Both Laska and I debated all through high school.  We were pretty good at it, but even the best lose debates now and then.  One of the sure signs you were losing is when you realize that your entire argument is based on semantics.  Sometimes that’s all you’ve got so you argue it as best you can and take your lumps. It’s worse when you get too emotional about a subject and too contemptuous of your opponent—and then start to see meaning and significance where there isn’t any. And you just get angrier and talk faster because you think you are making a point.  And, if you can just talk faster and louder . . . .

It’s not just Trump. Although of course it is, also, Trump.  I’m referring to all the times that Trump and other, competent, Republicans, like Lindsey Graham, have seized on the president’s reluctance to use the words “radical Islam” in talking about Isis or Isil.  The GOP has so much contempt for Obama and live in such an echo chamber that their foreign policy statements increasingly sound like the kids from Norwin High School that Laska and I used to routinely trounce.

This morning Newt Gingrich pointed out, accurately, that Churchill didn’t hesitate to use the word “Nazi” in referring to his enemies in 1940.  Which he did. Because they called themselves “Nazis”. And, he pointed out, accurately, that Kennedy and Reagan called their enemies “communists.” Which they did. Because they called themselves “communists.”

Remember back in 2012. Romney thought he had Obama nailed about the exact moment he used the words “act of terror” in regards Benghazi. Notice Romney’s cross examination of the president on this point. It’s what a high school debater does when all his friends agree with him and he’s lost all perspective.

Here’s the clip. Oh, just watch it again. You owe yourself a few minutes of fun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kbv7H_Sp-U

The president has said that he refrains from using terms like “radical Islam” because Isis might use that for propaganda benefit. I’m not qualified to weigh in on the tactical merits of how the use or non-use of the term may play in the Middle East.

It does occur to me that during the troubles in Ireland, I can’t remember—and admit I’ve only had time to do a cursory check—but I’m pretty sure that U.K. and American governments rarely referred to the IRA as “Catholic terrorists” or their cause as “radical Catholicism.” It was certainly advisable for the U.K. to be in a fight with terrorists rather than Catholics. I don’t know many Muslims, but I know a lot of Catholics, and I’m pretty sure they would have objected to Margaret Thatcher calling the IRA “Catholic terrorists.”  Even though that’s what they were.

Pretty sure that the non-Irish Catholics in the U.S. would have paid a lot more attention to what was happening in Belfast if it involved “radical Catholicism.” I can think of several people who would gladly own up to being “radically Catholic.” Maybe even feeling a little bit more resentful when driving by that Protestant church in town. All those Cadillacs in the parking lot. “My boss goes to that church . . . . They sing all the verses of the hymns. Not just the first two.”

I feel like I’m just kicking a straw man here. But, then I realize that’s what straw men are there for. And that we have such a man “presumptively” running for president.

One of the many things that Elizabeth Warren gets right about Trump is how “small” he is. USA Today (Huh? Wha? USA Today?) reported this week how Trump doesn’t pay his bills with contractors. Especially smaller ones who can’t take him to court.  He negotiates a price. Makes the first payment. The contractor delivers. And, then, Trump refuses to pay the agreed-to price and reopens negotiations.

We’ve all done business with people like this. I remember working for a computer games start up, a company that two of my friends created and that had financing from a shady rich guy in New York. I had to work really hard to collect my expense checks. And, to be clear, these expenses were modest, a few hundred dollars. Economy class flights. Marriott hotels and no room service. I’d call accounts payable and “Stephanie”—she had a Queens accent out of central casting—would assure me that my expense check was signed and in the FedEx envelope.  And, then two days later, I’d start the process over again.

Five or so years ago, the company I worked for had a contract dispute with a company in a business similar to Trump’s. I was trying to collect a much overdue completion milestone. The second of four scheduled payments. The representative of this “company” said to me at one point, “If I pay you, how do I know you won’t f_ck me.” I actually had to explain that we were part of a publicly traded company and had, like, a basic understanding of business ethics. I flew to San Francisco.  Met with the CEO. We worked out a deal. Shook hands. And then two days later he reneged on everything. He just lied to my face, and we brought in the lawyers and eventually worked out a settlement.

This is the kind of cheapjack that the Party of Big Business has nominated.  For president. In southwestern Pennsylvania we refer to these guys as “jagoffs”.  Here’s the USA Today link.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/06/09/donald-trump-unpaid-bills-republican-president-laswuits/85297274/

Two remarkable speeches this evening.  Elizabeth Warren and Vice President Biden speaking before a group of constitutional lawyers. Two adults reminding us that the future of the republic is at stake in this election.  As one of them points out, you have the nominee of one of our two political parties threatening a federal judge with retaliation if he’s elected in November.

