A couple of times during that last post, I mentioned how well things were going in this country until the presidential election of 2016. At every point before then, while one party or the other might have been bitterly or even childishly disappointed (like the Democrats in 2000, or the Trumpistas in 2020), our system had worked wonderfully, for the nation and the world.
That got me thinking. Yes, things worked well for those first 56 national elections. But which were the elections when it all worked out best?
Which seemed to me like a situation that called for a Top Five List. So here goes. Note that this time, I’m not ranking the five, but putting them in chronological order:
1800 — This is the one that proved our system could survive, that one party actually could peacefully relinquish power and step aside, and the nation would continue. We all know that my man John Adams lost this one, but we don’t talk much about the fact that it remained tied between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, which was a real crisis. But the backup plan worked (barely), as Jefferson won in the House of Representatives, thus protecting the nation — if not poor Alexander Hamilton — from the execrable Burr.
1824 — This is another that went to the House (although under the new rules of the 12th Amendment), which protected the nation from the awful Andrew Jackson, and gave us the last of that string of extraordinary founding presidents, John Quincy Adams. But this did not last. We got stuck with Jackson in 1828, and this lowered expectations almost to Trumpian levels, and Old Hickory was followed by a string of mediocre-to-bad presidents that most of us would be hard-pressed to name in order. And who would want to, anyway? This one was not lasting in its effect — much like the election of 2020, which gave me such joy and hope for the nation at the time, before we learned that madness still gripped our country. But I include it so that we remember John Quincy, perhaps our most-qualified presidential candidate ever.
1860 — The one that elected our greatest president, and launched our bloodiest war — the one against each other. This was the pivotal moment in our history. Abraham Lincoln was the only man in our history who could have gotten us through what was to come, and with the right outcome. No one else in our history ever possessed such eloquence, such brilliance as a leader, such high ideals, and such an exquisite political skill, which guided him to do the right thing at the right moment at every critical step.
1864 — In its way, just as critical as 1860. The threat from the useless McClellan and the Democrats, the Copperheads and people who were simply sick of our bloodiest war ever, was created a real possibility that we would not complete the task that all this bloodshed was about, and therefore fail to live up to the promise of this country. But Lincoln won re-election, delivered the best inaugural speech ever, rammed the 13th Amendment through the House, thereby ensuring the actual end of slavery (even though most Americans think the Emancipation Proclamation did that, Lincoln knew it did not). And he got it all done before he was uselessly martyred. If only he could have still been around to lead us into the Reconstruction.
1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944 — Yes, every election in which FDR was elected. I couldn’t make up my mind which was most important. The year he was first elected, with the country in its worst economic mess ever? Or 1940, with the war having started in Europe and the Pacific and our country’s ability to act crippled by isolationism? Or 1944, when it would have been crazy to change captains with a war still to be won? I don’t know enough about 1936 to assess it, except that this group of four seems a critical series to me.
Those are my picks — sorry about cheating a bit on that last one, but I really don’t think one of them would have done without the other three. Franklin Roosevelt was our second-greatest president, and we needed him throughout that period.
We’ve had other good ones, and a couple that gave me great joy in my lifetime, but none with the same positive impact.
What are your picks, and your justifications for them? And more importantly, when will we ever have such great elections again?
The Ecuadorean Guayas, named for the river that was the home of the city where I lived in the early ’60s. Nice to see them celebrating, even though this isn’t the Nueve de Octubre.
And I mean really random. So have my thoughts been in the big buildup to this day — random, confused and even conflicted at times.
I didn’t feel a bit that way 50 years ago today. The Bicentennial was pure, unadultered celebration of the country I loved then, and have loved all my life, including now. Proceeding with subheds, as a demonstration of just how random my thoughts have been this time…
The Bicentennial
I got up late this morning after going with my younger son and my grandson to see “The Mandalorian and Grogu.” I may review that later, but I mention it here only to note that I didn’t get up until after 10, because the show was at 8:55, and what with all those previews and such, I didn’t get home until well after midnight.
Celebrations were under way as I broke my fast. One of my wife’s classmates from high school — there were 37 girls in the St. Agnes Academy class of ’71, and they’ve stayed close — texted her to say she was watching the “tall ships” parade in New York Harbor. So my wife tuned it in, and we watched for awhile. It was enjoyable, just as it was 50 years ago. Other members of the Class of ”71 joined in, and one sent a picture of my wife standing with her dear late mother, both smiling hugely, on the Bicentennial Day. My wife was four months away from giving birth to our first child, and all was happy and beautiful.
And I don’t mean just for us on a personal level, but for the country as well. To me and to so many others, there was nothing but pride as I watched those ships on the small, low-res screen, and otherwise observed the occasion. To me, the American experiment was a tremendous success at 200. My love of country hadn’t been warped, as it was for so many, by Vietnam. And to my mind, Watergate had simply proved that our system — carefully devised more than a decade after 1776 — still worked. Then, we had a prominent Republican who asked, “What did the president know and when did he know it?,” and proceeded, along with his colleages, as the facts warranted And when it was plain that Nixon would be impeached, he resigned to spare the nation and himself that shame (for which I honor him still). Today, there is no shame, and no working system to protect our country. We have a president who was convicted of 34 felonies in the summer of 2024, and he was subsequently elected rather than serving a sentence or paying any penalty. So he tears a significant portion of the White House down, messes with the nearby Reflecting Pool, and holds a UFC event on the ground to celebrate his own birth, and continues on his merry way, unmolested. (And we thought Andrew Jackson’s raucus inauguration party was an embarrassment.)
Back then, Gerald Ford was our president, and that was fine. He was a good man. I would soon be overjoyed that Jimmy Carter would replace him — things were just getting better and better. We had 40 good years ahead of us. We could reflect on the triumph of 200 years of America taking giant steps to make its union more perfect for all, and its leadership of the Free World since 1945.
A Linguistic Question
I was thinking this morning a thought identical to one I wondered about in 1976: Why were we calling them “tall ships?” At the time of our revolution, wouldn’t they just have been “ships?” Although some — compared, say, to a frigate — did seem to have unusually tall masts. What do you call sails that fly even higher than the royals? Because I think I saw some of those.
Speaking of frigates… I wished the USS Constitution could have been there, as the U.S. Navy’s only still-commissioned square-rigged warship. I mean, I think I saw the Blue Angels, so why not Old Ironsides? I guess because although she occasionally gets under way, the old girl never leaves Boston Harbor anymore. Of course, despite being fabulously old, she’s still young enough to be slightly anachronistic. She wasn’t launched until 1797. But she was much, much closer to the period than anything else I saw sailing today.
We can still celebrate, but we do it 2 days late
I’ve mentioned before the live history lectures I help the Relic Room stage twice a month. Yesterday’s was a triumph — we drew a crowd of 80 (our previous record was 62), and we ran out of both chairs and space in the museum’s small Education Room. The speaker was award-winning high school history teacher Michael Burgess, and his topic was “We Hold These Truths to be Self-evident – the Declaration of Independence at 250.”
He was excellent as always, and the crowd enjoyed it. But as good as Mike’s words and delivery always are, perhaps the best part for me was the clip he played from HBO’s “John Adams,” which celebrates my favorite Founding Father (and fave Founding Mother, Abigail). It was this part, when the Continental Congress actually votes to declare independence:
After the clip, Mike encouraged us all to notice how quiet all those men were once it was announced that “the motion carries.” Everyone, including the nervous, foppish young Edward Rutledge from South Carolina (seen in the still on the video link above), was overwhelmed, struck to silence, at the enormity of what they’d just done, breaking away from the world’s greatest superpower. No fireworks. No “shot heard ’round the world.” Just thoughtful sobriety.
Quiet. I was wishing for some of that when I watched the “tall ships” this morning. My hearing aids distort loud sounds of certain pitches, to a painful degree. So I turned them off, and then turned off the volume so I could enjoy the spectacle without listening, say, to the overexcited, bombastic, stentorian announcers. One of the wonderful things about sailing ships is that when you’re sailing, you hear little more than the wind. And if you’re sailing before the wind, you don’t even hear that.
Oh, one last point on this part (and one I’ve mentioned before, many times) — that vote depicted in the video clip was on July 2, which John Adams always thought would be celebrated as our Independence Day — instead of the day of the signing of the document that the Committee of Five had drafted, with Jefferson doing much of the work at Adams’ behest. Jefferson hadn’t said a word during the debate, when Adams was browbeating those guys into voting “yes.” But Adams knew Jefferson was handy with a pen, and was also way more popular than Adams himself was. A situation that sadly exists to this day.
The Tax Revolt
Y’all know how I enjoy listening to Tom and Dominic on “The Rest Is History.” And of course their often mocking, wiseacre delivery helps make it enjoyable, particularly when they speaking of, say, the French. They’re English of course, and it’s sort of refreshing to listen to their somewhat exaggerated (for entertainment effect) John Bull patriotism in a time when there’s so much sad turmoil in Britain.
But it can be a tad uncomfortable to listen to them dismiss our revolution as a petulant “Tax Revolt,” and air the same views common to most Britons at the time, which can be summarized as “Why can’t those whiny colonists pay the taxes necessary to protecting their homes (such as in the Seven Years War), and shut up about it?”
