Trump: the GOP’s huge mistake? [BUMPED UP]

The New Neo Posted on by

[BUMPED UP. Newer posts are right below it.]

Commenter “Bill” writes:

The GOP needs to be chastened and sober up and get with the real business of trying to salvage conservative principles and philosophy and stand up against leftism.

And it needs to quit whining and telling us the sky’s falling and we’re all going to die if we don’t vote for a man who is too unstable to be President.

(Trump,. by the way, was rage-tweeting from 3:20am on last night about a former Miss Universe, her sex tape, etc. This needs to be over. It needs to be over now. The GOP made a huge mistake.)

It’s really that last sentence (“The GOP made a huge mistake”) that caught my attention. But let’s start with the fist one: “The GOP needs to be chastened and sober up and get with the real business of trying to salvage conservative principles and philosophy and stand up against leftism.” Continue reading →

Trump and Machado: it’s not about the women

The New Neo Posted on by

There are about five weeks to Election Day. No time to waste.

But instead, Donald Trump seems to be putting a lot of his energy into tweets about Alicia Machado, in response to a remark by Hillary Clinton during the debate. Here’s the debate exchange:

CLINTON: You know, he tried to switch from looks to stamina. But this is a man who has called women pigs, slobs and dogs, and someone who has said pregnancy is an inconvenience to employers, who has said”¦

TRUMP: I never said that.

CLINTON: ”¦. women don’t deserve equal pay unless they do as good a job as men.

TRUMP: I didn’t say that.

CLINTON: And one of the worst things he said was about a woman in a beauty contest. He loves beauty contests, supporting them and hanging around them. And he called this woman “Miss Piggy.” Then he called her “Miss Housekeeping,” because she was Latina. Donald, she has a name.

TRUMP: Where did you find this? Where did you find this?

CLINTON: Her name is Alicia Machado.

I’m not going to bother to track the back and forth of Trump’s tweets on the subject. You can follow it if you like. My point is that it’s happening, his reaction is almost certainly hurting him, and it was completely predictable. That’s probably one of the reasons Hillary brought up the subject.

Remember that very first Republican debate, many moons ago? Remember the question Megyn Kelly asked Trump at the outset, the one that caused so much bickering and controversy, the one about his prior nasty statements on women?

The context was that initially the candidates were asked to take “the pledge” to support the eventual Republican nominee, and then the leadoff question to each candidate was “on the subject of electability in the general election.” First, Carson was questioned about his ignorance of foreign policy and his inexperience. Some errors he had made were cited, and then the question: “Aren’t these basic mistakes, and don’t they raise legitimate questions about whether you are ready to be president?”

Next up was Rubio, who was asked about his own lack of executive experience vis a vis Jeb Bush: “Could you please address Governor Bush across the stage here, and explain to him why you, someone who has never held executive office, are better prepared to be president than he is, a man who you say did a great job running your state of Florida for eight years?”

Then to Jeb, after a little background about people being sick of Bushes, “So do you understand the real concern in this country about dynastic politics?”

After Bush answered, it was Trump’s turn [emphasis mine]:

KELLY: Mr. Trump, one of the things people love about you is you speak your mind and you don’t use a politician’s filter. However, that is not without its downsides, in particular, when it comes to women.

You’ve called women you don’t like “fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.”

(LAUGHTER)

Your Twitter account”¦

TRUMP: Only Rosie O’Donnell.

(LAUGHTER)

KELLY: No, it wasn’t.

(APPLAUSE)

Your Twitter account”¦

(APPLAUSE)

TRUMP: Thank you.

KELLY: For the record, it was well beyond Rosie O’Donnell.

TRUMP: Yes, I’m sure it was.

KELLY: Your Twitter account has several disparaging comments about women’s looks. You once told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president, and how will you answer the charge from Hillary Clinton, who was likely to be the Democratic nominee, that you are part of the war on women?

TRUMP: I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct.

