Teh Stupid

It's now possible to embed Bluesky posts! I guess it has been for a while, but I haven't given much thought to posting threads here the way I used to do with Twitter threads. Then yesterday everybody was talking about that Trump interview in Time, and I thought I might use some of mine. At least these, which have a more threadish form:

I think Josh is literally incapable of understanding how stupid Trump is. talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/decod... He's probably never met anybody that stupid. On the NATO issue, Trump is unable to comprehend what the issue is. It's like his inability to comprehend that a tariff is an import tax...

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— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) Apr 30, 2024 at 5:36 PM

Trump doesn't know that the 2% rule is about the countries' individual defense budgets. He has made up a story for himself that makes sense to him--that all the NATO countries are supposed to pay some kind of fee to the US and they're all deadbeats. And it makes him really mad!

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— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) Apr 30, 2024 at 5:41 PM

It's the only way to make sense out of things like this latest version. "You got to pay your bills." www.cnn.com/2024/02/10/p...

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— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) Apr 30, 2024 at 5:44 PM

I'm sure aides like Kelly have tried to explain it to him over and over again, and he just can't get it. Kudlow explained tariffs to him too, but he's still talking like this in the Time interview:

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— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) Apr 30, 2024 at 5:49 PM

As Philip Bump has said, what he's doing in the interview is largely refusing to say what he might do in a second term because he hasn't thought about it and doesn't want to, and trying to interpret it as representing Trump's plans, as Eric Cortellessa does in his report of it, is a mug's game: 

a lot of what Trump is reported as planning to do is constructed from murky, noncommittal answers Trump offered to specific questions. The interview is very revealing about Trump’s approach to the position in that it strongly suggests he hasn’t thought much about important issues, and makes clear how relentlessly he relies on rhetoric to derail questions

Literary Corner: NATO as Protection Racket

 

NATO map by CBS News.

Until I Came Along

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

NATO was busted until I came along.

You don't pay your bills, you get no protection.
It's very simple. I said,
‘Everybody’s gonna pay.’ They said, ‘Well,
if we don’t pay, are you still
going to protect us?’
I said, ‘Absolutely not.’

They couldn’t believe the answer.
One of the presidents of a big country
stood up and said, 'Well, sir,
if we don't pay and we're attacked
by Russia, will you protect us?'
'No, I would not protect you.
In fact, I would encourage them
to do whatever the hell they want.
You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.'

NATO actually does have bills, for its political headquarters and command structure in Brussels, which belong not to any specific country but to the organization as a whole, and various programs it runs, for a some €3.3 billion in 2023, or 0.3% of the members' total defense spending, and these are paid for with member contributions, on a sliding scale according to the wealth of the particular country: the two biggest being the US and Germany, at just over 16% each, with Britain and France coming next at 11% and 10% respectively, and so on, down to Montenegro, paying a bit under 0.03% of the budget.

It's not a whole lot of money, in reality, and NATO has never been busted, as Trump puts it. It's also not what Trump is talking about. But Trump does not know that. 

Joe Did What? Lake NATO

 

Erdogan 🇹🇷 à cours d’arguments, la Suède 🇸🇪 intègre l’OTAN et la Mer Baltique devient le Lac OTAN 👊🏻

Vladimir Poutine, génie militaire👊🏻 pic.twitter.com/6RzxrolXwP

— La Punchline de Yakovleff (@G_Yakovleff) July 10, 2023

Remember all those earnest realists explaining how the Russian Federation was literally forced!—forced, I tell you!—to march into Ukraine because of the increasingly threatening expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization through the states of the former Warsaw Pact from the Balkans to the Baltic, as we kept hearing from Professor Mearsheimer and Messrs. Greenwald and Carlson and most recently Bob-Bob Kennedy. 

I wrote about it with some sympathy myself back at the beginning of February 2022, in the context of the argument I was making back then, that there wasn't going to be any invasion of Ukraine because Vladimir Vladimirovich couldn't possibly be that stupid.

