Trump’s Inevitable Descent into Helsinki

There are still a a few of President Donald Trump’s die-hard supporters and a couple more reluctant fans among our readership, mostly family members and old friends, and they occasionally let us know how weary they are of our constant criticisms. Like all Trump fans they seem to relish blunt talk, though, so we’ll just come right and out say that Trump has just concluded the most disastrous and disgraceful presidential trip in the modern history of diplomacy.

We’ve already written out our aghast objections to Trump’s behavior at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Belgium, where his bully boy diplomacy clearly weakened the alliance despite his parting boasts it was stronger than ever. Between slaps to the forehead we also expressed our disfavor with his behavior in Britain, where he insulted the Prime Minister and lied that he didn’t and acted like a stereotypically boorish American tourist around the Queen and annoyed the general population of both the United Kingdom as well as Ireland, and didn’t get any lucrative deals except for some much-need publicity for a struggling golf course he owns in Scotland.

Somehow, however, Trump saved the worst for the last with his much-ballyhooed meeting with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in Finland. One hardly knows where to begin the describing the awfulness of the debacle, but we might as well start with Trump meeting Putin in the first place.

The appearance of the American president and the Russian dictator standing as equals on a stage with festooned with equal numbers of American and Russian flags was a needless concession to a tin-pot dictatorship that has lately been invading its neighbors, propping up brutal Middle Eastern regimes, shooting down civilian aircraft, assassinating domestic enemies on our allies’ soil, as well as launching a three-pronged cyber attack on America’s last presidential election. To compound this offense to America’s dignity, Trump also told a whole world’s media that he blamed “both sides” for the recent unpleasantness in Russo-American relations.

Trump had little to say about Putin’s invasion of his neighbors in Georgia and Ukraine except to nod as Putin said they’d agreed to disagree. Trump also had little to say about Putin’s support for those brutal Middle Eastern regimes, except to say he hoped to work out a deal that would also make Israel happy, which is a plausible but imperfect argument and one too damned complicated for Trump to make. Trump had nothing to say about Russia shooting down civilian aircraft or killing state enemies and the occasional unintended British life on British soil, and what he said about Russia’s three-pronged cyber attack on the past American presidential election was most disgusting of all.

The day Trump left on his disastrous diplomatic tour the special counsel investigation into the “Russian thing” announced a detailed and well-sourced indictment of 12 Russian officials for meddling, and laid out a convincing explanation of how they did it, and by now the only people who harbor any doubts about Russia’s role are Sean Hannity and this guy we know from Kirby’s Beer Store and Putin and Trump himself.

Trump acknowledged that all of his advisors had “said they think it’s Russia,” but added “I have President Putin — he’s just said it’s not Russia.” Trump said he couldn’t imagine any reason why Putin would have favored him in the election, although Putin later told that international press that he did indeed favor Trump, and Trump added that “I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.” Unless you’re Sean Hannity or that guy at Kirby’s or another unusually die-hard and fact-resistant Trump fan, it was an humiliating performance, and raises all sorts of suspicions about that “Russia thing.”

Trump was conspicuously polite to the Russian dictator, especially in contrast to his characteristically rude treatment of the leaders of our democratically-elected allies, and was most harsh about his past two presidential predecessors and that “witch hunt” of a special counsel investigation that just handed down those detailed and well-sourced indictments of 12 Russian officials, and went on a rant about why the DNC’s computer server wasn’t seized and how frustrated he was that even a President of the United States couldn’t any answers. It’s hard to concoct any explanation that’s not fishy, but the die-hard fans are giving it their best.

The general gist of it seems to be that the “Russia thing” really is a “witch hunt” no matter what all those Trump appointees might say, and that the real scandal that will get the real villains shot for treason is on that DNC computer server, and that a friendship with such a puny economy and tin-pot dictatorship as Russia will do more to make America great than those freeloading Euro-trash in the European Union and United Kingdom or Great Britain or England or whatever you call it ever could. They’re also citing America’s past sins and making the “blame America first” arguments that the Democratic left once used to justify Democratic weakness in the Cold War and President Obama’s awful apology tours, and they’ve forgetten how outraged they used to be.

So far, though, neither Trump nor any of his apologists have yet been able to convincingly point to anything tangible that the great dealmaker Trump got out of this trip.

— Bud Norman

Reality Winner and the Winners of Reality

The great British novelist Evelyn Waugh used to come up with some of fictions’ most fascinating characters and give them the most delightfully ironic names, but we doubt even he could have invented a sweet-faced multi-lingual 25-year-old Air Force veteran and outspoken liberal and alleged national security secrets leaker called Reality Winner. In the age of a reality show president and his reality show presidency, though, such an unlikely character with such an improbable name is an actual person in the news.

