Red State, Blue State

Just for the record, I do sometimes read conservative writers to gain a perspective on their points of view and to avoid the bubble-ization of my own political ideas. For example, I frequently read Karl Denninger's "Market Ticker" blog (I suppose Mr. Denninger is technically a libertarian); Peter Schiff; and, most fun of all, Redstate, which actually publishes some very good writing, much of it pretty funny. Redstate provides a lot of grist for the mill of the "Sorry, No!" blog, in fact, the photo-shop based lampoon site.

The difference between liberal and conservative often seems a species of theology in this country, and it concerns, logically enough, the relevant role of central government in everyday life. The extreme views of either side lead to equally implausible outcomes. The conservative belief in the "market" and capitalism as the solution to everything is just wildly impractical in modern times because of environmental issues. Conservatives, however, just can't see that; they honestly believe that the capitalist world, left to its own devices, will work life-and-death ecological matters out just fine without any Big Government oversight. This is the very height of naivete, and is in a sense the mirror image of the Enlightenment silliness about the "perfectibility" of man.

Liberals, on the other hand, often think that socialist/communist economic programs of mutual cooperation, centrally planned, are sustainable. They aren't. Certain features of a modern democracy can be socialistic, such as socialized health care, the post office, public education and transportation; in fact, the social democracies of Western Europe demonstrated that these systems worked best with such a socialistic framework. Those same social democracies are now in trouble because they decided to move away from such approaches toward the go-go, unfettered, Reaganesque capitalism of the United States, and now the American conservatives gleefully point out how wrecked Europe is becoming. Europe has imported not only all of our problems of wealth disparity and too-powerful central banks holding smaller countries (Ireland, Greece) in peonage, but also the practice of excessive import-based economies.

The world's power, obviously, has swung toward the East, and American political maneuvering now in an era of decline is about grabbing what you can and taking advantage of connections with the East for the future. We still have our big military, our trophy "kills" and dubious victories (bin Laden; invading Libya, where the oil is, but not Syria, where it isn't), but this isn't much compared to the general economic decline. It was kind of amazing that Barack Obama's "turnaround" in national polls centered on three events in the space of one week: revealing his "long form" birth certificate, trumping Trump at the Correspondents' Dinner, and pulling off the bin Laden hit. These pushed his sagging poll numbers up about 10%. What all three of these events had in common was that not one of them had anything to do with economic prosperity. Had they not happened, the United States would have been in the same position, no better, no worse.

The more realistic way of looking at politics in this country, at this point, is through the lens of Sheldon Wolin's "inverted totalitarianism," as described in Democracy, Inc., that is, as seeing the United States government as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Fortune 500. In such an environment, the actual "left-right" dichotomies don't matter. The utter neutering of the Tea Party caucus in the House of Representatives is an example of this process. A lot of noise is made about "debt ceilings" and "fiscal prudence" and the rest of it, but when the votes are actually taken, we can see that Wall Street, Big Business and the military-industrial complex are assured of power, as always, as ever. I read Paul Krugman's blog, as an example from the Left, and he continues the good fight against evil Republicans and rallies round the righteous Democrats, but this is all just show biz. He advocates "more government spending," and is confident that a Treasury market where the Federal Reserve is the effective buyer of 80% of the Treasury's issuance can go on forever. Or he pretends to believe such things in order to remain a Keynesian partisan and to denounce the "cruelty" of the Paul Ryan plan.

Simply street theater for the masses. All designed to earn a paycheck for the punditocracy (including, very notably, Mr. Krugman), and leaving undisturbed the actual predicament of the nation. A pathetic percentage of the working-age population with actual, decent jobs (not more than 58%), huge wealth disparities, and a globalized economy which keeps bringing the United States closer to a Third World mean.

So I read the Huffpost, and I read Redstate, with really only one thing on my mind: who's funnier today?

The faint aroma of performing SEALs

An amusing game one can play at home is the amateur forensic reconstruction of public events based on the information (reluctantly) provided to us by the powers that be. I had a pretty good time playing this game during the O.J. Simpson murder trial; for example, in response to the claim of the defense that O.J. was framed, and that the bloody glove found in the alley (which didn't fit so you must acquit) was planted there by the L.A.P.D., I wondered how, given the exigencies of the timing (the police who had just left the murder scene were the ones who found the glove, including Mark Fuhrman) the police could have managed to place not just Nicole Simpson's, but O.J. Simpson's blood inside the glove. O.J. was in Chicago at the time the glove was found. So where did they get the blood? There were attempted answers to this conundrum, but none was particularly convincing.

