Paul Ryan's Francis Macomber Moment: That Undeserving 3%

Paul Ryan and his friends will probably prevail today, whatever that means.
Well, I guess we do know what that means: He'll get his bill through the House of Representatives, claim victory and Mr. Trump will go to Wisconsin and claim another "Promise Kept!"

What you got is the healthy paying for the unhealthy, and the poor. Bad idea!

It all reminds me of the idea which kept coming up during the war in Vietnam: Let's just declare victory and go home.


Or that wonderful Hemingway story: "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," in which a rich man on safari raises his rifle to shoot a lion but loses his nerve, drops it and turns to run when the safari guide behind him raises his gun and shoots the lion dead. The native hired hands, who carry the rich mans baggage, who are paid by the rich man, then hoist him on their shoulders and carry him back to camp, as if he has had a great victory.

So, later today, Paul Ryan will have his Francis Macomber moment. Both he and President Trump will be carried off on the shoulders of the Congressional Republicans as victors.

It's going to be so great. You'll love it.

Health care, and the legislation affecting it,  is actually more complicated than Mr. Ryan or President Trump appreciate.  I certainly do not understand it.  But as we used to say at the hospital: The most dangerous intern is not the intern who doesn't know; it's the intern who doesn't know he doesn't know.

click to enlarge

One thing I've learned through all this is by far the vast majority of our citizens are not covered by Obamacare--only about 3% are--most people are covered by employee plans, Medicare or the Veterans Administration.  The 9 million or so who use Obamacare can easily be ignored, as they had been for generations, by the Republicans and all the members of Congress. The wonder is President Obama ever got anyone to vote to help them.

But there might have been a reason Democrats were able to get  Obamacare done:  Those uninsured people, as small a portion as they were,  kept showing up at emergency rooms, and the hospitals had to pay the doctors and nurses who took care of them in the ER's, in the hospital, and  in the operating rooms, and that burden ultimately got passed down a line of hands to the government and prices for everyone's health care premiums rose.

So you had this slow leak of the tire which kept getting in the way of the functioning of the whole car.

Seven years ago,  John Boehner finally blurted out his  greatest fear about the new Obamacare bill--If you give people a taste of health care, they'll never want to live without it.  

It was a version of that droll bit of wisdom I'd hear in the South all the time from the comfortable upper class country club types:  "Don't feed a stray dog: He'll follow you home."

Which, in case you missed it, means that once you show kindness to the hungry varmits, they'll become dependent on you, so never be kind or generous, it'll be a burden. He might be your brother, but he's really too heavy.

I promised we'd kill Obamacare and we did!

Without knowing the details of Obamacare, it seemed to me when I first heard about it, if you were going to tell insurance companies they had to insure all those sick people out there with pre existing conditions, who have not been able to get health insurance because they were sick and needed health care (the customers no insurance company wants) then you have to feed the insurance company a huge new pool of customers who will never need the insurance company to pay anything, namely healthy young people. But healthy young people are invincible and don't see any benefit to health insurance so you have to intimidate them to pay money for something they don't want.  That was the "mandate."

The basic flaw in the argument is that health insurance ought to be a commercial enterprise whose raison d'etre is to make a profit for investors in insurance companies.  Any business wants to take in as much money as possible while spending as little as possible. But the purpose of a hospital, a clinic is, in fact, to spend money, or actually, to provide services, which is pretty much the same thing.  So the idea of health care as a profit center is a contradiction. You are trying to make money while not doing the thing you are being paid to do.

And then you've got those young people, from whom you are trying to make your profit. It's the young, healthy, not needy from whom you extract your profit. Of course, those healthy young people are already unwillingly paying for stuff they would never pay for unless they were forced by law to do it: Social Security and Medicare.  We have those programs because the government discovered you have to force people to plan for the times when they will no longer be young, something no young person believes will ever happen. So we said, suck it up, you don't want to and you don't like it but we are not going to support you when, so we are going to make you eat your spinach now.


But the Freedom Caucus, Paul Ryan, the Tea Party want to say, Live Free and when you get sick, Die! They don't believe in no durned gov'ment making people behave like responsible adults and when those irresponsible adults show up at the Emergency Room with their I phones and their gold necklace bling, just turn them away. Serve 'em right.


