Month: November 2023

I had a bad case of insomnia last night, which is why I didn’t wake up early and write about the death of Henry Kissinger at the overripe old age of 100. If I had, it probably would have run with a headline very similar to Spencer Ackerman’s Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies. In a sense, that captures everything that needs to be said. Sadly.

Somewhere on my bookshelves I have a copt of David Rothkopf’s important 2006 book Running The World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power. It’s must reading for anyone concerned with American foreign policy is the second half of the 20th-Century. More recently, Rothkopf has been focused on the pernicious evil of Trumpism. In 2020, he wrote Traitor: A History of American Betrayal from Benedict Arnold to Donald Trump.

In the 2006 book, Rothkopf made very clear that virtually everyone of importance then involved in the National Security Council from both parties was mentored by Kissinger. It’s really striking how far Kissinger’s influence extended, including with Rothkopf himself who left the Clinton administration in the 1990’s to serve as managing director of Kissinger Associates, a geopolitical consulting firm Kissinger ran with former Clinton White House chief of staff Mack McLarty.

American critics of Kissinger tend to focus on the bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam, and with good reason. Before he died, Anthony Bourdain famously wrote “Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.” Of course, Bourdain also said he wanted to punch Kissinger in the face for his role in the death of 200,000 East Timorese, which is a rational response in my estimation. I don’t know for certain, but it’s probable that Bourdain wanted to pound Kissinger’s head with a mallet for his cynical betrayal of the Kurds.

“Promise them anything, give them what they get, and fuck them if they can’t take a joke.” –Kissinger to a staff member regarding the Kurds, 1975.

And who can forget Kissinger’s gift to Chile, Augusto Pinochet? I know you remember the fascist dictator who founded Operation Condor, persecuted leftists, executed thousands, tortured tens of thousands, and interred perhaps as many as 80,000 more.

People can throw around epithets like “war criminal,” but it doesn’t really hit home. Perhaps that’s why Ackerman compares Kissinger to Timothy McVeigh to make the point that McVeigh was a comparative piker in the creating death department.

McVeigh, who in his own psychotic way thought he was saving America, never remotely killed on the scale of Kissinger, the most revered American grand strategist of the second half of the 20th century.

The Yale University historian Greg Grandin, author of the biography Kissinger’s Shadow, estimates that Kissinger’s actions from 1969 through 1976, a period of eight brief years when Kissinger made Richard Nixon’s and then Gerald Ford’s foreign policy as national security adviser and secretary of state, meant the end of between three and four million people. That includes “crimes of commission,” he explained, as in Cambodia and Chile, and omission, like greenlighting Indonesia’s bloodshed in East Timor; Pakistan’s bloodshed in Bangladesh; and the inauguration of an American tradition of using and then abandoning the Kurds.

But you’ll never hear the Democratic establishment talk about Kissinger in these tones. Barack Obama and the Clintons will eulogize Kissinger just as they eulogized former Secretary of State Colin Powell who was similarly flawed but far more deserving.

I do believe we need to have a bipartisan foreign policy establishment that is respectful of each other, and saying nice things about the dead is part of the that. But Kissinger is the poster boy for all that can go wrong with this tradition. The man literally gargled the blood of innocents throughout the totality of his time in power, and he trained more than one generation of ensuing American statesmen and women to view the world through his lens.

The results were not good. Kissinger was a horrible, horrible person, a terrible American, a disastrous mentor and influence and he lived the fullest and most glamorous life imaginable. To top it off, now America’s elite will whitewash his record, exalt his career, and make all decent people throw up in their mouths a little.

Fuck Kissinger.

A slow clap for Amanda Marcotte’s lede in Salon.

It’s an amusing truth that comes up with regularity: Men who love Donald Trump struggle on the dating market. This is neither surprising nor regrettable. Supporting Trump is much like refusing to bathe, blowing your nose in your hands or farting loudly on purpose. It’s a repugnant habit that makes you repulsive to normal people. The whole point of dating and marriage is to find happiness, not to spend the rest of one’s days suffering in silence while the racist you live with cackles over Greg Gutfeld’s latest hateful diatribe disguised as “comedy.”