Thus taking us to the case du jour, the hit on Osama bin Laden. To begin with, and to restate the obvious, it is part of the Obama Doctrine that suspected terrorists, including American citizens, can be gunned down on sight, anywhere in the world, no questions asked. This is the ultimate "indefinite detention" idea at work, because once you're dead, you're pretty much detained forever. America in its post-modern phase has moved way beyond hidebound, antiquated ideas of due process. If we think you're guilty, you're guilty and we can kill you. Okay? I often think that Mr. Obama's Constitutional Law classes at the University of Chicago must have been a little unorthodox, but it doesn't really matter because except for the usual gang of malcontents in Congress (Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders), no one ever questions Obama's use of the Divine Right of Kings. You may believe that the American Revolution was about overthrowing just such tyranny. Silly you!

Still, it appears to make certain higher-ups a little nervous, this business of shooting unarmed Evil Masterminds in cold blood. Don't know why it should; it's what we do now. Nevertheless, as a result of these misgivings, and probably from watching lots of old Westerns where the Good Guy always insisted that the Bad Guy "go for his gun," a story has taken root concerning Operation Geronimo which holds that Osama bin Laden was "reaching for his AK-47" at the moment he was shot. We'll never really know. It seems I was mistaken about the idea that the Situation Room could follow the events in real time through helmet-mounted cameras (although I'm not sure about that; that's what the news shows originally said shortly after the story broke). But a couple of SEALs are the only ones who really know what happened, and maybe the wounded bin Laden wife, who is now being interrogated by our pals the Pakis.

But here's why I'm virtually certain that bin Laden was not lunging for his AK-47 at the moment he was shot. It's a matter of simple deduction, although I haven't seen anyone talk about it.

Bin Laden was on the lam, a fugitive from justice. He knew as well as anyone that once he was discovered, he would be immediately shot. Whatever else is said about him, no one ever thought he was stupid or uninformed. The main evidence against him, if you read the 9-11 Commission Report (not that anyone ever has, least of all any reporter transcribing narratives from the White House), are statements made by the Gurgling Confessor, Khallid Sheikh Mohammed, who sang (or gargled) like Tweety Bird on meth while he was being routinely tortured in Guantanamo a few years back. To put Osama bin Laden on trial, therefore, even in the concentration camp in Cuba, would have entailed all sorts of difficulties with this evidence, even given the benighted state of American justice at this point. To wit, troublemaking lawyers would have attacked the admissibility of statements against bin Laden made by KSM while he had a wet towel down his throat. Even though everyone already knows that bin Laden was guilty (because we just do, that's why we could shoot him), this could have been pretty embarrassing. What if the U.S. had lost the case against bin Laden? Hey, anything's possible. O.J. walked. Then Obama would have been in the position of ordering bin Laden detained for life anyway, despite the acquittal.

It's obvious when you think about it, and I'm sure bin Laden had figured it out. Thus, when bin Laden heard two helicopters land inside his compound, including one that crash-landed, in the middle of the night; heard a furious gun battle downstairs in which at least three of his associates were killed with automatic weapons fire; where at least twenty minutes had elapsed since the crash of one helicopter and the landing of the other, during which the gun battle described occurred; does it seem at all logical to you, if Osama bin Laden was going to defend himself with an automatic weapon, that he would have waited until two Navy SEALs had entered his sleeping chamber before "going for his gun?"

Maybe he's a really, really heavy sleeper, I suppose. Kidney disease can take it out of you. But what about the woman in the room. Another narcoleptic? It all seems very doubtful. The most logical explanation, the one that is left, as Sherlock Holmes would say, no matter how unlikely it may appear (because the other possibilities have been eliminated) is simple: bin Laden decided to die that night without resistance.

Further Corrections & Amendments to Osama Episode

4 May 2011 (Washington) - Jay Carney, the White House's Press Secretary, appeared before the media today to offer some further clarifying remarks regarding Operation Geronimo:

Mr. Carney: Good afternoon. This Administration's commitment to transparency and to getting it right leads us to offer some further details about the Special Forces operation in Afghanistan a few days ago where bin Laden was killed. We do not want any false narratives circulating in the public domain concerning this important development. The situation is simply too crucial to allow incorrect information to remain uncorrected, and we regret that the first accounts of the operation, based upon the best information we had from actually watching the mission live, in the Situation Room at the White House, fed to us from helmet-mounted cams as events unfolded in real time, were in some respects inaccurate, and that this narrative, while it did lead to the optimally expected jubilation from crowds in the street high-fiving, chest bumping and setting off fireworks, cannot be allowed to stand when we come in possession of superseding data.

