It’s such a corny joke, but such a good one. I never tire of these things, and it’s because Sellers delivers the lines with such outraged dignity:
Crazy acrobatic gymnasts
This will either charm or horrify you. Maybe both:
The “people don’t care” election
Donald Trump gave an interview yesterday:
In an exclusive sit down with ABC News’ David Muir, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said that people don’t care about whether he should release his taxes, while Gov. Mike Pence argued that the calls to release them are a “distraction” from Hillary Clinton.
“I think people don’t care,” Trump said Monday afternoon in Ohio of his tax returns, which he has not released. “I don’t think anybody cares, except some members of the press.”
Do they care? Is he right or wrong?
Well, on the “yes, they do” side, plenty of people seem to care and are suspicious of Trump’s not releasing the information:
A Monmouth University poll released at the end of August showed that 31 percent of voters think it’s very important that a candidate release his or her taxes, while 36 percent think it’s not important. Fifty-two percent of voters polled said Trump is withholding his tax returns because there’s something he doesn’t want the public to know. Twenty-four percent think Trump is keeping his tax returns private because his taxes under audit.
If Trump doesn’t release his tax returns, he’ll be the first presumptive major party nominee since 1976 not to do so.
But in the end I believe Trump is correct and the answer is “no, they really don’t care, at least not in terms of how people will vote.” So far I haven’t found the detailed stats from that Momnouth poll, but I’d wager that very few people would say they care enough to change their votes. For example, I can’t imagine that there’s a Trump supporter around who will change his/her mind and won’t vote for him on the basis of his failure to release his tax returns. Nor is there a Hillary supporter who will switch to Trump if he does release them.
In an election like this one (although there never has been another election in this country like this one), voters for the most part are choosing candidates based very much on the lesser of two evils principle. That means that the evils of the other candidate are considered so great that there is almost nothing a person’s own candidate can do to sway them. If Hillary Clinton is defined as practically the devil incarnate, how can Trump’s failure to release his tax returns (even if one is suspicious about his motives) matter? And if Donald Trump is defined as practically the devil incarnate, what could Hillary ever do to get her voters to abandon her? I don’t see anything on either side that will change this.
Of course, in this election there are still a lot of people who say they are undecided. I’m not sure whether they really are undecided; my guess is that they are actually leaners. Do they care enough about Trump’s failure to release his tax returns for it to matter, even to them? I doubt it, and that’s because there are so many other, larger issues to think about—including other issues involving corruption and character in both candidates—that something such as the absence of tax returns, which might loom large in another election, starts seeming like relatively small potatoes.
Thoughts on comments; comments on thoughts
The comments section here offers food for thought, and lots of it. So here’s a post based on a few comments and my reaction to them.
(1) “The Other Chuck” wrote of all the GOP presidential candidates in 2016: “It’s interesting how Trump makes them ALL seem reasonable in retrospect.”
Well, true. But most of them (maybe all) seemed pretty reasonable at the outset. Some were a lot more reasonable than others, of course. But if any of them—and that includes the ones I disagreed with most—had ended up the nominee, I would not have hesitated to have voted for that person.
(2) “Julie near Chicago” says “One of the things I find interesting is the number of people coming out from behind a bush to say that their first pick was Scott Walker ”” including me.”
I think I said it long before the campaign began. I initially thought Walker would be the one to beat. Courageous, experienced in the executive branch, with conservative bona fides, he had a proven ability to earn votes in blue states. Unfortunately he was too bland for the fired-up and angry electorate of 2016, and his foreign policy inexperience showed. But the latter problem wouldn’t have mattered to voters so much, I think, if it hadn’t been for the former. No, this year, the candidate who stomped his/her feet loudest was the one a plurality of people seemed to want. And because of the size of the pack, a plurality rather than a majority of the voters were able to decide the outcome.
(3) “AesopFan” quotes an article that claims, “a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.”
