Anger in Politics – Page 27

Words Have Meaning

This captures where we are:

COW Hill's Threats

People are debating whether Donald Trump suggested violence against Hillary with his comment about how “the Second Amendment People” might be the only group capable of stopping Hillary Clinton from appointing liberal judges if she is elected president.

The Trump comment was in the context of what happens after Hillary is elected, and that there was nothing anyone could do about Hillary appointing Justices, except for…Second Amendment people.

He said, “If [Hillary Clinton] gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks.” There’s “nothing you can do” in this situation because Trump is talking about a time after the 2016 election is over, and Clinton is president.

If he wasn’t talking about after the election, why would he say there was “nothing you can do?” During the election, there’s something pretty obvious you can do: Get out the vote and prevent her from becoming president in the first place.

Then Trump immediately follows it up by saying, “But I tell you what, that’ll be a horrible day.” Again, this suggests the time frame he’s talking about is when she’s already in the White House. Otherwise, both the “horrible day” comment and the “nothing you can do” comment that bookend his Second Amendment remark are total non-sequiturs.

So no, this isn’t about the NRA organizing their members to get out the vote. His comments were about doing something AFTER the election. Why would it be a “horrible day” if all he was talking about was getting out the vote, his vote? It is totally illogical.

There is no ambiguity here.

This seemed to Wrongo to be another effort at a joke by the Pant Load. The WaPo reported that Paul Ryan said:

It sounds like just a joke gone bad. I hope he clears it up very quickly. You should never joke about something like that.

It’s highly unusual for the Wrongologist to agree with Paul Ryan, but that’s probably the best defense for Trump’s words. But when faced with an outcry after his controversial comments, Trump never admits error and never backs down — no matter how strained the defense.

Why should this time be any different?

Trump knew exactly what he was doing, and he did so in the same manner he has been using throughout the campaign. A suggestion, an inference, a little birdie told him, it is what people are saying. The dog whistle, the wink, the nod. Some ambiguity to the comment, delivered in a veil of coyness.

Maybe we should remember the very bright line that Sarah Palin crossed a few years ago when she took out an ad that deliberately placed Gabby Giffords in crosshairs, just before Giffords was shot and critically wounded by a gunman. This is different, but really, how different is it?

On ABC’s Good Morning America, Rudy Giuliani gave Trump’s words the real test: How did they play with Trump’s audience? Getting Hillary couldn’t be what Trump meant, Rudy observed, because if Trump had actually called for Hillary to be killed, the crowd would have gone wild.

Imagine being Giuliani: So invested in Trump’s campaign that you’re contorting yourself into a pretzel to translate the candidate’s Wingbat-ese into English.

And once again, defending the indefensible.

Words matter, especially when delivered by someone who aspires to be POTUS.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – August 7, 2016

At a rally in Virginia, Trump said:

The [economic] numbers are getting worse and worse all the time.

He was saying that he thinks the economy is going to tank, and that he hopes he will benefit politically. It’s clear that if his assertion were true it would help him, but, it’s not:

The BLS reported Friday that nonfarm payrolls rose by a seasonally adjusted 255,000 in July. Revisions showed US employers added 18,000 more jobs in May and June than previously estimated. The unemployment rate was unchanged at 4.9% in July.

In any case, it’s good to know that the Pant Load is rooting for an economic downturn to happen in the next 90 days, so he can personally benefit. Seems like his normal mode of operation.

Sorry Donny, the American economy has now experienced 77 months of consecutive private sector job growth. He’s wrong, but OTOH, it is a very uneven recovery.

On to cartoons. The Rio Olympics dominated Trump’s efforts to command the news cycle this week.

Brazil put its Christ on the Hill statue in an appropriate garb for the Games:

COW Haz Mat

Concerns about Rio’s water reminds us that Congress didn’t appropriate any money for Flint:

COW Olympics Water

Many athletes pulled out due to the Zika virus when the solution was Trump-simple:

COW Citronella

Being in Rio gives athletes a respite from the news at home:

COW Making the Olympics

The ceremonial dumpster lighting kicked off our presidential Olympics:

COW Donnie Dumpster

In other news, voting rights won a few fights:

COW Vote Supression roll back

Election Myths and Realities – Pant Load Edition

Ian Welsh lays out a probable narrative that the Pant Load will use if he loses:

Republican leaders and billionaires turned on him when he could have won, flocking to Clinton, and there was voter fraud.