In that regard, a few amendments. We have previously noted that bin Laden, contrary to the first report, was not actually armed with an automatic weapon, nor does he appear to have been "going for his gun" as some later accounts described the event. However, the rumor that bin Laden, having swelled to about 300 pounds from complete inactivity over the last six years while eating a nonstop diet of lamb and hummus, was found on the toilet passed out, is obviously the product of a fertile imagination and a conflation of media images. Osama was, however, standing at the moment he was taken out, and contemporary accounts confirm that he was standing "in an aggressive manner" which ruled out any possibility of a live capture, transport home and a trial to determine what role, if any, he actually played in any of the events of September 11, 2001, events which form the basis of the last ten years of non-stop warfare, the bankruptcy of the country, the militarization of all foreign policy, the complete suspension of the Bill of Rights, and other adjustments to national life.

Bin Laden is, however, dead, and he now sleeps with the fishes.

As for the account of bin Laden's use of a woman, possibly one of his wives, as a human shield: this was a regrettable gloss on the initial story, and may have been based on confusion by one of the observers with a scene from "Casino Royale" with Daniel Craig, a really cool movie, which was viewed by the Situation Room observers via Netflix while awaiting the start of Operation Geronimo, the second feature that night. The story for now is that she charged the Special Forces team as they burst into bin Laden's room and was shot in the leg, but this account, like all other facts, is still under review and will be updated as necessary.

We are also looking into the possibility that the Pakistani government and military, our valued partners in the war on terror, may have been aware of bin Laden's presence for six years in an enormous walled compound a few feet from one of Pakistan's main military academies. A team is being assembled to get to the bottom of this mystery. The team will include many of the investigators from the White House team who conducted research into the person or persons responsible for leaking the name of Valerie Plame to the press.

That's it for today. We'll continue to keep you updated at all times so that your information is as accurate as possible.

Ding Dong the Evil International Criminal Mastermind is Dead

Well, good work, guys. I think we can all breathe a sigh of relief knowing that OBL took two to the head. Right now, as Bill Maher would advise, is the time for orgiastic celebration, not making trivial criticisms of this brilliant coup, this final affirmation of American competence. Wave Old Glory, chant "USA!" and spin Toby Keith on the CD player. I don't have any Toby Keith, but I'm going to get some. If Toby can front run, so can I.

Certain questions have at least been answered. For one thing, now I understand how OBL survived for ten years in renal failure while living without electricity in a Waziristan cave. He wasn't in a Waziristan cave for ten years, so the suppositions of Pervez Musharraf and Donald Rumsfeld, among many others, that bin Laden was already dead were mistaken. Bin Laden was living in a walled, highly-fortified compound "1/3rd of a mile" from a Pakistani "military academy," according to the Pentagon's spokesreporters at the New York Times. The Times also mentioned that a "military installation" was in the same small town of Abbottobad, one hour north of the capital city of Islamabad. The house was no ordinary suburban Eichler. According to Debka, the Israeli news source:

"The villa compound was encircled by 12-15 meter high walls topped by 7 foot privacy wall and barbed wire accessed through two steel, electrically-operated security gates. The Pakistanis could not have missed it when it was built in 2005 and more buildings were added later."

To say they couldn't have "missed it" is probably something of an understatement. Other reports put the walls at 15 to 18 feet, rather than meters, with barbed wire above that. Not sure it really matters. What we're talking about here is a huge fortress-like structure, with walls between 20 and 50 feet high with barbed wire on top for good measure. On a dirt road. Debka says the "military academy" was 100 meters away. It's not that hard to see a building with walls that high from a distance a little greater than a football field away. The Pakistani military probably didn't "miss it." I'm not a military expert, but it seems to me that if a commander of a military base noticed that someone was building a compound with high walls (considerably higher than any other building in the area) topped by barbed wire and accessible only through steel security gates a short walk from his fort, he would probably want to find out who the 6'-6" Arab on the dialysis machine at the compound actually was. Maybe the Pakistanis aren't psychic, but they would have their suspicions, you know?

Thus, I suspect that the story will come out that bin Laden survived because the Pakistani military protected him and provided him with medical care for about 6 years. At some point recently, the United States decided that November 2012 was just getting closer by the day and whether the Pakis were on board or not, we were going to drop a chopper into the compound and take OBL out.

As for the burial at sea: the Times dutifully reports that this was "presumably" done so that no "shrine" could be erected to bin Laden. Yet if we were the ones who had custody of the body, I don't quite follow how anyone could have built a shrine over a body they didn't have. I've learned to accept illogical nonsense from the MSM, however. If the Administration says it, if the Times writes it (as it will), then it makes sense whether it makes sense or not. Naturally, the conspiracy theorists are going to have a field day with this one. Presumably, a DNA match was made using a PCR technique in something like 12 hours, although ordinarily this process takes much longer if performed at, say, Harvard Medical School. Still, my guess is that they've got tissue samples which they'll match against I don't know what. Look, it's bin Laden - just let it go.

As I say, caveats, if any, can be expressed later. It's over, we win at last. I'm sure we'll pack up and leave Afghanistan now, along with Iraq. On the other hand, there's no chance whatsoever that will happen.

