New Light on a Familiar Conspiracy

"October surprise" via Merriam-Webster website.

I hate the American "paranoid style" in its usual rightwing form and in the leftwing form too, but there are some conspiracy theories that are just the right size and weight, and of these my favorite, possibly, is that of the 1980 October surprise, when somebody in the Reagan presidential campaign, most probably the old spymaster and future CIA director Bill Casey, is said to have worked to torpedo the Carter administration's negotiations with the revolutionary government of Iran and get the Iranians to delay the release of their American hostages until after the election, to stop the Carter campaign from benefiting from it, promising them that a Reagan administration would give them a better deal than Carter. 

The theory didn't in the end work in the most explicit form, that developed by journalist Robert Parry—Casey hadn't been visiting the places he was said to be—but that didn't mean it was wrong, just that the narratology wasn't adequately developed, and a lot of people continued to think there was something to it, including expert Gary Sick, and by at least some reports President Carter himself, and now there's something else, reported in today's Times by Peter Baker of all people: a story of how Casey may have planned the operation but the go-between was somebody else, former Texas governor John Connally, on a somewhat mysterious series of trips to the Middle East in summer 1980 on which he was accompanied by a rising young Texas Republican called Ben Barnes.

It's Barnes, now 85, who is telling the story, apparently struck by remorse at having kept it quiet for so long and moved by the condition of the former president, now in hospice care:

Reaganomics With a Human Face

 

Free lunch, photo by Bob Pennell, the Medford Mail Tribune, via USA Today.

I think I need to say something about "Modern Monetary Theory", in particular in its vulgar form, as the idea that, caricaturing a bit,

• since we now know that deficit spending does not necessarily cause hyperinflation (at least since the gold standard for the US dollar was somewhat inadvertently dumped in decisions of the Nixon administration in 1971-73),
• therefore, there is no reason to think about deficits at all, in planning increased social spending for the purposes of doing economic justice, and—oh, also, cutting, or not raising, taxes on the very well-to-do, no reason to worry about that either.

It's that last bit that got my attention, because I'm not an economist, like most of you, but an amateur human with some training in social science in general, who sometimes thinks about political economy and political morality, and my fondest dream has long been to work toward equalizing our situation, through the tax system, by getting the very rich to pay more. Lots more. Ever so much more, since the appearance of Thomas Piketty's Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century in English in 2014 gave me the courage. I told some relatively liberal online advocates of MMT about it, over the Twitter, some time ago: if there's no good economic reason for raising their taxes, how am I going to get it done? And they said, Don't worry about it! There are other reasons for taxing the rich! But they didn't offer me any reasons that would have any political weight.

That is—in other words—I started feeling as if the idea was being pitched as a justification for unlimited government spending on the poor, but was in fact a justification for not taxing the rich, a kind of Reaganomics with a smiling, liberal face, and I didn't want the economics to work out. And I really didn't like the thought that progressives like Senator Sanders and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez were looking warmly at it.

Goodbye Principled What?

Illustration by Alex Cai via Streak Club.

Say, what's in this barrel ("Goodbye Principled Conservatism" by Bret Stephens)? It appears to be full of fish!

How did the conservative movement reach this pass? Hemingway’s great line about how one goes bankrupt — “gradually, then suddenly” — seems apt. But the tipping point arrived on a precise date: July 20, 2015. That was the day Rush Limbaugh came to Trump’s political rescue after the developer nearly self-immolated with his remark that John McCain, who spent more than five years as a prisoner of war, refusing early release at the price of gruesome torture, should not be considered a war hero.

I don't know, I'd go for 1957 myself:

In 1957, Buckley wrote National Review’s most infamous editorial, entitled “Why the South Must Prevail.” Is the white community in the South, he asked, “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically?” His answer was crystal clear: “The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because for the time being, it is the advanced race.” Buckley cited unfounded statistics demonstrating the superiority of white over black, and concluded that, “it is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.” He added definitively: “the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage.”

Why don't conservatives care about manners any more?

A little horse-race pablum for the junkies

Colonel John C. Frémont, Republican candidate for the presidency in 1856, in a campaign lithograph, via.

So Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, is back on the theory that Donald Trump is Jimmy Carter.

