Looming over the verbal skirmishes concerning Iran’s recent attack on the Saudi oil facilities and Mike Pompeo’s calling the attack “an act of war” is the fundamental problem that Donald Trump has created: putting himself between a rock and a hard place. There’s no wriggling out of it without either losing face or getting into a hot war with Iran, which would incur the involvement of Russia and the Chinese—too hot for Donald Trump to handle.
At this point, the end result appears to have been a loss of face—not that Donald Trump would ever admit it. The Treasury Department is to clamp down further on Iran’s financial system—somewhat short of Trump’s bellicose rhetoric. This will wreak further havoc on Iran’s economy, but if the Iranian government asks its people to make big sacrifices to oppose the U.S., they will be ready to starve rather than knuckle under.
We saw a similarTrumpian backpedaling from explosive rhetoric back in July of 2018 as Trump, personally aggrieved by standard Iranian bluster, thundered back at Hassan Rouhani with threats of annihilation.
The argument against impeaching Donald Trump gets stronger every day. Check out liberal pundit Nathan Robinson giving pro-impeachment liberals a scolding in the pages of The Guardian. Robinson is wrong that impeachment of Trump is a bad idea. But he’s right that counting on Mueller’s congressional testimony to turn public opinion in favor of impeachment was foolish. Polls still find support for impeachment below 40 percent among the general population, although above 60 percent among Democrats. Mueller’s testimony didn’t change many minds on either side of the partisan divide, and the center has seemed not to care very much before, during, and after.
In making the case against impeachment, Robinson trots out the tiresome argument that “the Democratic obsession with the Mueller investigation was symptomatic of a party that has lost touch with the real concerns of working people.” Again, Robinson is both wrong and right. Wrong that the party has lost touch with the real concerns of working people. (He knows better—he’s just venting.) But he’s correct that the hype of the Mueller report—primarily on the Left—has given the appearance of a party that has lost touch. That’s not the fault of the Democratic Party, it’s the fault of the media that thrive on whipping up emotions. Their best bet for ratings has been to run juicy Trump-outrage stories to get the liberal tribe thirsting for blood.
A month ago Elizabeth Warren was the first Democratic presidential candidate to call for the impeachment of Donald Trump ASAP.
Robert Reich, non-presidential candidate but straight shooter, did likewise in The Guardian on May 8.
In both cases, they saw evidence of obstruction of justice so plainly exposed in what was the redacted version of the Mueller Report, that the case for impeachment was transparent and compelling.
Last night on CNN Tom Steyer, who has been calling for the impeachment of Donald Trump since the man took office (even before the Special Counsel’s investigation had started), once again called for impeachment ASAP. In Steyer’s view, the Mueller (Special Counsel’s) report had strengthened an already ironclad case.
The political counterargument
The argument against starting impeachment immediately is political. It’s the Nancy Pelosi-led camp urging the Democrats to go slowly and carefully with investigations to build a body of evidence incrementally—and to proceed with impeachment only if the body of evidence reaches critical mass. Otherwise, the violence of the reaction from the Trump base, plus the exhaustion of the political center of the electorate, would make Trump the victim he has consistently claimed to be, and turn the public against a rabid, overreaching, unjustifiably partisan Democratic Party.
The put-a-hold-on-impeachment policy is spun as “let the people decide,” as in, the verdict on Trump should be delivered in the 2020 election. (Based on the questionable assumption that the election will not be decided by Vladimir Putin.) What outrages Trump may commit in the interval between now and November 2020 are overshadowed by political considerations.
Key to Attorney General William Barr’s prevarications about the culpability of Donald Trump, is the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel’s (OLC’s) official policy that the indictment of a sitting president is “impermissible” because it would “unconstitutionally undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions.”
How does that square, Mr. Barr, with Donald Trump’s boast in January 2016, “I could stand in the middle of Times Square and shoot somebody and not lose any voters?”
Trump apologists will say the latter was merely a comic metaphor just to illustrate the utter loyalty of Trump voters. He “didn’t really mean it.”
But what was it he didn’t really mean? Just the shooting part, or the idea that his followers absolutely believed he was above the law? Or the implication that, if he acquired enough loyal followers, that he really would be above the law?
Inhumanity compounding inhumanity: the monumental price of “homeland security”
Trump’s border wall,an embodiment of cruel immigration policies, is inhumane to people to a degree that is criminal—if not according to written law, then according to moral laws we grasp by intuition. Even many of those whose job it is to enforce draconian immigration policies intuit those laws—it’s just that they don’t obey them.*
Border Wall dividing and conquering life
There’s another, less visible, less publicized inhumanity, that is not so plainly criminal. But in the long run it may be just as devastating to the living world as to refugees and asylum seekers. That’s the way a continuous wall carves up vital, often fragile habitat, puts up barriers to creatures who have neither understanding of, nor use for, political boundaries, and robs the environment of resiliency. We know how habitat fragmentation has diminished the capability of living things to cope with such additional man-made injuries as climate change. However, some things that fragment and destroy habitat have at least the excuse of some utility: roads, farms, power lines, airports, wind farms, solar energy arrays, etc. But this ugly artifice has little purpose besides division for division’s sake. It is a monument to human vanity, and especially the vanity of one corrupt, depraved individual, U.S. President Donald Trump.
