Author Archives: weeklysift

Doug Muder is a former mathematician who now writes about politics and religion. He is a frequent contributor to UU World.

The Do-Something-Else Principle

August 24, 2015 – 10:13 am

Why Republicans don’t want to run on policy.

Back in 2012, Ezra Klein noted an interesting distinction between the two major candidates for president:

The central difficulty of covering this presidential campaign — which is to say, of explaining Barack Obama and Mitt Romney’s disparate plans for the country — is the continued existence of what we might call the policy gap. The policy gap, put simply, is this: Obama has proposed policies. Mitt Romney hasn’t. …

Romney’s offerings are more like simulacra of policy proposals. They look, from far away, like policy proposals. They exist on his Web site, under the heading of “Issues,” with subheads like “Tax” and “Health care.” But read closely, they are not policy proposals. They do not include the details necessary to judge Romney’s policy ideas. In many cases, they don’t contain any details at all.

That distinction between the parties has continued into the 2016 presidential cycle. Rarely does a week go by without some Democratic candidate announcing a policy detailed enough to put a price tag on and assess who would be helped or hurt. Hillary Clinton has a plan to address student debt. Bernie Sanders has drafted a bill — Congress could enact it tomorrow if it were so inclined — to create jobs by rebuilding infrastructure. Democratic candidates are competing to make detailed proposals to increase renewable energy, promote racial justice, raise the minimum wage, limit the power of money in politics, guarantee the right to vote, and do dozens of other things. Sanders likes to propose fully drafted laws, while a Clinton proposal is more typically a list with a price tag and maybe a funding mechanism. But the details are there.

You may hate these plans, and think the proposals that implement them are terrible. But if you don’t know exactly what Democrats are proposing, it’s probably because you haven’t bothered to find out. The candidates (or their web sites) would love to tell you. [1]

On the other side, though, details are scarce. Republicans want to “shrink the government” and “secure the border” and “defeat ISIS” and “repeal and replace ObamaCare” and “promote a culture of life” and enact “a growth agenda” and “make America great again”. But when you ask exactly what any of that means in this case or that case, things get iffy.

Why? When a pattern like this persists over multiple elections, the cause has to be more than just the style of particular politicians.

On some issues, the cause is obvious: Republican candidates aren’t going to have point-by-point plans to deal with global warming, because their ideology won’t allow them to admit it exists. [2] Likewise, they’re not going to have a plan to deal with racial injustice, because (according to them) there is none: Blacks are a disproportionate share of the prison population because they commit more crimes, and police gun them down more often because they are more threatening. Likewise, Republicans are not going to have a minimum wage proposal (other than maybe getting rid of the minimum wage) because setting wages is the market’s job.

But that doesn’t explain why so few Republicans have detailed their plans for cutting the federal budget [3], or replacing ObamaCare, or reducing entitlement spending [4]. Republicans say they want to do all those things. They just don’t say how.

The reason, I believe, is what I am calling the Do-Something-Else Principle:

When a public problem is genuinely hard, and has so many moving parts that the average person has a hard time holding them all in mind, any realistic detailed solution will disappoint the general public. Consequently, a politician who gets identified with any particular solution is at a disadvantage when running against a rival who wants to do something else.

No matter who proposes it or what kind of principles they base it on, once a solution gets nailed down well enough for the nonpartisan wonks at the Congressional Budget Office to estimate what it will cost and how well it will achieve its goals, most Americans will get disenchanted, thinking “There has to be a better way.” So a canny politician — particularly one who is out of power and has no responsibility to actually govern — will align himself with that longed-for “better way” and avoid getting pinned down on specifics as along as possible.

Examples of do-something-else are legion: ObamaCare is a specific program, while “repeal and replace ObamaCare” is a proposal to do something else. [5] The Iran nuclear deal is a specific agreement that Congress can vote up or down, but the “better deal” that Republicans support is something else. The Comprehensive Immigration Reform that the Senate passed (with votes from Republicans like Marco Rubio who have since retreated from it) is a specific plan, but “securing the border” is something else.

So far, the campaign has only two complex issues on which Republican candidates have taken definite stands: abortion and immigration. On both issues, they have been dragged kicking and screaming into policy commitments, and it hasn’t worked out well for them.

Abortion. Republicans run best when they can maintain a vague abortions-are-oogy position without getting drawn into individual examples. But the Christian Right fell for that back in the Reagan administration and has been wise to it since. Today’s pro-lifers demand clear commitments.

Consequently, everyone who isn’t a religious extremist finds Republican candidates’ abortion positions disappointing, or maybe even horrifying. Mike Huckabee has supported the government of Uruguay in forcing a 10-year-old to give birth, even though the pregnancy resulted from rape by her stepfather. Huck has also pledged that as president he would “invoke the Fifth and 14th Amendments to the Constitution” to protect a fetus’ right to life, a position that would justify sending federal troops to abortion clinics in much the same way that Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy sent troops to the South to enforce school desegregation. Scott Walker won’t support abortion even when the life of the mother is at stake, and Marco Rubio has come out against rape and incest exemptions to abortion bans.

Hillary is eagerly awaiting her opportunity to run those videos in the general-election campaign.

Details kill you. Stick with “abortion is oogy”.

Immigration. Republicans were doing fine with “secure the border” until Donald Trump came along. Trump is operating by his own rules, and I’m not completely sure what they are. But one rule seems to be that he can put out detailed plans where the details make no sense.

For example, consider the first reprisal he lists if Mexico refuses to pay for the wall he wants to build on our southern border:

impound all remittance payments derived from illegal wages

A “remittance payment” is money that a worker in the United States sends back to his family in Mexico. Both documented and undocumented immigrants do this, totaling more than $20 billion. But these are not drug kingpins and we’re not talking about the kind of large-scale transfers the government is set up to trace. Even National Review, no fan of Mexican immigrants in general, doesn’t see a practical way to block the undocumented guy washing dishes at your local diner (for $3 an hour) from sending $20 to his mom, much less block only the payments from undocumented workers and allow remittances from legal employment. (The work-arounds would be simple. Maybe I’ll take the $200 I’ve saved up and wire it to my cousin in Toronto, who can wire it from there to our grandma in Oaxaca.)

Anyway, though, the idea that Trump has a detailed immigration plan is forcing the other candidates to comment on it. They’re taking positions on birthright citizenship and using derogatory terms like “anchor babies“. It’s not doing any of them any good with the non-Republican electorate.

Why only Republicans? The Do Something Else Principle generally works to the advantage of the party out of power. The president has to govern; he can do something or do nothing, but he can’t stand for doing “something else”. (You might think that controlling Congress would give Republicans a similar interest in governing, but apparently not.)

But there is also a subjective element in the Do Something Else Principle that makes it more applicable to Republicans: It only works when the issues are complicated. When a simple proposal would do exactly what it’s supposed to do in a perfectly understandable way — like raising the minimum wage, for example — you’re either for it or against it. Supporting “something else” doesn’t make a lot of sense.

