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.