From the Sideline View

The state of America and the rest of the world remains a preoccupying fascination for us, but these days we watch the news unfold with from a somewhat disinterred perspective. The team of old-fashioned Republican cold warriors and red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalists and stodgy traditionalists on the social issues we’ve always rooted for didn’t even the make the political playoffs in this crazy election year, so there’s the desultory feel of a World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the Los Angeles Dodgers about all of it, and our newfound objectivity makes the worst of both remaining teams so much more glaring.

All through the long years of President Barack Obama we groused about his groveling appeasement of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, and all through a crazy election year we indignantly noted that his would-be successor and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton was the Secretary of State started it off with that stupid “reset” button, and like all good Republicans we excoriated them durned Democrats for their Russkie-friendly ways. Now the putatively Republican president-elect has a mutual admiration society going with Putin and is appointing all sorts of Russophile wheelers and dealers who have also already wheeled and dealt some some officially friendly arrangements with the Russkies, suddenly those formerly apologetic Democrats who once laughed at Obama’s line about how “the ’80s are calling and they want their foreign policy” back are now demanding a more Reaganesque response towards that bear in the woods, and we note that pretty much everyone is accusing pretty much everyone else of being a partisan hypocrite who suddenly switched sides. Pretty much of all of them are right about all of that, of course, even if we do stand unsullied on stands, but from this viewpoint they all seem wrong about the rest of it.

There does look to be a whole lot of de-regulatin’ coming, perhaps even on a bigger-than-Reagan scale, and our old-fashioned Republican souls will begrudgingly enjoy that, along with the inevitable squealing from those durned Democrats, but we also anticipate a lot more of the kooky economic interventions that president-elect Donald Trump has already imposed on free markets. Trump’s admittedly different version of command controlled and outright protectionist economic policies have already aroused the indignation of the very same Democrats who spent the Obama years praising the same industrial policies we were continually grousing about, and we suppose we should welcome their company, but we don’t quite trust them. Much of the putatively Republican press we used to have some trust in are now suddenly enthused about about the government picking winners and losers and marketplace of ideas and products, such stalwart holdouts of of Burkean skepticism as The National Review and The Weekly Standard and The Central Standard Times are awaiting vindication before getting back in the game, and for now everyone looks faintly ridiculous.

We’ll continue to place our faith in God, but for now even His role in all this might be seem marginalized. The Republican party of family values finally vanquished that awful wife of that libertine ex-president, but it did so with a thrice-married-to-a-nudie-model casino-and-strip-club mogul who has bragged in print about all the married babes he’s bagged, and many of the Democrats who once defended Clinton’s behavior are now aghast Trump’s, and many of the Republicans who were once aghast by Clinton’s behavior are reaching into the Old Testament to exalt Trump. We count it a loss for the religious right, even though many of its putative leaders enthusiastically backed Trump, and despite their sudden prudishness we can’t see the secular left restoring any righteousness to the world.

All that bother about sex and abortion and the guy wanting to get into the women’s locker room and safe spaces from offending opinions and all the rest of those modern world things that keep popping up will surely continue for the next four years, no matter what the Illuminati have cooked up, and we expect that all sorts of people will wind up on all different sides of it, but for now we’ll try to keep warm and maintain a fair perspective from the sidelines.

— Bud Norman

Trump Gets Fed

Way back when politics and economics and all that made some sort of sense, before this crazy election year, much of the media would always devote a great deal of ink and internet pixels to the latest oracular pronouncements of the Federal Reserve Board. These days it takes a lot to knock president-elect Donald Trump off the front pages, but the almighty Fed was still able to elbow its way to a column just above the fold on Wednesday with a mere slight upward tweak in the interest rate, and we expect plenty of further commentary about it as the commentariat figures out the hard-to-figure Trump angle.

The Fed’s quarterly-or-so oracular pronouncements were damned hard enough to decipher even way back when politics and economics and all that made some sort of sense, and even the smart guys on Wall Street always seemed to have a hard time figuring it out, but in the age of Trump it’s exponentially more complicated. All of the inviolable laws of economics will ultimately be enforced, which does not bode well, but all of the inviolable laws of politics have been so brutally violated in this crazy election year that there’s no reliable guide to what comes next. What’s come before has been worrisome enough

For the past eight years or so the Fed has been “quantitative easing” enough money at pretty-much-zero-percent rates into the economy to sustain a a doubling of the national debt and two percent-or-so growth rate in the gross domestic product and a stock market boom that has outrun that pace like a hare past a tortoise. The past eight years or so have also seen the unemployment rate go from a depth-of-recession rate over 10 percent to a relatively robust 4.6 percent, with household wages and a few other economic indices also showing recent improvement, and given the latest enthusiasm of the stock markets the Fed has apparently decided that now is the time to put an ever so slight foot of the economic brake.

History shows that recessions have always come to an end, though, and always with a more robust and v-shaped recovery than the last eight years or so have seen. That 4.6 percent unemployment rate is not bad, but the numbers of the underemployed and those of working age but out of the work are horrible by modern standards. As for the ongoing stock market boom, we place more faith in Aesop’s fable about the tortoise and the hare. That long awaited uptick in household income is welcome, but doesn’t seem to have placated the most recent electorate. For the past eight years or so we’ve groused that President Barack Obama’s penchant for government-run health care and similarly disruptive regulatory schemes have had something to do with this, and enough people in a few key states were just as eager to put the brakes on Obamanomics, and thus Trump won, so at this point it becomes murky.