Except some kind hearted do gooder liberal Emergency Room nurses let those folks in and the whole system goes to hell in a hand basket. So what we need is a law which puts the TSI agents out in front of the ER and they don't let anyone get through the gates unless they have health insurance.

Not a dog, but you get the idea.

Don't feed them stray dogs.

Republican Realty Check

Listening to really psychotic patients on the psych ward when I was a medical student, I knew enough to keep my mouth shut.  Typically, they had their own deeply held beliefs which brooked no dispute. What was the point of questioning whether there really was a vast conspiracy of extraterrestrials  who wished this particular person harm, who sent radio waves in his direction so they could read his mind, who conspired with the ward nurses and orderlies to keep him from claiming his rightful throne as the one, true king of France? 

That's what the Republican Party has been like these past eight years--mutually validating their own beliefs, detached from reality, but really, why bother arguing with them? 

Now, they have to actually get a real, live health care bill passed and reality has a way of being very stubborn.
People don't like the idea of buying a health insurance policy which covers nothing but a week in the intensive care unit. They want their diabetes care covered, the visits to their cardiologist.

Even Ross Douthat (Doubt that?) has become desperate enough to offer a plan of his own, which he bases on solid conservative principles, "a coherent vision" as he calls it:
1/ "Health insurance should be, like other forms of insurance, something that protects you against serious illnesses and pays unexpected bills but doesn't cover more every day expenses. People need catastrophic coverage, but otherwise they should spend their own money whenever possible."
2/ "Because that's the best way to bring normal market pressures to bear on health care services, driving down costs."
3/ "Without strangling medical innovation."

So here's what's wrong with this:  The short answer is Mr. Douthat has not the faintest idea what he's talking about. (He's been listening to that famous lady in the parking lot who told Donald Trump vaccines cause autism, or maybe Ted Cruz or Paul Ryan or really, any Republican.)

But here's the long answer, if you are interested.

Health insurance for less traumatic and the less dramatic things prevents the catastrophes from developing.  
Even non catastrophic things, medically speaking, can be financially catastrophic. Take a single case which springs to mind. A 24 year old piano teacher in Brooklyn, bicycles to give his lessons to his students. One day he hits a curb, falls of his bicycle and strikes his wrist on cement. He has only catastrophic insurance. He considers going to the ER for $800, with another $200 for the X Ray and another $200 for the ER physician. He is not sure this is what the bill for his care will be, because, well, how do you ever know what such a medical bill will actually be? But that's what he can get from Professor Google, which is not so easy when you are trying to type with one hand. That bill will be close to a month's income for him.  Even if the hospital allows him to pay it off over time, there might be interest and he has rent and food to consider. 

On the other hand, if he does not go to the ER, he might be able to get an appointment with an orthopedist, if he could get a referral from an internist, but he doesn't have an internist because he's only 24 and has no other medical problems. The orthopedist office visit might be cheaper,  but his wrist is now the size of a grapefruit and he's got to give piano lessons the next day. If he needs a cast, it would seem prudent to act sooner rather than later. 

The 800 pound gorilla in the room

That is just one of a thousand examples.  The middle age hypertensive man who doesn't feel bad because of his hypertension,  but the $120 bill at the internist's office for his visit and his lab and his medications is painful.  Mr. Ryan would tell him that's money well spent, better than the new smart phone, but that new smart phone might help him in his night job as an Uber driver. That smart phone is a tangible benefit; treating his hypertension is only an abstract good. On the other hand, his catastrophic insurance will cover his ICU care when he has a stroke from his untreated hypertension. 

Then there is that great Republican mantra: Let "normal market forces drive costs down."
 This simply does not, never has and never will pertain to medicine. 
Medicine is not driven by "normal market forces."  Decades ago, Senator Ted Kennedy was bothered by complaints from his constituents about long waiting times for new appointments with doctors and about high office visit costs. So he said, well now the reason all this is happening is supply and demand, classic normal  market forces. So he got a law passed doubling the size of medical school classes, and within a few years the supply of doctors did in fact increase, nation wide, but waiting times for new appointments in fact quadrupled and costs quintupled. 

