Backlash

Donald Trump, it has often been said, is simply a backlash to the election of Barack Obama. 

The swing of the pendulum.

Watching the folks lined up behind Mr. Trump at his Kentucky rally a few days ago, it was easy to see the point. Right here in Hampton, watching people arrive to vote at the polls for the recent town elections, we have people in New Hampshire who look just like those Trump backdrop people.

They have stepped right off the pages of "What's the Matter with Kansas," the Thomas Frank 2004 book about how conservatives won the heart of America. One of the portraits Frank presented in that book Mad Dog has never been able to shake was the invective from a man who said his son, who can competently re-wire his home, who has rebuilt truck engines on his farm, who changes out the water heater, uses a computer to plow the fields and who can hit a 90 mph fast ball, could never get into Princeton because his SAT scores aren't high enough and he barely eked out a "C" in Spanish and he flunked calculus.  So his son, according to Princeton, just doesn't have the smarts to merit admission to Princeton.

Nicholas Lemann, now a professor at Columbia, writing in the March 16th New Yorker describes his father driving him as a little boy to Princeton: 

"We'd stand on Nassau Street and drink in the magnificence of the campus, as if it stood for everything great, and also distant in the world. Today Princeton is even more magnificent, with beautiful modern buildings scattered around the Colonial and Gothic ones, and elegant stores lining the street across from the Campus."

Students on campus tours with their parents absorb the message: This is the place where success is made, where the tickets to high paying careers are handed out, where superiority reigns, where merit is rewarded and where lack of merit disqualifies you from a future among the aristocracy. It is the classic embodiment of, "If you work hard and have God given talent, you will prosper. If not, it's your own damn fault."

It is where the tyranny of meritocracy reigns.

Barack Obama was the epitome of all this--the child of a Black man and a white woman--who raised him as a single mother--who, through hard work got from Hawaii to Occidental College in California, then to Columbia University in New York City, then to Harvard Law.

His father was not a rich real estate icon. Obama, a physical specimen, lithe, graceful, played basketball as men play basketball, and he was eloquent, inspiring, everything Mr. Trump is not.

But then, under Obama's administration his Department of Education went off the rails, and he did nothing to rectify that. The Department intervened in the operations of universities, insisting that on campus sexual assault allegations be handled by new protocols which stripped the accused boys of their right to question their accusers, to due process and a fair trial.

At Brown, an engineering student in his third year, found a drunk co-ed in his bed in the wee hours of a fraternity party and he had sex with her. The details have been scarce, but apparently, as reported in the Brown Alumni Monthly, they awoke the next morning, exchanged telephone numbers. When she got back to her dorm, her roommates heard the story and told her she had been date raped. Nobody ever asked if the boy had been drunk, and nobody ever said whether, if he had,  that would have made the slightest difference to his defense before he was expelled, losing three years of hard work in the Department of Engineering, having to pick up the pieces of his shattered career.

This became part of the cloth of "Believe the Woman," where due process went out the window.

At Penn, a male swimmer, who had an undistinguished career, underwent transgender therapy and then competed as a woman swimmer, smashing all records and winning Ivy League championships. Nothing wrong with this, according the the great minds in the Ivy League.

When the President of Harvard was asked by a Harvard alum (Rep. Elise Stefanik) whether she would tolerate on campus calls for the genocide of the Jewish people, the President, Claudine Gay, replied it would depend on the context. In what world is the advocacy for genocide of any people a matter of context?  This is not a difficult or trick question Stefanik said. Of course, you do not need a Harvard diploma to know that much.

After thousands of people lost their homes in the financial crisis of 2008, men went to jail for their roles in the scams which precipitated the fiasco, in Iceland, Denmark and Scandinavia. But President Obama did not send a single man to jail in the United States.

Speaking together, in "The Wire," two political campaign managers throwing down drinks at a Baltimore bar bemoan the choices made by their successful candidates. "You work so hard for them. You may even come to believe in them. But when they win, they always disappoint you."

So, do we have the failures of Barack Obama to blame for the successes and excesses of Donald Trump?

Yes, partly we do. We see the failure of the winning liberal coalition to discipline and moderate its own members, to prevent those who worked for the winning team from doing really stupid things.