Since Trump’s victory the stock markets have been exuberant, perhaps irrationally so, as Alan Greenspan might have said, at the prospect of all that quantitatively eased money flowing at pretty much zero interest rates through an already recovering economy suddenly disencumbered of all those Obama-imposed layers of regulations and taxations and rhetorical scoldings, along with all the cheap oil that’s going to come gushing through the Environmental Protection Agency’s weakened barriers. As much as we dispute the Fed’s self-congratulatory reasons for its slight touch on the economic brakes, we’re the self-doubting sorts who can’t really fault their decision as we head with one headlight into the economy’s dark and twisting road. Even before taking office Trump has intervened in the affairs of businesses ranging from aerospace to air conditioning, and is proposing a bigger-than-Obama-sized infrastructure plan to revive an economy that isn’t in recession but isn’t all that great, none of it bodes well for the national debt, and so far Trumponomics looks to be just as disruptive as its predecessor but in all in sorts of unpredictable ways. so perhaps some pat on the brakes is indicated.

Way back when Trump when merely a long shot candidate for the presidency he was “tweeting” his outrage that the Fed was keeping interest rates artificially low for the political benefit of Obama, which we didn’t argue, and so far as we can tell at this moment he hasn’t “tweeted” anything to the contrary since the Fed’s announcement. Perhaps he’s trying to figure out the political and economic implications himself, and finding it damned complicated, and maybe he’s cocky enough to think that he can make his deregulation of this and regulation of that work well enough even with slightly higher than zero percent interest rates, and in such a crazy election year as this he might even be right. This is a complicated matter, though, even for such a savvy businessman as Trump.

Trump has always come out ahead of his creditors, through six bankruptcies and two divorces and untold lawsuits by everyone from stiffed busboys to disgruntled real estate students, but now he’s up against the biggest bank of them all. The Fed is by law entirely independent of any branch of the federal government, and that law is likely to be backed by all the Democrats and a bigly number of Republicans in the legislative branch and a majority of the judicial branch, so we expect that Trump will sooner or later pick a fight with them. In the past the Fed has usually won these these confrontations, most famously when the aforementioned Greenspan agreed to open the monetary spigots in exchange for President Bill Clinton’s more business friendly policies, which wound up winning Clinton reelection in ’96 but couldn’t win his re-relection in ’16, but in this crazy election year everything seems up for negotiation.

— Bud Norman

Just West of Reality

In a more perfect world we’d pay no attention to the comings and going of garish reality television stars, but as things now stand Donald Trump is the president-elect and his high level meeting on Tuesday with Kanye West was unavoidably in the news.

West first came to fame as a performer of rap music, and those with a studied appreciation of the genre than ours tell he is quite adept at it, but he’s lately best known for such attention grabbing behavior as crashing a stage to interrupt another entertainer’s speech at a show biz awards show and she she wouldn’t have won, using another awards show to go on a rant about how President George W. Bush doesn’t care about black people, more generally ranting like a crazy person on afternoon talk shows, and being married into the famously dysfunctional Kardashian family of reality television renown. Such antics led President Barack Obama to describe West as a “jackass,” but have apparently long endeared West to Trump. Hence the invitation to Trump’s transition headquarters in New York City, where the president-elect told reporters afterwards that “We discussed life.”

West later tweeted that two also talked about “bullying, supporting teachers, modernizing curriculums, and violence in Chicago.” We assume that the conversation about bullying concerned how to stop it, although it’s possible they shared favorite techniques, and we also allow them the benefit of the doubt about their earnestness regarding teachers and curriculums and Chicago, but given their public personas we’re skeptical there wasn’t also some talk about various women’s derrières and grabbing them by their wherevers. “I feel it is important to have a direct line of communication with our future president if we truly want change,” West further “tweeted,” but what’s more direct than a little locker room banter between a couple of stars who can get away with it?

“I’ll never say anything bad about him,” Trump said of West during a 2015 campaign rally, apropos of some West brouhaha or another that was popping up at the time, and which Trump apparently felt needed to be addressed in a presidential campaign speech. “You want to know why? Because he loves Trump. He goes around saying Trump is my all-time hero. He says it to everybody.” The very same method of character assessment also explains Trump’s apparent affinity for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, as well as several other friendships with flattering but unsavory people ranging from Steve Bannon to Mike Tyson to Roger Stone to Dennis Rodman to Jeffrey Epstein, so it’s a convincing explanation for his friendship with West.

Harder to explain is West’s affinity for Trump. Rappers have long shared Trump’s penchant for gold-plated “bling” and shameless self-aggrandizement and constantly upgraded models, and have even acknowledged his knack for it on numerous songs, but they don’t usually like registered Republicans. So far as we glean from the snippets we’ve heard of his songs and rants West’s politics have been of the usual peace and freedom and kill whitey variety found in rap music, and although he has some pretty idiosyncratic ideas about being God and the nefarious forces arrayed against him he’s always seemed an show biz orthodox liberal in most of his political pronouncements, and it’s hard to see where he agrees with Trump on such matters as the violence in Chicago. Even so, West was telling a stunned concert audience during a prolonged rant that if he’d have bothered to vote he would have voted for Trump.