I am heartily sick of the common but misleading Russian roulette analogy. I wrote an entire post describing its inappropriateness to the situation we face with these two candidates.
(4) “Sergey” asks a very interesting question:
I can’t understand why authoritarian ruler is always considered to be a bad choice. It entirely depends on personal virtues of this ruler. Singapore and Chile are clear examples how authoritarian ruler can save his nation on the verge of catastrophe and do the job which no democracy can ever accomplish due its inherent weakness and impotence.
Certainly some people acknowledge that as a dilemma, because it’s well understand here (at least by those who think about such things) that authoritarian rule can be more efficient. But in this country it has been rejected, at least so far. It has to do with our special heritage about liberty.
We are very touchy about our liberty—at least, we used to be, and many of us continue to be, probably more than any other group of people on earth. Liberty is considered a good thing in and of itself, even a necessary thing. Also an American thing. Of course, our liberty is compromised in certain ways. But there are still many Americans who consider it very important and even vital, the key to American exceptionalism and to American culture itself
Hitler made the trains run on time [*see NOTE below]. We really don’t care. At least, most of us don’t. We’d rather they were a bit late and we kept our liberty. That’s why we don’t sing “God Save the King” any more, although we use the same tune for a different sentiment:
My country ’tis of thee
Sweet land of liberty
Of thee I sing.
Land where my fathers died
Land of the pilgrims’ pride
From ev’ry mountainside
Let freedom ring.
[*NOTE: A reader mentioned to me that it was Mussolini who is said to have made the trains run on time. When I Googled it, I found a few references to Hitler having done it in Germany, but the majority of the references were to Mussolini. So it’s likely to have been him.
The analogous saying about Hitler was that “he built the Autobahn.” Apparently, I got the two types of transportation mixed up in my mind, but the idea being expressed is the same: increased efficiency. Of course, in other ways, dictatorships and authoritarian rulers are not necessarily efficient at all. Five-year plans, anyone? How often does authoritarian rule actually “save” a country on the brink of catastrophe, as Sergey posits occurred in Chile and Singapore, and how often does it lead a country further down the road to ruin? I maintain the latter is far more common than the former.]
Happy Labor Day
Labor Day is a three-day-weekend, but today is the actual Labor Day. What are you going to do?
I’ve got a $25 credit at a store that expires after today, and it’s burning a hole in my pocket. So I’m going shopping now.
Then this evening I watch the first of two finales of this season’s TV show “Bachelor in Paradise.” I won’t even try to argue for the show’s redeeming social importance (probably doesn’t have any). But it does have Shakespearean overtones, as I described here.
So, what are you planning? Have a happy one, whatever it is!
Infighting on the right
Oh, why rehash the bitter disputes that led us to where we are right now in September of 2016? Sometimes I think it’s impossible—or at least highly unlikely—for people to learn from their errors, or even pay attention to them. We don’t even agree on what those errors are.
But this Red State article by Kimberly Ross entitled “Cruz vs. Rubio Hindsight in the Dark Days of Trump” got me to thinking about it.
Red State is very much an anti-Trump site. But it’s got a lot of good writers and it also covers news that has nothing to do with Trump. You don’t have to agree that these are “dark days of Trump” (although I certainly tend to think so) in order to wonder what happened in the Cruz vs. Rubio battle, or how it’s emblematic of what has so very often gone wrong on the right.
Ross writes:
As Trump was continuing to rack up primary victories, there remained a deep division among those who supported Rubio and those who supported Cruz, the only two (apart from Trump) who really had any shot at becoming the nominee. The divide was vicious and filled with attacks, strange accusations, and some legitimate grievances. I guess the mood from both sides was desperate as they saw the disastrous, embarrassing Donald Trump suddenly lead the pack.
Emotions continued to boil over until Rubio dropped out following the Florida primary loss. Suddenly we were left with Cruz and Trump. While plenty of Rubio supporters obligingly backed Cruz, many did not. Their loyalty to Rubio just couldn’t be shaken. Once Cruz was gone, reality began to sink in. This is who we are left with? Donald Trump??