 

But, in some measure, Trump may have been inevitable after the triumph of liberalism--it was bound to go off the rails, just as Trump has been doomed to go off the cliff. 

The problem now is, how do we get the pendulum headed back in the other direction?

How Wars Are Won

 

As any YouTube addict will know, World War II was won by brave and determined soldiers, good generals and competent armies using high tech devices like proximity fuses to shoot down airplanes and, the ultimate high tech device, that product of really abstruse minds, the atomic bomb.

During that war, the US produced 9,000 airplanes a month and Hitler said that was simply impossible.

It produced 150 aircraft carriers during that war, swamping the Japanese Navy, which, by the end of the war had only 5 functioning carriers.

Despite the Japanese ethos of war, despite the willingness of soldiers and kamikaze pilots to die rather than to surrender, the United States methodically turned warfare from a test of courage and physical endurance into a contest between the manufacturing capacities of nations.

During this current war with Iran, American airplanes and Israeli Iron Dome missiles have been shooting down Iranian missiles and drones and we have been told the Iranians have shot their wad and that rocket launchings are down 90% as they have run out of missiles. So, America, we are told, has again simply overwhelmed its enemy with industrial and technological power.

But, the truth is, we are likely seeing a classic example of David slaying Goliath using a weapon which may look unimposing (a slingshot) but which can be used at a distance, with some stealth and which is superior to a sword which looks fearsome but is simply not as effective for the type of conflict a warrior of small stature can use in asymmetric battle.

A recent analysis of a simple "kill mission" involving an RAF high tech stealth fighter plane accompanied by two other war planes, shooting down an Iranian missile is both illuminating and sobering. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVyAiZnvQhE&t=210s

The airplane was successful in destroying the drone, but the cost of the missiles, the cost of keeping the airplanes in the air was in the millions, all to destroy a $50,000 missile.

And Iran is nowhere even close to having exhausted its supply of drones and missiles. In fact, the United States and Israel have had to import Ukrainian soldiers knowledgeable in drone warfare to help them. After abandoning the Ukrainians in their fight against Russia, the US is now begging them for help, something which the Ukrainian drone warrior interviewed on the PBS Newshour had a hard time not crowing about--he managed to suppress a smirk and said only that he was glad he could help the US in our hour of need.

It turns out the cost of keeping a high tech warplane in the air has been costed out per minute of flight and that is a major Achilles heel in the United States' war planning.  Sure, we can hunt down a ten cent missile with a thousand dollar missile, but who wins that war?

The spectacle of Mr. Hegseth crowing about how we are reigning down death, destruction and mayhem on the Iranians and pounding his tattooed chest about how badly we are skunking our opponents reminds Mad Dog of watching his son step off a wrestling mat, having just pinned his opponent, who looked so overwhelmingly muscled and intimidating at the start of the match.

"Oh, how I love to destroy those jacked up [muscular] guys. They come stomping out looking all fearsome, but they have to be helped back to their chairs looking like little boys crying for their mothers."

Why that memory surfaces now, watching Mr. Trump's chest thumping boys do their frat boy taunting is something to ponder.

Wither to War?

 

Constitution of the United States

Article 1

Section 8

Paragraph 11: The Congress Shall have the power to declare War, grant letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water.

NB: Letters of Marque and Reprisal are legal documents allowing private citizens, e.g. captains of sailing vessels, to seize ships belonging to another nation, i.e. to make privateers legal, the forerunners of "contractors."

Stephen Decatur & Barbary Pirates

Congress declared war for the first time in 1812, voting to approve President Madison's request for war against Britain, which had been kidnapping American sailors and pressing them into service on British war ships, and which had been fomenting Indian wars against the United States along its western borders.  

Only on four other occasions has Congress declared war:

1. War against Mexico 1846 (Mexican-American War)

2. Spanish-American War 1896

3. World War 1

4. World War 2

No Congressional approval was enacted for the War in Vietnam. 

Neither did it vote a declaration of war against Iraq or Afghanistan, but in these two cases it voted an "Authorization for Use of Military Force."

The Iraqi war authorization happened after a year long campaign by President Bush and his Secretary of State falsely accused Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein of marshalling "weapons of mass destruction" in preparation for an attack against someone, presumably someone the United States wished to protect. No such weapons were ever found nor likely ever existed. 