Still… they have a point.
Make no mistake. I think the fact that the United States came into being as one of the best things that ever happened in human history. And as Mike Burgess stressed, our example (that is, our example prior to 2016) is still an inspiration to so much of the world. As you know, I’ll argue vehemently with cynics who run our country down.
But I’ve never felt good about the original excuses we offered for our revolt. The great thing about the Declaration, which we celebrate today, was the fact that we were legitimizing the war that had started more than a year earlier. At the point of July 1776, we had more legitimate grounds for a group of serious, sober men to gather and declare our split. After that, there was a legal justification to continue fighting. At Lexington and Concord the year before, there was not. Nor were many of the acts of resistance committed before that. The Stamp Act, for instance, was not a valid reason to take up a gun (many stages later in the escalation of hostility) and shoot at the only legally consituted authority our county had at the time.
‘No Kings’
Therefore, I have somewhat tempered views of some of the things that many of my fellow Americans think our independence is all about.
Do you get those texts urging you to participate in (or contribute money for) an upcoming “No Kings Rally?” I kind of wince at those. The problem today isn’t that we have a president who thinks he’s a “king.” The problem is that we have a president — a democratically elected president, elected after he had demonstrated previously just what he was — who is Donald John Trump. And that means our real problem is the American electorate, which has gone seriously mad. This would never, ever have happened before 2016. We had our problems, but we weren’t this crazy and depraved in those first 240 years. The great mass of American voters laughed anyone like Trump right off the stage back then.
We all quote Churchill saying “Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” We do that because both parts of his statement were correct. Although I would have said “representative democracy” or “liberal, constitutional democracy” rather than just that one word, which can be highly problematic by itself.
The word certainly made our Framers nervous, which is why they set up our federal system so that pure democracy came into play only in one half of one of the three branches — the House of Representatives. And even that, thank God, was representative, not direct, democracy.
But a lot of Americans have not been nearly as wise as the Framers, and while our country has done many wonderful things over the centuries — such as ending slavery, whipping the Nazis and freeing Western Europe, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — we’ve also steadily eaten away at the safeguards against the most dangerous elements of democracy. Probably the worst change in terms of our present problem was demolishing the party convention system to guarantee that the candidate who won the most votes in primaries and caucuses would win his party’s nomination, and therefore have at least an even chance of becoming president.
A lot of Democrats warned that Trump was a “threat to democracy,” reflecting our national habit of inadequately summing up the virtues in a single word — which doesn’t hold up upon examination. So I was encouraged, back during the 2024 election, when I was having breakfast at a local restaurant with a couple of friends, and one of them — a committed Democrat — said he didn’t think that was the problem. I eagerly agreed with him. Trump wasn’t a threat to democracy, he was an example of the harm that democracy itself can wreak in a time when our electorate has gone mad and lost its way.
Democracy’s great when you have serious voters who want the best possible leaders for our country — which is what we experienced for most of our history. But what do you do when a majority actually wants the worst candidate ever to step forward and ask for the job?
Time to celebrate
As concerned as I am in these times, I’ll still celebrate the promise of America today. We’re going to a cookout, and looking forward to it. And while I lightly disparaged noisy celebration and praised sober contemplation above, I took my grandchildren to the ballpark last weekend to hear the South Carolina Philharmonic play stirring music ranging from John Philip Sousa to John Williams. And it was perfect when, after dark, the fireworks started precisely as the “cannonfire” part of Tschaikovsky’s “1812 Overture.” It was wonderful, as always (especially when you can turn off hearing aids during the banging, and still hear the music quite well).
God Bless America. And in our troubled times, God Save America, because what those sober men started 250 years ago is eminently worth saving.
The Peruvians showed up, too. I hope they didn’t get too close to the Guayas. Last time I was down that way, some Ecuadoreans were still pretty sore about the War of ’41. Nautical footnote: What was going on in that harbor, in terms of wind conditions? The Ecuadorians had all their squaresails aloft, and the Peruvians had nothing flying but staysails…
What’s going on in this: Donald Trump is trying his best to redraw all the Southern states’ maps (and maybe others as well; I’m just looking at the South here) so that there is no hope of them ever electing another Democrat. No Jim Clyburn, and so forth. This is all sparked by the recent Supreme Court decision regarding the Louisiana map, which has thrown the doors open to this sort of thing. This is now apparently a big part of his vision of becoming permanent Fürher of America, along with such things as changing the rules so he can run for a 3rd time in what would likely prove to be our last presidential election (in his lifetime, anyway), and making sure he can win it in the House, no matter what the voters say.
I had sorta, kinda been following this — elsewhere. My wife, who’s from Memphis, had focused my attention on what Tennessee just did. They had torn apart the 9th Congressional District that since the early ’70s had been mostly electing black representatives. (I voted for the first of those, Harold Ford. Later regretted it. But I liked his son.) So now, black Memphians (who are the majority in the city) are raging about the “racist” map, and the current incumbent (who, incidentally, is white and the first Jewish congressman from Tennessee, and can’t really play the usual Memphis race card), is talking about the indiscriminate elimination of Democrats.
Which is somewhat more to the point in the Memphis case. If Trump thought black members would support him as slavishly (and that’s the word here) as white Republicans do, he’d be looking for a way to make ALL the districts majority-minority, if that were possible. For that matter, if only Democrats loved him as the terrified Republicans do, he’d go for more Dems. He’s not particular. But neither of those fantasies being the case, he’ll settle for a plan that elects only Republicans. He only cares about Number One — never forget that.
As for SC, I only heard about this last night from a Democratic friend whom I had called about something else entirely. I’ve talked to a couple of other people since then — well, one other person, a Republican. But I’m trying to reach a lobbyist by text who can tell me what the hell is going on right now. Other that, I’ve been reading but not learning much. Because going into today, nobody knew what was going to happen. This is moving very fast.
It seems it will depend on whether the Senate goes along with a last-second reapportionment. I hear Majority Leader Shane Massey is against it, but I can’t swear to that. We’ll see.
Meanwhile, over in the House, I hear about Republicans running around talking about the latest “White House map.”
Y’all do understand the extent to which this means we are living in a different country than the one in which I have spent most of life. Right? Sure, presidents have always been highly interested in the makeup of Congress, and therefore very interested in the maps, and quietly keeping track of what’s happening.
But that’s not THIS America, in which the president openly barges in and takes over this process, and his minions in Columbia are unembarrassed about making it clear what’s going on.
You see, folks, legally — constitutionally — remapping is entirely the responsibility and prerogative of state legislatures. In any previous decade, lawmakers of both parties would have been fiercely defending their turf, furious if any mere president tried to muscle in.
But not these guys. Not in Trump World.
We won’t even get into the completely uncaring betrayal of the Legislative Black Caucus, which in the early ’90s made the deal with the Republicans that let the GOP take over the S.C. House. But let’s not be too harsh in judging today’s Republican members. They, and their Master, are even more ignorant about history than most Americans. Thirty years ago, when that deal with the caucus was made, I doubt Trump knew where South Carolina was, much less which party was running it. (Here he is in those days.)
At the top of this post, I’ve including one of the maps that’s been floating around. If they go ahead with this, no telling what the final version will look like. This one is intriguing. It does away with the salamanderlike district the Republicans drew for Clyburn back then — not to elect a Democrat, but to get all those black voters out of their districts, to make them “safe.”
So the new 6th looks “normal.” it also looks like something they may regret if they go for it. That Democrat I spoke with about this last night is already thinking about running for it.
But what do the doofuses in the White House know about the political geography of South Carolina?
I’m very busy — which is why I generally restrict myself to simple posts that take less time and don’t say much — but I want to mention this before it gets too far in the past.
This was three days ago.
About the only time I see anything that falls within the definition of “TV news” is when I’m checking in on my Mom at an hour when she watches it. On this occasion, it was something worth watching, and I would have missed it otherwise.
I had heard about Artemis II, in passing. What I heard made me promise myself to pause and read more about it, but with all I’ve been doing, I didn’t get around to it. And now, it appeared, the spacecraft was coming back. We watched the whole re-entry and splashdown, and I was struck by how I was seeing something I hadn’t seen in many a year.
I had watched some of the shuttle launches in the ’80s, especially after the horror of Challenger. I felt I had to keep an eye on these strange things that landed rather than splashing down, if only in case we were going to have to scrap our plans for the next day’s front and whole A section.
But they lacked the excitement of the launches in the ”60s. After all, while the new craft was higher tech and carried a larger crew, these shuttles were just tooling around in low orbit, the way John Glenn had done in 1962. And I’d seen that. Everybody had seen that. My 3rd-grade class — indeed, I suppose the whole school — assembled in the auditorium to watch it live. The black-and-white TV was on a wheeled trolley placed down in front of the stage, to bring the small screen a bit closer to us. It was the biggest thing that happened that year, even bigger than Mantle and Maris vying to beat the Babe’s record back at the start of the term.
What was interesting about this Artemis II return over the weekend was that… well, it was a bit like that day in the school auditorium — or at least it seemed to be to the people on the screen.
There were differences, of course:
The screen itself. HD, and rich color that none of us could have imagined back in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo days. Better sound, better everything — except, no John Glenn, the Single-Combat Warrior fighting the godless Soviets in the Heavens, as Tom Wolfe would later describe it.
