Democracy and the press

It was instructive that Steve Bannon, Trump’s strategist, said recently that the press should “shut up and listen”, and all that the press heard, and reported, was “shut up” – they didn’t listen enough to hear or report the ”and listen” part.

Here is the exact Bannon quote in its entirety: “The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.”

Here is the New York Times Jan 26 headline about the quote: “Trump Strategist Stephen Bannon Says Media Should ‘Keep Its Mouth Shut’”.  Other papers and TV and online sources had similar headlines.  I am hard pressed to find any mainstream news that included the “and just listen for a while” part.

I keep wondering how democracy can function if the media is so partisan. What little most people know about the important issues they get from the media, or from friends who themselves get it from the media.  So on an important issue like immigration policy, how are people to make rational judgments if the media distorts the fact so much?

The media reports, with outrage, that Trump is barring refuges from Syria (temporarily, until a better vetting process can be established), but fails to report that Obama barred almost all refugees from Syria for the past few years.

The media reports that Trump’s order discriminates against Muslims, but the actual order itself (I have reread it several times) makes no mention of Muslims, and legal experts doubt that any court would construe it to discriminate against Muslims, since it doesn’t affect 44 other Muslim-majority countries.

The media is outraged at the seven countries selected, but fails to mention that it was the Obama administration that selected these seven countries as terrorist-promoting in the first place.

The media is outraged that Trump’s order caps the refugees at 50,000 per year, but fails to mention that, except for Obama’s last year in office, the cap under his administration and under the Bush administration before him was in the same range (50,000-70,000).

The media is outraged that religion is mentioned in the order (priority for persecuted minority religions), claiming this is un-American. Well, if it is, it has been un-American for a long time because religious criteria (persecuted because of religion)  has been part of immigration law for decades now.

Now Trump’s executive order may or may not be good policy. There are good arguments on both sides and I’m not sure yet which side I find more compelling. But we are apparently never going to get to that important debate because the partisan press has sidelined it into hysterical and emotional reactions to their misinformation.

I mentioned in a previous post how the New York Times, followed by other outlets, misreported the claim that 2016 was the hottest year on record. And this sort of partisan misreporting, spinning the facts, slanting the story, reporting only one side of the issue, and sometimes outright fabrication has been going for issue after issue this year. It’s not new, but it certainly has gotten a lot worse since Trump won the election.

In the face of this much partisan misinformation from the media, and the almost hysterical public reaction it has whipped up, how is any democracy to function?

Reality

I rather hoped that once the inauguration was over the liberal freakout and media hysteria would begin to abate, but apparently that isn’t going to happen. Nor is there any evidence that the mainstream media has learned anything from this election.

The Democratic Party is in shambles. Democrats in Congress are almost completely impotent, in part because of their own shortsighted action in exercising the “nuclear option” and changing Senate rules before they lost their Senate majority. At the state level Democrats continued to lose heavily in this election. And the Clinton steamroller has ensured that the Democrat’s bench of upcoming party stars who might plausibly run for the presidency in 2020 is very thin indeed.

In the face of these facts, a reasonable Democrat would sit back and try to figure out why they are in such bad shape, not only in this recent election but in the decade that preceded it. A reasonable Democrat would be dismayed that the party had been abandoned by its traditional working class base, and might do a little sober reflection on this problem.  A reasonable Democrat would face the fact that a fair proportion of the American public don’t agree with some of the more extreme left-wing positions that have dominated the party in recent years. A reasonable Democrat would be trying to figure out how to talk to those ex-supporters and bring them back into the party (and calling them dumb, deluded, sexist, racist “deplorables” isn’t the way to do it). A reasonable Democrat, if not blinded by the relentless media hysteria, might face the fact that many of the things Trump is doing have a great deal of support in the country – oh, not in the coastal urban centers perhaps, and certainly not in the liberal media – but in the other 85% of the country.

Democrats (and Republicans as well, for that matter) might finally learn that many people care far more about the security of their jobs, the safety of their streets and their financial situation than about the trendy social and cultural issues that preoccupy the media and the well-off coastal urban liberals. And, if they went and actually listened to these folks instead of endlessly lecturing them, they might learn how important religion and some traditional values are to these people. There is a saying I have always liked: “You can get to people through religion; their religion, not yours.” 

