Choice/No Choice

 

If the light-speed collapse of Afghanistan proves anything, it’s that, from day two, our involvement was a predestined failure. It did, however, make weapons manufacturers, Afghan “officials,” and warlords rich; and goosed the opium and meth industries. 

Any president would have retaliated after 9/11. Bush chose invasion. Alternatives are hard to conjure, so probably all others would have, too. Severe economic sanctions on the birthplace, funders, and protectors of al Qaeda, namely Saudi Arabia, would have made sense, had we not been addicted to their oil, nor our politicians to their cash. Only one legislator, California’s Barbara Lee, foresaw the inevitable and voted against the war.

And it was inevitable. Not for nothing, across centuries, has Afghanistan been considered the graveyard of empires. With its neighbors looking the other way or aiding the Taliban, “winning” from half a world away was exceptionalistic, neo-con hubris.

Had Rumsfeld not let bin Laden escape when they had him in Tora Bora, the US could have claimed “Mission Accomplished” and left. Maybe then, basking in victory, Bush’s Iraq invasion – and the lies behind it -- wouldn’t have occurred. But invade we did. If the die wasn’t already cast in Kabul, it was then.

Maybe if Carter and Reagan hadn’t armed and trained the mujahedeen to fight the Soviets, creating what became the Taliban, 9/11 plotters wouldn’t have had safe haven. But some say when those jihadis forced the Russians out, the end of the USSR began. So, worth it?

Twenty years, thousands of American lives, a couple trillion dollars better spent here, by Bush, Obama, Trump, and, briefly, Biden, claiming we’d created an uncorrupted, viable government there. Building, equipping (now in Taliban hands), training an army, 300,000 strong. (Far fewer, probably: audits found many more salaries paid, by the US, than identifiable people.) 

Desperate to be the one who ended the war, Trump “negotiated” an art-of-the-deal with the Taliban, committing the US to complete withdrawal, leaving out of it the Afghan government and military leaders, who called it a complete capitulation.

Declaring the Taliban future partners who’d fight terrorism, who’d magically become good guys, Trump set a date certain for leaving, bragging it couldn’t be undone. Immediately, the Taliban knew Afghanistan was theirs, and set about taking it, village by village, bribe by bribe, defection by defection, months ago. 

The final sweep confirms the one-sidedness of Trump’s “deal.” His usually fawning GOP would now like you to forget what he did. 

President Biden had two choices: after twenty years, acknowledge the obvious; or commit forever to defending a people no longer willing to defend the corrupt government we’d given them. Aware, surely, it could cost future elections, he made the tougher choice; the one previous presidents promised but never delivered.

Having planted my stake firmly in favor of pulling up stakes, I must say President Biden handled the denouement very badly. It’s understandable to have presumed that, twenty years in, our custom-built Afghan government and military would at least forestall, if not prevent collapse. But didn’t they know what the Taliban were doing? Had they no eyes in villages?

Evacuating our civilians and thousands of theirs who’d helped us at great personal peril should have had the highest priority. Chaotically, frightfully, it’s happening now. Hopefully, not too late.

Biden’s Monday speech was forthright; explaining his decision, taking responsibility for mistakes. Was it a compelling counter to hypocritical, CYA (see above) screams from the right? Does a bear use public restrooms?

Facing Republican gerrymandering, voter suppression, brilliantly effective distraction and disinformation, Democrats can’t afford mistakes. They’re already fighting amongst themselves instead of producing a coherent, resonating message.

If ever messaging should be easy, it’s now. Republican leaders and refusers are wholly responsible for the resurgent pandemic, uncaringly making it worse, even as their ICUs fill with younger and younger victims. Outside hospitals, corpse-cooling trailers have reappeared.

They’re pretending the January insurrection was a pleasant winter picnic, and – the law and order party – claiming the arrested, felonious perpetrators are “political prisoners.” Heroes. Trump all but literally called for violence against the defenders. Only the irredeemably Trumpofoxified aren’t appalled. 

Fast as they can, they’re legislating voting obstacles for non-Trumpists. Threatening election workers. Blocking aid to Americans in need. And still, while heatstroke kills, fires rage, glaciers melt, electric grids fail, acidifying oceans rise, sea creatures die, and water from the Colorado River is rationed, denying climate change. All to keep wealthy investors and corporate polluters on board. At whatever cost to everyone else.

