Orwellian Trump

"And the creatures outside looked from pig to man and from man to pig and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
--Animal Farm, George Orwell

The Quagmire of Culture: Radical Islam

A friend, returning from Afghanistan, told of arriving at a village where, a few hours earlier,  the Taliban had beheaded a school teacher in front of his class for the offense of teaching girls. The blood on the ground outside the school house was still coagulating.

I had asked him why he had chosen to work on a project in Afghanistan, when it clearly posed a threat to his life. He used that story as an answer: He was saying we must resist such evil.

He was into "nation building" which is to say, he was into the idea of changing a people's culture.

Republican candidates now speak of denying "safe havens" for terrorists in Somalia, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq when, across the border in the sovereign nation of Pakistan, lived Osma Bin Laden in the best safe haven of all, and consider that  the 9/11 conspirators lived in Berlin.

Bernie Sanders has called Syria and the whole Middle East, "a quagmire within a quagmire."

We lost in Viet Nam not because, as the gun toting Republicans will tell you, "Because the liberals wouldn't let us win," but because we were an alien culture there and we could never gain the support of the very people we said we were there to liberate.  We tried to "lay a little American freedom and commerce on them," George Carlin said. They weren't ready for it, not for another 30 years.

Today, in the New York Times is a story about a woman beaten to death by a mob.  I assumed she was just another woman who sought refuge in a shelter in Afghanistan because she had the audacity to run away with the man she loved, away  from her family and the husband they had  selected for her, another story about a father murdering his own daughter or a mob doing it for him. But  no, this particular woman had the temerity to object to men defiling a shrine.  There was likely some justification for the murder found in some sacred text. (Even the New Testament speaks of stoning a woman to death for sexual transgression--Jesus neatly side stepped the issue by saying he who has no sin should cast the first stone.)

Afghan police keep young boys boys chained to iron beds at their police compound so they can use them "for pleasure" at night. Unable to bear the screams of the children, an American captain tried to beat the hell out of the police chief, only to find himself drummed out of the Army, for the crime of having stuck his nose in where it didn't belong.

Of course, the issue is, where do any of our American noses belong in Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Iraq, Lybia or any of these cultures we do not understand?

Christopher Hitchens has argued that religion is the great poison which defiles life on earth. I cannot know, but I suspect it is culture, and religion is only the excuse or the organizing principle. 

It is true that people need some rationalization to commit acts of extraordinary cruelty. Among any population are people who are sadists and psychopaths who live for the opportunity to stone someone to death.  They are unemployed and have nothing better to do than run out and join a mob to stone a girl to death. The best entertainment in town--plus you get your virgins in heaven for participating,

So where does this leave us, here in America?  

I would never claim we should forswear all foreign interventions.  Going to war against Hitler was a good idea. It is true, you could have argued then, as I am arguing now,  we should  never have expected to reverse the culture of the Third Reich, which would send women to concentration camps for marrying a Jew.  But Germany had a capital and flag and a defined set of borders and an army in uniform. That war was a huge undertaking, but doable. 

What about the argument it's better to fight them in the streets of Baghdad than in the streets of New York?  A catchy phrase, but empty and essentially stupid--fighting them in the streets of Baghdad does not mean you will not have to fight them in the streets of New York. If only. Wishful thinking. Oh, we'll bomb the whatever out of them. We'll make the sands of the desert glow.  

How the dirtbags of ISIS must smile to hear that sort of talk.  The bleating of the impotent. They know there is nothing for the Americans to bomb. Their power is in stealth, not munitions factories, in bank accounts, not massed columns of tanks. 

From British officers in colonial America to Wehrmacht officers in Czechoslovakia, to the French in Algeria and Viet Nam, invading armies have complained about stealth attacks from native partisans who fade back into the local population. There is no successful strategy to defeat a determined local guerrilla force.