Ukraine Blogging

 

Weird message from Mr. Tucker Carlson a while back that was tagged by some observers, I think correctly, as of Russian origin:

This isn’t journalism, it’s an ongoing FARA violation. Tucker Carlson needs to be prosecuted as an unregistered agent of the Russian Federation and treason under Article 3, Sec. 3, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution for aiding an enemy in hybrid warfare against the United States. https://t.co/5JkLuCKoBn

— Alexandra Chalupa (@AlexandraChalup) January 19, 2022

It's easy to call it propaganda, but I'm finding myself inclined to think of it as something a little bit different, really a message from Putin, one in the Whataboutist mode, seriously, asking for just a little understanding, bro—the Russian Federation really is kind of surrounded on its west, by NATO members some of which control nuclear weapons, all along the western borders of Russia or Belarus or Ukraine from Estonia to Turkey, from the north end of the Gulf of Finland to the eastern end of the Black Sea, members of an alliance that was specifically designed 70-odd years ago to thwart Russian movements in that direction. 

Nothing Happened

Nuts of Fury Breakfast brown ale, made with local grain from Appalachian Malting and fresh Vienna Roast coffee from Iron Star Roasting Company, from the Fury Brewing Company of Huntingdon, PA, via untappd.

So it was all bullshit. The Breakfast of Fury was a performance, as Steve notes, for Trump's base in the United States to watch their God-Emperor filling the hearts of the foreigners with fear and trembling, and what actually happened at the NATO summit in Brussels was, precisely, nothing.

That's not what he said at his own press conference, of course (via Telegraph):

Mr Trump refused to deny that he had threatened to pull the US out of the organisation, and said the atmosphere in the meeting was "a little tough for a little while," but cordial after the spending commitments went up "like a rocket ship".

"Everyone in the room thanked me," he said. "There is a great collegial atmosphere in that room, that I don't think they've had for many years."

Asked directly whether he had threatened to withdraw, he replied: "I told people I'd be very unhappy if they didn't up their commitment. Yesterday I let them know I was extremely unhappy."...

"Nato is much stronger than it was two days ago," Mr Trump declared.

"We had a fantastic meeting at the end. Germany has increased very substantially what it is doing. I brought it up, no one brought it up but me.

"And frankly maybe everyone is going to have a good relationship with Russia."

It's just nonsense, as we learn from the AP report of the press conference of the president of France:

Continental Breakfast

Gif via Buzzfeed.

No doubt everybody's seen this video and heard the first-order commentary on the utter mortification on Chief of Staff John Kelly's lips as the boss is saying, in essence, to the German chancellor, "No puppet! No puppet! You're the puppet!" while the stricken smile of our ambassador to NATO, Kay Bailey Hutchinson, is saying, "Well, bless his heart!" as one does in a Texas Baptist church when one's brother-in-law starts hallucinating again and drops his trousers and takes a dump on the altar table during the collection. I'm pretty sure it's not the first time we've seen Kelly making that face, but his involuntary leg movements—as if they want to escape and he can barely command them—are something else.

Quite interesting to watch John Kelly's face in the background as Trump says that "Germany is totally controlled by Russia." (via ABC). pic.twitter.com/qJvj30a3zv

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) July 11, 2018

You've probably also heard how the press secretary acknowledged that Kelly was upset, but didn't acknowledge that he was upset because people whose opinion he values were seeing him as the helpless imprisoned tool of your impulsive and not very bright old uncle with the serious anger issues who nurses his rage from dawn till dusk at the teat of the TV, or because the grandest military alliance in human history was perhaps being shattered before his eyes. No,

In a statement to The Post, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, "[Kelly] was displeased because he was expecting a full breakfast and there were only pastries and cheese." (Washington Post)

Like the axe murderer in the Snickers commercial who turns out to be Jan Brady once she gets down some calories. Give Kelly his bacon and eggs and he'll be Dean Acheson.

And what on earth made you think it had something to do with the president?

We know Huckabee-Sanders lies all the time, too. There's nothing new here! And yet I can't stop feeling some kind of line has really been crossed this time. Like, she can't really be expecting people to cooperate with this one, can she? Can she?