Instead of Glenn, there was a group of four I’d never heard of. Of course, this being the 21st century, there was a lot of hoopla about one being black and another being a woman! Like we hadn’t seen that before. You know what “diversity” point meant more to me? At least three of the crew were military — and two of them U.S. Navy pilots. Ike wanted astronauts to be military test pilots, and I’ve always agreed with him. They tend to already meet many prerequisites, and they take orders well.
But the most startling thing to me wasn’t those minor differences. It was the sameness. The breathlessness, in every voice that came on the air. For instance… people kept saying, over and over, that there was going to be a terribly suspenseful few minutes during re-entry when we wouldn’t be able to communicate with the capsule!!!! Also the capsule will turn into a ball of intensely hot fire as it entered the atmostphere!!!
Like no one had ever seen such a thing before. Like it hadn’t been standard in all those flights in the ”60s. Like Hollywood Opie hadn’t Apollo 13, in which the most suspenseful moment was the one in which the capsule was making its re-entry, and the loss of signal was longer than expected.
Finally, of course, it dawned on me that most people hadn’t seen this before, as unimaginable as that was for me. Only 12-15 percent of people today were even living in 1962, much less in the 3rd grade. Only about 22 percent here living on the planet the last time we sent astronauts to the moon.
For that matter, only about half today’s population was even around when the heavily nostalgic “Apollo 13” came out!
So this was a complete, unprecedented novelty to most people watching — as well as to the network TV folks and possibly everyone at Mission Control, and even the astronauts themselves!
Which was weird.
This was underlined by one young TV guy who had drawn the job of interviewing regular folks who had gathered to watch the spectacle. He spoke of their awe at witnessing such a thing for the first time. And he was particularly impressed to have spoken to a man who was so old he could actually remember the early flights back during the Space Age!
But then the young man with the microphone said something that made him sound older and wiser himself. He said that to the people with whom he had spoken, what was happening “seems like something a previous America would have accomplished.”
And he was right. I remember that America. Early in my career I referred to the WWII generation as “the America that got things done.” Later, I realized that generation was still accomplishing things for decades after 1945, because at that point they were still in charge of this country. And they were still pulling together across the lines of division we know today, to get one tough thing after another done. So we got things like the Civil Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, the Peace Corps, and… the Space Program.
JFK and his veep got the Moon Landing done, with the whole country dedicated to the goal after Kennedy’s assassination. We were still pulling together then, even as Vietnam was starting to tear us apart.
You know who launched the Artemis program? Trump. Really. Of course, to the extent that he actually deserves credit for that, I suppose this is the ONE way in which he has acted to, in some way, make America great again.
But of course, he is still someone who owes his prominence to division — to the way Democrats and Republicans view each other as members of different species, to the rally crowds that roar approval when a speaker says things about OTHER people that no politician would have dreamed of publicly uttering when when we had some mutual respect, and got things done together.
(Of course, he didn’t inspire the nation with a speech like this. He couldn’t, both because he lacks the ability and inclination and because this isn’t that America. But hey, he signed the paperwork.)
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the Artemis program served somehow as a portal that led to us being that country again. ‘Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished…
“What I was not prepared to do on Saturday was for the U.K. to join a war unless I was satisfied there was a lawful basis and a viable thought-through plan. That remains my position.”
— Keir Starmer, PM of our longtime greatest ally
And so the PM sits (aside from sending some assets to the area to protect British subjects and interests).
And so do I. This started over the weekend, and I haven’t said a word about it here on the blog. Or about anything else, to be honest. I’ve been busy. But when you have something to say, you find time to say it.
Unfortunately, I have nothing to say beyond what I’ve said in the past. The basic math of this hasn’t changed. To set out the problem:
Donald “What-Irrational-Impulse-Am-I-Feeling-At-This-Moment?” Trump is the president of the United States, thanks to the fact that the American electorate has gone mad. If any other president in U.S. history were telling me this battle is unavoidable I would have a basis for trusting him.
I could do that because the possibility of an unavoidable war with Iran has been one of the standing threats for this country since the late 1980s. Handling the real threats Iran presents while avoiding that war has been a top American priority for all that time, because such a war would be far too destructive — for us, for them and for the world.
We haven’t wanted war despite the fact that the post-shah Iran was largely founded upon hatred of the United States and any country resembling the Great Satan; the additional fact that Iran is the world’s dominant force in supporting terrorism here, there and everywhere, including the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks that pulled Israel into the war that Hamas wanted so much; and the biggest fact of all, that Iran has been obsessed with, whatever the risk, developing the capacity to hurl nuclear weapons at the U.S., Israel and anyone else who has made their list. (That list tends be quite long, including non-Shiite states in the area.) And Iran is not inclined to send indignant notes to those on its list. It is far more inclined toward the apocalyptic approach.
So leaders of the United States, a once-rational country, have until now done what they could to contain that nuclear threat, short of outright war. But our presidents and their administrations have known that the time may come when we have to go in “bigly,” despite the fact that we believe the oppressed people of Iran have kindly intentions toward us — and we wouldn’t want to change that. The hope has always been peaceful regime change.
It is possible that before this started over the weekend, we had reached the point when a rational leader would say, “It’s time. The nuclear threat is now imminent, and we have no choice but to go all-out to prevent it.” If Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George Bush fils, Bill Clinton, Bush pere, or Ronald Reagan” announced that, I might be dismayed, but I would accept the situation as necessary. They were all rational men, surrounded by rational men and women who would have done all they could to avoid that step, but now saw it as unavoidable.
I can’t for a second take that position under the present circumstances. Donald Trump airs a video of himself in the middle of the night on the weekend wearing a hat that looks like it was bought from a souvenir stand at the Olympics and tells us that in his considered opinion the time has come. And I’m supposed to trust him, the convicted felon whose other current international obsession is threatening our closest allies with war if they won’t give him, for some insane reason, Greenland? And remember, this is not like the first Trump term, when grownups like James Mattis were in the room. In the place where decisions are made, there is no one around Trump who is both smarter than he is, and willing to stand up to him.
Do I “support our troops” — not only the pilots taking the most immediate risks now, but the soldiers, sailors and marines in the region who are targets for retaliation now, and likely to have to go in later? You bet. Always. I want them coming home safely to their families. I also want them, now that it’s started, to accomplish their missions. That means fully destroying Iranian nuclear capabilities, doing the same with conventional capacities (I think; can’t pretend to know what dangers lie in suddenly creating such a vacuum), toppling those presently in power, and standing ready to support a new regime that is better for all concerned.
And I want those missions accomplished with zero noncombatant casualties. I know that’s impossible, but it’s what I want. In this real world, though, I just have to hope for the fewest casualies possible. We need the good people of Iran to go home safely to their families. Then we need then to construct and run that new Iran, a place far better than the Iran of the ayatollahs or the shah who preceded them. That, of course, is almost as tall an order as zero collateral damage.
I also hope that our own electorate — including all those isolationists who thought Trump was one of them — turn the once-Grand Old Party out of power in the fall, because that would (or at least might) restore the legislative branch as a check on the executive. Then I hope the electorate completely recovers its sanity and elects a president who is entirely unlike this guy or the people with whom he surrounds himself. You know, someone like every other president we’ve ever had.
After all, this is why elections matter, and the one we had in 2024 more than ever. If we had put (or kept) a normal person in the White House, that person would have made mistakes, but would have been persuadable to change course. That person would have have been subject to reason, to the law, to tradition, to foreseeable consequences. These ways of changing course are unavailable to us. Trump is immune to such things, with a Congress that doesn’t dare oppose him, because of all those supporters who will back him no matter what.
I’ve set out a lot to hope for, plenty for cynical — or even just plain sensible — folks to laugh at. But what else can I do? No practical path for changing this situation lies before me, or any of us at this moment. All any of us can do is hope — and pray — for the best.
Hey! Whatever happened to U.S. determination to deal with THIS guy?
Last week, I referred to my recent lack of interest in the sort of news that used to fascinate me, and as an example mentioned my unsettling (to me) failure to keep up with what the U.S. was doing in and near Venezuela.
And then, BANG! My eldest granddaughter woke me on Saturday morning with a text that asked me to call her because “I don’t understand what happened in Venezuela.”
I took it something new had happened there overnight, and I was able to confirm that immediately. But if I was to explain it, I had to do a bit of scrambling. Knowing how good The New York Times is (or at least has been in the past) at providing overall perspective on events and the background behind them, I looked there. Unfortunately, I encountered one of those “live update” stories, which provide no easily accessible perspective at all.
It’s a pretty good piece, especially for something thrown together quickly. But it has its flaws. For instance, it asserts that “If there is an overriding lesson of American foreign affairs in the past century, however, it is that attempting to oust even the most deplorable regime can make matters worse.”
Well, yes, it can. But that doesn’t mean it must, as so many in our country — on the left and the right — now believe. Many of you believe it. So the NYT has used a convenient post-Vietnam lever here — We know intervention is always a bad idea! — as an easy device to persuade us that this foray into another country is a bad idea as well.