A cool week for the President: the birth certificate, now bin Laden. He's on a roll.

James McMurtry at the Freight&Salvage

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbWRfBZY-ng

I caught James McMurtry's act at the Freight & Salvage last week in Berkeley. Went by myself, which turned out to be oddly appropriate given that so many of his songs are about the essential loneliness of his own life and that of Americans in general. Songs like "Holiday," a bleak recounting of the hopelessness of forced intimacy and bonhomie of relatives thrown together periodically by red dates on the calendar. James is the son of the famous writer Larry McMurtry, and I don't suppose that's a particularly easy thing to be, scion of the creative force who produced Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment.

James, however, has his father's eye for the naturalistic or emotional detail which captures the essence of a scene or feeling. A few lyrics about a freight train passing in the gloom of twilight out on the Great Plains with "half an inch of snow on the coal cars." Or the rowdy white trash saga about his Uncle Slayton in "Choctaw Bingo," where he sings of a family reunion up somewhere north of Oklahoma, and where one family (presumably his) drives north from Texas after the kids in the back seat are tranquilized with a little vodka in their cherry cola on the way there, and with Benadryl as the additive on the way back.

James brought the house down with a "medley of his hit," the searing "We Can't Make It Here Anymore," all about the hollowing-out of the American economy, the deracinated dispiritedness of a country which had come to rely on modern manufacturing but had had the props kicked out from underneath it by offshoring, and by the resulting joblessness, hopelessness, drug abuse, and reliance on the military to provide "jobs" that the private sector no longer comes up with. So a listless Middle America looks at the shuttered factories, the "For Rent" signs in the city center and at the malls as they drive to Wal-Mart to buy a shirt, "made in Singapore, because we can't make it here anymore."

The Texastentialist is a good guitar player, a good singer, and reminiscent, if I were going to compare him to anybody, to a roughneck cross between Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan, but without any of Springsteen's faux-commoner shtick wrapped up in glitzy commercial packaging. Which means, of course, in this day and age, in America, that James, unlike his dad, remains obscure, even after barnstorming around the country and Europe for twenty years. Well hell, 99% of the American population has never read The Last Picture Show, either.

I was glad when the show was over. I'm a little too familiar, personally, with the themes and personalities of the white trash anthems like "Choctaw Bingo" to be entirely comfortable with them, and in general McMurtry just hits a little too close to home for any of us. This is "entertainment" of a particularly difficult kind. Life in modern America is a mess and he gets it all down. What happens, he seems to be asking, when you take away those old folkways down in Texas and elsewhere, when people would sit out on the front porch at night and watch the stars come out as entertainment; and they stop doing that because they've now got satellite TV and jobs in town at the mill or factory; and then you get rid of all the jobs, and the folkways of mutual reliance and comfort are gone, too, and the star-watching is gone in favor of the satellite for as long as you can keep it hooked up? He writes about such things in "Level-land," "Small Town" and in all his songs, really. I suppose you wind up with a country that looks like modern America, where the ethos of extreme financial and emotional independence worked well when the economy was the envy of the world. But kind of a bitch when the bottom falls out.

Trump's Hair Caught in Tuscaloosa Tornado - Film @ 11

That's the picture I actually wanted to run (as opposed to Kapiolani Medical Center to the right), with all respect and affection for my fellow Alabamians, who have been devastated by a series of massive tornadoes in regions I ordinarily thought of as being somewhat south of the usual path of twisters. Oh well, the climate, she is a-changin'. I do know that tornadoes are usually formed along the scrum line between cold fronts from the north and warm fronts from the south, which mix and create an upward spiral or turbulent convection, and so one looks for these a little farther north, say along the Red River area between Texas and Oklahoma, or farther north where Dorothy and Toto lived.

Meanwhile, the nascent presidential aspirations of The Donald have hit a major snag, or split end, since President Obama decided to release the so-called "long form" birth certificate from the state of Hawaii. What the White House released is essentially identical to the "abstract" which was already in the public domain, so one has to wonder why the conspiracy theory, The Donald's "signature issue" as Doonesbury derisively called it, was allowed to fester as long as it was. Which of course will give rise to a new round of conspiracy theorizing centered on the idea that the "long form" is a forgery or computer mock-up (I've already seen some of that stuff on the Net), and the "delay" will be used as the central "proof" of the new cover-up, and so forth, ad absurdum, ad nauseum. There's never any way out of a conspiracy maze once one is entered.