Why? 
For several reasons:  All those new doctors did not flood into communities, opening up offices with lots of space in their schedules. They became specialists and rather than competing with each other, doctors cooperated and they started referring Mr. Kennedy's constituents to each other and now the citizen had four appointments with specialists where he had only one before and he  spent four times the hours waiting in four new waiting rooms. Normal market forces: supply and demand. Simple minded people with simple solutions don't work in the macroeconomics of medical care.

And, oh, "medical innovation." What exactly does Mr. Doubt that have in mind? Does he mean new drugs? As if reducing the health insurance coverage of the average citizen will somehow stimulate the drug company to spend money on research for a new cancer cure or a new drug for diabetes?  Or is he talking about say, laparoscopic surgery? Now there is a medical innovation which is actually a revolution. 

Healthy people paying for sick people: Who woulda thunk? What a scandal!

How did that big innovation occur? Was it driven by market forces?  
No, actually, it was driven by curiosity. Gynecologists had been using laparoscopy for decades, pointing their scopes south, ward the ovaries and uterus,  and over a few beers they told their general surgeon colleagues they might want to point that instrument north, toward the gall bladder and some surgeons in private practice thought: why not?  
They got some CEO's at local community hospitals to invest $10,000 on new equipment, which for those hospitals was not much more than they were spending on coffee and sandwiches for the doctors' lounge and presto:  A whole new world of surgery blossomed. 
Not driven by big business. 
Not driven by government. 
Not driven by normal market forces or even abnormal market forces.
Not driven by academic university hospitals. 
Just a bunch of open minded, scientifically trained humble local surgeons, with the souls of engineers. 

Go figure.

Do Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Louie Gohmert, Jim Jordan or any of the "Freedom Caucus" know any of this?

What do you think? 

Putin Schools Trump on Dealing with Judicial Review

Donald Trump needs some help navigating the new shoals which he faces as President. Really, his most public gig before the Presidency was Celebrity Apprentice and that could not have prepared him for dealing with judges who second guess him every second.

But his brofriend, Vladimir, has some great ideas about how to keep those people in the courts in line.

Take Nikolai Gorokhov, the lawyer for a whistle blower (now dead) who called attention to the billion dollar boondoggle which enriched Vladimir Putin and his friends. Later the whistle blower was accused of--what else?--income tax evasion and found dead, poisoned no doubt, or maybe he was contaminated with plutonium or shot, or found floating in the Volga, I can never keep straight how these Russian dissidents get dead. Moscow must make Chicago look like Peoria when it comes to violent death.

Anyway, Mr. Gorokov was on his way to court, when he "decided" to help a crew move a bath tub (or a sofa)  into a fourth floor apartment and he somehow fell out of the window. Details are scanty. Did he fall out of the window in the tub or did he follow the tub or did he fall out without the tub?  Whatever, he fell four stories, which is usually enough to prevent most lawyers from making their date in court.


Putin's government buddies just have the best of luck. Whenever someone really gets under their skin, and is headed to court where who knows what those judges might do, they just somehow turn up dead.

A woman in the parking lot told me that President Trump was talking to Mr. Putin about this on a phone in Trump Tower and he asked Mr. Putin if he had any ideas how he could persuade Justices Ginsberg, Sotomayer and Kagan to fall out of windows because he has had such a good time with the first Presidential appointment to the Supreme Court. Everyone loves him. He is such a winner. He has all the best words, this Gorsuch guy.


One thing Mr. Trump has learned from his international businesses is we have a lot to learn in this country about how to get things done.

Our Fake President: Don't You Just Love Him?

Don't you just yawn when you hear the words, "Credibility"  or "It's unprecedented"  or "Our national reputation"  or "What the American people want" or a whole host of other words and phrases which allude to qualitative, subjective assessments of a sort of truth?

That Donald Trump has been vilified for his indifference to "facts" and evidence to support his arguments says less about him and more about the obtuseness of his critics, who don't seem to understand his audiences don't care about what these critics care about.  You have to be taught, usually in school, to construct an argument, to collect "evidence" to support what you assert. Trump dispenses with all that by simply stating a contention over and over until it becomes "truth."

So if Obamacare is a "disaster," if Hillary Clinton is a "crook" if the inner cities are a "disaster zone," if loss of manufacturing has happened because stupid Democrat government bureaucrats have been out negotiated by foreign competitors, then it's all true because he says it's true.

Of course, all those topics are complex, and almost matters of definition, so people can shrug off evidence to the contrary.