(APPLAUSE)

I’ve been challenged by so many people, and I don’t frankly have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time either. This country is in big trouble. We don’t win anymore. We lose to China. We lose to Mexico both in trade and at the border. We lose to everybody.

And frankly, what I say, and oftentimes it’s fun, it’s kidding. We have a good time. What I say is what I say. And honestly Megyn, if you don’t like it, I’m sorry. I’ve been very nice to you, although I could probably maybe not be, based on the way you have treated me. But I wouldn’t do that.

Remember that the highlighted question was asked Trump in August of 2015, over a year ago. He’s had a lot of time to think about it since.

As have the voters.

So what is happening now should not be a surprise of any sort. And Kelly’s question remain as good today—better, even—than it was back then. One of the ways in which Trump seems to have answered it originally was by attacking Megyn Kelly (mostly after the debate), and so it should also be no surprise whatsoever that he’s doubling down now. And whoever voted for him in the primaries voted for him despite these weaknesses.

Perhaps some voted for him because of them, and perhaps they don’t see them as weaknesses. They may percevie them as his strength in defying political correctness. But although I’m hardly a fan of political correctness, and I am all for defying political correctness, I’m also for choosing your battles and being smart about your vulnerabilities when you do so. In the Republican primaries Trump could get away with certain things that weaken him in the general, and one of them is opening himself up to the misogynist charge for no good reason and to make no good point. What’s more (and this is my bigger concern about him, and something I judge to be a far greater vulnerability of his), this behavior opens him to the change of having a temperament that should not be in the oval office (note also that it was really “temperament” that Kelly was questioning Trump about, too, in August of 2015).

The “poor temperament” charge isn’t about misogyny at all, and it doesn’t rest on the idea that Trump hates women (or even that he hates fat people). It’s that he’s thin-skinned, impulsive, emotional, shoots from the hip, reckless, uncontrolled, a loose cannon. This is fine (or at least acceptable to many people) for a celebrity and entertainer. It’s not fine for a president with a (metaphorical) finger on the (metaphorical) nuclear button.

Trump’s recent behavior during the debate and after has fed right into the Clinton camp. What are his advisors telling him to do now? Does he listen to them? Can he execute what they might tell him? Those are further concerns that have nothing to do with Trump and women, and everything to do with temperament and judgment. And they are important considerations that are part of the reason Trump has failed to win enough support from even the right, this election year.

It does no good for Trump supporters to excoriate those who won’t jump aboard the Trump train. Categorical declarations that Hillary is worse don’t cut it the more Trump is seen as dangerously and destructively (even self-destructively) impulsive. And this tendency of Trump’s was already crystal clear in the early part of the campaign.

[NOTE: Do you think I’m happy to have to write these words? If you do, then think again. Ever since it became clear to me some time last August that Trump had a good chance of becoming the Republican nominee in 2016, I’ve been devastated and have felt that an incredibly and surpassingly important election that was the Republicans’ to win was being handed away to the weakest Democrat candidate ever. And so far, that’s how it has played out.]

I never really loved you

The New Neo Posted on by

This quote from Nicole Kidman about her marriage to Tom Cruise caught my eye at Yahoo: Nicole Kidman on Marrying Tom Cruise at Age 23: ”˜I Look Back Now and I’m Like, “What?”’

I thought the article was going to be one of those things where someone reflects on an earlier relationship and says “I never really loved him/her.” But it’s not, as it turns out. Kidman is actually talking about the fact that she got married at all at the ripe young age of 23; she’s not dissing Cruise himself or their relationsip.

But it reminded me of a huge pet peeve of mine, which is the “I never really loved you” crowd.

First, a caveat. Fortunately, I’ve never heard those words addressed to me, so it’s not personal. Nor have I ever said them. My point of view is that, absent a marriage or relationship that takes place under some sort of coercion or major deception, the words almost always represent an attempt to revise history in order to make the speaker feel good at the expense of the listener.

