Romney wants to be the leader of the NeverTrumpers

The New Neo Posted on by

Mitt Romney is a strange case for a politician.

He lacks the common touch completely, which is probably the main reason he lost in 2012 and helped us get four more years of Obama. Although Romney was far from my favorite of the rather anemic choices available to the GOP in 2012, once he was nominated I supported him fully against Obama, as I would today if it were to somehow happen all over again.

In that sense – the “consider the alternative” sense – it was an easy thing to do. It was easy in another sense, too, because on a personal level Romney was and still is the kind of guy who doesn’t cheat on his wife or beat his kids. The worst thing Democrats could come up with in that sense was a prank in high school and putting his windshield-equipped dog carrier (with the dog in it) on the roof of his car for a 12-hour road trip.

Romney the politician was another story. It’s not true that he didn’t fight back at least somewhat in 2012 or that he didn’t criticize Obama. He did both, as I detailed in posts at the time. But he did not do so effectively, and not at all at especially critical times (the awful Candy Crowley intervention in debate number two being a prime example). I think Romney would have been a mediocre but okay president and a much better one than Obama (a low bar, to be sure), but he had and still has no big constituency and no large following, although he seems to be aiming to be the leader of the rather small but vocal group of GOP NeverTrumpers.

In addition, I think that Trump fills Romney with personal revulsion to go with the political envy. Trump is the un-Romney: he’s richer than Romney (hard to accomplish, because Romney is plenty rich) but has the common touch, he’s relaxed in front of the camera rather than stiff, he’s cheated on wives, and he fights. He fights and fights and fights, rather than turning the other cheek. Plus, Trump won the election and Romney lost, and then Trump did some public humiliating of Romney.

It’s with that sad background that I’ll (briefly) take up the subject of Romney’s speech criticizing Trump’s decision on Turkey and the Kurds. It’s certainly possible to criticize that decision, and as I’ve said several times we don’t know how this will work out or not work out. But I’ve read the speech, and the fact that Romney calls the Kurds an “ally” and says that we are therefore abandoning that ally to our dishonor and shame, and yet doesn’t mention that it is Turkey that is actually an ally of ours (NATO, for example) in the formal sense, seems to be a major major omission of a vital fact. Talk about simplifying the matter!

Coula edulis are hard nuts to crack

The New Neo Posted on by

But gorillas are eager to do it, despite the fact that their teeth don’t seem equipped for the job.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way:

After watching Loango gorillas chow down on Coula edulis nuts for over three and a half years, Adam van Casteren of Washington University in St. Louis and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute published their surprising findings in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. These nuts are approximately the size of ping pong-balls, and are a seasonal resource in tropical west African forests; in this part of Gabon, they’re only available from December through February, but are an energy-rich source of food…

The gorillas were doing it the old fashioned way — with their teeth. This behavior was surprising to the researchers, because while gorillas have powerful jaws and chewing muscles, they don’t have the kinds of flat, rounded molars that mammals who routinely crack hard foods open do. The sharp cusps on gorillas’ molars are an adaptation to the fibrous vegetation that makes up most of their diet (though western lowland gorillas do also eat a lot of fruit). But these cusps are a biological liability when it comes to eating hard objects, because they don’t distribute force the way a lower, more rounded cusp would. A cracked tooth could compromise a gorilla’s ability to eat and a serious infection could be life-threatening.

And yet they do it. Those nuts must be mighty tasty and mighty important to their diet.

5-day ceasefire in Turkey

The New Neo Posted on by

As I wrote recently, I don’t trust most analyses of the Turkey vs. Kurds situation right now. I’m not just talking about the left, either.

Just as one small example, we have this article in the WSJ yesterday, with the headline “Turkey Rejects U.S. Call for Immediate Cease-Fire in Syria: Turkish troops pursue their offensive against Kurdish forces, as Russia fills void created by U.S. departure from the region.”

Leaving aside the fact that if there were only 50 troops there who were withdrawn in the first place, as I’ve seen reported in most venues, then it’s hard to see how their withdrawal could leave such a big void – we have the fact that today Mike Pence announced Turkish agreement with a five-day ceasefire. Of course, the WSJ was not incorrect in its earlier reporting, because Turkey did reject a ceasefire. But that was yesterday, and today is today, and everything is provisional.

I would love to find an objective and knowledgeable source to analyze what these latest developments mean, but so far I’ve turned up nothing I trust. However, it is my observation, based on previous evidence from turmoil Syria, Libya, and similar places, that the different factions are all tainted to greater or lesser degrees and we often back people who turn out to be enemies greater than those we don’t back.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t act. But what is the best action?