Winner has been arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and charged with handing a purloined National Security Agency document about Russia’s meddling in the past American presidential election, and the rest of the story is believable only because no one could have made it up. It’s a mere subplot in a broader storyline about what President Donald Trump calls “the Russia thing with Trump and Russia,” which was already darned complicated, and Winner’s tale complicates it further.

So far all we know about the Russia thing with Trump and Russia comes courtesy of people with access to information to information they have leaked to the press, and what has then been confirmed the administration’s legally plausible but not altogether reassuring claim that the information was illegally obtained. Some of the damaging and inadvertently verified information has apparently come from the feuding innermost circles of the top-most Trump administration, most of it seems to have come from the permanent government bureaucracy and the holdovers from the President Barack Obama administration that are hanging around while the Trump administration gets around to filling that remaining 78 percent of appointed positions they’ve yet to name a nominee for, and for now there’s no telling where the rest of it has come from. Except for the administrations claims that the sources are all fake and must be immediately be locked up, we’d be inclined to dismiss it all as fake news.

The Trump administration has vowed to plug all those leaks, for principled reasons of law enforcement as well as naked self-interest, but so far the only alleged leaker they’ve nabbed is the aforementioned and improbably named Winner.

In the inevitable Facebook photos of a 25-year-old she looks like one of those beguiling young hipster women who hang around The Vagabond hipster bar where we argue with a gray-ponytailed but right-wing hipster friend of ours, and from the inevitable Facebook postings she seems to share the same fashionably left-wing political opinions. Unlike most young woman of our acquaintance, though, she’s fluent in the languages of Farsi, Pashto, and Dari, only two of which we were even previously aware of, and instead of going to college she volunteered her linguistic skills to the Air Force. After an honorable discharge Winner and her hard-to-find skill set found work with a private data-analysis company that contracted with the National Security Agency, where her impeccable Air Force record earned her a high security clearance, and at that point she allegedly came across an NSA document about how the Russian meddling had extended to the point that they tried to influence some local-level vote-counting.

She’s alleged to have copied the document and passed it on to an internet news site called The Intercept, which we had also previously never heard of, and so far as we can tell that’s why she’s the first alleged leaker to be nabbed. So far even the most sympathetic press accounts don’t do her legal case much good, noting that the neophyte leaker seems to have used office copy machines with their hidden code words and made other rookie mistakes, and they unhelpfully note all those Facebook posting about her disdain for Trump, and without drawing any conclusions we’d advise she hire a better attorney than the Trump administration is able to retain these days.

Trump’s stalwart defenders will be pleased that at least one of those leakers has been allegedly nabbed, and hope that others will be deterred from releasing any further discomfiting information, but no matter Winner’s fate they might still come out losers. The charges against Winner were discovered when the Intercept news site submitted its documents for government verification, which were duly confirmed in order to bring the charges, and so far a lot of leaks from more-savvy sources have been similarly confirmed. It doesn’t amount to anything undeniable, not yet, but there’s still a torrent of leaks from the feuding innermost circles of the White House and the vast bureaucracy that’s still unmanned and all the rest of it.

Should Winner be proved guilty of the charges alleged against her she’ll deserve the prison time that entails, as far as we’re concerned, yet we’ll hope her youthful idealism will carry through the consequences. As always we’ll be hoping that reality ultimately wins, which it always does, eventually, but in these days of reality shows days there’s no telling.

— Bud Norman

If Only Obama Knew

Will Rogers used to preface his humorous observations on the political scene by stating that “All I know is what I read in the papers,” which always got a big laugh back in the Great Depression days, and it’s still a good line for a folksy humorist. President Barack Obama is fond of the same disclaimer, however, but it doesn’t suit his job as well.

The latest development that the president only became aware of by reading the morning papers was former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail account. The practice posed a security risk, kept records from public scrutiny, and seems in violation of federal regulations, so we can only imagine the the president’s alarm upon learning about such a serious matter. One might wonder how the president failed to notice it during the four Clinton served as his Secretary of State, during which time one can only assume there was some e-mail communication between the two, but so far no one in the press has been so rude as to ask about it. If they ever do, the president will probably have to await the morning papers to learn of his response.