The first time I ever heard anything resembling the phrase was in the book Gone With the Wind, which I read at the age of eleven. The exchange occurs at the end of the book, shortly before Rhett utters his famous parting shot at Scarlett. The first speaker here is Rhett, and he’s saying that even though he had originally loved Scarlett very much, his love for her is gone; it has worn out. The second speaker is Scarlett:

Mine wore out.”

“But love can’t wear out!”

“Yours for Ashley did.”

“But I never really loved Ashley!”

“Then, you certainly gave a good imitation of it – up till tonight.”

That always seemed to me to be the finest response: “well, you certainly gave a good imitation of it.” But Rhett can afford to be cavalier. Not only is he Rhett Butler (and you’re not), but in this scene, he’s the one doing the leaving and she’s the one begging that he reconsider, and she’s saying she never really loved someone else.

In contrast, when most people hear the words they aren’t about someone else; they’re about themselves: “I never really loved you.” And usually that’s said in the context of a devastating breakup, in which the leaver is saying it to the person being left. The classic case of adding insult to injury.

Why would a person do this? My theory is that it makes the leaver feel less guilty. It makes the leaver feel justified in leaving—after all, the whole thing was a grievous error, a mistake, and aren’t we supposed to right our mistakes? Otherwise, the leaver would have to face the fact that his or her love wore out, which is after all a possibility and part of being human, but it doesn’t make a person feel better about what he/she is about to do.

Also, that person is often in the first flush of a new love. That new love might really be stronger than the old. Or it might just be newer and seem stronger (people make mistakes, right?). At any rate, the leaver is trying to tell the one being left that the old love pales next to the new, and that’s why he/she must leave. That seems pretty cruel, too, even if (or perhaps especially if) true.

Especially amazing and pernicious to me are those people who say some version of, “If you really loved me, you’d be happy for me,” thus slyly transferring the guilt and badness to the person being left for not being appropriately saintly and loving. Poppycock. Romantic love is not the all-encompassing selfless self-sacrificing love of that sort, although I suppose sometimes we humans can get there. The passage of time (and new relationships for the one being left) can sometimes help. But placing that kind of burden of utterly selfless love on the person in the throes of the grief of being left for another man or woman is a case of cruelty piled on cruelty, to my way of thinking.

Of course, my way of thinking may not be your way of thinking. If so, then I never really loved you.

Holocaust stories: temperament and trauma [Part II]

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Part I can be found here.]

I can’t find the quote right now, but Holocaust survivor and author Primo Levi—who wrote Survival In Auschwitz, which I consider the single most definitive and brilliant book on the camps from the point of view of someone who experienced them firsthand—said that for many ex-inmates, comparisons between what happened in the camps and their lives afterwards didn’t help (although it certainly did for the interviewee I quoted in Part I of this series). Levi said that even though the camps were exponentially worse than the rest of the more petty difficulties of life outside the camps, that each state (camps versus ordinary life) had its woes, and that survivors could still get annoyed and upset afterwards at the smaller frustrations and sorrows of ordinary existence.

That’s the human condition for most people; few are able to keep the contrast constantly in mind like the man in the Part I interview, and there’s no shame in that.

Levi was a scientist who wrote about the camps as though he were a scientist studying them: cool, dispassionate, analytical. He died as a possible suicide in a fall in 1987 at the age of 67. Whether he killed himself or died accidentally has been hotly debated and the answer is still unclear.

Levi is an author whose work I greatly admire, and I am hardly alone, as his biographer Carole Angier writes:

We feel we know and love him from his work, because we know and love his gentle, rigorous, witty, open mind. But the rest of him is completely closed. Primo Levi is, in fact, one of the most secretive writers who ever lived. And not only in his work. Though he gave hundreds of interviews, he used them not to lower the walls but to raise them still higher, by presenting a careful construct of himself almost to the end. He presented the same construct to most people throughout his life; even, as long as he could, to himself. That construct – the calm, rational, optimistic man – was his ideal: an ideal he managed to reach in much of his life, because it was both a moral imperative and a psychological necessity to him.

