To the President's Health

At Top Cottage, Hyde Park in 1941, with Fala and Ruthie Bie, granddaughter of one of the gardeners. Via.

In March 1944, not long after his 62nd birthday, President Franklin Roosevelt, who was taking too long to recover from a bout of flu the previous December, went to Bethesda Hospital for a battery of tests meant to find out why, and diagnosed with a pile of serious heart problems: hypertension, atherosclerosis, coronary artery disease, and congestive heart failure. The doctors' recommendations focused on rest—no business guests at lunch, and two hours' rest after lunch—not easy, as he was pretty busy prosecuting World War II and running for his fourth presidential term. They also prescribed some drugs, and thought he should cut down smoking, and try to lose some weight, which last turned out awkward: Roosevelt was anxious to hide his health problems from the public, as he always had been, going back to the paralysis he'd been concealing since contracting polio at Campobello in 1921, and the successful dieting ironically left him looking sick to the public, not his robust, jaunty, grinning self but gaunt and haggard, sparking exactly the rumors he was most anxious to avoid. 

That was a kind of bad thing, as everybody understands nowadays, in the wake of Eisenhower's heart attacks, Kennedy's Addison's disease, Nixon's stress-related alcoholism, Reagan's incipient Alzheimer's, Trump's obesity, severe personality disorder, and possible psychoactive drug use (sniff, sniff!), and whatever was going on with President Joe Biden during the presidential campaign last year on June 27, during the presidential debate with Trump, when he spoke in an almost inaudibly hoarse whisper, and altogether lost the thread of what he was saying at at least one point early in the show. Just an hour or two later he seemed fine, as loud and as on message as ever, but the damage (thanks in part to a long campaign on the part of The New York Times and other organs, not to claim that Biden was suffering age-related infirmities but that the public thought he might be, based not on observation of the president but on a bunch of rather pushy Times-Siena public opinion polls) was done.

Joe Did What? Ideology Edition

Via Unwanted.

Let me try from a different direction:

There is something better happening at the moment than in the Clinton (certainly) or Obama (probably) presidencies. Though Biden is officially to the "right" of Obama (certainly) or Clinton (possibly—way to the right of Hillary Clinton, anyhow), he seems to find himself leaping into things that are "left". Why would that be?

One possibility is that there's some kind of disconnect between the "left"-ness of the president's personal identity and the "left"-ness of the things she or he does. Is that possible?

Literary Corner: Sir Thing

Ridley Scott's Exodus: Gods and Kings (2017), via.

I liked this, from the Tucker Carlson interview, not just for its sonnet shapeliness but still more for the way it elevates the sir story into the hypothetical mood. When Trump imagines what it's like to be president, it's exactly the way he expects his TV and rally audiences to imagine it, like the court in a sword-and-sandals movie, where the sovereign stands, or sits enthroned, in the midst of a crowd of heroic-looking guys who "walk up to" him to announce their concerns.

Corollary to that is the insight that he must be aware he isn't, in fact, effectively president, to the extent that these scenes aren't really taking place, much as he clearly wishes they would. That's why . they figure so strongly in the stories he makes up.

Sonnet on the Poet's Theoretical Plan to Remove All the Troops From Afghanistan

by Donald J. Trump

But I would leave very strong intelligence
there. You have to watch because they do --
you know, okay, I'll give you a tough one.
If you were in my position and a great looking
central casting and we have great generals,
a great central casting general walks up
to your office, I say, "We're getting out."
"Yes, sir. We'll get out. Yes, sir." 

I'll say, "What do you think of that?"
"Sir, I'd rather attack them over there, than
attack them in our land." In other words, them
coming here. That's always a very tough
decision, you know, with what happened
with the World Trade Center, et cetera et cetera.

If the general's good-looking enough, George C. Scott type, it's war. There's a chance we haven't gone to war yet in Iran because it's John Bolton pushing the case ("If we don't fight them there..."), with his stupid facial hair.

Lincoln's birthday

Happy birthday, Abraham Lincoln!

Unknown artist, portrait of Belva Ann Bennett Lockwood (1830-1917), first woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court, in a campaign poster from her first presidential race, in 1884. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

Abraham and Tad Lincoln, 1865, in a photo by Alexander Gardner. Looking for an unfamiliar picture of Lincoln in the NPG collections is what set me off on this,

Moron this after the break

The story in the strip is that Trump is supposed to be visiting Tampere, Finland, so the town authorities decide to put up a welcome billboard with a local dialect expression meaning "Good morning!"

Via Raw Story, Emperor Trump on the subject of being called a fucking moron by his secretary of state:

“I think it’s fake news,” Trump told Forbes, “but if he did that, I guess we’ll have to compare IQ tests — and I can tell you who is going to win.”

