Month: July 2016

Every time you think about World War I you want to ram your head against the wall in anger and disgust.  How could all these people be so monumentally stupid?  The same thing would be true of any war between the United States and Russia.  How could anybody be dumb enough to blunder into that?

Russia and China are neighbors, two of the world’s great powers and together dominate the land mass of the world’s super continent, Eurasia.  They are rivals and will be in perpetuity.  They dislike and fear each other.  And they both would love to have the USA on their side if a dispute arises between them.  They’re the only two countries in the world that we have to really worry about.  We want friendly relations with both, and want to maintain stability with and between them.  Neither is our geopolitical rival.  Nobody is.  All great powers, including Japan and Western Europe, are entitled to spheres of influence.  Wars are avoided when great powers acknowledge and respect those spheres of influence.  That’s the way the world works.

In 1973 Henry Kissinger was meeting Brezhnev in Moscow, making preparations for Nixon’s upcoming visit.  Old Leonid insisted on taking him boar hunting, where they sat alone in a blind with an interpreter, and the Soviet ruler unburdened his soul about the Chinese Communist regime.  “Treacherous barbarians” he called them, and at that moment Kissinger knew one of the great feats in American diplomacy had succeeded.  The Russians wanted an understanding with the United States about their problems with China.  The Chinese wanted one themselves, vis a vis Russia, and America was in the catbird seat.

Nothing much has changed, at least in this regard, in the 43 years since.  Russia wants an understanding with us with respect to their China issues.  Our friendship and support of Russia is the most powerful restraint we can have on them.  Our threats of military involvement in a European war are empty.  The American people admire and respect the people of Estonia.  We’re just not willing to die for them, or anybody else, for that matter.  We don’t do foreign land wars any more.  That’s all behind us.  We will do everything we can to discourage Russian imperialism.  They must respect Western Europe’s sphere of influence, just as Western Europe must respect theirs.  The United Sates is a perfect middle man, as long as it respects Russian interests as well as it does West Europe’s.

In 1973 Nixon succeeded with detente, or a lessening of tension, with the Soviet Union.  Now, with Russia, we need to seek entente, or a mutual understanding.  I really don’t think Donald Trump is capable of such diplomacy, but there’s got to be another Henry Kissinger out there somewhere to to do it for him.  He can do the photo ops.  I don’t like the idea of the Russians meddling in our elections.  But it looks like they’ve got plausible deniability, so they may get away with it.  We can never let it happen again.  But that does not affect geopolitical reality.  The Russians, of all the great powers, are our natural friends.  Oh, I almost forgot. They’re the one with all the ICBM’s too.  Western Europe may have lost the will to live.  Vladimir Putin hasn’t.

Nixon and Kissinger get deserved credit for the opening with China, and detente with the Soviets.  Actually, they get more credit than they deserve.  Morris Childs, the most consequential spy in American history, deserves a lot of it himself.  He was the only man to ever be awarded the Soviet Order of the Red Banner (1975) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1987).  His story is told in Operation Solo, and I recommend it highly.  Steven Spielberg, are you listening?

He was a Russian Jewish immigrant, and his whole family were Communists.  He became ill in the late 40’s, and was discarded by the American Communist Party, where he had been a leader.  He became disillusioned with Communism, and the FBI recruited him as a double agent, sending him to the Mayo Clinic where he recovered his health.   As an American spy, he rejoined the Party, and quickly rose to prominence.  He would accompany Party Chair Gus Hall on trips to Moscow, and was responsible, over the years,  for funneling a total of $28 million from the Soviets to the American Communist Party.

Both Soviet and Chinese Communist leaders had a wildly inaccurate understanding of the American Communist Party, which was a joke.  But they accorded Hall and Childs great respect, treating them as American emissaries, in an odd way.  And in the 50’s and 60’s they complained bitterly about one another, and wanted the American Communist Party in their corner.  From the mouths of Kruschev, Brezhnev, and Mao Tse Tung, Morris Childs was told the truth about Sino-Soviet relations, and every American President since Eisenhower had an ear in the Kremlin and Red Square.  Nixon wasn’t a geopolitical genius.  He just listened to what Morris Childs was telling him.

