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Trump and Obama: a deeper resemblance
On the surface—in personality and speech characteristics—Donald Trump is nothing like Barack Obama. In fact, you might say he’s the un-Obama.
Obama’s most salient characteristics (at least, as his supporters and the press see him) include being smooth, intellectual, and articulate. He likes to lecture at us from a position of supposed superiority. One would never describe Trump that way. But underneath Obama’s surface smoothness lies the strongman who is actively trying to circumvent and/or destroy parts of the Constitution if it stands in the way of what he wants to do, despite Obama’s rep as the supposed constitutional law prof and scholar. Obama sees the Constitution as a negative restraining influence to be circumvented when he wants to accomplish something, and he counts on ignorance and/or lack of caring on the part of the public about that.
Now comes GOP-nominee-to-be Donald Trump. Trump may or may not actually be ignorant of the Constitution, but in any event he doesn’t seem to care much about most of it and his supporters don’t seem to care. To be more exact about that, many of his supporters used to care but don’t any more because—having experienced nearly eight years of Obama—they want their own strongman to ride roughshod over the Constitution in order to correct what Obama has done. Whether he would actually try to correct it or be able to correct it (not to mention the dangers inherent in the process of his doing it that way) is an open question, but there’s also no question that Hillary Clinton would not even try to correct what Obama has done.
Ted Cruz presented an alternative approach that GOP primary voters rejected. Cruz’s alternative was to undo what Obama did while respecting the Constitution and its restrictions. But that ship has sailed, at least for now. Those who much preferred (understatement of the decade) Ted Cruz and yet will end up voting for Trump in November of 2016 (and I might end up being one of their number) think that if Hillary Clinton is allowed to become president a corrective will never occur, and that with Trump there is at least a small chance of its occurring.
That’s the terrible dilemma we face.
The Juanita Broaddrick rape accusation
The topic of Juanita Broaddrick’s rape accusation against Bill Clinton has come up again this campaign season, a result of Donald Trump bringing it up in an interview with Sean Hannity.
Although anyone who reads this blog regularly knows I have no hesitation to criticize Trump vigorously, this is not an instance where I’m going to do it. Trump’s point is a valid one, and not only because Broaddrick’s accusations are serious enough to be at least potentially credible (particularly since there are people who swear she told them the story close to the time it allegedly occurred, back in 1978). It also is particularly relevant for Trump, who was recently the target of an article in the NY Times alleging various rather mild offenses on his part towards women, which even if true were deemed unoffensive by a lot of readers.
That does not mean, however, that Broaddrick’s allegations are true. We don’t know if they are or aren’t, and a good case could be made for either position. The full story is a complicated one, but you can read the pros and cons of it here if you’re interested. That Slate piece was published in 1999, when Broaddrick’s accusations surfaced, and it points out various inconsistencies in her story (including her saying under oath that Bill Clinton did not assault her, and then one year later saying he did). Also, several of the witnesses who said she told them the story long ago had beefs with Bill Clinton and might have a motive to lie. Lastly, although there is no question that Bill Clinton has been a major philanderer who came on to women at the drop of a—whatever, no one else but Broaddrick has ever alleged that he raped her.
That does not mean that Broaddrick is lying, however. She might indeed be telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The problem is that there are good arguments for either side. What does my gut tell me on this one? My gut says it just doesn’t know.
[NOTE: More details here.]
EgyptAir Flight 804: the four scenarios
I’d say that this just about covers it:
There are broadly four areas investigators will consider as they probe the disappearance of EgyptAir Flight 804 over the Mediterranean shortly before it began its descent to Cairo: Did it crash or explode due to pilot error, a technical malfunction, a smuggled bomb or an inside act of sabotage?
The “smuggled bomb” could involve a passenger carrying a bomb on purpose, or a passenger doing it unknowingly because someone else put a bomb in that passenger’s luggage or among his/her possessions, or ground crew being responsible for the placement of the bomb (that latter scenario would make it both a smuggled bomb and an “inside act of sabotage”). Other “inside acts of sabotage” could include something on the order of last March’s Germanwings crash in which co-pilot Andreas Lubitz locked the captain out of the cockpit and then intentionally flew the plane into a mountain, or 1999’s EgyptAir Flight 990 which is thought to have been the result of deliberate actions of the relief first officer who caused the plane to crash near Nantucket.