No, really, this has been going on for a couple of years. Just around the time of the inauguration, Julia Azari, Scott Lemieux, and Corey Robin wrote pieces suggesting that the Trump presidency was likely to be what Steven Skowronek called a "disjunctive" presidency, that is one that takes place at the time when an old order or "regime", the long-term ordering of the ideologies and interests on which the politics depends, is falling apart and a new one is not yet clearly emergent; like Buchanan's, before the cataclysms of the Civil War and Reconstruction, or Hoover's, before the New Deal, or Carter's, before the beginning of what you might call the Era of Miniature Government.

Ross, with an authoritarian's inability to grasp a discussion of systemic factors, took this to mean that Trump must be personally like Carter in some respect, as in this from his contribution to the Times inauguration coverage, committed to the proposition that Trump is as smart as Carter was, with a "vision" that is similarly "new", though unlikely to succeed:

One such president was Jimmy Carter, who tried to maintain the creaking New Deal coalition while also grasping at a new vision for liberal governance. He failed because his party simply couldn’t accommodate the tension, and he himself couldn’t effectively blend the old and new.

Right now Trump looks like he might be similarly disjunctive. Like Mr. Carter with the ’70s-era Democrats, he has grasped — correctly — that Republican politics desperately needs to be reinvented. But his populist-nationalist vision has seemed too racially and culturally exclusive to win him majority support, and it’s layered atop a party that still mostly believes in the “populism” of cutting the estate tax.

Combine those brute political facts with Trump’s implausibly expansive promises, and a Carter scenario — gridlock, disappointment, collapse — seems like the most plausible way to bet. 

Which is pretty amusing in retrospect: whatever we may think about Trump's intelligence and vision, he's turned out to have an amazingly firm hold on his party, in spite of the claims to independence of a few crabby pundits. Today, anyway, Ross isn't going for retrospection, but instead prefers to look ahead, toward the question of who's going to play the "reconstructive" Reagan in this remake ("Bernie Sanders, Socialism's Reagan?"):

Yes They Did

Updated with Bush funeral reference 12:30 PM

"Donald, Donald, I am so disappoint." Photo by Reuters/Marcos Brindicci via MSN.

I told you.

President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin held what the White House described as “informal” conversations at the G20 summit in Argentina. 

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed Saturday that the two spoke at a cultural dinner for leaders and their wives and husbands at the famed Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires Friday night.

Huckabee Sanders did not disclose the content of their conversation, but in a press conference later Saturday Putin revealed that Trump had questioned him about Russia’s seizure of Ukrainian ships in the Black Sea. 

“I answered his questions about the incident in the Black Sea. He has his position. I have my own. We stayed in our own positions,” Putin told reporters, according to the Associated Press. (Newsweek)

Russia's seizure of two Ukrainian naval ships and a tugboat and 24 crew members who are still in dentention a week later was an "outrageous violation of Ukrainian sovereignty," as Ambassador Haley said, on behalf of and with instructions from "the highest level at the American government" (that "at" is pretty weird English). But not so outrageous you can't have a chat with an old friend you have so much in common with, right?

Would you like spies with that?

Kilauea eruption, 1983, via Hawaii Volcano Expeditions (When I write about Greenwald, as I haven't done in a while. I like to illustrate it with volcano pix in tribute to the special qualities of his prose).

An odd thing in relation to the scandal du jour over the weekend, and the revelation that the FBI had asked an academic in England to try to worm some information out of both George Papadopoulos and Carter Pageon their knowledge of the conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian state (and, as it later turned out, Michael Flynn as well, though that was possibly just in 2014, and Papadopoulos's and Page's boss in the campaign, Sam Clovis, who talked to him about relations with China), or as Donald Trump put it, sounding more and more hysterical every day, put it,

Reports are there was indeed at least one FBI representative implanted, for political purposes, into my campaign for president. It took place very early on, and long before the phony Russia Hoax became a “hot” Fake News story. If true - all time biggest political scandal!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 18, 2018

Yipes! Though I didn't see any reason why they shouldn't have had an embedded informant in the heart of this criminal conspiracy, as they might inside a mafia family, there was no reason to supposed that they did in fact have one. As we soon learned (apparently The Daily Caller was the first to report it), what they had was Stefan Halper, a veteran of Republican administrations who has been for some time a Fellow of Magdalen College and was director of Cambridge's American Studies program, who enticed Papadopoulos to talk by commissioning a bona fide research paper from him and engaged him over dinner and drinks and apparently failed to get him to talk about the tens of thousands of incriminating Hillary emails; and had what Page described as "benign interactions" with that person.