There’s a lot more at the link. I read the whole thing, and although I agree with some of it (and think it does fairly represent a certain mindset at the time), it wasn’t anything like what I was going through back then. For example, I don’t think that what drove the bitter, nitpicky accusations between Cruz and Rubio supporters (or, for that matter, Trump supporters and both) had all that much to do with Donald Trump. The phenomenon of bitter division on the right long predated his rise. Anyone on the right who was dissatisfied with the nomination of alleged RINOs McCain and Romney understands that I’m talking about a split on the right that long preceded 2016 and which has made it difficult for a conservative alternative to be nominated.
Perhaps it is because I came to this crowd as an outsider—and to a certain extent am still an outsider—that I have always observed and been very concerned about the destructive bitterness of the disagreements on the right. Just before the 2012 election I wrote that the right would tear itself apart in the next four years, and though I certainly didn’t foresee all the ins and outs ad backs and forths of those years, the main outlines were clear and have been for a long, long time.
Not just clear to me. Clear, period.
My immersion in politics online coincided with my political conversion and was part of what made it possible. So I don’t recall being part of political discussions online (or even in person very often) back when I was a liberal. But to the best of my recollection, plus a certain amount of reading I’ve done in the last fifteen or so years on liberal and leftist blogs, there is a big difference in the way left and right approach candidates.
Simply put, the left accepts its candidates and unites against the common enemy, the right. Yes, there are exceptions to this rule (remember the pro-Hillary PUMAs in 2008? or some of Bernie Sanders’ die-hards now?). But they just aren’t all that numerous.
On the right, however, the focus is different. The right agrees that the left is an enemy, but somehow the left seems to fade way way into the background for many people, and looming huge and insurmountably in the foreground are the candidates on the right and their imperfections.
Sometimes it’s because the voter is a one-issue voter who uses an absolute litmus test—for example, on abortion. The rage against Rubio on immigration was another. It had nothing to do with the advent of Donald Trump, either. I watched it build for years in the blogosphere, and every now and then (not often) I also tuned in to talk shows and heard the spitting rage there. Against Rubio it focused on the Gang of Eight. Against Cruz (arguably the smartest and most conservative GOP candidate to come down the pike in a long long time) it seemed even odder, based on some form of visceral dislike for his face or his voice or his inability to get enough other senators to agree with him on issues on which they disagreed.
These things always seemed small to me. I am pretty sure that statement will rouse the ire many of my readers, who will ask how I can think that Rubio’s immigration betrayal was small. Well, “small” is a relative term. I’ve never idealized candidates, once I reached adulthood. I’ve always expected some problems with any candidate I basically like, but it’s a question of the overall picture among a very flawed lot. With Rubio, there was only that one thing, and although it was somewhat of a biggee, I carefully read all the explanations and apologia for it, and decided it was a big mistake but that on the whole Rubio was conservative and smart.
About Cruz’s conservatism there was no doubt. So either candidate was fine with me (my favored candidate at the very beginning had been Walker). But you know what? All of the rest of the candidates were okay with me, too, to different degrees, except for one: Donald Trump. He was not okay for reasons I’ve delineated in about 200 posts so far, but I’ll summarize by saying (a) I disagreed with him on many issues, not just one (b) he had changed his mind on so many of them and was sometimes still changing it, so often that I found what he said to be deeply untrustworthy (c) he seemed ignorant of a great many relevant facts (for example, the nuclear triad) and completely uninterested in learning about them (d) he had a liberal recent past and failed to adequately explain why or how he’d changed his mind (e) his character was profoundly narcissistic and vindictive; and (f) he lied not just sometimes, but constantly, and even about minor things.
That’s why, as I wrote in this post on the subject, objections to Trump are different in kind, scope, and number to objections to previous nominees.