If not for the press, a number of serious situations might have entirely escaped the president’s attention. The invaluable Sheryl Atkisson, demonstrating again the lese majeste that led to her departure from CBS News, has helpfully compiled a list of seven other times that the president professed to be shocked by press accounts of major stories. It starts way back in the early days of the Obama administration with Air Force One buzzing the State of Liberty and frightening the understandably skittish New Yorkers, continues with the Fast and Furious gun-running scheme at the Department of Justice, then the sex scandal involving Central Intelligence Agency director Gen. David Petraeus, and of course the Internal Revenue Service’s harassment of conservative non-profit groups, then the seizure of phone records of Associated Press reporters, then the National Security Agency’s spying on foreign leaders, and then the phony record keeping to cover up the substandard care being provided by the Veterans Administration. One of the commenters at Atkisson’s site mentions several more, including the problems leading up to the disastrous roll-out of the Obamacare web site, but they’re too numerous mention.

That portion of the public still devoted to the president seems willing to give him a pass on these problems, since he presumably didn’t know they were going on would surely have done something about it if he did, but the rest of us are entitled to some concern about his inability to keep abreast of what’s going on in his government. We suppose the president can’t keep up on everything, what with all the golfing and fund-raising and appeasing his job entails, but Air Force One and the DOJ and the CIA and the IRS and the NSA and the VA and the State Department are all under the purview of the executive brand and ultimately the responsibility of the chief executive. We can’t recall the heads of any high officials rolling for their failure to notify the president of the major developments unfolding on his watch, except for former Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sibelius, who also seemed surprised to find out about that Obamacare web site, and the president never seems at all embarrassed to say that some ink-stained wretches who have to file Freedom of Information Act requests and wait to get their phone calls returned and accept “no comments” on the first many tries somehow knew better than the president what was going on in the executive branch.

Perhaps the president was aware of these many problems as they occurred but was unable or unwilling to deal with them, but if so that is a problem. Perhaps the government is simply too vast for any one person to know what it is up to, but if so that’s also a problem, and one that the president seems determined to compound by vastly expanding both the government and the executive branch’s control over it. The biggest problem is that if you only know what you read in the papers, you don’t know much.

— Bud Norman

Another Generation of Disillusioned Youth

Some of those youngsters who adorned themselves with Barack Obama tattoos are probably regretting the choice. The tattoo craze might prove as permanent as the ink, but the Obama fad has begun to fade.

Anecdotal evidence of the president’s declining coolness is abundant, from the jokes that the late-night comedians are at long last making to the conversations overheard at the hipster hangouts, but more quantifiable proof is now available from Harvard University’s Institute of Politics. The impeccably prestigious institution has published a poll showing that 52 percent of the under-25 set would now like to see the president ousted from office, with only 41 percent still approving of his performance.

Obamacare is cited as the reason for the president’s sudden unpopularity among a cohort that overwhelmingly supported him in the past two elections, and this strikes us as the most likely explanation. Most of the young people we know had somehow gleaned the impression that Obamacare would provide them with unlimited health care at some rich guy’s expense, and now that it has become unavoidably apparent to even the most determinedly uninformed among them that they will be paying hefty fines to remain uninsured in order to subsidize some geezer’s hip replacement in the biggest generational transfer of wealth in history their enthusiasm for the law seems to have waned.

The difficulty of finding a full-time job that will generate the wealth being transferred might also be a factor, although many young people have yet to contemplate the possibility that a president’s policies might have anything to do with that and are still open to the suggestion that it’s the Republicans’ fault for failing to fully fund green energy or something, and it would be pure wishful thinking to imagine that young people have noticed the president’s failed foreign policy or any of the various scandals that have long swirled around the White House. Young people love their cell phones and are well aware that Obama’s National Security Agency is keeping tabs on them, and even though they post every thought in their hairy heads on Facebook or Twitter they express outrage at the violation of their privacy, but the Internal Revenue Service’s harassment of dissident groups and the Justice Department’s gun-running to Mexican drug gangs and such things are of little concern.

The Harvard poll indicates that the young folks’ disillusionment with Obama has not resulted in a newfound affection for the Republicans, and we suspect that rather than becoming conservatives they’re still nurturing class resentments and hoping for the unlimited health care at some rich guy’s expense, but the numbers are bad news for the Democrats nonetheless. If the young voters stay home in next year’s mid-term elections the Democrats will miss them bad, and there might even be a few former Obama supporters showing up to vote for a Republican. Looking further into the electoral future, the Democrats’ dream of a life-long lock on those voters now seems somewhat far-fetched.

Worse yet for the Democrats, many the recently wised-up young folks will be less inclined to fall for political fads in the future. They might even begin to question the Democratic premise that government knows best and can always be trusted so long as the right party is in power, and be willing to at least consider the arguments of those mean old Republicans. Back in an earlier era of disillusioned youth The Who had a big hit with a song called “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” and today’s youngsters could do worse for an anthem.