Given all those caveats, I’ll quote from one of today’s articles:

After more than four hours of negotiations with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Pence said the purpose of his high-level mission was to end the bloodshed caused by Turkey’s invasion of Syria, and remained silent on whether the agreement amounted to another abandonment of the U.S.’s former Kurdish allies in the fight against the Islamic State.

Turkish troops and Turkish-backed Syrian fighters launched their offensive against Kurdish forces in northern Syria a week ago, two days after Trump suddenly announced he was withdrawing the U.S. from the area.

Pence and Secretary of State Mile Pompeo lauded the deal as a significant achievement, and Trump tweeted that it was “a great day for civilization.” But the agreement essentially gives the Turks what they had sought to achieve with their military operation in the first place. After the Kurdish forces are cleared from the safe zone, Turkey has committed to a permanent cease-fire but is under no obligation to withdraw its troops.

In addition, the deal gives Turkey relief from sanctions the administration had imposed and threatened to impose since the invasion began, meaning there will be no penalty for the operation.

Kurdish forces were not party to the agreement, and it was not immediately clear whether they would comply. Before the talks, the Kurds indicated they would object to any agreement along the lines of what was announced by Pence. But Pence maintained that the U.S. had obtained “repeated assurances from them that they’ll be moving out.”

Ankara has long argued the Kurdish fighters are nothing more than an extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, which has waged a guerrilla campaign inside Turkey since the 1980s and which Turkey, as well as the U.S. and European Union, designate as a terrorist organization.

See what I mean? Are the Kurds PKK and what are they aiming for? What have the Kurds actually told Pence? And why assume that sanctions are off the table forever just because they are off the table for the moment? One thing I’ve learned is that Trump is not shy about applying economic pressure to get what he wants.

I believe that what we are seeing now in Turkey is the tip of a very considerable iceberg. Whether the Trump administration is doing good here or bad (or something in-between, which is more likely) remains to be seen.

One thing the anti-Trump people seem to be doing is championing the idea of intervention here, whereas before they were shrieking “get out of the Middle East!” for years and even decades. But consistency is not their strong suit (except, of course, for consistency on their opposition to whatever the right is doing). Trump, on the other hand, has been consistent, in that it’s always been part of his campaign promises to do this sort of thing.

As for my own opinion, right now it’s watchful waiting.

Different strokes…

The New Neo Posted on by

…for different folks.

Very different:

What does it feel like when you first get into the water? It burns. It feels like you’re on fire. But in temperatures like this, you don’t die of the cold. You drown. Within the first five seconds your body goes into shock; it’s very difficult to breathe. The only thing I can do is count every stroke, “One. Two. Breathe. Three. Four. Breathe.” It doesn’t get any better after that. As the cold envelops you, it gnaws at your muscles and they start seizing up. Stretching one arm in front of the other gets harder and harder because you’re shivering – everything feels strained. I’m only wearing Speedos, goggles and a cap; I don’t grease my body for insulation like long-distance sea swimmers usually do, because if a seal or a killer whale goes for me, my team could struggle to drag me to safety.

You might say he’s crazy, but he’s certainly tough.

Elijah Cummings dead at 68

The New Neo Posted on by

RIP.

Cummings was 68 and apparently had serious cardiovascular problems, although I believe his death was a surprise. It certainly was a surprise to me.

From the article:

Cummings had represented Maryland’s 7th Congressional District for 23 years before ascending in January to his perch atop the Oversight panel, from which he oversaw several investigations into the administration. Along with House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and House Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), he was one of three committee leaders guiding House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry.

The headline of the Politico article calls Cummings a “Trump target.” I would say it would be just as correct and perhaps more so to call Trump a Cummings target. And since everything is about Trump these days and everything Trump does is bad, apparently Trump was criticized for writing a gracious tweet in response to Cummings’ demise after being hard on him for the long-standing awful conditions in his Baltimore district.

That district will almost undoubtedly send another liberal Democrat to the House, so I don’t see any major political repercussions to Cummings’ death.

Last night’s debate

The New Neo Posted on by

No, I didn’t watch.

Actually, that’s not true. I watched – that is, I was on an airplane the whole time, and the person next to me was viewing the debate on her little TV screen, listening to it with earphones. Even the basic tedium of the airplane ride (wonderfully smooth and without a hitch, even to the extent of arriving early) could not motivate me to turn on the sound to my own TV and actually listen to the Democratic candidates. But every now and then I would glance over to her TV and notice the facial expressions and body language of the candidates.