That rant also included something about a feud with a fellow rapper and something vaguely sinister about the show business industry and how he was risking his life by talking about it, and immediately afterwards West was reportedly admitted to the psychiatric wing of a hospital, forcing the cancellation of a remaining tour. The official explanation was exhaustion, which is plausible given that he has such a grueling schedule and is married to the most callipygian of the Kardashians, but the conspiracy theorists on the lunatic fringes of internet were theorizing better explanations.

One holds that West was about to expose Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s satanic pedophile in the back room of a D.C. pizzeria, and that The Illuminati swooped in at the last minute to silence him and make it look like he’s crazy. Another theory holds that the entire entertainment industry, as well as the Democratic party and entrenched establishment of the Republican party, are controlled by the same Illuminati conspiracy, which is plausible to extent that there’s really no other accounting for the wealth and fame of Kanye West or Donald Trump being president, but the same theory holds that they’re two of the last remaining good guys fighting the dark forces, and that’s just too hard to believe.

We’ll not begrudge Trump his friendships, at least the ones that don’t re-align the more or less stable global order, but we do hope he’ll seek advice elsewhere about modernizing curriculums and other pressing matters. There might be some conspiracy afoot in that Trump Tower summit of the reality show stars, and we’re sure it will be coming to a YouTube video soon, but rappers have been dropping by the White House for eight years already, some of them arguably even more unsavory than West, and show biz and politics and all the craziness they entail have long been intertwined, so the more likely explanation is that we all just let it get to this point.

— Bud Norman

Recounting the Inevitable

Green Party nominee Jill Stein’s quixotic effort to recount the presidential election results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, where her quixotic campaign won enough votes to account for the slight Trump victories that won him a majority of the Electoral College’s votes, have apparently come to naught. The Wisconsin recount wound up yielding only another three hundred ballots to Trump’s previously announced win, and the courts in the other two states have concluded that a recount isn’t worth the bother. There’s still a slight chance that 37 electors in states Trump apparently won will not vote for him, and one has vowed in a New York Times op-ed that he won’t and several others are requesting intelligence briefings about Russia’s alleged involvement in the election, which suddenly seem plausible given the apparent president-elect’s announced appointments, but even in such a crazy election year as this that seems unlikely to change the already crazy enough outcome.

There’s a long and colorful history of “faithless electors” casting their votes against the will of the majority or plurality of their states, and depending on what state you’re in or what judge you wind up in front of it might be quite legal, and there are sound historical and constitutional arguments to be made on their behalf, especially in such a crazy election year as this, but they’ve never once changed the outcome of an election. Even in such a crazy election year as this it seems unlikely to occur, and even if it did it wouldn’t provide a happy outcome.

One highly unlikely scenario has those 37 electors switching their votes to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and making her the president, which would arguably be even worse than Trump taking the office, and we note that the country has wasted much of the past year and a half arguing about that very question and come to mixed results about it, so we can’t see that happening. The electors could also decline to vote for either of the major party nominees, as we did, in which case the matter would be left to the House of Representatives, where the Republicans hold a majority and would most likely wind up holding their noses as so many of our Republican friends did and vote for Trump. At this point in this crazy election year there’s still a one-in-a-gazillion chance that neither Clinton nor Trump will become president, and we will bitterly cling to that faint hope until it is inevitably dashed, but we’re already girding ourselves for what’s to come.

— Bud Norman

From Russia, With Love

President-elect Donald Trump has peddled conspiracy theories about President George W. Bush lying America into a war, President Barack Obama being born in Kenya, and the father of would-be president and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz being in on the Kennedy assassination, and many of his more fervent supporters are currently convinced that despite her deathly illness former First Lady and Senator and Secretary of State and would-be first woman president Hillary Clinton somehow finds the energy to run a satanic child sex ring in the back room of a pizzeria, so we’ll come right out and admit to a sneaking suspicion that there’s something fishy going on between Trump and the Russkies.

Our first sniff of a certain malodor came way back when Trump was still considered a long shot in the Republican primary, and he exchanged such fulsome praise with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin that it bordered on the homo-erotic. He later fired his first campaign manager and replaced him with a fellow who had substantial business dealings with Russia, and added a foreign policy advisor with similar ties, and then there were the resurrected quotes from Trump’s son about how the family business was heavily invested in Russia, and Trump’s own claims on national television that Russia would never invade Ukraine, and that you could write it down, and that it wouldn’t necessarily be a big deal even if they did, which of course they already had done. He also publicly urged Russia to release whatever e-mails they had hacked from Clinton’s scandalously unsecured server, although he later claimed it was meant facetiously, and when the e-mails from her party’s and her campaign manager’s accounts surfaced and started a bad a news cycle that culminated in all those rumors of a satanic child sex ring in the back of a pizzeria he scoffed at the very idea that the Russians might have had anything to do with it, even though it did seem plausible.

Trump wound up firing that campaign manager with the Russian business ties after they were widely reported, but since his election he’s chosen a national security advisor who has travelled to Moscow to dine with Putin and appear on the regime’s propaganda television network and otherwise seems to have a certain affinity for Russia, and his reported but as-yet-unannounced choice for Secretary of State is a former Exxon chief executive officer who negotiated a $500 billion deal with Putin’s kleptocracy in 2011 and was awarded Russia’s “Order of Friendship” a year later. Now the Obama administration and The New York Times and The Washington Post are all reporting that Russians were indeed responsible for the hacked and leaked e-mails, and that Republican e-mails were also hacked but not leaked, and Trump is once again scoffing at the very idea the idea the Russians might have had anything to do with, even though it now seems all the more plausible.

