Netanyahu's Other War. II

Dadanite statues dating back to 4th to 1st century B.C.E., found in a funerary temple in Al-‘Ulā, Saudi Arabia, March 2024. Photo by Ali Lajami, via Wikimedia Commons.

The prisoner exchanges of November, five weeks into the war, as I wrote at the time, seemed aimed at a broader purpose than simply freeing the hostages captured by Hamas: permanent peace, on a scale most of the world had stopped imagining, towards which this was a step. Biden had signaled it himself, in a Washington Post op-ed the week before the exchanges began:

for over a month, the families of more than 200 hostages taken by Hamas, including babies and Americans, have been living in hell, anxiously waiting to discover whether their loved ones are alive or dead. At the time of this writing, my team and I are working hour by hour, doing everything we can to get the hostages released....

The Palestinian people deserve a state of their own and a future free from Hamas. I, too, am heartbroken by the images out of Gaza and the deaths of many thousands of civilians, including children. Palestinian children are crying for lost parents. Parents are writing their child’s name on their hand or leg so they can be identified if the worst happens. Palestinian nurses and doctors are trying desperately to save every precious life they possibly can, with little to no resources.

In fact, the program was to move toward the outcome US and Saudi negotiators had been envisaging in Doha, before the war began: while the Israelis stubbornly refused to think about what the end of the war might look like, Biden had already imagined it; a plan already existed, in some detail, with the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia providing the political-diplomatic framework within which the Palestinian state could be constructed from the bottom up, from infrastructure to social safety net, as we now understand, though my readers may have thought it was kind of fanciful at the time, and I didn't really have any evidence of the kind Foer has now provided.  

As long as the hostages were being released, the cessation of hostilities could be maintained, the food and water supply in Gaza could be replenished, the health system restored, a ceasefire evolve into a genuine peace; the release of Palestinian detainees from Israeli jails would supply the makings of a political class to replace not only Hamas but also the elderly and corrupt rulers of the old Palestinian Authority, often seen as Israeli puppets. And then there was the political economy, as Biden said:

Netanyahu's Other War. I

  

Abbott ID-NOW™ COVID-19 2.0 detects SARS-CoV-2 in 6‑12 minutes with the option to add on an ID NOW Influenza A & B 2 test without collecting another sample. About six pounds, comes with a kit of 24 tests and 24 nasal swabs. This is the machine of which Donald Trump is said to have sent "a bunch" to Russian President Vladimir V. Putin in spring 2020. Or maybe it was one machine and a bunch of test kits. I can imagine Putin needed several, though, including some for his retainers, so that the one he used would be dedicated to his snot and his alone. Via. 

The most exciting for me of the revelations from the teasing of Bob Woodward's new book on the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East, and US politics (it's titled simply War) wasn't about Trump's and Putin's continuing relationship, anyway, though it was nice to have some confirmation about that. I was more impressed by the stuff reported by CNN on the relationship between Joe Biden and Binyamin Netanyahu: 

“What’s your strategy, man?” Biden asked Netanyahu during an April phone call, Woodward reports.

“We have to go into Rafah,” Netanyahu said.

“Bibi, you’ve got no strategy.” Biden responded....

“I know he’s going to do something but the way I limit it is tell him to ‘Do nothing,’” Biden told his advisers, according to Woodward.

But Biden’s frustration with Netanyahu boiled over as the war continued to escalate.

“He’s a fucking liar,” Biden said privately of Netanyahu, after Israel went into Rafah, Woodward writes.

“Bibi, what the fuck?” Biden yelled at Netanyahu in July after an Israeli airstrike killed a top Hezbollah military commander and three civilians in Beirut, according to Woodward.

“You know the perception of Israel around the world increasingly is that you’re a rogue state, a rogue actor,” Biden said to Netanyahu.

Scenes From a Brief

 

Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller, enthroned, with the Hand Sanitizer of State. Actually, that's an illusion, he was walking into the US Capitol when this was taken, during Trump's second impeachment in January 2021. Photo by Andrew Harnik/AFP via Getty Images, as seen at CBS News.

Miller, P4 in the Jack Smith cast of witnesses (I'm reading his wonderfully vivid brief on the January 6 case and the theory that the president is immune from prosecution if he stages a coup in the course of performing his official duties), was among those who advised the president that the 2020 election had not in fact been stolen by Democrats, that there were not more than 10,000 votes from dead people in Georgia's returns but more like 12 total, which "could not be outcome-determinative" as Smith dryly points out, and that the video of Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss during the tabulation of ballots at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta did not show them pulling ballots from suitcases under the tables and counting them multiple times or "quite obviously surreptitiously passing around  USB ports [presumably containing fraudulent vote counts] as if they are vials of heroine or cocaine" as Giuliani put it in testimony before the Government Affairs Committee of the Georgia House of Representatives. 

Miller even got a little tetchy about it (p. 25):

(P26 is apparently the Georgia attorney general Christopher Carr, whom Trump had called on December 8, asking him not to discourage the other state AGs from joining in the lawsuit pressed by Texas's Ken Paxton against Pennsylvania and other states including Georgia, to stop them from certifying their elections.)

Literary Corner: Making the Hell's Angels Look Nice

 

Désiré Ntwayingabo, a refugee from the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo who settle in Dayton in 2010, and works there now for the city as a community engagement specialist, at a World Refugee Day event he and his team organized in June 2023, via Spectrum News 1 in Columbus.