And the mainstream media might learn just why it is that more and more people don’t trust them, are turning to alternative sources like the internet, and are increasingly tuning them out. I am hard pressed these days to find media sources that aren’t, not just biased, but blatant propaganda outlets for liberal or conservative positions. Or as one writer recently put it, too many of the purported journalists, even on the major news outlets like the New York Times, are really political operatives with a byline.

The reality is that the Democrats have lost touch with much of their base, and they had better get back in touch with them soon or they will become as extinct as the Bull Moose Party. The noisy daily media hysteria may mislead them into thinking their opinions always reflect the majority will, but they often don’t. They seem to be hoping that Trump’s character flaws alone – and there are many – will eventually put them back in power. But in the long run it won’t be Trump’s narcissism that matters in upcoming elections, but whether the policies his team put in place make things better for the average voter, and they may well do that.

It’s time for Democrats to sober up and face reality.

Recommended: Separating Fact from Hysteria on Trump Refugee Order

Those who are emotionally committed to being outraged at anything and everything the Trump administration does can just stop reading here. Those who want some real perspective might find it interesting to read David French’s article in the National Review today: Separating Fact from Hysteria on Trump Refugee Order.

Yes, the implementation of the order was a little ham-handed, in that the immigration service wasn't given advance warning to prepare for the change.  On the other hand if they had been given a few days warning it would have surely leaked and no doubt prompted a flood of last-minute refugees trying to beat the deadline. But the order itself, if you read the article, isn't that much out of line with policy under previous presidents, including Obama. And it doesn't single out Muslims, despite the hysterical claims by liberals; it singles out anyone from those named countries that have ongoing terrorist activity.

The press clearly isn't used to having a president who actually does what he promised to do on the campaign trail, and moreover does it promptly. As one other writer put it, 

Half of America — the coasts and the big cities — is apparently shocked by Trump’s eagerness to start delivering on the promises that got him elected in the first place. They’re not used to a politician who not only means what he said on the campaign trail, but also is not dissuaded by the usual recalcitrant Washington bureaucracy, media nitpickers and congressional back-scratchers.

Doesn’t he know how the game is played? That the rule is to wink at the rubes who make up your base, then quickly join the insider’s game. After all, Republicans like the horse-trading majority leader Mitch McConnell and senator John McCain have fashioned entire careers out of promising their constituents one thing and delivering their big donors something altogether different. Surely, D.C. will corrupt Trump the way it has most everybody else.

Worst of all, they can’t believe the other half of America is actually cheering Trump on as, on one hot-button issue after another, he’s giving them exactly what they voted for, at warp speed.

Global warming misinformation

The New York Times ran a recent story about how 2016 is the hottest year on record, and on the basis of that story, from a supposedly dependable news source, a great many people no doubt believe that 2016 was the hottest year on record. But was it really?

As I mentioned in a previous post, measuring the “global temperature” is really a difficult thing to do, because there is so much day-to-day and place-to-place variability. And things are further confused because there are several different datasets – measures from ground station, measures from satellites, etc, etc.

But the real issue is how accurate those measurements are.  In science all measures are approximations limited in their accuracy by all sorts of things, just like presidential voting polls (and we know how inaccurate those can be).  In real science, measurements are always accompanied by error bounds – by an estimate of how much the measurement might be off. Funny, the New York Times article didn’t mention those.

So the UK Meteorological Office reports a difference between 2015 and 2016 global temperatures of 0.01º C, but with a margin of error ten times larger of 0.1º C, which is to say they estimate the real difference is somewhere between 0.09º C COOLER and 0.11º C WARMER.  Hardly a convincing case that 2016 was warmer than 2015.

The NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) pegs the difference between 2015 and 2016 at 0.04º C, with a likely margin of error around 0.09º C.  Satellite data shows the difference between 1998 – the year of the last El Nino warming cycle – and 2016 as about 0.02º C, with a margin of error of 0.10º C, meaning that really there is no convincing evidence from this dataset that the earth has warmed since 1998, let alone since 2015.

2016 might indeed have been the hottest year on record, but these measurements don’t provide evidence for that. All they show is that whatever the difference really was, it was smaller than the likely errors of measurement. So much for good science reporting!