For years, Republicans have been pushing the idea that governing should be simple: There’s right and wrong, principled and unprincipled. We just need simple, good-hearted leaders who have the will to do the right thing, not brainiac experts who design complicated systems. (No Sarah Palin speech is complete without a reference to “common sense solutions“. George W. Bush once pushed a nominee for the Supreme Court — a job normally thought to require expertise — by assuring us that “I know her heart.”) Voters shouldn’t need to study an issue or understand anything difficult, nor should they have to yield to people who do study and understand things. “I’m not a scientist” is a reason to ignore climate change, not a reason to listen to the people who are scientists.

Consequently, the voters of the Republican base, particularly those who live inside the Fox News bubble, have been trained to throw up their hands quickly when things get complicated. Undoing structural racism? An insurance mandate? A tax on carbon? There has to be a better way!

Republican candidates, by and large, are not stupid. They just pander to voters who have been over-indulged in their intellectually laziness. Those base voters don’t want to understand complex issues, they just want to be told that the solution follows easily from the common-sense principles of their ideology. If no actual solution is simple or ideologically correct, then you shouldn’t present one. Just tell them that you’re going to do something else.

[1] The exception that proves this rule is Clinton’s position on the Keystone XL Pipeline: She hasn’t announced one, and that’s a serious problem for her campaign. Democratic voters expect to know what their candidates plan to do.

[2] That’s not entirely true. Republican candidates are split between those like Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, who think the Earth is not warming, those like Marco Rubio, who believe the Earth might be warming, but don’t care because “the climate is always changing”, and those like Jeb Bush and Carly Fiorina, who acknowledge the reality of global warming, but don’t believe political leaders should do anything about it, beyond crossing their fingers and hoping for “innovation”. But all the candidates are united on the don’t-do-anything conclusion.

Given that, “do nothing” actually is a fully detailed description of their intentions.

[3] In previous years, Rand Paul made headlines with detailed descriptions of how he’d cut federal spending. However, a plan to slash the CDC doesn’t look so good in light of the recent Ebola scare, so Paul has de-emphasized the specifics now during his presidential run.

In his announcement speech, he stated his intentions in a more do-something-else way:

Currently some $3 trillion comes into the U.S. Treasury. Couldn’t the country just survive on $3 trillion?

Three trillion is a number beyond the ken of most of us. So who can say why the sum total of all the stuff we expect out of our government costs more than that? Isn’t there some other way to spend that $3 trillion that would do everything we want?

That sounds a lot better than slashing the CDC or cutting back on food safety or the national parks.

[4] Chris Christie is virtually unique in presenting a detailed plan for cutting Social Security benefits and raising the retirement age. He thought this would enhance his image as a guy who tells it like it is, even if it means delivering the bad news. That message seems to be working for about 3.3% of the Republican electorate. He will probably be out of the race soon.

[5] The polls that show ObamaCare is unpopular usually measure it against doing something else. It would be interesting to poll a question like: “Do you want to keep the Affordable Care Act or go back to the way our health care system worked in 2009?”

Likewise, if Republicans offered a detailed replacement plan — they’ve controlled the House since 2011 and the Senate since January, so if they had a plan they could have passed it in the House and forced the Democrats to either filibuster it in the Senate or have Obama veto it — polling that plan against ObamaCare would be a fair comparison. But if they had a plan, the burden of public disappointment would shift to them: Is their plan really the best we can do? Why isn’t the problem simpler than that?

Scott Walker and Marco Rubio have talked about their ObamaCare replacement plans recently, but they have produced exactly the kind of “simulacra of policy proposals” Klein was talking about. As Politico observed about Walker’s “plan”:

Walker leaves many other questions unanswered about his plan, including how many people might be covered and how he would pay for it, except to say it would require no new taxes or fees.

Rubio’s “plan” is presented in an op-ed. It includes no numbers. (The numbers in the op-ed are all about ObamaCare, not his own program.) The ObamaCare tab on his website is similarly non-quantitative and unanalyzable, containing statements like “we must save Medicare and Medicaid by placing them on fiscally sustainable paths” without saying what such paths might look like in terms of decreased benefits or increased taxes.

The last time Republicans floated a healthcare proposal detailed enough to be analyzed was in 2009, when ObamaCare was still being debated. The CBO found that the Republican alternative would lower the 2019 federal budget deficit by a small amount ($18 billion), while doing essentially nothing to cover the uninsured: 3 million more people would be covered in 2019 than if Congress did nothing (no ObamaCare, no Republican alternative), but 52 million non-elderly adults would remain uninsured.

If somebody wants to run on “I stand for an America where in 2019 you will have a 1-in-7 chance of being uninsured”, the Democrats will eat them up.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

August 24, 2015 – 7:25 am

I’m just back from a vacation where I got less done than I expected. (I know, “getting something done” contradicts the whole notion of “vacation”, but my inability to sleep late usually allows me to keep the Sift going on trips without inconveniencing my fellow travelers that much. When I cancel a Sift, it’s usually because I have some other deadline.) So today the Sift will run a little later than usual.

The featured article defines “The Do-Something-Else Principle”, which explains why Republican candidates resist turning their rhetoric into detailed policy proposals.

The weekly summary has a lot to cover: the ongoing stock market crash, Jimmy Carter’s response to cancer, my response to the ad you’ve been seeing against the Iran deal, and a variety of 2016 developments, including my general disgust with the way the Democrats are being covered in the media.

Expect the do-something-else article by 11, and the summary by noon.

Posted in Morning tease | Comments (2)

Discomforting Urgency

August 17, 2015 – 9:33 am

In this movement exists a kind of urgency that only proximity to terror can produce, and yes, that urgency can be extreme and discomforting, because it must be. The sedative of all normalcies and niceties are the enemies so long as lives are in danger.

— Charles Blow, “Activists ‘Feel the Bern’?“

This week’s featured post is “Why BLM Protesters Can’t Behave“.

This week everybody was talking about China

for two reasons: the massive chemical explosion in Tianjin (which was visible from orbit) and the devaluation of the yuan.

Tianjin is a port 75 miles from Beijing, and it contains the kinds of warehouses typical of a port, but on a Chinese scale. Something blew up there early Wednesday morning, killing over 100 people and injuring hundreds more. Thousands have had to leave their homes as sodium cyanide has been scattered widely.

The currency devaluation is one of those technical issues whose effects are anything but technical. The Guardian does a good job laying out various implications. A factor that complicates everybody’s thinking (and makes it more likely that somebody will over-react in a stupid way) is the Chinese government’s lack of transparency. We’re all trying to read tea leaves because we can’t get trustworthy data.

and Iraq

Jeb Bush knows why Iraq is such a mess: Even though the Surge totally worked and everything was fine when his brother left office, Obama and Hillary screwed it all up.

The saddest thing about this fantasy (contained in a “foreign policy speech” he gave Tuesday) is how predictable it was. The day before Obama was inaugurated, I wrote:

It’s just a matter of time before we hear: Bush had the war won, but then Obama came in and threw it all away.