I wouldn’t date a Republican and I certainly would not marry one. If I were a woman, that would go double. What other people do is their business, not mine. If you love a Republican and want to be intimate with them or begin a lifelong commitment, who am I to judge? But I have to agree with Marcotte that it gets tiresome reading this recurring articles, including now from the Washington Post editorial board, bemoaning the fact that Trump-loving men can’t find heterosexual bliss.

To be fair, the editorial board is a little more subtle. The problem, they say, is that women can’t find mates and this is exacerbated by the fact that they won’t date people with whom they are not politically aligned. Simply put, too many young men are conservative and therefore undateable.

If you think this is unfair, consider that Democrats are less willing to date Republicans than the reverse, although both groups are reluctant. And since women skew to the left, they’re more likely to be the ones turning up their nose than the men.

For the editorial board, the problem is that marriage has “collapsed” and studies show that married people are happier than singles. If women won’t date Republicans let alone marry them, how will this societal calamity be repaired?

Marcotte treats this with the contempt it deserves:

In trying to sell women on this “marry men who repulse you” plan, the editorial board unconvincingly argues that simply being married makes people happier than being single. But while it may be true that married people — even those in politically mixed marriages — report higher levels of happiness than single people, it doesn’t follow that the wedding ring is the reason. Most Americans marry for love, after all. Being married to someone you wanted to marry is very different than what is being suggested here: lowering your standards just to get married.

It seems like it should need saying that marrying someone who makes you miserable is not likely to make you happier than sitting at home alone with your cats. It doesn’t seem to occur to the editorial board than men who can’t attract women should do something different. And I don’t mean a better haircut, nicer clothes or leasing a car you can’t afford. How about not being a Trump-loving asshole? Why not try that?

Trump, who is an admitted and convicted abuser of women isn’t a great role model. Women are wise to look askance at any male who holds Trump in even the least amount of esteem. He’s also solely responsible for stacking the courts with opponents of women’s reproductive freedom, and you can’t ask a woman to engage in a reproductive act with you if you’re not willing to let her decide on the potential consequences. Try telling a woman, “I’d like to have sex with you and if you get pregnant you are absolutely having my baby.” This doesn’t work well when explicitly stated, so why is it a surprise that it struggles as a pickup stance when left merely implicit?

I don’t know why so many men who can’t find mates wind up hating women. It doesn’t seem like the reverse happens with the same frequency. But, in any case, it’s a bit of chicken and egg question. Many men who hate women have no trouble attracting them, but many others are inept daters precisely because they don’t like women in the first place and don’t give a shit what they think or what they might want in a partner.

All I can say with certainty is that it’s true that women are having trouble finding good men, and the best way to remedy this is for bad men to try being good men for a change.

In a parliamentary system like the Weimar Republic, political dysfunction often takes the form of failing to be able to form a government. Something similar has plagued Israel in recent years, with multiple elections being required to gain a ruling majority in the Knesset. The United States doesn’t have a parliamentary system so our dysfunction takes a different form.

After the 2022 midterm elections, the Republican Party won a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, but it took them 19 days to settle on Kevin McCarthy has the Speaker of the House. As I noted at the time, the new Speaker didn’t actually rule over a functional majority because he could not pass spending bills or pay our nation’s debts on time without relying on votes from the minority caucus. I predicted McCarthy’s speakership would be short-lived, lasting until June at a minimum and the end of September at a maximum. It turned out to be the latter.

After another prolonged period of paralysis, House Republicans forced Mike Johnson of Louisiana in as the new Speaker over the unanimous opposition of the Democrats. But Johnson doesn’t have a functional majority either. In a parliamentary system, this would likely lead to no governing coalition forming at all and a new set of elections. But the key is that in either scenario, when the legislative branch cannot come together to execute its constitutional responsibilities, the result is likely fascism, beginning with a strengthening of the executive branch at the expense of legislative and judicial branches.

In the Weimar Republic, the Reichstag was the legislative branch, and when it ceased to fulfill its budgetary role, it was marginalized.

The first Brüning cabinet, headed by Heinrich Brüning of the Centre Party, was the seventeenth democratically elected government during the Weimar Republic. It took office on 30 March 1930 when it replaced the second Müller cabinet, which had resigned on 27 March over the issue of how to fund unemployment compensation.