Recommended: Trump Can Fix the Defects in US Foreign Policy

Ted Carpenter has a good piece today in The National Interest: Trump Can Fix the Defects in US Foreign Policy. Whether the Trump team will be smart enough to do this or not remains to be seen, but they at least are not drawn from the same establishment Washington foreign policy teams that have so poorly advised preceding presidents, Republican and Democrat alike, apparently suffering from "groupthink".  And Trump certainly has made it clear he and his team are rethinking American foreign policy.

Carpenter identifies, correctly I think, three main defects in America foreign policy since the end of World War II.

1. Threat inflation - the tendency for American foreign policy experts to see a new Hitler in every tinpot dictator who arises, and a potential world war in every minor expansionist move by these tinpot dictators, and to over-react as if each one were an existential threat to the US. A few may be a real threat to us; most are not.

2. An inability to set priorities -  as Frederick the Great said,"He who defends everything defends nothing."  The US has extensive and expensive security commitments all around the globe, and it is costing us a fortune that could be better spent on other things. We don't seem to be able to distinguish between "nice to have" and "necessary". Nor do we seem to be able to do "tough love" and tell, for example, Europe, with an economy bigger than ours, that they need to step up to the plate and take on their own defense, rather than relying on us for almost everything.

3. An inability to make cost-benefit or risk-reward calculations. As Carpenter says, we don't seem to be able to distinguish between desirable outcomes and essential ones. We have spent 15 years in an expensive series of wars in the Middle East with no discernible improvement in the situation - and it is not the least bit clear why it should have mattered that much to us.

I recommend reading the whole article, because Carpenter makes a good defense for his thesis.

Hyperventilating over Trump

The largely liberal press and the usual talking heads have, predictably, been hyperventilating over Trump’s actions over the first few days of his administration. I suppose that was to be expected, considering how they have behaved all through the election.  But, ignoring Trump’s more inflammatory tweets, how outrageous have his actions to date really been?

He wants to build a wall on the Mexican border, which liberals seem to think is outrageous even though the Obama administration already built some 700 miles of that very same wall. It may be a dumb idea, it may be ineffective (though no one has proposed a more effective approach), but why is it outrageous now when it wasn’t during the Obama administration?

He wants to deport illegal immigrants, which liberals seem to think is outrageous even though the Obama administration deported more illegal immigrants (about 2.4 million of them) than all preceding presidents put together. Why is it outrageous to deport people who enter the country illegally when so many others are waiting patiently, sometimes for years, to enter legally?  Why is it outrageous now when it wasn’t during the Obama administration?

He wants our allies (Japan, Korea, Europe, NATO) to bear more of the share of their own defense. Only 5 of the 28 NATO countries are meeting their treaty obligations to put at least 2% of their GDP toward defense.  The rest don’t bother because they know the US will do it for them. This has been a worry in Washington for years, but no president to date has been willing to step up to the plate and deal with it  Why is it so outrageous now to demand that our allies at least meet their NATO treaty obligations?

He promises to appoint a strict constructionist to the vacant Supreme Court seat last held by Anthony Scalia, a strict constructionist, which is producing the predictable outrage in the press. Why? When Obama replaced liberal justices with liberal justices (Souter replaced by Sotomayor and Stevens replaced by Kagan) it wasn’t outrageous, and those appointments got bipartisan support.  Why are liberals so outraged by the idea of replacing a conservative with another conservative?

He wants to keep jobs in the US instead of outsourcing them to other countries, and has been jawboning corporations to do that. Since he is the president of the US, not of those other countries, why is it so outrageous for him to look out for his own voters?  It may well be an ineffective method to maintain jobs, since automation, not outsourcing, is the real threat, but it doesn’t seem to me outrageous for him to want to keep jobs in the US, especially since that was the main issue that won him the election.

He has said he is for America first, which earned him scathing criticism from the more transnational liberal elite. Why? Do liberals think all other countries aren’t looking out first and foremost for their own national interests? What is the purpose of a national government if it isn’t to look out for the safety and welfare of the people it governs?

He promises to cut regulations. Is that really outrageous? As of 2015 there were more than 81,000 pages of federal regulations in the Federal Register.  Just the regulations added during the Obama administration are costing companies, by the estimate of the agencies themselves, more than $108 BILLION per year to comply.  Now he may or may not succeed in cutting regulations – bureaucracies are remarkably good at protecting their turf – but is it so outrageous for him to try?