With something more concrete, like whether or not President Obama tapped Mr. Trump's phones, we have something even his most ardent supporters will know is either true or false. Now Mr. Spicer is "walking back" that claim, well, he didn't really mean wire tapping, just meant any sort of eavesdropping.

But it's finally stuck in the craw of even Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal. Stock market people, after all, have to deal in data and evidence and graphs and reality, or they lose money.

But it is now dawning on them what a Fake President looks like, and their metaphor--Trump clinging to the lie of wire tapping like a drunk clinging to an empty bottle of gin is telling. Of course, his prior birther claims, his claims about Muslims on top of roofs in Newark after 911, well, that was just hyperbole.  But, in the case of the WSJ, better late than never.

If President Trump announces that North Korea launched a missile that landed within 100 miles of Hawaii, would most Americans believe him? Would the rest of the world? We’re not sure, which speaks to the damage that Mr. Trump is doing to his Presidency with his seemingly endless stream of exaggerations, evidence-free accusations, implausible denials and other falsehoods.

The latest example is Mr. Trump’s refusal to back off his Saturday morning tweet of three weeks ago that he had “found out that [Barack] Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory” on Election Day. He has offered no evidence for his claim, and a parade of intelligence officials, senior Republicans and Democrats have since said they have seen no such evidence.

Yet the President clings to his assertion like a drunk to an empty gin bottle, rolling out his press spokesman to make more dubious claims. Sean Spicer—who doesn’t deserve this treatment—was dispatched last week to repeat an assertion by a Fox News commentator that perhaps the Obama Administration had subcontracted the wiretap to British intelligence.

That bungle led to a public denial from the British Government Communications Headquarters, and British news reports said the U.S. apologized. But then the White House claimed there was no apology. For the sake of grasping for any evidence to back up his original tweet, and the sin of pride in not admitting error, Mr. Trump had his spokesman repeat an unchecked TV claim that insulted an ally.

The wiretap tweet is also costing Mr. Trump politically as he hands his opponents a sword. Mr. Trump has a legitimate question about why the U.S. was listening to his former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, and who leaked news of his meeting with the Russian ambassador. But that question never gets a hearing because the near-daily repudiation of his false tweet is a bigger media story.

FBI director James Comey also took revenge on Monday by joining the queue of those saying the bureau has no evidence to back up the wiretap tweet. Mr. Comey even took the unusual step of confirming that the FBI is investigating ties between the Trump election campaign and Russia.

Mr. Comey said he could make such a public admission only in “unusual circumstances,” but why now? Could the wiretap tweet have made Mr. Comey angry because it implied the FBI was involved in illegal surveillance? Mr. Trump blundered in keeping Mr. Comey in the job after the election, but now the President can’t fire the man leading an investigation into his campaign even if he wants to.

All of this continues the pattern from the campaign that Mr. Trump is his own worst political enemy. He survived his many false claims as a candidate because his core supporters treated it as mere hyperbole and his opponent was untrustworthy Hillary Clinton. But now he’s President, and he needs support beyond the Breitbart cheering section that will excuse anything. As he is learning with the health-care bill, Mr. Trump needs partners in his own party to pass his agenda. He also needs friends abroad who are willing to trust him when he asks for support, not least in a crisis.

This week should be dominated by the smooth political sailing for Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court nominee and the progress of health-care reform on Capitol Hill. These are historic events, and success will show he can deliver on his promises. But instead the week has been dominated by the news that he was repudiated by his own FBI director.

Two months into his Presidency, Gallup has Mr. Trump’s approval rating at 39%. No doubt Mr. Trump considers that fake news, but if he doesn’t show more respect for the truth most Americans may conclude he’s a fake President.

The Wall Street Journal, March 22,2017.

Trumped Up: Is It Still A Lie If You Forgot What You Said?

David Leonhardt, fulminating in the New York Times just cannot let it go. He wants to preach to the choir about what a liar, liar pants-on-fire Donald Trump is.  I have to ask: To What End?  Is there anyone who voted against President Trump who does not already agree with this list?  Is there anyone who voted for President Trump who gives a good hot damn?