From a fundraiser with Texas governor Greg Abbott  in Aspen,  Colorado, August 10, $25,000 to $500,000 a couple, of which The Guardian obtained a recording. For money like that, you get to hear the former president say "fuck". The first piece is about a party of 22 Congolese migrants to the United States he claims to have met at some point; the second his encounter with Helen Comperatore, widow of volunteer firefighter Corey Comperatore, who was killed in the first attempt to assassinate Trump on July 13.

Two Songs

By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

 

I. I Hate to Use That Foul Language

We said, ‘Where do you come from?’
They said, ‘Prison’.
‘What did you do?’
‘None of your fucking business what we did.’

You know why? Because they’re murderers.
I hate to use that foul language.
These are the toughest people.
These people are coming in from Africa,
from the Middle East. They’re coming in
from all parts of Asia, the bad parts
the parts where they’re rough,

and the only thing good is
they make our criminals look extremely nice.
They make our Hell’s Angels look
like the nicest people on earth.

II. I'd Much Rather Have My Husband

So they’re going to get millions of dollars
but the woman, the wife, this beautiful woman,
I handed her the check –
we handed her the check–

and she said, ‘This is so nice,
and I appreciate it,
but I’d much rather have my husband.’
Now, I know some of the women
in this room wouldn’t say the same.

I know at least four couples.
There are four couples, Governor,
that I know and you’re not one of them.
At least four couples here
would have been thrilled, actually.

There is obviously no reason to think Trump has ever interacted with a large group of migrants from Congo, let alone that they told him they came to America "from prison", let alone addressed him so rudely. The idea of Congolese must come from the story of the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, accused of roasting and eating their neighbors' dogs and cats, for which Christopher Rufo found some video evidence, except it turned out that the migrants in question were not Haitian but Congolese, in Dayton rather than Springfield, and the video was an evident fake (sounds like a Radio Yerevan joke!).

All he's retained of the story is that there are Congolese somewhere in the US (there's a big community in Dayton in particular), which must have shocked him a lot, and he's made the rest up out of his congested head, probably mostly from the Mariel Boatlift from Cuba in 1980, the only time as far as I know when a foreign government really did "send them" to the States, and rumors flew that some of the boat people might be prisoners and mental patients, which was probably not true, though many of them were undesirable from President Castro's point of view, gay, ill-educated, political detainees, or Black. That was a time when a relatively young Trump was still capable of learning something—the wrong thing, of course—and the source of many things he thinks he knows now.

On Mrs. Comperatore, I can't find any evidence that he's ever presented her with a check, or met with her personally at all—he did speak with her on the phone at least once, and he may well have contributed to the gofundme, though he's not listed in the report of celebrities (Dana White, Ben Shapiro, Kid Rock) who did. On the joke about how some women would be pleased if their husbands got shot to death at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania, four of whom were at the Aspen dinner, not including Mrs. Abbott, I have no words.

Vance in Defense of the Lie

Drawing by Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press, 7/17/24.

Anne Applebaum, of all people, created or appropriated a meme, and a good one:

This was the moment that mattered. Trump's political movement relies on total impunity for liars, and mostly gets it. The lies bind them together, cement their feeling of power. pic.twitter.com/McbdBNwUyq

— Anne Applebaum (@anneapplebaum) October 2, 2024

This is another instance of the same shocking openness as when Vance claimed that he was justified in telling lies (on the imaginary pet-eating in Springfield, Ohio) in order to get attention—

The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do, Dana...

—and in this case turning it around on the moderator, making her the offender, and taking advantage of the moment to tell a more difficult-to-expose lie without fear of correction, as you see from the transcript:

Margaret. The rules were that you guys weren't going to fact check, and since you're fact checking me, I think it's important to say what's actually going on. So there's an application called the CBP One app where you can go on as an illegal migrant, apply for asylum or apply for parole and be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand. That is not a person coming in, applying for a green card and waiting for ten years.

The CBP1 app, introduced in October 2020, was originally meant for truckers crossing from Mexico into US to schedule cargo inspections, so they could just show up at the border at their appointment time instead of lining up and waiting for hours and days clogging the road. In January 2023, DHS added some new functionality, so that it could also be used by individuals applying for asylum (from all over the place, but chiefly at that time the "Northern Triangle" of Central America) or Temporary Protected Status (at the moment for Haitians, Cubans, Venezuelans, and Nicaraguans) to schedule interviews from the Mexican side of the border instead of having to wait in line for hours and days and months or, in the pattern that had become a serious problem since 2014 or so, crossing the border at an uncontrolled spot and chasing down a border patrol agent to interview them; and that May, the app was made the only way to get a first asylum interview at the Mexican border.

So the app, far from being a "Kamala Harris open border wand", is a piece of cell phone tech for applying the law as it has stood since the 1990 Immigration Act was signed by George H.W. Bush (in which Temporary Protected Status was instituted—the asylum provisions date back well before that), and meant to get rid of the much decried chaos at the border, or rather keep it on the Mexican side. In fact it adds a good deal of harshness to the system (for which it has been rightly called out by organizations like ACLU), as waiting in Mexico is difficult and dangerous, and it can take a really long time. But in terms of what it was intended to do, it's worked exceedingly well, with migration at the border at its lowest level since fall 2020 (when the Covid pandemic had largely shut it down).

And Vance's picture of a Kamala conspiracy to wave people in (presumably to vote illegally and beget "anchor babies" that will dilute America's blood) is as grotesquely false as the cat-eating canard. 