Which really doesn’t explain what’s wrong with this latest action. In making its easy point, the board of course mentions Afghanistan. As though it was a similar situation. It was not. As the Times and a huge proportion of America seem to have forgotten, we had an ironclad reason to go into Afghanistan — we needed to make sure it would never again be a haven for Al Qaeda. You know, that group that had just deliberately murdered almost three thousand Americans in their own country.
We’ll discuss later, if you wish, what happened later. The point here is that Venezuela does not in any way offer such a justification. Mumbling about “narcoterrorists” and the like does not constitute a viable explanation. Nor does mention of the Monroe Doctrine. I wonder who told him about the Monroe Doctrine? Well, no matter. The fact is, it doesn’t apply.
But on the whole, the NYT piece did a good job of explaining the situation, and condemning this unwarranted action by Mr. Look-at-me-now-I’m-suddenly-a-neocon.
To appreciate how good the piece was, you have only to look at the mad raving that was published in The Washington Post under the headline — and I’m not making this up — “Justice in Venezuela.”
The Post, which was once a great newspaper, seems unable to see past the happy fact that Nicolás Maduro is now out of power. And it is a happy fact, as the NYT acknowledges:
Few people will feel any sympathy forMr. Maduro. He is undemocratic and repressive, and has destabilized the Western Hemisphere in recent years. The United Nations recently issued a report detailing more than a decade of killings, torture, sexual violence and arbitrary detention by henchmen against his political opponents. He stole Venezuela’s presidential election in 2024. He has fueled economic and political disruption throughout the region by instigating an exodus of nearly eight million migrants…
But that’s not the point. The thing is, if the man in the ruins of the White House is in a mood to pull on his big-boy pants and throw his nation’s weight around, there are more urgent needs in this world.
You want to take bold action? International priorities indicate the place to demonstrate your strength and determination would be Ukraine, or the Near East. But no, not the same kind of action. No, no, no, no, no.
Since the adversary in Ukraine possesses — you may have heard about this — nuclear weapons, a far more subtle approach is called for. Something like what we saw the Biden administration doing — exercising soft power where we could, and gradually beefing up Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. This was working,, before an off-and-on Putin admirer took over.
Or you could concentrate your efforts on trying to sort out the mess in the Mideast. Don’t expect overnight success, but we need to continue to try — as American leaders have tried since about 1967 — to keep the peace and realistically reassure our ally Israel of its survival. And if you’ve decided regime change is your new thing, try doing it the hard way — by convincing Israelis, via diplomatic means, that they can survive without Netanyahu.
But, you say, why can’t we get rid of Maduro and then do that more important, harder stuff?
Because… as I acknowledged in response to the NYT’s simplistic condemnation of interventionism, attempting to oust even the most deplorable regime can make matters worse. Every such venture is a risk, often in ways we’re unable to anticipate.
There can be far-reaching negative effects, even horrific effects, from this action in Venezuela. And I’m not just talking about the straightforward, housekeeping considerations such as answering the question, “So what happens now in Venezuela?”
Let me pull one such consequence out of left field: For more than thirty years, China has very effectively been buying friends all over the planet, particularly in the Third World. (I’ve occasionally written about this since my first week on the editorial board of The State in 1994. Here’s an update from the NYT.) Building airports and local economies, it has promoted an image of itself as poor countries’ kindly, helpful friend. This action in Venezuela can play right into China’s hands as it tries to become the next America (in hegemonic terms). We’re the Bully Boys; they’re the ones in the white hats. Maybe you don’t think that and I don’t think that, but we’re not the only people in this world.
For that reason (and many others), you don’t do things such as this unless you have an extremely good reason — as we did in Afghanistan, before we all forgot what it was.
Digression: Of course, we can’t do what China does because we are not run by leaders who spend money as they like in pursuit of their careful plans. Try spending a few extra bucks on a needy country, and the folks who currently run our democracy will holler, “America First!”
America First. Speaking of that… we could talk all day about Trump’s inconsistency in this instance, but what’s the point? What are we going to say — that he’s not following his own doctrine? The power he currently possesses is not the result of philosophy of any kind. How could it be? Philosophy means “love of wisdom.” It’s hard to imagine a word less at home in TrumpWorld.
Trump does what makes him, personally, feel good. And that may be the most dangerous thing about this venture in Venezuela — it has greatly expanded his own sense of what he can do, and get away with, and feel good about.
So going into Venezuela was a bad thing. But it wasn’t the worst thing Trump has ever done. It’s not even the worst thing he’s done this week.
I’ve written about 1,200 words so far on this, and I need to move on to some other things. So I’ll just mention in passing my nomination for worst thing of the week: Withdrawing the U.S. from 66 more international organizations, and making America more of a pariah in the world. That was not as noticed the way removing Maduro was, but it was way worse…
The evening of the day on which Charlie Kirk was murdered — a week ago today — I read an editorial about it in The New York Times that said everything that needed to be said about that appalling event.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk — the founder of a youth political movement that helped revolutionize modern conservatism — at Utah Valley University on Wednesday is a tragedy. His killing is also part of a horrifying wave of political violence in America….
Such violence is antithetical to America. The First Amendment — the first for a reason — enshrines our rights to freedom of speech and expression. Our country is based on the principle that we must disagree peacefully. Our political disagreements may be intense and emotional, but they should never be violent. This balance requires restraint. Americans have to accept that their side will lose sometimes and that they may feel angry about their defeats. We cannot act on that anger with violence.
Too many Americans are abandoning this ideal. Thirty-four percent of college students recently said they supported using violence in some circumstances to stop a campus speech, according to a poll from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression published a day before the Kirk shooting. Since 2021, that share has risen from 24 percent, which was already unacceptably high. Surveys of older adults are similarly alarming….
The intensity of our political debates will not disappear. The stakes are too high, and the country disagrees on too many important questions. But we Americans have lost some of our grace and empathy in recent years. We too often wish ill on our political opponents. We act as if people’s worth is determined by whether they identify as a Republican or a Democrat. We dehumanize those with whom we differ….
That was the penultimate graf. Since I’ve quoted so much, I might as well give you the last one:
…This is a moment to turn down the volume and reflect on our political culture. It is a moment for restraint, rather than cycles of vengeance or the suspension of civil liberties, as some urged on Wednesday. It is also a moment to engage with people who have different views from our own. When societies lose the ability to argue peacefully and resort to violence to resolve their political debates, it usually ends very badly.
(When I read that editorial that night, I retweeted it with this comment: “NYT ably describes the violent tip of the iceberg of hostility that is sinking America. But we’re all too busy despising each other to bother trying to find a way to save our ship. “)
As for the excerpts above — if the NYT lawyers call, I’ll just have to ask them how much I have to cut to suit their definition of Fair Use. But I just thought it was too important not to share. It was a grown-up editorial. It seems to me to have been written by someone mature enough to remember when this country was healthy enough that we could disagree strongly and vehemently, and then shake hands and walk away as friends — or at least as people who recognized each other as fellow Americans, and not as “the enemy.”
Of course, maybe it was written by a younger member of the board. If so, we have someone to thank for providing that person with an excellent education, and a firm understanding of what made America great, before our country’s recent tragic decline.
Evidently the faculty members who were suspended from teaching at Clemson were not the kind who provide such intellectual enrichment. Their grotesque fulminations are an embarrassment to anyone with. conscience. Doubt me? Here are some quotes from their outbursts. If that link doesn’t work, I’ll be happy for you, because you’ll be happier for not having read them.
Should they have been fired for it? Let me pose a different question. Should people who would have deliberately published such remarks at such a time have been employed in the first place, in jobs that involve shaping young minds? Such irresponsibility is inexcusable. They weren’t courageously outspoken; they were stupid, cruel and hateful.
You would think that in an atmosphere in which more than a third of college students believe violence can be justified to stop speech they don’t like, anyone who teaches them would understand that their responsibility is to model productive speech and behavior. And the responsibility of college administrators is to make sure they hire people mature enough to understand that.
At this point in our increasingly ones-and-zeroes country, we will now start hearing the “what abouts.” What about those GOP politicians who have demanded their firings? Are you defending them?
Are you nuts? Those people are cheap opportunists, trying to make themselves heroes to an angry crowd. Or, worse, they’re trying to make a merely grieving crowd… angry. Stir things up. Because they seek higher office, and Donald Trump has taught them that the approach taken by every president before him — striving with all their mights to pull us together in troubled times by invoking the values we hold in common — is for chumps. You can win by feeding division, by pouring gasoline on the embers, he has taught them. And they’re acting upon those lessons.
Just as others have learned that if you post something stupidly inappropriate — the more hateful the better — on social media in response to any news event, there are thousands if not millions of people like them who will regard them as brave and witty, and clap them virtually upon their backs in congratulation. A certain needy type eats that sort of thing up.
Both categories are unacceptable in a rational society. But they are so richly rewarded — in the currencies that matter to them — that they just keep doing it.
One final word: If you actually believe that anything those disgraced faculty members said about Kirk was justified by his rhetoric, you are just as much a part of the problem as those hungry GOP pols.
Personally, I had never heard of Charlie Kirk before the news of his murder. But I went and looked at a couple of videos of him speaking. The entire thrust of what he said, even in the milder comments, was wrongheaded and objectionable to me. In others, he was utterly offensive. But all that was what I expected, since Trump is trying to canonize him. And all of it is beside my point.