He continued his public attacks on Tillerson’s diplomatic work with North Korea, which he said was helpful to the secretary of state.

“He was wasting his time,” Trump said. “I’m not undermining, I think I’m actually strengthening authority.”

I wish people would grasp when he says things like this that he's showing he is effectively not the president. When he tells Twitter that he's mad at Sessions for refusing to work his will with the Mueller investigation, he is acknowledging (correctly) that he has no power to tell the attorney general what to do, and when he tells Twitter, or Forbes, that he wishes Tillerson would stop attempting to negotiate with DPRK, he's suggesting (weirdly) that he has no power over the secretary of state either. He's identifying himself as a concern troll ("I'm just trying to give him some good advice"), not as the executive to whom the secretary reports.

For the record: Is Trump a 19th-century president?

There's something genuinely Trumpish in pictures of Millard Fillmore, here in an 1849 daguerrotype by Matthew Brady, via Wikipedia, in his pouchiness, peculiar hair, and attempt to display a flinty manly firmness. I'm not the first to notice; it was noted a couple of years ago by Michael Beatrice.

Somebody else was thinking about 19th-century American history:

Really interesting way to look at Trump by @julia_azari: a 19th century-style president https://t.co/wuV498ZWRX

— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) August 28, 2017

The idea that for most of the 19th century, between A. Jackson and T. Roosevelt or from Van Buren through McKinley presidents really weren't very important, with the giant exception of Lincoln; small staffs and restricted functions, not that much to do, which is somewhat true, and Trump with his lack of interest in policy and failure to offer moral leadership is not so different from John Tyler or Benjamin Harrison. If I look at that graphic without really looking, I see Trump in a nightcap with a tassel.

I think Azari's idea is a mistake, and I left a thread. It gets a little apocalyptic toward the end...

Timing is everything, isn't it?

Image via IN.

Leon Wolf just used the word “pivot” in the context of Trump. (Managing editor of The Blaze)

— Karoli (@Karoli) August 22, 2017

That was on MSNBC, before Trump's speech even began.

New York Times came out shortly after it ended, trying to get out ahead of the narrative by not only calling the pivot in the speech ("his best speech" apparently meaning "the one with the fewest words composed by Donald J. Trump") and the counterpivot we should be expecting sometime today.

POTUS gave his best speech as POTUS. He's given extremely few of these types of speeches. And he has a campaign rally tomorrow. Soooo...

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) August 22, 2017

But the most scorching hot take of all, I think, came from Chris Cillizza at CNN: the speech was great because it was only "ostensibly" about Afghanistan, it was really about Charlottesville:

President Donald Trump used a speech ostensibly focused on his decision about the future of America's role in Afghanistan to issue a call for unity and healing in the United States, a clear attempt to patch over the damage caused by his repeated unwillingness to condemn white supremacists and neo-Nazis following their violent protests in Charlottesville.

He just wasn't telling us how many troops he was sending to Virginia. I guess it depends on how much cooperation we get from North Carolina and Maryland.

Best thing is, that explains what happened last week in the Charlottesville speech: he was talking about Afghanistan!

"It's been going on for a long time... Not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama, it's been going on for a long time.... Egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides, on many sides."

Like poor old Robert Mugabe, he just got the speeches switched.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

This is no country for old women

Updated 2/19/2013

David Brooks writes:

Via Eliva Hellena.

The Europeans who settled North America escaped the lazy, improvident parents who were holding them back and crossed the Atlantic without ever looking back, like stones from a slingshot, in the belief that a single-minded focus on money-making would enable them one day to give their own children something cooler for Christmas than that same dumb-ass sweater. So did the pioneers who traveled the Oregon trail, and each generation of immigrants after that, except for the Asians and Hispanics, who insist on living ten to a bed so they can send remittances back to the Black Hole from which they have fled, as if a little money could make a difference to those haggard, toothless invalids in their opium dens and botánicas.

That's why they call America the Land of the Future, even though technically everywhere you go it's still the present, and time traveling is actually physically impossible; because every true American's mind used to be fully occupied with counting chickens from eggs that hadn't even been laid. We couldn't see the wilderness we were in for the tract houses and strip malls that would one day be there. And so the government invested heavily in things like railroads and canals.*

But nowadays this has all been turned upside down, and instead of starving our parents in order to put our kids in the sleepaway camps where they'll meet kids that will be able to give them jobs ten or fifteen years down the line, we're neglecting the kids to take care of the parents, putting them in luxurious nursing homes, making videos of them telling their stupid stories about the Depression, and generally keeping them alive until they're 120 or 130 years old.