He promises to reduce the size of the federal government and to reduce the budgets and staffing of some federal agencies, which seems to be outraging liberals. Why? Both Republicans and Democrats have been promising on the campaign trail to reduce the size of government for decades, though neither has actually done it when in power, so why when Trump says it is it now outrageous?  And just how do liberals think this would be accomplished without cutting the budgets and staffing of federal agencies?

He has killed the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty, which has liberals outraged. Why? Hillary had said she too didn’t support it. Would liberals have been outraged if she had been elected and killed it?  Would they have been outraged if, after promising to kill it on the campaign trail (to counter Bernie Sander’s position), she then reneged and didn’t kill it? Or are they just outraged because it is Trump?

He has used executive orders to dismantle many of President Obama’s initiatives, which seems to be outraging liberals. Why? Obama enacted those initiatives in the first place using executive orders (since he couldn’t get them through Congress) and liberals thought he was daring and resourceful. Why, when Trump uses executive orders do liberals think it is outrageous?

Ignoring Trump's intemperate tweets, his actions in the first few days of his administration don't seem that outrageous to me. They are of course mostly conservative actions which liberals don't like (naturally), but they certainly don't seem outrageous.

All in all, I am amazed at the breathtaking hypocrisy of the liberal press and the liberal spokespeople.  As I have said before, I actually support many – perhaps even most - of the liberal positions, but those positions are being very poorly represented by the current crop of journalists and Democratic leaders.

Recommended: Celebs Threatening Trump Doesn’t Help

The Daily Beast has a good common-sense article today: Celebs threatening Trump doesn't help.  The writer is a long-time critic of Trump and the Trump campaign, but even so is dismayed by the post-election liberal "freak out".   As he correctly points out, if Democrats hope to someday recapture the White House and a significant number of state legislatures, and actually have some political power again, they will need to win back a lot of Trump voters, and what they are doing now isn't the way to go about it.

If Hillary had won and Trump supporters had threatened to burn down the White House and smashed windows in Washington during her inauguration, one can imagine the outrage the largely liberal press would have expressed.  Funny how mute they are when the situation is reversed.

Also recommended: The Losers of 2016

Walter Russell Mead just published a companion piece to the one just recommended in the preceding blog: The Losers of 2016.  It too is very good and is highly recommended.

Recommended: The Winners of 2016

Walter Russell Mead had a good piece in The American Interest Saturday: The Winners of 2016. The women's march across the nation this weekend, impressive as it was, highlights the stark divide in the country. FiveThirtyEight estimates that about 80% of the women were from states Clinton won, most of them from big cities.  And of course the march blocked participation by pro-life women. So while it was impressive, it masked the liberal's weakness across the nation, especially among the more religious.  Likewise, more detailed analysis of the voting patterns shows that, yes, Hillary won the popular vote, but only because she won overwhelming in deep blue California. Remove California and she lost the popular vote across the country.

All of which highlights the Democrats' current problem.  Having lost the monolithic support of the working class across the country, the Democratic base is now concentrated heavily in a few urban areas, which doesn't help them win either nationally in the electoral college nor in local gubernatorial or state legislature races. Winning decisively in California wasn't enough to win the nation as a whole.

As I have mentioned before, since the (nominally) Republican candidate won, the Republicans will do little soul-searching after this election, despite the obvious dysfunction in the party. The Democrats, having been beaten by a candidate they should have been able to overcome, are already (finally) beginning to do some thoughtful analysis of why they lost not only this presidential election, but the House and the Senate and so many state offices over the past decade.

But in a sense, both parties have the same problem: they have been seduced into fighting culture wars instead of focusing on the fundamentals of the economy (job growth or preservation, tax policy, infrastructure maintenance, worker education, etc).. And both parties have been captured by their big-money donors, and the issues these wealthy people care about, rather than attending to the day-to-day concerns of the mass of average voters across the country.