But it was not the reality. “I have no instincts,” he said, with his smile, “or if I do, I repress them.” But the more he repressed them, the more they resisted, and took their revenge. The man who loved and spoke to the whole of humanity found private, emotional life impossibly hard. And the man who chose optimism, because one must not spread despair, found he had locked the despair inside him; and more and more often it rose and drowned him.

Even though it is not known whether Levi killed himself, it is known that he suffered from depression. But his depression predated his Holocaust experience and represented a lifelong struggle. A different man, a different temperament, than the man interviewed in Part I. And yet Levi managed to live and work for about forty highly productive and creative post-Holocaust years until his death. If he did kill himself (and the preponderance of evidence is that he did; he certainly was depressed prior to his death) it was his own temperament, and his own unhappy family history, that probably led him to it:

…Auschwitz did not destroy him. It came very near at the time, and immediately afterwards. But after that it did almost the opposite, requiring him to understand and to communicate, the two things that kept him alive. “I am a talker,” he said. “If you stop up my mouth, I die.” When, in his last depression, he felt he could no longer communicate, he died. That is what killed him, not his memories of Auschwitz. Neither Alex the Kapo of If This Is A Man [the European title of Survival in Auschwitz], nor his heirs, should imagine they have that victory.

Angier also offers a few excerpts from Levi’s great masterpiece about the camps. Here is a passage that reflects with Levi’s usual brilliance and extraordinary clarity on the mindset in the camps that brought some small (very small, in this case) measure of optimism to a situation so full of nearly unfathomable misery:

Strange how, in some way, one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy. Or else, it is raining and is also windy: but you know that this evening, it is your turn for the supplement of soup so that even today, you find the strength to reach the evening. Or it is raining, windy and you have the usual hunger, and then you think that if you really had to, if you really felt nothing in your heart but suffering and tedium – as sometimes happens, when you really seem to lie on the bottom – well, even in that case, at any moment you want you could always go and touch the electric wire-fence, or throw yourself under the shunting trains, and then it would stop raining.

Gary Johnson gets an endorsement

The New Neo Posted on by

The Detroit News is a Republican paper. Today the editors write:

Today this newspaper does something it has never done in its 143-year history: endorse someone other than the Republican candidate in a presidential contest.

Since its founding in 1873, The Detroit News has backed a Republican every time it has made a presidential endorsement (three times we have sat on the sidelines ”” twice during the Franklin Roosevelt elections and in the 2004 Bush/Kerry contest).

We abandon that long and estimable tradition this year for one reason: Donald J. Trump.

They go on to endorse Johnson.

The awfulness of the Clinton email scandal

The New Neo Posted on by

See this (read the whole thing):

This mass destruction of evidence was known to Comey. It’s in his investigative case summary. Yet he couldn’t make an obstruction case?

“Any one of those in that long list says obstruction of justice,” Ratcliffe said. “Collectively, they scream obstruction of justice.”

Ignoring such evidence leads “not just reasonable prosecutors but reasonable people to believe that maybe the decision on this was made a long time ago not to prosecute Hillary Clinton,” he added.

And this, about how it was the DOJ and not the FBI that granted immunity in the emails case:

“The FBI doesn’t grant immunity to anybody, the Department of Justice is able to grant very different kinds of immunity,” Comey said. “If new and substantial evidence develops a witness lied [under immunity], of course the Department of Justice can pursue it. Nobody gets lifetime immunity.”

In addition:

Comey told Rep. Ben Sasse (R-NB) that Mills needed the immunity “because without it, Mills would have fought investigators tooth and nail in an effort to withhold her computer.” But as Guy Benson points out, Hillary has claimed she and her team have fully cooperated. Well, doesn’t this declaration contradict her statement?…

Despite all of this, the FBI and DOJ allowed Mills to act as Hillary’s attorney and sit in on Hillary’s interview even though she was a witness.