Republicans, of course, decided to go with the Deep State Infiltrates Spy Into Trump Campaign line, where they were joined by our old friend Glenn Greenwald, as I learned from LGM, has been at work reinforcing that in The Intercept, demonstrating how especially sinister Stefan Halper is, with the allegation that he

Hip to Hip

Urban Bush Women Hip to Hip, via University of Florida Performing Arts/

David F. Brooks ("The G.O.P. is Rotting") really seems to have got out of the wrong side of the bed. He doesn't even have anything good to say about his own people, the humble folk who occupy the middle, like ideological magpies looking for sparkly ideas to decorate their nests!

A lot of good, honorable Republicans used to believe there was a safe middle ground. You didn’t have to tie yourself hip to hip with Donald Trump, but you didn’t have to go all the way to the other extreme and commit political suicide like the dissident Jeff Flake, either. You could sort of float along in the middle, and keep your head down until this whole Trump thing passed.

Wait, when were those good old days when the good and the honorable thought there was a middle ground between Trump and suicide? The announcement of Flake's political suicide was on October 24! He's talking about a month ago!

I should also mention that if you're tying yourself to somebody hip to hip is the wrong way to go. That knot's going to slip something terrible (see illustration above).

Hyperion to a satyr, etc.

At least thanks to Reagan the Japanese aren't dumping their cathode ray tubes on us any more. Oh wait, really? Via.

Brooks ("The Politics of Cowardice") is too funny to pass up this morning:

This is a column directed at high school and college students. I’m going to try to convey to you how astoundingly different the Republican Party felt when I was your age.

That's because if you were born any earlier than around 1993 you might have some memories of your own, or from your parents, of what it was really like: the same uneasy coalition it is today, between the huge-money tax cheats and union-haters who supply the funding and the small-town neo-Confederates who supply the votes with their terrorized wives and children.

The big guy then was Ronald Reagan. Temperamentally, though not politically, Reagan was heir to the two Roosevelts. He inherited a love of audacity from T.R. and optimism and charm from F.D.R.

But he has his mom's eyes. That is some startling metaphor, isn't it?

GÖPperdämmerung*

*Sure, others may give you the same old pun, such as the genial Doctor Cleveland, but will they throw in the essential umlauts? WILL THEY BOGROLL, as Smut would say.

Betty Amann in Gustav Fröhlich's Asphalt (1929). Via Fritzi.

What David Brooks meant to say ("The Post-Trump Era", New York Times, March 25 2016):

This is a thrilling moment to be a conservative!

For an entire generation, the Republican party has vegetated, stuck with the sclerotic ideology of Reaganism, which used to be conservative back in the day but is now liberal. Reaganism was based on the idea that voodoo economics, by creating more wealth for the wealthy than the wealthy could comfortably accommodate, would force them to let some of it out, and the resulting trickle would turn into a mighty tide upon which the dinghies of the lowly would float as high as the yachts of the great, but that's not true any more, though of course it was in the 1980s.

What happened? How did Morning in America turn into the Twilight of the GOP? When did the Lifting of the Boats become the Disintegration of the Drydock? How did these fresh and cheery metaphors turn anxious and bitter?

Brooks in denial, 'cause he's a crocodile

Clara Bow in William Wellman's Wings (1927) Via.

David Brooks really dislikes anger. I guess that's why he's decided to stick with stage 1 of his grief ("Stay Sane America, Please!", January 26 2016):

I am going to spend every single day between now and then believing that neither Donald Trump nor Ted Cruz nor Bernie Sanders will be standing on that podium. One of them could win the election, take the oath, give the speech and be riding down Pennsylvania Avenue. I will still refuse to believe it.... please allow me a few more months of denial.

Pretty standard horserace panditry today, the sort of thing I believe he does on television, and at first glance not wrong enough to be very interesting. It's cute how he has to set up a tag-team match to make a bothsiderist case with Sanders, Cruz for the equidistant-from-the-center argument (Cruz is as far right as Sanders is far left and therefore neither of them can win) and Trump for the outside-the-pale (Sanders isn't even a Democrat, therefore Trump really isn't a Republican, in spite of the latter's claims) and conclude that because Sanders will most likely not get the Democratic nomination therefore neither Cruz nor Trump will get the Republican one. That does not follow.

Cheap shots: Aboard a doomed dirigible

"I'll fight them off like Reagan did," Mr. Trump did not add. Image via West Wing Reports.

