Is the Presidency About Personality?

After eight years with a man in the Presidency so many of us liked, have we come to conflate the idea a good President with a good man?

I think that's likely, at least for many of my friends. 
But if my time in Washington taught me anything, it is how little we actually know about the person behind the public image, "The West Wing" notwithstanding.
John F. Kennedy has got to be the most stark and recent example.

Let us consider things many find deplorable, even detestable about Donald J. Trump:
1. He is characterized as a misogynist: 
based on the stolen comments about his glee in fondling women, and his oogling contestants in beauty pageants.  I really don't know the guy. But, I suspect, you wouldn't hear anything from him you wouldn't hear three blocks away from my home, down at the local bars, when men are drinking beer together.

2. He is a coward, 
who used his money to avoid the draft and serving in Vietnam.
 I cannot hold avoiding Vietnam against any man, even one who wants to be President.

3. He does not give to charity, which means he's selfish. 
 He accumulates money, but unlike Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg or Warren Buffet, he does not "give back."  One might infer this impulse toward philanthropy among many of the rich derives from a sense of gratitude and a sense wanting to use wealth for good works, but it may just as well derive from a sense of guilt at having so much when others are wanting. Mr. Trump, one suspects, has a sense of entitlement to his wealth, like royalty of the past, who thought themselves deserving because God willed them to be wealthy, or, in Trump's case because he "earned" his wealth.

4. He has avoided paying his share by avoiding income taxes for twenty years. 
But all rich people avoid paying taxes, use loopholes.  Some, who live in New York City, keep careful logs to document they have spent fewer than 180 days in the city to avoid paying city income tax, on the claim they do not actually "live" in the city.
Mr. Trump's harrumph that he avoided paying income taxes because the government would have only "squandered" his hard earned money is, of course, subversive and would lead one to say if the head of the government tells you to evade income taxes,  then you are right to do so.  The contradiction in the head of state advising citizens to avoid paying the taxes his own government levies is something new. 
On the other hand, it's exactly the sentiment and the rationalization of every garage owner, every shop owner, and many doctors I know. They consider income tax a theft. Mr. Trump says he already pays plenty of taxes--corporate taxes, gasoline taxes, sales taxes on his yachts, real estate taxes--why should he worry about income taxes?  This makes sense, emotionally, to his voters, even if it's bad public policy.

5. He's a xenophobe:
He threatened to ban all Muslims from entering the country and he promised to round up and deport illegal immigrants and he promised to build a wall. Of course, all of this is dismissed by his supporters as not to be taken literally.  He was just saying what many people have said privately, that we are, in fact, horrified by radical Islam, its bestiality, its rabid aggressiveness, its intolerance, and being told our fear is not politically correct, is not rational is only infuriating.  
As for the Mexican "wet backs," this is puzzling, because outside a few border counties in Arizona and Texas, most people I know do not fear or loathe Mexican immigrants, legal or illegal. Quite the opposite.  Here, he really does sound like some later day Hitler, looking for a scapegoat to hate, hoping to find someone to blame for the loss of jobs.

Considering personal characteristics--what HRC called "temperament"-- there are some things to reject about the man:
1. He's a psychopathic liar: 
He has not accepted the idea of "evidence based" argument. So he doesn't have to cite evidence that Muslims were dancing on the roof tops in New Jersey on September 11, 2001. He does not have to cite evidence that Hillary Clinton ever committed a specific crime--she is simply "crooked." (Of course, the head of the FBI showed no more care about evidence than Mr. Trump, but that's another topic.)
Of course, when it comes to his accusation of criminality, he was just kidding, or, really, lying. But, it's not lying if you really don't mean it. 

2. He's thoughtless and impulsive: 
He, to all appearances, does not think much about what he says before he says it: So he's for the war in Iraq before he's not; he's okay with punishing women for having abortions, until he's not. 3. He's okay with transgender using whichever bathrooms they desire, until he's not. 

