Sunday, December 8, 2024

Haute Diplomatie

 

Russia Pyotr Veliky missile cruiser makes port call in Tartus, Syria, 2023, via Countercurrents.

Let me get this straight? Trump dithers on about the situation in Syria and his concern is what's best for Russia?

[image or embed]

— Joyce White Vance (@joycewhitevance.bsky.social) December 8, 2024 at 8:31 AM

Here's the rest of it. It is ironic, of course, that he criticizes Obama for staying out of Syria and then calls for the same course of action. But his focus is on Russia. Not the US. Not the Syrian people. Russia.

[image or embed]

— Joyce White Vance (@joycewhitevance.bsky.social) December 8, 2024 at 8:33 AM

Couple of thoughts:

Obviously, Trump did not write this. The thinking is banal, but it's moderately complex and coherently designed toward a single main idea, as Vance notes, the question of how the Syria events will affect Russia. Completely different from Trump's "weave". Also not a subject to which our narcissist-in-chief is likely to devote that much consideration, with participants who aren't his own enemies—and while Russia might be considered one of his friends, he doesn't usually talk about his friends in this tone, as having made a mistake. He's usually "saying nice things" about his friends in return for their saying nice things about him, not speculating about them in this detached way.

Friday, December 6, 2024

The Last Postmortem

 

Screen Capture from Save Daddy Trump on Steam.

A popular postmortem sentiment is the idea that what happened in the US in this month's election is what has happened all over the place in developed democracies, in the wake of the inflation that accompanied the recovery from the Covid pandemic all over the world, when angered voters punished the ruling parties in a frustration with the way democracy is seen to be failing

“There’s an overall sense of frustration with political elites, viewing them as out of touch, that cuts across ideological lines,” said Richard Wike, director of global attitudes research at the Pew Research Center.

He noted that a Pew poll of 24 countries found that the appeal of democracy itself was slipping as voters reported increasing economic distress and a sense that no political faction truly represents them.

and even though inflation in the US wasn't nearly as bad as in some of those other countries, our voters just did the same thing.

I wanted to check that hypothesis out for the flood of big elections between 2021 and 2024, and found evidence for a much more nuanced picture: a bad time for a few ruling parties, but not so great either for Trumpies and like-minded individuals on the nationalist, anti-immigrant, authoritarian side of the right (loosely characterized as "fascist" below, sue me if you don't like it):

Sunday, November 24, 2024

At War With Virtually Everybody

 

Eli Feldstein, former spokesman in the Prime Minister's Office, now under indictment in an elaborate plot to use fabricated intelligence to exculpate Binyamin Netanyahu (who of course knows nothing about it) in the deaths of those six hostages. Photos via The Times of Israel.

I don't pretend to know any better than I did before the election what Joe Biden should have done about the Gaza war beyond what he did do, but I will say that the administration shouldn't send a ferocious letter like the one of October 16 if they're just going to back off from their threats the way they did on November 12 and pretend everything's fine, the way they've generally seemed to do for the whole 13 months. You can't have it both ways.

International Criminal Court has finally issued the arrest warrants the prosecutor requested last May for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, former Defense Minister Gallant, and Hamas commander Mohammed Deif (whom Israel claims to have killed in a missile attack back in July, but they've never offered any kind of evidence). White House and State Department quickly out condemning "moral equivalence", which I don't get. The ICC isn't claiming that Netanyahu and Deif are "morally equivalent", merely that they have something in common—both seem to be guilty of war crimes. And not the same crimes. Deif is held  responsible for the killing of some 1200 Israelis and others in the massacres of October 7, Netanyahu and Gallant for the killing of at least 44,000 Palestinians, a large majority of them noncombatant women and children, and the deliberate starving and displacement of two million more, for one thing, and Deif committed his crime first, so he "started it", so that Israel is entitled to argue that it has merely been exercising its "right to defend itself" (needless to say, Gazans are not allowed to argue that they were driven stir-crazy by their 16 years in a kind of prison camp from which their freedom of movement was under absolute Israeli and Egyptian control, stir-craziness isn't a legitimate defense).

BBC News Hour asked a Prime Minister's Office flunky "what evidence do you have" of some complaint the flunky was making, I didn't quite catch what, but I think it must have been Israel's irrelevant allegations against prosecutor Karim Khan:

Saturday, November 23, 2024

For the Record: Who's in charge here?

Wu Wei, Berlin-based virtuoso on the sheng, or ancient Chinese mouth organ, with the ensemble Holland Baroque, in a version of the Baroque hit La FolĂ­a. I was just looking for an excuse for posting it, it's outrageously good.

Mr. Trump, you have informed the public that you know nothing about "Project 2025" and that some of its ideas are "ridiculous". And yet your nominee for Office of Management and Budget is the author of the Project 2025 chapter on "The Executive Office of the President of the United States"...

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) November 22, 2024 at 9:43 PM

When he ran OMB in your previous term, were his ideas ridiculous? Have the two of you come up with an agreement on whose views are going to be followed? Can you tell us how that's going to work?

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) November 22, 2024 at 9:45 PM

Did anybody tell you that Russell Vought and FCC chair nominee Brendan Carr and "border czar" Tom Homan were contributors to Project 2025? Now that you know, do you think you should maybe reconsider their nominations? You don't want ridiculous people working for you, right? Are you in charge?

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) November 22, 2024 at 10:02 PM

Saturday, November 16, 2024

The Emperor's New Cabinet: Postscript

 

Margaret Rutherford as Miss Jane Marple, via Novel Suspects.

