill is fine as the opening of an investigation.  It is not sufficient for a political ad -- or for a news article, or for a wiretap.  For any of these things there must be corroboration.  It was because of the lack of corroboration that the Clinton campaign did not use any of Steele's research during her campaign (must I reiterate again why it makes no sense at all to make such an elaborate fabrication and then not use it?), and why the press did not publish it until after the election and then with great controversy.  But the intelligence community has access to sources not available to the Clinton campaign or the news media.  Were these sources able to give sufficient verification to justify a warrant?

And the only reasonable answer, based on what has been made public so far, is that we simply do not know.  The application begins (pp. 1-2) with a pro forma explanation of who Carter Page and Russia (!) are.  Page 3 is a large, blacked out section of Russian's clandestine intelligence activities.  Page 4 says that Carter Page is foreign policy adviser to "Candidate #1" and is believed to be a target for recruitment by the Russian government to undermine and influence the US election.  This is, once again, a strong hit that it was probably not a commercial or romantic rival who underwrote the research.  And, really, it is appropriate to investigate attempts by a foreign power to undermine and influence an election, even if it is on behalf of the party out of power.

Pages 5-8 address Russian attempts to sway elections, in the US and other countries, in general, and in the 2016 election in particular.  Some chunks are blacked out that presumably deal with how they know Russia is meddling.  Pages 8 (toward the bottom) through 10 (near the top) say that George Papadopoulos and Carter Page are foreign policy advisers for "Candidate #1" and that the FBI believes the Russian government's efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with "Candidate #1's campaign."  Further information (a little more than a page) are blacked out.  Two things here are significant.  First, the application believes that Page, though no longer a member of the campaign, was still coordinating with the Russians, suggesting his association with the campaign had not entirely ended.  Second, the others doing the coordination were "associated with" rather than members of the campaign.  That probably refers to Roger Stone.

Pages 10 through halfway down 13 are about Page's business ties with Russia and are almost entirely blacked out.  Pages 13 through 15 is about Russian spying in 2015.  It is not quite clear why this is significant.  Page was a target for recruitment as a Russian spy in 2013, but the 2015 operation was separate.  What it may have to do with Page is blacked out.

Pages 15 through 18 are the sections dealing with the Steele Dossier and Christopher Steele as "Source #1."  It reports Page's trip to Moscow and address at the New Economic School as matters of open record and discusses Page's alleged meetings with Sechin and Divyekin according to Steele.  It also says that Steele has been a reliable source, that he was and doing dirt digging, and that he did not know who the client was but suspected "Candidate #1's" political rivals.  It also identifies who Sechin and Divyekin are and what "kompromat" is.  It also contains some blacked out information about Steele's ties to the FBI (presumably the work he and Bruce Ohr were doing seeking to flip Russian oligarchs), and on why Steele is considered reliable.  Pages 19 and 20 are blacked out and my contain corroboration.

Page 21 quotes July and August news articles about the Trump campaign's seeming openness to recognizing the Russian annexation of Crimea and lifting sanctions.  Pages 22-24 quote the September 23 Yahoo News article which made most the same allegations as Steele about Carter Page's trip to Moscow.  (Conspicuously absent:  Any talk about a 19% share of privatized Rosneft).  Republicans strongly condemn the FBI for using this article as corroboration of Steele's report, since Steele himself was the source.  Democrats defend it as not being offered as corroboration, but to show that Page denied the meetings.  Actually, the article is offered more as a setup for Page's denials.  There is also a footnote that acknowledges the remarkable similarities between the article and Steele's findings, but says the FBI does not believe Steele was the source of the article.  This mistake was never acknowledged, though later versions of the application mention that the FBI terminated relations with Steele after the October 31, 2016 Mother Jones article sourced to Steele came out.  (The first application dates to before the Mother Jones) article.  Pages 24 through 26 cite various new and other open source denials of the meeting by Carter Page and attempts by the Trump campaign to repudiate Page.

Pages 27 through 31 are blacked out but may contain corroboration of Steele.  Page 32 is boilerplate language saying there is probable cause to believe Page is the agent of a foreign power in violation of criminal statutes.  The rest of the application (total pages 67) is either boilerplate or blacked out.

Conclusion:  The Steele Dossier alleges real and serious crimes. Its origins as opposition research do not taint it and were revealed or at least strongly suggested in the application.  It is the product of milking the rumor mill.  Milking the rumor mill is fine as the starting point of an investigation, but not sufficient to justify a wiretap without further corroboration.  The publicly released portions of the dossier are not enough for a conclusion one way or the other whether there is enough corroboration.

And now Donald Trump has authorized further releases.  His authorized releases are specific -- pages 10 through 12 and 17 through 34.  Pages 10 through 12 appear to address Carter Page's business ties to Russia.  Pages 17 through 20 probably address corroboration or lack thereof of Steele's material.  Pages 26 through 31 follow Trump's and Page's denials of allegations.  I have no idea what they contain.  Pages 33 through 34 probably contain information about why the FBI suspects Page is the agent of a foreign power.

I will make two more comments.  First, I don't trust Trump as far as I can spit.  Presumably the releases he has authorized are selected to make him look good.  Nonetheless, it must be acknowledged that he is not disclosing the most dangerous parts of the warrant -- the early parts showing how the intelligence community knows that Russia is trying to sway the election and the later parts that presumably discuss how the surveillance would take place.