There might be some innocent explanation for all of this, and the more pro-Trump sorts of publications have already concocted several.

One theory holds that the late-breaking bad news cycle engendered by those leaked e-mails didn’t sway any voters anyway, which is also plausible, but they surely didn’t do the Democratic ticket any good and given how very close the race was in three states that swung the electoral college victory it’s plausible as well that they did make a difference. There’s an adjunct theory that even if the Russians did hack the Republican party they didn’t find anything worth leaking, but that doesn’t seem at all plausible. In any case, it’s hard to build a convincing case that Americans and their president-elect shouldn’t be concerned about even ineffectual interference in an American election.

Another theory, offered by Trump himself, is that you just can’t believe anything you hear from America’s so-called “intelligence community.” In a characteristically defiant television interview, Trump noted these were “the same people” who told Bush that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction during the lead-up to the America’s invasion of that country, which Trump had previously insisted Bush somehow knew was not true, and that he regards it all as a Democrat-controlled attempt to undermine him. He’s already announced that he doesn’t want to be bothered with daily intelligence briefings, making us nostalgic for all the talk radio outrage about reports that Obama was skipping them way back when, and leading us to wonder where he does get his information about the world. Trump has praised “InfoWars” for its “awesome reputation,” and he recommended The National Enquirer for a Pulitzer Prize, and their track records are even worse than that of America’s “intelligence community.” Perhaps Trump has his own high-tech global counter-intelligence operation like all the jet-setting international playboy billionaire villains in the James Bonds movies, which we admit would be pretty cool, but we also can’t shake a certain suspicion that he’s just going with his gut and the latest “tweet” he saw and his own naked self-interest.

Sooner or later will come the theory, already percolating in the comments sections of countless news reports and bubbling just between the lines of the official statements, that an alliance with Russia is best for America and who better to negotiate it than the savvy businessmen who have already swung such profitable deals with our former adversary. All through the campaign Trump was talking about aligning with Russia to defeat the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, even though Russia was already aligned with the odious dictatorship in Syria and mostly devoted to defeating the more secular rebels rather than the Islamic State. Syria is more or less a puppet state of Iran, whose nuclear ambitions Trump promised to thwart by scuttling Obama’s loophole-ridden deal that country’s terror-sponsoring theocracy, and Russia is currently aligned with Iran, but we’re sure the theorists will eventually explain how that works out.

From our admittedly old-fashioned Republican perspective, it doesn’t seem plausible. After a Cold War childhood we remain instinctively suspicious of the Russkies, and remain appalled by how they deny their citizens basic rights, and we stand steadfastly against their recent revanchism in Ukraine and the bullying of their bullying of other neighbors and their meddling in the Middle East on behalf of its most dangerous regimes, and we can’t see how the economic benefits of a partnership with a moribund economy and dwindling population and a strongman dictatorship will outweigh such considerations as the survival of free societies in Europe and the Middle East and elsewhere.

We’d like to think that Trump’s oft-stated affinity for strongman dictatorships explains his rapprochement with Russia, and not some economic benefit he might accrue from the partnership, and we surely look forward to his tax returns and other financial disclosures and plenty of congressional investigations that would clearly disprove any such notion, but in age when Ted Cruz’s dad was probably in on the Kennedy assassination and Hillary Clinton is still getting around well enough to run a satanic child sex ring in the back of a pizzeria there will always be a nagging suspicion. Enough of the old Cold War-era Republicans are still around still around in the Senate and even the House to perhaps allow for a congressional investigation, and we wish them well, even if it does wind up with only more conspiracy theories

— Bud Norman

Capitalism and Its Current Respectability

Lately the reports from The New York Times and The Washington Post and the rest of the respectable press have a strange new respect for the old-fashioned Republican sort of free markets economics, which we attribute entirely to president-elect Donald Trump.

Although Trump won’t take office for another five weeks or so, he’s already made news by cajoling the Carrier heating and air conditioning company into keeping 800 jobs that were slated for Mexico in Indiana, “tweeted” the cancellation of an order with Boeing for a new Air Force One fleet over alleged cost overruns, and once again threatened any company that’s considering a foreign work force with a 35 percent tariff. All of which is news that poses a dilemma for the respectable press.

The current operational definition of a respectable press is its instinctive opposition to anything that any Republican might do, and especially Trump, but the president-elect’s unorthodox style of Republicanism is not susceptible to the usual criticisms. Trump’s meddling in Carrier’s affairs is precisely the sort of industrial policy that Democrats have long championed, and although they usually prefer the stick of punitive tax hikes to such carrots as the $7 million in tax abatements that the state of Indiana will offer it’s not enough to hang a scathing critique on. Boeing and the rest of the military-industrial complex are usually cast as the villains, and any attempt to shortchange them is usually cheered. All the tough protectionist talk that got Trump elected isn’t much different from what self-described socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders eventually forced Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to embrace.