Senator, the question was, will you separate parents from their children, even if their kids are U.S. citizens? You have 1 minute.

JDV: Margaret, my point is that we already have massive child separations thanks to Kamala Harris' open border. And I didn't accuse Kamala Harris of inviting drug mules, I said that she enabled the Mexican drug cartels to operate freely in this country, and we know that they use children as drug mules, and it is a disgrace and it has to stop. Look, I think what Tim said just doesn't pass the smell test. For three years, Kamala Harris went out bragging that she was going to undo Donald Trump's border policy. She did exactly that. We had a record number of illegal crossings. We had a record number of fentanyl coming into our country. And now, now that she's running for President, or a few months before, she says that somehow she got religion and cared a lot about a piece of legislation. The only thing that she did when she became the Vice President, when she became the appointed border czar, was to undo 94 Donald Trump executive actions that opened the border.

Harris wasn't the "appointed border czar"; she was asked in early 2021 to work on combating the "root causes" of the wave of asylum seekers coming through Mexico from the three countries of the Northern Triangle (Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala) by improving cooperation with the four countries on US immigration law and by encouraging investment to relieve the economic stresses of living in Central America, and it may have had some effect—by 2023 just 16% of all CPB encounters were with people from Golden Triangle countries, compared to 52% in 2021 (replaced by Venezuelans and Haitians, who were not part of Harris's mandate).

It's true that some family separations took place up through 2022, of parents accused of gang affiliations, or through the stupid Trump-instituted Title 42 program, but nothing like the systematic destruction of families pushed through by Stephen Miller in his truly czar-like, sadistic and violent, reign.

Fentanyl is not smuggled into the US by undocumented aliens, but by US citizens driving cars at the official crossings. Do the cartels use children as mules? Sure, if they're Americans and can drive:

State of the Race

I'm on a bit of a very refreshing holiday and finding it hard to focus on the realities, but this seemed especially hilarious: 

Per CBS News, 

A company called TheBestWatchesonEarth LLC, which is licensing Trump's name for the watches, lists its address as a suite located in a building in Sheridan, Wyoming, the same address as the company selling Trump's $499 sneakers. The suite is near a Wendy's fast-food location and Sherwin-Williams paint store. 

New York's Chas Danner and Matt Stieb have reported of the sneaker operation, however, that the Sheridan company that licensed Trump's name for the sneakers, 45FootwearLLC, as well as the company that did the digital Trump trading cards, is the creation of an "asset-protection consultant" called Andrew Pierce, who specializes in creating LLCs for clients who could like to keep their transactions inside layers of misdirection, apparently quite a big business in Wyoming (see Pandora Papers), in these cases the not-at-all illegal fact that Trump actually owns the businesses himself, and the buyer of these cheap sneakers from a "low-cost Asian country", smelling of glue (that's said to be a bad sign) and marked up something like 900%, who probably thinks he is benefiting the Trump presidential campaign, or the equally dubious Tourbillon watches, is actually giving the money straight to Donald. 

And with those those kinds of markups, he's definitely got the tariffs covered, if the goods are subject to any.

Then there's the way he's restructured the Republican National Committee, taking the management away from that loyal tool Ronna McDaniel and turning it over to his daughter-in-law, the aspiring pop singer Lara Trump, and Michael Whatley, whoever that is (he's a North Carolina lawyer and an election denier). They are pledged not to use the party funds to pay Trump's legal fees, for whatever that's worth, but they've allocated their energies in a sort of weird way, devoting themselves mostly to fighting against the election results before the election takes place, with 120 lawsuits in 26 states, while the party's normal get-out-the-vote activities have been wholly outsourced to outside groups, Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA, the "America First Works" run not by political operatives but by theoretically sane celebrity veterans of Trump's old cabinet (Linda MacMahon and Larry Kudlow), and most splendidly a superPAC aligned with former genius Elon Musk, AmericaPAC, which is said to be doing most of the work but adopting a somewhat peculiar strategy, aimed at a relatively small number of unlikely voters:

Seems Tired

  

Photo by Getty Images via Forbes, April 2024.

From Fox News:

At the end of the interview, Attkisson asked Trump if he was not successful in his bid for president in November, could he see himself running again in four years? 

"No, I don’t. No, I don’t. I think that that will be, that will be it. I don’t see that at all," the former president answered. "I think that hopefully we’re gonna be successful."

It's been reported all over the place (I heard it on NPR), but I haven't seen anybody hearing what I hear, a huge change in the discourse, as I'll explain; especially coming, as it does, on top of his remarks suggesting Jewish voters might be responsible for bringing him down.

That's in the American Israeli Council "Fighting Anti-Semitism in America" event in Washington, where he appeared with huge donor and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Miriam Adelson, expressing his disappointment that he got only 24% of the Jewish vote in 2016 and 29% in 2020, after all he accomplished for the Jewish people, and still four years after that is scoring only 40% of the Jewish vote (in fact it's 25%):

I'll put it to you very simply and as gently as I can, I wasn't treated properly by the voters who happen to be Jewish. I don't know. Do they know what the hell is happening if I don't win this election? And the Jewish people would really have a lot to do with that if that happens because at 40% that means 60% of the people are voting for the enemy. Israel, in my opinion, will cease to exist within two years, and I believe I'm 100% right. You know, there's a hat that comes out, Trump was right about everything and I believe I'm right and that's a hell of a thing to say. But I believe I'm right. If I do win, Israel will be safe and secure, we will stop the toxic poison of antisemitism from spreading here all over America. It's spreading, it's spreading like it's never spread before. I've never seen anything like it. I really believe it would be obliteration and it'll happen quickly, too. It's very close to happening. (Retyped from C-Span)

Note that point where he's trying (and failing) to work his way back into the teleprompter text, with the obvious Stephen Miller phrase "toxic poison" (Miller never allows himself to refrain from using an adjective just because it means the same thing as the noun), but can't manage until he gets to "obliteration".