"He has lied about — among many other things — Obama’s birthplace, John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Sept. 11, the Iraq War, ISIS, NATO, military veterans, Mexican immigrants, Muslim immigrants, anti-Semitic attacks, the unemployment rate, the murder rate, the Electoral College, voter fraud and his groping of women."


So, David, Get a grip:  When are you going to stop all this? When are you going to try to use these examples in a way which might help?

Let's get organized here:  Let's group these lies and examine which really matter and which do not and which ought to matter. Let's imagine we are about to launch Radio Free New Hampshire and we are planning our programming.  Let's organize these things into useful categories.  Let us Triage.

1. Lies which have no policy implications but simply reveal that Trump is not a serious man and you cannot take what he says seriously: 
           a/ Obamac's birthplace
           b/ John F. Kennedy's assassination by Marco Rubio's father  and the radical Cuban Costa Nostra
           c/ Groping of women: But then again Bill Clinton lied about sex. Everyone lies about sex.
CATEGORY: DOES NOT MATTER

2. Lies which suggest he views Muslims the way Bull Connor and George Wallace and Strom Thurman once viewed young Black males. 
         a/ Muslims were dancing on the rooftops after 9/11--he heard, or saw.
         b/ ISIS
         c/ Muslim immigrants
These lies are part of his fantasy world for which he actually tries to marshall some testimonials as a sort of trumped up--you should excuse the expression--evidence, case reports to bolster his general proposition that if one Muslim shoots a Christian, this is a war of the worlds.  But his ability to do Muslims harm is limited by the courts in a sane world, by Congress. (Of course look at Congress if you want any indication about how sane this world is right now.)
          This playground bully type of reaction actually thwarts his own effectiveness, e.g., if he wanted to ban Muslims from entering the country, he could have simply said people coming from failed states cannot enter the country because there is no practical way of screening them in a state without a functioning government--so Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Syria could have been excluded. By trying to play the Muslim card, he tripped over his own feet.

CATEGORY: OUGHT TO MATTER, BUT DOESN'T

3. Lies about Mexican immigrants: Using that one case of a Mexican rapist has been sufficient for some of the people all the time, but eventually, you can't fool most of the people all the time with this one.  He'll use it to "build the wall" which will be expensive but symbolic and mostly ineffective at preventing the flow of undocumented immigrants, who will simply go underground; some literally will tunnel under the wall. But since they will be hiding, he'll be able to claim victory in stopping the flow. 
CATEGORY:  OUGHT TO MATTER BUT DOESN'T.  
This is where any self respecting opposition should be able to strip the emperor of his clothes.

4. Lies to say that Obama and the Democrats failed to govern well:  The murder rate and the unemployment rate increased under the Democrats.  Every insurgency needs to say those in power have failed.( Read our Declaration of Independence.)

There is legitimate objection to the claims for "full employment" because many people have stopped looking for work. What we need to know is who these people are, who've stopped looking. Are these the marginal workers who will only work at low skilled jobs when they are undemanding and well paying? Maybe we shouldn't be worried about those who have given up because they really aren't workers anyway.
As for the murder rates--those have got to be pretty hard numbers. Either the number of dead bodies in the morgues has risen or it has not. The remedy for this is to say so. It is likely it has risen in isolated spots, like Chicago, but overall life in the US may be safer than in many decades.  Testimonials about murders are emotionally wringing but eventually most citizens can see through this claim.  
CATEGORY:  MATTERS AND SHOULD BE THE SUBJECT OF ONGOING  RIDICULE

5. NATO:  He's got a point--NATO nations have not spent the way we have or the way we would like them to spend and we can see that as they have become dependent and we've enabled them to do this. On the other hand, how much sense does his order to increase our own military spending make, if he is so exercised about NATO? Why should they spend more if we are going to spend more anyway? 
Also in this category is Russia. Fact is, Russia, Germany, the Koch Brothers a whole slew of nations and corporations tried to influence our election and they all had the same problem--all they could do was try to persuade. 

CATEGORY: DOESN"T MATTER
If you want to worry about something foreign that really matters: Look at Israel and Netanyahu.  Did he not try to influence our election and our Congress? 


