Category Archives: Politics

There Will Be Much To Clean Up

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Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post has some ideas about cleaning up the mess after Biden becomes president (in addition to reinstating regulations and international agreements that didn’t survive this administration’s assault):

From July:

Former vice president Joe Biden has said that if elected, he would not pardon President Txxxx for any alleged crimes. As a political matter, that makes perfect sense; as a legal matter, it smartly leaves options open.

As much as I would love to see the federal government prosecute Txxxx for potential crimes in office, I fear that criminally prosecuting a predecessor would be so destructive and fraught with peril that it would outweigh any added benefits. (If Txxxx committed financial crimes unrelated to his official acts in office, that is another matter.)

That still leaves open what Biden, if he becomes president, should do regarding Txxxx. I would suggest two main goals.

The first goal should be a complete historical accounting of the reams of scandals and abuses of power in the Txxxx era. We usually leave it “to history” to review a presidency, but here we need a swift and definitive legal accounting on issues such as any secret understandings with Russian President Vladimir Putin; the use of federal forces against peaceful demonstrators; the limitations imposed on the FBI in investigating Brett M. Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing; the firings of inspectors general and more. (I would not recommend redoing the Russia and Ukraine investigations, although coming to a conclusion where then-special counsel Robert S. Mueller III would not — on whether Txxxx committed crimes — may be required.)

The second goal should be to investigate crimes by others so as to prosecute them and set an example for future administrations. My suggestion would be for Biden’s attorney general to announce on his or her first day in office that everyone in the Justice Department has two weeks to deliver any evidence of crimes or ethical violations by anyone in the department, up to and including the attorney general. Anyone who does not may themselves be the subject of investigation and prosecution. We need a full fumigation of the Justice Department in particular; only when we know who did what can we go about repairing its reputation.

The model for accomplishing this must not allow the administration to be preoccupied with Txxxx. The ideal setup could be a body similar to the 9/11 Commission that could oversee the entire undertaking with subpoena power and an appropriate budget. As was the case with the 9/11 Commission, this one should be co-chaired by one respected Democrat and one respected Republican (or one Republican-appointed judge and a Democratic counterpart). Given the number of areas of concern, there would need to be investigative teams devoted to separate, agreed-upon topics (e.g., one looking at the Txxxx-Putin relationship, one at misuse of law enforcement, one at illegal directives to department heads on immigration). Set a deadline (a year or two?), and let them do their work.

No one in the administration thereafter should answer any questions or make any comments about the entire undertaking; instead, the new administration must go about the business of governing the country. At the end of the investigative process, a report should be published that includes the findings of each team. If Txxxx has not yet been prosecuted at the state level, the door remains open for Biden to authorize prosecution, but the main task of determining what occurred and who did what will be settled. (Biden should also ask for a recommendation on whether to change Justice Department guidelines that prevent prosecution of a sitting president.)

Biden’s team would do well to think through this now so a decision can be announced after November, if he wins. The transition after the election should not get sidetracked from the normal task of setting up an administration. In any case, a truth commission may be key to preventing a Txxxx-type presidency from occurring again.

From August:

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has plans for the economy, green energy, fighting the coronavirus pandemic and much more if he wins in November. But while pursuing all that once in office, he would also need to clear the decks from the Txxxx administration. We have discussed the issue of prosecuting President Txxxx — let the New York district attorney work his will and set up a truth commission to explore wrongdoing among Txxxx administration officials — but the issue goes beyond the president’s personal misdeeds.

First, every agency and department should release all documents the Txxxx administration previously withheld from congressional subpoenas. Find them and post them online. Every page. That should set the scene for a transparency initiative from the new administration. Freedom of Information Act requests should be answered promptly. Claims of executive privilege should be asserted only in the most limited circumstances, such as national security. White House logs of who comes and goes should be posted online, as well.

Second, the new administration should vigorously pursue each and every credible charge of perjury committed by administration witnesses over the past four years. Perjury is difficult to prove, but incomplete or misleading testimony to Congress can also be actionable. This should set an example of zero tolerance for lying to Congress.