The most direct parallel to Bush’s Iraq revisionism is Vietnam revisionism. Listen to Bruce Herschensohn tell the Vietnam story for Prager “University”:

Decades back, in late 1972, South Vietnam and the United States were winning the Vietnam War decisively by every conceivable measure. … On January the 23rd, 1973, President Nixon gave a speech to the nation on primetime television announcing that the Paris Peace Accords had been initialed by the United States, South Vietnam, North Vietnam, the Viet Cong, and the Accords would be signed on the 27th. What the United States and South Vietnam received in those accords was victory. At the White House, it was called “VV Day,” “Victory in Vietnam Day.” … The advance of communist tyranny had been halted by those accords.

Then it all came apart. And It happened this way: In August of the following year, 1974, President Nixon resigned his office as a result of what became known as “Watergate.” Three months after his resignation came the November congressional elections and within them the Democrats won a landslide victory for the new Congress and many of the members used their new majority to de-fund the military aid the U.S. had promised, piece for piece, breaking the commitment that we made to the South Vietnamese in Paris to provide whatever military hardware the South Vietnamese needed in case of aggression from the North. Put simply and accurately, a majority of Democrats of the 94th Congress did not keep the word of the United States. … Many of them had an investment in America’s failure in Vietnam. They had participated in demonstrations against the war for many years. They wouldn’t give the aid.

So there you have it: Hundreds of thousands of American troops fought for almost a decade without a clear result. But just a few more billion in aid to a famously corrupt South Vietnamese government would have finished the job.

That is so much more credible than the other story: that Nixon was a crook thrown out of office for good reasons, and that he was just lying when he declared victory. We could have kept our troops there for another decade, and when we left South Vietnam still would have fallen.

Or, if not more credible, Herschensohn’s version at least makes better wishful thinking for the people who started our intervention in Vietnam or continued it beyond all sense.

The same process is at work in Iraq revisionism: If you don’t want to admit you were wrong (because you want to apply all the same ideas to Iran and ISIS), then Jeb’s story is much more comforting.

I stand by what I wrote in 2005:

We can leave Iraq now, or we can leave after our losses have grown. That is the only choice we have.

America’s key mistake in Iraq was invading in the first place, not getting our troops (mostly) out of harm’s way.

BTW: My Facebook feed has been full of links to the Prager U video by West Point historian Colonel Ty Seidule, making a clear case that the Civil War really was about slavery rather than states rights or tariffs or any of the other excuses Southern whites have invented for denying that their great-grandfathers fought on the wrong side.

I love the message, but the video itself is a Trojan Horse. Here’s a tip: Before sharing something from an institution, take a look at the other stuff it puts out. Prager U is a project of conservative talk-radio host Dennis Prager, who stars in some of the videos. You really don’t want to encourage your friends to wander its “campus” and imbibe its point of view.

The Vietnam revisionism piece quoted above is much more typical of PU than the Civil War video. Other PU videos feature  climate-change denial, anti-feminism, a reduction of the Israeli/Palestine problem to “one side [Palestinians] wants the other side [Israelis] dead”, blaming all the problems of America’s public schools on teachers, and claiming that liberals are more racist than conservatives.

Do you really want to lend credibility to all that?

and 2016

Numbers about the GOP debate are in, so I have to correct a few of my initial responses from last week. First, I was wrong to say that nobody watched the kids-table debate among the candidates who didn’t poll high enough to get into the main event. It turns out six million people did, which would be a big number for any debate this early. I don’t know why they watched, but they did.

Second, I identified the losers of the debate as

Walker, Bush, and Carson. Not because they made any major gaffes, but because they seemed to fade into the background.

Post-debate polls agree with me about Walker and Bush, but not Carson. Ben Carson moved up to second in Iowa. 538 says his national poll numbers have moved up by an average of 2.4% and credits his performance:

Depending on which poll you look at, he was rated as either the most impressive or the second most impressive candidate in the varsity debate.

Again, not sure why.

538 identifies Carly Fiorina (from the kids’ table) as the big winner, going from nowhere to the high single digits, and Scott Walker as the big loser.

Speaking of Fiorina, according to the NYT:

Now, many Republicans, preparing to potentially confront Mrs. Clinton in a general election, are looking anew at Mrs. Fiorina, who rose from being a secretary to running the giant technology company HP, as the party’s weapon to counter the perception that it is waging a “war on women.”

Republicans who hold that hope really need to take a look at the exit polls from 2010, when Fiorina lost the California Senate race to Barbara Boxer. In a year when Republicans actually won the women’s vote nationally (51%-49%), Fiorina lost the women’s vote by a wide margin (55%-39%, with 6% going to “Other”).

If your policies appeal to a group, then nominating a member of that group will boost their turnout, as black turnout increased for Obama in 2008 and 2012. But identity politics won’t save you if your policies suck. If Marco Rubio runs on a platform that calls for building a wall on the Mexican border and tossing all the undocumented immigrants over it, and if his campaign panders to the working-class whites who believe they’d still be making big money on the assembly line if not for all those brown people — then Hispanics will decisively reject him. Ditto for Fiorina and women or Carson and blacks, if they just put a one-of-us face on the anti-woman, anti-black Republican consensus.

Ask your black friends how much pride they take in having Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, or whether his race makes up for him providing the decisive fifth vote to gut the Voting Rights Act.

Or think about this: The last time the Democrats nominated a white man, John Kerry lost the white male vote 62%-37%.

Bernie Sanders shocked everybody by taking the lead in a New Hampshire poll. Polls are noisy this far away from the election, so it could be a blip. Or maybe not.

I’m sure it’s not a coincidence that we’re starting to hear rumblings about Joe Biden and Al Gore (though unidentified “close advisers” to Gore deny it) getting into the race. But the NYT’s Nate Cohn doesn’t think Clinton has much to worry about yet.

New evidence that this election cycle is unique: The negative ads have already started. Here’s Rand Paul’s attack on Donald Trump.

Contrast the bickering and name-calling on the Republican side with what’s going on among the Democrats: They’re competing to produce the best policy proposals. Clinton announced a plan to make college affordable, and Sanders produced a racial-justice platform.

To be fair, Scott Walker is due to unveil his ObamaCare replacement plan tomorrow. Salon’s Simon Malloy is not optimistic about it, given the op-ed Walker published Friday, in which he seems unprepared to recognize any of the real-life trade-offs involved in healthcare policy.

Also, the Trump immigration program is out. I’ll have more to say about it next week.

Trump is an example in the latest phrase I’ve added to the “Conservative-to-English Lexicon”

Telling it like it is. Pandering to people who resemble the speaker.  Usage: Middle-aged white guy Wayne Allyn Root: “Donald Trump tells it like it is.” Alternate form: Calling it like he sees it. Usage: Ted Nugent writing, “Donald Trump … calls them like he sees them.”

and Cuba

John Kerry dedicated an American embassy in Havana, a big step towards more neighborly relations with one of our nearest neighbors. Maybe the embargo can end soon.

The embargo made sense for about a year. Castro’s new regime seemed fragile, and it was not unreasonable to think that the extra economic pressure of the embargo might push it over the edge, producing a more friendly government in Havana. Half a century later, it’s still here, because we can’t admit a mistake. (Marco Rubio makes pig-headedness sound like a virtue: “a half-century worth of policy toward the Castro regime that was agreed upon by presidents of both parties.”)