3. He's untrustworthy:
Rumor has it, although I do not know the details, he has few scruples about entering into contracts with people with no intention of actually keeping his end of the deal. This, he considers good business. Promise to pay the electrician or the plumber, but then pay half of what you promised.  You can choose not to believe this about the man, or you can choose to believe. 
You can cite his multiple bankruptcies, which he simply dismisses as good business.  Here we may have evidence, but as is true of most evidence based arguments, he will also cite evidence for his argument what he did was not stiffing workers but simply protecting his investors. 
But I choose to believe he hurt the little guys, the contractors, the construction workers, while enriching himself.  Is he worse in this than others in the top 1% of the top 1%? I don't know.  
Does this disqualify him from my vote? Yes, but I can understand how the boys at bar shrug this off.
 He is as good as his word:  But nobody ever said he was "good." He's a bad boy. And they love him for it. 

So, now we have examined Mr. Trump's personality, such as we can see it for ourselves on TV.
My point is none of this is "real." It is all open to interpretation, contrary assertion, spin.  You will say he's despicable; his friends say he's adorable.

The big things which  ought to be the focus of our resistance to President Trump and, as importantly, to the Reactionary Right, now in power, will be policy issues. 

Let's stop talking about Trump's personal failings. Hasn't yet and will never work. 

1. Medicare: 
If people are policy, then Mr. Price, at HHS, will try to turn this into Vouchercare, aka Coupon care.  And Paul Ryan and the Republican majorities in Congress will aid and abet him.

Oh, save Flipper! He's drowning!

2. Obamacare: 
Like democracy, the worst possible solution,  other than all the other solutions which have yet been tried--at least in this country.  There is another option, the "government option," or Medicare for all,  but even the Democrats did not have the guts or the votes for this last time. Had we elected Bernie Sanders, we still would not have got this, because "we" elected a Republican House and Senate and Supreme Court. 

3. Social Security: 
Mr. Trump promised to keep it intact, but Mr. Ryan wants to privatize it. Attempts  to privatize Social Security are attempts to destroy Social Security.  If the power to tax is the power to destroy, then the power to privatize is the power to destroy Social Security.

4. Creating jobs, 
or rather resuscitating jobs in the Rust Belt by renegotiating trade deals; protecting the homeland by rejecting globalization.  
Mr. Trump has been canny enough to understand his voters in the Rust Belt don't want just any job, they want their old jobs back. They want to coal mining jobs, the assembly line jobs in the big factories.
If Paul Krugman and others are correct, the jobs lost in the coal mines are gone because of fracking and the emergence of cheaper, better fuels. If Krugman is right, robots, not the Chinese have reduced factory jobs in Indiana and Wisconsin and Ohio and Pennsylvania.  
Mr. Trump has the option of giving them jobs, not on the assembly line but on bridges, on the roads, on the power lines. The question is whether there are enough infrastructure jobs out there waiting to be created, and how easily private enterprise can be induced to create them. Maybe privatizing our interstate highway system can work. Maybe not.
If Mr. Trump knows something Mr. Krugman does not, and if he is able to bring the sorts of jobs back to those who voted for him, that may be all that matters. 
We can call him a misogynist, a xenophobe, a liar, a cheat, a con man. The boys down at the bar don't care.  
They can get goodness when they go to church on Sunday.
What they want the rest of the week are their jobs and their sense of self respect. 

Merry Christmas to Us, One and All

If it is true, as Mephistopheles says in "Dr. Faustus" : "The greatest Hell is remembering happier times," then at least some of our countrymen may well yet learn the truth of this observation over the next four years. 

For now, however, we have an economy which works for most of us, but indisputably, the best in the world; we have a health care system which, while very flawed, structurally flawed (because it's based on a private enterprise, profit motive rather than on a public health model), is still 22 million times better than it was just 8 years ago; while we still are caught in the brier patch of eternal war in Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires, we have fewer American boys and girls on the front lines; and while we have  festering lesions of malicious discontent scattered over our backsides and shoulders, we still  have a functioning brain and central nervous system and some functioning brawny muscles, as a nation. Not to say those abscesses cannot seed the blood stream and ultimate infect the central nervous system, but for now, we seem to have a functioning immune system.