“Read the Constitution” – A Trump Wake Up Call

By now, most have seen the short speech that packed a wallop by Khizr Khan at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. The speech by Mr. Khan was one of the most difficult/beautiful/gut wrenching 15 minutes of this long campaign season.

When Khan pulled his copy of the Constitution out of his pocket and waved it at Donald Trump, it was only a matter of time before the Pant Load responded. You can count on the Donald. Trump said:

If you look at his wife, she was standing there…She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe, she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say. You tell me.

Khan shot back on CNN’s”State of the Union” :

For this candidate for presidency to not be aware of the respect of a Gold Star mother standing there, and he had to take that shot at her, this is height of ignorance…

Trump then went on to say that he had made a lot of sacrifices by, ya know, hiring people and stuff. That led to a twitter storm carried on the hashtag: #TrumpSacrifices. While there are many funny tweets, Paul Begala, CNN commentator and advisor to a pro-Clinton Super PAC, wrote:

Once survived an entire weekend at Mar-a-Lago with just one can of hairspray.

Or this, Wrongo’s favorite:

Rob Woodyard tweet

OMG, THAT’s what Trump wants to get out of this: He wants to be Kevin Spacey with a comb-over!

Thank you, Khizr Khan for reminding our country that we are founded on what should be a sacred document that lays out how we should live in a society based on justice. And thanks for the sacrifice of your son Humayun, lost while taking part in an ill-advised war:

Humayun Khan

Donald Trump needs a wake-up call for his shocking lack of knowledge of the US Constitution. Let’s start with a list from the WaPo that shows Trump doesn’t know the Constitution:

He wants to “loosen” libel laws, so he could more easily sue news organizations who write “nasty” articles about him. There are centuries of First Amendment jurisprudence that would restrict his ability to do this.
He’s said he would push military commanders to go further than water boarding, even though it has been banned by federal law.
Many scholars believe Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims would be struck down as unconstitutional (due process, equal protection, religious freedom, etc.).
He insisted on “Meet the Press” earlier this year that the 14th Amendment does not guarantee birthright citizenship.
His attacks on Judge Gonzalo Curiel over his Mexican heritage show his lack of respect for an independent judiciary.
Trump has at times suggested that he might somehow be able to initiate the prosecution of Hillary Clinton over her emails if he’s elected. In March, asked about the kind of Justice he’d name to the Supreme Court, he said he’d:

Probably appoint people that would look very seriously at [Clinton’s] email disaster because it’s criminal activity.

A signal he doesn’t understand the role of each branch.

To help wake up the Donald, here is a hip hop tune about the Constitution by Smart Songs, an organization that provides kids and teachers with positive, educational hip hop, to help make learning fun. We chose this because Trump needs to start with an elementary education about the US Constitution, and work up from there:

For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can view the video here.

Obama’s Convention Speech

The President gave a great speech last night. And it was a clutch performance. For our non-ESPN readers, “clutch” means a top performance when the stakes are high. It was a summation of his time as president, and the presentation of a vision which is left for his successor to achieve. From Nancy LeTourneau:

The expectations were high for President Obama’s speech last night at the Democratic Convention. He had several tasks to accomplish. First of all, he needed to remind us of what we’ve accomplished over the last eight years.

And Obama said:

A lot’s happened over the years. And while this nation has been tested by war and recession and all manner of challenge – I stand before you again tonight, after almost two terms as your President, to tell you I am even more optimistic about the future of America. How could I not be – after all we’ve achieved together?

Focus on the Doughnut

(There will be limited blogging until 7/26, as Wrongo and Ms. Right spend an extended weekend in Philadelphia)

From Vox:

The first night of the Republican National Convention ended dominated by one bizarre question: Was Melania Trump’s convention speech plagiarized from a Michelle Obama convention speech from 2008?

OK, she probably would have gotten an “A” from Trump University, but pulleez, people! This isn’t a big deal.

Melania Trump is not a major figure in the GOP, and plagiarism of parts of a speech doesn’t have the same connotation in political speeches that it does in academia. So she stole a few lines from a Michelle Obama speech. So what? She isn’t running for anything, and the statements were largely clichés. If you are hoping to show the incompetence and dishonesty of the Trump campaign, there are bigger more important examples.