— Bud Norman

Manipulating Democracy

America seems to have become inured to scandal, judging by the apparent lack of attention being paid to an allegation that the unemployment statistics released just before the past presidential election were manipulated to benefit the incumbent.

The claim was made in Monday’s New York Post, but except for the perfunctory scoffing by the White House spokesman, a promised probe by the implicated Commerce Department, and yet another investigation by the Republicans in the House of Representatives, it seems to have drawn little attention outside the constantly indignant conservative talk radio shows. Such insouciance is hard to account for, given the potentially history-changing implications of the charge.

The New York Post is a conservative publication by the lax standards of the New York press, and therefore lacks requisite cachet to fuel a media frenzy, but its record of accuracy compares well to its more fashionable competitors. Although the story cites an unnamed source, which is usually sufficient to ignore any scandal involving Democrats, it also documents that name a specific employee involved in the deception who is quoted as saying he acted under orders from higher-ranking bureaucrats. Given that many knowledgeable observers were skeptical of the suddenly and serendipitously rosy unemployment numbers at the time, including the former chief executive officer of General Electric, the story also has a sobering plausibility.

If true, the story warrants far more attention that it has received. Manipulating such crucial data as the unemployment rate calls into question the accuracy of all government reports, with dire consequences for the markets that rely on the information to make that the decisions that drive the economy. Doing so for partisan political reasons also calls into question the results of the election, with dire consequences for democracy and a free society. As the latest in a series of scandals involving a politicized bureaucracy acting on behalf of the one party committed to its continual growth, it could even call into question whether we still have a democracy.

The story seems all the more plausible following revelations of the Internal Revenue Service harassing conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, the Department of Justice’s apparent lack of interest in the matter or anything else that might prove embarrassing to the administration, the National Security Agency’s inordinate interest in the phone records of average Americans, the National Park Service’s heavy-handed efforts to exacerbate the inconvenience of a partial government shutdown, and numerous other cases of government gone wild. The notion that only one or two low-level employees are responsible for a deceptive jobs report is not plausible, and even if it were the notion that they expected to get away it is still scandalous.

— Bud Norman

An Innocent Bystander

Two of the bigger fiascos currently swirling around Washington cannot be blamed on President Barack Obama, we are told, because the poor fellow didn’t even know about them.

By now everyone in America is aware that the $634 million computer program that was supposed to enroll a grateful nation in Obamacare simply does not work, but Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has assured the nation that her boss didn’t find out about it until the rest of us did. The revelation that the National Security Agency has been eavesdropping on German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the leaders of various other allies has been more widely reported in the snooped-upon countries, where the formerly Obama-crazed citizenry are now marching in the streets with “Hope and Change” replaced by “Stasi 2.0” and other similarly snooty slogans beneath the president’s famously chin-upturned and stylized visage, but Sen. Dianne Feinstein and others are nonetheless anxious for the American public to know the president was as surprised by the news as anyone else.

This might even be true, but if so it is not so reassuring as the apologists probably intend. One likes to think that the president is a bit more au courant on the latest bureaucratic computer glitches and cloak-and-dagger international intrigues than the common folk, after all, and it’s downright to worrisome to contemplate that he is just as uninformed as the average voter. There used to be a notion that the chief executives of large organizations were ultimately responsible for anything that happened along their chain of command, pithily surmised by the “Buck Stops Here” that adorned the Oval Office desk of Harry Truman, and it also discomfiting to think this standard is no longer in effect at the White House. The president’s most loyal acolytes will likely be satisfied by the belief that their man had nothing to do with these messes, only the people he appointed to positions of responsibility, but those less enamored will be left to wonder why he hasn’t fired the incompetent idiots who didn’t at least give him a heads-up before their best efforts hit the fan.

It causes a certain queasy feeling, in fact, that the Obama apologists are so seemingly confident they can successfully plead ignorance to acquit their man of responsibility for what happens during his time in office. So far they have done well at convincing a significant portion of the country that Obama is an innocent and righteously indignant bystander to the bad things that are happening in the country, well enough that Obama himself can claim with a straight face to be as angry as anyone about the state of the government, so perhaps the confidence is realistic. Still, it is hard to see what good can come of having an innocent bystander as the president of the United States.

— Bud Norman

As the Left Turns

Our conservative friends have been feeling quite dispirited for the past five years or so, for obvious reasons, but these days we are noticing a growing glumness among our liberal pals as well.