For my part, I never had any doubt that Barack Obama was born in Honolulu in August, 1961. The test I used was Vincent Bugliosi's "in this world" argument from his analyses of the O.J. Simpson trial. "In this world," there is simply no way that Barack Obama was born anywhere other than Honolulu, for the simple reason that there were two contemporary newspaper accounts, from two newspapers I'm personally familiar with (the Honolulu Advertiser being the main rag in the islands, then and now) that published the fact of his birth in August, 1961. Conspiracy theorists, motivated as they really are by blind hatred and racism, have no answer to this simple fact, much as the "O.J. was framed" theorists had no answer for the mountains of blood and DNA evidence admitted at the Juice's trial. (As the joke had it, "take away all the blood and DNA evidence, and what do you really have?" Plenty, actually, such as the cuts all over O.J.'s hands and arms the morning after the murders, supposedly caused by a broken drinking glass in a Chicago hotel room. Funny, O.J. never looked clumsy.)

But the real acid test of the "in this world" argument is simply this, and it is a common sense standard not actually usable in a court room: one cannot prove a single fact, in this world, which is decisively inconsistent with Barack Obama's having been born in Honolulu. There is compelling evidence that he was, of course, such as eyewitnesses, the birth certificate, the doctor's recollections, all kinds of stuff along with the published newspaper accounts giving the home address of Obama's parents in 1961 on the Kalanianaole Highway, and with no explanation why two newspapers of record would falsify vital statistics provided by the Kapiolani Hospital 47 years before Barack Obama was elected.

I doubt, nevertheless, that the production of the "long form" certificate will have much effect on the beliefs of the Birthers. This is actually a window into the declining capacities of critical thought in the American population, and is aligned, in my analysis, with the growth in general religiosity and "enchantment," that is to say, mumbo jumbo. As with Creationism and anti-evolution "theories," the Luddites believe it is enough, to justify their own prejudices, to poke holes in science or to find areas that are not absolutely certain, in order to claim, voila!, that their own viewpoint has been vindicated or even "proved."

Epistemologically, or from the viewpoint of logical positivism, this makes no sense whatsoever. One does not "prove" anything by process of elimination unless one has already proved, positively, through evidence meeting the standards of scientific proof, that the one remaining explanation is the only one possible. And mumbo jumbo advocates, including the Birthers and Creationists (who I suspect are frequently inside a Venn Diagram with one circle), never come close to proving anything as a positive fact. Thus, their arguments run along these lines: "If evolution cannot explain absolutely everything with no questions remaining (such as explaining to our satisfaction the concept of punctuated equilibria), then God must have created the Universe and all the creatures great and small." This is a form of backing into proof and hoping no one notices the trick. For there is another possible explanation for the existence of the Universe or of modern species: we don't know the explanation.

Similarly, with the Birthers, the reluctance of Obama to release the long form was used as "proof" that he was born in Kenya (this being the only possible alternative explanation for a reluctance to release the form), when such a supposition does not meet, in any sense, the probative weight of two contemporary newspaper accounts or the records maintained in the regular course of business by Kapiolani Hospital.

I suppose the beauty of Know-Nothingism is that it frees you up to take the day off and then tune in Dancing With the Stars, with no heavy reading. God's in his Heaven, Barack's birthplace is in Kenya, and all is right with the world. One windfall from Mr. Obama's decision, however, is that it might be enough to get The Donald out of the race. His "college transcript" attack is pretty lightweight stuff next to the Birther junk, and beyond these "signature issues," The Donald is a badly-coiffed joke. When we have the regular staff in Washington, D.C. bankrupting the country for 30 years running, why do we need to bring in a serial bankrupt from New York City?

Transcript of The Donald's First Presidential Press Conference

You've probably heard about this mysterious capacity of the iPhone to track your every movement, record the data, store it and then upload it into your computer whenever you "sync up" through iTunes or whatever. Presumably then the data, reflecting the GPS coordinates of everywhere you've been, can piggy-back through file-sharing and wind up on the hard drives of millions of complete strangers who will then have, as Major Strasser said to Rick Blaine in "Casablanca," a complete dossier on you. Only in this instance, you will not receive the Major's smarmy reassurance, "Don't worry, we're not going to broadcast it," because in the age of Facebook and Twitter you can guarantee the data will be everywhere faster than you can say Kim Kardashian.

Once I read about this, I stopped taking my iPhone everywhere. Who needs to pack a snitch where your cell phone should be? "Hey, aren't you forgetting something?" the iPhone says in simulated electronic speech as I head out the door. "Oh, just going to the store," I say (wink wink).

It turns out another app running in background can also record events from the future and download them onto your iPhone. Either that, or I'm making this whole thing up as a premise for a blog post. My iPhone, for example, in a very timely move given what I've been writing about lately, just provided me with the transcript of President Donald Trump's first press conference held in January, 2013, the day after his Inauguration. Here it is:

President The Donald (PTD):

Hello journalists. As the warm-up man just told you during his opening routine, I expect this to be a good show and the kickoff for a major presidency. I expect your cooperation in making this happen. Everything I've done in my life has been top-shelf and a very major, successful enterprise, and I expect this presidency to be no different. I won't tolerate mediocrity or anybody giving it less than one hundred percent. You've been warned. So let's start the questions with a major journalist, no second bananas. Where's that Gregory guy, who gets a lot of network time?