In America, the fundamental political divide on these issues comes down to this: Conservatives believe we are doing other countries a favor when we talk to them. So why are we “giving” Cuba an embassy? (Rubio: “President Obama has rewarded the Castro regime.”) Liberals believe talking to your enemies is just what you do, because you can’t kill everybody you don’t like.

The Atlantic asked the question Americans so often ignore: How does all this look from the other side? It published a column by a Cuban blogger, who imagines telling his grandchildren he was there at this powerful “inflection point” in Cuban history. When he writes about “a collision between two countries”, he’s not talking about the U.S. and Cuba, but the new Cuba and the old Cuba.

and you also might be interested in …

This year might see the most powerful El Niño on record.

36 retired generals and admirals published an open letter titled “The Iran Deal Benefits U.S. National Security”. It says the deal is “the most effective means currently available to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons”.

We just had the hottest July on record, keeping 2015 on pace to be the hottest year ever, breaking 2014’s record.

Well worth reading: “How the NRA Rewrote the Second Amendment“. One interesting tidbit is how bogus some of the pro-gun quotes from the Founders are.

“‘One loves to possess arms’ wrote Thomas Jefferson, the premier intellectual of his day, to George Washington on June 19, 1796.” What a find! Oops: Jefferson was not talking about guns. He was writing to Washington asking for copies of some old letters, to have handy so he could issue a rebuttal in case he got attacked for a decision he made as secretary of state. The NRA website still includes the quote. You can go online to buy a T-shirt emblazoned with Jefferson’s mangled words.

Computer programmer Byron Clark has set up his web browser to automatically replace the phrase political correctness with treating people with respect. So here’s how one Donald Trump quote appears:

I think the big problem this country has is treating people with respect. I’ve been challenged by so many people, and I don’t frankly have time for treating people with respect. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time either.

Vox writer Amanda Taub comments:

The meaning hasn’t really changed, but it has been made clearer: Trump was asked about his disrespectful treatment of women, and his response was that the very idea of treating women respectfully was a problem for the country as a whole. That’s nonsense. Kudos to Clark for showing us why.

A Michigan math teacher explains “Why I Can No Longer Teach in Public Education“:

I have been forced to comply with mandates that are not in the best interest of kids. … The amount of time lost to standardized tests that are of no use to me as a classroom teacher is mind-boggling. And when you add in mandatory quarterly district-wide tests, which are used to collect data that nothing is ever done with, it’s beyond ridiculous.

… my take-home pay has been frozen or decreased for the past five years, and I don’t see the situation getting any better in the near future. … As a 10th-year teacher in my district, I would be making 16 percent less than a 10th-year was when I was hired in 2006.

… If I were poorly compensated but didn’t have to comply with asinine mandates and a lack of respect, that would be one thing.

And if I were continuing my way up the pay scale but had to deal with asinine mandates, that would be one thing. But having to comply with asinine mandates and watching my income, in the form of real dollars, decline every year?

The fervor to fight ObamaCare is getting wacky in some places. Wheaton College is cancelling its student health insurance. Not because ObamaCare forces them to cover birth control — it doesn’t; the college qualifies for the religious non-profit organization exemption. But it has to notify the government that it is claiming its exemption. Then the government can instruct the appropriate insurance companies to cover students’ contraception by a separate policy Wheaton doesn’t pay for.

That’s too much for them; the notification makes them “complicit” in the great evil of birth control. Much better just to let its students go without health care entirely.

More proof ObamaCare is working: Gallup says the number of people without health insurance continues to go down, and it goes down faster in states that implemented the Medicaid expansion portion of the law.

and let’s close with something big

Like the elephant swimming pool at the Fuji Safari Park in Japan.

Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (5)

Why BLM Protesters Can’t Behave

August 17, 2015 – 8:01 am

What if you must be heard, but no one listens to your polite voice?

In the mostly white professional-class suburbs where most of my friends live, I have frequently seen this bumpersticker:

It tends to show up on Volvos, Priuses, and other cars popular among middle-aged women with advanced degrees, though now and then it appears (in the company of many other stickers) on a less expensive car that is as much billboard as transportation.

The point (which is well understood by the kind of people who have spent their lives testing whether a glass ceiling will break if you hit your head against it hard enough) is that playing by the rules may keep you out of trouble, but it probably won’t get you where you want to go.

In the 70s and 80s when this sticker was becoming popular, the rules in just about every bureaucracy and corporate ladder in the world were made and adjudicated by men. So if a woman played by them, kept to the agenda, didn’t interrupt, waited her turn, and colored inside the lines, she would likely wind up in whatever place men had left on the org chart for a well-behaved woman, a place safely isolated from the levers of power. So the turn she was waiting for would never come. The evidence and arguments she had assembled in her carefully-written memo would likely never be read, or, if read, would never be taken seriously.

In some parts of the economy and government we’ve gotten past that by now, to the point that many young women don’t grasp why confrontational feminism was ever necessary. But even today, when women reach for the top rungs of the ladder, the standards are different. A Hillary Clinton or Carly Fiorina has to walk a narrow path that Donald Trump (or any male candidate) isn’t constrained by: She must be forceful without sounding angry or shrill, authoritative without talking down, dressed to perfection but not obsessed with appearance. Those rules — still mostly made and adjudicated by men — will tie a woman in knots if she lets them.

Even today, a well-behaved woman has trouble making history.

Now let’s think about well-behaved black women. How much history are they going to make?

That’s the question to start with if you want to understand disruptive protests like the one that kept Bernie Sanders from talking about Social Security in Seattle.

The Seattle protest makes no sense if you come at it from the point of view of an aging, white, progressive, Sanders supporter who came out wanting to hear about Social Security: Neither you nor Sanders had any ill intent. The meeting wasn’t a plot to maintain white supremacy. There was an announced topic, a topic that needs the public’s attention. Sanders wanted to talk about it and you wanted to hear him.

And then those damn women got in the way.

Their tactics are easy to criticize: By targeting Sanders, they’re pissing off the whites most likely to be on their side. On TV, they looked really rude and obnoxious, making white viewers less sympathetic with their cause. It would have been a lot braver if they’d disrupted a Republican rally, where they might have wound up in jail or worse.

“Why are you picking on us?” the progressives wonder. “We’re the good guys. If you’d just asked nicely, we might have paid attention to your issue.”

Why can’t you behave? Wait your turn. We’ll get to your concerns at a more appropriate time.

On her Facebook page, Dominique Hazzard answers:

People are always wanting to know- why are black people rioting? Why are twoc of interrupting the president? Why are those black women disrupting the Netroots panel? Why are they shutting down Bernie’s campaign stop? Why are the coloreds doing things that *i* consider to be unstrategic?

I’ll tell you why. It’s because nobody listens to black people until we fuck their shit up. That’s what works. And we are trying to survive, so that’s what we do.