Everybody's talking about one thing in this passage, the ratification of antisemitic conspiracy theories, which is understandable; Trump can't be talking here about the math of the Jewish vote, which couldn't make that kind of difference at maybe 2.4% of the electorate and much less in the swing states (except Pennsylvania, which could well be the crucial state, with 2.3%)—he must be talking about Jew magic, the Elders and their incantations, making all the plain folks vote for the communists.

I myself think Trump's mathematical understanding is really that weak and he may well think the Jews could defeat him on the sheer numbers, though that doesn't mean he's not an antisemite—he plainly is. Unforgettable how he told the American Israeli Council 2019:

A lot of you are in the real estate business, because I know you very well. You’re brutal killers, not nice people at all,” he said. “But you have to vote for me—you have no choice. You’re not gonna vote for Pocahontas, I can tell you that. You’re not gonna vote for the wealth tax. Yeah, let’s take 100% of your wealth away!”

But it's their intrinsically treacherous character he's thinking about there, not their occult powers.

What's interesting about the current phase is the note of discouragement in the antisemitism speech and the Atkisson interview, the recognition of the possibility that Trump and Vance might not be winning at all, the acknowledgment that he might get beaten, without cheating, just by voters, even if he thinks it could be mainly the Jewish voters.

I mean, just in these instances, not in every speech, and perhaps he was just tired and out of sorts for these occasions, but I'm pretty sure it's a first in his political career, or indeed his career all round, which has always run on his never admitting defeat or the possibility of defeat. 

This seems huge to me, if true.

What She Needed to Do

Portrait of the candidates as baffled uncle and skeptical niece. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty. 

When Vice President Harris opened up in her first debate response—to the fairly stupid but utterly predictable question whether Americans are "better off than they were four years ago", I was somewhat dismayed by the way she completely ignored it, choosing to answer a completely different question instead, with a peculiar mix of autobiographical detail and Clintonian numbers:

So, I was raised as a middle-class kid. And I am actually the only person on this stage who has a plan that is about lifting up the middle class and working people of America. I believe in the ambition, the aspirations, the dreams of the American people. And that is why I imagine and have actually a plan to build what I call an opportunity economy. Because here's the thing. We know that we have a shortage of homes and housing, and the cost of housing is too expensive for far too many people. We know that young families need support to raise their children. And I intend on extending a tax cut for those families of $6,000, which is the largest child tax credit that we have given in a long time. So that those young families can afford to buy a crib, buy a car seat, buy clothes for their children. My passion, one of them, is small businesses. I was actually -- my mother raised my sister and me but there was a woman who helped raise us. We call her our second mother. She was a small business owner. I love our small businesses. My plan is to give a $50,000 tax deduction to start-up small businesses, knowing they are part of the backbone of America's economy. My opponent, on the other hand, his plan is to do what he has done before, which is to provide a tax cut for billionaires and big corporations, which will result in $5 trillion to America's deficit. My opponent has a plan that I call the Trump sales tax, which would be a 20% tax on everyday goods that you rely on to get through the month. Economists have said that Trump's sales tax would actually result for middle-class families in about $4,000 more a year because of his policies and his ideas about what should be the backs of middle-class people paying for tax cuts for billionaires.

But it's astonishing, looking back at it, how many necessary things she accomplished with that, in the first two minutes: 

• sketching out her character, as an ordinary American raised by a single mother with the help of a day care provider (loved, and also properly paid for her work), which has given her a feeling for what ordinary Americans need and a motivation to help them get it, for the benefit of those in the audience that had barely heard of her before July and still doesn't know much of anything about her; 
• establishing her readiness to talk about policy with details, numbers and all, for the benefit of the moderators whose preparation has led them to believe that she's going to keep it vague and airy, and precisely the kind of wonky detail they hate at the politics desk, because they find it so boring;
• establishing the contrast with her opponent, who is focused on helping his fellow billionaires and their giant companies, as he has shown in the past and as he plans in the future; and
• spooking the opponent personally with a description of his tariff proposals that he may not even be able to recognize—it's import duties, paid by the American importers of foreign goods—effectively a sales tax, since the importers normally pass the cost on to their customers, but not literally a sales tax, while Trump keeps implying idiotically that it's paid by the governments of the exporting countries, which he should understand better considering all the import businesses he theoretically ran in his TV star days (Israeli vodka, Slovene cocktail glasses, Turkish furniture, Chinese neckties and eyeglass frames, etc.—of course he was just a licensee pretending to run the businesses for the show, and they were all failures), a description that immediately goads him into opening with a ridiculously ignorant lie:

First of all, I have no sales tax. That's an incorrect statement. She knows that. We're doing tariffs on other countries. Other countries are going to finally, after 75 years, pay us back for all that we've done for the world. And the tariff will be substantial in some cases. I took in billions and billions of dollars, as you know, from China. In fact, they never took the tariff off because it was so much money, they can't. It would totally destroy everything that they've set out to do. They've taken in billions of dollars from China and other places. They've left the tariffs on.....