Trump on the Japanese menace:

“Ben is a nice man, but when you’re negotiating against China and you’re negotiating against these Japanese guys that are going to come against you in waves, and they think we’re all a bunch of jerks because our leaders are so stupid and so incompetent and so inept, we need people that are really smart, that have tremendous deal-making skills and that have great, great energy.”

In waves? He's expecting, as president, to be confronted by Japanese guys coming against him in waves?

Also,

On Friday night, a seasoned party activist compared him to “the bad boy you date over the summer before returning to college.”

Wake up Donald, I think I've got something to say to you
it's late September and I really should be back in school...

No, I'm not doing this. (For those who missed it, my Trump song, "It's On His Hat", is here.)

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Is there intelligent life in Langley?

Like many others, I was startled to learn about the Government Accountability Institute (toujours GAI, toujours GOP!) and its discovery that our president appears to have missed quite a lot of his daily intelligence meetings. Indeed, I had no clear idea that the meetings even existed—though who could ever forget George W. Bush and "All right, you've covered your ass now"? (Happy September 11, by the way!)

From NSPT4Kids.

I did know that Obama gets his President's Daily Brief (PDB) by iPad, and that that is supposed to be the finest product our intelligence services put out, and having to have a meeting about it every day seemed like a little bit of overkill, when you could always just read it and make a quick phone call if you had a question; and I wondered, idly, if the meetings had been instituted for a reading-challenged President Bush ("What do you mean you told me Osama was determined to attack?" "It was in the PDB! It was in the headline!").

This is not the case, but the facts are available, and almost as entertaining. The daily meetings were cooked up after the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan. Richard J. Kerr and Peter Dixon Davis, director and deputy director of the Office of Current Intelligence at the CIA, came up with the idea as they faced

another new administration, another foreign policy team, another group to which we had to prove ourselves all over again....

We knew that in the confusion of changing administrations, establishing daily intelligence support at top levels of a wary new leadership might just as likely be resisted as welcomed. At the same time, this new group valued intelligence; the question was whether they thought CIA was up to the task. How would we be received by a palace guard that at times had appeared downright hostile?

President Carter immediately put the president-elect on the receiving list for the PDB, and Richard Allen, the designated national security advisor for the incoming administration, established contact with Kerr and Davis, insisting that they work with him directly and not through the DCI. They had a number of meetings with Reagan when Reagan spent a week in Washington in mid-November, and more importantly perhaps meetings with the new vice president, George H.W. Bush, who naturally, as an ex-DCI himself, had a soft spot for the Agency.

Bush had ruminated on several occasions about the need to bring Reagan into the current analytic stream as quickly as possible. He felt it was imperative that the newly elected president receive daily briefings based on the PDB, and--even more important--that a professional intelligence officer be present to answer any questions, provide background information, and follow up on whatever intelligence needs Reagan might have. Bush knew from firsthand experience that filtering went on as an intelligence product moved through the White House staff and on to the President. He also knew that to make intelligence relevant the Agency needed regular feedback from its key customers.

It seemed a good opportunity, given Bush's candor and friendly disposition toward the Agency, to make a bold recommendation: because he was scheduled in a few hours to ride along with Reagan to Andrews Air Force Base, perhaps he might want to urge his new boss to request that such daily briefings be provided him personally during the period he remained in California pending the inauguration. Bush told Davis he would give it a try.

I really like the between-paragraphs sleight of hand where they're making a "bold recommendation" to Bush to arrange for what Bush has just said was "imperative" (how bold can it have been? Waiter says to customer, "May I make a bold suggestion? I'd like to bring you the item you ordered"). Kerr and Davis are likely hiding from themselves, as much as from us,  how much this story is about greed, for turf and for access.

From FamilyEducation.

Be that as it may, the proposal worked out, and Davis was summoned right away to Pacific Palisades to start the briefings, spending a week in California while Kerr did the editorial work in DC, and then switching. Now they don't even try to hide their glee:

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the briefing process was the relationship that developed between both of us, on the one hand, and those we briefed. Often during briefings, or while we waited during telephone calls or other visitations, we overheard conversations between Reagan or Bush and potential cabinet members or advisers. We listened to discussions of their strengths and weaknesses, complaints and personal exchanges that clearly were not meant for outsiders' ears....

Equally striking was the degree to which we were given a free hand during this two-month period of direct contact with a top leadership that would eventually include Secretary of Defense-designate Caspar Weinberger and Secretary of State-designate Alexander Haig as well as Reagan, Bush, and Allen. We had little supervision from officials within the CIA or the Carter administration.