One must be careful with all these theories, particularly ones that might slander good people (the crew) who are recently deceased and whose families are in deep grief. But unfortunately—very unfortunately—they all have to be considered, including what used to be the unthinkably shocking idea of pilot intention. Previous incidents have made it all too clear that such a thing is possible.
It does seem, however, that since wreckage has been sighted and the Mediterranean is not incredibly deep, the plane’s black boxes will be recovered and much more information should be available before too long.
RIP.
Giraffes are more amazing than you knew
They’re certainly more amazing than I knew, anyway, and I already knew they were pretty amazing merely by looking at them. It’s the neck, of course—that impossibly long, impossibly stretched-out, Dr. Suess-like neck.
I recently saw surprising footage of giraffes fighting and using their necks as clubs. It wasn’t this exact footage, but it was very similar:
Ouch.
So I had giraffes on the brain when I came across this article describing the latest theories on the genetics of the giraffe’s long neck and cardiovascular idiosyncracies.
I’d never thought about it before, but it makes perfect sense that giraffes would have to have some special way of getting blood all the way up up up to their lofty brains. Sure enough, they do:
The giraffe’s heart, for example, must pump blood two meters straight up in order to provide an ample blood supply to its brain. This feat is possible because the giraffe’s heart has evolved to have an unusually large left ventricle, and the species also has blood pressure that is twice as high as other mammals.
To identify genetic changes likely to be responsible for the giraffe’s unique characteristics, including sprints that can reach 37 miles per hour (60 km/h), Cavener and Agaba compared the gene-coding sequences of the giraffe and the okapi [its nearest relative] to more than forty other mammals…
Using a battery of comparative tests to study the genome sequences of the giraffe and the okapi, the scientists discovered 70 genes that showed multiple signs of adaptations. “These adaptations include unique amino-acid-sequence substitutions that are predicted to alter protein function, protein-sequence divergence, and positive natural selection,” Cavener said. Over half of the 70 genes code for proteins that are known to regulate development and physiology of the skeletal, cardiovascular, and nervous system ”“ just the type of genes predicted to be necessary for driving the development of the giraffe’s unique characteristics.
Among the research team’s discoveries are that several genes known to either to regulate the development of the cardiovascular system or to control blood pressure are among the genes showing multiple signs of adaptation in the giraffe. Some of these genes control both cardiovascular development and skeletal development, suggesting the intriguing possibility that the giraffe’s stature and turbocharged cardiovascular system evolved in concert through changes in a small number of genes.
The article goes on to explain theories of how it might be that the vertebrae of the giraffe (they have the same number of vertebral bones as we have) and their leg bones may have elongated in concert with each other. Fascinating.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Campaign funding hypocrisy: Obama and Trump
I clearly remember when I first became truly alarmed during Obama’s 2008 campaign. Originally I didn’t know much about Obama, and slowly but surely began to notice warning signs that he might be worse than the garden-variety liberal Democratic candidate he was trying to present himself as being. But the real red flag occurred in June of 2008 when he abruptly changed his mind about public campaign financing.
Now, that incident probably doesn’t stick in the minds of many people now. Nor did it then. But I wrote at the time:
Yesterday Obama channeled Emily Litella and said “never mind,” taking back his earlier promise to accept public financing for his campaign if his opponent would as well…
Well, so what? Promises, shmomises…
…as soon as Obama saw that the money flowing his way was far beyond what he could get if he adhered to his agreement, he reneged.
It’s not just that he reneged, either”“it’s how he reneged. Who’s to blame, according to Obama? Why, John McCain and the nasty Republicans, that’s who. James Joyner writes that this charge of Obama’s does take “a bit of gall.” I’d say it takes substantially more than a bit, as well as a heavy dose of the whining, blaming, audacity in which the holier-than-thou Obama tends to specialize…
The most important thing about it, though, was that his supporters made excuses for what he did, or praised it. I noticed that they did not seem the least bit perturbed:
…once again, he’s relying on the American people not to know or care””and, if the comments by his supporters are any indication, he could be right…
In early July of 2009, after just a few months of President Obama, I revisited this turning point and added the following:
[Right after Obama’s switch on campaign financing]…something even more perturbing to me than what Obama was doing or even how he was doing it…was the reaction to him. The mainstream press (with only a few exceptions) seemed to take it in stride, mentioning it but not making a fuss about it, seeing it as a pragmatic decision. But what of Obama’s supporters? Would they not feel betrayed by his hypocrisy on campaign financing? After all, wasn’t his perceived trustworthiness, his business-as-unusual persona, a great part of what attracted them to him in the first place? Would this lack of integrity not make the scales fall from their eyes?