Perhaps it’s a generational thing

Perhaps it’s a generational thing, but I see all these protests scheduled around the inauguration of Donald Trump as simply bad manners. I was raised in the generation that thought manners mattered, and thought that someone else’s bad manners wouldn’t excuse my own. My generation still thought that if two mortal enemies were about to dual to the death, it was still polite for them to salute each other with their swords before beginning the duel. My generation thought that the inauguration of a president – any president – was an important national ritual, an affirmation of the American democratic tradition of passing presidential power peacefully from one person to the next, whatever one might think personally of the new occupant of that office.

Yes, a lot of the country isn’t happy Donald Trump won the election.  I’m not particularly happy with him, but then I wouldn’t have been happy with Clinton either. That is almost always the case in an election; there are winner and there are losers. But he did win and he is our new president, and good manners would dictate that we respect the office even if we don’t particularly respect the occupant.

But then this is a generation that often doesn’t answer RSVPs or send “Thank You” letters for gifts. So maybe I am just out of date. Maybe acting like a boor, or like a spoiled child that didn’t gets its way, is the new norm. If so I am sorry for the state of the nation, and of American society.

The Russian hacking issue

Yes, Russian hackers probably hacked the emails of some of the Democratic party operatives. So, probably, did Chinese hackers, perhaps North Korean hackers, perhaps the hackers of a mafia ring or two, and even perhaps a few teenagers around the world. It was apparently so easy.  Why do I say this? Because hackers have been breaking into everything from corporate databases to the Pentagon computers over the past decade.  Even the venerable NSA, whom we trust to do our most invasive hacking of other nations, had some of their prize hacking tools stolen last year by hackers and put up for auction in the internet.

And no doubt, despite the desperate denials by her team, one or more hackers had a good look at all Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails, classified and unclassified, on her unsecured server.

Is this news? No. We know this sort of hacking has been going on for at least a decade.  And we ourselves do a great deal of it.

Yes, no doubt Russia tried to influence the election. Why not? America has tried to influence elections in Russia and in Russian border States. Indeed, over the past 50 years the CIA, among others, has actively tried to influence elections all around the globe, and even instigated some outright coups.  Next to that record, just releasing some embarrassing emails is hardly very serious, though it certainly showed the seamy side of Democratic operations. But there seems to be no evidence that the Russian meddling had any significant effect on the election, despite the media hysteria. After all, the only real effect was to give voters some more information about the candidates.

The real scandal under all of this is that government and Democratic Party computers apparently are so easy to hack into.  The Obama administration had eight years to do something practical about this, but apparently, from the available evidence, they either didn’t bother or were so incompetent that whatever they did was ineffective.

Let’s get real. Hacking is spying. Nations have always spied on each other, even on other friendly nations. We do it just like everyone else does it, and in fact we do a lot of it and put a lot of money into the effort.  So let’s stop all this hypocritical theatrical outrage about Russian hacking. This is the real world. It goes on. A competent government would do something practical to better protect its computers.

Putin and Obama

I have argued before in these blogs that Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly outplayed and outfoxed President Obama, especially in the Ukraine and in Syria. His latest move, deciding not to retaliate after Obama expelled a number of Russian diplomats, is a classic and brilliant move – once again completely outmaneuvering Obama and his national security team, and making Obama look petty and weak. Putin has consistently played a very weak hand brilliantly, and Russia continues to punch way above its weight.  The recently concluded cease fire in Syria, negotiated without any American participation, shows just how far we have been pushed out of that arena. Not that perhaps it wouldn’t be better for us to get out of that arena, but certainly not to be seen to be pushed out.

Obama once argued that his first foreign policy rule was “not to do dumb stuff”.  Expelling a couple of dozen Russian diplomats in his last weeks in office over alleged Russian hacking seems to me to fit squarely into the “dumb stuff” category.  Does anyone think this step will make any difference at all to the Russian (or Chinese, or mafia) hackers?

Common sense might tell any thinking person, after years of the government and major corporation being hacked repeatedly by everyone in sight, including teenagers in their family bedrooms, that perhaps a better approach would be to put some real money into developing computer systems that were not so easily hacked. If we can afford to spend almost $400 billion for a fleet of new F-35 fighter plane, or build new submarines at around $2.4 billion apiece, might we not find a little spare change somewhere to fund a really robust research effort to harden our computer systems before some enemy hacks them and brings down the entire economy?  Obama had eight years to do that, and it would probably be far more effective than kicking out a few diplomats.