Listen to the Lyndon Johnson tapes as LBJ asks his most trusted adviser, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, what Johnson should do about Viet Nam. "Well," the senator tells him, "You really don't want to stay in Viet Nam, do you?"
"Hell, no," Johnson says. 
"Well, them boys on the other side, they know that, too."

John McCain has thought this out. He says we should send an army to the Middle East,  like the army of the Roman Empire, prepared to rule for 150 years, if necessary.  That's what "winning" will look like.

I wish we could free women in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Iran, Pakistan and Indonesia from their bondage.  But freeing the slaves in a well defined area of the continental United States took four years and cost more lives than the United States has lost in all other wars put together. And that war ended in something that looked like victory, only to continue for another 100 years in the hearts and minds and public schools and toilets and restaurants of the South.

A policeman in "The Wire" once observed the war on drugs is no proper war at all because wars end. Policing, however, continues forever. If we had spent the trillion dollars we spent on Iraq on American intelligence and police, would we have detected the 19 "martyrs" of 9/11 before they got on the airplane? Possibly. The problem is, all the money in the world will not solve a problem if organization and intelligence is lacking. Here you have men who take flying lessons in Florida who are not interested in learning how to land the aircraft. That didn't catch the attention of the flying instructors?  And if it had, would our FBI, or CIA or FAA been smart enough to act? 

Could we have detected the shooters at San Bernadino?  Can we predict a shooter at a Denver Planned Parenthood or at Sandy Hook? 

If a group of men meet mysteriously in a motel or an apartment to plan the next attack with a dirty nuclear bomb or Saran gas, will the neighbors notice and if they do will they know to whom and how to report it? And if they call the Hampton police department, will the Hampton police know what to do with that information?

Well, Ted Cruz will tell us he has the answers. Clearly Donald F. Trump KNOWS he has the answers, as do all the rest of the Republican candidates. It's only Mr. Sanders and Ms. Clinton and Mr. O'Malley who are in the dark about what to do about "Radical Islam"  or the next Planned Parenthood shooter, or the next Sandy Hook shooter, all of whom I place in the same category. 

My friend, who had just got back from Afghanistan, so appalled by the beheading of the school teacher, went off to fight again against another evil empire--this one not Islamic. He wound up in a foreign prison for five years, although, ultimately, his life was spared. 

The lesson I drew from that: Passion, outrage, even righteousness is not enough. 

As Bernie Sanders said in the last debate, using his finger to point to his grizzled head: "First and foremost, we have to be smart."

Mr. Trump Demands the Evidence!

Mr. Trump is outraged, just OUTRAGED! that Ms. Clinton asserts ISIS is using videos of Donald Trump as recruitment tools. ISIS proclaims Islam is at war with America and Donald Trump's expostulations--"Keep Muslims out!"--and, according to Ms. Clinton Trump's statements and insinuations are all they need to demonstrate this.

"Where are these videos?" asks Mr. Trump. "Where is the evidence?"

Donald J. Trump demands an apology from Mrs. Clinton. He wants to see the evidence. How can you make such an accusation without presenting the evidence? Mr Trump wants to know.

Well, we have found them.  Those videos are in the possession of the thousands of Muslims on roof tops Mr. Trump says he saw  in New Jersey, celebrating the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

It is wonderful that Mr. Trump, who has claimed that vaccines cause autism, that Mr. Obama was born in Kenya, that a majority of American Muslims want to be governed by Sharia law, that Hispanic immigrants are not the best Hispanics, are rapists and murderers, that Hispanics love him because he gives them jobs, that every trade agreement between China and the United States is injurious to the United States, that Ms. Clinton was the worst Secretary of State in the history of the country, that Ms. Clinton lied about Whitewater and lied about Benghazi, that she has lied about everything her whole life,  that Muslims by the thousands cheered from the rooftops in New Jersey watching the Twin Towers collapse has new found a new respect for evidence.

As Christopher Hitchens noted, "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."