The Spanish American war was launched by a newspaper magnate, William Randolph Hearst, for unclear reasons, although it clearly sold newspapers. An American warship, the Maine, had blown up in Havana harbor, likely owing to a boiler explosion, but Hearst claimed the Spanish Empire had bombed the ship. Famously, an American  reporter in Havana had told Hearst he could see no reason for war, but Hearst told him all he wanted was photographs of the aftermath of the explosion: "You give me the pictures; I'll give you the war!"

You Give Me the Pictures; I'll give you the War

The Mexican-American war was even worse: the United States was swept by notions of "Manifest Destiny" which meant the entire continent should belong to the United States, and that meant California and New Mexico and everything down to the Rio Grande. Texas, meanwhile had Americans who wanted to be separate from Mexico and they wanted to establish slavery, which was illegal in Mexico. The rest is all Alamo and myth and Davey Crockett and might makes right.

Manly Hero

Thomas Jefferson, who did not at all like the idea of a standing army or an American Navy, finally realized if his young country wanted to be able to trade with the world, he needed to protect his trading ships, which the Barbary pirate nations of the North African and Mediterranean coasts simply confiscated, demanding "tribute" (ransom.)

It would be cheaper and more efficient to simply send an American navy to attack these pirate states, and Jefferson did that, without a declaration of war.  Meet force with force. Commerce demanded it.

U.S. Soldiers Spanish American War

Then the world changed, and the American military became the De facto policeman of the world, and America became the prime target of every fundamentalist wacko group. President Obama looked at this new world and realized there was no practical way to get an authorization of war out of Congress every time he wanted to kill some kingpin of every homicidal group or rogue head of state. 

U.S. Soldiers Manila Manifest Destiny

So, Obama joined a NATO raid on Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, 2011, and he launched a drone against Anwar al-Walaki (Yemen, 2011) and he launched a raid against Osma bin Laden (Pakistan 2011) who most people assumed was behind the 2001 World Trade Center attacks--and if he wasn't the trigger man, he surely did celebrate those attacks and call for more.  Then Obama got Mullah Mansour, leader of the Afghan Taliban, in Pakistan in 2016 with a drone attack. Hakimullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban got drone struck in 2013.

Obama, a constitutional scholar, argued that executions like these did not require a trial or Due Process or a declaration of war because these were non state actors (except for Gaddafi, whose "state" was dubious.) 

None of these guys engaged in actual "war" wearing uniforms, operating by the Geneva convention rules of war, taking prisoners and providing for Red Cross visits. 

The ACLU actually challenged this practice in Court but got nowhere.

President Obama's drone strikes and especially his operation to kill Osma Bin Laden were notable for their surgical precision, and "collateral damage," i.e. deaths of civilians not targeted but in proximity to the attack were limited. Nevertheless, there were 540 drone strikes over the 8 years of his presidency.

So, now we have Mr. Trump bombing Iranians for reasons which are opaque, and keep shifting: Iran was a week away from an atom bomb after we obliterated their nuclear program; no, wait, Iran was threatening to assassinate Mr. Trump; no, that's not it; Iran was killing its own citizens; no, wait, it was going after Israel; no, wait, Iran is still a threat to world peace. 

"They weren't very nice to me," seems to be Trump's main thing.

As Paul Krugman has noted, sending in the fleet with aircraft carriers, missiles, drones, airplanes is costing $1 billion a day, money which Ukraine could surely have used to great effect, not to mention medical insurance programs, food for the poor, American homeless, infrastructure repair.

History helps us understand: This one ranks right around the Mexican-American war, except we get no land from it, and the Spanish-American war, but we get no naval bases or a nearby island to abuse.

The difference in Trump's attacks on Iran and Obama's targeted drone strikes seems to be one of precision and clarity. 

Obama said we have to fashion our use of force to the enemy we face--in his case shadowy strongmen who target innocents at markets or office buildings or embassies and then slip away, often without explanation--"You figure it out," seemed to be the terrorists' modus operandi--and so we respond with stealthy, targeted surgical strikes and let the Taliban, ISIS, Hamas or Hezbollah figure out what they did wrong.