But to get back to Rubio and Cruz—the problem was always that they split the un-Trump vote somewhat evenly between them (in addition, of course, to the huge number of other candidates who kept limping along), and that kept them both going way too long, long after one should have dropped out. I almost didn’t care which one it would be, because I thought Cruz was the most ideologically consistent and trustworthy, but Rubio the most likely to win against Hillary. Based on polls, however, both seemed like they could win, and both consistently did better than Trump.
But throughout the entire campaign season one thing that especially puzzled me was that so many pundits thought Trump couldn’t win the nominiation. It was obvious by August of 2015 that he definitely could, and might. As I wrote that August:
From the start of Trump’s rise in the polls I’ve taken him very seriously as a phenomenon. I haven’t understood those who casually asserted “He’s never going to win the nomination.” I’ve long thought he could, because the force of that appeal is obvious, and he’s somehow made himself immune to being criticized for anything he says. His niche is “the more outrageous, the better,” and the more extreme his utterances the more his supporters seem to like him””although not all of what he says is extreme, of course, and some is just common sense.
If I were one of the other Republican candidates I’d be very very scared. And if I were one of the Democratic candidates I’d be scared, too.
So here we are. Why did more people not see where it was heading? A prognosticator didn’t need a crystal ball; it was glaringly obvious. Was this wishful thinking? Denial? Yes, and yes.
But I see the main problem mostly as the propensity of anti-Trump voters on the right to nitpick about their candidates, and their inability or unwillingness to unite behind one. Who would organize that uniting?
Don’t rely on the RNC, that’s for sure; they have their own agenda. I’m not even sure what that RNC agenda was this year. At first it seemed to be Jeb Bush, but his candidacy was such a failure that after that they seemed to throw up their hands in despair. The one thing they did seem united about after Bush was gone was their hatred of Ted Cruz.
But the main problem was something else, and that’s this tendency toward extreme divisiveness on relatively minor disagreements (again, I see Trump’s problems is being of a different number and type compared to all previous GOP candidates, and not the least bit minor). It’s not for nothing that for years the GOP has been called a “circular firing squad.”
Philae: like finding a needle in a haystack
Every now and then I lose something and can’t find it, or it takes me a long time to find it.
My favorite earring fell off in my car, and seemed to completely disappear. Several years later I found it under a mat.
My bluetooth is continually leaping out of my ear and wedging itself in the strangest of hiding places.
Right after my husband and I were married, we were moving cross-country and we stored most of the wedding presents in my parents’ attic. He also lost some eyeglasses, although we never connected those two events. It took about three years for us to get a big enough place to be able to ship our stuff from my parents’ attic to where we were now living. When we opened one of the boxes, there were the glasses, which had apparently fallen out of his shirt pocket while he was packing up our wedding haul.
And on and on and on. Lose it, and no matter how hard you look, sometimes you just can’t find what you lost.
But sometimes you can.
Which brings us to this:
Philae, Europe’s comet space lander that went missing nearly two years ago after its batteries ran down, has finally been found wedged into a dark crack on Comet 67P.
The discovery was made by the European Space Agency’s craft Rosetta, which came within 2.7km of the surface of the comet and used a high-resolution camera to capture the main body of the lander along with two out of three of its legs on Friday.
Philae went missing after completing a soft-landing on icy dirt-ball 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in November 2014.
On landing, the probe’s harpoons did not fire to keep it anchored to the surface and it bounced a number of times, before settling in the shadow of a cliff where its solar panels could not pick up enough energy to keep it going.
…“This remarkable discovery comes at the end of a long, painstaking search,” [Patrick Martin, ESA’s Rosetta mission manager] said. “It is incredible we have captured this at the final hour.”
It seems to be a close relative of my bluetooth:
Happy Labor Day weekend
Are you planning to have fun this weekend? I am. Of course, my idea of fun is pretty sedate: going out with friends for a meal, going to a dance performance, going out for a walk and enjoying the fine weather—“fine” till Monday, that is.