No, "other countries" don't pay a dime. And while the money paid by US import businesses is real, it's hardly important: it's up from about 1% of annual federal revenue from 1946 to 2017 to 2% (compared to 49% for income tax), and that's not the reason the Biden administration has held on to them. Tariffs haven't been a significant source of revenue since the income tax was introduced by a Progressive movement a bit over a century ago (it's imaginable that Trump learned from his rightwing father that income tax is an attack on the wealthy, and that's the reason he's convinced tariffs are the solution to every problem).

The only reason for imposing tariffs nowadays is as the (post-neoliberal) Biden administration uses it, for the encouragement of domestic industry, but combined, unlike the Trump tariffs, with an effective industrial policy of the kind Republicans regard as an abomination and which Trump and his minions wouldn't know how to begin in any case (Trump's own tariffs on imports from the EU as well as China are best known for China's retaliation against US agriculture—92% of the "billions and billions of dollars" they brought in went to compensating US farmers for the losses Trump policy had caused them).

Via.

FWIW.

Moreover, Harris did have an answer to the "are we better off" question, which she got to in response to Trump's freakout Gish gallop, which ran in a matter of seconds from tariffs to inflation to a rant on "millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums" before he remembered he was supposed to be talking about the economy. 

"I'd love to" talk about the economy, Harris replied:

Let's talk about what Donald Trump left us. Donald Trump left us the worst unemployment since the Great Depression. Donald Trump left us the worst public health epidemic in a century. Donald Trump left us the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War. And what we have done is clean up Donald Trump's mess. 

So you can't complain that she didn't answer—she just chose to do it in her own time, after getting Trump to define his own character, as ignorant, delusional, and vicious, and did it with a list of charges that placed him as the defendant in what would amount to a trial, and took control of the occasion. 

Really, as Rebecca Traister suggested, she took control of it the minute she came on stage and marched over to Trump's podium introducing herself as if she were the host ("Kamala Harris. Let's have a good debate") and forcing him to shake hands.

It was a stunning performance. It was by far the most entertaining presidential debate I've ever seen, and by far the most useful (both at the same time: the faces she made for the camera when Trump was speaking were funny, but they were also instructive, assisting with the fact checking; leading the audience to distinguish Trump the liar from Trump the fool, libelous Trump from psycho Trump, the sneaky one from the one who was just tired and lost). (It's only fair to mention that the moderators did an unusually good job of keeping the candidates on the subject and checking the facts themselves.)

It didn't, as many of the pundits complain, provide a very clear sense of how Harris's presidency will differ policy-wise from Biden's, but I don't understand why it should; she's not running against Biden, she's running against Trump. Josh Marshall likes to say she's making Trump the "incumbent", the representative of the discredited establishment, in order to present herself as the change agent, and some think that's a little too paradoxical, but I think it meets the psychology of the moment, in terms of the Lacanian picture I sketched out a couple of weeks ago. Economically, Biden (or "Biden-Harris") rescued the nation from the calamity of 2020; psychologically, Biden's term is the afterwardsness in which we began to realize how traumatized we've been, and we may irrationally blame him, in the form of the psychoanalytic transference, but it's Trump we're suffering from—it's Trump who abused us, and he really is the incumbent in that sense.

As to whether the debate worked or not for the Harris campaign, whether she "did what she needed to do" as the horserace pundits always put it, I don't know, but I think there are reasons for being hopeful, and I don't mean the current picture in the polls, or for that matter the parade of Bush-era endorsements for Harris, most recently from that old reprobate Alberto Gonzales, or last week's statements from Liz Cheney and her father the abominable former vice; not that there's anything wrong with those in and of themselves, it's the responsible thing to do, given Trump's known incompetence and criminality, and Trump opposes some things in national security and foreign policy where the "bipartisan consensus" is so fundamental that at some level I agree with Dick Cheney (like "the US should have multilateral economic and security alliances"); but I can't quite bring myself to see it outside the context of Liz Cheney's broader project of rehabilitating the Republican Party by pretending Trump isn't really one of them, that he's some kind of horrific invasive species from somewhere entirely different. I may get back to that a little later.

The Liz Cheney endorsement that startled me was the one for Texas Democratic Senate candidate Colin Allred, because it's a direct attack on the party as it is, in the rebarbative person of Senator Cruz: she wrote,

There are numbers of candidates around the country who have embraced election denialism [the C-SPAN transcript says "elections and nihilism" first, but never mind that]—denialism. It is important that we beat them too. I think one of the most important things we need to do as a country as we begin to rebuild our politics is we need to elect serious people. Often, when you go in to vote you don't have the choice. I want to say specifically here in Texas, you guys do have a tremendous serious candidate running for the United States Senate. [Applause.] It's not Ted Cruz. [Laughter.] [Applause.]....You might not agree on every policy position, but we need people who are going to serve in good faith. In this race, that is Colin Allred.

And because she gives a nod to the idea that Allred might conceivably win, pinned in Cheney's explanation to Trump's and Vance's (and by implication Cruz's) misogyny, and its connection to the reproductive rights issue: "Women around this country, we've had enough," she said. It seems like a more conventional endorsement, in which she'd not only like him to win, but personally hopes to help.

The things that are giving me the most hope at the moment have to do with how bad the Trump Republican party is, in every sense of the work, incompetent, corrupt, and unresponsive to voters, especially on the abortion issue. 

There's the  arrogance of Donald Trump saying he doesn't have to prepare for a debate being matched by his vice presidential candidate:

A reporter asked Vance how he was getting ready for the [October 1 debate with Walz] at a campaign rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Wednesday.