David Gregory: President Trump, and let me say how good it sounds to say that...

PTD: No brown nosing, Gregory.

Gregory: Right. How are things proceeding on your cabinet selections?

PTD: Right now we're looking at onyx for the White House kitchen, with gold door pulls...

Gregory: No, I mean State, Defense, Attorney General, like that.

PTD: Sure. Well, for one thing, you can bet that each appointment will be a major figure, someone who's absolute tops in their field. I won't tolerate someone who doesn't have what it takes to really excel. I want tens, major, major successess. I would think of it in the same way as my dating years, when the women were absolutely gorgeous, tens everyone of them, no eights or even nines, just knock-outs and major lookers. I'm looking for the same type of quality in my cabinet appointments, not so much the looks part but the major excellence part. This is going to be a major presidency and fall in line with everything I've ever done, which is top-shelf. The American people deserve no less. Who's next? Chris Matthews? Go ahead.

Matthews: Wow, I'm getting that tingle up my leg again just thinking about a celebrity of your stature actually in the Oval Office. This is huge.

PTD: Thanks, Chris. It feels good to be here, to get this show moving. I want another hit. Every show I've been involved with has hit big and this presidency will be no different. It will be a major success. My businesses are all doing fantastically, I'm really, really rich and a tremendously successful human being. I'm a major player.

Matthews: One slight criticism that I'm hearing is that some people feel you're making the office of the Presidency a little too much about you. Do you think that's fair?

PTD: I don't and I'll tell you why. During the transition period, when I unveiled my plan to redo the Capitol dome in onyx and gold, to match the Trump Plaza and Trump Tower, I heard a lot of this kind of sniping. The onyx design is part of who I am, I really like onyx and I want onyx for the American people. It isn't just about me, unless you think that only an extremely rich, very successful, top player such as myself deserves to use tremendous amounts of onyx in designing buildings and not the American people. And that's not who I am, and those aren't my values.

Thank you very much. I've got to break now. I've got some very major meetings with some top individuals about some huge matters. Keep up the good work and I'll convene another meeting soon to go over some other stuff I want you to be working on.

(End of transcript.)

If it quacks like a Duck, it's The Donald

As a man who strives to believe in the essential goodness of people, I take it as an article of faith that President Obama's decision to disturb the slumber of his Attorney General, Eric Place Holder, and to pursue those "speculators" who are driving our gasoline prices to the moon, is completely unrelated to The Donald's movement of this issue to a position front and center in his presidential non-campaign. Meaning, Mr. Obama has been very concerned about this problem all along but he just didn't want to say anything that would upset our burnoosed friends any more than he absolutely had to.

You know. It's the way the O-Man rolls. But gasoline prices really are a problem, not like they're a problem in Europe, of course, but a problem for a grotesquely spoiled populace such as ours which demands its inalienable right to occupy vehicles at the rate of one person per unit and to define a "High Occupancy Vehicle" as one in which there is one person more in the car than the minimum number physically necessary to drive the damn thing. Thus enters The Donald, the magnificently-tonsured almost-candidate who is aching to declare but can't quite yet (not till May 22, when the last episode of "Celebrity Apprentice" airs), because a candidate cannot have his own hit show because of the "equal time" laws that are never enforced.

But he's going to declare, you know that, and the delicacy of his equivocation is not only The Donald's natural probity at work, but a chance to pump the show for a month while people wait, breathlessly, for Duck Man to make if official. I can barely wait myself, because frankly I just can't blog anymore about the Fed-hallucinated economy. Like boring, man. But a magnificent blowhard like The Donald actually running for office - I think we need this. A lot of other people do too - among Republicans, for example, The Donald has higher name recognition (bigger Buzz Quotient) than Romney, Huckabee and Palin -- combined. You read that right. The Donald clocks in at 39%, while the other three losers add up to 19%.

The man with the High-Tensile Hair-do is on a roll. His campaign strategy is borrowed directly from Germany, 1933. America is teetering on the brink of mediocrity, we're getting pushed around by the Saudis and the Chinese. The Chinese, in particular, manipulate their currency, defy all intellectual property laws, cheat like hell on everything. A country groveling in the dirt loves to hear this kind of stuff -- it's not our fault, dammit! Our jobs were "stolen" (by American companies relocating to Asia, but don't get picky - we're trying to make a point here). The Donald is going to slap a 25% tariff on Chinese imports until they allow their currency to appreciate in line with reality (we reserve the right, however, to keep debasing ours through profligate money printing).