Third, the Justice Department needs a thorough review of its filings under the Txxxx administration. Did the department lie to any court? Did it improperly withhold documents from any court? There is an ethical obligation to inform courts of any such conduct. The perpetrators, if still at the Justice Department, should be fired and their alleged wrongdoing referred to state bar authorities for professional sanction. (Beyond examining evidence of falsehoods, the department will need an inspector general to review any other cases of professional misconduct, whether in facilitating or ignoring illegal conduct or in allowing political motives to taint investigations or cases.)

Fourth, scientific and other outside boards disbanded by the Txxxx administration and information scrubbed from websites should be restored. Each agency or department should withdraw and/or correct previous publications, studies and reports that did not adhere to the highest standards of scholarship.

These are concrete items a new administration can initiate — and what better time than when one party controls the House, the White House and possibly the Senate? But there is also the power of example. The White House and the president personally set the tone. If the White House press secretary misstates something, he or she should correct the record promptly. All press secretaries are there to emphasize the positive and downplay the negative, but whoever holds that job has a solemn obligation not to intentionally misstate facts. When the press secretary does not know something, say so.

And the president himself should take fact-checking seriously. If he got something wrong, do not repeat the assertion — or at least modify it. When the president gets something wrong, he, too, should correct the record, thereby setting a standard for the entire administration.

No administration is 100 percent candid or factual, but the acceptance of lying as a matter of course, the encouragement to say easily disprovable things, must end. We deserve a president and administration that at least tries to stick to the truth.

Just Do It

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The Washington Post editorial board is launching a series of editorials that might be called “Stating the Obvious”. But this is well-done:

After he is nominated at a pared-down Republican convention next week, President Txxxx will make this argument to the American people: Things were great until China loosed the novel coronavirus on the world. If you reelect me, I will make things great again.

Seeking reelection in the midst of the worst public health crisis and sharpest economic downturn of our lifetimes, this may, realistically, be the only argument left to him. But, fittingly for a president who has spoken more than 20,000 lies during his presidency, it rests on two huge falsehoods.

One is that the nation, his presidency and, above all, Mr. Txxxx himself are innocent victims of covid-19. In fact, his own negligence, ignorance and malpractice turned what would have been a daunting challenge for any president into a national disaster.

The other is that there was anything to admire in his record before the virus struck. It is true that the economic growth initiated under President Barack Obama had continued, at about the same modest rate. Mr. Txxxx achieved this growth by ratcheting up America’s deficit and long-term debt to record levels, with a tax cut that showered benefits on the wealthy.

But beyond the low unemployment rate he gained and lost, history will record Mr. Txxxx’s presidency as a march of wanton, uninterrupted, tragic destruction. America’s standing in the world, loyalty to allies, commitment to democratic values, constitutional checks and balances, faith in reason and science, concern for Earth’s health, respect for public service, belief in civility and honest debate, beacon to refugees in need, aspirations to equality and diversity and basic decency — Mr. Txxxx torched them all.

Four years ago, after Mr. Txxxx was nominated in Cleveland, we did something in this space we had never done before: Even before the Democrats had nominated their candidate, we told you that we could never, under any circumstances, endorse Dxxxx Txxxx for president. He was, we said, “uniquely unqualified” to be president.

“Mr. Txxxx’s politics of denigration and division could strain the bonds that have held a diverse nation together,” we warned. “His contempt for constitutional norms might reveal the nation’s two-century-old experiment in checks and balances to be more fragile than we knew.”

The nation has indeed spent much of the past three-plus years fretting over whether that experiment could survive Mr. Txxxx’s depredations. The resistance from some institutions, at some times, has been heartening. The depth of the president’s incompetence, which even we could not have imagined, may have saved the democracy from a more rapid descent.
But the trajectory has been alarming. The capitulation of the Republican Party has been nauseating. Misbehavior that many people vowed never to accept as normal has become routine.

A second term might injure the experiment beyond recovery.

And so, over the coming weeks, we will do something else we have never done before: We will publish a series of editorials on the damage this president has caused — and the danger he would pose in a second term. And we will unabashedly urge you to do your civic duty and vote: Vote early and vote safely, but vote.