One thing we might all do is to read about what the world was like before the 21st century, in ancient times, in the 18th and 19th centuries, and even back in the middle of the 20th century, that time so many Americans in the exurbs and rural parts of the country dream of returning to, when being White meant you had advantages, but for most White families, not enough to matter all that much, because you were still poor and desperate.

My father was a man who often surprised me  with his answers. I loved reading about the Civil War and the Second World War and about all sorts of glorious past epochs, when great forces swept continents and when war was a force which gave lives meaning, and when railroads were being built across the continent linking the nation, and when waves of immigrants flooded into our great cities and into our heartland, spawning the most diverse, energetic and vibrant nation on earth. And, still holding a Bruce Catton volume in my hand, I asked my father, if he had a time machine and could go back to live in any time, what would he choose? King Arthur's time, when he could be a knight?  Franklin's Philadelphia, when the Constitution was being written?  

And he replied, with an atypically benign smile, "The present."  Then he added. "This is the best time on the planet to be a human being."

God Bless Us, one and all.

Weakness of the Left

Listening to NPR on the way to work, it dawned on me that as much as I love NPR, there is something every bit as aggravating about the assumptions of liberals as the assumptions of the Right.

The story about the Tunisian guy who demolished a crowd with a big truck in Berlin revealed this man had come on the flotilla across the Mediterranean, got stuck in an Italian refugee camp, where he was jailed for burning down part of the camp, was released because the effort to deport him back to Tunisia floundered when Tunisia, a dysfunctional state, did not provide papers to do this. So he hung out among the large Tunisian community in Northern Italy, where many are known to be radical Islamists, then hopped a train to Germany, crossing borders as easily as we travel from New Hampshire to Massachusetts, and then mowed down some Christmas shoppers in Berlin.  Last Christmas in Munich, Turkish and Syrian men fondled blonde German women in a square because, well, it was okay to do that sort of thing where they came from, sort of like Tahrir Square in Cairo.

When Donald Trump looks at that, he responds viscerally and says, "Send them all back!" and "Bar them from entry."

And the response from liberals, who value offering sanctuary to the oppressed, who want to welcome the tired, the poor, the wretched refuse of the teeming shore is what, exactly?

When a trans sexual, who has testicles and a penis, refuses to use a locker room specially set aside for him (or her, as he wants to be called) because he/she wants to use the girl's locker room to strip down and change and does not want the stigma of being made to feel different, what is the liberal response? (As if we have made him/her feel different!)

click to enlarge

When the man who cannot afford his insulin because his health insurance will not cover that cost learns his neighbor gets it for free through Mass Health, the state run program for low income people, how does the liberal explain why this unemployed man seems to get a better deal than the working man who pays the taxes to support Mass Health gets, how does the liberal explain that?

When a Muslim transit worker in New York City is accosted by someone who screams she should go home to her own country and a group forms which teaches concerned citizens how to intervene in behalf of this unfortunate Muslim and the teaching is to approach the Muslim and ask how this assault has made her feel, has the liberal, tolerant approach been of much use?

What this country needs is an effective liberal radio show, a sort of liberal Rush Limbaugh, who is better than Radio Free America was, which is more muscular than Rachel Madow or any of those well meaning nerds on MSNBC, which is more present than Trevor Noah or even Jon Oliver, which takes up several hours every day, predictably, right across the time slot from Rush and which can fight fire and lava flow with fire. 

We sure don't have it now. 

Resistance

In the dark days of the Civil War, when the outcome was in doubt, Grant was pushing South with his armies and his generals, facing Robert E. Lee, a general commanding an army which seemed to never blink, never lose, despite all odds against them.

Attack. Do not worry about what your opponent will do.

As is true today, people on the right side of history expressed fear and dismay, and these were commanders fighting armies of slavery, racism, dedicated to inequality and aristocratic rule. And yet these righteous warriors expressed fear of failure; they were daunted by the victories of their opponent.

Grant told them:
"Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing about what Lee is going to do. Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault, and land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do."

And this is what I feel like roaring, every time I read an article in the New York Times or on Huff Post about what Donald Trump has done, or will do, how he's appointed a destroyer to each Department he seeks to undo, at  Health and Human Services, HUD, Energy and the EPA.

