At the Roald Dahl Museum in Great Missenden, Bucks, Matilda confronts President Trump. Photo credit PA via BBC.
Monumental and Very Powerful
by Donald J. Trump with Stephen Miller
It has been suggested that we should rename
as many as 10 of our Legendary Military Bases.
These Monumental
and very Powerful
Bases have become
part of a Great American Heritage,
and a history of Winning, Victory, and Freedom.
The United States of America trained
and deployed our HEROES on these Hallowed
Grounds, and won two World Wars.
Therefore, my Administration
will not even consider the renaming
of these Magnificent and Fabled
Military Installations.
Our history as the Greatest Nation in the World
will not be tampered with. Respect our Military!
Unless Trump's slyly parodying Miller here ("Winning, Victory, and Freedom"
would be Mark Twain–level satire). But the covert purpose of this piece is
clearly to mention "Hallowed Grounds" and wipe out the memory of "hollowed
grounds" in the president's Memorial Day address.
The important part of this remarkable Politico article by Natasha Bertrand and Bryan Bender, no doubt, is that it looks as if the US armed forces have been used to funnel money into the Trump Organization's coffers, but I want to start someplace a little different.
So Prestwick Airport is the one that serves Glasgow, in western Scotland, and also Trump Turnberry, the Luxury Collection Resort on the Firth of Clyde that the Trump Organization acquired in 2014, so the way Trump expected to make the airport successful would be presumably by bringing it a lot of golfer traffic. Which would be nice for the Scottish government, maybe, because they own it, since 2013, and it's a money loser.
He did not mean, I imagine, that the Pentagon would be spending $11 million on fuel there between October 2017 and June 2019 but that's a thing that happened, according to Bertrand and Bender, though they could have bought it a lot cheaper 360 miles away at Lakenheath, Suffolk, home to the 48th Fighter Wing of the United States Air Forces Europe–Air Forces Africa, or better still Mildenhall, also in Suffolk, home of the 100th Air Refueling Wing, if they were in the neighborhood. And they were apparently in the neighborhood pretty often: 629 separate purchase orders, says a letter from Elijah Cummings and Jamie Raskin of the House Oversight Committee to acting defense secretary Patrick Shanahan (dated 21 June, just three days, as it happened, before Shanahan quit the post to spend more time with his problematic family).
RT comedian Lee Camp passing on a story from Forbes Retirement columnist Laurence Kotlikoff claiming Pentagon spent an unauthorized $21 trillion without noticing it from 1998 to 2015. (That's six times the amount printed by the Quantitative Easing program 2009-15). It's false. https://t.co/4VqdkBEIJg
What's going on was explained by Mick West of Metabunk in May https://t.co/Z2twroXaKQ The number totals all the accounting errors--not even errors, "unsubstantiated adjustments", in all the Pentagon's accounts--not only what they've spent, but what they owe and what they own.
But those numbers--"adjustments" in spending, AND debts and assets, repeated year after year for the same pension and the same ship--don't add up to anything real. The amount they spend in a given year is pretty much the $600 billion they say they spent.
If I owe you $10 and I mistakenly think it's $15 and write it down that way while my accountant has the right figure, that's going to be an unsubstantiated adjustment of $5 in the audit (in my favor: I'm in less debt than I thought I was). And if I don't pay you for 15 years, and keep getting it wrong, it's another $5 unsubstantiated adjustment every year. Then if somebody like Professor Kotlikoff comes around trying to figure out what I'm up to he's going to claim that I secretly spent $75, although in fact I merely saved $5 I thought I was going to have to spend.
Anyway I'm not defending military, I'm defending math. The $21 trillion figure is nuts, and the way it was calculated is worse. Attack the military all you want, they deserve it, but don't use bogus arguments like this, because they're making us stupid.
The poet-president did a private reading of some new pieces yesterday, at his meeting with officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency gearing up for the start of the hurricane season, of which Washington Post got hold of an audio recording. There's a simple structure, drily comic tone, and unexpected granularity in the works, which greatly heightens the fantastical oddity of the things he says.