In Trump's case, he kills the Ayatollah and some of his friends, and announces it's time for the Iranians to rise up and change the regime, as if that is going to happen automatically.

After the Atyatollah's boys killed somewhere in the neighborhood of 7,000 protestors, few in the West will mourn his passing.  And if Trump had said, "Well, this is what I do to people who offend me," and left town, then maybe we'd all shrug, the way we did with Maduro. Neither one of these gems garners much sympathy.

Trump, it is well known, is a great defender of protestors--just ask Renee Good or Alex Pretti.

But Trump's "move fast and break things" method only works occasionally. Just ask Elon Musk.

And wars are usually easier to get into than to get out of.

You Never Smelled the Stench?

 

"Band of Brothers" Private David Webster confronts a German baker in a bakery where Webster has arrived with his compatriots to seize bread they intend to feed to the newly discovered concentration camp prisoners--today we would call them "detainees"--and the baker protests that he is and never has been a Nazi. "Nicht Nazi!" the baker yowls.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7b0ZX61DLA

"Nicht Nazi?" Webster repeats, incredulously. "You are trying to say you never smelled the fucking stench?" 

Deportees, Detainees, Doomed

What this all about, of course, is the complicity of the townsfolk, who had to know about the concentration camp within sniffing distance of their lovely homes, bakeries, wine shops. The American troops are thunderstruck by what they discover in the camps--they called them concentration camps--today we would call them "detention camps."

Nice People (note the flag)

This depiction is accurate. American troops capturing SS officers and troops at concentration camps, seeing the walking dead prisoners, the cattle cars brimming with bodies, so the Americans lined up the SS guards against walls and shot them, or hanged them in front of the prisoners.  

American soldiers, having seen plenty of horrors on the battlefield, still had the capacity to react to the horror of seeing people reduced to cattle, people who did not even speak their language, but who were human or who showed the sorry remnants of humanity, and the Americans were outraged.

American soldiers could never look again at those German villagers and see them as anything other than accomplices, silent, passive accomplices, but accomplices nevertheless.

In "Band of Brothers," this is economically portrayed in the nodding relationship Captain Nixon has with the wife of a German colonel, whom he firsts encounters when he breaks into her home looking for whiskey and she appears before him, folding her arms and silently rebuking him for being a common thief, a marauder-- and he feels enough shame to simply slink away. But the next time he sees her is when she is ushered into the concentration camp just outside the village and she is forced to carry bodies of dead prisoners to burial sites; then the roles are reversed--it is she who is humiliated and exposed as a criminal, and her crime is not simple breaking and entering but indifference to murder.

If you walk through Amsterdam, around the corner from the "Anne Frank" house, there is a canal lined on either side by lovely, neat row houses and across from those houses, on the far side of the canal, are individual metal plaques engraved with the names of the people who lived in those townhouses, and their ages when the Nazis dragged them off, and which concentration camps they died in: Peter DeVries, age 7,  Anna DeVries, 32, Sobibor concentration camp. 

The Dutch handed over 75%  Dutch Jews to the SS and they all died in concentration camps, the highest percentage of any European nation.

Anne Frank

The Dutch were tidy, well behaved, decorous and yet, in that lovely land of beautiful, blonde people, something really ghastly happened.

American Citizens Japanese Extraction 1942

During the Deliberative session in Hampton when the warrant article (#38: instructing the Hampton Police to sign no contract with ICE) was discussed, and one speaker spoke of Renee Goodman and Alex Pretti, dead at the hands of ICE, a well scrubbed couple, looking to be about seventy or eighty years old (old enough to remember World War II and the Holocaust) were visibly upset and they got up from their front row seats and hurried out of the gymnasium, in mute protest to the unseemly mention of murder and mayhem.

Worst of the Worst?

Others, who shared their views stood up to speak, to protest that those who spoke of ICE and Minnesota were "politicizing" our Deliberative Session, our warrant articles and our civil, polite, orderly town proceedings by bringing up ICE.

As if the most political police force we have ever seen in the United States is not political.

 

The image of Anne Frank, whose crimes were: 1/ Being an illegal immigrant  2/ Being Jewish may seem to be a long stretch from Amsterdam to Hampton, but it could hardly be more relevant.