In later post, she addresses the “Why Bernie?” question:

IF YOU WANT TO BE STRATEGIC, you target the people with power who are in your sphere of influence, and who can actually be persuaded to give you what you want. A lot of the time (not all of the time, but often), those people are your allies- allies who are close to getting it right but not quite there.
(Bernie Bern is not ‘there’ yet. Last time he got interrupted, it was disruptors wanting to talk about the criminalization of black women. He centered his answer on unemployment… mere days after Sandra Bland died *on her way to a new job*)

Disrupting a Huckabee rally would be a worse idea, because not only would he not listen, but

your action might backfire, causing Mike Huckabee to double down and racists to respect him even more, rewarding him with more votes.

But however it looked to white suburbanites watching on TV, the Sanders protest got results. A new racial justice page appeared on the Sanders web site, with detailed proposals that met with substantial approval.* The bar has been raised for Clinton and the other Democrats.

Even more than that, though, is the mirror this event places in front of white liberals. (Protests are always part street theater, and the response a protest evokes is part of the production.)

Racism in America today is largely underground, and among liberals it’s completely underground: Nobody ever comes up to me throwing the N-word around and asking how we’re going to keep “them” in their place. But underground is not the same as gone, and a lot of us don’t see our own racism until we’re confronted. That’s why it was instructive to watch how angry the crowd got in Seattle, and how quickly all the paternalistic let-me-tell-you-how-to-protest-better responses popped up.

Very few white liberals’ first reaction — not even mine, I have to admit — was to ask: “Why do you feel like you have to do this?” And even those who asked that question seldom waited for an answer or listened to that answer.

Bernie, to his credit, seems to have listened: not immediately, not in the moment, but within a few days. Maybe the rest of us can follow his lead.

* A legitimate question is: What was wrong with the Sanders platform before this racial justice page was added?

From a BLM point of view, the problem was that Sanders’ message had been class-based and largely color-blind, as if the problems faced by black people in America were just artifacts that stem from being unemployed or underpaid or living in dangerous neighborhoods or having bad public schools. Just create more good entry-level jobs, and solve the crime and education problems in general, and black people will benefit.

And that’s true as far as it goes: If blacks are disproportionately poor and the poor are disproportionately black, helping the poor will help the black community. But what BLM is trying to get across is that race is not a side-issue; the obstacles blacks face do not arise merely from unfortunate circumstances or historical accident. Racism is a very real problem here and now. White people may not like to talk about race, but you can’t solve racial problems in a color-blind way.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

August 17, 2015 – 6:57 am

Last week I linked to multiple opinions about the Black Lives Matter protesters who disrupted a Bernie Sanders speech. With more time to think and listen, I take a clearer position in this week’s featured post: “Why BLM Protesters Can’t Behave”. It should be out around 8 EDT.

The weekly summary will cover both China stories: the explosion at Tianjin and the devaluation of the yuan. Also: Jeb’s rewriting of the history of the Iraq War (and how it resembles the Right’s Vietnam revisionism), corrections to my post-debate analysis, other 2016 campaign developments, the new embassy in Cuba, a teacher explains why she’s leaving the public schools, more evidence ObamaCare is working, and I’m still looking for a closing.

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Inquiring Minds

August 10, 2015 – 10:11 am

Finally, there’s the bullshit of infinite possibility. These bullshitters cover their unwillingness to act under the guise of unending inquiry. We can’t do anything because we don’t yet know everything. We cannot take action on climate change until everyone in the world agrees gay-marriage vaccines won’t cause our children to marry goats, who are going to come for our guns.

— Jon Stewart, “Three Different Kinds of Bullshit“

This week’s featured post is “The Artful Puppet Master: How Fox turned the first Republican Presidential Debate into a plus for the GOP“.

This week everybody was talking about the Republican debate

The big winner in the debate was the Republican Party, which avoided a potential disaster through Fox News’ careful stage-managing (which I described in “The Artful Puppet Master“). Beyond that, it’s hard to say. Trump, I think, solidified people’s prior opinions. The moderators did their best to trip him up, but the kind of people who liked him to begin with probably liked his answers — and felt confirmed in their loyalty by their impression that Fox was unfair to him.

Rubio was consistently served softball questions and looked good answering them. (Solidifying my prior opinion that Rubio-for-president is a high-concept campaign. Once you grasp “young good-looking Hispanic conservative” you’ve got the whole message.) Like Trump, Huckabee, Cruz, Paul, and Christie gave answers that appealed to their core audience but probably didn’t convince many other people. Kasich looked like the moderate in the debate — which he isn’t — but whether that will serve him in the Republican primaries seems doubtful.

I thought the losers were Walker, Bush, and Carson. Not because they made any major gaffes, but because they seemed to fade into the background.

If watching the actual debate was too much for you, the Gregory Brothers have turned it into a song.

Winner!

Pundits tell us that Carly Fiorina won the kids-table debate among the seven Republicans who didn’t rank high enough in the national polls to get into the real debate. They could just as easily tell us that Marvin the Martian won, because absolutely no one watched that debate, probably including half the pundits who tell us Fiorina won. (I kept telling myself it was my due-diligence duty to watch, but life is too short.)

Charles Blow nailed the blindness about racism that the debate exemplified: We focus on the “tip of the spear”, the final interaction between a police officer and a poor black person. But we ignore “the spear itself”, the system that cuts taxes on the politically powerful and then sends police out into powerless neighborhoods to raise revenue by finding violations to ticket.

One thing to keep in mind when you listen to Jeb Bush: The impressive growth numbers he quotes about his two terms as governor of Florida come mostly from good timing. He took office in early 1999 and left in early 2007, just before the housing bubble popped — rocking Florida worse than just about any other state. As PBS’ fact-check on the debate noted: Jeb’s claim that Florida added 1.3 million jobs during his governorship is correct “but by December 2009, 900,000 of those 1.3 million jobs had been eliminated.” Here’s the relevant graph from the Federal Reserve by way of Paul Krugman:

Florida has those jobs back by now, but think about what that means: It actually took 16 years, not 8, to create those 1.3 million jobs. So if you cut all of Jeb’s claims in half — 2.2% long-term economic growth rather than 4.4% — you’re closer to reality.

Krugman comments:

So Jeb is basically promising that as president, he can generate Florida-style bubbles, which bring disaster when they burst, to the rest of America.

A National Journal reporter tried — and pretty much failed — to cover Donald Trump seriously. His attempt makes a great critique of our spectacle-driven politics.

Finally, the people who really deserve a chance to respond to Donald Trump are not the other Republican candidates, but the Mexican-American community. Melissa Fajardo takes a good shot:

You probably think I’m here to say a big “F**k you, Donald Trump.” But actually, I’m here to say “Gracias.” Thank you for making 2016 the year in which immigration will define the election. … We might not all have big fancy hotels or beauty pageants like Trump, but lucky for us, we have a community of more than 11.6 million. And we’re tired of being called criminals and bad people. So in the coming months, we’ll go out to the polls and vote.

and Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart’s final Daily Show Thursday night was a sweet and sentimental send-off. Imagine, as Stewart was about to begin his run, that someone had said to him: “You’re going to do this for 16 years, leave on your own terms, have everybody you worked with turn up for your going-away-party final show, and get played off the stage by Bruce Springsteen.” I think he’d have found that an acceptable future.