Unquote.

Hell, you can vote early, vote safely, vote late, vote unsafely. Just vote.

As If the Future Wasn’t Scary Enough

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The science fiction I used to read often depicted the future as very weird, culturally speaking. It was the kind of place where nutty celebrities would rise to high office and strange cults would be born. It was like the Sixties and Seventies but more so.

If you don’t find climate change or the next pandemic scary enough (or a visitation like what killed the dinosaurs), read this long article by Adrienne Lafrance in The Atlantic. It’s about QAnon, the conspiracy theory that now looks like a new religion. A few paragraphs:

If you were an adherent, no one would be able to tell. You would look like any other American. . . . You may well have an affiliation with an evangelical church. But you are hard to identify just from the way you look—which is good, because someday soon dark forces may try to track you down. You understand this sounds crazy, but you don’t care. You know that a small group of manipulators, operating in the shadows, pull the planet’s strings. You know that they are powerful enough to abuse children without fear of retribution. You know that the mainstream media are their handmaidens, in partnership with Hillary Clinton and the secretive denizens of the deep state. You know that only Dxxxx Txxxx stands between you and a damned and ravaged world. You see plague and pestilence sweeping the planet, and understand that they are part of the plan. You know that a clash between good and evil cannot be avoided, and you yearn for the Great Awakening that is coming. And so you must be on guard at all times. You must shield your ears from the scorn of the ignorant. You must find those who are like you. And you must be prepared to fight.

You know all this because you believe in Q.

The origins of QAnon are recent, but even so, separating myth from reality can be hard. One place to begin is with Edgar Maddison Welch, a deeply religious father of two, who until Sunday, December 4, 2016, had lived an unremarkable life in the small town of Salisbury, North Carolina. That morning, Welch grabbed his cellphone, a box of shotgun shells, and three loaded guns . . . and hopped into his Toyota Prius. He drove 360 miles to . . . Northwest Washington, D.C.; parked his car; put the revolver in a holster at his hip; held the AR-15 rifle across his chest; and walked through the front door of a pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong.

. . . As parents, children, and employees rushed outside, many still chewing, Welch began to move through the restaurant, at one point attempting to use a butter knife to pry open a locked door, before giving up and firing several rounds from his rifle into the lock. Behind the door was a small computer-storage closet. This was not what he was expecting.

Welch had traveled to Washington because of a conspiracy theory known, now famously, as Pizzagate, which claimed that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of Comet Ping Pong. . . .

While Welch may have expressed regret, he gave no indication that he had stopped believing the underlying Pizzagate message: that a cabal of powerful elites was abusing children and getting away with it. Judging from a surge of activity on the internet, many others had found ways to move beyond the Comet Ping Pong episode and remain focused on what they saw as the larger truth. If you paid attention to the right voices on the right websites, you could see in real time how the core premises of Pizzagate were being recycled, revised, and reinterpreted. The millions of people paying attention to sites like 4chan and Reddit could continue to learn about that secretive and untouchable cabal; about its malign actions and intentions; about its ties to the left wing and specifically to Democrats and especially to Clinton; about its bloodlust and its moral degeneracy. You could also—and this would prove essential—read about a small but swelling band of underground American patriots fighting back.

All of this, taken together, defined a worldview that would soon have a name: QAnon, derived from a mysterious figure, “Q,” posting anonymously on 4chan. QAnon does not possess a physical location, but it has an infrastructure, a literature, a growing body of adherents, and a great deal of merchandising. It also displays other key qualities that Pizzagate lacked. In the face of inconvenient facts, it has the ambiguity and adaptability to sustain a movement of this kind over time. For QAnon, every contradiction can be explained away; no form of argument can prevail against it. . . . 

QAnon is emblematic of modern America’s susceptibility to conspiracy theories, and its enthusiasm for them. But it is also already much more than a loose collection of conspiracy-minded chat-room inhabitants. It is a movement united in mass rejection of reason, objectivity, and other Enlightenment values. And we are likely closer to the beginning of its story than the end. The group harnesses paranoia to fervent hope and a deep sense of belonging. The way it breathes life into an ancient preoccupation with end-times is also radically new. To look at QAnon is to see not just a conspiracy theory but the birth of a new religion.

