The Weekly Sift

These are the values and traditions I believe in, and they are not Republican or Democratic values. They’re American values we can all share.

– Barack Obama, opening the Obama Center Friday

This week’s featured post is “Story Games“.

Ongoing stories

• Trump’s assault on American democracy. The attack on California’s elections as “fraud” are a preview of what we’ll see when Trump’s party gets pounded in the fall elections. The charges are a clear example of “truthiness“. No one has any evidence of fraud, but the charges just feel right to the MAGA faithful. “It’s impossible to prove, but I think everybody knows instinctively, something is wrong here,” says Speaker Johnson.
• Climate change. The Trump regime continues to pay money to cancel wind-power projects. The total bill has reached $2.5 billion. It’s hard to imagine a more wrong-headed policy.
• Iran War. For months commentators have been saying that Trump was losing the war. The agreement he signed to end the war proves he did. Now we get to see whether the US can control Israel and Iran can control Hezbollah, because the Lebanon front is key to maintaining the ceasefire.
• Ukraine. The war continues to shift in Ukraine’s favor. The video below of the roof flying off of a Moscow oil refinery is striking. Putin’s war has followed him home.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about Trump’s Versailles Agreement

The full text of the US/Iran memorandum of understanding finally came out. I don’t know what’s more striking: What a bad deal this is for the United States, or how many people are surprised it came out this way. What did they think was going to happen? The phrase that springs to mind is: Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Pentagon simulations had consistently demonstrated two reasons for avoiding a war with Iran:

• Air power by itself won’t topple the theocracy.
• When Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz, we have no effective answer short of a costly land invasion or nuclear war.

We’ve now had four months to watch those two obvious truths play out. Sure, we can destroy a lot of Iranian stuff and kill a lot of their people, while using up a lot of weaponry it will take years for us to replace. But no one in the Trump regime was ever able to explain how destruction and killing by itself could lead to some positive outcome for the US. Wednesday,

Trump said that “the alternative would be a worldwide depression”, arguing that if he had not struck a deal, “the strait [of Hormuz] would never have been opened.”

Of course the Strait was open before Trump attacked, so maybe he could have thought about worldwide depression then. But he didn’t, so he ended up making a number of concessions to Iran in order get it open again. Avoiding a bad outcome is an explanation for why you sign a bad deal, not something to crow about as an accomplishment.

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Is the Strait of Hormuz open now? Kinda-sorta. Some ships are getting through, but the traffic is limited.

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If you want to mix some laughter into your tears, watch British pseudo-journalist Jonathan Pie recount the course of the war.

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For an example of the kind of military cluelessness that got us into this war, look at WaPo columnist Marc Thiessen’s reaction to the Versailles agreement. He thinks Trump had achieved a “historic victory” on the battlefield, which the peace agreement mysteriously screws up.

What victory is that? Well, we destroyed things and killed people. And if we’d just kept doing that for two more weeks we wouldn’t need an agreement at all.

I have been clear about my view from the start: Trump would be better off ending the war without a deal, with a final 10-to-14-day bombing campaign that completes the destruction of Iran’s military capabilities — and then declaring victory, ending combat operations and launching a covert effort to arm the Iranian people and help them overthrow the regime in time.

Where does that 10-14-day estimate come from? From “the target list [Admiral Cooper] was assigned at the start of Operation Epic Fury”.

Yep, that’s how war works: You make a target list before the shooting starts, and when you finish it you’ve won. Easy-peasy. Why didn’t anybody think to do that in Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq?

and Obama’s new library/museum

When an ex-president who is widely respected and admired throws a party, people show up. Friday, on Juneteenth, the Obama Presidential Center opened in Chicago. Every living president other than Trump was there, along with celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Stephen Colbert, and Dwayne Wade.

The musical line-up put Trump’s Freedom 250 effort to shame: Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Common, Christina Aguilera, John Legend, Bono, and others. But the highlight was President Obama himself, who can still give a great speech:

[T]he exhibits here focus not just on policies, but on the shared values that make democracy possible, a belief in the intrinsic dignity and worth of all people, and that no one is above the law or beneath its protection, a belief in checks and balances in our government and an accountability that comes with an independent judiciary and a robust, free press. A belief that our military and law enforcement owe allegiance not to any president or political party, but to the people and our Constitution.

A belief in the peaceful transfer of power after the people have spoken in fair and free elections, recognizing that in a large, complicated society like ours, no group or faction gets its way 100% of the time. And a belief that qualities of character, honesty, integrity, kindness, compassion, a sense of duty and honor, those things matter in our public dealings, just as they do in our private lives.