President Reagan had the honor to present the Medal of Freedom to Morris, in a private ceremony.  His older brother Jack, an accomplice, received one posthumously.  He married his wife Eva in 1962, and he told her what he was doing, and she signed on herself.  She accompanied him on his foreign trips, and was in great danger herself.

When he was courting her they would take long drives in rural America, and he wondered aloud to her about how stupid he had been to try to destroy a country with such wonderful people.

R.I.P.

 

John Fund at NRO says it will come to that in October, as Trump’s tax returns are leaked, and the Russians see to it that Hillary’s “personal emails” are revealed as well.  Trump will be shown as a tax evader, a charity stiffer, an associate of people with questionable ethics, and a man who earns far less money than he says he does.  Nothing new there, really.  That’s what you expect with Trump.

Clinton will be revealed as a criminal who used her office to make money.  A Secretary of State, perhaps the first in our history, who used the power and prestige of the United States Department of State to enrich herself.  At last, the true nature of the Clinton crime family will be laid bare before the public.  If it happens, she’s toast.

Unless and until Gary Johnson makes a move this is now Trump’s election to lose.  Think of all the crazy things he might do.  Like get us in a costly foreign war that diminishes our national security.  Like Iraq.  Or make a completely idiotic choice for a Supreme Court Justice.  Like Harriet Miers, or David Souter.  Or decide to push millions of unqualified buyers into purchasing homes they couldn’t afford, causing an economic meltdown and bank collapse.  Like 2008.  Or refuse to reform entitlements, but expand them instead.  Like the expansion of coverage for prescription drugs.  Or run up trillions in the national debt, and make no real effort to control it.  Like 2001-2009.  He could do a lot of damage, so much so that the Republican brand would be mud, as it’s been since 2006.  If Donald Trump is as bad as Bush 2, we’re in big trouble.

Trump doesn’t care about the Constitution, but it cares about him.  It’s designed to restrain him, and it will.  As ignorant as he is, he’ll be surprised  by how little power he really has.  He has to work with Congress to get anything done.  And the courts will be far less willing to accommodate Trump than they were with Obama.  Both conservatives and liberals on the Supreme Court will check him.  The conservatives will do it out of principle, the liberals out of political calculation, but they’ll unite against any usurpation of power.  Andrew Jackson didn’t like being overruled by the Supreme Court, but it prevailed against Old Hickory, and compared to him Donald Trump is a marshmellow man.

I read some article by a guy who was pleading with Gary Johnson to become pro-life, so the guy could vote for him.  He wants, he says, “pro-life justices”  appointed.  This guy is a moron.  You don’t want pro-life justices.  You don’t care how they feel about abortion.  You want justices who understand that you don’t legislate from the bench.  It’s only peripherally about abortion.  It’s mainly about judicial activism, of which Roe v. Wade happens to be the most egregious example.  Gary Johnson’s nominees to the Supreme Court will vote to overturn Roe v. Wade because they will be constitutionalists, like he is.  His personal pro-choice position has nothing to do with it.

I’m picturing Vladimir Putin going over Clinton’s “personal” emails.  The guy’s KGB, so he likes doing this stuff.  He knows all about all the shady deals the Clinton Foundation was involved in, and with these emails he can prove that everything she did was quid pro quo.  You donate, you get what you want.  When this all comes out in October the election is over, and Putin will have installed his personal favorite in the White House.  Not bad for the leader of a declining power.  But this is big boy politics, and bad Vlad knows how to play.  Maybe it’s the time to buy Russian bonds.  Uncle Fritz met the Russians in Berlin in 1945, and he liked them, though they were a little crazy, drinking aviation fuel to get drunk.

So the internet decides the 2016 election.  Hillary is the same age I am, and she should have known better.  I don’t understand the internet  any more than she does, but I realized with the first email I sent that I was dealing in a public medium.  No email is secure, as far as I’m concerned.  Bill Clinton is smart enough to know that, but not his wife.  In today’s world internet ignorance can kill a politician.

Another attack by a Syrian refugee in Germany.  Another cut to the chances for Clinton.  It seems like every day, another cut, and now the blood begins to flow.  Trump could win big if the facts of her criminality are undeniable.  Good God, a Trump landslide?  And then, God only knows what.