And I found this in the comments at Legal Insurrection:

““because without it, Mills would have fought investigators tooth and nail in an effort to withhold her computer.””

Physically when the FBI executed the search warrant? Because I’ve never heard of a witness/target/whatever setting the terms for what evidence FBI investigators were entitled to have and under what conditions. If this had been anyone else the FBI would have simply seized the evidence. Cheryl Mills nor her attorneys could have done nothing about it. Getting a judge to sign off on a search warrant is not an adversarial procedure.

Basically Comey is admitting that Mills was in charge of this investigation , on behalf of Clinton. That’s been clear from start to finish. When Mills was interviewed, she and her attorneys set the parameters for what the investigators were allowed to ask. When investigators asked about Clinton’s email procedures Mills et al shut down the interview. And at the end, when Clinton was interviewed Mills, and immunized target in the investigation herself, sat in as Clinton’s attorney.

This is despicable, but it’s clear that Obama and his court toadies and throne sniffers such as Comey don’t have to lie well. In fact, the more obvious the lie the better because it just serves to highlight the fact that they’re giving Congress and the American people the finger and telling us that they’re above the law.

Which pretty much sums up my reaction.

So, all you have to do to get immunity is Just Say No?

But it’s that last part of the LI comment I quoted that strikes me as especially true and very insightful. One of the things I’ve noticed during the entire Obama administration is how clear it is that there is no objectivity and no impartiality in institutions we used to think were both—the press, long long ago (although I believe that was always an illusion); the FBI; the DOJ; the IRS. The lies of elected officials during the Obama administration have become more blatant, and that’s because the people involved feel immunized (usually metaphorically speaking, although in the case of the emails it’s a literal immunization) in advance. They know they will not be held accountable. They know that a press that’s almost wholly on their side will not turn on them. They know the American people won’t be able to figure it out on their own, or if they do figure it out they will be powerless to stop them.

[NOTE: And in connection with the last paragraph of this post, please see this post of mine that counters the popular meme on the right that the GOP ever “took impeachment off the table.”]

Another makeover

The New Neo Posted on by

Why? Because I like them, that’s why.

And because they have nothing to do with politics (although I’m sure someone creative can come up with a tie-in).

Here’s one that’s more subtle than some of the others, but still quite transformational:

Disabled people and the police

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Ann” has helpfully provided this link that corroborates the story I had reported yesterday about Terence Crutcher, one that’s gotten surprisingly little attention—the fact that he had one fake eye. And it adds another surprise:

“One thing that people don’t know about my brother ”” my brother has a very severe hearing issue in his right ear, and a prosthetic eye,” she said…

Crutcher also ripped the unidentified officer caught on video calling her brother “a bad dude” while riding a helicopter over the scene.

“He knew nothing about my brother,” she said. “I’m not even sure why a helicopter was there versus a tow truck. That’s what I’m trying to understand. He didn’t do anything wrong.”

A helicopter was there because Crutcher was acting in a way that aroused Officer Shelby’s suspicions that he was on PCP and might have a gun. That’s a separate issue from whether those suspicions were justified, and a very separate issue from how Shelby and the rest of the team should have proceeded and might have proceeded if they did suspect it.

But it also raises a larger question I’ve thought of before in the wake of police shootings and the publicity about them: what about a disabled person when confronted by the police? What about a hearing-impaired person in particular?

Here’s a report of an incident that involved a white deaf man and a black police officer. Not that the race of each participant really mattered here, but it shows that this particular issue transcends race.

What’s a deaf person to do if he (or she, but I’ll stick with “he”) doesn’t hear the command to get his hands up? If the person tries to get a card saying “I’m deaf” out of his pocket, that’s a move towards the pocket and can be dangerous. Sign language is also a movement of the hands, and that can be dangerous, too.