These are the values and traditions I believe in, and they are not Republican or Democratic values. They’re American values we can all share.

The word “Trump” did not appear in his text. It didn’t have to.

and masculinity

The combination of the UFC bout on the White House lawn, a match winner telling an outrageous lie about Michelle Obama (who wasn’t there and had nothing to do with the event), and neither the White House nor any of the sponsoring corporations making any statement about it afterward — it started a lot of people writing about how the MAGA movement has distorted and corrupted the notion of masculinity. Mitch Jackson comments:

Here is the product Trump and his supporters are selling. Be loud. Be cruel and a male chauvinist. Racism is fine. Mock the weak. Call people names. Shout down anyone who corrects you. Repeat whatever Fox News told you this morning as gospel, even when you know nothing about the subject. Wrap all of it in a red hat and call it manhood. …

Here is what the Trump manosphere salesmen do not want you to know. A man stands tall and tells the truth even when the truth costs him. A man keeps his word. A man protects the people who have no one else to protect them, the kid getting bullied, the worker getting cheated, the stranger getting hounded by a mob. A man stays calm when calm is hard. A man extends his hand to the person everyone else wrote off. Compassion is strength. Empathy is strength. Owning your mistakes out loud is strength. Shouting the loudest in the room has never once made anyone a man. Name calling is the move of a coward who ran out of arguments.

It especially burns me to hear the MAGA imitation of a man called a “cowboy”. I grew up watching westerns on TV, and Mitch Jackson is describing the heroes of those westerns. Ben Cartwright, Matt Dillon — they were the kind of men Jackson is describing. They were nothing at all like Donald Trump.

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Here’s a question: If, as right-wing ideology insists, there are only two genders, established by God and unalterably built into our bodies — then why does masculinity require a performance like this? Can’t MAGA males just be men? Why do they have to go to great lengths to perform their masculinity?

But if, on the other hand, gender is at least partly a performance, that opens up a lot of interesting discussions and possibilities.

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Another example of MAGA “masculinity”: Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is a right-wing leader who had been one of Trump’s few allies in Europe. Recently there’s been some friction between them after Trump started attacking Pope Leo. (Popes tend to be popular in Italy — who knew?)

She’s also a comparatively young and good-looking female head-of-state who stands out in a graybeard meeting like the recent G-7 in France. So of course Trump had to comment to an Italian TV interviewer about how Meloni “begged” to have her picture taken with him, as (no doubt) all good-looking younger women beg when overwhelmed by his manly presence.

She’s probably happy I talked to her. I didn’t have to talk to her. She begged me to take a picture with her. She wanted a picture with me so badly. I wouldn’t have taken it, but I felt sorry for her.

Meloni, and apparently all of Italy, took offense at this comment. The Italian foreign minister cancelled a trip to the US. Meloni said that Trump had “fabricated” the interaction and said “Italy and I do not beg.”

Trump make something up? Heaven forefend. Just the other day, someone said to him “Sir, you are so honest. You never invent conversations that didn’t happen.” But I think Meloni should count her blessings. At least he didn’t grab her by the pussy.

and the reflecting pool

This is the kind of trivial thing I usually ignore. The $14-or-so million Trump spent to repaint the bottom of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool isn’t significant in any fiscal way, and the resulting mess isn’t something I walk past on any regular basis. Even the fact that the job was done on a no-bid contract awarded to somebody Trump had hired at one of his clubs — it’s barely a drop in the bucket of Trump regime corruption.

But the series of incompetent moves — the huge cost overrun, not understanding the biology of algae, awarding the no-bid clean-up contract to another crony, dumping hydrogen peroxide into the pool to kill the algae without realizing it might cause the new layer of paint to peel up, and then blaming all his failures on “vandals” — it’s just too typical of the whole regime. Trump ignores expert opinion, pats himself on the back for his brilliant solution, siphons taxpayers’ money off to insiders, and then blames somebody else when it all goes wrong.

Like the Iran War, in other words. Max Boot comments:

I’m sure Trump will catch the vandals desecrating the Reflecting Pool just about the time that Captain Queeg catches the thieves who absconded with his strawberries.