Professionally-thickened skulls are impenetrable. For America to endure, in people and parchment, thoughtful citizens must vote in enormous numbers: the antipode of a sure thing. Maybe we should invade Grenada again. 

Impeachment Debrief

My upcoming column in The Everett Herald.

On a reality-based planet, even the most resolutely Foxified, the definition of which this columnist has previously provided, would have watched the impeachment hearings and recognized Trump did what he did. Withholding aid to Ukraine, desperately at war with Trump’s Svengali, Vladimir Putin, to force President Zelensky to launch, or, at least, announce an investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden. In these days of instant media, the announcement alone would suffice for Trump’s purposes. 

There’s been no credible, contradictory testimony. We saw disagreement among witnesses as to how outrageous Trump’s actions were; though those saying it was extremely serious – for Ukraine and for the future of American foreign policy – far outnumbered those saying it was bad but not super-duper. Other than Republicans on the committee, none suggested it was normal.  

Lacking facts on their side, Republicans took to smearing the witnesses, especially Lt. Colonel Vindman. In the case of Fiona Hill, though, after she pointed how they were gifting Putin, they clammed. Bolted from the room, some did. Though the Foxified need no convincing, they tried to persuade the rest of us that if a criminal plan fails it’s not a crime. 

Ignoring the “favor” he asked, they’d have us believe Trump, who made a career of corruption, only wanted to confirm Zelensky’s honesty, despite responsible agencies already reporting favorably. In fact, we heard how much he truly cared: he didn’t “give a s**t.” Then they brushed the whole thing off as impeaching a “president” because “he didn’t take a meeting.” Are their voters that dumb? Well, when Ambassador Sondland quoted Trump as saying he “wanted nothing,” they ignored how Sondland went on to confirm there were quids and quos aplenty. But Trump mouthed innocence. To a certified Trumpist, that’s good enough. 

Republicans demanded the Bidens be called, despite knowing what they did or didn’t is immaterial to what Trump did. Cynically, they kept demanding the whistleblower’s appearance. They were unbothered, however, by Trump’s defiance of our Constitution, obstructing appearances by White House personnel who were important material witnesses. Unconstitutional authoritarianism by their “president”? Who cares? After all, Trump said the law allows him to “do anything I want.” Imagine President Barack Obama saying that, and their reaction. Did your hair just catch fire?  

As arguments lead-ballooned, they coughed up the “Steele Dossier.” Echoing Trump, calling Russian interference a hoax, they handed Putin yet another win. But it raised and answered important questions: Was what Trump did okay, or not? And, because it matters, would those who argue it was okay make the same assertion, had it been President Barack Hussein Obama? The answer is obvious.  

In orchestrated outrage, Republicans wailed about candidate Hillary Clinton, private citizen, spending privately-raised money, hiring a group previously assembled by Republicans to get dirt on Trump, to get dirt on Trump. Since they find that horrifying, we needn’t wonder how they’d react to the theoretical Obama scenario. (Surprise: Devin Nunes, Trump’s most housetrained lapdog, helped by Giuliani’s bagmen, may also have been trying get dirt on Biden, while sitting on the very committee. If it’s a hoax as he says, perhaps he’ll stop peddling hoaxes of his own.) 

Trump, Republican Congress-creatures, and their permanently propagandized voters have chosen to dismiss the obvious. Knowing their denial of Russian interference and repeating multiply-debunked Ukrainian conspiracies further Putin’s goals, they do it anyway. If your central argument comes from a Russian disinformation campaign, you might need a better one. Or check your allegiance at the committee-room door. For a clarifying explanation of a favorite conspiracy and its implications, still promoted by Trump and his committed Russophiles, watch this.

From the impeachment hearings, it’s undeniable: elected Republicans and their voters are lost to reality. Like their “president,” they’re all in on lying; on demagoguery over democracy. Devin “Naked Pictures” Nunes, most clearly. Jim “It Was Just A Shower” Jordan, too. Intentional or not, the results are the same: Russia gains, America loses.  