He answered: "The way I'm doing debate prep is by spending time with these fine people—this is how I do debate prep."

That didn't work out so well for Donald, JD, you might want to rethink it.

There's the awful quality of so many of the GOP downballot candidates, especially for the Senate, to the despair of the National Review, with only two seats likely to flip to the Republicans, West Virginia and Montana (but Montana is looking iffier for them, with the Republican, ex–Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy falling from multiple lying scandals to financial scandal to racism scandal).  

There's the turnover of the national committee from Ronna McDaniel (a horrible person, but a professional) to Trump's daughter-in-law focusing on her imaginary music career and outsourcing the party's entire GOTV program to pikers with no experience like Charlie Kirk and his Turning Point USA. I'm personally convinced Trump is continuing to milk the party to pay his own and his henchmen's legal fees. It's as if they're so confident in their voter suppression efforts in Pennsylvania and North Carolina that they don't need GOTV:

The Republican National Committee (RNC) once envisioned an extensive field operation for the 2024 election, including having about 90 staffers in the must-win state of Pennsylvania.

But the Trump campaign scrapped those plans when it took over the RNC in March, redirecting the focus on field operations to combating supposed voter fraud and pursuing a twin voter turnout strategy of relying on several political action committees and ardent Trump volunteers.

The result has been that the Trump campaign has put fewer resources into its ground game in battleground states, according to people familiar with the matter – and Republican officials have derisively said the Trump operation is more comparable in size to a midterm cycle than a presidential.

They're so bad at everything else, maybe they're not really good at voter suppression either.

Meanwhile, since the coming of Kamala Harris, there's an explosion of new voter registrations, especially among the 18-to-34s and among those particularly among women:

Voter registration surged 700% after President Joe Biden announced he would not seek reelection, according to the CEO of a nonpartisan voter engagement organization....Hailey noted significant registration increases in key swing states, including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. By the end of the week following Biden’s announcement, Vote.org had recorded more than 142,000 new registrations nationwide....

(who don't show up in the likely voter polls because they'll be voting for the first time). 

This phenomenon is plainly connected to the issue of abortion, which is also the subject of ballot measures in 10 states, including some with important Senate races with repellent Republicans: Montana (Tester vs. Sheehy), Arizona (Gallego vs. Lake), Missouri (Kunze vs. Hawley), and Florida (Mucarsel-Powell vs. Scott). Plus Ohio (Sherrod Brown vs. the unspeakable Bernie Moreno), which had its referendum in 2023, which that state's vile legislature has decided to ignore, and the voters really ought to punish them for it

I'm convinced there could be a Blue blowout in November that polls couldn't have predicted—not that there will be, because it's unpredictable, but that it's really possible, between the joy of the Democrats, the worthlessness of the Republicans, and Harris's emerging pro-freedom campaign.

Literary Corner: Essay on Criticism

Drawing by JaysonZHahn/Medium.

 

Trump finally explained the Hannibal Lecter bit, and it's worse than you think.

[image or embed]

— Comfortably Numb (@numb.comfortab.ly) Sep 7, 2024 at 6:10 PM

The Poet Defends Himself Against His Critics

by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

AND THEN THE PRESS WHEN I SAY DR HANNIBAL LECTER.
THE PRESS SAYS, OH, WHY DID HE MENTION THAT?
THEY ARE WISE GUYS BACK THERE? JUST WISE GUYS. THEY SAY
HE RAMBLED AND STARTED TALKING ABOUT
HANNIBAL LECTER. WHAT DOES THAT HAVE TO DO?

THAT'S A REPRESENTATIVE OF PEOPLE THAT ARE
COMING INTO OUR COUNTRY. DR HANNIBAL LECTER,
HE WILL HAVE YOU FOR DINNER. YOU KNOW THAT
HE WILL HAVE YOU FOR DINNER. NO, BUT THIS
IS WHAT'S HAPPENED. THIS IS WHAT'S HAPPENING AT LEVELS
THAT NOBODY CAN EVEN IMAGINE. MILLIONS AND MILLIONS.

I love how the critics speak mostly in an easy dactylic pentameter in the first five lines, before Trump responds in his own choppily unmetered voice.

Dr. Lecter is just what your fancy-ass literature professors refer to as a metaphor. That is, not a "representative" like your congressman but a symbolic representation, of the millions and millions of Latin American lunatics, mental patients like Dr. Lecter, driven by their governments from the asylums of their own benighted countries and pushed to cross from Mexico into the USA to find asylums here. The liberals even admit this!

Not that they're really cannibals, exactly, that's a metaphor too, though they really are criminals. It means their rapacious consumption of all the generous benefits we give them is eating our lunch.* 

And finally, like Dr. Lecter, they don't exist, just like the benefits we don't give them. Their existence isn't the point! This is literature, people! The point is the emotions they give us! 

"True! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses — not destroyed — not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily — how calmly I can tell you the whole story."

He's not rambling at all! He's weaving! As the fancy-ass literature professors in his own circle have told him.

*I think Hannibal's joke, the play on the ambiguity of "have for dinner", may be the first and even only piece of purely verbal humor Trump has ever understood, his first or only experience of what it's like to "get" it. That's surely why he's compelled to keep repeating it, in every speech.

Literary Corner: Oh Freedom

 

Music historian Linda Russell, via RecordOnLine, on campaign songs.