Why should anyone care about this? If Melania Trump has one interview with the press, and says she liked the ideas in Michelle Obama’s speech, this is over. Why is the media so focused on this? Why are they not focusing on the things of substance that were said in Cleveland yesterday, things that are legitimately terrifying because they could actually become policy?

They could have focused on Rep. Steve King (R-IA) going full white supremacist.

Or, Rudy Giuliani going off about the imminent (?) terrorist threat facing America, saying:

You know who you are, and we are coming to get you.

Or, the extended poutrage about “The Battle of Benghazi”.

Or, convention speaker actor Antonio Sabato Jr. who questioned Obama’s religion, saying the president is “absolutely” a Muslim.

Or, if they were truly interested, they could analyze the GOP 2016 Platform, its most socially conservative platform ever.

But our media wants to keep it simple: Everything else spoken from the stage last night requires explaining something complex, like matters of policy. That’s hard work for the reporters, and maybe for the people to understand. But when a candidate for first lady steals parts of the opposing party’s speech, that’s easy to report and to understand.

It appears that the media is incapable of making the sort of deep, factual critique of policy that we need from them. Wrongo can be annoyed about it, but that’s how it is.

The press should focus on the doughnut, and not the hole, particularly when the hole isn’t a policy speech.

OTOH, when a goofy low-stakes gaffe like this one gets the media saying negative things about Trump, we’ll just have to go with it.

Make America Safe?

Wrongo has tried hard not to write again about the murderous and divisive actions taken against police over the past few weeks, but it seems impossible. From the NYT:

The twin attacks — three officers dead Sunday in Baton Rouge, five killed on July 7 in Dallas, along with at least 12 injured over all — have set off a period of fear, anguish and confusion among the nation’s 900,000 state and local law enforcement officers. Even the most hardened veterans call this one of the most charged moments of policing they have experienced.

Never one to let bad news pass without blaming, the Pant Suit criticized President Obama’s response:

FireShot Screen Capture #104 - Trump

Monday kicked off the GOP Convention. The theme for the first day is “Make America Safe Again”. In case you thought that despite the recent spate of cop killings, you live in one of the safest places on earth, the Trump team is out to scare you up good.

The central theme of Trump’s campaign is that he plans to protect you: From scary Islamic terrorists, from scary immigrants who steal jobs, rape and pillage, and from scary black men with guns.

This resonates with many Republicans who are in the grip of overpowering nostalgia for the1950’s. Republicans see this as a time of stable marriages, respect for authority and economic dynamism. They are not alone: Democrats see it as a time when most men could leave high school and walk into a well-paid job, with pension and health-care benefits, which would allow them to support a family and retire comfortably.

There was much to like about this era of 25₵ gallons of gas, sport coats and cars with tail fins, but it is far from the whole story. It forgets the specter of nuclear annihilation that was ever-present. It forgets that women had little chance of a career beyond the typists’ pool, or that society forced African-Americans to the back of the bus.

Feminism, the civil-rights movement and economic progress in other countries swung a wrecking-ball at the society of the 1950s. But, to regret its collapse, as many Tea Partiers and Republicans do, is also to wish those improvements had never happened, which is absurd. Life was NOT good for the working person in the 1930s and 1940s. Even in the halcyon days of the 1950s -1970s, life was not good for women, people of color, gay people, and others.

Republicans see our politics and our culture decaying, so we see the sharpening Trump “law and order” rhetoric, and the success of the Tea Party in setting our national political agenda.

An alternative view to Trump’s is that Obama’s eulogy for five Dallas police officers a week ago was an eloquent plea to Americans to acquire “a new heart” – a new empathy toward others across the racial divide. And rarely has a president talked so bluntly about the limits of his ability to bring about the changes he seeks. Mr. Obama:

It is as if the deepest fault lines of our democracy have suddenly been exposed, perhaps even widened…Faced with this violence, we wonder if the divides of race in America can ever be bridged…We must reject such despair…I’ve seen how inadequate words can be in bringing about lasting change. I’ve seen how inadequate my own words have been…I confess that sometimes I, too, experience doubt.