Let us now dedicate ourselves and highly resolve to stop worrying about what Trump is going to do to us, but let us think about what we are going to do to him and to all those who sail with him.

 For starters,  let us simply speak the truth to our neighbors, in letters at every opportunity, to say, "You know, Dr. Ben Carson is clearly in the early stages of Alzheimer's and Trump has appointed him to wreck HUD by simple incompetence. And if he does this,and if  public housing in New York City collapses and 700,000 people in Public Housing find themselves homeless, then it is Trump voters who have done this. This is a population the size of Boston. Is this what you voted for?"

I will make the people of Georgia howl.

Let us not worry about documenting, building a case, fact checking. Let us simply set aside the things we learned in school about argument and as we face new challenges, so we must think anew about how to respond. 

Simply state the truth as we see it:  Mr. Price wants to kill Medicare and Social Security. Trump promised not to do this but he has spoken with this decision to put Price in charge with a clarity nobody can doubt. The Republicans  tried to murder Medicare in its cradle and now they are trying stiil.

With our backs against the wall: Our finest hour.

If fighting this new administration requires lawyers, then let us lawyer up. If it requires demonstrations, then let us demonstrate. If it requires making movies or TV dramas or puppet shows or youtube videos, let us do that.  If it requires protest songs, let us write, disseminate and sing those.
We may not win immediately. It may take time to prevail, but let us take the first steps.

Resist 

But let us not quake and quail. Let us fight them on the beaches. Let us fight them in the fields, but while there is a single one of us left, the righteous and the true left,  never surrender.


  

Trump and Meaning

"I feel like I don't belong to any world which even fucking matters."
--Jimmy McNulty, Police detective, Baltimore, MD, "The Wire"


After his dinner with the woman who is a political consultant, Jimmy McNulty goes back to riding around Baltimore in his raggedy unmarked car, watching hoppers and corner boys call in orders for drugs and watching drugs sold and he is trying to work up the chain of command to the ultimate drug kingpins.  The feds refuse to divert even the most minimal resources to the drug wars; their new focus is on terrorism.

The feds will not tolerate localities legalizing drugs, but they will devote absolutely no resources to help local cops chase the drug dealers.


Local people are being told, in one way or another, whether they are cops or the dealers the cops are chasing, that their world is unimportant.


As one police sergeant tells a detective who is working on a murder in West Baltimore, "Well, the thing is, he died in a zip code that don't matter." And the sergeant pulls the detective off that case and assigns him another. Nobody cares whether people in that zip code live or die, not even the police.


Then you have a billionaire flying in on his own 747 with his name on it, a new, American king, telling his subjects he cares about them, whether they live in Peoria or rural Pennsylvania.

The life of the citizen in Hatfield, Pennsylvania or West Kingston, Rhode Island, or Buford, Texas is often one of rejection, disappointment and hopelessness. Heroin or Fentanyl may offer some escape, but where politics are concerned, a woman who got chosen for fancy private schools, who married a guy who became President, who played the meritocracy game and won is someone these losers are going to hate, a priori.


Part of the problem may be the experience of so many who feel the very idea of meritocracy is corrupt, a rigged game.  Part of the reason for this is examined by people like Andrew Hacker, in "The Math Myth" in which he examines the way math has been used in perverted ways to deny people from getting qualified from a wide range of jobs as veterinary assistances to electricians, and these experiences engender life long bitterness.

There is nothing more alienating than being told you will have a fair shot, then being given a test which is anything but fair or relevant and being told you failed. Multiply that experience by millions and you have a recipe for discontent, restiveness and outrage.


There were many streams which fed into the raging current which became Trump, but surely alienation from a rigged system of awarding the prizes in this economy has got to be an important stream.

The War Against Government: Who Needs the Feds?

If there was ever a war against Christmas, it was nothing compared to the war against the federal government of the United States Donald Trump is waging. He promised to drain the swamp and he is going at the federal government by appointing men to head departments and agencies who have as their singular, distinctive and qualifying qualification a stated intention to destroy the departments they have been appointed to head.