What Trump doesn’t get about NATO, in Conservative Review, is a neoconservative critique of his foreign policy.   Read it carefully and you’ll see why neoconservatism is going extinct.  It’s Wilsonian idealism, no more, no less, and it has no constituency.  The troubling thing about the article is that it’s author, a Bush 2 veteran named Kristofer L. Harrison, says he is a foreign policy adviser to Ted Cruz.  I thought Cruz was moving away from foreign entanglements toward the end of his campaign.  Maybe it was a head fake.

Harrison says NATO is an expression of our shared values with Europe, and that those values are threatened by the Russian aggression against the Ukraine.  He says that our shared commitment to those values allowed us to win the Cold War, and that those same values should motivate us to defend the Ukraine against Russian aggression.

But, of course, today Russia is not the leader of a world wide conspiracy to impose communism on the free world.  It is a Christian European nation devoted to its own survival and self interest.  Sort of like us, except it’s authoritarian (as it always has been), and we, thank God, are thousands of ocean miles from Europe.  When Cassius Clay was drafted, he said he didn’t have any fight against any Viet Cong, whoever they were, and he was right.  And we don’t have any fight against the Russians.  They’re no threat to us, to freedom of the seas, or to world domination.  Putin is racing against a demographic time bomb, and he wants there always to be a Russia, and he wants Russia respected as the great power it still is.  If Trump is elected he should meet with Putin and come to a broad understanding with respect to our respective spheres of influence and shared goals.  We have a lot in common, and very little to fight about.  We’re about to join Russia as one of the great energy exporting countries of the world.  Nobody wants a war.  We’re both under attack from the Islamists.  We’ve got a lot to talk about.

Trump’s nationalism is one reason he might win.  His populism is a reason he should lose.  Andrew Jackson was a nationalist, but he was no populist, and he’s the man Trump should try to be (although, it must be said  — good luck with that).  Jackson was a hard core constitutionalist.  One of his most controversial actions, the veto of the Bank of the United States, was done out of constitutional principle.  His response to talk of secession was to threaten to hang any man who tried it.  Jackson was no scholar, but he respected those who were, the Framers, and he knew the system they devised was a repudiation of direct democracy, or populism.  The whole Constitution was designed as a defense against the untrammeled will of the people.  Trump doesn’t read, but maybe someone could do an audio tape of the Federalist Papers and he could listen to it in his sleep.

This is all a foreign language to Clinton, but it’s familiar to Gary Johnson.  He’s a libertarian, and therefor a constitutionalist.  Is he a nationalist?  There’s certainly no contradiction between the two.  Selling constitutionalism and opposition to foreign adventurism at the same time is easy.  Revive the power of the purse, along with the Congressional war making power, and you’re restoring the Constitution as well as restraining the war hawks.

To gain some cred as a nationalist Johnson needs to spell out, in some detail, his plan for dealing with ISIS.  They must be wiped from the face of the earth.  Their New Caliphate should be reduced to smoke and ashes.  Forget the U.N., assemble a coalition of the willing (including, of course, Russia), conduct a police action, and then get out.  And as we leave tell the Islamists of the world if they try to seize any territory in the future they’ll be incinerated just as ISIS was.

I’m reading Walter Isaacon’s Kissinger, and reacquainting myself with realpolitik.  It’s really nothing more than cold blooded nationalism.  Henry Kissinger is a full blooded American patriot and a brilliant man.   Gary Johnson should get to know him.

 

If Gary Johnson doesn’t make the debates, I think Trump will dominate Clinton.  She’s the plodding planner, and the great moments in Presidential debates are spontaneous, unscripted.  I don’t think Reagan planned on saying, “There you go again.”  He was an actor, and he could do improv.  Trump’s got his own, more aggressive schtick, and he’s quite good at it.  The contrast between the freewheeling Trump and the canned rhetoric we can expect from Clinton is all in his favor.  And he won’t hesitate to turn the tables on the moderators, as Romney disastrously failed to do.  His superficial knowledge of the issues won’t hurt him too much.  That’s baked in, and the voters know less than he does.  He hires people to the details.

Johnson’s the wild card.  He’s sharp as a tack, and has done this all before.  If he’s man enough to stand toe to toe with Trump, challenge him, and refuse to back down an inch he could have great debates, with great effect.  He could even knock Trump off his game.  If you’re a Never Trumper you should do what you can to help him get to the 15% he needs.  What else have you got?