Ocelot native to southern Texas
So many wildlife refuges and sanctuaries are already under assault by the Wall or are soon to be, that I gave up trying to list them here. Just do a search on a string such as “threatened wildlife refuge border wall,” or similar keywords, and you’ll find enough of them to make you seethe, or weep. One particular lovely and imminently jeopardized landscape can be seen at Lower Rio Grande Valley Wildlife Refuge
The horrific and potentially irreparable damage resulting from extensions of a continuous border wall would spread well beyond wildlife refuges, as described in a paper in the journal Bioscience and summarized last summer in an article in Cosmos. (I referred to this same piece in a post last year; it’s even more urgent today.) The article had 16 co-authors and was endorsed by 2,500 scientists worldwide.
The now infamous video of a confrontation between a Catholic high school student and a Native American elder near the Lincoln Memorial on January 18th shook the cable news landscape like the launch of a Saturn Five rocket. Much of what was left after the first 48 hours of media conflagration was a lot of hot dust and scorched earth. Many were outraged, some were burned, many were confused, and no one was happy.
(I’ve embedded the initially-released video at the very end of this post.)
After a cool-down of a few days, some perceptive commentators noted that what went most terribly wrong in the immediate aftermath of the incident was the dependence on one three -and-a-half minute video, shot from oneangle with the camera held almost perfectly still throughout, to convey truth. It was that video— and one intense image in particular pulled from it—that triggered a righteous media blast from the Left. A tweetstorm erupted, blown initially from the Left and soon answered by gusts from the Right, while more, and increasingly ambiguous, information flowed in.
McConnell implies Trump may have gone a step too far
While Senate Republicans cast about for some legislative hodgepodge to satisfy both President Trump and House Democrats in order to prevent another government shutdown, Mitch McConnell was saying, publicly, that he was “for whatever works that prevents the level of dysfunction we’ve seen on full display here the last month.” This not only addressed the narrow matter of the border wall standoff, but also spoke to calls from Democrats and some Republicans to create a legislative mechanism to prevent both the President and the legislature from using government shutdowns as a bargaining tool on any legislation. McConnell, with the weight of 35 years in the Senate and at least six government shutdowns behind him, commented, firmly “I don’t like shutdowns. I don’t think they work for anybody.”
If such a mechanism could be put in place, that would take away what Trump feels is his strongest bargaining chip. His other chip, the declaration of a national emergency, is proving so far to be too hot for even Trump to handle.
This would be the closest thing to a public rebuke of Donald Trump that Mitch McConnell has delivered since the Republican primary season in 2016 when McConnell supported Rand Paul and made evident his disdain for the eventual winner. He is now, obliquely, standing up to Trump’s cavalier use of the federal government as a hostage in his all-or-nothing campaign to get $5.7 billion for an expansion of the magnificent border wall.
By framing the shutdown dilemma as a matter of process rather than substance, McConnell may dodge a counterattack by the President. He may think Trump owes him something for his month-long refusal to bring to the Senate floor a veto-proof bill to re-open the government. He may think that Trump himself believes he owes McConnell something. Enough to keep his trap shut for a few hours.
Thunk, thunk, thunk, is the sound of Donald Trump throwing shovelfuls of partisan excrement on one side of the sagging scales of justice within a crumbling system of governance. In one week he has named a blatantly partisan operative of the political right wing to the position of Acting Attorney General—without even bothering to give lip service to the obligation to get Senate confirmation—and gone on to deny the legitimacy of elections in places where the sole source of grievance is that the President’s allies may lose to Democrats.
Talk of impeachment is now much in the air, with pundits parsing the meaning of the “high crimes and misdemeanors” to be invoked in the case of impeaching a U.S. President. Here’s the wording of the impeachment clause in the U.S. Constitution: “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
Vainglorious boaster President Trump, having declared trade war against much of the developed world, assured us that trade wars are easy to win.
?? Maybe, and maybe not. I’m no economist, but I have noticed that the majority of mainstream economists and many business leaders have opined that trade wars are bad for everyone. They are particularly bad when they slow down the global economy as a whole, in an age where the global economy is increasingly THE economy that really matters in the long run.
On the other hand, seasoned economist Irwin Stelzer proposed that Trump’s trade war “really might be easy to win.” Stelzer on trade war
The basis of Stelzer’s conjecture is that the U.S. economy dwarfs that of any one of its economic adversaries (euphemistically called “trading partners”), excepting China, and they need the U.S. market more than the U.S. needs theirs. Secondly, if foreign tariffs really were as relatively disadvantageous to us as Trump claims (and Stelzer seems to agree), greater parity could put those foreigners on the ropes. As Stelzer points out, a German auto industry’s proposal to eliminate tariffs is a sign that some foreign businesses are seeing trouble ahead with the status quo. The status quo is that EU tariffs on U.S. automobiles have been five times that of the America’s on theirs.
Some days ago, the brat who poses as our nation’s president declared we would commence a winning strategy in Afghanistan. I believe he said “win” at least five times, eliciting a lighthearted “ha ha ha” among the more jaded listeners.
That this flies in the face of logic—given the seventeen-year history of our military adventure in Afghanistan—is no impediment to Mr. Trump, whose logical faculties (such as they are) are overwhelmed by his egotism, vainglory, and desperate cravings for winning at any cost.
Containment of the Taliban, not defeating them, is the name of the game in Afghanistan, which the generals whom Trump maintains he consulted at length know very well. (He also said he had looked at the Afghanistan situation “from every angle.” That was not the only time that I laughed out loud at this speech, but it was probably the loudest.) My guess is that the only way they could sell their strategy to him was to tell him it was a “winning” strategy, because the language of zero-sum games is the only language he understands. I’d wager they had a good laugh among themselves once the ruse succeeded.