This is what the voters voted for.
It may not be what they wanted.
It may not be what they will want six months from now, but it is definitely the change Donald Trump promised and then some.
Personally, I'm looking forward to it.
After years of Republican bombast about the evil of the federal government, I'd like to see just how correct they have been.
I really do not know exactly how bad things would be without the federal government. I can't bring to mind all the things it does. It's one of those things which may be so big you can't even really imagine life without it.

Margaret Bourke White

For example, I listened to the guy who runs the public housing for New York City who noted these housing units house 700,000 people, a population the size of Boston, within NYC, which is largely dependent on federal government funding. So if public housing in New York City collapses, how many of those 700,000 will go on the streets? How many will simply leave the city and cause no problem for the city? Can New York do without public housing? And that's just one thing Ben Carson can find out by destroying HUD.

How about Mr. Price at HHS, when he kills Obamacare and Medicare and Social Security?   If he does a good enough job, one can only imagine the effect on families when their sick parents have to move in with them. They voted for it. Hey, enjoy it. It is always possible, none of that will happen and we'll live happily without health insurance, or social security. Maybe the Republicans are correct. Maybe we'd be better off without these government programs. Let's find out.

And who needs an EPA or a department of Energy?

And really, if the State Department shuts down, what's the loss? No more visas for Muslims trying to get into the country. That great Trojan horse kept outside the city. We might all feel safer.

Really, this could be salutary. We may find without our enabler, the federal government, we have to be strong, to stand on our own. That's what the Republicans have always told us.

Lets find out!

Russians Aren't the Problem. Losers Are.

Listening to all the clamor about the Russian attempt to influence American voters has exposed one thing: How completely effete Donald Trump's opposition is.

No problem with a guy who likes pussy

For 18 months, the Democrats failed to appreciate that Donald Trump was speaking to a part of our population which is not offended by profanity, expressions of sexual avarice, or frat boy humor, and was more concerned to find a champion who would get in the face of whoever it was who was responsible for their loss of old line factory jobs, coal mine jobs and the general loss of status of households headed by white males who never got past high school.


I watched the woman who is the current head of Health and Human Services explain why killing the legal requirement for everyone to buy health insurance would kill the provision which assured nobody can be denied insurance for pre existing conditions.


She sounded like your third grade teacher, smiling, patiently explaining the connection between the two things. 


She did not say, "Look, how smart do you have to be to understand if you are going to require insurance companies to lose money by paying out for a lot of sick people with expensive illnesses like cancer and diabetes, you got to find them some healthy people they'll make money on, people who will pay for insurance they'll never need? You got to find people the same way Medicare finds healthy people, by taking money out of paychecks for years from healthy young people, so you can pay for them when they get old and sick. That's the way commercial insurance works: You exploit large numbers of the healthy, selling them something they don't need, so you can cover your expenses for the sick people. and still make a profit. It's about money. You don't like that? Suck it up. Or just shove the commercial insurance model aside and go to universal Medicare. At least we know that works. But no, the Republicans are all whining about more choice, more private enterprise. You want private, you got yourself pre existing conditions 'cause no businessman is going to sell insurance to anyone who actually needs it."


But no, she couldn't put it bluntly, hit 'em between the eyes, because she is part of an administration which is civil and kindly and wants to avoid turning off the ladies who go to church every Sunday and the PTA mothers and all those folks who love President Obama because he is such an overtly kindly man, who loves his daughters and his wife and who nobody can even conceive telling an off color joke.

Not afraid to offend

Listening to some former head of the CIA on the radio, I'm hearing a man using words like "very scary" and "unprecedented" and "heedless" as if that is supposed to worry me about Mr. Trump. 


Fact is, no matter how much dirt, or how many lies the Russians may have put out there, there is no way you will ever convince me or the majority of Americans, this disinformation resulted in Trump's win.

Not shocked by bombing the shit out of them

Trump won because he looked tougher than Hillary. That much was true.
He looked tough because he was unconcerned about details and logic--all he cared about was what he wanted, and that was putting Americans first, bringing jobs back to idle factories and screw the wusses who talk about trade wars and precedent.

Not the leader we need

Why did so many Democrats love Bernie? Because he sounded tough.
We need to find a tough sounding Democrat.
Everyone is sick of kind and gentle.