Hope for our country resides with voters who sat out 2016, or voted third party. Democrats need to demonstrate to them what’s at stake: the environment, climate, the health of their children; truth itself, science, democracy, America’s place in the world. Surely some of them care about these things. Trying to awaken Trumpists is a waste of time. 

Final, marginally-related thought: if, as Rick Perry just said, God chose Trump, it explains why He also chose famine, earthquakes, cancer, and hemorrhoids.

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When One Party Loses Its Mind

My forthcoming newspaper column:

Think we’re overtaxed? Overregulated? We can talk. If it’s your opinion public education has problems and you have ideas, it’s conversable. If you believe our country is heading in the wrong direction, let’s debate. Which direction, especially. We could have a conversation about military vs. social spending, and where the balance is; to what extent each protects us. I’ve even had almost room-temperature excursus about why, in successful societies, people care for one another. 

However. 

If you believe the planet isn’t warming, or humans have nothing to do with it, or it’s not serious, there’s no point in wasting either of our time. If you deny evolution or feel sure the earth is six thousand years old, or flat, I’ll defend your right to such beliefs, but they announce the impossibility of fruitful back-and-forth. Likewise if you think homosexuality is a choice. I suppose we could discuss whether tax cuts pay for themselves, but we wouldn’t get far.  

The need to reject indisputable facts is something that puzzles me about humans. In our evolutionary history, gut feelings no doubt played an important role in survival. React first, analyze later: it got us a long way. So, several hundred thousand years ago, did prehensile tails, the vestiges of which we all retain, occasionally causing coccygodinia. 

According to polls, forty percent of Republicans are certain Russian election interference is fake news created by liberals to distract Trump from his job. This they believe despite knowing every relevant intelligence agency has concluded otherwise and, shown the evidence, so has every member of involved congressional committees, Democrat and Republican. Of Republican voters who acknowledge it occurred, most seem undisturbed. (In a recent challenge, American hackers broke into voting machines in minutes.)  

In political fora, many Republicans insist our economy didn’t tank until Obama took over, and continued to decline throughout his presidency. Presenting them with indisputable facts makes no difference. The best hope is that such people are trolling. Otherwise it’s a serious mental defect of information processing, the same kind that rejects unwelcome news as fake. In theory, voting presumes the ability to evaluate data; this broad-based dismissal of evidence by a major political party is ominous. 

I don’t think forty percent of Republicans are innately stupid or unable to learn new things. In fairness, they’ve been victimized by intentional disinformation for decades, so it’s not entirely their fault. Whatever the explanation, because it requires both sides accept basic facts, rational discourse has become all but impossible. If political beliefs are a mutable hodge-podge, especially in a messy democracy like ours, facts are not. For propaganda to take root, there must be fertile soil. In that, Democrats are a raised-bed backyard garden. Today’s Republicans are a corporate farm. Our democracy was designed by men who didn’t imagine such a divide was possible. 

Aided by clever gerrymandering, Republicans dominate state and federal legislatures. In many red states, not unlike the US Senate (and the current president, thanks to the quirky Electoral College), Republicans received fewer votes than Democrats. And those elected tend to be the most rigid denialists. If it were true, as third-party nihilists argue, that there’s no difference between Democrats and Republicans, it wouldn’t matter. 

But when one’s adherents are consistently disdainful of facts, and when its leaders count on that instead of winning on ideas, a pathologically lying president who considers the White House “a dump” and lies about Boy Scout phone calls is what happens. The White House revolving door happens. An EPA following the law only by court order, its scientists resigning, happens. Incoherent foreign and domestic policy by tweet, Pizzagate, Seth Rich fake Fox “news” allegedly pushed by the president all happen; a president who’s made it impossible to believe anything he says. Happens. The Republican Prevaricare farce happens (Lindsey Graham called it a disaster and a fraud. And voted for it.)  

Ironically, the same information-processing deficiency that allowed Trump’s voters to disregard his lifelong moral and ethical failings, his businesses based on inherited (and laundered?) money and swindling, caused them not to reckon how incapable of governing he’d be. His ineptitude is the only thing saving us, so far, from dictatorship. Or worse. The arch-conservative NRO gets it. Republican Senator Jeff Flake, too. Who’s got next? 