Best line of the night: Larry Wilmore (whose Nightly Show got pre-empted for the hour-long Daily Show finale) complained, “Black shows matter, Jon.”

Not so fast, guys. There’s a new cat coming. And from what I saw of his stand-up show in Portsmouth a few weeks ago, Trevor Noah might be up to the job.

and a BLM protest that drove Bernie Sanders off the stage

A Bernie Sanders rally in Seattle was disrupted by Black Lives Matter protesters, who grabbed the microphone and wouldn’t let go. Organizers weren’t willing to give TV cameras the spectacle of police dragging the protesters away, so they cancelled the rally. Later that day, 15,000 people saw Sanders at a different Seattle-area rally.

The protest evoked a lot of discussion in the blogosphere, mostly centering around the question: Why Bernie? Isn’t he one of the candidates most sympathetic to African-American issues?

Several contradictory points are bouncing around.

  • BLM isn’t a top-down organization, so we don’t really know that the two or three black women who grabbed the microphone represent anybody other than themselves. One of the women in particular seems a little atypical.
  • Bernie’s proposals center on class rather than race. Since the lower classes are disproportionately black, his policies would favor them. But he’s not attacking racism directly enough for BLM activists.
  • Some blacks are asking the same question. The comments on the article about the protest in The Root are all over the map.

As I watch Bernie supporters react on my Facebook newsfeed, I’m struck by their frustration about why anybody would vilify a candidate who mostly agrees with them, just because the candidate doesn’t completely agree. I don’t think they realize that Hillary supporters look at them exactly the same way. Bernie himself has been pretty good about not vilifying Clinton, but his Facebook supporters show a lot less restraint.

Jade Helm 15 gets serious

When the lunatics were raving about how the Jade Helm 15 military exercise was really about imposing martial law, I laughed. I laughed a little less when the Governor of Texas pandered to these nuts, and when various other Republican leaders treated them as if they were reasonable people with legitimate concerns.

Now some of them have been caught plotting to lure American troops into a death trap in North Carolina. Shots may have been fired in Mississippi, though that story is a little sketchier.

I realize Republicans don’t want to stop anybody from making up crap about President Obama, no matter how unfounded it might be. But encouraging this kind of insanity has consequences.

but I was thinking about abortion

In particular about Katha Pollitt’s op-ed “How to Really Defend Planned Parenthood” in the NYT.

When you hear someone attempt to defend abortion, too often they’re just defending abortion rights, with a subtext something like: “This is a distasteful, disreputable practice that I think other people should have the right to engage in if that’s how they roll.”

Pollitt argues:

To deflect immediate attacks, we fall in with messaging that unconsciously encodes the vision of the other side. Abortion opponents say women seek abortions in haste and confusion. Pro-choicers reply: Abortion is the most difficult, agonizing decision a woman ever makes. Opponents say: Women have abortions because they have irresponsible sex. We say: rape, incest, fatal fetal abnormalities, life-risking pregnancies.

… We need to say that women have sex, have abortions, are at peace with the decision and move on with their lives. We need to say that is their right, and, moreover, it’s good for everyone that they have this right: The whole society benefits when motherhood is voluntary. When we gloss over these truths we unintentionally promote the very stigma we’re trying to combat. What, you didn’t agonize? You forgot your pill? You just didn’t want to have a baby now? You should be ashamed of yourself.

Women who regret their abortions become pro-life crusaders, but the far greater number of women who think they made the right decision leave all that behind them.

It is understandable that women who have ended pregnancies just wanted to move on. Why should they define themselves publicly by one private decision, perhaps made long ago? I’ll tell you why: because the pro-choice movement cannot flourish if the mass of women it serves — that one in three — look on as if the struggle has nothing to do with them. Without the voices and support of millions of ordinary women behind them, providers and advocates can be too easily dismissed as ideologues out of touch with the American people.

Women aren’t the only ones who need to speak up. Where are the men grateful not to be forced into fatherhood? Where are the doctors who object to the way anti-abortion lawmakers are interfering with the practice of medicine?

Here’s what I think: At times, a woman’s decision to have an abortion can be heroic. She is defending her dreams, rather than letting her life get derailed by an accident. She is braving disapproval for the sake of the family she already has, or foresees having when she is better able to care for it, or for the sake of the great things she hopes to do as a woman without children.

Pollitt’s article took me back to “What Abortion Means to Me,” which I wrote in 2012.

We came to this strategy: We practiced birth control faithfully, and planned to get an abortion if it failed. … So that’s what abortion has meant to me as a married man. My wife and I took responsibility for our childbearing. Without the possibility of abortion, we could not have done so.

Another interesting abortion article was in Vox. Julia Pelly reflected on how she mourned her miscarriage, and what that said about her prior pro-choice beliefs.

She might have done what Paul Ryan did when he saw his wife’s ultrasound: interpret personal intuitions about the value of this particular fetus as a universal moral truth that the law needs to impose on everyone else. Instead, Pelly leaves open the possibility that what she mourned were all the hopes she had attached to her pregnancy, which died in the miscarriage. Other women might feel differently about their pregnancies.

Two years later and with a toddler at my feet, I finally feel at peace. I’m at peace with the sadness I felt about my miscarriage — and with my belief that abortion is a fundamental human right. … What’s right for me, or sad for me, or joyous for me, may be just the opposite for another woman. In the absence of this knowing, knowing when life begins, we must defer to the woman and to what feels right to her, to the balance she strikes between the life she carries and the life she has. …

I trust women to know themselves, to know their lives, and to make good choices for themselves. I know now too that making a family is hard, that the beginning of life is ambiguous, part science, part spirit. With something so fragile, so hard, we should do all we can to support women in their journey, to celebrate when they celebrate, to mourn when they mourn. I will always mourn the loss of my unborn baby, and I will always fight to keep women’s right to choose, and access to abortion, alive.

and you also might be interested in …

All hell is scheduled to break loose when Congress returns from its summer recess. Of course there’s the Iran deal to vote on. But a lot of appropriations bills have to pass by October 1 if the government isn’t going to shut down. And another debt ceiling deadline looms.

A billboard in Kansas luring teachers to Missouri.

Do experienced teachers matter, or can we hire pretty much anybody to staff our public schools? Kansas may find out.

Kansas is the poster state for the Tea Party. Governor Brownback has implemented the full tax-and-budget-cuts-will-create-Utopia game plan, with the predictable result that the state is in serious financial trouble and the promised economic boom is nowhere on the horizon.

A lot of those budget cuts have hit the public schools, and some school districts ended the 2014-2015 school year a week or two early because they ran out of money.

As for teachers: pay is low, a law ending teacher tenure (not just for future teachers, but for current teachers who thought they already had tenure) is being challenged in the courts, collective bargaining has been limited, and the overall villainization of teachers has hit the point where the legislature debated a bill criminally prosecuting teachers who present material deemed harmful to minors. (It failed, but there’s always next year.)

Unsurprisingly, teachers are deciding that Kansas is a bad place to pursue their profession and are leaving in droves. Not to worry, though: Six school districts have been given a waiver to hire unlicensed teachers. Because it’s not like there’s any knowledge or skill involved in handling a classroom of kids — you just stand up and talk, right? Who can’t do that?