In an era of partisan polarization, the problem isn’t merely a deficit of leaders capable of binding us together; it’s a shortage of citizens willing to listen. According to the Pew Research Center, only 14% of Republicans approve of Obama’s conduct, compared with 80% of Democrats. That’s a record high in polarization – except that the previous record held by George W. Bush, who was supported by only 23% of Democrats. Trump is exploiting that.

When we zoom out from the “Make America Safe Again” meme, we remain in a competition between divergent views. We will not even start on the road to consensus until two conditions are met:

Our solutions strive for the preservation of a value called “the greater good”.
Our solutions rely on the preservation of a value called “in good faith”.

We have never changed ethics by legislation, although we can impact behavior. What we have to change is whether or not we as a society will accept the greater good and good faith as inextricable parts of our society.

But as long as there are those among us who can defend the rights of people to use a weapon of war to kill policemen and children, or people who threaten the careers of the elected representatives who stand up to them, we will be seeing this happen again and again, and we’ll be stuck asking the same questions over and over.

Welcome to the TerrorDome

Last Thursday night it was in Nice, France. Next, will be another city. Maybe on another continent. In the last month, dozens of terror attacks have killed hundreds of people across the world. Every public event is a potential target for these killers, who not only welcome death, but confuse our leaders who have tried to stop them.

From Rami G. Khouri at Agence Global:

Every terror attack generates anger, shock, and powerful emotional and political commitments of our indomitable will not to be terrorized, to stand firm and strong, to affirm liberty, free speech, and pluralism. We are all, sincerely, Boston, Paris, London, Nice, Orlando, Dacca, New York, Baghdad, and a hundred other cities around the world, and a hundred more that will be attacked in due course. We will stand with them all in a steel chain of humanity against barbarism.

But, then what? What happens if after a dozen more attacks, the power of their barbarism outpaces the power of our solidarity? Do we willingly give up all of our rights to be kept safe by an authoritarian leader?

We need to debate what we can really do to fight terror, and win.

The policy responses of Western governments and the emotional responses of entire societies suggest we have no idea how to respond to defeat this monster. More from Khouri: (editing by the Wrongologist)

We see no serious questioning of whether… [our] primary focus on militarism reduces or increases the terror threat. We see no credible willingness among most governments, and most of their associated media and intellectual spheres, to transcend Islam as the main analytical…[frame in which to view] the world of terror.

Was the truck driver behind the attack in Nice an Islamic terrorist? Was he a lone wolf with psychological issues? We assume he is a terrorist because of his Arab name. Many terrorists conform to the Islamic narrative – think about the Orlando shooter, or the Muslim couple in San Bernardino. This assumption also shapes attitudes and policy responses of governments when they respond to mass killings. Our first thought is always Islamic terrorism, as in the initial response to the Dallas shooter when we heard his middle initial was “X”.

Our two flawed presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, are evenly matched on protecting us: Clinton wants to push out the Assad government, in part by using ISIS mercenaries as proxies, plus US drones and bombing. Meanwhile, The Donald wants to fight an all-out war on ISIS and Islamic ‘terrorism’ in whatever shape. GW Bush anyone?

The US is now facing the consequences of our simplistic knowledge of the Middle East. We are stuck in the 1950s, a time when we could impose regime change in disobedient countries. Today, we drone them, and they kill a few of our citizens every few months. Wash, rinse, and repeat.

When will we ask the presidential candidates how long we have to put up with this steady stream of death and pain? What do they propose to do to tackle the terror problem at its roots? Anger, square-jawed determination, serial incompetence, and heavy-handed, counter-productive militarized policies are signs of cumulative failure.

Can we ask for a more serious response after Nice? Or, do we wait for a few more attacks, and ask then?

The Rio Olympics are starting in less than three weeks; the long list of concerns surrounding the games continues to grow.
The US military is eyeing a potential increase in troop engagement in Yemen to confront threats by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Why?

Our domestic terror victims are collateral damage of the decisions by the Powers That Be to support using extremists as a weapon. What we see today is not unforeseen blowback, it was knowable.

The entire world needs a wake-up. How should we answer the threat of the TerrorDome?