Compelling arguments against Trump’s policies can only be found on the right, in the free market theories that until recently defined the Republican party’s economic platform, and in its desperation the respectable is suddenly willing to go there. All the stories now feature lengthy explanations of Trump’s inefficient market distortions by economists from such capitalist think-tanks as the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute or the University of Chicago or some similarly red-in-tooth-and-claw economics department, and without the usual characterization’s of “right wing” or mention of any funding they might be receiving from the Koch brothers. They’re the same names that have been in the respectable press’ rolodex the past eight years, quoted briefly in the tenth or eleventh paragraph for the sake of balance, but suddenly they’re showing up right after the lead and getting a chance to rebut the Trumponomics that is now being added for the sake of balance somewhere in the ten or the eleventh paragraph.

We’re glad to see it, being red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalists and no fans of Trump ourselves, but it seems a case of much too little and far too late. The respectable press wasn’t making such a fuss about Trump’s Republican heresies back during the Republican primary, when it might have done some good, and these days the respectable press doesn’t seem to have much influence even with with Democrats. Such disreputable Democrats as the party’s newest congressional leader, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, have long been the beneficiaries of Trump’s political donations, and they’ve always come through for him in the past, it’s hard to see how they’re suddenly going to be swayed the think-tank theories of a suddenly swept away Republican party to oppose the same sort of tax-abatement-dealing and corporate strong-arming and old-fashioned protectionism they’ve always wanted, and the respectable press will also have a hard time with that news.

The old tried-and-true ideas will surely stick around to denouement, with all the variations from those think tanks and economic departments and the help of such respectably anti-Trump conservative presses as National Review and The Weekly Standard and The Central Standard Times, even if it is eventually relegated to the tenth and eleventh paragraphs. Eventually they’ll get another try. In the meantime we’re glad to see the likes of The New York Times and The Washington Post helping out, however begrudgingly.

— Bud Norman

Rasslin’ With Power

Perhaps the two most tawdry spectacles in America are politics and professional wrestling, and president-elect Donald Trump has managed to merge them into something tawdrier yet. Trump has been a past performer in the professional rasslin’ ring, having famously shaved the head of World Wrestling Entertainment owner Vince McMahon following their “Battle of the Billionaires” at “Wrestlemania XXIII,” and now he’s recruited his past faux foe’s wife and business partner to run the Small Business Administration.

Linda McMahon is not without qualifications for the job, we must admit. Say what you will about the WWE, the McMahons have brought it from a small time local circuit to a big money-making global monopoly, and she’s also the founder and chief executive of Women’s Leadership Live, which advises independent businesswomen. In addition, she has some political experience from running a failed race for a Senate seat in Connecticut, where the “tea party” wave of 2010 didn’t quite reach, and she once staged a slapping match with her daughter for the entertainment of a crowd and has survived being kicked and body-slammed by Steve “Stone Cold” Austin‘and “tombstoned” by a behemoth named Kane, so at least she acts like she fights.

More pertinent selling points, we’re guessing, include her longstanding business relationship with Trump, the $6.5 million she contributed to his campaign, and the $5 million she’s contributed to the Trump Foundation, which supports such worthy causes as the reelection campaign of that Florida Attorney General who decided shortly after the check cleared to not pursue a case against Trump University. Trump frequently boasted during the campaign of all the favors he’d bought from politicians during his dazzling career, on the other hand, so perhaps he just considered the contributions another example of the business savvy McMahon will bring to the job, which is the very logic that got him elected.

In any case, we hold to a firm belief in the separation of politics and political wrestling, and contend that if only the founding fathers had been more farsighted they would have surely put something about in the Constitution. The last time the two came together was back in ’98 when Jesse “The Body” Ventura beat out Hubert Humphrey’s son and a perfectly reasonable Republican to become governor of Minnesota, and that did not end well. His crazy proposals for a unicameral legislature and instant run-off voting were rejected by both parties, 45 of the bills that did get passed were vetoed, he was bogged down a recall effort that focused on his use of state funds for a promotional book tour, and he left after one contentious term blaming everything on the media. Since then he’s been best known for peddling crackpot conspiracies and getting in bar fights with war heroes, and Minnesotans are still trying to remember what they were so fired-up angry about when electing him.

At the risk of sounding unfashionably elitist, we’d prefer that people in positions of political power have an innate sense of dignity that precludes them prancing around a ring in a feather boa, as “The Body” used to do, or shaving an opponent’s head, as “The Donald” once did, or getting “tombstoned” by some one-named giant in leotards or slap-fighting a daughter, as “The New Head of the Small Business Administration” has done. Presidents and their highest appointees were once recruited from the best of industry, academia, the military, sometimes the arts, oftentimes those who had proved themselves over long careers in politics, and although they frequently failed at least they did so with a certain dignified bearing. This is an age when reality shows and fake fights are all the rage, though, and with everyone so fired-up angry about something we suppose that the WWE’s newfound political was bound to happen.

— Bud Norman

Boeing, Boeing, Boing, Boing

For civic and family and purely personal reasons we have a certain affection for the Boeing Company, gigantic globalist corporate villain of creative capitalist destruction though it might well be, so naturally we were alarmed to see it was the most recent target of president-elect Donald Trump’s latest “tweet.”