Alternative Facts
by Donald J. Trump
I. Hurricane Harvey
Sixteen thousand people,
many of them in Texas,
for whatever reason that is,
people went out in their boats
to watch the hurricane.
That didn’t work out too well.
That didn’t work out too well.
"I thought you were bringing the beer!" Hurricane viewing party, Houston, 28 August 2017, photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images. In fact it's a volunteer rescue party, saving people's lives, but television images of calm and colorful scenes like these have inspired Trump to imagine an entirely new narrative, like that of the Washington tourists who came out in carriages with blankets and picnic baskets to watch the First Battle of Bull Run.
Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Proclaiming Claudius Emperor, 1867. Wikimedia Commons.
Foreign Policy reports on new insights into the views of the Trump transition, as seen at the department of Defense:
A Pentagon memo outlining the incoming Trump administration’s top “defense priorities” identifies defeating the Islamic State, eliminating budget caps, developing a new cybersecurity strategy, and finding greater efficiencies as the president-elect’s primary concerns. But the memo, obtained by Foreign Policy, does not include any mention of Russia, which has been identified by senior military officials as the No. 1 threat to the United States.
It doesn't mention Iran either, for whatever that's worth; the only named countries in the memo are North Korea and China (plus ISIS or ISIL—both stylings are used, irritatingly).
This isn't equivalent to Obama's view in 2012, in opposition to candidate Willard Mitt Romney, that Russia was not the most serious military threat to US interests, if only because the DoD agreed with Obama, and it was a moment (near the end of the presidency of Dmitri Medvedev) of really warming Russian-US relations, important cooperation on the Syria and Iran issues, and no signs of Russian designs on foreign territory since the Georgian war of 2008, for which the Georgian government seemed (to the USG) to be to blame.
Trump's national security adviser James Woolsey was on BBC earlier (you might find the audio here) saying if you want to know how Trump is going to handle foreign policy issues you shouldn't look at anything he said during the campaign; he seemed to think was a very silly idea to judge a candidate on the basis of the candidate's public statements. He said we should be looking forward, to the particular problems he's going to face. The answer, my friends, is in the future.
In private, he said, Trump is very calm and judicious about foreign policy. Personally I have some questions about Woolsey, Bill Clinton's first Director of Central Intelligence who was forced to quit, it seems, after the exposure of the CIA mole Aldrich Ames, because of his refusal to hold anyone accountable in the agency for Ames's destruction of CIA operations in the Soviet Union and then Russian Federation. He was a member of PNAC and an anxious booster of the Iraq War, going on TV to blame Saddam Hussein for the 9/11 attacks hours after they took place, and a participant in war profiteering (Booz Allen, Paladin Capital, Lux Capital).
He decided to support Trump, we read, because of Trump's big plans for upping spending on weapons systems in all four branches of the service:
“I think the problem is her budget,” Woolsey said of Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton. “She is spending so much money on domestic programs — including ones that we don’t even have now, and the ones we have now are underfunded — I think there can be very little room for the improvements in defense and intelligence that have to be made.”
Woolsey has previously called for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to be “hanged by the neck until he’s dead, rather than merely electrocuted.”
Anybody who didn't want to vote for Clinton because they've heard she's a hawk and Trump after all was such a vigorous opponent of the Iraq War and has such a peaceable approach to the Syria situation (except for the people over there he wants to "bomb the shit out of") and to Ukraine and getting rid of NATO and so forth, here's somebody who's spoken to Trump about these issues claiming to know more about than you do, and suggesting you shouldn't have trusted what Trump said on the stump. And guess what, judging from the number of demonstrable lies Trump told on the stump the odds are Woolsey is right on this one.
According to Andrew Cockburn's Letter from Washington in the current Harper's, the good news is that spending billions of dollars on TV ads and direct mail campaigns can't win elections; the techniques simply aren't effective, especially not in comparison to the much cheaper method of having volunteers go door to door and talk to voters. The whole "election-industrial complex" is a scam run by political consultants and the broadcast media to enrich themselves.
The bad news is that politicians don't believe it (though some, notably Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz, are making good use of the effective techniques this year), and continue to maintain this monumentally wasteful system. I don't know whether the most depressing aspect is that they'll remain as they have been for decades, openly for sale and spending the bulk of their time on fund-raising instead of the people's business, or just that they're so dumb.