I’d put Warren’s speech up there with some of the best I’ve heard.  Not quoting her, but she has a section of the speech where she says that “Democracy does not sustain itself. The rule of law does not sustain itself.” Referring to Republican efforts to destroy trust in the congress, the judiciary, and the executive. She should not run for vice president. She should keep doing this kind of thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzLMf6QGONQ

Biden’s not as focused or eloquent. But, this is the vice president of the United States having to remind us that an independent judiciary is kind of important. I also like the part where he talks about serving in the senate being the greatest privilege of his life.  And how his many Republican friends in the senate know better than to support Trump.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF82N0B2VYE

This is, indeed, a preview of the assault that Trump can expect from Hillary, her eventual running mate, Bill, Obama, Biden, Bernie, and Warren over the next five months. But, these speeches aren’t the usual campaign stuff.

I thought we should have a post on the blog that celebrates what happened last night. We all have our misgivings about Hillary and how committed she’ll be to the issues we believe in. And, as I noted somewhere else in this blog, she often manages to be as ineluctable as Nixon and as charismatic as Walter Mondale.

And, we all are so used to working with women in all types of senior executive roles, that it’s easy to just say, sure, why not a woman nominated for president. But, A WOMAN JUST BECAME A MAJOR PARTY CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!

And, last night, she really stepped into it and reminded people why this is an emotional and historic moment. Between the San Diego speech and this one, I am becoming optimistic that she can be a more inspiring figure than we thought.

I was half-way through a post on how last week revealed the Trump campaign to be barely functional and possibly on the verge of collapse six weeks before the Republican convention.  But, a picture really is worth a thousand words.

Here’s Trump’s tweet honoring the anniversary of the D-Day Invasion:

Here’s a link to Redstate.com where Caleb Howe points out how ludicrously obvious it is that this photo is not of D-Day. Notice the guy standing with his hands on his hips and his back to the Germans.  As Howe, asks:  “And who, exactly, would have taken this photo? The Germans? Look at the perspective.”

http://www.redstate.com/absentee/2016/06/06/even-donald-trumps-d-day-tweet-fallen-heroes-wrong/

Howe publishes the full photo with a clear caption from Getty Images that states this was a photo of a training exercise for D-Day. I mean, it’s in the caption of the photo!! Is anyone on his staff even trying?

Btw, before the election, I would visit Redstate a couple times a month just to see what the other side was thinking. Or just to get really angry. But, have to give them credit. Most of the contributors to the site have been against Trump from the start, at first because they don’t think he represents conservative values. But, since Trump has secured the nomination, they’ve denounced his candidacy as dangerous to the country. And a few of them, like Caleb Howe, have appeared on cable news and declared that they are voting for Hillary.  Even though that means that they get Supreme Court justices and a lot of other stuff they don’t like for the next four years.

Nothing becomes a Saturday morning like watching someone be really good at politics. This week, Hillary showed that she could deliver a masterpiece of a speech. And, that maybe she’s getting the hang of being stand-up comic funny while also cutting the knife deep and quick across her rival’s hamstring.

Not that this is a new thing. Here’s a one-minute clip of FDR in December, 1938 at the University of North Carolina, mocking his critics. You could cut and paste this performance into 2016 (o.k., I just did), and it’s funny and feels contemporary.

1938 was a terrible year for Roosevelt and the New Deal. He’d overplayed his hand on a number of fronts: court packing, challenging anti-New Deal Democrats in congressional primaries, and mostly failing in those challenges. In the November mid-terms a month ago, the Democrats lost six senate seats and 71 House seats.

And here he is in North Carolina, still master of the game.

Love the smile that he can’t suppress when he says, “Actually, I’m an exceedingly mild mannered person.”

And the trademark throwing back of the head at the end: “I’m a devotee of scrambled eggs!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQRwcI0-Nm4

I thought to post this because it’s a great clip from one of the greatest political performers.  But, then I read the entire speech. It’s here and pretty remarkable.

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15578

He’s at once aligning himself with the forces of modernity, but at the same time goes back to the beginning of the country and the Democratic Party. Fascinating in part because for all of us, the Democratic Party started with the New Deal. Here’s the leader of the New Deal, going back into history to justify his program.

“The very birth of the Democratic Party, at a time when President Washington publicly expressed the hope that the Nation could be run without Parties, was due to the simple fact that the Government itself was dominated by the great commercial and shipping interests of the seaboard, and failed to give recognition to the needs and the desires of the masses of the inhabitants of the original Thirteen States who did not subscribe to their theory that birth, wealth or political position could give to the possessors of these qualifications the sole right to govern. Hence the Democratic Party.”

I’d look to Mr. Jones to keep FDR honest on his reading of history. I suspect that he wasn’t above bending it to his own purposes.  He does, for example, totally gloss over the Civil War because he needed all those white supremacist committee chairs to support his legislation.