Y’all know I don’t believe in capital punishment. But even if I did, I certainly wouldn’t support summarily executing a man for saying things that offended me. I could never support that. And I could never support or worse, applaud anyone who mocks a human being who has died that way.
I haven’t posted much lately, but of course I feel compelled to say something about this.
But what should I say? I don’t feel qualified to express an opinion about it — yet. I might have in the past, but I’m hobbled by two things:
Donald Trump is president of the United States. He and Pete Hegseth are the main sources available right now as to what just happened, and I can’t trust a word either one says about it. When I say “can’t trust,” I’m not so much talking about lying — although we all know Trump does that almost each time he takes a breath. The thing is, he and Hegseth could be tellling the absolute and complete truth. And from everything I’ve seen, neither one of them understands what’s going on — especially not Trump (I don’t know Hegseth nearly as well).
Second, the way news is reported these days, it’s difficult to get a coherent picture of what has happened from major newspapers. A few years ago, those papers spent the hours before their daily deadline distilling all that was known into a single, coherent story arranged with all the key information in the first paragraph (the lede). You read the first few grafs of a story back then, and you had a pretty decent idea of what had happened. Now, whenever something big happens, you get these moment-to-moment update strings, such as this one and this one. You have to read every update from the last to the first (sometimes stretching over 24 hours) to get anything like a handle on the story, and even then it’s difficult. When something of moderate importance happens, you still get the one, coherent story — with new ledes added as necessary. With the big stories, such as this, newspapers are little help, because you get the “updates” string instead. They no longer focus on helping readers understand; they’re too busy making sure they throw out the latest factoid.
So… that means I turn to the journalists who still write in the old style — and that means opinion writers. Of course, since I know who they are, I look for the ones I know are trustworthy — again, not so much in terms of not being liars (although, of course, that’s a prerequisite), but because they have consistently displayed deep understanding of such matters in the past.
Unfortunately, not many have weighed in yet. For the moment, I recommend checking out Nicholas Kristof (“The Three Unknowns After the U.S. Strike on Iran“) and Max Boot (“Iran badly miscalculated. Now it’s paying the price.“). And while he’s not one of my trustee regular voices, you might want to read this piece (“Why Israel Had to Act“) by Amos Yadlin, a former chief of Israeli military intelligence. It was written before the U.S. joined in, but I still learned some things from it that help me understand Max Boot’s points.
That’s of course assuming you can read them. If you can’t and you want to, I can try to give you “gift” links. (I’ve tried in the past to share those with you, but I haven’t gotten enough feedback on them to be sure whether they even work when sent to more than one person.)
So I’m waiting to read a lot more, from smart people who’ve been following all this far, far more closely than I have.
But I should say something, right? But all I have now is random, chaotic, piecemeal reactions — which is probably what you’ve seen elsewhere at this point, whether those offering such reactions tell you that or not (especially if you’re someone who forms your impressions of such events by watching television, God help us).
So here you go:
I’m very, very worried. Smart leaders (pretty much everyone who’s been in relevant office before Trump was elected) have avoided war with Iran for very good reasons. One of the biggest is something Kristof mentions: By and large, the Iranian public is quite pro-U.S. What they need is new leaders, if they can manage to get them. And the fastest way to turn them against us is military action. That change in Iran public opinion would be disastrous.
That said, it is indeed essential to make sure that Iran, whose current leaders hate the U.S. almost as much as they do Israel, does not obtain nuclear weapons. If you look at that and only that, these U.S. strikes are good news — if they were effective, by which I mean they set Iranian nuclear efforts back many years without killing civilians. That’s a big “if.”
The one thing that makes me tentatively optimistic (and only slightly) on that last point is that Iran can’t hide facilities essential to its own Manhattan Project in tunnels under civilian dwellings, hospitals and schools — they way we know its ally Hamas does. At least, I don’t think so. But I don’t know that.
As much as I may search for reasons not to be terrified at this point, I know that even if all the steps taken up to this point by Trump and Netanyahu (and there’s a fragile liferaft to cling to), have been wise and correct, I know that Trump, at least, is capable of turning in another direction in a split-second, prompted by something as idiotic as a social media post he doesn’t like.
That’s the situation that a majority of U.S. voters put us in on Nov. 5, 2024. And the only recommendation I have for dealing with that is to pray. If you don’t know how to do that, it’s past time to learn…
I’ve mentioned before that I’m cleaning up old emails that backed up way last summer when we were in Europe. Well, I’m still doing it, making my way through a few hundred each day. Which is progress, just not fast progress.
Anyway, today I ran across something I had set aside to consider writing about (which I may have done in passing; I don’t recall now). It was an Ezra Klein podcast (he’s always good) headlined, “What’s Wrong With Trump?”
I gave you a link to that if you want to go back and hear it, or read the transcript. But I’d rather you spend time reading what I’m thinking about today, which is on the much larger topic, which is Trumpism, and what is wrong with that. Which is, of course, an immense topic (since it’s about what is killing our country), but this is at least a digestible bite out of the subject.
It’s a David Brooks column from several days ago, and it’s headlined, “I’m Normally a Mild Guy. Here’s What’s Pushed Me Over the Edge.” (That, by the way, is one of those “share full article” links that the NYT offers, so please let me know whether it works for you).
It very much goes to the core of my own views, because it arises from Brooks’ marked tendencies toward communitarianism, which is one of the main reasons I enjoy reading him, and am often inspired by his words.
He starts this way:
Last Monday afternoon, I was communing with my phone when I came across a Memorial Day essay that the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen wrote back in 2009. In that essay, Deneen argued that soldiers aren’t motivated to risk their lives in combat by their ideals. He wrote, “They die not for abstractions — ideas, ideals, natural right, the American way of life, rights, or even their fellow citizens — so much as they are willing to brave all for the men and women of their unit.”
This may seem like a strange thing to get angry about. After all, fighting for your buddies is a noble thing to do. But Deneen is the Lawrence Welk of postliberalism, the popularizer of the closest thing the Trump administration has to a guiding philosophy. He’s a central figure in the national conservatism movement, the place where a lot of Trump acolytes cut their teeth….
He then mentions that J.D. Vance made a similar point at his inauguration, and that “these little statements point to the moral rot at the core of Trumpism, which every day disgraces our country, which we are proud of and love. Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.”
Of course, Brooks isn’t saying soldiers don’t lay their lives on the line for their buddies. “Of course warriors fight for their comrades.” And they do. I’ve made that point many times on this blog. (Based of course upon study, not personal experience. But what I’m studying is the experiences and memories of combat veterans.) When battle is at its hairiest, that’s an essential factor that keeps soldiers from turning tail and running — the comrades beside them. To see what happens when that factor breaks down, read the first part of The Red Badge of Courage, when the protagonist flees the battlefield because others around him are doing the same.
But there are larger questions — the factors that cause a someone to become a soldier to begin with, and don the uniform and go through all that training, long before they’ve even met those comrades who will keep them from running.
That’s what Brooks is writing about. And it’s what Deneen and Vance are dumping on when they say soldiers are never motivated by “abstractions — ideas, ideals, natural right, the American way of life, rights, or even their fellow citizens.”
That is not only an insult of immense proportions to soldiers (and sailors and Marines and others who serve) but to all Americans, whether they’re capable of perceiving the insult or not. It’s an insult to the idea of America. It’s an insult to ideas, period — to democracy, to freedom, to humanity, to God. It reduces us to grunting animals who can’t see past their own feeding troughs, and don’t care.
So it’s worth getting “angry about,” as Brooks so mildly puts it:
Deneen’s and Vance’s comments about men in combat are part of a larger project at the core of Trumpism. It is to rebut the notion that America is not only a homeland, though it is that, but it is also an idea and a moral cause — that America stands for a set of universal principles: the principle that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with inalienable rights, that democracy is the form of government that best recognizes human dignity and best honors beings who are made in the image of God.
There are two forms of nationalism. There is the aspirational nationalism of people, ranging from Abraham Lincoln to Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden, who emphasize that America is not only a land but was founded to embody and spread the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address. Then there is the ancestors and homeland nationalism, traditionally more common in Europe, of Donald Trump and Vance, the belief that America is just another collection of people whose job is to take care of our own. In his Republican National Convention acceptance speech Vance did acknowledge that America is partly a set of ideas (though he talked about religious liberty and pointedly not the Declaration). But then when it came time to define America, he talked about a cemetery in Kentucky where his ancestors have been buried for generations. That invocation is the dictionary definition of ancestors and homeland nationalism.
Trump and Vance have to rebut the idea that America is the embodiment of universal ideals. If America is an idea, then Black and brown people from all over the world can become Americans by coming here and believing that idea. If America is an idea, then Americans have a responsibility to promote democracy. We can’t betray democratic Ukraine in order to kowtow to a dictator like Vladimir Putin. If America is an idea, we have to care about human dignity and human rights. You can’t have a president go to Saudi Arabia, as Trump did this month, and effectively tell them we don’t care how you treat your people. If you want to dismember journalists you don’t like, we’re not going to worry about it….
Well, I’ve probably gone what the lawyers at the NYT would consider “Fair Use,” so I won’t quote any more.
But I urge you to go read the piece, and reflect upon it. It’s worth your time…
Rarely does a state have an opportunity to make history the way we do on Feb. 24 in the Republican presidential primary election.
