23 March 2024
Hitler’s Enablers
It’s uncanny the parallels in Adam Gopnik’s review of Tomas W. Ryback’s book, “Takeover,” in the March 25, 2023, New Yorker, between the threat of autocracy in the U.S. if Donald Trump is elected as President again and the rise to power of Hitler. From the media mogul, Hugenberg, and Rupert Murdoch, to the close confidantes wishing to take advantage of his appeal to disaffected petite bourgeoisie, shopkeepers, rural residents and domestic workers, like Hindenburg, von Papen, and General von Schleicher, and Hitler’s transparent solipsism when it came to his vaunted policies, Hitler never disguised his motivations, and they were ignored by both an overwhelmingly segment of the voting public as well as by a nonplussed liberal and educated sector of society.
20 March 2024
Trump Won’t Be Categorized
He’s not anti-Semitic—Kushner us his son-in-law!
He’s not racist—he has also suffered discrimination!
He doesn’t have money to burn—his wealth is tied up in real
estate!
He’s not xenophobic—he only wants to keep undesirable foreigners
out of the country!
Those who want to call Trump names are just trying to control him. That’s why the MAGA Crowd identifies with him—they’re just as fed-up with taking orders from anyone.
Biden's Policies Are Better for the MAGA Crowd
Biden’s liberal-democratic policies lower the cost of living, increase national security, and improve our general well-being not just theoretically, but also in at least eight practical ways:
- Well-funded and controlled open
borders bring in laborers with needed skills allowing businesses to expand.
- NATO and other honored alliances
maintain world order and promote the exchanges of ideas and people that improve
living conditions.
- International peace enables leisure, ancestral-heritage,
and business travel.
- Free trade and capital transfers facilitate
inexpensive imported manufactures.
- Unobstructed trading routes reduce
transportation costs and inflation.
- Reciprocal world environmental
accords ultimately benefit all global inhabitants.
- Similarly, making domestic
technologies available worldwide ultimately benefits us, too, by increasing IT
sales income and reducing the price of imports.
- Fulfilling treaty commitments is a
two-way street, e.g., we owe support of Ukraine's resistance to Russian aggression
as fair compensation to Europe for their support when the U.S. suppressed the Taliban's sheltering of terrorists in Afghanistan.
Campaign slogans
should also include concrete examples of the harm that MAGA policies and
blunders caused during Trump’s prior administration, including:
- Withdrawal from Paris climate accord—global
warming gets worse when any country, even alone and particularly when exceedingly more
intensively, refuses to collaborate.
- Admiration of foreign authoritarian leaders
only encouraged their aggressive behavior, viz. the Russian invasion of Ukraine
and Chinese obstruction of sea lanes.
- Appointment of conservative Supreme
Court Justices led to the robbing of a woman’s right to choose.
- It also led to further loosening of gun
ownership control at the increased risk that deadly weapons will be handled
threateningly and recklessly.
- Trump’s legal debts are making him vulnerable to influence by deep-pocket special interests (cfAll-In with Chris Hayes on X: ".@chrislhayes: Part of Trump's appeal in 2016 was the lie that his personal wealth would allow him to self-fund his campaign and make him immune to outside influence. That's even less true today. Trump is strapped for cash, and his political positions are up for sale. https://t.co/N9ZXnvgNoD" / X (twitter.com)).
- According to David French in the NYT, “The murder rate skyrocketed on [Trump’s] watch. Between 2019 and 2020, America experienced the largest single year increase in the murder rate in more than a century, and that was under Donald Trump.” The rate dropped to its lowest level in fifty years under Biden.
05 March 2024
What Makes a Likely Voter?
A recent NYT / Siena Poll reports the preferences of “likely voters” in the 2024 presidential election. Assuming that that category is self-selected, the poll obviously is biased in favor of those citizens who feel most highly motivated to plan ahead and devote the time and personal inconvenience needed to carry out that intent.
The question is whether the statistical margin of error adequately accounts for a possible change in the strength of that motivation as the voting date approaches. This change can work in either direction. History is replete with public opinion polls that proved to be contradicted by subsequent election results, e.g., Truman vs. Dewey in 1948 and Trump vs. Clinton in 2016. Voters who thought then how they would vote and that they were or were not likely to vote when asked the question for the opinion poll apparently changed their minds.