States are said to be the “laboratories of democracy“. Well, Kansas is experimenting on its kids. We’ll see how it turns out.

This NASA photo of the Moon crossing the Earth seems very peaceful to me. As Rick put it: “It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”

Media critic Jeff Rouner has a great response to the people who are upset that the new Fantastic Four movie makes the Human Torch black. In particular, he addresses the straight white men who object to this kind of “pandering” to the black segment of the audience or to political correctness or whatever.

Nearly every single movie, comic and video game you have ever enjoyed has been pandered to you as a straight white male. … Did you honestly think that every poster showing a strong, handsome male lead holding a gun and getting ready to do some damage wasn’t designed to appeal to your need to feel and identify as powerful, and that making the lead actor white would make that connection easier?

… My fellow straight white (and cis and abled) males, you’re under a delusion, and that delusion is called normal. We are not normal. Black people aren’t normal. Trans people are not normal. There is no normal. We are all categories with no default setting for the human race. However, for more than 100 years, the vast majority of stories that have been told have been pandered to us.

Where we’re headed:

and let’s close with some art history

The art-museum chase scene from Looney Tunes: Back in Action.

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The Artful Puppet Master

August 10, 2015 – 8:24 am

How Fox turned the first Republican presidential debate into a plus for the GOP.

Leading up to Thursday’s debate, most liberals I know were somewhere between smug and gleeful. The Republican presidential process had started out as something of a circus, with more candidates than anyone could remember and a corresponding need to say outrageous things to stand out from the crowd. And then Donald Trump got into the race, openly characterizing undocumented Mexican immigrants as drug dealers and rapists, and responding to criticism from Senator Lindsey Graham by saying Graham was “not as bright as Rick Perry” and revealing his personal cellphone number.

With Trump in the race and rising to the top of the polls, the other candidates started acting out like five-year-old boys competing for a pretty kindergarten teacher’s disciplinary attention. Previously, Ben Carson had set the gold standard for crazy, with his comparisons of ObamaCare to slavery and the IRS to the Gestapo. But now Mike Huckabee was talking about Obama “marching [the Israelis] to the door of the oven“, and discussing using the military and the FBI to stop abortions. Rand Paul was destroying the tax code with a literal chainsaw, and Ted Cruz went even further by cooking a strip of bacon on the barrel of an AR-15. Lindsey Graham seemed downright eager to be in a war with Iran. (“We win!“)

It got so bad that even Democrats were getting a little uncomfortable, thinking about how these shenanigans reflected on America. Humorist Andy Borowitz was only partially kidding when he wrote:

As preparations get under way for the first Republican Presidential debate, on Thursday night, a new poll shows that Americans are deeply concerned that the rest of the world might see it.

Hours before the debate, this showed up on my Facebook newsfeed.

For  a real news network or even an unbiased political entertainment network, none of this would have been a problem. (Pass the popcorn and let the insanity begin!) But the debate was being hosted and televised by the official Republican Party Ministry of Information, a.k.a. Fox News. So although a debate that descended into kindergartenish chaos would make great television, Fox’ brain trust recognized that such a spectacle would hurt the conservative movement it has worked so hard to foster. They saw that as a problem.

They solved it brilliantly.

If you watched the debate through your liberal glasses, you may not have recognized their achievement; to you, everybody probably looked just as scary and unhinged as you expected. (When Huckabee started talking about invoking the 5th and 14th Amendments to protect the personhood of the unborn, he seemed seconds away from calling for federal troops to occupy abortion clinics. But moderator Brett Baier wisely moved on.) However, in the eyes of moderates, independents, and low-information voters, I suspect the debate raised the image of the Republican Party and its gaggle of candidates.

How did Fox manage that? Artfully. I learned a lot by watching.

The problem and the solution. The first step in solving a problem is to state it precisely: The Republican Party’s problem is that its conservative base is shrinking and far out of tune with the rest of the country. So as they campaign for the nomination, candidates constantly have to choose: Should they appeal to the base voters (who will be the majority in the upcoming primaries), or to the American public as a whole (who will judge the eventual nominee in the general election)? For example: Members of the conservative base love to hear pledges that Republicans in Congress will shut down the government this fall and keep it shut until Obama knuckles under and agrees to defund Planned Parenthood. But the public as a whole is ready to be done with that kind of brinksmanship.

So the path to a Republican presidency involves walking a tightrope: leaning far enough to the right to get the nomination, but not so far as to topple out of the mainstream voter’s consideration. Mitt Romney (who I think was a far better candidate than he gets credit for) couldn’t manage it in 2012. His actual record as governor of Massachusetts would have been hard to defeat: He was a problem-solver who could work across the aisle to come up with bipartisan programs other executives wanted to imitate, the way ObamaCare imitated RomneyCare. But he had to pander to right-wing extremists to get the nomination, and he couldn’t recover in November.

Since then, the problem has only gotten worse: The base has gotten angrier and more demanding, while the white Christians who provide its membership continue to shrink as a percentage of the population.

The worst possible thing for the image of the party would be to lob a series of questions into that gap between the base and the average voter: Ask Ted Cruz about his role in the 2013 government shutdown. Ask Ben Carson if Hitler might actually have been a teensy bit worse than President Obama. Ask all the candidates how they plan to avoid war with Iran (if they do), or what they would say to the 16 million people who will lose their health coverage if ObamaCare is repealed, or whether they think our scientists are conspiring to deceive us about climate change, or why they want to force women to bear their rapists’ children.

Once you understand that, you also see the solution: Control the questions and control who answers them. If an issue makes the party look bad, just don’t ask about it. And when most of the candidates stand united around an unpopular position, pick out the one with the most moderate record and ask him to defend it. That answer will look completely different to the two camps: The base voter will see that you’re really putting this guy on the spot. But the average voter will listen to the answer and say, “Hey, these Republicans aren’t as far out as I thought.”

And finally, there’s the special problem of Donald Trump, whose wild statements have been turning off Hispanics, women, and other key demographics. Here, the solution is to excommunicate him: Trump is not a real Republican, so all the bile he expresses is just personal and has nothing to do with the party.

See nothing, say nothing. For two hours in that arena in Cleveland, large chunks of American political discourse just vanished, without even leaving a puff of smoke behind.

The environment, for example, was simply not an issue — not just climate change, but also pollution, oil spills, endangered species, or any other environmental concern. Bashing the EPA is a standard Republican applause line, but there was no cause for that here, because the environment did not exist. It was so far off the radar that Jeb Bush could express puzzlement that Hillary Clinton hasn’t endorsed the Keystone XL pipeline. Rand Paul didn’t have to explain why he once proposed a 42% cut in the National Park Service budget, and Ted Cruz didn’t have to justify his proposal to sell off large chunks of federal wilderness lands.

The related issue of energy policy was also off the table, so no one had to defend burning coal, or fracking, or drilling for oil offshore, or in other fragile ecosystems like the Arctic. No one had to explain wanting to end subsidies for wind and solar power.