“Boeing is building a brand new Air Force One for future presidents, but costs are out of control, more than $4 billion,” Trump “tweeted,” ominously adding the words “Cancel order!” Although a president-elect’s “tweet” doesn’t carry the same legal authority as an actual president’s nebulously defined executive power to renege on a contract, at least for the moment, the threatened cancellation was enough to cause a momentary dip in Boeing stock value and set off a round of harrumphing among all sorts of media. The left was reflexively appalled by any Trump “tweet,” even if it meant defending one of their usual corporate villains, the office-dwelling segments of the right were understandably worried about what’s to become of the rest of the federal government’s sizable contracts in the upcoming age of “The Art of the Deal,” even if that was a criticism of a duly elected Republican, and from our political perspective on the sidelines we’re going with our personal affection for the Boeing Company and unshakeable suspicion of this Trump fellow.

Four billion bucks does seem a lot of money for an airplane, at least by our own personal transportation standards, and probably even by the personal transportation standards of a billionaire who has famously gold-plated and leather-lined toilets on one of his fleet of jets and helicopters, and even those suspiciously lefty newspapers concede that Trump’s “tweeted” price is not far off the mark, but surely there are other considerations. There are actually two airplanes required to cope with all the exigencies of an all-out nuclear war, which unfortunately is once again one of those things that might actually happen, and both have to be outfitted with highly sophisticated defense and re-fueling systems that can survive the most devastating attacks and still coordinate communications with whatever’s left of a post-apocalyptic world. That kind of thing doesn’t come cheap, of course, and is not typically acquired by the same means as a real estate developer leaning on a less-politically-connected contractor and his immigrant workers, so we’re reduced to hoping that the president-elect is out of his league in this fight.

If Trump is willing to be the first future president to risk that post-apocalyptic scenario so be it, and we’ll just be glad he’s going down with the rest of us, but if he thinks he can get a better bid elsewhere, we’re not sure where he’d look. At this point Boeing is the only company in America with the know-how and other resources to get the job done, and even if Trump were willing to forsake his nationalist principles and find a supplier elsewhere he’d probably discover there’s no other company in the entire world up to the task. Unlike the Democratic left or what’s left of the erstwhile Republican right, Boeing finds itself in a strong negotiating position against Trump. Something in our red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalist souls abhors such a monopoly, but we can’t help liking the idea of Boeing serving as a check and balance on Trump’s presidential power.

Our beloved hometown of Wichita was transformed from a sleepy little wheat-dealing and biplane-making town into a top-50 metropolis when Boeing started cranking out round-the-clock B-29s here during World War II, and the resulting military-industrial complex drew our beloved pop here with a job at the same company. As he rose from the engineering drafting boards to the executive suites he and his colleagues helped win the Cold War with the constantly and expensively upgraded B-52, and he went on to devise some very deadly helicopters designed for the persistent smaller but still expensive wars that have followed, and in his retirement he’s been mostly pleased how those young whippersnappers who succeeded him have kept his stock holdings up, so naturally we cheer on Boeing’s success. The company pulled almost entirely out of town a while back, and is now outnumbered by the heavily-subsidized and once-hated Europeans of Airbus in the local workforce, but as a good-bye gesture Boeing gave a sweetheart deal on that huge south side factory complex and most of its job to one of its biggest subcontractors, and the Beech and Cessna and Lear plants or whatever their current corporate names are have all survived the current president’s past rhetoric against “corporate jets,” so for now we’re still the self-proclaimed “Air Capital of the World.” The family portfolio should do just as well, and we hope that the rest of capitalism fares as well.

An apparent attempt to low-ball Boeing on a previously signed and legally iron-clad deal is already alarming every other company that does business with the federal government, and given that more than 22 percent of the gross domestic product is paid for by the federal government that’s a lot of businesses, and among them are the only ones who know to get certain essential jobs done. If Trump wants to renegotiate each of the thousands or hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of contracts that have already been negotiated by the government he now heads he can go right on ahead, but we expect it will prove more costly than that Trump University case he recently settled for a mere $25 million. Free markets and an independent judiciary are two of the essential bulwarks against autocracy, even when they’re monopolistic and legalistic, and we’re glad of it.

— Bud Norman

A Climate of Conspiracies, With Sauce

The Washington Post has been a veritable feast of fascinating news stories lately, but on Monday two in particular caught our eye. One was about former Vice President Al Gore’s long chat with president-elect Donald Trump about anthropogenic global warming, the other concerned some heavily armed guy who walked into the trendy Comet Ping Pong pizza parlor  in a fashionable neighborhood of the District of Columbia in search of the satanic pedophilia ring that recent Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is said to be running in the back room.

Gore described his conversation with Trump as “extremely interesting” in a brief statement to the press as he exited Trump Tower in New York City, and we don’t doubt that he overstated it one little bit, but somehow that pizza parlor story seemed even more intriguing. We’ve been following the “Pizzagate” saga as it has unfolded in the far lunatic fringes of the internet the past few weeks, and the apparent unsuccessful rescue attempt was too tasty a plot twist to pass by.

For those of you who have been relying on the more reliable news sources and are therefore unaware of “Pizzagate,” it’s hard to sum the story thus far. Suffice to say that it began when someone Wikileaked a bunch of Clinton consigliere John Podesta’s e-mails, and they revealed his friendship with a fashionably weird performance artist whose work is said to include occult illusions, and is in turn a friend of that Lady Gaga woman you can’t help but have heard of, who is a well-known shape-shifting Illuminati reptilian, and there were also frequent references to “hot dogs” and “pizza,” which are apparently pedophile slang for sex with young boys and young girls, and Comet Ping Pong’s owner and staff do seem to have odd taste in art and music, and it has hosted Clinton fundraising events, so what more proof do you need that she’s running a satanic pedophilia ring in the back room?