Brüning hoped to be able to work with the Reichstag to solve Germany’s pressing economic problems, but when it rejected his budget for 1930, he worked with President Paul von Hindenburg to have it converted into an emergency decree. After the Reichstag rejected the decree, Hindenburg, at Brüning’s request, dissolved the Reichstag and called new elections. The steps that were taken after the rejection of the 1930 budget marked the beginning of the presidential governments of the Weimar Republic under which the president and chancellor used constitutional emergency powers to bypass the Reichstag.

By this point, a good percentage of the German public had lost faith in the parliamentary system. Specifically, they didn’t think coalition governments made up by cobbling together various parties, could act decisively or effectively to solve the nation’s problems. The problems were pronounced due to the global financial collapse on 1929. Once it was accepted that Germany would be governed by emergency presidential decree rather than through the Reichstag, the Weimar Republic was doomed.

Speaker Johnson has set up two new deadlines, January 19 and February 2, to fund the government. As The Hill reports, with no spending bills under consideration this week, that leaves only 16 legislative days for Johnson to meet the first deadline. His predecessor lost his job when he used mainly minority caucus votes to fund the government, and Johnson repeated that sin to extend funding into January. The government can be funded quite easily through this kind of ad hoc informal coalition government, but it is unsatisfactory to both Republicans and Democrats. It’s unsatisfactory to Republicans because they don’t control the spending levels and priorities but rather just continue the program set out by Nancy Pelosi when she was Speaker. For the Democrats, they rightly expect to share power if they’re serving in the functional majority, just as a coalition partner would in a parliamentary system.

Because the Biden administration cannot dissolve Congress and ask for new elections, nor can they simply bypass Congress and fund the government through presidential decrees, we face the ongoing prospect of government shutdowns and also potential national credit default if we can’t pay our debts on time. This constraint provides some protection against fascism but it actually makes it more difficult to solve the political gridlock. If we could dissolve Congress and hold new elections right now, we might get a functional partisan majority to replace the barely functional coalition majority we have now.

What’s constant between our system and Weimar however is that a dysfunctional legislative body loses public support and this leads to public acceptance of extra-constitutional solutions. Nothing is more extra-constitutional than Donald Trump and his political movement. This is a movement that refused to accept the legitimate results of the 2020 election and launched a violent insurrection against our legislative body in an effort to make Trump our Führer.

If polls are to be believed, the American public would prefer a Führer right now to another four years of Joe Biden and a dysfunctional legislature. Electing the Führer outright would resolve the House Republicans’ inability to agree on funding measures. They would no longer have factions among themselves, but one leader to follow. And that’s apparently what Americans want right now, not because they’ve thought this through but because the status quo calls out for someone strong enough to get shit done.

The Republican Party as a whole is really primed for a Führer because it lacks any coherent political program and cannot govern itself. They are desperate to be told how to act. They want to be compelled because they are conditioned against compromise. And the public is following along simply out of frustration.

There’s no question at this point that the legislature cannot stand a strong challenge from the executive, precisely because the congressional Republicans want to give their responsibility away. And the judiciary cannot due much of anything without help from the other two branches.

The American experiment in representative democracy appears to be coming to an end.

Can anything save us?

Yeah, what can save us is winning the 2024 presidential election. Nothing else will.

I am grateful that the New York Times is willing to report the objective truth about why so many members of Congress are miserable and don’t want to continue in their jobs:

More than three dozen members of Congress have announced they will not seek re-election next year, some to pursue other offices and many others simply to get out of Washington. Twelve have announced their plans just this month.

The wave of lawmakers across chambers and parties announcing they intend to leave Congress comes at a time of breathtaking dysfunction on Capitol Hill, primarily instigated by House Republicans.

To be honest, the House is so pathetic that it makes service in Congress hard to bear even for senators. It’s just difficult to get anything enacted into law. The only way the government is able to operate at all is simply by extending already existing programs at their current levels. That’s what the continuing resolutions do, and it annoys hard right House Republicans because those levels were set when Nancy Pelosi was the Speaker of the House, but it annoys all appropriators from both chambers because none of their work can come to fruition.

Here and there, there is a trickle of bipartisan legislation passed unrelated to spending, but it’s hard for most lawmakers to convince themselves that they’re making a difference. At best, their presence in Congress takes up a spot that at least theoretically might be occupied by the opposing side, but even that is rare due to the uncompetitive nature of most seats. The truth is, these members can retire and in most cases no one will notice and it won’t make a lick of difference.