Labor Day is a sort of bittersweet holiday. When I was young I dreaded it because it meant back to school, although it was always nice to get those new pencils and pens and erasers and bookbag and clothing. But on the other hand it was the gateway to autumn, one of my favorite seasons then and now.
Georgetown University tries to expiate its guilt over slavery
Georgetown is a Jesuit school trying to atone for an episode in its past:
In an effort to acknowledge its ties to slavery, Georgetown University will offer the descendants of nearly 300 slaves preferential treatment in its admissions process.
In 1838, the school sold 272 slaves who were working on plantations in southern Maryland to pay down its debts.
Now, the school said it will give the descendants of those slaves “the same consideration we give members of the Georgetown community” when they apply. That means that the applicants will “receive an extra look” and that their relationship to the university will be considered.
Interesting.
It’s not as though these descendants aren’t required to meet certain standards; they are. It’s just that the standards are slightly lower, and equivalent to those required for what used to be called “legacies.”
And Georgetown is free to do whatever it wants concerning admissions. I suppose this would not be considered any more discriminatory than already-existing preferences for “diversity” (racial, geographic, economic, what-have-you) or the already-existing preference for the descendants of those who have attended the school and/or given it money.
However, I have reservations about this one (not that Georgetown cares). The first is that it is a rather arbitrary thing. The slaves themselves were wronged by being sold into conditions that were almost certainly worse than those they were already enduring (they had been in Maryland and ended up in Louisiana). Their immediate descendants of the next couple of generations likewise probably suffered. But, eight generations later (that’s what I calculate an 18-year-old living today would probably be)? Can we really assume that that person today is still feeling some effects of that 1838 sale, and should be given preferential treatment because of it?
Also by my calculations (which are both rough and quick, so I certainly might have made errors), if you imagine two descendants for each of those eight generations, there would now be 139,263 descendants in all. How on earth could those people be found? Apparently, “research conducted by Georgetown and other organizations, including The New York Times, has identified many living descendants of the slaves.” But I bet it’s only a very small fraction of the actual descendants. Another interesting question is whether any of these descendants are white, and what’s to be done about them. Do they get special treatment, too? After all, when people track their DNA, it’s not at all unusual for people who are to all intents and purposes white to find they have some black ancestry, which could be assumed to have occurred for many of them back in the days of slavery. Do those descendants get special treatment, too?
As I said, Georgetown is free to do this. My guess is that it has more to do with the Georgetown administrators’ own feelings of guilt for something that happened about 175 years ago, an act perpetrated by people they have nothing to do with except for ties to the same institution. How far back does one take guilt, I wonder? And does this really change anything, except Georgetown’s PR?
[NOTE: If you want to learn the backstory of the pressure that was brought to bear on Georgetown regarding its slave-selling history, please see this. It’s been going on for a long time. Daniel Berrigan was instrumental in the preface to it many decades ago, as part of his general leftist (and in his case, Catholic and Jesuit) focus on American and Western guilt.]
Convincing reluctant Trump supporters to vote for him
For a long time I’ve conceptualized Trump voters as falling into two camps: the enthusiastic and the reluctant. No doubt there are some who fall in between, too, but I think that mainly there are those two categories.
The first group are people who supported Trump in the primaries, either as first or second choice. They believe he would be a good president, or at least that he was the best or one of the best of the lot of GOP candidates who originally threw their hats into the ring.
The second group are people who support Trump now only because he’s running against a person they consider worse, Hillary Clinton (if I end up voting for Trump, it will be for that reason).
Members of the first group sometimes appeal to members of the second group, urging them to make sure they vote for Trump. The arguments vary widely (we’ve seen many in the comments section of this blog). Sometimes the argument is that Trump will be a good president and will do a number of good things for the country. Sometimes it’s that Trump will do one or two good things, usually involving SCOTUS justice choices and/or immigration policy. And sometimes it’s that even though we don’t know what Trump might do, we know that Hillary would be awful and there’s at least a chance that Trump would be better.