South Carolina may be Nikki Haley’s last chance to derail Donald Trump’s path to the nomination. It will be hard for Haley to justify remaining in the race until Super Tuesday without a strong showing here.
I won’t rehearse all the reasons Trump is bad for America, just two quick points. First, Republicans could get all they say they want – conservative policies, family values, and respect for the Constitution – from Mike Pence and several other prominent Republicans. Yet they are drawn to Trump’s scorched-earth approach, despite the Sisyphean rock of baggage he bears.
Second, Trump has proven he is dangerously unpredictable. Almost no one on Jan. 5, 2021 would have predicted what happened the next day: a sitting president encouraged his VP to overturn the will of the people, exhorted the gathered crowd to march on the Capitol, and then watched passively for three hours as they ransacked it. When he finally sent out a Twitter video asking the crowd to disperse, his message to the rioters included “We love you; you’re very special.”
S.C. Democrats and Independents propelled Biden to the nomination in 2020. Our task in 2024 will be less comfortable and potentially riskier. Like me, you may prefer Biden over Haley and have deep policy disagreements with her. But this election is less about the candidates than about America herself. Both Biden and Haley will try to leave America better than they found her. Trump has no such desire.
If you are like many in this state and nation, you have had Trump’s number since he first announced for president in 2015. You recognized what a small, soulless human being he was. You understood his drive to be revered and his dearth of compassion and loyalty. Over the past eight years, you have endured his fountain of lies, from the claim that Obama was not a citizen to his claim that he won in 2020. You’ve asked yourself again and again, is this is the best the Republicans can do?
This is your moment. The turnout in South Carolina’s Democratic primary on Feb. 3 was predictably low, since Biden had only token opposition. Only about 131,000 voters participated (about 4 percent of the state’s more than 3 million registered voters). In 2020, when the outcome was not a foregone conclusion, about 540,000 voters participated in the Democratic primary. That means more than 400,000 voters who turned out in 2020 stayed home this year.
So if you’re a Democrat or Independent who voted in 2020 but didn’t vote on Feb. 3, you can make history. If we leave the election to usual Republican primary voters, the latest polls predict Trump will win by 65 percent to 35 percent. If there is healthy turnout, say 700,000 votes, then the final tally will be roughly Trump 455,000, Haley 245,000, a difference of 210,000 votes.
The 400,000 of you who voted in the 2020 Democratic primary but not in the 2024 primary can swing this election. In addition, there are hundreds of thousands of others who didn’t vote in the 2020 primaries who could vote this time around. Everyone, yes everyone, except the 131,000 who voted on Feb. 3, is eligible to vote in the Republican primary (South Carolina has an open primary system, so you can vote in one primary or the other, but not both).
There are two ways to use this power. One is cynically, by trying to elect the weakest opponent for the other side so your candidate can beat them in the general. The better way is to help elect the strongest candidate for the other side, so that America will have the best choice possible. If Haley wins and then goes on to beat Biden in the general, I will disagree with some of her policies, but the country will be in sane, stable hands.
Imagine you have an infant child or grandchildren. How will you explain your vote for Trump to them in 15 years, when they are old enough to understand politics? I suspect many South Carolinians regret their vote for Strom Thurmond as candidate for the Dixiecrat Party in 1948 (more than 70% of SC voters chose him) or for George Wallace in 1968 (over 30% of SC voters). How an evangelical Christian will explain his or her vote for Trump in 15 years to intense questioning from a skeptical teenager, I have no idea (although I would pay to watch it).
I am hoping South Carolina plays the role Iowa did in January 2008 in its first-in-the-nation Democratic presidential caucus. In a state with challenging demographics, Barack Obama won and was propelled to a general election victory over John McCain. Whether or not you agree with Obama on policy, his respect for the office was clear. He adhered to essential presidential norms and left the fundamentals of American democracy as strong as he found them. Needless to say, if someone with McCain’s integrity was the Republican front-runner in 2024, this column would never have been written.
On Feb. 24, we can make a statement similar to the one our countrymen and -women in Iowa made 16 years ago. We can signal the beginning of the end of Donald Trump’s political career by voting for Nikki Haley.
A version of this column appeared in the Feb. 14 edition of the Post and Courier-Pee Dee.
I’m learning to embrace small developments that offer glimpses of hope for our world. Yesterday, Jordan was finally rejected as speaker. Today, I welcome this… “Aid trucks cross Rafah border, providing first relief to besieged Gaza Strip” https://t.co/zLLMrY6CWq
The fact that the one of the worst representatives I can think of in the House — a guy whose name has long been one of the first mentioned in connection with the most insane, destructive developments in that dysfunctional body — will not be speaker is hardly an indication that things are going well in our country. We are left with the fact that the overwhelmingly majority of the party that controls the House was willing and even eager to elevate him to that post.
But it does mean the worst has not happened — yet. Even though we were careening in that direction this past week. And it offers a tiny gleam of hope that the GOP will get sufficiently fed up with doing things this way that it will turn to some approach that a reasonable human being might take. What would that be? Well, the most obvious thing that would happen in a sane world is that enough of the GOP would work with Democrats to choose a consensus speaker. That would be the best thing for America, and for the hope that our system used to give the world.
A somewhat more likely scenario would be to simply settle on the interim speaker, Patrick McHenry. I don’t know nearly enough about him to know whether he would be a good speaker, but at least we have few indications so far that he would be a horrible one.
Sadly, that’s where we’ve been in this country since 2016 — trying to avoid the horrible. Remember back in the 2008 presidential contest, when the country was offered a choice between “good” and “better.” And I don’t really care which of them you think was the good, and which the better. We’d have done well with either of them.
A great country should have choices all the time — for president, for speaker, for whatever. But it’s been a while for us.
As for Gaza… No, a truck crossing a border to provide humanitarian aid is not in any way an indication that this crisis is anywhere near over. Quite the contrary… Much blood, much horror, much suffering still seem inevitable. But if there is to be a path toward peace and justice, things like this have to happen. So it’s good to see, after all these days in which nothing good has happened on the ground there.
Yep, these are tiny things, but they need to be welcomed, if we want to move in the right direction on anything…
So I listened to the song several times, and got to thinking about how that one line is more than just fun:
He stands to be insulted and he pays for the privilege
You know how I frequently make the point that it’s harder and harder to get the kind of people who ought to run for elective office to run anymore? Reading those books from the late 19th century lately has driven home the point so much more painfully. Why do we almost never see the likes of Teddy Roosevelt or James Garfield — or, to reach higher, Abraham Lincoln — step forward any more? Or for that matter, the extraordinary men who served under them, in key positions — John Hay, Elihu Root, Henry Cabot Lodge?
Well, I know why — because of 24/7 TV “news,” and more recently and intensely, social media. Things that climb all over you and mobs that can’t wait to cancel you for the most trivial things. Consequently, instead of people who set brilliant careers aside to give back to the country by sitting down with other serious people and working out the country’s real problems, you get people who don’t give a damn about any of that. They don’t want to work out problems with anybody. They just want to posture for their respective bases.
And to gain the “privilege” of doing this, they spend every moment between elections raising the money to pay for it.
I even felt a moment of gratitude today when I heard the House GOP had gone behind closed doors to nominate a new speaker. No strutting or posturing for the mob. And they came out with Scalise, which I think is better, or at least not as horrible, as the alternative. Which isn’t much to celebrate, of course.
Anyway, Elvis said it better than I have:
He stands to be insulted and he pays for the privilege…
VILNIUS, Lithuania — Many Americans and Europeans flatter themselves by seeing the war in Ukraine through a false prism.
Too often, we think we have sacrificed for the Ukrainians. We pat ourselves on the back for providing expensive weapons and paying higher heating bills to help Ukrainians win their freedom — and we wish they’d get on with it.
In fact, what’s clear here in the Baltic countries is that it’s the other way around: The Ukrainians are sacrificing for us. They’re the ones doing us a favor, by degrading the Russian military and reducing the risk of a war in Europe that would cost the lives of our troops…
The whole piece is worth reading, but only those first three grafs are relevant to the memory that they stimulated…
It was a few months ago, maybe even in 2022. It’s hard to pin down, because it happened at Lowe’s, and I go there a lot.
This time, I wanted to copy some keys, and was using the self-serve machine devoted to that purpose. So for a minute or two, I was standing there, unable to easily evade folks who come up to strangers and initiate conversation.
There are a lot of people like that. And seriously, I try to go along and be nice to these folks. I get the impression sometimes that they are lonely. Maybe they live alone, and only get to speak to other people when they are out and about. And this is bad for everyone — but (or so I understand intellectually) especially painful for extraverts. (Although it would be great if some of them would stop whining about it! Oh, wait — I’d better add one of these… 🙂 )
This guy, whom I’ll describe as an older (as in, near my age) white guy, was at least topical. He comes up and without prelude (although maybe I’m just forgetting the prelude), he asks me who I thought would end up paying for all this aid we send Ukraine — us, or the Ukrainians.
I simply said, well, I assume we will, since we are the ones with the money as well as the goods. At that point, I could have gone on at length about how important it was for us to do so, and to keep doing so.