A few observations on their body language. Sanders looked a bit more subdued than usual but otherwise none the worse for wear. Tulsi is attractive, but of course you already know that. Without the sound on, Kamala Harris looks like an actress playing a DA on a TV series. But new front-runner Elizabeth Warren was the most interesting, watched in that manner. She looked like a cartoon character.

I don’t mean that to be funny. I mean that she had a sort of snub-nosed Disneyesque freshness that defied age, and her body movements and expressions conveyed the gee-whiz impatience and energy of certain gym teachers or camp counselors I’ve known. Does this appeal to people?

A personal note – I am now on the west coast for a while, visiting family and friends for various occasions. Blogging is planned to continue, however, so never fear.

The left: principles vs. principles

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Mac” writes:

I recently had an exchange with a leftist who explicitly rejected the significance of plain facts to the debate. For him the only *fact* that mattered was that his cause was morally right. It dawned on me that principle in the sense that I or most people here would understand the term simply wasn’t part of his equipment. What he had was a very high level of moral outrage, which he kept referring to: “I don’t care about the factual details of this thing, I just know what’s morally right.” I know some very intelligent leftists who are very decent well-meaning people, and have had similar exchanges with several of them.

It dawned on me that when they use the word “principle” they mean commitment and zeal for the cause of equality, etc. To deviate in that support by acknowledging something that works against the cause is what they mean when they speak of betraying a principle. This particular conversation had to do with LGBT activism, and the person was quite willing to simply defy certain facts that didn’t fit the paradigm in his mind–and thought of that as sticking to principle. He didn’t necessarily even deny the facts. He just refused to let them affect the greater truth to which he was committed. The Covington thing brought that out in several people: It didn’t matter what the video showed, what mattered was that white people were on one side and an oh-so-spiritual native American was on the other.

Maybe this all sounds obvious, but the recent exchange was kind of a light-bulb moment for me. I’d never seen it quite that clearly. Suddenly their behavior and rhetoric made sense in a squirrely sort of way–it wasn’t simple stupidity or dishonesty, it was quasi-religious zeal.

Whether you call leftism “religious” or “quasi-religious” – or what I prefer, the more generic “fanatic” – Mac is describing something I had noticed even as a child among certain leftist relatives of mine, in particular an uncle I’ve written about before. If one observes the phenomenon over and over, it’s striking how every fact can be deflected or twisted or changed or even incorporated by the true believer to conform to the cause rather than to challenge it.

I think that Mac is correct that the word “principles’ is key. For a leftist and particularly a Communist, the Party became the only principle, the one in which all hope and all loyalty was invested. Family, friendship, religion, kindness, and even conventional notions of fairness were to be jettisoned if the Party said that doing so was to the Greater Good of the Party, and that some ultimate as-yet-unrealized Utopian time will come as a result of all this suffering. Those older principles must bow down before the new principle, which is Party Uber Alles.

For many other people (and one would hope it’s the majority, although I have extremely grave doubts about that) there are other principles that transcend blind faith in a particular socio-political theory of human history: truth, beauty, the Golden rule, and I’m sure you can come up with others. For them, if facts keep emerging that contradict a socio-political theory they hold, it must be abandoned or at the very least revised drastically.

That’s what happened to some Communists in the US: after Khrushchev openly spoke in the 1950s of the manifold crimes of Stalin, they abandoned their faith in Communism (although perhaps not leftism in general). The larger principles won out over the Party principle. My particular relative (an uncle) was made of sterner stuff, and never seemed to blink an eye or express a doubt about the Soviets. He remained devoted to Communism till the day he died, for manifold personal reasons some of which I believe I understand and some of which I do not understand and probably will never understand.

He died about a year before the fall of the Soviet Union. My mother used to say he had good timing, because that event would have shaken him to the core. But I think not. I think he would have easily incorporated it into his belief system as a mere temporary setback, and gone on believing as before.

Trump, Turkey, and the Kurds

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the things that has happened to me during the last twenty years or so is that my natural skepticism of all news analysis has increased (and that’s saying something because I was somewhat skeptical even before that). I’ve come to the point where I distrust most news sources and most talking heads. But over time there are a few I’ve come to trust more than the others, because I’ve observed over time that they seem to at least try their best to be informed and to sort things out fairly.