6. Iraq War:  Who cares what Trump  thought about going to war in Iraq back when?  The fact is, he changes his mind so often even today he can always find some statement which suggested he opposed it, after he first supported it. Same is true about transgender bathroom use and punishing women who've had abortions. All this shows is he hasn't thought about these issues, doesn't care to, and has the attention span of a gnat.
 CATEGORY: DOESN"T MATTER

7. Voter Fraud: Another expostulation which does not matter in the rust belt. Oh, that's just Donald mouthing off again.  Nobody actually believes he believes that himself.
 CATEGORY:  MATTERS AND SHOULD GET MORE ATTENTION
This is one of those whoppers which should be shoved down the throats of the rust belt I-want-my-job-back voters. 

8. Donald will get your jobs back.
As Sarah Palin would say: How's that working for ya?
CATEGORY:  MATTERS AND SHOULD BE ASKED EVERY DAY:  DO YOU HAVE YOUR JOB BACK YET?  ARE YOU MINING THAT CLEAN COAL YET? 

But What Do We Do About Trump?

At the end of our monthly Hampton (NH) Democratic Club meeting, after all the usual business about how we should vote on the upcoming warrant issues for the town, to fund teachers and firefighters and school building, and plans for the summer lawn sale and for the picnic, and who we could get for speakers, one of the octagenarians raised his hand and squawked, "But what do we do about Trump?"

That of course, was the 800 pound gorilla in the room nobody had talked about, and this was the animating reason why we were all in that room in the first place.

A woman in the middle row stood up and said she loathed the President and she loathed all the people he had around him and she loathed the hate he had directed at Muslims and Mexicans, of which we have few or none here in New Hampshire, but she still thought it was awful.  Seized by the crest of that wave, I leapt to my feet and said I was sick of all the whining and wringing of hands and I wanted to do something, to foment revolution and I invited anyone who was interested to come meet at my house, and realized immediately I had not asked my wife about this, but then I thought, "Did Che Geuvara ask his wife or his mother?" 

About 10 people stood up and said they were with me, which was bracing, but as I looked from face to face, I asked myself: With me for what?


What could 10 townspeople from Hampton, New Hampshire do about the man who 60 million people had voted for?  A friend told me about driving to his home in Minnesota through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin and he saw an uninterrupted  sea of Trump signs and he was not at all surprised on November 8.

How many hundreds of counties had flipped from Obama to Trump across the rust belt? And why?

They had drunk the Kool Aid, just as the followers of Jim Jones had done.  They had bought into the fantasy, they had forsaken reality, the reality that immigrants are only rarely sadistic rapists, radical Islamic Terrorists, that no terrorists organization, not ISIS or Al Qaeda are a serious threat to the United States, that the worst they can do is unleash a flood of refugees which overwhelm the good will of liberal European nations.  They had drunk the Kool Aid of coal mine jobs coming back, of factories re opening because Trump told the capitalist owners to do that, of Obamacare as Disaster Care, of white working class, work a day men having been stabbed in the back by a mongrel Democratic Party that wanted to take their jobs and their self respect and give it to dark skinned immigrants, of white policemen shooting unarmed Black men in the back because the white policemen thought themselves in danger.


But the thing is:  You know while a sizable portion of Trump fans are unabashed racists, a sizable portion in the North and Midwest are not. The same people who voted for Obama, far as we can tell, voted for Trump. While his vote in the South may have come from the womb of the Ku Klux Klan, in the rust belt it may well have been a case of "I want my job back." 

These voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan may not have been put off by Trump's appeal to racists. They knew they weren't racists, but they knew they had seen their towns collapse after the factories closed.   Had it been between Bernie and Trump, they may well have gone for Bernie because he played the class war card better than even Trump. Trump made the enemy everyone outside our borders who stole our jobs. Bernie made the billionaires who sent the jobs overseas the enemy.

Looking at President Trump in Nashville, I could not keep my eyes from the two village idiots standing behind his left shoulder. At every Trump speech, there are always  two village idiots behind his left shoulder, a different pair of individuals but always the same. They look liked they had been drawn by Mad Magazine artists.  They grinned and shouted "USA" and "Lock Her UP" and I realized there is no way you could win these guys over. They are a lock for Trump and Rush and all who sail with them.


Well, maybe Bernie might appeal to them, if they ever lost faith in Trump.

But the thing is, this part of the citizenry, of the electorate, will never allow themselves to see Trump for what he is and is not.