Once again, with just a few exceptions, the answer was a resounding “no.” It was merely seen as a clever move, a sign that Obama was a winner rather than a loser.
Yet another thought then came to me””the idea that this action of Obama’s had been a sort of test””not of him, but of us. In weighing whether to go ahead and refuse public financing, he had probably calculated that the extra money he’d have access to if he broke his pledge might be the key to his winning. So, although it would give his opponents further ammunition with which to criticize him, and might offend his base by showing that he was just a pol like any other after all, he felt it was probably worth the gamble. But his public’s reaction told him that there had been virtually no risk at all, and gave him a green light for future reversals and other cynical moves.
From this experience, Obama learned to his pleasure (I don’t know whether it was to his surprise) that the press was so thoroughly behind him, and his many supporters so hypnotized by his spellbinding charisma, that he no longer had to be quite as careful as before. Audacity was going to pay off, big time.
So, why am I going on and on about something that happened all those years ago? As you might imagine, something Donald Trump did recently made me think of it:
Now that Donald Trump is the presumptive nominee, it’s almost shocking how quickly his tune has changed on the corrupting influence of big money donors. SURPRISINGLY (to Trump voters), it turns out that he doesn’t mind them at all and places no value on being independent from them. After all the railing he did about how the other candidates were “owned” by their financiers and special interests, he finds zero problem with the whole system now.
That’s from Leon H. Wolf at RedState. And in the comments section there we have this:
This amounts to a sociological experiment where the question posed is, “What if I abandoned any pretense of Honor or Shame, and behaved in an entirely pragmatic manner, saying whatever will move me forward in any given moment without regard for past statements, actions or any hypocrisy to be proved thereby?”
If Trump has a business plan for this election, this would be part of it. He has clearly decided not to care about anything a decent human being would value. He is taking a completely amoral approach, and believes the Media will continue to allow it because he brings them ratings.
I assume I don’t have to point out the parallels to Obama. I would only add to that comment the fact that Trump believes (correctly, it seems) that his supporters will continue to allow it—and even praise it—because they see him as the only alternative to the even-more-hated Hillary, or because they actually applaud the approach itself.
In other words, it’s okay because he’s our audaciously lying hypocrite with a sycophantic following. And in this act of Trump’s he’s a hypocrite and/or liar in more ways than Obama was when he broke his finance pledge, such as:
(1) Trump’s acceptance of Adelson’s enormous sum of money is an indication (and not the first one) that Trump may also have been lying about the extent of his own financial assets
(2) Trump’s trashing of other candidates for accepting donations and therefore being the puppets of their donors was apparently just so much empty propagandist blather on his part (and as one of the major talking points used early on by his most activist supporters, their apparent silence on this matter now speaks volumes about their own hypocrisy, too)
Obama paved the way for a man like Trump to get as far as he has. People sometimes say that, and they often mean a number of things—including the idea that Trump is needed now as a corrective to Obama. But I think that Obama demonstrated something to any candidate who will follow, which is that the American people will now accept things they wouldn’t accept in a candidate just a short while ago.
Some of these changes have been apparent for a while. For example, I can remember (and it wasn’t all that many years ago) when a divorced candidate was impossible or highly unlikely (Reagan broke that mold, and he’s the only one till now). I can also remember when a candidate who admitted to taking illegal drugs was going nowhere (Bill Clinton tiptoed up to that line but didn’t cross it; Obama crossed it). The first is relevant to Trump; the second is not (he has never used drugs or alcohol). And I can remember when, although candidates certainly lied and/or made promises they couldn’t or wouldn’t keep, they were wary of breaking those promises so unapologetically and so obviously during the campaign itself, because they thought the American people wanted a president with more integrity than that—or at the very least, one who appeared to have more integrity than that.