Two Songs

By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

I. Take a Look at Bacon

You take a look at bacon
and some of these products –
and some people don’t eat bacon any more.
We are going to get the energy prices down.

When we get energy down, you know …
this was caused by their horrible energy – wind.
They want wind all over the place.
But when it doesn’t blow,
we have a little problem.

II. The Transgender Thing

But the transgender thing is incredible.
Think of it. Your kid goes to school
and comes home a few days later
with an operation. The school decides
what’s going to happen with your child

and you know many of these childs
fifteen years later say, what the hell happened?
Who did this to me? They say, who did this to me?
It’s incredible.

The price of bacon in 2023 was down 9% from its all-time high in 2022, year over year, and it's lower now than it was then. Brad DeLong, who I really, really trust, claims the price of bacon is at a historic low, matched only by the price in one weird interval 30 years ago:

The price of bacon relative to personal income per capita has only been noticeably lower than it is today for about a year in 1994-1995.

Doing it for Hersh

 

Desert gazelle (tzvi in Hebrew, hersh in Yiddish), via.

The killing of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Alex Lobanov, Carmel Gat, and Almog Sarusi in a tunnel underneath Rafah last Thursday, or possibly Friday morning, a day or two before the Israeli Defense Forces found their bodies Saturday afternoon, according to the autopsy reports from Israel's ministry of health, isn't the only terrible thing—it's all terrible—but maybe made especially poignant for many of us by the presence of the Israeli-American, the youngest of these particular victims, Goldberg-Polin, 23, who we've come to know a bit, or at least his parents, Rachel and Jon, who addressed the DNC in Chicago last month with a plea for a Gaza ceasefire:

the one thing that can most immediately release pressure and bring calm to the entire region: a deal that brings this diverse group of 109 hostages home and ends the suffering of the innocent civilians in Gaza. The time is now.

Hersh was my father's Yiddish name, and by extension that of my son, who was born just a month after my dad died, and named after him, in accordance with Jewish custom, so that I find myself involuntarily projecting the special qualities of my young Hersh, generous, attentive, deeply mentshlekh, on their young Hersh. It's too sad. May all their memories be a blessing.

We don't always mention the other thing, which is that so many of the victims of the October 7 massacre belong to the Israeli left, a political movement that has been mostly defunct for three or four decades, with a commitment to equity between Jews and Palestinians that the Israeli government was not often willing to match and the Palestinian resistance movements rarely took seriously (with some reason; even the nicest Jews weren't usually offering to give the stolen land back).  

Graveyard Scene

Screen capture from Trump's Tik Tok campaign video shot illegally in Arlington National Cemetery, via. Just for the record, I know you probably know this already, there were 45 combat deaths of US troops during Trump's presidential term, 18 "non-hostile" deaths, and no 18-month period during which there were no deaths at all. I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere, but there actually were about 18 months with no US deaths in Afghanistan after Trump signed the deal with the Taliban in February 2020, but Biden was the president for eight of those months. (This is a key reason why Biden honored the deal, because he knew if he didn't the Taliban would go back to attacking and killing Americans.)

On that story about the shoving match last week at Arlington National Cemetery, where a ceremony meant to honor the last Americans to die in the Afghan War, with presidential candidate Donald Trump as a guest, was marred by the behavior of members of Trump's gang entourage, who insisted on violating the rules (and the law) by filming the event, for what turned out to be a Trump campaign Tik Tok commercial, to the point of using violence against the official who tried to get them to stop (it's not clear exactly how, whether they pushed her to the ground or just punched her—the Trump team apparently has some video, but they don't seem at all eager to let it out)—there's an angle that hasn't been covered directly, which has to do with the mourners, family members of the American dead.

There were 13 Americans, 11 Marines and one man each from the Army and Navy,  killed on August 27 2021, among 180-some deaths altogether in a suicide bombing at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, where desperate crowds were trying to get flights out of the country as the US forces packed up and left under the disorderly arrangements negotiated by the Trump administration the previous February, and the Taliban assumed control. The Americans were there, at least some of them, to help Afghan evacuees process their papers to get out. The attacker detonating the suicide belt was affiliated with the Taliban's enemies from Isis-K (the Islamic State in Khorasan), but it's not ruled out that panicked American troops killed some of the victims as well. It was a terrible mess.

Joe Did What? Post-Trumpatic Stress Disorder

Listen to it twice, if possible—it's not long, and it's mostly in English. Here's a good text for following along, with the few German bits translated.

A little over a month ago, at my day job as a music bibliographer, I was processing an essay by the Italian musicologist Mariano Russo about the12-tone music of Arnold Schoenberg and his students, which argued that it was never as revolutionary as it sounded, and didn't last very long, if at all, as the norm for contemporary music; nevertheless (according to the abstract I wrote),

in the history of 20th-century music it continues to be felt as the decisive parting of the waters after which everything changed. Jacques Lacan's concept of the après-coup (after Freud's term Nachträglichkeit, "afterwardsness"), a "mode of belated understanding or retroactive attribution of sexual or traumatic meaning to earlier events", is drawn on to explain the phenomenon: the arrival of 12-tone music was recognized as a traumatic event only after the event had passed. An illustration is provided by the premiere of Schoenberg's A survivor from Warsaw under the conductor Kurt Frederick in Albuquerque in 1948. After the performance, the audience remained stunned and baffled, without applauding, for a full minute. Then Frederick repeated the whole of the 7- or 8-minute work, and the audience applauded thunderously--it was only in the "afterwardsness" of the re-hearing that they were able to process the traumatic character of the first impression.