Here is Steel Pulse to get us going with “Find it Quick” from their 1982 album, “True Democracy”. You weren’t paying attention, but Mr. Obama said something in Dallas to the effect of “those in authority reject the cries of want” which comes from “Find it Quick“:

Sample Lyrics:

We got to find this love oh
Oh help us Jah above yeh come on
We got to find this love
Those in authority reject the cries of want
Those in power corrupt and weak in heart
This world don’t you know that
Hatred has grown
Love fly gone out through the window
We’ve got to find it we got to find it
Love fly gone out through the window
We’ve got to find it

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – July 17, 2016

We said last Sunday that “Events were in the saddle”, that life ran a risk of spinning out of control. Well, the past week proved that events are driving everything. We had the horrible attack in Nice, France as their Bastille Day celebration was ending, and there was an attempted military coup in Turkey on Friday night.

Hard to believe two events in one week could drive Trump off page one, but it happened. And this week, the new Pokémon is more popular than either presidential candidate.

It may seem ironic that, while France refused to participate in the Iraq War, they are a preferred target for terror. But France DID led the way in the dismantling of Libya (while we “led from behind”). They intervened in Mali, and their history in Algeria was horrific. And France’s failure to integrate immigrants is a major causal element as well.

One of the big problems with terrorism is that it always strikes innocent people rather than the bosses who led their countries into war.

Welcome to the TerrorDome:

COW Nice

France now lives under the TerrorDome:

COW Terrordome 2

On the home front, Trump selected Mike Pence:

COW Pence VP

Regrets, they had a few:

COW So Sorry

The Hill and the Bern get on the same page:

COW Hernie America has decided:

COW Pokemon

The GOP convention starts this week. Let’s hope it is peaceful:

COW Convention

Our Thin-Skinned Blue Line

When we see each other as enemies, we are the Middle East, and we can no longer work together for the common good. Consider what happened last week at a Minnesota WNBA basketball game:

Four off-duty Minneapolis police officers working the Minnesota Lynx game at Target Center on Saturday night walked off the job after the players held a news conference denouncing racial profiling, then wore Black Lives Matter pregame warm-up jerseys.

Lt. Bob Kroll, president of the Minneapolis Police Federation, the union that represents rank-and-file officers, praised the officers walk out:

I commend them for it… If [the WNBA players] are going to keep their stance, all officers may refuse to work there.

What is lost in the police union grandstanding was that the Lynx jerseys in question read “Change starts with us, justice and accountability” and on the back had Philando Castile’s and Alton Sterling’s names along with “Black Lives Matter” and the Dallas Police Department shield. How is that seen as anti-cop? This highlights how thin-skinned police forces around the US are whenever criticism emerges about bad policing.

But what can be done?

The most recent report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics quadrennial “Census of State and Local Law Enforcement Agencies, 2008” shows that there are 17,985 state and local law enforcement agencies with at least one full-time officer or the part-time equivalent in the US. All of them are managed by local, county or state governments, and the majority of police are members of a local union. Wrongo is not anti-union, but the social identity of being in law enforcement cultivates a code of unduly protecting members, hiding evidence, and blindly supporting the position of other officers simply because of their collective identity. The “Blue Wall of Silence” around cops is the excuse to cover up bad behavior in the face of investigation.

Creating an equivalency between #BlackLivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter is wrong. Consider this thought from Jonathan Russell, Professor and Chaplain at the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

A black life is a life under the threat of social death, a social life constituted by precarity and the potential of imminent death…Blue lives have no analogous history, no precarious location from which their collective lives need recovery…Blue lives are not…living under conditions similar to black life. It is the history of black lives not mattering that gives meaning to the hashtag. Blue lives have no such analogous history.

Russell goes on to say:

Blue lives have always mattered, present and past. Their experience of social space is (for the most part) one of…deferential treatment… It is profoundly misrepresentative and disrespectful to develop an analogous hashtag, as if blue lives have an analogous experience of social life in America as black lives have. This hashtag is wrong in so much as it connotes that the lives of law enforcement officers have failed to matter sufficiently in the broader public consciousness.

For the umbrage-takers out there, relax. Wrongo isn’t saying that cops don’t deserve respect, they do. He thinks that cops have a tough job, and that we must mourn any cop killed on the job. But, we can’t be blind to the power of this confrontation between #Blue and #Black to tear us apart.

Here is ginandtacos: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

I keep holding out hope that we will learn something from this, that police can say to themselves “All those Dallas officers wanted was to do their job and go home alive at the end of the day” and have some moment of inspired transference wherein they realize that every black person they pull over in a traffic stop wants the same...

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: Anger in Politics