In 2008 Obama demonstrated that with enough chutzpah a candidate could say up is down and 2+2 is 5, do it during the campaign itself, could go back and forth and reverse what he’d said previously, and it didn’t necessarily matter. The American people had become cynical enough, hardened enough, uninformed enough, amoral/immoral enough (some or all of the above), that it would praised as a clever move.
We have reaped what was sowed.
And even Obama did not create this situation in the electorate. He merely exposed it, and showed those who would come after him how to exploit it.
EgyptAir flight disappears over Mediterranean; probable crash [UPDATED]
A search is under way for an EgyptAir flight from Paris to Cairo which has disappeared with 56 passengers and 10 crew on board – including one British national.
The fate of the plane is not yet known and officials have said it is too early to rule out any possibility, including terrorism, but all those on board are now feared to have died.
French President Francois Hollande said “unfortunately the information we have … confirms to us the plane came down and is lost”, suggesting it crashed near the southern Greek island of Karpathos where the search is focused.
Air control lost contact with the plane just as it was entering Egyptian air space. The pilots sent no distress signal, and Greek defense minister Panos Kammenos said the plane “swerved ’90 degrees left and then 360 degrees to the right’ before vanishing.”
Ominous. In addition to the terrible and tragic loss of life, this seems to have been a sudden and catastrophic event. Unlike the Malaysian airplane that went missing two years ago and has never been found or its crash explained, this one went down in an area that is far easier to search, and at a known time. Already the plane’s emergency beacon has been sending a signal. My guess is that authorities will find the black boxes and get a lot more information.
Will the mystery then be solved? And will it end up being terrorism, or highly suspected terrorism, including the possibility of terrorism on the part of the crew, as already may have occurred in the case of EgyptAir Flight 990 in 1999?
UPDATE 4:30 PM
Some wreckage from the plane has been found. The leading theory right now is terrorism—specifically, a bomb—although that is very speculative and could end up being incorrect.
Degas and the dancers
[Hat tip: Open Blogger at Ace’s.]
When I was a child I used to greatly admire Degas’ dancer paintings. My family had a reproduction of one of them, and I used to study it and marvel at how well it expressed how ballet dancers stand, pose, and move.
Most artists cannot draw ballet dancers. To the unschooled observer their attempts might look just fine, but a trained dancer (that’s me, for example) knows what’s off, and there’s almost always something that’s not right.
Degas gets it right. Of course, ballet has changed since the time he painted, but not that much, and if you look at old photos or very old movies you will see how well he managed to match what he was seeing. His dancers in repose have the weariness of the physically spent, and yet even then they retain the exaggerated turnout of their ballet training. In movement, there’s the grace and the strain. You can see their unnatural postures and the slight but somehow beautiful deformation of the leg and feet, the hyper-extended knees (I’ve got ’em) and the rolling in of the arches that sometimes happens in spite of dancers’ best efforts not to give in to it.
Degas was probably the most intensely accurate observer of movement who ever painted. He isn’t looking for the light and decorative, as most painters of ballet dancers are. His dancers have weight and awkwardness and stress, and they go beyond the pretty into the true. I have yet to see a Degas ballet painting—and there are many, many—that isn’t superior to every other painting of dancers I’ve ever seen.
Some of my Degas favorites are charcoal sketches, some are full-fledged paintings. I especially like his renditions of dancers fussing with their shoes or their garments, something dancers are constantly doing in real life:
There are so very many it’s hard to choose, but I’m very fond of this one adjusting her shoulder strap:
This next drawing in particular demonstrates Degas’ exceptionally keen eye for movement. It’s not really pretty; can you see the slight strain in the shoulders and necks of the dancers, trying their best for height of the raised leg and extreme turnout of both that one and the supporting leg and foot? It’s very very common for dancers to take the strain into the upper body like that, and yet it’s subtle. Degas fully captures it:
You may be very familiar with Degas’ statue of a young dancer, with her fabric dress and the ribbon in her hair. Although the sculpture is very popular now, it was controversial in Degas’ time; the story can be found here. I imagine that she’s resting a bit as she watches the teacher set the next combination:
Reflections on the primaries and the 2016 election
Hey—haven’t I reflected on the primaries enough?