The details of how Matt Gaetz got the attorney general offer have been coming out like the facts in an Agatha Christie puzzle—I mean literally who was heard whispering with whom and where they were sitting on the plane—particularly in a Politico report (I first heard about it from Jay Kuo) citing their reporter Meridith McGraw, and it's stimulating the narrativium for me: I'm pretty sure I know what happened, and it's not at all what you might think, or what Tim Snyder has suggested, but something much more farcical, though perhaps equally chilling.

The background is that Republican operative Susie Wiles, co-chair of the Trump campaign and soon-to-be chief of staff, has been playing adult-in-the-room, keeping the boss on a bit of a leash and trying to keep him sensible, and had furnished him with a nice respectable shortlist of attorney general candidates, but he didn't like them. He wants his Roy Cohn, and the guys on the list seemed to have a different concept of the job; as Marc Caputo reports it, they

looked at AG as if they were applying for a judicial appointment. They talked about their vaunted legal theories and constitutional bullshit....

The Gaetz-for-AG plan came together [Wednesday], just hours before it was announced, Meridith tells us. It was hatched aboard Trump’s airplane en route to Washington, on which Gaetz was a passenger. A Trump official revealed more details to Playbook late last night: BORIS EPSHTEYN played a central role in the development, lobbying Trump to choose Gaetz while incoming White House chief of staff SUSIE WILES was in a different, adjacent room on the plane, apparently unaware.

So the setup is the two thugs, Epshteyn and Gaetz, confabulating, and Gaetz in a state of high anxiety, with the House Ethics Committee report coming out in 48 hours, and you know it's going to be really bad, and one of them comes up with a brilliant idea for a scheme: if they can get Trump to solve his attorney general problem by naming Gaetz, Gaetz will have an excuse for resigning his House seat and stopping the release of the report. They can do it right now, while Wiles isn't looking.

So Epshteyn walks over to where Trump is sitting and starts pitching him to give Gaetz the job: Gaetz wouldn't be giving him constitutional bullshit, he'd be hounding your enemies, sir, just like you wanted. In Caputo's words, he'd "go over there and start cuttin' fuckin' heads." 

And of course Trump loves it—he wouldn't have thought of it himself, but he doesn't care that Gaetz is completely unqualified (he'd already named the equally unqualified Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard to their important national security positions), and he doesn't care that Gaetz is a coke-snorting child fucker who told former Rep., now Senator Markwayne Mullin he would "crush Viagra and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night" (though I'm guessing Trump—and Wiles—did not realize how much trouble Gaetz was in with the ethics committee). Gaetz is his kind of guy, a guy who understands his own hopes and aspirations, and once he's made up his mind there's nothing Wiles can do about it.

In other words, the fact that Gaetz is under investigation for sex trafficking is the fundamental reason that he is slated to become attorney general. It's happening because of the investigation and wouldn't have happened otherwise, though none of the characters but him and Epshteyn realize this. 

And I still have hopes the plan may fall through, because they weren't going to able to hide the crucial element, but the main thing I'm wondering about is how pervasive this kind of thing is in Trumpworld; how much it's pure thug behavior, rather than the big political issues we try to focus our minds on, that drives what happens there.


Friday, November 15, 2024

The Emperor's New Cabinet

Artist oddly unnamed. Via Red Cheeks Factory Shop.

So I guess you've heard that Health and Human Services Secretary-Designate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is planning to devote himself to the crusade against unhealthy snacks, which sounds more like a First Lady gig than a cabinet position, but what do I know? I certainly agree that unhealthy snacks are unhealthy, choosing to go with the science on that as well as on vaccines, in contrast to whatever it is he's doing.

At first I thought it was funny that he appeared to be going with the liberal side on this issue, since we're all down on Doritos and Mountain Dew and up on water and organic granola, but I figured out that he's actually being a conservative in the Wilhoitian sense: he wants freedom for the nice suburban ladies who are the backbone of the anti-vaccine movement, to have their kids die of measles or polio if that's how they need to express themselves, and compulsion for the poor recipients of SNAP benefits, who won't be allowed to buy Doritos or Mountain Dew other than with folding money, even if they live in food deserts where kale isn't available. It's the same old ingroup/outgroup stuff.

Idly wondering, speaking of the cabinet choices, if Trump isn't actually trying to get himself impeached. It wasn't Kennedy's nomination for HHS that led me there but Gaetz's, for attorney general. At first, having a pretty clear idea how much almost everybody in both Houses of Congress hates Gaetz, Republicans even more than Democrats, I figured Trump was just saying "Fuck you" to all of them, and enjoying the opportunity to make them grovel.

Saturday, November 9, 2024

For the Record: You Can't Be Serious~

 

Still from The Manchurian Candidate, 1962.


Special counsel office working to wipe away the charges against Trump before January 20, including the ones about him stealing classified documents from the government, lying about them, refusing to give them back, conspiring to hide them from the FBI, showing them to hotel guests...

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) November 8, 2024 at 10:12 PM

Then on January 20 he gets a new security clearance! Is that wild or what? We can't have a trial to find out whether he's guilty of espionage or not, because that might interfere impermissibly with his ability to perform his official duties. We just have to give him the chance to do it again!

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) November 8, 2024 at 10:19 PM

That's in spite of the fact that we already know perfectly well he did it. I mean the polite thing is to say he's "innocent until proven guilty", but have you looked at the indictment? Have you looked at his sorry excuse for a defense? "Oh I secretly declassified them all!" I don't think so.

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) November 8, 2024 at 10:25 PM