Update:  Not even close. For one thing, it was Americans, in the form of Ambassador Hutchinson's residence, who paid for breakfast. and for another, there was plenty to eat.

Is it possible @PressSec did not tell the truth about today’s supposedly inadequate NATO breakfast being the cause of CoS Kelly’s visible dismay and horror? https://t.co/rQxconWSDg

— David Frum (@davidfrum) July 12, 2018

Thus offering an explanation that is not only hilariously unbelievable but also throws a (distinguished Republican) colleague under the bus. In this way Huckabee Sanders provides an illustration of Trumpiness in which mendacity, stupidity, and treachery may be combined more intimately than they have ever been. H/t Cullen Martin.

Got paranoia?

Port Petermann Glacier, 2009 and 2011. Photos by  Alan Hubbard and Jason Box / Byrd Polar Research Centre

Here's a scary fantasy from the New York Times, page 1 below the fold, datelined Nuuk--I'm not sure whether they even realize what story they're telling, but the headline makes it pretty clear:

Race Is On as Ice Melt Reveals Arctic Treasures

Not only are the Petroleum Powers aware of the human-driven process of global climate change, they're rejoicing at it. There's more stuff under the glaciers and permafrost and sea ice, not only oil and gas but who knows what rarer minerals, to say nothing of the opened Northwest Passage for shipping us our cell phones and knockoff designer clothes and American flag pins, and they can't wait to get their hands on it. The only fear is, what if China gets there first?

Arctic nations and NATO are building up military capabilities in the region, as a precaution. That has left China with little choice but to garner influence through a strategy that has worked well in Africa and Latin America: investing and joining with local companies and financing good works to earn good will....

But Chinese officials have cast their motives in more generous terms. “China’s activities are for the purposes of regular environmental investigation and investment and have nothing to do with resource plundering and strategic control,” the state-controlled Xinhua news agency wrote this year.

Michael Byers, a professor of politics and law at the University of British Columbia, said the Chinese were unlikely to overstep their rights in a region populated by NATO members. “Despite the concerns I have about Chinese foreign policy in other parts of the world, in the Arctic it is behaving responsibly,” he said. “They just want to make money.” 

 Oh, if that's all...

But suppose they're not only aware of global warming, but aware that they're driving it; suppose they're driving it on purpose! They don't need to worry about their children and grandchildren, you see, who will be living in air-conditioned splendor; when the rest of the world has turned into a half-desert, half-flooded nightmare like the central Indian plain, they'll be in the hill stations and the Vale of Kashmir, or the Kashmir of Vail, living forever off the rent of today's adventures.

Failure of imagination, imagination of failure

I'm listening to the NPR staff racking their brains over the question of why the Afghan population isn't as a whole more upset over the ghastly massacre in Kandahar province than they were over the Qur'an burnings of last month—like, have the years of war just made them place less of a value on human life than we do? Are they just clinging to their Qur'ans and guns?

It seems pretty obvious to me that NATO forces are to blame for the massacre insofar as if they hadn't been there it wouldn't have happened, but not guilty beyond that; the soldier was plainly not following orders, he was out of his mind, amok. The Qur'ans, on the other hand, were coolly and deliberately detroyed by order—it was NATO's intention to burn them, and why was that? Why wouldn't the Afghans think it was meant maliciously? It's an occupying army, isn't it?

The conceptual error from NPR and the commentariat is their starting by thinking "Why are these people different from us?" Whereas you can come up with an answer by starting with the assumption that they aren't different; what's different is the point of view from which they are interpreting what they see—the point of view of a people under occupation.

It's a failure of empathy that goes right up the chain of command (past those generals who think Muslims are idolators to those who hold doctorates), and it causes a lot of problems. Of course if they started thinking that way they might start thinking the whole operation was doomed to failure no matter what they did, and I guess that wouldn't be very cool.

Mohammad Sabir Khedri, fourth from left, displays the biggest Quran in the world to Afghan officials at the Hakim Nasir Khosrow Balkhi library in Kabul, 17 January 2012. Photo by Reuters.