Not Political, Nicht Nazi

Comfortable, proper, quiet, polite Dutch families stood by silently, averted their eyes, ignored the stench, as 75% of their Jewish neighbors were rounded up and sent off.

The crime of silent complicity is what those Dutch were guilty of, just like that German baker, and all the townsfolk of that German town. The American soldiers rubbed the clean German noses in it and made the townspeople line up and walk through that concentration camp.

Is Nice Enough?

And now we have ICE scouring the country, looking for empty warehouses to serve as "detention centers"--oh, the euphemism!--or spare jails (in Rockingham County, NH) to set up the 21st century version.

Of course, these centers are not Bergen-Belson, Dachau, or Auschwitz--they are not charnel houses, but they look enough like it to warrant comparison: Big places for lots of people grabbed up arbitrarily on Kavanaugh stops (i.e. they spoke Spanish and looked Hispanic) and kidnapped, transported to these warehouses of humanity.

But we do not want to politicize the discussion. MAGA is not political; it is aspirational. 

We are not Germans or Dutch, after all. 

We are Americans.

The Eraser Effect: RFK, Ryan Schwank & Truth

 

In George Orwell's Animal Farm, the official truth was written in chalk on a blackboard, which was convenient when truth needed to be changed. So "Four legs good, two legs bad," could be erased and replaced with "Four legs good, two legs better."

Truth, in authoritarian regimes, can be adjusted to the needs of the regime.

Or, it can be ignored entirely.

For Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the MMR vaccine protecting against measles, mumps and rubella is bad. He says it's better to get the measles, as he did and as countless generations did before him because "natural" immunity is stronger and better than the immunity from vaccines. Which sounds right, right? What could be better than "natural"? 

Except, that turns out to be wrong.  Measles, the most highly contagious disease known to the world of viruses, has one other peculiar quality: it erases immunity to other viruses and bacteria when it infects human beings, an immunosuppression which can last 5 years. So even if you survive your measles, you may die from a subsequent bout of pneumonia next year.

It does this by attacking the immune cells (B cells) which make antibodies and T cells, which remember what previous bad guys (viruses) look like and call in the troops.

The MMR vaccine does not do this. So getting your immunity to measles from the vaccine is way better.

Any number of scientists have talked about this erasure phenomenon, from Vincent Racaniello and Brianne Barker of the podcast, "This Week in Virology," to Paul Offit, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Pennsylvania, but their megaphones are not as loud and are not heard as far as RFKJR's.  So, falsehood flies and the truth comes limping behind.

Another truth, which has been obvious to those willing to see it, is the nature of ICE agents: they are simply, as one citizen speaking at a Hampton town "Deliberative Session" said, "The otherwise unemployable, the unrestrainable, the bottom of the barrel, ignorant of law and eager to find a safe space for sadism."

But his microphone reached only the 150 or so citizens gathered in a middle school gymnasium to consider a warrant article instructing the town chief of police to sign not contracts with ICE.  Voices in small town New Hampshire tend to stay in New Hampshire.

Ryan Schwank

And then there is Ryan Schwank, a lawyer employed by ICE to oversea the instruction of agents in the law, the Constitution, the sort of basic training for any officer of the law in the United States of America, which, presumably, differentiates the good guy with a gun and a badge from the bad guy with a gun.

But then ICE accelerated and abbreviated its training program, and cut out all that fluff about law and the Constitution, and sent its agents out to the streets to enforce their own sense of law and order, which meant breaking down doors without judicial warrants,  shooting a mother as she drove by,  and shooting a nurse being held face down on the ground ten times in the back.

In Richard Grant's wonderful "Crazy River" he tells a story about a twenty foot alligator named Gustave who eats people who wander into the water. People, of course, fear him and try to avoid him, but when he eats somebody or chomps off a leg, they do not hate Gustave, because he is simply doing what alligators do. It is behavior they expect of him.

And that is what Mr. Schwank is telling us, namely the truth, that when you put a beast into a place, you expect that beast to behave as his nature directs him to behave, whether an alligator or an ICE agent. They are just doing what they do.

So is RFKJR. He is just doing what he does, as directed by the brain worm. 

Whether ICE agents have been screened for brain worm is unknown to Mad Dog.