But I didn’t, because I sensed I was standing at the precipice, and one more step would take me into a spontaneous, fruitless argument with another isolationist. And I get into enough of those.
The conversation ended at that point. I don’t recall whether he just had no rejoinder — he may have been hoping to connect with someone who would say “It’ll be US, dammit! AGAIN! Those damn’ foreigners!” and didn’t know how to respond to my more neutral response — or I found some easy way of extricating myself.
Anyway, I now regret that I didn’t wait to see what was going on. It would only have taken a moment to find out whether I was in “America First” territory (in either the Trumpian or Lindbergh sense). I could have extricated myself at that point. Or perhaps I could have gotten him to see a broader picture (OK, everybody, stop laughing hysterically).
Or maybe he would have responded by saying “Hallelujah! Finally, somebody who’s not an isolationist!” And we could have had a high old time slapping each other on the back in mutual congratulation. That probably wasn’t where we were going, but let’s admit the possibility.
I think what chased me away was the thought that here’s a guy who comes up to busy strangers and starts conversations with something as likely to lead to acrimony as that. Made me wonder whether it was wise to stick around. Although I appreciated that he wanted to talk global affairs, rather than the weather or the Gamecocks.
But rather than keep kicking myself, I’ll close with Kristof’s words:
We’re right to celebrate a successful NATO summit. But especially if Ukraine struggles to recover large swaths of territory in this counteroffensive, there’ll be feckless grumbling in Western capitals about the price we’re paying and the favors we’re doing Ukraine. Anyone tempted to think that way should listen to the Baltic leaders, because they’ve learned the hard way how best to manage unruly bears.
I found the body language in the pool pics of Anthony Blinken meeting Xi this morning interesting.
Ol’ Xi seems to be going out of his way to make sure the world knows that he’s not thrilled to be finally meeting our secretary of state after the previous appointment was canceled over the spy balloon.
The one above is like, “OK, well, they told me I have to do this thing, so I’m doing it. Whatever…”
And I especially like the one below, evidently taken moments before by the pool photographer: Blinken eagerly striding over with his hand out, and Xi standing like his feet are nailed to the floor and he’s saying, “Yeah, OK, you can shake my hand if you must, but you’ve gotta come over to me, foreign devil…”
After I posted last night about the debt limit deal, the Senate did as I had hoped and passed it. So that’s done.
No thanks to Lindsey Graham or Tim Scott, who were among the 36 — all but five of them Republican — who voted instead for the United States to default on its debt, plunging the U.S. and world economies into turmoil.
Graham, for his part, offered an excuse that gave us a glimpse of his old self, the senator we knew before he lost his mind in 2016 — he said it was about national security. But that doesn’t wash. I’ve seen nothing on his vote since it happened, but hours before, he made a speech:
Graham made an impassioned speech Thursday on the Senate floor, saying small increases in fiscal year defense spending are not part of a “threat-based budget” but one that lacks safety and security for Americans. He later said that a supplemental defense budget for Ukraine and other spending must be agreed upon swiftly by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to make up for the House GOP’s below-inflation 3 percent military increase….
And as it happened, Schumer and Mitch McConnell joined together to offer as much assurance as anyone could reasonably expect under such rushed conditions, with default looming on Monday:
None of the amendments were adopted. But in an effort to alleviate concerns from defense hawks that the debt ceiling bill would restrict Pentagon spending too much, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) issued a joint statement saying the “debt ceiling deal does nothing to limit the Senate’s ability to appropriate emergency supplemental funds to ensure our military capabilities are sufficient to deter China, Russia, and our other adversaries.”…
As for Tim Scott — I’ve found nothing about why he voted the way he did. Maybe I’ve looked in the wrong places, but I found nothing on his website, on social media or in any news reports. Which reminds us of why it’s weird that he’s running for president. He’s not a guy who tends to be out front on anything, making his views known in developing situations. He’s not making an effort to tell us, and if he said something on the floor of the Senate, no one covered it.
He’s just this nice guy who’s happy to be a U.S. senator — his bio line on Twitter says “Just a South Carolinian living his mama’s American Dream” — and who doesn’t get swept up in what’s actually happening. Look at that Twitter feed, by the way. There’s nothing there — at least, anywhere near the top — posted in real time in response to anything that was happening, or anything he was doing. It’s just a bunch of prewritten campaign stuff, going on about how awful Joe Biden is.
You know, the Joe Biden who threw his all into working with McCarthy to keep the nation from defaulting for the first time in history.
And then, Graham and Scott basically said Nah, let’s go ahead and crash into the mountain…
Above, you see my results from an exercise offered today by The Washington Post that promised to show me “what kind of budgeter you are.” It was offered, of course, within the context of the debt ceiling “debate” going on in Washington.
It is laughable. Apparently, since I’m not, I don’t know, a member of AOC’s “squad” or something, I “believe that the national debt is the foremost crisis.”
It says that, even though I said a flat no to “Cut Defense Spending.” So go figure. I also, by the way, said no to “Enact House GOP debt ceiling bill.”
“Play our budget game,” the headline that led to the above brilliant conclusion. As though I were a child to be entertained. But at least they admitted that it was a game, and didn’t claim it bore any resemblance to real budgeting on the federal level — which, like everything else in government, is a tangled web of conflicting priorities.
Bottom line, as a more-or-less rational person, I believe we should reduce the debt. And I don’t see any way we get there without doing both of the following:
Cutting some spending.
Raising some taxes.
In fact, it will involve both cutting more spending, and raising more taxes, than most people even want to think about. Still, note the “some” in each case. Only a fool would cut all spending in sight or raise every tax suggested. The decisions to be made along the way are staggeringly complicated, and neither ideology nor simple rule of thumb will not guide you to anything that could remotely be recognized as wise governance. The process requires discernment and deliberation.
And putting silly labels on yourself or others — especially simplistic ones assigned by such a “game” as this — doesn’t help you acquire those qualities…
But before I start sharing travelogues, I thought I’d try to get some basic, everyday posts up. I’ve had several on my mind the last three days, but have been too busy trying to catch up with work (still not there) and emails (about 2,600 waiting, still unread).
So let’s start with this:
You know why they see no other choice? Because there IS no other choice. So whatever this supposed reluctance is about, it’s irrational and counterproductive…. https://t.co/cd8YGzJAvm
If you go to that on Twitter, you’ll see I got some likes, but also some new things to think about from our good friend Phillip Bush. He wrote:
‘Reluctance’ probably isn’t the right word. There’s no single word I can think of for this, but ‘being disheartened that we have no other choice’ probably covers it for many people.
I responded that “disheartened” is hard for me to understand as well. For my part, I’m deeply grateful that Joe is willing to do this. I think he sees, just as I do, that there’s no one else available right now.
But Phillip wasn’t done:
But Joe bears some responsibility for there being “no one else available” on the D side. And, will you still be grateful to Joe when he loses to DeSantis?
I’m not sure how Joe is responsible for the lack of other suitable candidates. That’s a problem that already existed, to which he responded by stepping up himself. (Maybe Phillip can elaborate on that point here.) And I’ll always be grateful to him for stepping forward when his country needed him — whether he succeeds or not.
This leads to my original concern about this “reluctance” I keep hearing about, which I continue to see as irrational and counterproductive.
Irrational because, what is it these people want? Who is it they see out there who could carry the banner better? Who do they think is MORE likely to beat DeSantis, or anyone else? I’m not seeing anybody. And Joe didn’t cause that problem. He stepped forward to offer himself to fill the void.
And it’s counterproductive because if Democrats don’t enthusiastically back Joe — their only option — this nation will plunge back into the steep decline we experienced starting in 2016. And it’s likely to be worse this time around.
So what’s your problem with Joe? His age? Hey, I’d love it if Joe was 20 years younger — he would, too, I’m sure. But that’s not being offered as an option. We’ve got the Joe we’ve got. And I like him…
I guess we’ll have to repaint them first — some none-desert color.
The Ukrainians need heavy tanks to fend off the increasingly desperate efforts by Vladimir Putin to crush their country.
I’m glad they’re about to get them. And I hope and pray that a peaceful solution can soon be found — not the kind of “peaceful solution” Putin would like, in which Ukraine is under his thumb and the world trembles in fear of him, but one in which it is a safe, self-governed nation, living next to a Russia that will never do this again.
But right now, they need the tanks. So it is a good thing that the Germans are going to provide Leopard 2s, and allow other European nations to share theirs. But they refused to do it if we weren’t in it with them, so we have decided to hand over some Abrams main battle tanks.
But since the Germans wouldn’t agree without our participation, we’ll be sending the M1s. They mostly likely won’t arrive until the fall, but that’s not the point. The Leopards are what is needed to help resist the expected spring onslaught. They’re a gesture of solidarity. To the Germans, this gives them the ability to say to Putin, “Hey, don’t just blame us…” That’s the point of all this.
Assuming, though, that we follow through, and assuming also that they are impossible to keep running without having a bunch of experienced people maintaining them, it seems highly likely that we’ll soon have “advisers” in Ukraine. They may just be maintenance crews for the most part, but it will be a presence we don’t have now.