Perhaps.
But I’m going to reflect a bit more. After all, since Indiana, I’ve barely talked about them at all, and they’re still going on.
In Oregon yesterday, the only man left standing in the GOP race won about 67% of the vote (as of this writing), but the size of the vote for two candidates who have already suspended their campaigns—Cruz at 16.7 and Kasich at 16.4, representing the conservative and moderate wings of the party—shows the lack of acceptance of Trump among many voters, despite the GOP regulars slowly coalescing around him as nominee.
One thing I’m very grateful for at this point is that I don’t have to suffer through any more of those suspenseful primaries, where I fear a Trump victory and hope for one of his rivals (a whole succession of them over time) to win, only to see those hopes dashed. Quite early in the primary season, and certainly by Super Tuesday, I was pessimistic after seeing the continuing phenomenon of Trump victories (mostly with about a third of the vote), particularly when the field was way too big and I suspected if it narrowed down soon enough there would be someone to stop him. My frustration built and built until I wanted to shriek to most of them to DROP OUT and stop playing this game of Chicken.
But Chicken it was, for way too long. And we’ll never know what, if anything, might have been different if a great many had dropped out a long time ago. Now we have the surreal experience of seeing Donald Trump edging very close to the magic number of 1273 which he will almost certainly attain, and then he will indeed be the 2016 presidential nominee of the Republican Party. This has certainly been the most “interesting” primary season of my entire life, and I’ve seen quite a few.
Its “interesting” quality is not limited, however, to the GOP side, although that’s the one I’ve been covering most diligently. I’ve assumed for a long long time that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee, because that party’s system is very different from the way the Republicans go about these things. For the most part, proportional primaries rather than winner-take-all, plus those super-delegates, put the party much more firmly in control than the shell-shocked and clueless GOP has been this year.
But despite all that, the Democratic Party’s firm hold on things looks almost as wobbly as the Republicans’. This speaks of a phenomenon that transcends parties and is a sign of the times and the voters. Call it the Howard Beale electorate, very very angry and fed up with everything. We know what that has meant for the Republicans. For the Democrats, it means the surprising strength of socialist Bernie Sanders, who last night won Oregon and forced a photo finish in Kentucky.
It may not end up mattering; it’s almost certain Clinton will be the nominee. But it indicates the depth of the trouble in the Democratic Party, as well. Have you noticed, too, how every single candidate—probable nominees Trump and Clinton, and Democratic challengers Sanders and even Biden—are rather long in the tooth for presidential contenders? To me, that signifies an exhaustion in each party. The GOP had plenty of younguns, and many of us thought one of these fresh young faces would get the nod, but they didn’t. And there’s nary a fresh young face in sight for the Democrats, at least not at the moment.
Despite the pending coronation of Hillary, the discord among the Democrats is very very real:
Sanders showed no intention of dialing back his fight against Clinton or urging his supporters to fall in line. His spokesman said Sanders is considering seeking a recount in Kentucky, where Clinton was clinging to a lead of a half percentage point.
“We are in until the last ballot is cast,” Sanders told supporters at a rally in Carson, California, saying he believes he can win the June 7 primary in the nation’s most populous state. “We have the possibility — it will be a steep climb, I recognize that — but we have the possibility of going to Philadelphia with the majority of the pledged delegates,” Sanders said of the July nominating convention. He said in early general election poll match-ups he does “much better against Trump” than Clinton…
…Some Sanders backers threw chairs and shouted down speakers during the [Nevada] convention, at which Clinton was awarded a majority of delegates, in a dispute over rules. The chairwoman of the Nevada Democratic Party was subjected to threatening messages on her voicemail…
Sanders responded with a statement saying that Democratic leaders must “understand that the political world is changing and that millions of Americans are outraged” at the political and economic establishment…
Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz told CNN on Tuesday night that Sanders’ response “added more fuel to the fire.”
The Nevada state Democratic Party said in a statement that the Sanders campaign was being “dishonest about what happened Saturday and is failing to adequately denounce the threats of violence of his supporters.”
