Recommended: Election 2016: The Life of the Party

Another good piece today about the underlying nature of this exceptional election season is John O'Sullivan's piece in the Wall Street Journal: The Life of the Party.

He makes one point that hadn't occurred to me, that the traditional Republican and Democratic bases  have largely changed places over the past few decades. Wealthy, well-educated white business people who used to be the Republican base are now more likely to be liberal Democrats, while the blue collar working people who used to be the Democratic base are more likely now to be conservative Republicans, or even Tea Party supporters. The party elites in the two parties seem not to have noticed yet, which may be why the "establishment" figures in both parties are in trouble in this election.

He make a number of other interesting and perceptive points, so this is also a piece worth reading.

Recommended: Donald Trump is Shocking, Vulgar and Right

Followers of this blog will know that I am no supporter of Donald Trump (nor for that matter of any of the other leading presidential candidates in either party), but Tucker Carlson's piece today in Politico is worth reading.  Donald Trump is Shocking, Vulgar and Right: And my dear fellow Republicans, he's all your fault, makes the point, persuasively, (a) that the failings of the Republican Washington establishment itself are largely to blame for the rise of Donald Trump, and (b) that looked at in the cold light of day, without the blinders and hysteria of political correctness, many of Trump's proposals are hardly the fascist ideas that the media (mostly liberal) has been labeling them.

It's worth reading this piece.

The Clinton dilemma

A “dilemma” is defined by the dictionary as “a situation in which a difficult choice has to be made between two or more alternatives, especially equally undesirable ones.” We in America now face just such a dilemma – whether (a) to indict presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for mishandling secure documents, and perhaps as well for using her position as Secretary of State to enrich herself and the Clinton Foundation she and her husband run, or (b) to not indict her and prove once and for all that Washington insiders are completely above the law that the rest of us are subject to.

The evidence against Hillary Clinton is now overwhelming that she (a) violated the oath she took when she was granted a security clearance and has mishandled classified documents, and (b) lied to investigators when she claimed that the emails she (thought she had ) deleted from her home server were all personal and included no government documents.  In fact the number of emails on her home server which have been found to contain classified information now exceed 1300 and still growing, and include at least a couple that were the highest possible classification – special access documents. Moreover, investigators have found explicit written instructions from her to her staff to remove classification markings from documents and send them to her over her insecure system. Any one of these offenses would put any ordinary citizen to jail in short order, as has happened to a number of ordinary workers.

Of course Washington has a track record of protecting high officials from the harsh justice the rest of us face. Most recently Ex-CIA head General David Patraeus gave notebooks full of classified information to his mistress/biographer, but the government prosecutors, conveniently, felt they could not bring a solid enough case against either him or his mistress/biographer, so he got a plea deal with two years’ probation and a fine.  Ex-CIA director John Deutch simply got a presidential pardon for his mishandling of classified materials. And a number of members of Congress and/or their staffs have routinely leaked classified information to journalists for political reasons, and not even been investigated.

On the other hand lower level officials like John Kiriakou, a former CIA counter-terrorism operative, spent two years in federal prison and three additional months under house arrest for leaking the name of a covert CIA official involved in "enhanced interrogation techniques." Former State Department official Stephen Kim was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison for revealing classified information about the CIA's effort to disrupt Iran's nuclear program to journalist James Risen.

So here is the administration’s dilemma – either (a) indict Hillary and put the presidential campaign, and the Democratic party as a whole, into chaos, or (b) don’t indict her and risk a massive public revolution against the obvious abuse of power.  Of course, the administration may judge that the American people are too passive, and have too short an attention span, to really do anything effective about this abuse of power by Washington insiders.  And they may be right.  If so, the abuses will continue and get even worse, and we the voting public will have only ourselves to blame for it.

Lincoln quote

Watching this year’s campaigns, I am reminded of a quote from Abraham Lincoln, roughly paraphrased: “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”

For those who want accuracy, here is the entire original quotation:

Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.

American democracy thus far has survived incompetent presidents, fractious and corrupt  legislators, financial disasters and even civil war.  But can it survive any of the four current leading contenders for the presidency? Can it survive, in this increasingly complex world, an electorate (that’s us) so naive and uneducated about history, world affairs, science, and basic economics, and so easily swayed by unrealistic populist promises or religious or political ideologies?