The Federal government is the most obvious example. It's become nothing but a kind of vacuum cleaner to suck up value out of the economy and shower it on the elderly. This harms children in two ways. First, it takes money that could be used for investment in the future and essentially throws it away on this idiotic ancestor worship.** Second, it's the children that will end up paying for it.*** A report from the International Monetary Fund says that their taxes will have to go up 35%, even as entitlement spending will have to be cut by the same amount.****

Via webmd.com.

But it's not just the government, it's private enterprise as well. Banks have slowed down on business investment even more than on real estate, devoting their time instead to credit cards, for some reason.***** And student loans. Meanwhile, companies are pouring billions of dollars into their retirement funds to keep their diabetes-crippled retirees tooling around on their imported scooters and spending nothing (compared to Germany, Finland, and South Korea) on research and development.****** 

What happened to turn us around from that traditional throw-mama-from-the-train fascination with risk and adventure to our current terrorized selves? I'm guessing it was the Depression and World War II, in which we sacrificed so much that, like Scarlett O'Hara, we decided we'd never sacrifice anything again.******* There's less of a sense of obligation to the future, in a chain linking the dead (who don't need any money) to the unborn (who certainly will).

Nevertheless Republicans and Democrats just keep arguing about government and business, who started it, and who needs a time out, and President Obama's address tonight looks likely to be another salvo in the same tired battle. He's going to quote Sun Tzu, I understand ("Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across", whatever the hell that's supposed to mean), as if he were the one teaching Grand Strategy at Yale instead of me.

If he would just address himself to the future instead he could give a fantastic speech. He could agree to give a permit to the Keystone XL pipeline, which is a totally futury thing (we won't know if it will make Nebraska uninhabitable until the future). He could cut corporate taxes and pay for it with a progressive national sales tax, one of my most futuristic ideas ever, and he could make cuts in Social Security and Medicare, yielding money for the National Institutes of Health and charter schools and maybe charter universities. Maybe the NIH could come up with a drug to make those old people stop whining so much—for God's sake, Grandma, man up!

*As well as subsidizing industry and occasionally owning it themselves, picking winners and losers, and using tariff policy to reinforce the choices. They had this insane idea that government could somehow beat the market to the next big thing!

**Absolutely. If we could only cut the Social Security and Medicare budgets, Congressional Republicans would be jumping to put that money into infrastructure and schools.

*** Except that they won't, nor is there any good reason to do so. Although they will have to pay the interest, meaning it's a better idea to borrow now, while the rates are low, than later.

**** Oh, you precious little Brooks! No, what that report said (in April 2011) is that we should have raised taxes and cut entitlements by 35% then, or if you prefer you could leave entitlements alone and raise taxes by 88%. And you know you have to listen to the IMF, because they're the ones who advised Ireland, and Greece, and Spain, and UK. And Latvia. And Iceland—oh, wait, smarty pants little Iceland thought they knew better than the IMF and, uh, actually they were sort of right.

*****Wouldn't have anything to do with deregulation, would it?

******Those figures are for growth between 1999 and 2006. For what it's worth, in 2011 the US spent a higher proportion of GDP on research and development than any industrialized country except Japan, South Korea, Israel, Sweden, and Finland; more than Germany, Taiwan, Austria, Switzerland, or Singapore, to say nothing of total laggards like China, France, and UK.

Via AgeNorthernIreland.

*******Yes, undoubtedly. How else do you explain why after the war we didn't build the Interstate highway system, win the race to the moon, create the state university systems of California, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, New York, etc. (of course only losers go there), invent the Internet, or decode the human genome. The failure to invest certainly had nothing to do with the antitax movement and its triumphs from around 1978!

Update:

Tom Levenson has a wonderful post on this column. While I still really like my own post here, his covers many extremely important points that I didn't, or didn't even notice. How can there be so much wrong with one little essay? The moral is:

Of the faking of Brooks there is no end.

Stockmen and bondsmen

Now that the Dow has closed above 13,000 for the first time since May 2008, I wonder if the Times is going to redo their famous chart showing the stock market difference between Democratic and Republican presidents from October 2008:

Given that it's already up 56% since Barack Obama took office three months after that, it might even lead a person to suspect that the Times has a liberal bias and is waiting till October 2012 to do it. If things carry on as they have been doing, that's going to be pretty graphic, as they say.

But speaking of liberal biases, I now have a new idea on the foundational difference between Democrats and Republicans that is directly related to this news. Like so many others who have grown to feel that the liberal-conservative classification doesn't apply any more, I have been talking for quite a while now in terms of a conservative party that we have to vote for and a crazy party that explains why we have to vote for the conservative party, but I'm not really satisfied with that either.

Partly because it's still fun to vote for Democrats, because they're still so truly forward-looking in so many little ways, whether we're talking about same-sex marriage or [jump]