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Good Rant, Rachel

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About the insane bubble in which teabaggers live nowadays, she's absolutely right. I used to have a friend who, while he didn't much like President Obama, was once able to see the good things he's done.  For reasons unknown but which, for a while anyway, made me actually worry about him, he descended into non-stop paranoid birther-level babble; or at least he had until I cut him off from communication. For all I know, he's in a rubber room somewhere by now. But there are plenty like him who aren't. Who are running for (and elected to!) office or being courted by those who are. Who are given credence (and rides!) by potential presidents.

But here's the point: no matter how right Rachel Maddow is on this subject, it makes zero difference. That Mitt Romney has chosen to ferry Mr Corsi around says nothing about either of them that we didn't already know: Corsi is insane and Mitt will pander to anyone. And there's nothing, no amount of facts to the contrary, no new information, no out-pointing of their falsehoods, that will change the minds of these people. By definition. If facts made any difference to these people, we wouldn't have these people. Those who need wild conspiracies to keep their heads from exploding, those to whom the real world is just too hard to face, will never change. I feel bad for them, as a fellow human being. But as someone who lives in this country and would like to see it survive, I feel worse for the rest of us, if that sort of thinking is enough to swing elections.

How Much More Obvious Can It Get?

So, after this situation, I wondered how teabaggers would react. I guess now we know (as if we didn't already):

Apparently wanting to steer clear of fancy highbrow academic stuff like research or informed assessments, North Carolina has banned using recent science to guide policy making. House Bill 819, which passed today after the governor let the deadline to stop it slip, restricts all sea-level predictions used for policy-making to be based on "historical data," effectively sending science back to 1900.

It's no joke: under guidance of the crazy wing of the R party, this is where we're headed. In Texas, it's (no exaggeration) coming out against education that causes people to think. In N.C., it's science. In Missouri, it's theocracy sneaking in under claims of religious persecution.

In Congress, it's ignoring history and simple arithmetic when it comes to proposing budgets.

I don't care how much you hate the idea of that black guy in that white house, or how offended you are by same sex couples who love each other, or how many hallucinatory conspiracies have been implanted in your Foxified mind. To hand power to these people is to kiss the country goodbye; of that there can no longer be an atom of doubt. They don't even try to hide it. Worried about terrorism? This is the sort of stuff can actually destroy our country. From within. By unrepentant idiots.

If Obama hasn't fully lived up to everyone's hopes, at least he's been trying, based on reality. The other guys? Their proud ignorance (and undisguised attempts to sabotage the economy as political ploy) ought to embarrass anyone. You simply can't have a desire for a future of America and cast a vote for any of them. And it seems the few commenters here who've occasionally attempted to rationalize it have given up trying. Who can blame them?

Rising C's

How much more news like this before the permanent party of full-time factlessness will find it too much even for them to deny?

Americans just lived through the hottest 12 months ever recorded, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Tuesday.

The announcement came as NOAA reported that the U.S. also just experienced its third-warmest April on record.

“These temperatures, when added with the first quarter and previous 11 months, calculate to the warmest year-to-date and 12-month periods since recordkeeping began in 1895,” the agency reported.

NOAA said that for the period from May 2011 to April 2012, the nationally averaged temperature was 55.7 degrees, 2.8 degrees higher than the 20th century average. The national average temperature for April was 55 degrees, 3.6 degrees above average.

You'd think there'd be an end-point, a line beyond which it'd be impossible to follow, even when a major political party exclusively counts on and spreads denialism and lies; that eventually there'd be a collective up-wising. And I'm not just talking about climate-change denial: It's everything they say.

But why stop, when it's working so well? When they're cruising comfortably, counting on a carefully created and callously curried crop of clueless contradictors, clearly not capable of calculating the chaos that's coming countrywide; clashing continuously with common sense, countering cogency with calumny. Conservatives? Contrarily. The converse.

Nutcase In A Nutshell

Hey, watch this! It's absolutely perfectly illustrative -- the perfect distillation -- of how the right-wing scream machine works: ignore facts. Deny facts. Demand the exclusion of facts from the whole conversation. Anything to keep the false narrative alive.

And do so with the confidence that your sheeplike followers, having been beaten into submission by your constant peddling of fear and hate and lies, won't bother to know the truth. Won't want to know it. Won't even care. Because, as we see daily, they won't and they won't and they won't.