And, yes, this is entirely the fault of House Republicans. Kudos to the New York Times for stating this plainly and without caveats.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the Jerome, Arizona scene. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

I have attempted to refine the cars with mixed results. More refinement for next week.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

Hey folks, I hope you had a great Thanksgiving Day. I’ve been arguing for a while that it’s not out of the question that Donald Trump’s support could collapse costing him the Republican nomination for president. And, I’ve argued that despite everything that has gone wrong with Ron DeSantis’s campaign, he’s still the most likely alternative to Trump. I still feel that way, but with less confidence. It’s beginning to look like Nikki Haley might emerge as the second option.

Now, to be honest, I don’t think it matters tremendously what the big donors think or want. The New York Times has found evidence that Haley is picking up momentum with the monied crowd, but that doesn’t really move votes. What it does is give Haley the freedom to run an actual campaign with a full staff and travel schedule, plus a budget for advertising and organizing. Without that ability, candidates cannot maximize their chances or easily capitalize if they start to get some juice.

At the moment, it looks like Haley’s best bet is to finish second in Iowa and use that to challenge for a win in New Hampshire where independents can vote. That would give her an argument when the campaign turns to her home state of South Carolina. As with DeSantis, she’ll need Trump’s legal problems to mount in a way that really causes Republican voters to question Trump’s electability. As things stand, President Biden’s low approval numbers and poor performance in head-to-head polls against Trump are giving right-leaning voters little reason to fear nominating Trump. He actually looks like the most electable option.

Haley is doing a good job of being the first choice of non-Trumpers, but I still think DeSantis is better positioned to be the first choice of Trumpers who feel like Trump is no longer a real option. Unfortunately for Haley, I don’t think she can win unless Trump becomes non-viable, so I still give DeSantis better odds.

But the fact that money is leaving DeSantis and going to Haley is perhaps an indication that her chances have improved. If nothing else, this threatens DeSantis’s ability to maintain a serious campaign, and it could all wither on the vine leaving Haley as the sole savior still available.

Howdy! I am back with another recent Seth Meyers A Closer Look segment:

Enjoy your Turkey Day tomorrow. I will be doing a lot of cooking. Cheers!

How grim are things in Gaza? Even the prospect of a four-day cease fire brings little enthusiasm. The New York Times quotes Bisan Owda, who has been documenting the war on social media, “This period is not enough to pull the dead bodies from under the rubble and bury them, to search for the missing people, to open the roads, to treat the injured.”

It doesn’t allow for any of the million northern Gazans who’ve been relocated to the south to return home:

“I want to go home,” Hind Khoudary, a freelance journalist who stayed behind to document the war after her family evacuated from the strip, said on Instagram. A temporary pause “without going home is meaningless,” she added.

Not that they are likely to have homes anymore, as roughly half the housing in the Strip has been damaged or destroyed, and a far higher percentage than that in the north.

“There’s a little bit of relief,” Ahmed Nassar, a 27-year-old taxi driver, said in a phone interview, adding that he hoped the deal would not fall through. “God willing, at midnight we will see it.”

…Mr. Nassar, who fled his northern Gaza neighborhood of Jabaliya and is now living in the central part of the strip, said the deal raised the prospect that a longer cease-fire could come in the next few weeks, which could allow his family to go back and check on their home.

Here’s what Mr. Nasser’s neighborhood looked like several weeks ago.

The Israeli army announced on Tuesday that they had “completed the encirclement of the city of Jabaliya, and [were] ready to deepen the fighting as they sought to take control of one of the last major Hamas strongholds in the northern Gaza Strip.” There’s not going to be anything for Mr. Nasser and his family to go home to.

But one day, the Israelis will be done destroying northern Gaza and there will be a big clean up problem. A million people will be looking for their things. They’ll be looking to excavate all the collapsed buildings so they can properly bury their family members. They won’t accept everything just being bulldozed.

It took America eight months, working 24 hours a day to clean up the World Trade Center after 9/11. Fortunately, very little of that tragic site had residential housing. There was no foreign occupying force interfering and looking to explore the tunnels underneath. The rescue crews had the best equipment available.

And let’s not overlook that the south of Gaza is next. It is already heavily damaged but will soon be pulverized like the north. And, this time, there won’t be any place left to run.