There has been a palpable sense of disappointment with th president among our leftward acquaintances at least as far back the past presidential election, when it was not yet so pronounced that they couldn’t be whipped back into the party line by the frightening prospect of the fascist nightmare of fiscal responsibility and free-market contraception that would have surely followed the election of Mitt Romney, but recent events have clearly exacerbated the gloom. Revelations about the unnecessarily widespread snooping by the National Security Agency prompted some tentative grumbling about the government, the administration’s recent demands for missile strikes against the Syrian regime have prompted unprecedented criticisms of the administration, and there are signs of discontent among the usually reliable constituencies about other policies of the once-infallible President Barack Obama.

The NSA scandal was offensive enough to liberal sensibilities, featuring as it did a heroically unshaven whistle-blower and a George W. Bush-era program that had been expanded beyond even Bushian levels of national security state snoopiness, but the Syrian situation has been an especially bitter betrayal by their former hero. Obama had been the community-organizing peacenik with the courage to lift his chin and sneer at the bloodthirsty cowboy Bush’s unilateral and congressionally-unauthorized war against some harmless and loveable Baathist dictatorship in the Middle East over some unverified and slightly suspect accounts of chemical weapons, which along with the vague promises of hope and change and quasi-socialism were the reasons that liberals so adored him, and when Obama announced his intention to go to war against a Baathist dictatorship in the Middle East based on some slightly more suspicious accounts of chemicals, and without the broad-based coalition or congressional approval that Bush had somehow put together before his war, it was a bit more than the true-believing Obama supporter could bear. Throw in the undeniable ineptness of the entire Obama foreign compared to the supposedly stupid Bushies, on top of the apparent failure of the peace-through-conflict-studies that Obama attempted with such earnestness, and it’s downright infuriating to even the most mellow liberal.

Cravenly political types such as Rep. Nancy Pelosi and former Vermont governor and erstwhile liberal standard-bearer How Dean have remained loyal to Obama, and they’ll no doubt rope in a few more for the upcoming votes on war in Syria, but the liberals whose careers are not so closely connected to the political fortunes of the Democratic party are clearly more skeptical about the president’s war plans. The demonstrations haven’t reached any Bush-era levels, of course, but the grousing from the left has been widespread enough to require a begrudging acknowledgment by right-winters of a sudden intellectual consistency among the left. We are no fans of the Code Pink coalition of crazily anti-war women, but we have to admit to a slight respect for their heckling of Secretary of State John Kerry during testimony before the Senate, where he was also forced to give them some credit for maintaining the principles he had so foolishly endorsed in his long-haired youth, and it’s embarrassing to admit how much we enjoyed the spectacle of Kerry suffering the Alinskyite indignity of the at-home demonstration usually reserved for corporate executives and Republican politicians and other approved villains. Polling indicates the sentiment is widespread among the liberals less inclined to such tactics as home invasions, and the discontent is spreading into other issues.

Conservatives should be heartened to note that 40,000 longshoremen have broken ranks with the AFL- CIO over the union’s support for Obamacare, which they blame for all the costs and problems that conservatives have long warned of. The union movement in general has lately been restive about the president’s signature legislation, and when the equally crucial youth vote figures out they’re expected to sign up for more insurance than they need to pay for some old geezer’s hip replacement yet another loyal constituency will be in revolt. Should African-Americans ever notice their collective unemployment rate has been remained while their collective wealth has declined yet another key group of supporters might be less enthusiastic about voting Democrat come the next election, and even the oh-so-politically-correct arts establishment might been noticing that Obamacare has it out for them. The crucial academic community is suddenly under the administration’s regulatory sights, the press is still smarting from the Justice Department’s nosiness in the phone records of the Associated Press and even the legal threats against a Fox News reporter, and Obama know finds himself in the unusual position of being out of favor with the opinion-making establishment.

This turn of events will likely embolden the president’s conservative opponents, especially those who take a principled stand against his war aims, and it will be good to see some revived spirits among the ranks. Still, one hopes there won’t be any of the predictable overreach, or any unrealistic hope that the lefties have at least com around to the right way of thinking. Liberal opposition to the war has little to do with the conservative’s distrust of half-hearted action, and instead only resents the half of a heart that Obama is putting into it, and the liberal solution to Obamacare’s increasingly obvious flaws is a fully-fledged socialist system. Should the Republicans overplay their hands in the upcoming budget-ceiling debates and its inevitable Obamacare issues they might once again find themselves in the same bogeyman role that Romney wound up playing.

Even so, it’s nice to see the opposition as irked as we are for a change.

— Bud Norman