Sadly, though, law enforcement in the capital now serves the Mad King’s fantasies. People are being arrested for vandalizing the pool, including an ex-Olympian who stopped by in the middle of his morning bike ride. Prediction: None of these cases will go to trial. Either grand juries will refuse to indict or judges will throw the charges out for lack of evidence.

but I want you to read an essay

“Winning the Story Game” by A. R. Moxon. I discuss it in the featured post.

and you also might be interested in …

Most stunning video of the week: During a massive Ukrainian drone attack on Moscow Thursday, the city’s largest oil refinery literally flips its lid. The roof is blown off and turns over in the air. Later, it turned out that the refinery wasn’t hit by a drone, but by a misfired Russian anti-drone missile.

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The anti-ICE protests outside Delaney Hall in New Jersey are continuing. The latest: video of a protester getting hit by a car.

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The $400 million bribe Trump took from the Qatari royal family is now ready for service as Air Force One.

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Sci-fi TV shows like “For All Mankind” sometimes feature nuclear-powered rockets. Russia has one now, but it’s “wildly expensive and very dangerous”.

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Since the Supreme Court reversed Roe v Wade, the number of abortions nationwide has nearly doubled. Nobody knows for sure why, but one possibility is that women in remote areas did not realize before that they could get abortion pills through the mail. NPR reports that even if telehealth clinics are banned from sending mifepristone through the mail, the companion drug misoprostol will work by itself, but with more discomfort.

I’ll repeat something I’ve pointed out before: Christian abortion opponents can stretch certain Bible verses to claim that the prophets would have banned surgical abortion if they’d known about it. But drugs to induce miscarriage are as old as time, and the Bible does not mention them. Mifepristone and misoprostol are just more effective modern versions of folk remedies that go back to the Egyptians.

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Paul Waldman asks why Trump’s increasing mental and physical infirmity isn’t being covered the same way Biden’s was.

While there are occasional articles analyzing Trump’s aging, the mainstream media — especially the most important agenda-setting outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal — treated Biden’s age as one of the most important stories in politics, a four-alarm fire that demanded every ounce of attention they could give it. … There’s no way to know for sure [how age has affected Trump’s judgment]. But the nature of Trump’s personalist presidency, in which the entire government is organized around turning his whims into reality and the barest hint of dissent is swiftly punished, makes the question of his age even more important than it was with Biden, who was surrounded by competent people who could run the government even when the president was less engaged than he ought to have been.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates’ article in Vanity Fair is headlined: “Did Kamala Harris’s Silence on Gaza Cost Her the White House?“, but it’s also a meditation on the long-standing American conflict between democracy and human rights at home vs. empire abroad.

Gaza is not a betrayal of American democratic tradition but an expression of an American imperial tradition.

Coates describes “survivalist democracy”, when the lesser evil of a leader who protects many groups within America allows many Americans to ignore brutality against the groups left out.

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So Georgia won’t be redistricting to kill its majority-Black districts. At least not this year.

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Using solar panels to create needed shade always seemed like a no-brainer to me. Now California has a pilot project to cover its canals with solar panel canopies to avoid evaporation while generating electricity. Next we need to do big retail parking lots.

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UCLA Professor of Medicine Robert B. Shpiner pulls together a bunch of Trump initiatives that don’t look nearly so ominous when you see them one-by-one.

• The schedule of newborn vaccinations has been cut back from 17 to 11. One of the missing vaccines is hepatitis B, a disease which turns chronic in 9 out of 10 infants who catch it.
• The monthly food stamp fruit-and-vegetable benefit for small children has been cut from $26 to $10.
• About four million people are being pushed off food stamps, many of them parents.
• Two million fewer children are covered by Medicaid or CHIP than were at the end of the Biden administration.
• A program that bought locally-grown produce for school lunches has been cancelled.
• Enforcement of the law guaranteeing an education to children with disabilities has been moved from the Department of Education to the Department of Justice.
• The federal government is no longer gathering data that might show the effects of these changes.

He concludes: “I’ve never seen the US harm its children this deliberately.”

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Pete Hegseth cancelled the Pentagon’s requirement for flu vaccines. Now there’s been a flu outbreak at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. Over 220 cases have been reported so far.

The military forces people to live in close quarters that facilitate the spread of disease. Such diseases are often have military significance. The Plague of Justinian in the sixth century (an early version of the Black Death of the Middle Ages) put a stop to the Byzantine Empire’s attempt to reconquer the western territories that had been lost after the fall of Rome.

Requiring vaccines is just military good sense.

and let’s close with something twisted

Occasionally I’ve managed to glimpse a hummingbird before it flitted away. But my eye has never been sharp enough to see one’s extended tongue.