Recommended: What has Worked Against ISIS? Nothing.

One of the best recent pieces about our Middle Eastern quagmire is Peter Van Buren's What has Worked Against ISIS? Nothing, in RealClear Politics. He details the successive failures - a decade of boots on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, trillions of dollars wasted trying to train indigenous armies, ineffective but very expensive airstrikes, handpicked US-backed presidents in Iraq and Afghanistan who have turned out to be disasters, etc, etc, etc.  Nothing we have tried has worked, and yet presidential candidates - Republican and Democratic alike - keep proposing more of the same.

His conclusion, I suspect, is correct.  There is nothing we can do to help the situation, and our continuing involvement is just exacerbating the problems and wasting US lives and money.  This is a complex cultural war in the Middle East that simply has to play out.  In the end the national borders will probably be different (since, after all, the current borders were drawn arbitrarily by Western powers with no regard at all to local tribal or ethnic affiliations), most of the nations will probably have illiberal governments, and they will continue to sell oil on the world market, irrespective of who runs the countries, because they will need the revenue.

Will they be a threat to us when everything settles out? Not much.  A few jihadists radicalized over the web may still occasionally kill a few Americans, but thus far statistically an American is more likely to killed by a nutty Christian anti-abortionist or a disgruntled postal service employee than by a Muslim jihadist. And a thousand times more likely to be killed by a drunk driver.

This piece is worth reading to keep some perspective on the problem, since presidential candidates in both parties seem to be thoroughly unrealistic on this issue.

Good for the American Episcopal Church

The homophobic African Anglican bishops and their right-wing supporters in America have suspended the American Episcopal Church from participation in meetings and policy discussions within the Anglican Communion for three years over the issue of gay marriage.  It is amazing that with all of Africa’s serious problems – Ebola and other endemic diseases, poverty, illiteracy, civil war, brutal governments, and ethnic cleansings – the conservative African bishops feel their most important issue, the issue on which they have to take a stand, is the sexual preferences of a few people.

Well, perhaps the America Church ought not to be part of the Anglican Communion if that is what the Anglican Communion stands for.  I’m proud that the American Church is liberal in its views, and ordains women and blesses gay unions, and refuses to back down from those positions. The world has moved on, and if the conservative Anglicans in Africa (and America) want to hold on to old, outmoded, illiberal views, they can go join ISIS, which in fact holds much the same views.

And by the way, the conservative views on these issues are in fact really much more aligned with the fundamentalist Muslims in ISIS then they would probably like to admit. Both Islam and Christianity arose in the Middle East centuries ago, and both carry in their scriptures some of the illiberal traditions of those distant Middle Eastern cultures, many of which still persist in the Middle East today. Foremost among those illiberal traditions are the subjugation of women and homophobia. So perhaps those conservative bishops ought to ponder the implications of the fact that they agree with ISIS on some of the very issues that the rest of the world finds most repellent in ISIS.

H L Mencken Was Right

Watching the current presidential race, I am reminded of H. L. Mencken’s quote: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” And his other quote: “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.”

The Republican race at this point appears to come down to Donald Trump, a demagogue who appears to have no fixed policy positions at all, and Ted Cruz, a far right wingnut who appears now to be trying to be Trump-lite.  That something like 40% of Republicans polled currently support Trump shakes my confidence in the intelligence of the human race.

On the Democratic side we have Hillary Clinton who, if she were not a Washington insider and therefore immune from the justice that we mere mortals face, would already be indicted for her security violations, and perhaps as well for the Clinton Foundation corruption while she was Secretary of State.   And Bernie Sanders, a socialist with that thoroughly unrealistic grasp of economics and human behavior that most socialists seem to have. Though I do have to say that Bernie is at least personally likeable, which is far more than I can say for the other three.

And from among these four thoroughly flawed candidates we are to pick our next president? If this is the best the current political system can offer up, then the system is broken far worse than I thought.

I am reminded that throughout history revolutions, however laudable their initial objectives have been, have seldom improved things, and have quite often made things much worse. This election is turning into a voter revolution against the ineptness, arrogance, and special privileges of the Washington ruling elite – all sound reasons to be upset and angry.  But like most revolutions, once we have beheaded the rulers we are likely to find ourselves in the hands of leaders even more inept and even more arrogant than their predecessors.