Because nobody knows how this election will shape up.  All the experts, with all their fancy charts and algorithms, don’t know any more than you or I.   If politics had a volatility index, this year would be off the charts.  Nobody knows anything.

I’ve been studying, and practicing, politics for over half a century, and I consider myself smarter than the average bear.  As Babbie enjoys pointing out, I gave her absolute assurances that Trump would never be nominated.  There are people who know more about politics than I do, like Michael Barone, and we all got it wrong.  So I’m out of the prediction business.  For all I know, Trump could be a successful President, in the vein of James K. Polk, a thoroughly unlikable man, and one of the more accomplished Presidents in our history.  I’d bet against it, it’s highly unlikely, but nobody knows anything.

If all Trump did was improv, he’d be broke.  But I think he knows what he doesn’t know, and relies on employees, and, above all, his family and Ivanka.   He’s besotted with her, and I can’t blame him.  It’s the way I feel about my granddaughter.  I would do anything for her, would never do anything to embarrass her, and Trump feels the same way with Ivanka.  If he outsources the hard stuff to people like Mike Pence, Harold Hamm and Peter Thiel, and listens to his daughter, he could be sort of normal.  Kind of.

I read some social conservative raising hell about Thiel’s appearance.  It makes me think the term “religious right” is a Reagan relic.  They got into politics over 40 years ago to fight Roe v. Wade, and they seem to have petered out.  I didn’t see it, but the standing “o” given Thiel was the best thing to come out of the Convention.  The millennials are repelled by Bible thumpers.  If Cruz wants to win in 2020 he needs to leave his Bible at home.

Babbie and I are babysitting in a small bedroom community not far from Silicon Valley.  It’s around 90% white, with some Asians and just a fairy sprinkle of blacks. I’d guess it voted about 80% for Obama, and it’s very tolerant and progressive, and the people are pleasant, for the most part.  In 2016 this should be Johnson country.

But I have a Monopoly game to play, and planning to do for when my girl comes up for a few days to visit.  Oh happy days.

If you don’t know who Cartman is, you should watch an episode of South Park.  He’s a fourth grade Donald Trump, with ADHD.  Because Cruz had the nerve to cite Trump’s criticisms of his family as a reason not to endorse him, Trump decided to start the whole thing over again.  He’s an incredibly unattractive man.  Who cares what he’s like in private?  I see him in public, and he could be representing my country.  Talk about your ugly American.

And then there are events, and more events, and they just keep coming.  They’re like candy to the media because they drive ratings.  Today was Munich’s turn.   The Islamists are playing pin the tale on the donkey with us.  This may be the one that puts Trump up on Clinton, or maybe it’s the next one, or the one after that.  These crazy bastards are feeding off each other on social media, and they’ll keep coming.  Any sensible American who doesn’t own a gun, and knows how to use it, should go out and get one.  It’s starting to happen even here in elitist coastal California.  And it all helps Trump, every bit of it.  He’s playing the strongman now, and reveling in his success.  There’s a danger he may get a little cocky, and somehow screw the pooch.  But don’t count on it.

I can’t see how the Democratic Convention does much for Clinton.  She’s a very unattractive woman herself.  The more some people see her, the more they dislike her.  And what’s her message?  Solidarity with the ‘hood.  She’s got to hang tightly to her base, the black vote.  There was no disorder in Cleveland, thanks to great security.  Philly could be a different ball game.  That’s a nasty town, from what I hear.

And free stuff for everyone else, the same old , same old.  Yawn.  She’s got nothing to say, and nothing she could say would change anyone’s opinion of her.  We know her all too well.

So the Trump train chugs along.

I was at a 70th birthday party of a friend of Babbie and mine in Sonoma County, the wine country, last night.  Not a Trump voter within miles.  But these are good, if misguided, people, and they don’t care for Clinton.  I think I made some converts for Johnson.  It was fertile ground.  These are like, mellow people.  And there are quite a few marijuana consumers in places like California.  These people like Johnson when you talk to them about him.  Legalization is on the ballot here in California, and will pass easily.  A growing industry of marijuana farmers is expanding rapidly.  Locals, California kids.  It’s a little mini-industry, with young capitalists starting to make serious money.  I’ve met some of these guys, and I like them.  They work hard.  It’s hand labor agriculture.

They’re all libertarians.