The Smile

Donald Trump excoriated a reporter who, unsmiling, asked about Jeffrey Epstein's victims. Trump, of course, does not want to hear the name Jeffrey Epstein, for reasons we can all imagine, and he launched into his customary assault on the reporter as a worthless piece of failure, who works for a failing network, a place for losers like her.

He never answered the question about Epstein, but he did launch into a new line of attack on the reporter. She clearly did not qualify as a Miss Piggy, being svelte and comely, but Mr. Trump, always looking for the point of entry, the chink in the armor, assailed her for failing to be able to smile.

What kind of a woman never smiles?

Such a nasty woman.

She replied that she was asking about victims of sexual predation, of pedophilia, and that did not seem to be something you'd want to smile about.

None of that registered with Trump who was off into a tirade about worthless, lying news media types. 

Trump, ironically, has made unsmiling a thing.

He laughs and smiles at his rallies and in the Oval Office, looking like a latter day Hermann Goering, enjoying his power and affluence, but he has been careful to cultivate a stern, powerful man image as well. Just look at his official Presidential photo, which is hung in every government office building by the Government Service Administration, a practice which has always struck Mad Dog as positively Hitler-arean. But, the Presidential photo has been adorning walls of government buildings for decades, if not generations.

Trump's is almost a parody of Hitler's.

This cannot be a coincidence. 

Some common driving force must account for these visages.

Tough guys do not smile.

In Hampton, there are elections in March and the Democratic candidates, mostly men, have been admonished by the party operatives, almost entirely women, to smile for their campaign photos. 

Bronze Star, but he Smiles

As politically incorrect as it may be to observe, every single Democratic woman has reacted to unsmiling male candidates with horror, saying they have to look "approachable" and less "severe."  

The few male members of the Democratic Party apparatus who  have commented have said, "Well, it wouldn't hurt to smile." But the gender divide cannot be just a case of individual preference; it has got to be a gender difference.

Women, Mad Dog ventures to postulate, want their men cuddly, warm, friendly, "nice," and smiling.

Men, on the other hand, Mad Dog observes, are not so inclined. They tend to want men in office who project strength, a willingness to be not liked, a willingness to offend to get their point made.

Some years ago, during an open primary for a Congressional seat, eleven candidates emerged. One was a former combat veteran, a winner of a Bronze star, who had fought in Iraq. He smiled occasionally, but every woman who came to the house party where he spoke to a dozen different questions about abortion, immigration, health care, and crime--he was a former US attorney who prosecuted drug cartels--every woman thought him too aggressive, not "nice." 

The winner of the primary turned out to be a very nice man, with a warm smile, gay, who some men described as a "house cat," and the reservations the male voters had about him was that to send him to Washington to spar with Jim Jordan would be like sending a man to a knife fight with a spoon.

The woman loved him.

The Democratic women.

Mad Dog asks: Is it any wonder there is a gender divide in exits polls, with the Democrats losing the male voters, especially among males who never went to college?

Mad Dog does not think so.

Hard Work Is For the Little People

Adolph Hitler, in Mein Kampf, asserted that the best course for a human being was to trust his heart, not his mind, to believe in emotion not intellect.

Mad Dog has been thinking about this as he has considered another problem: the difference between dilettantism and mastery, and, beyond that, the difference between something which is derivative and that which is original, new or at least sufficiently different to be considered really creative.

All this came to mind when Mad Dog saw someone on youtube talking about his life, saying, "I had always wanted to be a writer." And it made him think of how many times he had heard someone say, "I had always wanted to be a doctor."

Of course, hearing that, Mad Dog had thought, "You are exactly the person who should not become a writer," or a doctor. 

What that person who said "I always wanted to be..." is actually saying is that he had seen representations of what doctors are, what their lives are like, and what their rewards and trials are like and that's the sort of life they could imagine for themselves.

Of course, medical school admission committees gave preference to the children of doctors, not out of a sense of clubbiness, but because they knew these kids had no romantic illusions about a life in medicine. And what actually makes for a successful doctor is not a person seeking to be a hero, but someone who is actually interested in the process of problem solving, which is what medicine is all about.

This is called separating the "dreamers" (the romantics who have no knowledge of the actual reality) from the real champions. 