 

Hillary delivered what was billed as a major foreign policy address yesterday in San Diego. If you missed it, find the time to watch the full thing.

As far as foreign policy speeches go, this wasn’t JFK calling for a nuclear test ban treaty or Reagan telling Mr. Gorbachev to tear down this wall. But that’s not what the moment called for. To paraphrase other reviewers of the speech, it was a blistering evisceration of Donald Trump, a complete unmanning of the Republican nominee and jackass.

The speech was masterfully written, eschewing any cringe-worthy gotcha phrases, and Hillary delivered it skillfully. She looked presidential. She also looked like she was enjoying herself. And she seems finally to have mastered the Obama approach of being presidential, somewhat aloof, and yet devastatingly funny and biting in her comments.

She pushed all the chips into the middle of the table, calling Trump unqualified to be president, questioning the state of his mental health, generally ridiculing him, mocking all the stupid things he’s said about foreign policy. And she did all of this without getting down into the gutter with him. This was a former first lady, former senator, former secretary of state just brushing this clown off.

I certainly hope this speech presages the Democrats’ strategy for the rest of the summer. To simultaneously remind people that she’s a serious candidate for president and to just call Trump out as the national joke that he really is and to render him a laughing stock.

And, He’s Still Lonely . . .

Meanwhile, Trump’s all by himself.  I haven’t seen a single prominent Republican step up to defend Trump. Certainly, no national security surrogates to respond to Hillary on foreign policy. Trump tweeted some half-hearted nonsense. And his “comments” at a rally in California last night were so uninteresting that MSNBC didn’t even bother to air more than :30 seconds of them. He apparently spent the day still complaining about the “Mexican” judge in the Trump University case.

“Charlie, They Took My Thumb!”

Paul Ryan used the occasion of Hillary’s speech to sneak out his non-endorsement endorsement of Trump. He said that he would vote for Trump. He didn’t really ask anyone else to do the same.  And he published his “support” in an op-ed piece in his local paper in Wisconsin. I’m surprised he didn’t slip it into the classifieds section.

He did appear on television explaining his decision. I can’t find a video on Youtube. I’m sure that Ryan’s staff insisted on watching the reporters delete the files from their hard drives. He looks sad and mumbles some things about “policies” that Trump would advance without bothering to mention what those “policies” are.  If you turned the sound down on the video and just watch his body language, you could easily imagine him saying things like, “we think we caught the cancer in time” and “Uncle Bill lived a long and full life. . . “

The Pope of Greenwich Village is a really bad eighties mobster movie starring Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts (I realize this sentence is a tautology). Roberts’ character is unavoidably named “Paulie”. There’s a scene where Paulie’s Uncle Pete is dispatched by a mob boss to amputate Paulie’s thumb in retribution for some offense. Before doing the deed, Uncle Pete tells Paulie to “go numb . . . . Nothing ever hurts as much as you think it will.” Paul Ryan had that look on his face yesterday.

Hillary Veep-Stakes Update

With Hillary a week away from locking up the nomination, focus will start to turn again to who she selects as her running mate. I’m convincing myself that she’s going to select Xavier Becerra, the congressman from Los Angeles and member of the House Democratic Leadership.  The House minority leadership team is not typically a spring board to national office, and Becerra would bring zero national name recognition to the ticket.

But, he is a seasoned and polished performer on television. He’s got the skills to prosecute the case against Trump. He’s been in the House since 1993, knows the issues, and passes the test of someone who could be a heartbeat from the presidency. His lack of national profile means he won’t upstage Hillary on the campaign trail in a way that, say, Elizabeth Warren might, but he would be a fresh new face.

Am I forgetting anything?  Oh, yeah, he’s Latino. His parents were immigrants from Mexico, the place that Trump wants to wall off. Becerra’s candidacy would be a living refutation of Trump’s xenophobia and racism. Democrats would do anything to have a Latino on the ticket for all the obvious reasons. So, much so that people are floating names like Julian Castro—immensely talented, but thin resume: HUD Secretary and former Mayor of San Antonio—and Secretary of Labor, Tom Perez, who’s never run for elective office.

Becerra would be an exciting, historic choice, that helps energize an important part of the Democratic coalition and refutes one of the main rationales for Trump’s dreadful candidacy.

Trump Still Lonely: The Opposite of a Drinking Game

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder today became the latest high-profile Republican to announce that he won’t be endorsing any candidate in this year’s presidential campaign. Meanwhile, most senior Republicans when asked if they are supporting Trump say things like, “well, I said I would support the Republican nominee and so, I am going to support the Republican nominee.” They rarely actually say the word “Trump,” and I’m pretty sure a lot of them are going to vote for Hillary.