Mr. Trump has a strong aversion to the practice of marshaling evidence to bolster his arguments. He simply says it is so, and his audience goes wild.  Carl Sagan once noted extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but that was science he was talking about, not Mr. Trump. 

As Bertrand Russell once noted, "The fact that an opinion is widely held is no evidence whatsoever that it is not utterly absurd."

And that is where Mr. Trump finds himself on each of the opinions he has voiced above.  He has exploded in righteous indignation to find that his tactic has been expropriated by a rival.  

The pot has called the kettle black. 

Muslims Save Christians on a Bus: Trump Wants to Revoke Their Visas!

One of my sons told me about this great thing: You can go on line and pull up Der Spiegel or Le Monde or any foreign newspaper and if you are on Google Chrome, you can hit the translate tab and peer in to what Germans are reading and writing. It's wonderful, a sort of legal, shameless peeping Tom into the life of another nation, an ocean away. 

So, the first news item I saw was about this bus in Kenya, stopped by al-Shabaab Muslim cut throats.  They stormed on the bus with their attack rifles, and demanded of the Muslim passengers that they identify the Christian passengers. The Muslim passengers refused to do this, and the Christians escaped. The Kenyan Muslim passengers said, "Kill us all together or let us go."

What I love about this story is none of these Muslims who protected the Christians at risk to their own lives would be admitted by Donald Trump to the United States, even on a tourist visa. 

The other thing is these decent human beings who protected people who were likely strangers, fellow bus riders, were Kenyans. You remember the Kenyans. That's what Donald Trump says Barack Obama is.

President Obama has denied he is a Muslim from Kenya. 
Donald Trump says Obama owes him an apology.

Kerfuffle: Hillary Small; Bernie Big

So a staffer from Bernie's kids stumbles into a website with proprietary Hillary information and now: 1. The DNC is closing down Bernie's campaign by closing down his access to the small donors (2 million of them) who have contributed to his campaign  2. Hillary has not said, "Oh, this sounds like a lower level misstep; let's move on."

This is how Hillary repays a magnanimous opponent, who has kept his debate with her on an admirable level of substantive argument and respectful disagreement.

The Democratic National Committee has acted as if it will brook no challenge to the chosen front runner, as if spirited debate will somehow hurt the Democratic campaign for Presidency in 2016. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz has done the bidding of unknown, unseen power brokers who limited debates to a paltry 5 and placed them in spots which ensure a small viewership. 

This is exactly the bitter, small minded pettiness which her critics have found unattractive about Hillary Clinton, and if she benefits from these injustices to her rivals rather than speaks out against them, well, I know a few Hampton Democrats who will not simply vote against her in the primary but who will find better things to do with their Saturdays in the Fall of 2016 than to go canvassing for Mrs. Clinton.

The Dumb Down Dilemma: Phony Toughness

Dumb and 

One of the eternal problems of mass communications is the perceived need of appealing to the lowest common denominator. The vote of the most ignorant, mentally limited citizen counts exactly the same as that of the most educated and intelligent citizen.

It is up to the politician to appeal to both.

This is not a huge problem when you are discussing simple concepts, but when the problems and their solutions are complex, then you get the candidates sounding like morons in an effort to find something simple even the most simple minded will agree with.

In England, the style has been for politicians to speak up to the electorate; in America it's always speaking down the electorate, following H.L. Menken's admonition nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

Dumber

So you have Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz all trying to boil down our very vexing problem with terrorists who carefully plan an assault with attack rifles and pipe bombs, and who knows?  Maybe Saran gas or a dirty bomb is being planned.  

These Presidential wannabes want to formulate a zinger or two even the most cognitively challenged citizen can remember, so it becomes:  It's all President Obama's fault. He isn't scary enough to the terrorists. All we need is a winner (Trump) a guy who is so tough he scares them (Cruz) not "feckless" (Christie) not a disaster (Rubio) and all the terrorists will run shrieking from the field of battle and stop building bombs in their garages or apartments. 

