Obsession

The subtitle is Inside the Washington Establishment’s Never-Ending War on Trump and the author is Byron York (2020).

Depending on how you voted, you probably read the title and made up your mind about whether the book holds any value.  That would be a mistake.  To be clear, it is definitively a tome that is supportive of the President with respect to his impeachment ordeals.  But, in reporting the first-hand accounts and reading the transcripts, the author’s narrative is definitely not some sort of revisionist history.

I admittedly ignored the news for the past 4 years, and so did not track the impeachment scandals nor have a strong view on what did or did not happen (I was generally skeptical because I did not think the media wanted to report fairly on Trump).  And, after reading Mr. York’s rendition (he is a reporter for the Washington Examiner), I feel comfortable in taking the view that the accusations against the President were a whole lot of nothing.

In looking back, you had calls for impeachment before Trump was even sworn in.  In addition, given recent events, I would remind everyone that 10 Democratic House members stood up to contest the electoral college certification in 2017.  And within months, Representative Al Green (a Democrat from Texas) started making the call for impeachment on the floor of House.  And, by October of 2017, he submitted his first resolution for impeachment – a House Resolution which got the support of 58 Democrats – and, included, I shit you not, Trump’s criticism of the NFL amongst the impeachable offenses.  The moral of the story is, throughout his term, the Democrats were out to get him.

The crux of this story, of course, was supposed collusion with Russia.  It started with a very sloppy and politicized investigation by James Comey – who was eventually fired because he lied to folks in the Justice Department and the Senate about what he was up to, and then leaked information to force a Special Counsel to be convened – and then came the Mueller investigation, which Democrats breathlessly hoped would be Trump’s final undoing.  Lest we forget, all of this started with the Steele dossier, which we now know was funded indirectly by the Clinton campaign and the DNC, and ultimately was debunked by the CIA as internet garbage fairly quickly (and, yet, Comey, knowing this, still kept pushing it forward and leaked it to the media).

Here’s where I think the book does a wonderful job of telling the story.  It has interviews with a number of the lawyers involved, brings up first-hand accounts of interactions and transcripts, and so by the end you can feel pretty confident that the right result was met – even if Mueller’s team tried to spin their report to suggest that the lack of evidence of criminal behavior was not enough to throw these allegations into the waste bin of history (rather than innocent until proven guilty, the new standard that they create is “not exonerated”).

The Mueller probe focused on 5 supposed instances of collusion:

-Carter Page supposedly went to Russia for the Trump campaign and was offered bribes to have Trump rescind US sanctions on Russia.  After repeated interviews and Grand Jury testimony, no evidence suggested that was the case (including any evidence that might have come from the illegal wiretap).

-An allegation that the GOP platform on Russia vis-à-vis Ukraine was watered down to benefit Russia at Trump’s request.  In fact, the exact opposite was true, both in terms of the content introduced at the GOP convention, and in practice as Trump supplied lethal and financial aid to Ukraine during his term.

-Michael Flynn.  The story here is again a non-story.  Obama imposes sanctions against Russia before the end of his term.  Flynn, as the incoming National Security Advisor, tells the Russian ambassador not to overreact and wait for the new President to be sworn in.  Comey, before being fired, suggested that no charges would be brought against Flynn.  Mueller went after it again and also did not find any evidence of conspiracy.

-George Papadopoulos.  A member of the Trump campaign who had allegedly told people that he knew about the Russian DNC hack ahead of time.  First the FBI (under Comey) investigated it and came up dry, then Mueller’s team went through the motions and also found nothing about Russia and collusion.

-The most provocative element was the Trump Tower meeting where Don Jr., Manafort and Kushner met with a Russian lawyer who promised damaging intel on Hillary Clinton.  In fact, when investigated, it turned out a music producer who knew the Trumps used that tease to get a meeting set up, only to have the lawyer show up and appeal to the Trumps that they should repeal the Magnitsky Act if elected.  In real time, based on text messages and the like, it became clear the Trump side felt the meeting was a waste of time and ended it after 20 minutes.

There you have it, all five parts of the supposed Russian collusion story.  And the Mueller team came to understand the lack of any there there pretty quickly as well.  But, rather than shutting it down, they changed courses and pushed to figure out if there was an obstruction angle.  Here’s where I point out the obvious conflicts – Mueller is a good friend to Comey (who was fired by Trump and leaked documents to force a Special Counsel investigation), and Mueller’s team was comprised not just of Democrats, but Democrats who contributed to campaigns, including Hillary Clinton in 2016.

In any event, the next saga included a push by the Mueller team to interview the President.  The logic being that they needed to understand Trump’s frame of mind to determine whether he was trying to obstruct any investigations.  Except there was no crime to obstruct an investigation for.  And the Trump legal team had already made the concerted decision up front to provide access without claiming any Executive Privilege, thereby allowing them to say that there was nothing further that an interview with Trump could offer.  In reality, the Mueller side wanted to meet with the President to set him up for a perjury trap, which the historical notes reveal was what they intended and did with Michael Flynn.