With the growing evidence that Donald Trump’s civil and criminal legal troubles are diminishing the enthusiasm of his supporters, it may be reasonable to distrust current public opinion reports as reliable predictions of the likely election results in November 2024. Nevertheless, the Biden campaign mustn’t relax the forcefulness of its messaging on the superiority of the current president over his predecessor, particularly with respect to the improved benefits of his programs and performance for the public, not to mention the danger that Trump’s reelection will mean for the security of the U.S. and for the health of our democracy.
29 February 2024
The Ultimate Verdict—2024 Election
On 28 February 2024 SCOTUS ordered the presentation of arguments on the appeal by Trump’s lawyers of the criminal charges against him based on Presidential Immunity. This process will inevitably delay a legal resolution of the issue until after the next presidential election on 5 November 2024. At best, it makes impossible the determination of Trump’s guilt or innocence on those criminal charges until way past the inauguration of the next POTUS.
Therefore, the real verdict on both issues, presidential immunity
and Trump’s criminal conduct, will only be the outcome of the 2024 presidential
election. SCOTUS has effectively
abdicated its responsibility to make that decision in time for fairly informing
the public before its being called on to choose its next president. The ultimate jury to decide that verdict will
be the U.S. citizens who vote in that election.
They will have to rely on the evidence collected by the January 6
Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives for making that determination,
just as SCOTUS was asked and failed to do.
The earlier SCOTUS decision in Bush v. Gore was based on the
conduct of the 2000 presidential election in Florida, rather than on a criminal trial. Although
it showed that a SCOTUS decision bearing on the outcome of a presidential
election could occur after the relevant election day, it did not address a case
that would have to await a criminal case, a jury verdict and the inevitable
appeals that could delay its final effect beyond the Constitutional
inauguration date. Therefore, Bush v.
Gore is not fully relevant.
The Democratic opponent of Trump later this year, therefore,
should make a leading element of the campaign the closing argument in what will
effectively be the criminal trial of Donald Trump. The campaign message must be prepared by
experienced prosecutors who have succeeded in disabusing juries of falling for
the showmanship of other narcissistic criminal defendants. Only by keeping him out of the White House
will Trump be held accountable for his high crimes and misdemeanors.
27 February 2024
Laughingstock
How dare Trump celebrate his victory in South Carolina by telling his MAGA Crowd that America under Biden is the world’s laughingstock? One of many unforgettable moments during Trump’s presidency was a NATO heads of state meeting when many European leaders, including Emmanuel Macron, were pictured chatting with each other, awaiting Trump’s appearance, and joking about the ineptitude of the U.S. president. That was a literal illustration of one inevitable consequence of an eventual return of the Donald to the White House.
It is to be hoped that in November 2024 enough members of
the MAGA Crowd will remember the embarrassment and ridicule that electing so
insufferable a clownish showman to lead our nation subjects us to.
21 February 2024
Alabama Supreme Court IVF Decision
The 2/20/2024 decision of the Alabama Supreme Court, LePage et al. v. Center for Reproductive Medicine et al., ruled 7-1 that an amendment to the Alabama Constitution installed by popular vote in 2018 made it illegal in that state to destroy human IVF embryos because they have the civil rights of born human children. By extension this ruling would mean that only the 13th and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution prevent Alabama voters from stripping non-white persons of their civil rights, not to mention women. The amended Alabama constitution is patently misogynistic and must be rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Whatever one thinks of the Dobbs decision of the Supreme Court, it does not authorize a state to violate the civil rights of any U.S. resident by a simple statement in or amendment to its constitution.18 February 2024
On The Best Case for Ukraine Aid
On the comment by Ross Douthat in the 2/17/2024 NYT, we should ask hese questions: Would the defense of Ukraine be such a cause for America's and NATO's strategic security if it weren't for the compelling image of Volodymyr Zelensky? Or is Zelensky so compelling an image mainly because of the importance of a free Ukraine to America's and NATO's strategic interests? It was always dangerous that as driven and effective a chief executive as Putin would assume leadership of as powerful a country as Russia. How existential a threat Putin's aggression is must be determined by the EU, and the U.S. has to follow its lead in fulfillment of our NATO commitment. There can be no equivocation on that. It goes both ways.