So, no blaming the Jews this time around, which was a dumb call by the Nazis anyway. (The German Jews were leaders of German society in medicine, physics, the arts, the professions. Hitler lost before he got started by kicking the props out from underneath his own society.) No, this time around we've got billions of enemies. No more bowing to them when they come to town, no more deference, no more making nice. And think about it - with his penchant for boorish, self-indulgent, grandiose behavior, who can possibly be better at abrasiveness than The Donald? He's more likely to head slap King Abdullah than to bow and kiss his ring.

I think Barack is beginning to hear footsteps at this point, and thus the rude call to Holder in the middle of the afternoon when Eric normally likes to knock off early and catch a nap before tuning in the NBA playoffs in the evening. We'd better start doing something that looks like protecting ordinary Americans, because this wild-haired maniac is catching the Big Mo'! And he'll say anything! And he can finance his own campaign! He doesn't even have to cut backroom deals with Goldman Sachs and medical insurance companies in order to finance himself. This guy's going to play in Peoria! It's a nightmare. I Hope we can come up with some Change in our approach!

Like I say, The Donald introduces the element of fun so sorely missing in our national political scene. Mark your calendar. May 22: The Day of the Duck.

Why is the punditocracy dissing The Donald?

I just don't get it. Donald Trump (hereinafter "The Donald") uses his constitutional right to express an interest in becoming President of the United States, and after a brief flurry of excitement from the media, the commentariat appears to have settled on the position that his candidacy is a joke, not to be taken seriously, that he is, in some sense, an usurper who has no right to such pretensions.

This is one of the things wrong with American politics, in my opinion. The Donald is entitled to his aspirations. I thought it was a joke when George W. Bush ran for President, a travesty when he was actually elected (okay, appointed, after coming close in the popular vote), and two shams of a mockery of a travesty (for fans of "Bananas" - in joke) in the way he governed. We've also had Ronald Reagan as President, a mediocre actor faking his way through the office, George Murphy as a senator, Arnold Schwarzenegger as a governor, Jesse Ventura as a governor, et al. The point being that in the age of pervasive, saturating electronic media as a substitute for Reality, the populace cannot distinguish anymore why "famosity" is not transferable between any two roles requiring high visibility. Once you're famous, you're famous across the board, and the public ceases with any distinction between your public image, carefully crafted by media consultants and PR firms, and your underlying reality, if any. For these reasons, Richard Nixon seriously considered Vince Lombardi as a running mate in 1968 (Vince would have been more satisfactory, come to think of it, than Tricky Dick himself, and certainly a better choice than Spiro Agnew.)

The Donald has taken some heat for seizing the Birther issue and running with it. Exploiting Barack Obama's failure to produce his original birth certificate is mainstream Republican politics. It's a stupid issue leading nowhere, but the same can be said for nearly everything in American politics, including the wars in Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq, the abortion "issue," gay marriage, gays in the military, and the entire "social issues" agenda. The wars should go away, the "social issues" agenda should disappear entirely from the political scene in favor of simply letting everyone do whatever the hell they want in their private lives, so long as it's not in the street where it might frighten horses or large dogs.

Of course, this would remove about 80-90% of the heat and noise from the political scene, and would leave the Klowns exposed to the awful truth, which is that they have run the country into the ground economically. This is where The Donald "brings" something to the political process. As a serial bankrupt, The Donald knows a little about what it's like to go belly up, as the U.S. of A. has done, and knows how to engineer a comeback. The same cannot be said, for example, of Barack Obama. His life story has been a steady, uninterrupted climb from obscurity to the pinnacle of power. Kind of boring in its American predictability, in fact. Whereas The Donald, as the scion of a real estate magnate who took Dad's empire and first trashed it, then restored it, then branched out into the total cheesiness of Atlantic City gambling and Reality TV nonsense, is far more representative of the historical arc of recent America. With his gravity-defying, marvel-of-engineering hairdo, and his ceaseless bragging and grandiosity, his ill-used, solecism-filled grandiloquence, The Donald is a Man of Our Time. A boor, a braggart, a parvenu, a cheater, a liar, a thoroughly frivolous human being of, by and only about himself.

In short, he's perfect. How can all these political operatives take a cornpone Neanderthal like Mike Huckabee seriously as a candidate and dismiss the candidacy of The Donald? I don't get it. I think it's because the little nerds in politics, and their journalistic acolytes, just don't like the idea that a boast-filled Big Shot like The Donald can simply buy and bully his way onto the national stage without going through them. Yet The Donald did not have to navigate through such vermin in order to establish "The Apprentice" on TV, or memorialize for the ages the phrase, "You're Fired!" He did that on his own, or at least his writers did, leveraging his fame for being famous.