“We believe, unfortunately, that the tactics and behavior on display here in Nevada are harbingers of things to come as Democrats gather in Philadelphia in July for our National Convention,” the state party’s lawyer wrote in a formal complaint to the Democratic National Committee.
What do they expect from socialists? Just as the alt-right wants to take over the GOP, the ultra-left sees its opportunity in the Democratic Party. They are like parasites seeing their chance to take over a weakened host, and both activist groups aren’t going to play by the usual rules.
It is indeed ironic that, just as Sanders suggests, he does better than Clinton in polls that match each one against Trump. And yet Sanders will almost certainly not be the Democratic nominee. Likewise, way back when, Rubio and several other GOP candidates did consistently better against Clinton than Trump did in polls taken before Trump had clinched the deal. This is another irony of this season—the eventual nominees that will be pitted against each other, Trump vs. Clinton, have consistently polled weaker against each other then many of the other contenders in their parties.
It’s only May and there are six more months to go before the election. Can you believe it? It seems to have been going on for so very long already. A lot—a lot—can change in those six months. The more Clinton weakens, the more Trump will rise.
For me, the election is likely to be somewhat anti-climatic, because I cannot rejoice at the victory of either candidate, and one of them will win. I keep trying to imagine how I’d feel at a Clinton victory (dreadful) and how I’d feel at a Trump victory (dreadful, but perhaps a mite less dreadful?). It’s that “mite less” that could get me to actually vote for him, although I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to make a decision until I’m standing in that voting booth holding my barf bag in my hand.
More evidence that the social contract has broken down
This.
I’m a dog lover. But in a situation like the one described, every stray dog needs to be put down. And even that won’t solve the problem. But it would help.
Is Trump expanding the GOP?
The answer, according to this piece at Politico, is only a little bit, and nowhere near the amount Trump brags about or the numbers that would matter.
I’ve been pointing out something similar for months. However, much as I find Donald Trump deplorable, I am not going to say he can’t at some point draw more voters to his side, including voters who might ordinarily vote Democratic. The fact that we haven’t really seen that happen yet doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen, and the more Trump tacks to the left the more of them he may draw.
Which is in some ways a Pyrrhic victory for the right, isn’t it? If Trump wins Democratic votes by out-RINOing any RINO we’ve ever known, what does that make him? Doesn’t it make him—a Republican-in-name-only liberal Democrat with some odd populist/nationalist quirks?
I also don’t see Trump-crossover formerly Democratic voters as voters who will “expand the GOP,” anyway. To the extent that they do exist or could exist or will exist, they would be Trump voters through and through, attracted by his very unique persona. They would be drawn to either his brashness or his insults or his immigration policy or the blows he’s dealt to the GOP, rather than being drawn to the GOP itself—unless the GOP is going to be made over in his image.
That latter, of course, is what the alt-right would like to happen—or rather, they’d like the GOP to be made over in their image, with Trump as mere temporary figurehead.
Thomas Sowell on the grim prospects that face us
[Hat tip: commenter “Alan F.”]
Thomas Sowell is probably the conservative writer I respect the most. I discovered him during my political change process, and his clarity of thought and economy of expression helped to give me a philosophical framework for the political point of view that was coming to seem more simpatico to me than the one I’d previously held. Throughout the years I can’t think of a topic on which I’ve disagreed with him.
Sowell is a changer. In his youth he was trained as an economist and was a man of the extreme left, but he abandoned the leftist point of view when facts seemed to contradict his belief system. He is black, was raised poor and academically brilliant, and I highly recommend his autobiography A Personal Odyssey
And so he’s written another column that elegantly and simply—and sorrowfully—expresses what I feel now, facing the choice of Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump. Please read the whole thing—it’s not long. Read it, and weep.
I might quibble—just a little bit, anyway—with one thing Sowell says, though. When I read “This year’s general election will offer a choice between a thoroughly corrupt liar and an utterly irresponsible egomaniac” my first thought was “Okay, which is which?” Yes, I know the answer, but I could make an argument that that sentence should be amended to “This year’s general election will offer a choice between a thoroughly corrupt liar and utterly irresponsible egomaniac, and a thoroughly corrupt liar and utterly irresponsible egomaniac.”