Can't Get Out of the Kitchen
#13--Austere blogger tries to keep his cool.
Context & Perspective: When I was in elementary school, in 1961, half of Bel-Air burned down (484 homes ). Here’s Joan Didion on the 1975 fires [thanks to alert reader J.E.]:
"It was Thanksgiving morning, 1975. A Santa Ana wind was just dying after blowing in off the Mojave for three weeks and setting 69,000 acres of Los Angeles County on fire."
This punk song came out 15 years ago. It seemed old and tired then, though now it has become a beloved anthem for some of us.
Maybe the current California fire season is worse than earlier fire seasons. But it sure doesn’t feel like it here.
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Here’s the amazing Rosetta Tweet of Trump's presidency so far:.
It would be really great if the people within the Trump Administration, all well-meaning and good (I hope!), could stop hiring Never Trumpers, who are worse than the Do Nothing Democrats. Nothing good will ever come from them!
He's President of the United States. Been president for almost three years. He's now realizing his administration is stocked with people who hate him? It's like he just discovered he's a real estate developer.
P.S.: He’s about to hire another one: Chad Wolf, currently slated to be acting DHS secretary, seems to be opposed by border-controllers as a former cheap-tech-labor lobbyist who’s done his best to thwart those pursuing Trump’s immigration agenda. ..
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Reckless Driving? How About Annoying Driving? When I was back East recently, anti-Trump friends almost convinced me to upgrade my label for Trump’s Ukraine behavior to “improper” and “indefensible”—just still not a “high crime”. But I can’t do it.
As friend J.E. says, we all know basically what was going on: Trump was leaning on Ukraine to investigate Ukraine’s possible involvement in the 2016 election, and also the Burisma energy company that employed the son of his possible Democratic rival. How bad was that? It’s not enough to say nothing really happened—No Harm, No Foul. If the behavior’s bad enough, it doesn’t matter that nothing happened. And you can say the issue should be decided by the 2020 election (I say that)—but this doesn’t absolve you of the responsibility to decide what you think about it.
If Trump had said to Ukraine “You get the aid after you deposit $20 million in this Swiss bank account,” the verdict would be clear. Likewise if he’d attempted to manufacture false evidence against Biden. But he doesn’t seem to have done that. And the Biden family involvement in Ukraine stinks: what did Hunter Biden do for his $50-80,000 a month? Maybe he was just selling his name as a way to give the impression of strong U.S. support for Burisma. That’s bad enough. But what if he could also call in a little help from his father, as he seems to have done in some earlier cases? Trump’s allowed to pursue corruption, even abroad, even if it hurts his political rivals. And even if we suspect he wouldn’t do it if it hurt his political allies (bust him for that, then).
I originally called the Ukraine business “unsavory” and “Nixonian.” That still seems right, absent evidence that, say, not only were all the possible charges against Crowdstrike and Biden obviously totally bogus but Trump knew they were. Maybe add “heavy-handed” and “hardball.” Even the most troubling detail—that Trump really wanted the Ukraine government to annnounce an investigation—has a possible non-evil explanation. Announcing an investigation would commit the Ukrainians to actually do it, in a way a private promise wouldn’t. But it would also create a bit of bad publicity to use against Biden.
I don’t trust Trump’s motives. I’m not an idiot! But you need more than suspicions, even semi-deep suspicions, to condemn, let alone censure, let alone impeach, let alone remove. Sorry.
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The most useful word for describing lots of things in politics is a word taken from the Left: "reification," which roughly (as I understand it) means ascribing a false permanence to arrangements that are actually human and transitory. A mundane example of reificiation is the post-Watergate idea, among Democratic legislators, that businesses wouldn't start “political action committees” (PACs) because, hey, they never had before! PACs were union things. Wrong!
A lot of the alleged "norms" of the Trump era are really reifications. For example, the idea that the president must notify the Gang of 8 (Congressional leaders and intelligence committee chairs of each party) before a major military mission like the raid to kill al-Baghdadi. Hey, Obama involved Congressional leaders before the Bin Laden raid! And Nancy Pelosi has never leaked any military secrets! But that doesn't mean Trump was wrong to ignore tradition and keep them in the dark. Democrats have never hated a president as much as they hate Trump. It's a new situation. Even if there were a .1% chance that there’d be a leak -- eg, someone, Democrat or Republican, thinking it’s more important to embarrass Trump than kill Baghdadi -- it was too much of a risk to take.
P.S.: Other norms that really seem like reifications: The idea that a President’s aides shouldn’t discuss politics in White House meetings. The idea that a president should never campaign in a primary against a sitting governor of his own party. The idea that you shouldn’t oppose a smart, qualified judicial nominee just because you have suspicions about his or her political background (untenable once court decisions became zero-sum political death matches, as with Roe). The idea that opinionated political writers shouldn’t intervene directly by trying to light up the Capitol switchboard with calls from readers opposing specific laws or appointments. (Why not?)
The same also goes for Speaker Nancy Pelosi's initial refusal to take a vote to start impeachment proceedings. Yes, it had always been done before. But was it always necessary? Presumably there would still have been a vote before the House actually impeached anyone. The fuss seemed manufactured.
P.P.S.: Bigger reifications involve seemingly timeless political goals that, upon reflection, turn out to be transitory means to other, more authentic goals—like the idea that Democrats should always pursue Wagner Act unionism as a way to help equalize incomes. Or, for that matter, the idea that Democrats should always try to equalize incomes, if the real goal is social (not money) equality. Don’t get me started .