You don’t have to take my word for it.  Bottom line, the Mueller special investigation brought charges against 7 Americans, and none of those charges made any reference to collusion or efforts to fix the 2016 election.

As for the actual impeachment that took place in 2019, it came after the Democrats won back the House and was a story of trying to reach a desired result by skirting transparency and due process.  A conversation between Trump and the newly-elected Ukrainian leader, an overreaction by someone inside the DNI, who reports the information to someone else that runs to Adam Schiff, who advises that person on how to file a complaint, and then Schiff runs the investigation.  The transcript of the call was released, and it doesn’t read like high crimes or bribery or any other criminal act.  And the process under Schiff did not give the defendant any opportunity to question witnesses.  The final charges consisted of “abuse of power” – which is not actually a crime or a specific violation of law, certainly not “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” – and “obstruction of congress”, which is funny since Trump released the transcript, but then in invoking certain constitutional privileges with respect to other information, the Democrats decide that they couldn’t wait for the actual court system to settle it.

We know how it ends.  He is acquitted.  And then Joe Biden wins the election.  That was always the way to get rid of Trump.  But reason and logic went out the window.  We will see if they ever return.

Critical Race Theory

This is the third edition of one of the core introductory texts for Critical Race Theory written by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (2017).

Nothing that I read here leads me to think that the Pluckrose & Lindsay book is overstating the illogic of social justice theory, especially with respect to race.  It is ant-liberalism:

“Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equity theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

Unpack that a bit.  Equality under the law, scientific method, and the like are considered problematic.  The achievements of the civil rights movement are dismissed as too incremental.  The system that enables change and progress is somehow a propagator of racism.

And the issue to be confronted and challenged is effectively unempirical by any measure: “…the unseen, largely invisible collection of patterns and habits that make up patriarchy and other types of domination”.  It is a problem framed so abstractly and imprecisely as to describe nothing.

And everything is racist: “…racism is ordinary, not aberrational – ‘normal science’, the usual way society does business, the common, everyday experience of most people of color in this country.”

And the only people able to assess such a statement are the oppressed: “Minority status, in other words, brings with it a presumed competence to speak about race and racism.”

And, by the way, every white person is racist or complicit: “…no white member of society seems quite so innocent.”

And we should strive for socialist ideals: “…system applauds affording everyone equality of opportunity but resists programs that assure equality of results.”

In general, rather than taking any empirical approach to this issue, the authors frame the questions of race with comically exaggerated and blatantly racist scenarios, as if they represent the standard interaction (I thought it was “largely invisible”).  And they excerpt various court decisions, recommending those that take an unscientific approach to race and criticizing those decisions that insist on more than just anecdotes to confirm a systemic bias.

I would comfortably say that this a theory without real value if the goal is to address issues of race in this country.  And because it lacks any empathy for other groups in its discourse, I suspect it will struggle to get the cooperation of the many that is needed for real change to happen.

Cynical Theories

The subtitle is How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody and the authors are Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay (2020).

I am on a bit of a mission lately, to take what is deemed liturgy and demonstrate how it is really sophistry.  In part, it is about showing how Trump was actually deeply effective in the White House in ways that were good for the country but never got a fair shake, and, as a corollary, about how certain ideas and theories have been given way more oxygen than they deserve.  With respect to the latter, such is the case with this book in contemplating critical race theory and the like.  I am doing this a bit in reverse, as my next read is one of the core texts of critical race theory, but this book gets the point across without any of that background material.

The “Social Justice” theory that we hear about today, which posits the constant and omnipresent existence of racism, sexism and bias in every facet of society and every interaction, finds its roots in postmodern theory.  It is a theory whose hallmarks are radical skepticism (to the point that there is no longer any objective fact, the correspondent theory of truth is rejected, and science and empirical data are regarded with suspicion), that society is merely a system of powers and hierarchies, and there is no longer any emphasis on the individual or universalism (everything is contextualized in terms of discourses and identity groups).  And by virtue of its almost ethereal nature, unrestrained by any scientific method or measurement, it strives to make itself unfalsifiable and immune from criticism.  It basically begins with a conclusion and then works backwards to find proof, unreceptive to any challenge.  And from this starting point, we have different iterations, from postcolonial theory, to queer theory, to gender studies, to (my focus) critical race theory (under which I would probably be a racist by the logic of a believer).

Critical race theory at its core argues that “race is a social construct that was created to maintain white privilege and white supremacy”.  It rejects liberalism and its notions of equality, legal reasoning, and enlightenment humanism.  It suggests that only white people can be racist, and that those of an oppressed group have a special insight to diagnose racism, such perspective not to be questioned and to be deemed authoritative.  It is driven by “research justice”, “epistemic justice” and experiential knowledge (spoiler: not scientific or objective analysis).  It espouses systemic racism in the face of ever improving legal, political and economic status for people of color.