Another interesting feature of this period was that, to our knowledge, Reagan, Bush, and Allen did not receive formal, regular briefings from any other part of the government. There were contacts with State and Defense, but nothing like the type of regular contact we had established. The lack of contact between us and William Casey, who was to become DCI, was also noteworthy. At most, Kerr would exchange "good morning" greetings with Bill Casey, to whom he had been introduced by Reagan.

Interesting indeed! And then after the inauguration, it just carried on:

By Inauguration Day, the daily briefing system was so well established that it seemed natural to all involved that it would simply continue. The question hardly arose; it seemed a fait accompli. At President Reagan's direction, the service was to be provided also to Secretary of State Haig and Secretary of Defense Weinberger. (George Shultz and William Clark became recipients when they replaced Haig and Allen, respectively.) The Agency had finally obtained the continuing, high-level access it had been seeking since 1961.

And on, and on, until evidently Barack Obama decided he was big enough to read the Brief sometimes without assistance.

What the intrepid briefers told President Reagan about Ayatollah Khomeini's key-shaped cake,  or Colonel North's adventurous method of funding Nicaragua's anti-democratic insurgency are not disclosed: this is an account only of the important matters, of who sat next to whom on the bus to Six Flags, and did she really give him his ring back?

“If President Obama were participating in his intelligence briefings on a regular basis then perhaps he would understand why people are so offended at his efforts to take sole credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden,” Cheney told The Daily Caller in an email through a spokeswoman.

No, if that's what they talk about—Cheney's feelings—then he's already going too often.

Eugene de Blaas, The Friendly Gossips, 1901. WikiPaintings.

He also surfs who only stands and waits

Shorter George Will:

When the Wilson brothers—Brian, Carl, Dennis, and James Q.—formed the Beach Boys in 1961, they represented exactly the same California spirit that made Ronald Reagan governor in 1967.

Didn't use to be that individualistic. Los Angeles beach, from UC Berkeley PlayGreen

Actually he doesn't say that James Q. Wilson belonged to the Beach Boys, but he doesn't deny it. And he doesn't mean to suggest that Californians were mentally ill when they voted for Reagan. He just quotes James Q. to the effect that the Californians of the time were totally alienated, every-man-is-an-island, Hobbesian atoms, but really really happy that way: Southern Californians had

“no identities except their personal identities, no obvious group affiliations to make possible any reference to them by collective nouns. I never heard the phrase ‘ethnic group’ until I was in graduate school....

“The Eastern lifestyle,” Wilson wrote, “produced a feeling of territory, the Western lifestyle a feeling of property... a very conventional and bourgeois sense of property and responsibility.”

I'd say it was that half the population was too stoned to vote—the half that had human connections, unfortunately—and I'd say that Brian would agree, at least if he could remember. And the Beach Boys had such a group affiliation that they were always referred to by a collective noun.

And I'll bet, moreover, that there were brown people within low-rider distance of whatever little-boxes suburb James Q. Wilson grew up in (he was from Denver, and went to college in Redlands, CA, to a Baptist school with compulsory religious services) that knew plenty about group identities, including the ethnic group James Q. himself belonged to (the ethnicity that dare not speak its name!).

Take that, Dr. Turk! Nobody disrespects the Beach Boys around me.

Retroactionary Watch

Updated 3/23

Thers found a gorgeous case in a column by Thomas Sowell which starts off from an old newspaper column reminding him how good the persons of color had it back in Ronald Reagan's day:

One of the front-page headlines said: "White-Black Disparity in Income Narrowed in 80's, Census Shows."

The 1980s? Wasn't that the years of the Reagan administration, the "decade of greed," the era of "neglect" of the poor and minorities, if not "covert racism"? [jump]

Salvador Dali, Voltaire, 1940. From Art History Videos.

Retroactionaries

Here's another example, in the person of Eric Cantor and his "warm Southern-gentleman demeanor" (per Leslie Stahl) and his less warm press secretary, via Hunter at Daily Kos: Reagan didn't raise taxes.



Sounds like a lie to you and me, but they say it with such fervor! But then again if you're seeing it backwards, well! He never raised taxes before he got elected, did he? I mean, except in California, and that was only after he got elected there. He just got purer, and purer, as time did the opposite of going on, until he was flying those planes in imaginary World War II and inventing baseball games and all.