Putin does it again!

Once again Russian President Vladimir Puten has managed to outfox and blindside the Obama administration with his quick and decisive move to put Russian military forces in Syria to bolster the Assad regime, and his moves today to begin bombing, not ISIS as he claims, but rather the American-backed forces fighting the Assad regime. No doubt he feels he can get away with this because of the history of indecision, waffling, and strategic confusion displayed by the administration since the beginning of this Syrian civil war - not to mention the indecision, waffling, and strategic confusion the administration has shown in the Ukrainian situation.

It is clear that President Obama and his advisers are out of their depth here, not least because they are apparently ignoring the advice of the military commanders (who predicted, for example, that his pitiful plan to train a few thousand Syrian rebels wouldn't work - they never got but a few hundred signed up, and those were all but wiped out in their first encounter with ISIS).

It would be nice if I thought any of the current presidential contenders would be any better at this. I don't.

My personal filters for presidential candidates

I have my personal filter for potential candidates for president of the United States.  For what it is worth, here it is:

A) I want someone who has actually governed before, actually met a budget and negotiated with a legislature and dealt with the sort of problems a government faces.  That means, in effect, I want someone who has at least governed a state before.  Reagan, Carter, Clinton and George W. Bush had all been governors.  Bush’s father, H. W. Bush had not been a governor before becoming  President,  but he had been Vice-President.  Obama had not been a governor or had any significant legislative experience before,  and it shows.  He still has absolutely no idea how to negotiate with Congress, not even with members of his own party.

This filter alone eliminates Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Hillary Clinton, Carly Fiorina  and Bernie Sanders, all the current front runners in both parties.

B) I want someone who is not a scientific ignoramus. I don’t require that they have a doctorate in a field of science, but that at least they understand the value of the scientific method and have some respect for widely-held views in the scientific community.  In particular, I have no interest in voting for anyone who, despite the overwhelming consensus among climate scientists, still believes climate change is a fraud.

This filter eliminates a number of those with governing experience, including Jeb Bush (governor of Florida) , Mike Huckabee (governor of Arkansas) , Mike Pence (governor of Indiana), and Rick Perry (governor of Texas).  Scott Walker (governor of Wisconsin)  and Bobby Jindal (governor of Louisiana)  are unknowns – they keep dodging the question.  It also eliminates Ben Carson, though he was already eliminated above.

C) I want someone who doesn’t have a religious agenda to force their own religious views on issues like abortion and gay marriage down everyone else’s throats.  That eliminates most of the remaining Republican contenders who haven’t already been eliminated by (A) and (B) above.

Notice that I haven’t even dealt yet with policy issues of substance, like fiscal policy or foreign affairs or immigration policy, and yet we have already eliminated almost everyone in the field.

Of the candidates currently in the field, the only contenders who look like they might possibly pass these three filters are Chris Christie (governor of New Jersey, but currently only a blip in the polls) and Vice President Joe Biden (and he hasn’t even decided to run yet).

The refugee issue

The hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern refugees streaming into Europe over the past few weeks raise some difficult questions about just how much responsibility nations have to take in refugees.

One might think that simple human kindness would dictate that any refugee ought to be accepted by any nation.  And for relatively small numbers of refugees that is a reasonable course.  But what about situations where the number of refugees severely disrupt a nation, and severely strain its resources?

America is a nation of immigrants, so we manage to adapt to imported new cultures relatively well.  But many European nations are quite homogeneous in their makeup and culture, and the importation of hundreds of thousands of people from an entirely different culture will be massively disruptive, and will no doubt cause considerable cultural and political difficulties and taxpayer expense in future years, and perhaps produce massive ghettos of un-assimilated people who will resent their inferior job opportunities, and who have a tradition (among some, at least) of reacting with religiously-driven extremism. This is already what has happened in many European nations with the relatively few Middle Easterners who have emigrated – how much worse will it be with hundreds of thousands or even millions more?

Fortunately we are separated by a wide ocean from this refugee wave, so we can pick and choose who we take. Europe is not so lucky.

I’m sure it is politically incorrect to mention this (especially in the current “victim-centered” culture in America) , but don’t refugees themselves bear some responsibility for their own condition? In some cases they actually elected the very people who have made their life so miserable.  In other cases they at least didn’t resist the ascent of the forces that are now driving them out of their own country.  No doubt their current condition is piteous, but do other nations have a responsibility to rescue them from their own political fecklessness or unwillingness to fight for their own rights and freedom?

Certainly there are many things other nations should have done to prevent this tragedy.  Neither the US nor Europe took the Syrian uprising seriously enough, nor the rise of ISIS.  Our military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq only succeeded in thoroughly destabilizing the Middle East, not in solving any of its problems.  And I notice that other wealthy Muslim nations aren’t rushing to help their Muslim brothers and sisters much.

This issue needs some rational, clear-headed discussion about just what responsibilities nations have for people dispossessed in their own country. It will be hard to have such a discussion while small toddlers are washing up drowned on beaches, but we need the discussion anyway.

Still a miserable field!

About a month ago I wrote a piece about how miserable the field of presidential candidates was, both Republican and Democrat. A month on things look, if anything, even worse.

On the Democratic side, Hillery Clinton's campaign continues to implode as her cadre of loyal but apparently inept advisers and hired media experts (she has spent million on them over the past couple of months) continue to try to reshape her image, first one way and then another. A president's advisers matter, because they shape the president's policy, perceptions, and reactions to events. Set aside Hillery's own faults (of which there are plenty) - her advisers, apparently chosen, as in her last campaign, for loyalty above competence, are not the ones I would want shaping the White House's actions in the world.  And of course the polls show her losing support day by day, so that by now even a renegade, poorly-funded unknown (but authentic) Socialist like Sanders is even with her in Iowa.