So, if we cannot win these guys over, who are we going to convince? How do we approach the flippers in those rust belt counties that once went for Obama?
And if we can identify who our audience is, how do we reach them?

I imagine vast rallies like the Trump rallies, with Bernie or some charismatic speaker rousing the crowds to go out and carry the message forth, the way Trump did.


But who? And what is his message?

The Crazy Thing About Trump: He's Not 100% Crazy

President Trump says Alan Dershowitz says the Supreme Court will uphold his non Muslim Muslim ban and he's right about that. 
Of course, this comes after Mr. Trump reads "the statute" (as if there is only one relevant law) to the audience of grinning nitwits he gathered in Nashville.) 

But the thing which bothered me about both rulings, from the Ninth Circuit and now from Maryland, is the judges in both cases did not confine their opinions to the actual order, but they considered the order in the context of the man, of the things he said during his campaign, which seemed a little bizarre to me. Mr. Dershowitz says it bothered him, too. If the court starts looking beyond what the actual order says, to the motivations of the man who wrote it, where does that end?


A man can say he hates Negroes, and then he can issue an order which says that anyone living in Watts, or South West Washington, D.C., can be stopped and searched for concealed weapons because we've had trouble with violent crime in those areas and one would think if the order is applied equally to every citizen, black and white in those areas, the order would be legal.

The first Trump order said people from 6 countries would be denied visas to enter the United States but exceptions would be made for Christians. Well, that is an order to bar people because they come from a country where radical Islamic fundamentalists have issued threats to the United States and thus anyone in those countries may be a threat.  You can say it's not because they are Muslim, but because they live in those countries where the threat is high, where it may be difficult to distinguish enemy from friend.

But when you exempt Christians from that, you are saying, well they are above suspicion but Muslims are suspicious,  and so we are assuming Muslims are the enemy and Christians our friends.
The President has argued he doesn't suspect every Muslim--as is evident by the fact he did not exclude all Muslims from every country, just Muslims from countries which are failed states. When you look at these six failed states: Somalia, Sudan, Syria are all chaos, and Yemen is pretty close, although it may have made the list because Saudi Arabia is warring with Yemen and America will always genuflect before Saudi Arabia and Iran, well, you know they are cheating on the Nuclear deal, so we don't like them.

The President may still have the right to do that under the power to exclude foreigners  to protect the country, but applying a religious test may violate the First Amendment, but it may not. Congress may make no law to establish a religion, (First Amendment) but that doesn't say the President may make no rule. )And Muslims living in Sudan or Somolia may not be entitled to that Constitutional protection.


Apparently, Japanese living in California did not have protection from being incarcerated because they were members of a disfavored class during World War II.

There is the problem of whether it would be effective to ban Muslims getting on airplanes from Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Iran, and Syria when you do not forbid Muslims from Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, who may be just as likely to be angry and intend to harm American citizens in the homeland.
When you look at 9/11 and the Boston bombings those guys hailed from Saudia Arabia and Chechneya, Kyrgyzstan,  so why not exclude Muslims from those places? You will always be dealing with exceptional cases.  And you are only banning people with passports from these countries, what about people from Somalia who have become U.S. Citizens but their children are now radicalized? 


What Trump's men are arguing is there is no way to actually evaluate anyone who is living in a failed state. These countries cannot vouch for these people. They just happen to be Muslim. It's not that Muslims are to be feared. It's that Somalis are to be feared. Or not that the whole lot of them is assumed to be guilty, but we have no way of distinguishing the bad ones from the good ones.


When you look at Sudan and Syria and all these boiling cauldrons, you might reasonably say--there is such tumult there, how can you ever really know what will come out of these environments? 


When you look at the "lost boys" of Sudan, the boy soldiers who have come out of those horror shows in Africa and now live in the USA and then commit violent crimes, one might look at what they came from and ask, "Is it not surprising that every last one of them does not murder, given what they experienced?"  Of course, these lost boys from Rawanda, and other African nations were not excluded. Why not?

I do not have the answers to these questions.
Certainly, President Trump does not have the answers.
But he is not clueless.
If we could actually talk about these problems without exploding into shouting matches about racism, we might actually achieve some agreement.
The problem is, Trump approached this in just the opposite fashion Obama did.
Obama was all about defusing, approaching things in an analytical way.
When you choose the emotional path, there is more heat than light.