I hope the four-day truce comes about and results in the release of all the Israeli women and children being held hostage. I hope it leads to the release of all the hostages. But I can’t understand how Israel can extricate itself from what it has done. Where are the Gazans going to live? How are they going to live? Who will clean up? How will the dead be respected? Who will rebuild? Who will govern?

When Bashir al-Assad destroyed Syria, 70 percent of the population became refugees. Most of the Gazans were already refugees, and they’re not allowed to flee. Egypt is determined not to take them. Europe is already facing a right-wing backlash because of the Syrian refugees.

I understand the Middle East mindset about deterrence, but this is about more than preventing a recurrence of the unconscionable October 7 attacks from Hamas. This is a Humpty Dumpty situation.

And, as far as I can tell, no one has any idea what is supposed to happen next.

So, this happened.

BUENOS AIRES — A radical libertarian and admirer of Donald Trump rode a wave of voter rage to win Argentina’s presidency on Sunday, crushing the political establishment and bringing the sharpest turn to the right in four decades of democracy in the country.

Javier Milei, a 53-year-old far-right economist and former television pundit with no governing experience, claimed nearly 56 percent of the vote in a stunning upset over Sergio Massa, the center-left economy minister who has struggled to resolve the country’s worst economic crisis in two decades…

…Milei made a name for himself as a television pundit who insulted other guests, and he has shown a tendency to fight with the news media. He has circulated conspiracy theories and raised unsubstantiated claims about electoral fraud…

…He has branded Pope Francis, an Argentine, an “evil” leftist. Climate change, he says, is a “socialist lie.” He would hold a referendum to undo the three-year-old law that legalized abortion.

And of course there are Argentinians who explain their vote in terms you will recognize.

“We don’t have anything to lose,” Tomás Limodio, said a 36-year-old business owner who voted for Milei in Buenos Aires on Sunday. “We’ve had this type of government for so many years, and things are only getting worse.”

…“The thinking is well, maybe since Milei is crazy, he’ll launch himself like a kamikaze” and make necessary reforms that previous leaders refused to make, in fear of getting kicked out of power, Touzón said. “Let’s use the crazy man to make the reforms that the rational ones didn’t want to make.”

Javier Milei sounds exactly like Trump. The Milei voters sound exactly like 2016 Trump voters who thought the system needed a big shakeup, and damn the torpedos full speed ahead. The problem will kamikazes, however, is that everyone dies including the pilot.

But, here’s the thing. The center-left establishment in Argentina really has led the country into very bad economic straits. It really has been in power for a very long time. That was not the case for the United States in 2016. In 2016, the center-left had taken over only eight years prior, in the midst of the worst economic downturn in 80 years. And it had quickly righted the ship. The economy had recovered and was going so strong that it lasted well into Trump’s administration, only crashing on the shoals of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Whether you liked Hillary Clinton or not, there really was no broadly economic reason to fly an explosives laden plane into her political coalition. The things that needed to be done, like tackling monopolistic concentration, were certainly not going to be done by Republicans, let alone a con-man like Trump. But enough people were feeling left behind economically and culturally, that a rabid insult dog had a cult-like appeal to millions.

And, as Hannah Knowles reports from Iowa for the Washington Post, the cult is still going strong.

Offered the chance to support other presidential hopefuls who champion similar agenda to Trump in a less abrasive package, Republicans are for now sticking with the former president — underscoring how his personality and shattering of behavioral norms have long been a major part of his appeal…

…“Joe’s gotta go,” said Lori Carpenter, 59, as she left the Fort Dodge event.“And the ho shouldn’t have been there in the first place.” The “ho” was Harris, she clarified, before offering another nickname for Harris that was even more vulgar.

“It doesn’t bother me,” she said of Trump’s insults and crudeness. Her relative, 71-year-old Marsha Crouthamel, agreed.

“It doesn’t bother me either because his policies are strong,” she echoed, adding that Trump got a lot of laughs and added, “Sometimes you just gotta excite people a little bit.”

“We’re Christians, and we can look past that,” Carpenter said. “We see the good that he did our country when he was in.” Asked what she thought of GOP rivals arguing they could deliver Trump-like policies without the baggage, she said: “They’re weaker than him.”

 

 

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the Jerome, Arizona scene. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

I have now started to paint the cars along the far side of the road. These will be adusted (Several times, no doubt.) in the future installments.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.