Polls are fickle and unreliable at this stage of the contest, but the behavior of senior Republicans, particularly those running for election or re-election this fall, is a great predictor of what’s going to happen in November. Other than the shell-of-a man that is Chris Christie, I don’t think that a single Republican governor or senator or candidate for those offices has appeared on a stage with Trump since he won the nomination. So far, they are taking a walk.

Links

A couple of thoughtful pieces this week:

Rebecca Traister in New York reports on her travels with Hillary on the campaign trail.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/05/hillary-clinton-candidacy.html

David Frum, former speechwriter to George W. Bush, writes in The Atlantic about everything in our democracy that had to break in order for Trump to be the Republican nominee. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/the-seven-broken-guardrails-of-democracy/484829/

I wanted to get this up yesterday, but, there are still two days left to the Memorial Day holiday.  Here’s a list of books that I’d recommend for this holiday in which we honor our service men and women. I’m focusing on battles that have mostly been forgotten by the American public, or anyone who’s younger than 85.  I’m also calling out where I believe members of my family served.

 The Coldest Winter, by David Halberstam

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/coldest-winter-david-halberstam/1100538541?ean=9780786888627

David’ Halberstam’s history of the Korean War. This is Halberstam, so it goes without saying that this book is monumental. But, also because it’s Halberstam, it’s both epic history and journalism dramatically rendered and imminently readable. Don’t let the heft of it put you off.  You won’t be able to stop reading.

This is not a military history of the Korean War, though he does cover with great detail and drama the valor of American soldiers in places like the Pusan Perimeter, Incheon, and The Chosin Reservior.

I will call out that one of my uncles, Charlie Moff, served at Pusan. He served in the artillery.  I’m forgetting the details, but he told me that the artillery they were operating had a maximum range of x hundred yards if well maintained.

“But, ours didn’t go that far,” he said. I asked why, and he responded, “well, we were using them a lot.”

The book is also a social and political history of the war and America going to war again only five years after the end of World War II. The account of Truman’s conflict with McArthur—the unpopular president prosecuting an unpopular war and facing open insubordination from the most popular general on the planet and the defacto emperor of Japan. Truman’s handling of the crisis puts the lie to any assertion that a president can just surround themselves with good people who will run that country. Truman had courage, character, and a sense of self that guided him through the crisis.

 Chosin, by Eric Hamel

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/chosin-eric-m-hammel/1102559177?ean=9781890988142

More Korean War. The battle of the Chosin Reservoir is right up there with Iwo Jima, Peleiliu, and Guadalcanal in the annals of Marine Corp valor, but too few people remember it.

This book is a military history so lacks the sweep and drama of a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist like Halberstam. But, the events of Chosin don’t need much embellishment.  McArthur, in the wake of brilliant success at Incheon, revealed his full megalomania, narcissism, and incompetence by driving an ill –equipped army (along with 30,000 Marines under army command) right up to the Chinese border, despite the numerous indications that the Chinese would respond.

When the Chinese did attack it resulted in one of the most devastating retreats in U.S. Army history. It was during this retreat that my mother’s uncle, Mario Del Costello was taken prisoner of war.  He’d remain a prisoner until the end of the war. He was tortured. Among other things, his captors would make him stand bare foot on blocks of ice for long periods of time. When I met him as young boy in the seventies, I wondered why Uncle Mario had such a hard time walking around.

This book tells the story of the 30,000 marines who were encircled by a Chinese force four-times their number.  They were at high altitudes, in the winter, with no winter gear. They engaged in a ferocious fighting retreat over the next 17 days.  As one veteran said, “We weren’t retreating. We were attacking in the other direction.” By the time they broke out of their encirclement, they had smashed two Chinese Army divisions beyond repair, inflicting staggering casualties.

 The Battle for Leyte Gulf by C. Vann Woodward

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/battle-for-leyte-gulf-c-vann-woodward/1101999183?ean=9781782899112

Leyte Gulf is the largest naval battle in the history of the world, the most ships committed to combat over the largest theater of battle. It was not the decisive battle of World War II, that was Midway, and so it’s largely forgotten.  It was the Japanese Navy’s desperate last effort at victory in the Pacific.

At one point during the battle, a large fleet of Japanese war ships bore down on a group of U.S. tender and transport ships that were in a position thought to be safely away from the battle.  In what came to be called The Charge of the Light Brigade, the three U.S. destroyers protecting the tender and transport ships engaged the much larger Japanese fleet. They fought so desperately—and to the last full measure—that the Japanese fleet broke off the attack, thinking that they were facing a much larger force.

My uncle, John Emile was a sailor on one of the tender ships that was saved by the “Light Brigade”.