That and a few more coincidences have persuaded numerous concerned citizens around the country to issue death threats against Comet Ping Pong’s owner and staff, as well the neighboring businesses, which have some suspicious signage that suggest they’re also connected by a system of underground tunnels, and on Sunday it apparently prompted that well-armed fellow to enter the pizza parlor and fire a couple of shots from a rifle in the course of what he reportedly told police was a “self-investigation.” The suspect is a North Carolina man whose friends and describe him as devoted father and tenderhearted idealist, and one speculated that “He most likely really believes this conspiracy theory. He’s a good guy with the best of intentions. He probably saw himself as more on a hero mission to save children than anything else.” All of which seems plausible, given how very stupid tenderhearted idealists can be, and should provide a warning to any others to await more conclusive proof of a satanic pedophilia ring before rushing into a pizzeria armed with a rifle, shotgun, handgun, and folding knife.

To the more conspiratorial way of thinking, though, it just goes to show how shrewd these satanic pedophiles can be. Within hours of the suspect’s arrest there were several YouTube videos explaining how the entire incident was staged to discredit the people who are exposing “Pizzagate,” with one of the theorists boasting that he had predicted just such a “false flag” operation some days ago, and the true believers were more convinced than ever that somebody needs to storm that pizzeria with plenty of guns to save those poor children who are surely suffering in some subterranean hellhole. They all note that there’s no definitive proof that they’re wrong about any of it, except perhaps for the testimony of that heavily armed guy who reportedly spent 45 minutes looking around the place, including the rooms where he had to shoot off the locks, but of course he’s just an actor hired to play the part, and in one of those weird coincidences he apparently has acted in a couple of low-budget flicks filmed near his hometown, so we expect the conspiracy theorizing will continue for a while.

We’d love to slough it all off as one of those crazy crazes that always happen, and no more harmful to the public good than mood rings or pet rocks or that Lady Gaga woman’s admittedly inexplicable popularity, but lately such conspiracy theories have been threatening policy. The whole “Pizzagate” story seems to have started with Alex Jones’ crazypants “InfoWars” program, probably the country’s leading purveyor of crackpot conspiracy theories, where president-elect Trump has appeared as a guest and praised the host’s “awesome reputation,” and Trump has also insinuated that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya, a theory he has since claimed credit for debunking, alleged that President George W. Bush lied about the intelligence regarding Iraq’s weapons programs in order to start a war for nefarious purposes, and urged everyone to read The National Enquirer’s claim that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s father was in on the Kennedy assassination.

Although Trump has backed off his campaign promise to have former Secretary of State Clinton jailed for her use of a private e-mail server, which Trump had urged the Russian government to hack, and now says that she and her husband are good people he wouldn’t want to hurt, which is also fueling some intriguing conspiracy theories over on the leftward lunatic fringes of the internet, he hasn’t yet used the “Pizzagate” hashtag in any of his recent “Tweets.” He’s only a couple of degrees of separation away from it, though, as his controversial choice for national security advisor, Gen. Michael Flynn, has “tweeted” about Clinton that “U decide — NYPD Blows Whistle on New Hillary E-mails: Money Laundering, Sex Crimes w Children, etc … MUST READ!” Putting aside the depressing fact that presidential advisors write such prose, even The Washington Post conceded that it wasn’t necessarily a reference to “Pizzagate,” and that Flynn might have been referring to other news about both Clinton’s relationship with the convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, whom they rightly note also has a documented relationship with Trump. Yet Flynn’s son, who is also a paid advisor to the presidential advisor, has more blatantly “tweeted” that “Until #Pizzagate proven to be false, it’ll remain a story. The left seems to forget #PodestaEmails and the many ‘coincidences’ tied to it.” Given all the proof he might need in in those scarily quotation-marked coincidences, and his military upbringing, perhaps he’ll be the next to storm that trendy pizzeria.

Our president-elect has also peddled the conspiracy theory that anthropogenic global warming is a hoax concocted by the Chinese government to cripple American industry, so it would have been indeed been extremely interesting to hear him talk about it with past presidential popular vote winner and electoral college loser Gore, whose post-political career has mostly been devoted to peddling the scientific theory that man-made air pollutants should have drowned Trump’s fancy Mar-a-Lago resort on the Florida coast by now. We’re skeptical of Gore’s theory, for reasons that are even more complicated to explain than “Pizzagate,” but we find Trump’s idea that the Chinese came up with it just as laughable, so the conversation would have made for an interesting “thread” in some internet chat room or another. Alas, all we know of it is Gore’s unsatisfactorily brief statement that “I had a lengthy and productive session with the president-elect. It was a sincere search for areas of common ground. I had a meeting before hand with Ivanka Trump. The bulk of the time was with the president-elect, Donald Trump. I found it an extremely interesting conversation, and to be continued. I’m going to leave it at that.”