Unquote.

Joseph Smith said he was visited by an angel in upstate New York. There are now more than 17 million Mormons. William Miller claimed Jesus would return in the 1840s. There are more than 20 million Seventh Day Adventists. America has done it before and can do it again.

One more paragraph from The Atlantic:

The Seventh-day Adventists and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are thriving religious movements indigenous to America. Do not be surprised if QAnon becomes another. It already has more adherents by far than either of those two denominations had in the first decades of their existence. People are expressing their faith through devoted study of Q drops as installments of a foundational text, through the development of Q-worshipping groups, and through sweeping expressions of gratitude for what Q has brought to their lives. Does it matter that we do not know who Q is? The divine is always a mystery. Does it matter that basic aspects of Q’s teachings cannot be confirmed? The basic tenets of Christianity cannot be confirmed. Among the people of QAnon, faith remains absolute. True believers describe a feeling of rebirth, an irreversible arousal to existential knowledge. They are certain that a Great Awakening is coming. They’ll wait as long as they must for deliverance.

The president has spoken highly of QAnon and provides publicity on Twitter. All he claims to know is that they are patriots who “like him” a lot (that’s all that matters). It’s easy to imagine QAnon playing a bigger and bigger role in the Republican Party after a difficult election, with less crazy office-holders being replaced by crazier ones.

From Charlie Warzel in The New York Times:

For almost three years, I’ve wondered when the QAnon tipping point would arrive — the time when a critical mass of Americans would come to regard the sprawling pro-Txxxx conspiracy theory not merely as a sideshow, but as a legitimate threat to safety and even democracy.

There have been plenty of potential wake-up calls. Among them: a 2018 standoff at the Hoover Dam with a QAnon believer, the 2019 murder of a Gambino crime family boss by a QAnon supporter who believed the boss was part of a deep-state cabal, an August 2019 F.B.I. report that warned that QAnon could spur domestic terrorism, a West Point report calling the movement “a security threat in the making,” and the April arrest of a QAnon follower who was found with a dozen knives while driving to “take out” Joe Biden . . . 

Then, on Tuesday, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia who has been vocal in her support of QAnon, won a primary runoff. (In recently uncovered blog posts, Ms. Greene said that Hillary Clinton had a “kill list” of political enemies and questioned whether the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting was orchestrated in a bid to overturn the Second Amendment.) Given the deeply Republican makeup of Ms. Greene’s district, she is widely expected to be elected to Congress in November.

This week’s news is a sign of QAnon’s increasing influence in American cultural and political life. What started as a niche web of disproved predictions by an anonymous individual has metastasized into a movement that is now too big to be ignored.

Decency

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All the evidence indicates that Joe Biden is a decent human being. A cynic or a Republican might say it’s all an act. They often find it hard to accept reality.

Last night at the Democratic convention, 13-year old Brayden Harrington appeared in a video talking about how Biden helped him with his stutter. You may have already seen it.

Their original meeting in February in New Hampshire deserves to be seen too (you might have to do an extra click to see the video):

Biden meets Brayden

Every time we elect a president, people say it doesn’t matter who wins. Nobody should say that this year.

Mysteries

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I did something I usually don’t do, which is look at one of those articles about rural or suburban voters in the Midwest who voted for Txxxx and will do it again (“Txxxx supporters still support Txxxx!”). Everything he said was about how he’s doing personally. His farm is doing well. The pandemic is mostly far away. He expressed no concern about anybody else and made inane excuses for the president (e.g. it’s so unfair that the news media report all this bad news — they’re purposefully ignoring the good things (?) the president does).

Fortunately, however, the thrust of the article was that Txxxx will do worse in Iowa than four years ago and possibly lose the state.