Which took hours of research, I may say; I don't have any experience with the later 20th-century psychoanalytic material—somewhere in my library there's a chapter on Lacan in a book surveying the French structuralist movement, but I know I didn't read the chapter with much interest or understanding, and I can't find it at all at the moment. But the après-coup concept really stuck in my mind, where it got connected to something completely different: the political events of the last month and the last eight years, and in particular the strange sensation of "joy" Democrats have been experiencing especially last week over the Chicago festivities.

Not just the joy in itself, but what seems to me like its belated character, of a national celebration we really should have been enjoying four years ago, when we drove Trump out of office. We're out singing and dancing in the public square like the Munchkins after Dorothy's house falls on the witch—"Ding dong, the witch is dead!"—at the wrong time, when the witch has actually come back to life, and seriously threatens to retake power.

Literary Corner: Did Trump Close the Border?

 

Screenshot from Newsweek.

The former president responds to the Democratic candidate's acceptance speech, in a call to Fox News, which the network cut off after ten minutes, claiming they were out of time:

I Didn't Have a Bill

By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

Why didn’t she do the things
she’s complaining about?
She didn’t do any of it.
She could have done it
three and a half years ago.
She could do it tonight
by leaving the auditorium
and going to Washington, DC,
and closing the border.
She doesn’t need a bill.
I didn’t have a bill.
I closed the border.

It's almost endearing how he still hasn't found out what vice presidents are supposed to do for a living, even though he had one of his own for four years. 

Or is this something I've been missing? Did Pence use to pop over to the White House and issue executive orders while Trump was in the East Wing watching Fox & Friends? Or does he think Harris is already the president? He's often suggested in recent months that the presidency is a very slippery kind of identity, sometimes suggesting Barack Obama is still in office (and likely to be responsible for a nuclear war, because Putin doesn't respect him), sometimes hinting that he believes he's still president himself. 

Here's the passage from Harris's speech:

Pre-DNC Pep Talk

Trump "Freedom Cities" affordable housing proposal, via Raw Story.

By the way, I still think Biden would have won the election, when it came down to it. I still think there was a majority who would be happy to vote for him but told the polls they didn't want to because they'd heard he was unelectable, and were afraid if Biden was the candidate Trump would win. Fear of Trump won out.  But it certainly wouldn't have been as much fun as this looks likely to be. As Josh Marshall (gift link) is saying, it was going to be a slog, weary work, not happy. And now we're talking joy!

I also still think Biden made that happen, defeating the timid centrist plan to run Some White Dude chosen by some improvised set of reality-TV rules, with his endorsement of Kamala Harris as his successor minutes after he left the race (the centrist plan was specifically meant to exclude her, as too "controversial"). And it was clearly a great decision, as was his naming Harris in the first place, back in 2020. If anybody engineered a "coup" it was Biden himself, ensuring his post-neoliberal "legacy" by naming the candidate most representative of the Biden coalition and most likely to continue along his policy lines. As Harris has confirmed in her own naming of the most Biden-like of VP candidates, Tim Walz, the lovable non-rich white guy, mainline Christian, tell-it-like-it-is orator (Biden could easily have invented the "these guys are weird" line himself), simple but extremely sharp, with a genuine fund of out-of-country experience (in China, where he taught English for a while and used to bring his American high school students on trips every year) and an unshakable commitment to kindness and understanding. 

(I also should add, contra Peter Beinart's "Joe Biden Is Not a Hero", that I still think Biden has been doing everything he believes is possible to stop the killing in Gaza, and continues to work tirelessly at that at this late date. I think he's literally hoping to have the permanent ceasefire announced at the Democratic convention. Biden may well be wrong on the hopefulness of this approach, but I'm certain an arms embargo wouldn't have succeeded any better at stopping the killing, given the mood in Israel and the criminal intransigence of the prime minister and his party, intent on saving his own bacon; it would have left Netanyahu feeling even freer to ignore US entreaties. Meanwhile, as I type, FWIW, Blinken has just announced that Netanyahu and Gallant have accepted his "bridging proposal" for getting from here to there, though the details remain thin.) 

Weaky Leaks. II: Interviews With a Vampire Squid

...Which was the detail emerging from the WikiLeaks dump if you happened to read it instead of screaming about it, on October 16.

I had no idea, but there actually is such a thing as a vampire squid, Vampiroteuthis infernalis. Not because it sucks blood, it doesn't, but because of its red eyes and the webbing on its tentacles, making it look as if it were wearing an opera cape. Threatened by predators, it "inverts its caped arms back over the body, presenting an ostensibly larger form covered in fearsome-looking though harmless spines" in what is known as a "pineapple" or "pumpkin" posture. So it's actually kind of cute! Image via Wikipedia.

Everybody knows Hillary Clinton refused to release the speech transcripts because she didn't want us to see her cozying up to those bankers (and cardiovascular researchers, Canadians, Jewish organizations, Silicon Valley women, and pro-camping lobbyists, among many others, who also paid her upwards of $200,000 a pop to address them in 2013-15, as we know thanks to the fact that she released complete tax returns in July 2015). But it's possible that she was really much more worried about somebody entirely different seeing the transcripts, like Xi Jinping, you know, or King Salman.

Or Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Donald Trump, who still wields real power in Italy as a news magnate and opposition politician. Speaking of that third Chelsea Manning dump of 250,000 diplomatic cables in late 2010, she told an audience of Goldman Sachs "builders and innovators" three years later,