Gore can leave it at that, but the conspiracy theorists should be able to come up with a few plots to be continued. Ivanka Trump is said to be the typically fashionable high society New York City sort of Democrat that her father was until a few short years ago, and he admit she’s the one behind his liberal maternity leave policy proposal, and she’s in the business of selling very expensive clothing and jewelry to rich jet-setters who tend to believe in anthropogenic global warming, and she’s apparently inviting Gore into the sphere of presidential influence, so perhaps another one of Trump’s campaign promises will shape-shift. The true believers in Trump won’t mind if he continues Obama’s carbon regulations, probably not even those West Virginia coal miners, not when there’s satanic pedophilia rings going in the back rooms of trendy pizzerias.

— Bud Norman

The Democrats’ Dilemma, Not Ours

These are the times that try our traditional Republican souls, but we suppose it’s even harder on a Democratic.

A mere eight years ago the Democrats won the White House back with the most hyped candidate in the history of presidential, along with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, clear control of the House of Representatives, and had enough votes on the Supreme Court to get away with its most grandiose ambitions. Those congressional majorities quickly vanished, now the White House has also been lost, and it seems likely that a conservative Supreme Court will be getting in the way of Democrats for another ten to twenty years no matter how future elections play out. Republicans control most of the state and local governments, too, with the Democrats’ dominance confined to the west coast and the upper northeast and a few big but shrinking cities in between.

The latest election results don’t represent a clear victory for the Republican party we once knew or the conservatism it once represented, but there’s no way to read them but as a resounding defeat for the Democrats and the liberalism is has come to represent. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton won the popular vote due to running up the score in the west coast and the upper northeast and those few big but shrinking cities in between, and her party also won most of the Senate votes thanks to two Democratic candidates in California and no one running in Texas, but pretty much everywhere else the Democrats and their ideology were overwhelmingly rejected. Obamacare and the Iran deal and all those executive actions on immigration and everything else the Democrats have accomplished in the past years has been found wanting and will soon be erased, the noisy and angry race-class-gender sort of identity politics that the Democrats have peddled to ascendant minority-majority for the past many years has been beaten by an equally noisy and angry identity politics among a still mostly white and working class and almost entirely male or female population that doesn’t feel the need apologize for its race or class or gender, and at the moment the Democrats seem out of any other ideas. Whatever they get in the way of infrastructure spending or protectionist trade barriers or isolationist foreign policy will come courtesy of the reviled Republican president-elect Donald Trump, and none of it is likely to help the Democrats’ future electoral prospects, or anything else for that matter.

This has prompted some long overdue soul-searching within the Democratic Party, along with the usual finger-pointing and squabbling, but so far the results have not been promising. Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, who was Speaker of the House back in the good old days of six years ago but has been consigned to minority leader status ever since, has somehow retained her leadership position despite losing 63 of her caucus’ votes to challenger Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio, and think the Democrats missed a chance there. Seventy-six-year-old Pelosi represents a district in San Francisco, a sanctuary city for illegal immigrants and every sort of race and class and gender identity refugee you can think of, and was the one who made sure that Obamacare passed so that we could as see what was in it and pushed that trillion dollar infrastructure spending “stimulus” boondoggle and pretty much everything else that voters have now soundly rejected. Ryan seems a rather middle-of-the-road to Democrat to our old-fashioned Republican eyes, but he’s only 43 years old and represents a district in Youngstown, a hard luck town chock full of the sorts of disgruntled white folks who used to vote for Democrats but are lately responsible for the Republicans’ monopoly of political power, so he might have been able to drag the party at least slightly closer to where most of the country is.

The Democrats are also forced to choose a new National Chairman or Chairwoman or Chairperson of Indeterminate Gender, the last two women who held the post having been forced out by scandals of collusion with Clinton, and thus far the leading contender seems to be Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota. He’s also gone by Keith Hakim, Keith X, Keith X Ellison, Keith Muhammad and other variations during his long career from the virulently anti-white Nation of Islam to a more mainstream form of Islam that is merely anti-western to his current status as America’s first Muslim congressman, and although his views on all those newfangled gender issues seems more in keeping with Democratic scripture than the Koran and he’s right on all the minimum wage and corporate taxes stuff he’s got all sorts of ties to some some unsavory segments of the Muslim world. At a time when a relatively recent Republican is winning a majority of the electoral votes by stoking the public’s very rational fears of radical Islamist terrorists, Ellison seems an odd choice as the chairman of a major American political party.

Both Pelosi’s and Ellison’s races are a result of the predictable divide in the party between those who feel that its liberalism is at fault for their predicament and those who blame it for not being liberal enough. There’s a sizable segment of the party that believes that should have gone with the self-described socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and although that’s based on some polling from ages ago and doesn’t take into consideration that incredible amount of opposition research any Republican could have unleashed on that unkempt nutcase it’s at least theoretically possible. Another segment blames Sanders’ insurgent primary challenge to Clinton for making her unpopular among the most idealistic sorts of Democrats who’d prefer someone less indebted to Wall Street and corporate boardrooms, as if Clinton’s appalling record of dishonesty and corruption was already obvious, and as if such idealistic Democrats were a significant voting bloc, but we suppose that’s also theoretically possible. The 70-year-old Clinton will probably still have some sway in the party, although she not only but she lost to the reviled Trump, and 67 year old Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts is probably the most prominent high-cheekboned face of the Democrats, but a party of scolding old white women will have a hard time going up against a party of angry old white men, and we’ve seen enough of those arguments to know that it won’t do anyone any good.

Not being Democrats, we’ll leave to them to sort it out. We used to be Republicans, and we’ve got our own worries.

— Bud Norman