On the Republican side, while Donald Trump continues to clown his way to the top of the polls, most of the rest of the field  are trying to outdo themselves chasing irrelevant "moral" issues, like defunding Planned Parenthood or defending a Kentucky County Clerk's right to ignore the law. From the point of view of campaign strategy, it would be stupid to do even if these were legitimate issues, but the Planned Parenthood issue has no basis in fact, and the County Clerk in question is a poor sap being used by an anti-gay organization to get some free publicity.

Set aside the candidate's positions on issues that matter (to the extent one can even tell what they are), none of the candidates in either party are showing the sort of good judgement and competency one would like to see in a president of the worlds most powerful nation.. 

There is something significant about the Trump phenomena

When Donald Trump first announced for president, most observers (including myself) though he would be a flash in the pan – a week-long media event and then gone.  When he made his first outrageous statement (I can’t even remember what it was, there have been so many) most observers (including myself) figured he had shot himself in the foot, and would soon be gone.  Well, we were all wrong.  It is months later, many, many outrageous statements later, and Trump is not only leading in the polls, but is widening the lead over the past few weeks.

Taken in isolation, it would be easy to assume there is a small base of Republicans who just live on another planet.  But look at the context.  The nominal democratic dynastic shoo-in, Hillary Clinton, is losing ground steadily to outright Socialist Bernie Sanders, and some polls suggest that if Vice President Biden runs, she would lose ground to him as well.  On the Republican side, look at who the runners-up are behind Trump -  not the establishment figures like Jeb Bush or Scott Walker or Marco Rubio, who were supposed to be the contenders – it is Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon.

There is a significant message here – It’s Washington outsiders who are leading or gaining in the polls, on both the Democratic and Republican side, not establishment Washington insiders.  And why might that be?

Well, among the outrageous and incorrect and plain made-up-on-the-spot statements that Trump spouts every week there is a lot of truth, a lot of things we all know but don’t often say. Maybe he is getting the support because, in his crude and uncontrolled and egotistical way, he is saying what no professional politician will admit – that the emperor has no clothes.

·         Everyone knows, but few say, that politicians from the president on down are bought and paid for by special interest groups, corporations, unions.  When a super-PAC puts half a billion dollars behind a candidate, who but a naïve fool would not think that they expect something significant in return when she/he wins?

·         Everyone knows, but few say, that Washington insiders get special treatment and are for the most part above the law. When I did classified work, if I had mishandled classified material like Hillary Clinton (who is still getting a pass from the media), or like General and CIA Director David Patraeus (who got a lenient plea bargain), or like CIA Director John Deutch (who got a Presidential pardon), I would have been in the slammer so quickly and for so long.

·         Everyone knows, but few say, that Washington insiders are not accountable. How many heads have rolled because of the IRS’s baised treatment of Republican political action committees before the last election?  How many heads have rolled since The Office of Personnel and Management managed to lose the entire files of everyone investigated for a security clearance since 2000, and lose them apparently to Chinese hackers?  How many heads rolled when the Government ObamaCare websites first went up so disastrously?  How many heads do you expect to roll because Hillary Clinton was allowed to use a personal server (likely not very secure), in her home, to store and pass government and diplomatic messages of potentially damaging information?

·         Everyone knows, but few say, that politicians are in it for their careers, and for their pocketbooks, not for the nation or even for their supporters. (If I hear another politician prating on about “serving the People”, I’m going to throw up!) Most of Congress gets re-elected every year, unless they really goof up or they die. And both parties have made sure that happens in the House by outrageous gerrymandering of districts. Note how many in Congress are pretty rich. Notice that when they leave office they go into lucrative jobs in corporations or as K-street lobbyists for the very people for whom they used to do favors (Or, if they are Clintons, they get $750,000 speaking fees for an hour speech from a group negotiating with the State Department – headed by Hillary - for a lucrative deal)

·         Everyone knows, but few say, that our Government is really, really f**ked up (pardon the language, but it seems to require that level of expression to truly capture the state of affairs). OPM can’t even keep some of nation’s most sensitive data (files from security clearance investigations) safe. (They didn’t even discover they had been hacked until a vendor came in to demonstrate some security software and discovered it)   The Air Force makes a $25 BILLION dollar error in calculating the probable cost of its new bomber. A guy like Edward Snowden  - only a low-level contractor, not even a government employee - can download millions of classified files and send them off anywhere he likes – and isn’t even caught (he had to announce that he had done it before anyone noticed).  The list goes on and on, with new examples added every single day.

So perhaps when outsiders begin to speak up, even if they are as outrageous as Donald Trump or as left-wing as Bernie Sanders or as unconventional as Ben Carson, they are tapping into something fundamental about the America electorate.  The electorate as a whole isn’t particularly smart, and is easily beguiled by specious arguments and red herrings and populist promises that can never be fulfilled, but they are smart enough, Republican and Democratic alike, to know that the Washington insiders these days  are pretty inept at most things they try except getting re-elected and getting rich.

Barack Obama got to be president on the basis of soaring oratory and a promise to make Washington work better. Well, we got the oratory - almost 8 years worth of it thus far - but we didn’t get better government (though we certainly got more government). So perhaps it is not surprising that outsiders in both parties are doing so much better that the talking heads on TV  would have predicted.

There is an interesting dynamic at play here. It started, or at least perhaps first became noticeable, with the rise of the Tea Party groups.  I suspect the anomalies thus far in this election are part of the same mass movement and largely independent of political parties.  The electorate is uneasy, unhappy, even perhaps increasingly enraged, at Washington insiders. The issues are many and different depending on one’s political stance, but the uneasiness is general, across all parties, and may well develop into something politically significant. Especially since the emergence of social media has dramatically changed the electoral landscape.