I doubt seriously that The Donald has any particularly strong views on abortion (perhaps this Constitutional right has even come in handy at some point in his checkered love life), gays (he lives in New York, for cryin' out loud), evolution (he's probably for evolution, since he's an infrequent church-goer) or much of anything else, other than his own self-aggrandizement.

I say give The Donald a freaking chance, and don't allow these self-appointed gate keepers to decide the issue before this magnificently-coiffed candidate even has a chance to develop a little Mo'. The punditocracy is scared right now because he's actually leading the pack, not altogether surprising when his competition is clothing store mannequins like Mitt Romney. Maybe he'll win, or buy, the GOP nomination. What fun those debates would be with Barack! Can't you hear it now? At the end of every campaign speech, there's The Donald: "And I have a message for you, Mr. President, from the American people: You're Fired!"

I've got a hundred more like that, Mr. Trump. You know where to find me.

Herzog the Blogger

One of my favorite books from high school years, and my favorite among all of Saul Bellow's novels, was Herzog, about a stressed-out, middle-aged, cuckolded academic who undergoes a nervous breakdown and begins compulsive letter writing. He writes to everyone he knows, then to politicians, then finally to the famous dead, in long, complicated, highly literate language, complaining about the state of the world and his place in it. It is an intellectual tour-de-force.

Gee, wonder why I liked that novel. It's pretty obvious Herzog was a proto-Blogger. I don't know if one of the ten million blogs out there is called "Herzog," but one ought to be (along with "Impotent Information Overload"). With their limited readership, at least half the point of an amateur blog is self-therapeutic, although things didn't work out that well for Herzog himself.

You can now post comments to columns and blogs, of course, so if in the course of gassing on in your own blog you don't quite pontificate enough, you can do that too. I did, today, on Paul Krugman's blog, which he calls "Conscience of a Liberal" (just the slightest touch sententious, do you think?). Prof. Krugman was writing recently about the august, esteemed title he has in German society because of his degrees and standing, to the effect that he is Herr Doktor Doktor Krugman (he's not actually, because he doesn't understand how those German honorifics work for foreigners). That's where "Dokrugman" comes from.

What's distressing to me, Dokrugman (portmanteau of Herr Doktor Doktor & Krugman) is that (a) you're over-using this "serious" trope (which I think, along with Very Serious Person or VSP, might be an unattributed borrow from Glenn Greenwald; is that possible?) and (b) you're getting involved in "budget-cutting" discussions at all. I don't read "The Conscience of a Liberal" to be reminded of the grim reality that the United States faces in its budget difficulties. I read this blog for its Keynesian hopefulness, where $150 billion in income against $330 billion in expenses (as in March's Treasury Statement) is okay and nothing much to worry about. Maybe the deficit will go to $2 trillion this year (or roughly total income), but it doesn't matter because, as you say, the Treasury is hardly "cash strapped." It can easily borrow as much money as it needs at rock bottom rates. For some strange reason. And only conspiracy theorists think that Treasury auctions are simply a rigged market, and if the PBOC calls the whole thing a "Ponzi scheme" (as they did recently), it only proves that they are not VSPs. Or proves that they are, I'm not sure which way the snark cuts.

So please, do not get bogged down in ways to "cut the deficit." That's for the others. You should be urging the government to spend more, to increase the deficit to $4 trillion per year, to $20 trillion. Whatever we need. Because the Treasury can simply borrow $20 trillion at 1% in perpetuity, with no problems once the Fed adds the bills and bonds to its mounting stash. And the 1% the Fed earns on its $20 trillion per year ($200 billion) can be remitted to the Treasury as income, reducing the deficit, thus...

What was the PBOC saying again? Anyway, please: no more belt tightening. Leave that to the uninformed.

Dokrugman does believe we'll be okay and that we should not be worried about cutting "now now now" (as he says over over over), but should keep spending and stimulating until the economy recovers to its mid-Bubble heights. Of course, I've never understood what economy we are aspiring to return to. The reason we went to Bubblenomics was because (a) Wall Street needed a cash cow, and housing was The Last Frontier, and (b) our so-called "Real Economy" is gone, shipped overseas along with all the middle class jobs it used to provide. So Americans can go "back to work," but it's all crap jobs and completely inadequate to provide a real tax base.

How do such obvious things remain hidden from view when they're lying in plain sight? If housing prices are once again correlated to income, and incomes are stagnant or even losing ground, how can housing prices do anything other than continue to go down? And if housing prices continue to go down (which they are, which they will, with 13 million houses empty in the U.S., with 20% of all real estate in Florida vacant), what is the economic driver of consumer spending, and thus jobs, and thus recovery, and thus federal fiscal solvency? Huh?

My inability to answer such questions explains why I do not have a Nobel Prize in Economics, I suppose. I'm just a lonely Herzog, crying in the wilderness.