In the current mess in Turkey with the Kurds, it’s even more apparent that most people are reacting in kneejerk fashion without much knowledge. I’ve seen way too many times before in that region of the world that predictions made by supposedly knowledgeable people have been way off, and yet they nevertheless retain a sort of hubris about themselves that seems wildly inappropriate.

In the case of Turkey and the Kurds, I admit to being largely ignorant about all but the most basic things. That makes it doubly hard to sort out what’s what. But I think that Victor Davis Hanson, whose analyses have impressed me in the past, not only seems to make sense in this recent article on the subject, but he’s also well-positioned to analyze it as a professor whose specialty is war, the military, and the history of war.

The entire article is well worth reading, but here’s an excerpt:

…[I]t is incumbent on the Trump administration in general and on Secretary Pompeo in particular to find ways to prevent mass Turkish attacks on the Kurds, while not inserting American ground troops into a cauldron of fire between Turks and Kurds. That effort will require a great deal of skill and deftness that are weirdly forgotten in the current bipartisan exclamations of “We sold out the Kurds!” — given the labyrinth of paradoxes that surround Turkey, Syria, Kurds, and the U.S. and the lack of information about the actual redeployment of American troops…

Many of the critics demanding that we restrain our NATO ally Turkey are precisely the same who have damned Trump for undermining the NATO alliance by loudly reprimanding allies for not keeping their promises of military contributions. Yet an American presence in between the Kurdish and Turkish trajectories may not necessarily serve as a successful deterrent to violence given our present limited deployment. If all Trump has done for now is to remove a few dozen Americans from a “trip wire” deployment between the two belligerents, he can hardly have “sold out” the Kurds.

Much much more at the link.

Matt Taibii: hating Trump, but hating what the Deep State is doing to Trump more

The New Neo Posted on by

A couple of commenters mentioned this piece by Matt Taibbi. It’s quite fascinating, because Taibbi – a guy who defies classification but is described (accurately, I’m going to assume) by commenter “huxley” in these words:

[Taibbi] tends to write purple-prose political pieces for “Rolling Stone.” Needless to say, he’s not a Republican or a Trump fan.

I know him from his writing on “The eXile,” a free paper he and friends wrote as ex-pats in Moscow during and after the fall of the Soviet Union. Wild Hunter S. Thompson stuff without Thompson’s tics.

…Taibbi has been covering RussiaGate with horror, but not the horror one might imagine. He has been a voice in the leftie wilderness warning against the ongoing Democratic coup.

And on reading the piece, it does seem exactly that way. Taibbi doesn’t just disagree with Trump, he detests him. But he also couldn’t help but notice that the intelligence community, the press, and the Democrats have been staging a coup since the very beginning of Trump’s tenure – playing dirty, lying, leaking, and engaging in a process far more dangerous than anything Trump has done.

Now, that’s an usual position to take for someone who detests Trump and is a liberal or a leftist or whatever description fits Taibbi. Why is it that he manages to see this? My guess is that it’s a combination of two things. The first is he’s kind of a wild one, and doesn’t seem to like to follow the pack. The second is that Taibbi’s experience in Russia may have given him the perspective to understand what that sort of unbridled power means, and the peril in which it places this country.

Before I read Taibbi’s piece, I was mulling over the fact that so few leftists – who, after all, used to hate the CIA and the FBI and the intelligence community in general – see the danger here. But my experience of the left is that all principles are fungible, except the principle that the end justifies the means if the end is to increase the Party’s power. Thus, for most leftists, if the CIA is hurting Trump then the CIA is a wonderful thing. Not for Taibbi, who writes:

And while Donald Trump conducting foreign policy based on what he sees on Fox and Friends is troubling, it’s not in the same ballpark as CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post and the New York Times engaging in de facto coverage partnerships with the FBI and CIA to push highly politicized, phony narratives like Russiagate.

Trump’s tinpot Twitter threats and cancellation of White House privileges for dolts like Jim Acosta also don’t begin to compare to the danger posed by Facebook, Google, and Twitter – under pressure from the Senate – organizing with groups like the Atlantic Council to fight “fake news” in the name of preventing the “foment of discord.”

I don’t believe most Americans have thought through what a successful campaign to oust Donald Trump would look like. Most casual news consumers can only think of it in terms of Mike Pence becoming president. The real problem would be the precedent of a de facto intelligence community veto over elections, using the lunatic spookworld brand of politics that has dominated the last three years of anti-Trump agitation.

He gets that if the bell tolls for Donald Trump today, it can toll for you, and you, and you.