In the case of the San Bernadino shootings: Obama shoulda caught those two. None of the blame can be laid on the Congress, for limiting data gathering after Snowden, and none can be laid on the difficulty of identifying malignant people who are intent on being invisible to whatever radar we might construct.  

It's not like the terrorists are robbing banks. Banks you can fortify, and you can arrange for quick response teams alerted by buttons at every teller's station. These terrorists choose places more or less randomly--who woulda thunk a building housing case workers for local health and social workers in San Bernadino?

The fact is, what makes terrorists so difficult to stop is you cannot simply bomb the "shit" out of them because you don't know where they are, and you cannot "carpet bomb them" for the same reason and you cannot simply make the sands glow, attractive as that image may be. 

Flexing your muscles and growling in a manly way will not intimidate them or send them fleeing for the doors.  
 It's interesting: Neither  Trump, nor Cruz nor Rubio nor Christie nor any of the tough talkers has ever actually done anything in their lives which requires actual toughness, to my knowledge, like put on a uniform and having a bullet fired at them in anger, or served in a trauma unit handling cases of wounded, or, for that matter, hiked the Appalachian trial, kayaked down the Potomac, run a marathon or completed an Iron Man competition.  These flaccid wimps are calling President Obama a weakling.

Certainly Ted Cruz never stood in that White House Situation Room and given the order for Navy Seals in helicopters to attack a compound in Pakistan, knowing full well what happened when Jimmy Carter tried to send in the helicopters across an Arabian desert. 

Far as I can see, not a one of them could last ten minutes on a basketball court with Barack Obama.  So where do they get all this tough talk?

I remember guys like this from high school and college, who were blow hards, but if you got right in their faces, stood about two inches from their noses and said, "You want a piece of me? I'm right here," well, then they got all jovial and backed off with aplomb born of lots of practice at retreating.

When did we get to the point where nobody calls the bully's bluff in politics?

If we had more prime time Democratic debates, we could have Hillary and Bernie and Martin lacing into the simplicity and saying all the things we want to hear about, but for now, by default, the only voices on the airwaves, the only images are of the thundering herd from behind the podiums.

President Obama at the Archives: "Oh, How Quickly We Forget"

"How quickly we forget. One generation passes, two [generations pass] and suddenly we don't remember where we came from.  And we somehow suggest that there is 'us' and there is 'them,' not remembering we used to be 'them.' On days like today, we need to resolve never to repeat mistakes like that again."
President Barack Obama, December 15 2015

Today, President Obama welcomed newly naturalized citizens in a speech at the National Archives, the building in Washington, D.C. where they keep the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence under pressurized, humidity controlled glass cases. 

The building is one of my favorites in Washington, with the words: "What is Past is Prologue" etched in the stone facade above the entrance.

But the assault on the Constitution we must fear and guard against is not of the physical variety, of humidity or mold--it will always come in the form of action and ideas. 

When Donald Trump calls for the exclusion of immigrants and even tourists because they are Muslim, that is what tears at the fabric and soul of the American Constitution. But what really sets fire to that document is the response by Americans who think themselves patriots and winners, as they respond to the purveyors of fear and tacit loathing with cheering and mindless joy.

We are so lucky to have as President a man who can write and speak among the best politicians we have ever had. Lincoln was one of the best writers in the 19th century. Since Lincoln, we have only rarely been blessed with a President who has risen to the level of Obama. Roosevelt could inspire, finding just the right words in a very dark time. 

Reagan could deliver the lines prepared for him by his script writers, but the ideas contained in those lines, the disparagement of government, the facile sloganeering, the idea that government is the problem not the solution were poisonous to the body and soul of government and the nation.



Oh, how I will miss President Obama. I already miss him, even before he has left office, just thinking with a mild revulsion at those characters on the Right who might well replace him.