It's a great long read, in any case. I would add only that I was saying the same thing myself nearly four years ago, if without the benefit of all the relevant facts Cockburn has gathered, but taking the argument an important step further, in a post of June 2012, reproduced below:
Washington Post wants to know why presidential campaigns in the US spend so much money on television advertising, even though it is known that it doesn't really work very well in general elections :
The notion that all that TV money will buy relatively little is
almost as old as TV itself. Dozens of academic examinations since the
1940s have shown that TV ads have limited persuasive effects on voters
in general elections, often accounting for no more than a 1 or 2 percent
difference, and often considerably less.
What’s more, outspending
a rival on advertising in a general-election campaign doesn’t guarantee
anything; John Kerry and his Democratic allies ran almost 200,000 more
commercials than George W. Bush did in 2004 and lost in a close
election. On the other hand, Obama had a narrower advertising advantage
over Sen. John McCain in 2008 and won relatively easily.
They have an idea for an answer, but it seems pretty lame to me; that they "can't afford not to." It's not likely to make any difference, but they figure you never know:
[Former Howard Dean advisor Steve] McMahon says the great danger for any campaign is to lose your “share of
voice” — the ability to match or exceed an opponent’s advertising. Such
imbalances could crop up more frequently in this election because of
unlimited spending by super PACs.
It's like saying we should go spend more money on a clearly ineffective missile defense system because maybe it could help in a real pinch. Oh, wait.*
I had an idea about this once that might be worth developing. You know the famous revolving door between the military and the defense industry, where muck-a-mucks leave the service to join "private" enterprise and their job is to tell the generals and colonels that were once their junior officers to buy the company's products, whether they need them or not? And the equally famous revolving door between politicians and their staffs and the K Street lobbying firms?
Maybe there's the same kind of thing going on between campaign operatives and pollsters and media folk, advising politicians to make themselves known and then moving back to their ad agencies and PR firms, convincing each other that that TV market is really really important precisely because it's so expensive, i.e., profitable for the company, just like an F-35 or a $640 toilet seat.
And look how much money and fame there is in it! Look at the late William Safire, if you will, an advertising man from the start, or George Stephanopoulos**; look at the abominable Mark Penn!
So it's basically a con game, with Sheldon Adelson as the hapless mark. Looking at it this way really ought to make me laugh out loud, but it doesn't somehow. Not because, or not just because the relatively good guys must do it as well as the relatively bad; and certainly not because of what it does to my own TV, since we get almost none of that here, New York not being a swing market.
No, it's because of what advertising is primarily used for, to give value—buzz value, or wishful elegance, or significance—to the crappy stuff we are expected to buy, McDonalds food, the Adam Sandler movie, Paloma Picasso earrings. It's that our candidates see themselves as intrinsically valueless, as needing that kind of semiotic inflation. Which is true, in a sense, because the amount of money you raise governs the amount of attention you get from the news media, broadcast and print, such that only a candidate with x many millions of dollars is a serious candidate, and a striking ad is a news story in itself, with made-to-order visuals, way better than a policy speech.
And who sells advertising? Exactly. It's another revolving door.
*That's what poor old Mr. Cheney called the 1% doctrine, isn't it? That was a funny one, anyway. Even the most skeptical skeptic would admit that there's at least a 1% chance that human-created global warming would make our planet uninhabitable within a couple of generations, but that didn't rouse the Big Dick to action. Or maybe that probability is just too high; like, "OMG, Mr. Vice President, looks like the North Koreans are going to build a nuclear weapon!" "Well, there's just a 1% chance Iraq might do it first, so let's go whack them."
**I saw George Stephanopoulos once, toddling up West 79th St. from Riverside. I don't know why I'm telling you this, but in 20 years of living in New York that is my biggest celebrity spotting, unless you prefer Julia Child, which I do—Julia Child was gratifying, because I was studying an interesting restaurant menu, and I thought she beamed at me. Now she's gone, of course, and Stephanopoulos is still around, even though Blogger thinks his name is misspelled and underlines it with angry red dots.