And that kind of is the point – the context is that these theories have gained momentum and volume all as civil rights, liberal feminism and gay rights have made remarkable progress legally and politically.  The system of liberalism, science and reason – which enabled these achievements – is now viewed as the problem because there is still some manifestation of something bad somewhere.  Which only confirms that the social justice theorists don’t actually understand how and why progress is made.  Liberalism.  A system which believes in equality, which allows us to perpetually question, challenge and debate, which uses logical reasoning and experimentation to figure out what works, and which gets nothing accomplished – except everything.  And which fundamentally, in stark contrast to social justice theory, promotes fairness and reciprocity.

The Real Grievance

Over the past few months I have been having an internal conversation in an attempt to dig in on what the real travesty is in this country.  And I think it comes down to blatant hypocrisy.  I can accept losing, even when I think the guiding wisdom for that loss is donkey logic (pun intended).  What I struggle with is rationalizing double standards with no accountability, as if there is a moral and intellectual superiority that makes awful behavior somehow better if it is generated by one side of the debate rather than other.  Thus, I stumbled onto a libertarian blog post (primarily focused on the debate around wearing masks -- I wear a mask, as does 80% of the country), and the following couple of sentences encapsulated my own feelings extremely well:

"The Left specializes in situational ethics; in fungible etymology.  Like Humpty Dumpty, a word means what Left says it does until the Left says its means something else...The Left is defined not so much by its leftism but its psychotic doublethink.  It is rancidly intolerant while touting itself as ethereally tolerant."

You're Hired

The subtitle is Untold Successes and Failures of a Populist President and the author is Casey Mulligan (2020).

Mulligan is a Chicago economist who served on Trump’s Council of Economic Advisors from 2018 to 2019.  The book examines the major policy initiatives that Mulligan contributed to during that time, but also provides first-hand accounts of working in the White House that represent a stark contrast to the media’s relentless narrative of the Trump Presidency.

He viewed Trump as a Populist who was deeply experimental in his approach, using Twitter as a way to beta test ideas – and also as a manner to get the media, which proved reluctant to report on his successes but would happily refute his exaggerations, to correct him and ultimately disseminate the story that he wanted to put out there (it is a logic that marries well with Scott Adams’ theory that Trump would push debate in 2016 to an illogical extreme in order to control the issues under focus).  His greatest successes could largely be derived from his keen effort to deregulate, thereby bringing costs down and putting more money in people’s pockets – whether that be the elimination of the individual mandate or removing regulations that protected special interests in health care and the auto industry.  His administration was the first that exceeded its own economic growth forecasts over its first two years.  And following major inflation in prescription drug prices because of Medicare Part D, prices actually declined for the first time in 46 years in 2018 after he got the FDA to reduce hurdles that come with generic drugs getting approval after patents expire.  These realities often were not well covered, or simply denied, by the media – a denial that extended beyond the press corps – economists would deny their own academic findings and articles when they saw the Trump administration relying on them.

Anecdotally, emphasizing how politicians simply do not read the bills that they propose and pass (and as Mulligan has been a longstanding and vocal critic of the ACA), he notes that the “Medicare for All” legislation pushed by Democrats is anti-market, with the most recent version including the following language: “There is a moral imperative to correct the massive deficiencies in our current health system and to eliminate profit from the provision of health care.”  If you don’t realize, the profit motive is why we might hope to have more doctors and nurses, which is what makes health care more accessible and affordable.  And the ideas underlying that legislation, in a time where Democrats now control all branches of government, should make everyone nervous about what might come next

How Numbers Work

I do love how transparent and honest the new administration has been so far.  Especially with respect to COVID.  As you may be aware, President Biden is striving for the very aggressive tally of 100 million vaccinations over the first 100 days of his term.  Relatively easy math, that is about 1 million vaccinations per day.  Impressive, no?  Wait, you're not impressed?!  Well, let Jen Psaki, the new White House press secretary, regale you then:

"Well, none of us are mathematicians, myself included, so I asked our team to do a little math on this.  So, the Trump administration was given 36 million doses when they were in office for 38 days.  They administered a total of about 17 million shots.  That’s about less than 500,000 shots a day.  What we’re proposing is to double that to about 1 million shots per day.  And we have outlined this goal and objective in coordination and consultation with our health and medical experts.

So it is ambitious.  It’s something that we feel is bold and was called that certainly at the time, and we’re working overtime to help to achieve it — try to achieve it."

Turns out that I'm not a mathematician either, but I'm also not a gullible idiot.  What Ms. Psaki provided is an average of how many doses were administered, which is a number, but not one that actually offers any context for whether the Biden plan is actually an improvement.  As it turns out, per Bloomberg, in the final week of the Trump term, average daily vaccines were up to 938,000 doses per day.

So, they are BOLDLY increasing vaccinations by 62,000 doses per day -- and they are working overtime to do it.  Dat shur iz sumthin.

I'm here all week, try the veal. 

We are f#*^ed!

The results from the Georgia Senate races are concerning.  No obvious barrier to stupidity and lunacy remaining.  I hope a hero steps up...

As far as the week that was, good to see the Democrats taking one final crack at impeachment.  They still have 12 days left to repudiate the 2016 election.  America will be saved and morality back.