Here is a very helpful video that tells deaf people what the pitfalls are and how to deal with them in order to minimize trouble. As you can see, though, there’s a lot of information to learn, and I wonder how many people could remember this and properly execute all of it when under stress. That’s true of all of us, but for a deaf person it’s especially hard and especially important. Note also, the part about the dangers of just walking away without getting permission. How many people—deaf or hearing—know how extremely risky that can be? And of course, a person under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol would have special trouble remembering all of this and being able to do it even if that person wanted to:

Okay, okay—just one more post about the debate

The New Neo Posted on by

For a person who hardly watched it, I certainly have a lot to say, don’t I?

The first thing is that what pundits and political junkies are looking for in a debate is not necessarily (and maybe not at all) what the undecided or LIV voter is looking for. I’m not going to say I know what undecided or LIV voters are looking for, but I’m pretty sure that it’s not what policy wonks care about.

Sometimes what undecideds and/or LIVs are looking for is a sound bite, and sometimes just a feeling. Whether that reaction of theirs is rational or irrational I don’t really know, either—or at least, whether it’s more or less rational than what the better-informed go on. After all, paying attention to what a candidate says he/she will do in terms of policy (that’s what the better-informed do—or say they do—right?) is paying attention the promises of politicians. And is that especially rational either, particularly this year with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as our candidates?

Permit me a just a moment of non-nostalgic looking back to the 2012 campaign. One of the things that so frustrated me at that time was the number of conservatives who profoundly distrusted Mitt Romney. Now granted, he’s a politician. But as politicians go, the guy comes from the island of the truth-tellers. But he wasn’t good enough for a lot of people, and Obama was re-elected; perhaps in part because of that.

But hey, let’s look forward, right? Upward and onward; excelsior!

As far as Monday’s debate went, one thing that puzzles me is that a lot of very smart people seem surprised at how badly Trump did. My guess is that ever since Trump has become the nominee and relied on the teleprompter much more, he has seemed more coherent than he did back in the days of the Republican debates. So perhaps a combination of wishful thinking and forgetfulness (accent on the former?) caused a great many people to hope that he had actually changed and improved rather than that the difference between after his nomination and before consists of the difference between his scripted speeches written by someone else and the extemporaneous emanations of Trump’s own mind.

I’m not happy about Trump either. I would very much like to have seen a different Trump than emerged (or re-emerged) Monday night, but I didn’t expect one, and that’s one of the reasons I couldn’t bring myself to watch most of it. Had he turned his back to the audience and mooned them it would not have surprised me (okay, it would; but you know what I mean). That’s how little I thought of his previous performances during the Republican debates and how much they relied on vile and often mendacious insults—as well as the hugeness of the field—to effect his nomination.

Back then, Trump’s most rabid supporters supported his every move. By now, many of his reluctant supporters have either forgotten what he did then, or (understandably) rationalized his approach and/or decided he has changed his act. But during those Republican debates he was inarticulate, easily rattled, emotional, repetitive, garrulous, and anyone with a modicum of debating ability could—and did—debate rings around him in terms of logical debating points. And Hillary Clinton has more than a modicum of debating ability.

However, the Republican primaries weren’t decided on logical debating points. And maybe the general election won’t be, either. The post-debate polls are contradictory so far about the debate’s effect, which is no surprise either. What are a majority of voters looking for? Darned if I know.

Oh, and I very much wish that Gary Johnson had been allowed to participate.

[NOTE: On a somewhat-related issue, Scott Johnson of Powerline reports on how the news of the FBI’s immunity offers and President Obama’s involvement in the email scandal has surprised people who believed that the FBI and Comey were above this kind of thing. Seems you can’t get too cynical these days.

Well, I was already that cynical. I have long felt the stakes were too high and the fish too big for this investigation to really go anywhere.]