(Mind you, I’m no expert on tank operations and maintenance. I couldn’t change the oil on an Abrams any more than I could repair a television. And maybe we can teach the Ukrainians everything they need to know before the tanks arrive there. But it doesn’t sound like the brass over here think that can be done. At least, they didn’t think so last week. It’s one thing to teach people to drive the tank and fight with it. It’s another to keep complex machinery going once it’s deployed, and that doesn’t sound to me like a long-distance procedure.)
Is this the moment that historians will look back on, 50 years from now, as the one that the “Ukraine Quagmire” began? Assuming historians still exist then. I mean, assuming this (or something else) doesn’t lead to the nuclear exchange that we worked so hard — and successfully — to avoid during the Cold War. Which is what enables us to sit around and argue now about how that was accomplished.
Will this be like when JFK sent the 500 advisers in 1961, to reinforce the 700 Ike had sent in 1955? (A sort of follow-up to the ones Truman sent in 1950 to help the French, but the French ignored the advice.) By the end of 1963, there would be 11,000 Americans in-country.
Today, the consensus is that boy, we really screwed that up. Correct me if this is not what you would say, but I can imagine most Americans saying, “We just kept sending more of our boys over there to a place where we had no business being.”
And Americans tsk-tsk about the foolishness, and worse, wickedness of it all. And they’re so sure they’re right, and that they are so much wiser then the Best and Brightest who got us into Vietnam, and couldn’t get us out. Or refused to get us out, until Nixon came along and saved the day by abandoning Saigon.
Myself, I can — with the benefit of hindsight — point to a truckload of mistakes and miscalculations made that got us deeper and deeper into a conflict that was simply not going to turn out our way. But I also look back and see how every mistake was made, and how it didn’t look like a mistake to those making it.
A lot of people around me think they know better. I guess I’m writing this to make sure they’re noting this as it happens — assuming I’m reading it right, and something similar, or at least analogous, is occurring. Yes, the situations are different in a thousand ways. But what I’m pondering here is the bits that seem familiar.
It would be great if we, as a country, could have foresight that is half as perfect and accurate as everyone’s hindsight is regarding Vietnam. That would lead inevitably to a happy ending in which Ukraine and the rest of Europe are safe, and Russia has learned the lesson we’d like it to learn.
But we don’t have that, and right now — in light of this and that and the other thing in the real world we’re looking at — it seems right to send the Abrams tanks. I hope and pray — yep, I’m repeating myself — that it is…
This is what a Leopard 2 looks like. This one was just a prototype, but it was the only image I could find in the public domain.
Occasionally, I have given y’all a heads-up about programs happening at the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum — an ADCO client.
Well, the museum has something very special coming up on Friday, Veterans Day. It’s been in the works for years, enduring many setbacks, from COVID to the flooding of the space where it is located.
My own father, like many South Carolina veterans, played a small role, being interviewed for hours back in 2017 by Fritz Hamer, then the curator of history at the museum. We lent a few of his artifacts and souvenirs from those days.
Fritz Hamer interviewing my Dad in 2017 about his Vietnam experiences.
And it’s all free on Friday and Saturday this week. It’s a good opportunity to check out the whole Relic Room, if you never have, but especially this new exhibit.
My father is gone now, but so many of these veterans are still with us, and it’s long past time for their service and sacrifices to be honored, and their stories told. I’m very glad the museum is doing this. It’s still coming together as I write this, but what I’ve seen looks good. I hope you check it out…
A tribute wall to South Carolinians killed in action.
Someone knocked urgently on the door that leads in from the garage while I was having a late lunch yesterday. It was my friend and neighbor John Culp, and he had brought me a Judd Larkins yard sign.
Well, it’s about time. I got James Smith and Jaime Harrison signs for him back in 2018, and he’s been owing me.
It also reminded me. A few months back, I had breakfast with John and Clark Surratt one morning at Compton’s, and John had brought along Judd Larkins and Marcurius Byrd for us to meet. Judd is running for office, and Marcurius is his campaign manager. Later, I got him together with James Smith over coffee, and they got along well.
Oh, you haven’t heard of Judd? Well, he’s the Democratic nominee for the 2nd Congressional District. But since everyone knows that district is drawn to provide Joe Wilson with a sinecure for life, that he inherited it from Floyd Spence, and that no one else will sit in that seat so long as Joe lives, folks don’t pay much attention to who runs against him. No matter what Joe does. Or, since this is Joe we’re talking about, no matter what he doesn’t do.
So Judd doesn’t get a lot of attention. But he should, because he is the kind of person who should get elected to public office, and Joe Wilson, by comparison, is not.
At the very least, watch the one and only debate in this “race.” It’s coming up Monday night, Oct. 24, and will be webcast from River Bluff High School at 7 p.m. If you’d like to attend in person, I’m pretty sure you can still get a ticket. If you want to see it on TV, I’m told you’re out of luck.
But if you miss that, don’t worry — you can go out and read some of the extensive news coverage of this election to decide who will go to Congress and run this country, such as… wait… how about… OK, I’m not finding any. No, wait, Marcurius has posted a story on Facebook from The Lexington Chronicle, and I’m sure y’all all subscribe to that, right? In case you don’t, here’s a link.
At some other point, I’ll put up a separate post asking why we even bother to pretend to have elections for Congress, since no one knows anything about these “races.”
But now, a few words about Judd, since you probably won’t see much anywhere else. First, I urge you to go check out his website. On the “About” page, you’ll learn such things as:
Judd was born and raised in a small town in Greenwood County called Ninety Six. Judd’s father is a high-school dropout turned success businessman while Judd’s mother was a schoolteacher before tragically passing away from breast cancer when Judd was just 14 years old. Judd attended Ninety Six High School where he was a two-sport star and Track and Field State Champion.
After Graduating High School, Judd attended Clemson University where he graduated Su(m)ma Cum Laude with a degree in Language (Chinese) and International Trade. While attending Clemson, Judd spent two summers in China becoming fluent in Mandarin Judd also holds a Master’s in Business Administration (MBA) from the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge (UK). While attending Cambridge, Judd worked on crafting a business plan for new, innovative transplant technology and also conducted market research for a finance firm located in Dublin, Ireland. After Completing his MBA, Judd was based in Luxembourg while working for an Asian Financial Company…
Yeah, that needed some editing. And yeah, he holds a master’s degree from Cambridge. Personally, I went to Oxford — my wife and I spent six days there in 2011 and had a lovely time — but I guess a master’s from Cambridge is OK, if that’s all you’ve got.
In other words, he’s a smart kid. That he’s a kid is undeniable. If you meet him, you might think that self-proclaimed champion of the kindergarten set, Joe Cunningham, looks a bit like Methuselah by comparison. But again, Judd’s a smart kid.
More than that, he’s an idealistic, thoughtful, considerate, unblemished sort of young man who would do a lot to improve our ideology-poisoned Congress — if he could get elected.
Based on what I’ve seen, Judd’s campaign has little or no money. I don’t think he’ll do as well as Adair Ford Boroughs (who at least got to be U.S. attorney), because he’s simply a lot less visible.
Basically, his campaign seems to consist mainly of going door-to-door and introducing himself to people. Nothing wrong with canvassing, of course, but it’s kind of hard to do enough of it when the odds are stacked against you to this extent. In a congressional district, there are just too many doors you’ll never have time to knock on.
“There’s just so much ground to cover,” Judd told me when I checked in with him Wednesday. “We’re probably gonna run out of time.”
But Judd tries anyway. And generally, he’s pleased with the reception he gets. He hasn’t had anybody cuss him out, in spite of his being a Democrat and all. He doesn’t seem to do as well getting time with big shots in business and politics, but “Regular folks are generally nice.”
“Folks are like, oh, I saw you last week. Thanks for being here,” he said. “We need somebody new, somebody younger.”
I would add that they need somebody who’s all about telling you what he would do if he got the chance to serve (here’s his platform), and not about how bad that other guy is. Some of the folks out there tell him that, and Judd listens. “They all seem to be tired of the fighting. Just do something,” they tell him.
Of course, if he wanted to go negative, Joe gives him plenty to work with. Adair did a good job of pointing that out — the fact that the main thing about Joe is, he does nothing. (And don’t think it’s because he’s lazy. It’s a deliberate approach, which he inherited from his predecessor Floyd Spence, who I think got it from Strom Thurmond — do nothing as a legislator, and take care of constituent service. If you do anything, it might tick people off.)
But Judd’s not interested in that. Nor does he care to go on about what’s wrong with the Republican Party, or any of that stuff so many want to yammer about.
He wants to make life better for young and old, with a particular emphasis on the small towns all over his district, such as the one he grew up in — Ninety Six. (And by the way, when he speaks, you can tell he’s from someplace like that, Cambridge or no.) Again, here’s his platform. He can also speak intelligently about international affairs, but that’s not what he talks about.
Anyway, those are the kinds of things Judd wants to do. Y’all know I’m not big on platforms and promises. But I am a big fan of Judd’s approach. He wants to identify “universal issues” that people care about regardless of politics, and then “try to find allies on the issues,” and “find a solution.”
You know all those people on both ends of the spectrum who are all about putting a proposal out there that they know the competing party will oppose, and then running against the opponents on the basis of their opposition? It’s Plan A for so many in politics. And nothing ever gets done.
Well, Judd Larkins is sort of the opposite of that. Check him out.
.jpg)