That latter type of reasoning has probably become the most common argument we see these days, at least as reflected in blog comments and blog posts, in newspaper and magazine columns and TV commentary, plus social media. As Trump’s poll numbers rise and fall and then rise and fall and rise, and state polls become increasingly common, it occurs to me that the latter argument rests almost entirely on the race being at least somewhat close.
For example, let’s say you live in California. If Clinton is ahead by 12% in the polls there (I chose that number because it was the figure in a recent poll, but the point is that no one really disputes that she’s way ahead there), why would a reluctant Trump supporter be motivated to compromise what he/she sees as both his/her principles and integrity by voting for a man he/she detests, if that man is seen as having absolutely no chance of winning in that state? In other words, why prostitute yourself without a payoff?
It behooves Trump to stay close in swing states, because a whole lot of his supporters everywhere are in the category of “reluctant supporters.” Often very reluctant supporters. They will only hold their noses and vote for him in that voting both if they see a good chance of defeating her. Because elections are decided by winning state electoral votes rather than winning the national popular vote, voting decisions will be made by most voters who know much of anything about elections (and I would guess that the category “reluctant Trump voter” is probably made up of people who are aware of the way the Electoral College works) by taking into account this system.
That’s another way in which polls matter. There are margins of error in polls, to be sure, and there are just plain errors, too. But overall, polls that show Trump far behind in a state—particularly a state that usually and reliably goes for the other party; in other words, for Trump supporters that would be blue states—are going to discourage the Trump vote. And polls that show him close will almost certainly encourage it.
Tolstoy post du jour: the voice
More Tolstoy! Just can’t get enough of that Tolstoy!!
Seriously, though, I came across something extraordinary yesterday. It’s a recording of Tolstoy himself reading an English translation of a book of quotations from other writers (The Thoughts of Wise Men, published as A Calendar of Wisdom in English), that he assembled late in life:
The audio recordings above were made at the writer’s home in Yasnaya Polyana on October 31, 1909, when he was 81 years old. He died just over a year later. Tolstoy apparently translated the passage himself.
Here’s what he’s saying; you can follow along:
That the object of life is self-perfection, the perfection of all immortal souls, that this is the only object of my life, is seen to be correct by the fact alone that every other object is essentially a new object. Therefore, the question whether thou hast done what thou shoudst have done is of immense importance, for the only meaning of thy life is in doing in this short term allowed thee, that which is desired of thee by He or That which has sent thee into life. Art thou doing the right thing?
I find hearing the actual voice of a long-ago historic figure to be a powerful and moving experience. There are a lot of these old audios on YouTube, one of the many reasons I love that site and am addicted to it.
Hillary Clinton, fast and loose with security
It certainly seems that way:
Earlier today, the FBI released its investigative notes on the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal, including its notes on their interview of Hillary in June. It makes for an interesting read, and a couple of eye-popping moments. For instance, agents showed Hillary the e-mails containing information that investigators had verified had been classified at the time of transmission, including Top Secret/SAP ”” programs so sensitive that even their names were classified. According to pages 26-7 of the first part of the 302, Hillary told them that she believed that the information wasn’t classified, and was not a problem even if the data had gotten into the hands of foreign governments.
The media is picking up on another interesting tidbit: Clinton claimed she could not remember any kind of training regarding how to handle classified information. The FBI also noted that the former secretary of state may have had as many as 13 devices…
At one point in the interview, an FBI agent noted that Clinton didn’t know the “C” meant classified…
Clinton aides said she often replaced her Blackberry and whereabouts of the old device would “frequently become unknown”…
Here are the files, if you want to read them yourself. I haven’t yet done so; don’t know if I will. The summaries are depressing and outrageous enough.