Along with the mystery of why anyone would vote for such a terrible person and president, there’s the mystery of why the stock market is doing so well. Paul Krugman helps answer that question and warns of darker times ahead:

On Tuesday, the S&P 500 stock index hit a record high. The next day, Apple became the first U.S. company in history to be valued at more than $2 trillion. Dxxxx Txxxx is, of course, touting the stock market as proof that the economy has recovered from the coronavirus; too bad about those 173,000 dead Americans, but as he says, “It is what it is.”

But the economy probably doesn’t feel so great to the millions of workers who still haven’t gotten their jobs back and who have just seen their unemployment benefits slashed. The $600 a week supplemental benefit enacted in March has expired, and Txxxx’s purported replacement is basically a sick joke.

Even before the aid cutoff, the number of parents reporting that they were having trouble giving their children enough to eat was rising rapidly. That number will surely soar in the next few weeks. And we’re also about to see a huge wave of evictions, both because families are no longer getting the money they need to pay rent and because a temporary ban on evictions, like supplemental unemployment benefits, has just expired.

But how can there be such a disconnect between rising stocks and growing misery? Wall Street types, who do love their letter games, are talking about a “K-shaped recovery”: rising stock valuations and individual wealth at the top, falling incomes and deepening pain at the bottom. But that’s a description, not an explanation. What’s going on?

The first thing to note is that the real economy, as opposed to the financial markets, is still in terrible shape. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s weekly economic index suggests that the economy, although off its low point a few months ago, is still more deeply depressed than it was at any point during the recession that followed the 2008 financial crisis.

And this time around, job losses are concentrated among lower-paid workers — that is, precisely those Americans without the financial resources to ride out bad times.

What about stocks? The truths is that stock prices have never been closely tied to the state of the economy. As an old economists’ joke has it, the market has predicted nine of the last five recessions.

Stocks do get hit by financial crises, like the disruptions that followed the fall of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 and the brief freeze in credit markets back in March. Otherwise, stock prices are pretty disconnected from things like jobs or even G.D.P. [the Gross Domestic Product] [although the market does quickly, sometimes violently respond to the latest earnings reports].

And these days, the disconnect is even greater than usual.

For the recent rise in the market has been largely driven by a small number of technology giants. And the market values of these companies have very little to do with their current profits, let alone the state of the economy in general. . . .

Take the example of Apple, with its $2 trillion valuation. Apple has a price-earnings ratio — the ratio of its market valuation to its profits — of about 33. [The historical P.E. ratio for the stock market is around 15.] As long as they expect Apple to be profitable years from now, they barely care what will happen to the U.S. economy over the next few quarters.

Furthermore, the profits people expect Apple to make years from now loom especially large because, after all, where else are they going to put their money? Yields on U.S. government bonds, for example, are well below the expected rate of inflation.

And Apple’s valuation is actually less extreme than the valuations of other tech giants, like Amazon or Netflix. . . .

[Prof. Krugman left out another well-known factor helping the stock market (a factor he understands very well). That’s FOMO (fear of missing out). When stocks go up, it’s natural that people want to own stocks. The stock market is, among other things, a giant casino. When some gamblers are having a great time, other gamblers want to join in the fun.]

Unfortunately, ordinary Americans get very little of their income from capital gains, and can’t live on rosy projections about their future prospects. Telling your landlord not to worry about your current inability to pay rent, because you’ll surely have a great job five years from now, will get you nowhere — or, more accurately, will get you kicked out of your apartment and put on the street.

So here’s the current state of America: Unemployment is still extremely high, largely because Txxxx and his allies first refused to take the coronavirus seriously, then pushed for an early reopening in a nation that met none of the conditions for resuming business as usual — and even now refuse to get firmly behind basic protective strategies like widespread mask requirements.

Despite this epic failure, the unemployed were kept afloat for months by federal aid, which helped avert both humanitarian and economic catastrophe. But now the aid has been cut off, with Txxxx and allies as unserious about the looming economic disaster as they were about the looming epidemiological disaster.

So everything suggests that even if the pandemic subsides — which is by no means guaranteed — we’re about to see a huge surge in national misery.

Oh, and stocks are up. . . .Â