Fantasyland, Magaland

The difference between the World Wrestling Association professional "wrestlers" and the NCAA wrestling champions is the difference between theater/make believe and Fantasy land and the reality of those who have mastered the science, done the hard work of learning, failing, succeeding and training.

 

Nothing Like the Real Thing, Baby

Similarly, there are scads of people who can see themselves sitting around Parisian cafe`s like Hemingway, scribbling in notebooks, writing the next great American novel, having adventures with liberated women, and strolling along the Seine, who have little or no regard for the actual written word. They are not in love with the thought but with the romantic, unrealistic idea of what being an author would be like.

Actually being good at something, attaining mastery requires not just talent, a proclivity, but a willingness to labor, painstakingly at it, to endure the boring, tedium of attending to minute details, to craft and fashion. 

This is precisely what Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. lacks: Doing science and even reading the science others have done is tedious, requires patience and a willingness to follow an argument, then the patience to see where that study, that argument might have drifted into error. He does not have that. It is so much easier to just believe something and then slapdash apply some belief to get where you want to go.

Thus, the story of the polio vaccine is a long, exhausting exercise, but it's just easier to wave your hand and say the polio vaccine killed more people than it saved, and be done with it. Same for measles and rubella.  Dilettantism is just so much easier. You can be lazy and prevail.

Which is not to say everyone has to be an original or a genius to be worth listening to. The Marsh family sets lyrics to music and songs which have been worked out by others, by folks with talent who did the work of mapping out a song, but the Marsh family uses that work for its own purposes--it uses the mind work of others to evoke an emotional response which is worthy in its own right. Their rendering of "Minnesota" is emotionally right, and effective, even if they did not work out the rhythms and the chords and the harmonies themselves. They make it work for their own purposes, and they should be congratulated for that. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRHxXHZmVAM&list=RDBRHxXHZmVAM

 But then we should appreciate the original, the man with talent, attention span and insight to do the thing which others may use for their own purposes. 

Steve Goodman is a name few know today, but his most famous work, popularized by Arlo Guthrie, and sung by a host of famous artists is astonishing. Why he did not become as famous as Arlo Guthrie, Johnny Cash, John Denver, Judy Collins, or Willie Nelson is another topic altogether. But whatever the reason, it has nothing to do with laziness.  Steve Goodman's version is, to Mad Dog's mind at least, the best of all of them. And he was the guy who made the original observations, who spun that golden story. His introduction here says it all. He says his manager told him to announce he wrote this song, but to him what was important that the song got crafted--he knew he had written the song, but it wasn't the credit for the song he craved: the reward was the song itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4ztWNJYFrU&list=RDe4ztWNJYFrU&start_radio=1 

When we observe Pam Bondi, testifying before a Congressional Committee, we can see the playbook, literally, in front of her. She has a list of Democratic Congressmen or Senators in front of her and under each name is a paragraph of oppositional research, so when Adam Schiff questions her, she does not answer his question, "Is it ICE training to shoot someone in the back once he is restrained on his belly on the ground?" but she responds

"Will you apologize to Donald Trump for trying to impeach him after you now know that Joe Biden tried to cover up Hunter Biden's involvement with Ukraine?" 

When questioned by Senator Richard Blumenthal she did not answer his question but spewed out, "I cannot believe that you would accuse me of impropriety when you lied about your military service. You lied, you admitted you lied to get elected."

Blumenthal had lied about serving in Vietnam when he was in fact in the military, but remained safely stateside during Vietnam (as had George W. Bush, who never lied about his lack of deployment.)

But this is laziness. Rather than doing the hard work of trying to justify a shoot first-ask questions later ICE force of miscreants who seek a safe space for sadism, she simply attacks her interlocutors as being unworthy of questioning her.

This is a technique favored by Pete Hegseth, and Trump himself, who calls any journalist who asks an embarrassing question, "the worst journalist ever from a failing network with no ratings." Miss Piggy.

Does it work? 

Yes, at least it gets appreciative laughs from the 40%, the MAGA mob. 

And that is the only audience Trump and MAGA need or care about. 

They are not living in the unforgiving, real world of detail, mastery and insight, but in the magical world of just say it and it is real, especially if you say it often enough.