Economic inequality was also not an issue, despite the fact that it has come up in several of the candidates’ campaigns: Rand Paul has talked about “the income gap”, and Rick Santorum has charged that “Middle America is hollowing out.” Just about every candidate has questioned whether the American Dream of economic mobility will be available to future generations. But none of that came up.

A related phrase you won’t find in the transcript is minimum wage. A large majority of the public supports raising it, because people who have full-time jobs should not have to live in poverty, and businesses whose workers need food stamps are the real moochers in our society, not the hard-working people they underpay.

But as far as I know, Rick Santorum is the only Republican candidate who wants to raise the minimum wage at all, and even his proposed rate is far smaller than the $10.10 that President Obama supports. (Bernie Sanders wants a $15 minimum.) And while I haven’t found a direct quote of a candidate openly calling to repeal the federal minimum wage, several seem to dislike it on general principles. Marco Rubio has said, “Minimum wage laws have never worked in terms of having the middle class attain more prosperity.” And the Rand Paul 2016 Facebook page posted a link with the comment “How the minimum wage hurts everyone.”

Student debt wasn’t in the questions, and only came up because Marco Rubio volunteered that he used to have some. “How is [Hillary Clinton] gonna lecture me about student loans? I owed over $100,000 just four years ago.” But that was just a fact, not a problem, so no solutions were necessary.

Equal pay for women? Off the table. Prosecute bankers whose law-breaking contributed to the Great Recession? No mention. Again, Marco Rubio volunteered that he wanted to repeal the only real financial reform Congress passed after the collapse, Dodd-Frank, inaccurately blaming it for the failure of small banks. But Fox completely omitted Wall Street reform from the agenda.

No one was asked about government shutdowns — including Ted Cruz, who more than any other person was responsible for the last shutdown. Another shutdown in the fall is a real possibility, and Cruz in particular wants that option left on the table. But it wasn’t discussed.

Although many candidates called for ending ObamaCare and none defended it, no one was asked how to replace it, or what they would say to the millions of Americans who have health insurance now, but will lose it if ObamaCare is simply repealed without a replacement.

Although all the candidates oppose the Iran nuclear deal and several criticized it during the debate, none was asked how he plans to avoid going to war.

The Black Lives Matter movement rated one question (to Scott Walker, who dodged it. He didn’t say whether he thought police were over-aggressive towards blacks, but merely called for better police training. There was no follow-up.)

Voting rights? Not an issue. Gun violence? Nothing.

Pin the tail on the moderate. Rather than draw attention to the most rabidly conservative positions the candidates have taken, Fox repeatedly picked out the candidates’ most moderate positions and asked them to justify why they weren’t more conservative.

For example, most of the ten candidates oppose allowing abortions in cases of rape or incest. But Marco Rubio was asked to justify favoring such exceptions (which he denied, misleadingly). No one was asked why he would force a woman to bear her rapist’s child. (The one counter-example to the pattern was when Scott Walker was asked to justify his opposition to abortions that protect the life of the mother. He dodged, and there was no follow-up.)

Governor Kasich was asked to justify accepting the money the federal government offered his state to expand Medicaid, but Governor Walker wasn’t asked to justify turning the money down in Wisconsin, thereby denying coverage to 87,000 Wisconsin residents. Kasich talked about the good that money has done in Ohio, delivering a paean to compassion and the effectiveness of government that is totally atypical of both his own philosophy and the Republican Party as a whole.

Kasich got to give another heart-warming speech about love and acceptance when asked how he would respond if one of his daughters turned out to be lesbian. But Mike Huckabee wasn’t asked why he believes same-sex marriage will lead to “the criminalization of Christianity“.

Jeb Bush was asked why he favors immigration reform. (Ted Cruz volunteered that he led the fight against the immigration reform bill that passed the Senate but died in the House.) On the campaign trail, I believe all the candidates have come out against the executive order by which President Obama has prevented DREAMer deportation, and the Republican-dominated House has voted to deport them, but Fox did not find DREAMer deportation worth mentioning.

Rand Paul had to justify why he wants to stop the NSA from collecting the phone records of Americans who have done nothing wrong.

Trump. From the opening question, the moderators made their position clear: Donald Trump is not really a Republican. That opening was a lesson in how apparently neutral questions can in fact be targeted. Brett Baier asked:

Is there anyone on stage, and can I see hands, who is unwilling tonight to pledge your support to the eventual nominee of the Republican party and pledge to not run an independent campaign against that person.

Only Trump raised his hand, and that invited follow-up questions, a reminder that an independent run by Trump “would almost certainly hand the race over to Democrats and likely another Clinton,” and a direct attack from Rand Paul:

This is what’s wrong. He buys and sells politicians of all stripes. … He’s already hedging his bet on the Clintons, OK? So if he doesn’t run as a Republican, maybe he supports Clinton, or maybe he runs as an independent.

Trump was later asked about his past support for “a host of liberal policies” (partial-birth abortion, an assault-weapon ban, and single-payer health care), and his donations to Democrats, including Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi. He has justified those donations as a normal business practice, and so he was asked “what specifically” he got in return.*

Megyn Kelly finally brought it home:

In 2004, you said in most cases you identified as a Democrat. Even in this campaign, your critics say you often sound more like a Democrat than a Republican, calling several of your opponents on the stage things like clowns and puppets. When did you actually become a Republican?

It was hard to miss her implication that the right answer was never.

Results. I suspect that when all is said and done, we’ll find out that Fox’ effort to pick the candidate — favoring Rubio and Kasich while trying to cast out Trump — had very little effect. But in the way the debate showcased all the candidates and made the Republican race seem much less clownish than it has otherwise been, I think Fox has scored a major victory for its party.

All in all, the evening resembled one of those holiday dinners where you introduce your fiance to your crazy relatives for the first time. All day long, you short-circuit the discussions that will set Aunt Jenny ranting about the Jews, or evoke one of Uncle Bob’s long pointless stories. You carefully approach your sister only when her husband is around to keep her in line, and you seek out Cousin Billy early, before he starts drinking. Only in the car, after hours of threading a safe path through the labyrinth of family issues, do you finally begin to relax. And that’s when your spouse-to-be says, “I don’t know what you’ve been so worried about. They don’t seem that bad to me.”

* Trump replied that because he was a contributor, Hillary had to come to his wedding. I wish I were doing Twitter for Hillary, because I know exactly how I’d respond. Of course she should deny that money was her reason for attending, and she should promise to attend all his future weddings as well, whether he gives any more money to her campaigns or not.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

August 10, 2015 – 7:04 am

The big event this week was the Republican debate on Thursday. What impressed me was not any particular candidate’s performance, but how well Fox News stage-managed the event to prevent the kind of clown show liberals tuned in hoping to see. I’ll examine how they did that in “The Artful Puppet Master”, which should be ready to post by around 8 EDT.

That’s not all the debate news, so in the weekly summary I’ll discuss individual candidates and point you to two videos: the Gregory Brothers’ songification of the debate, and a young Mexican-American woman thanking Donald Trump for making the election about immigration.

Other recent events in the summary: Jon Stewart’s farewell to The Daily Show, the Black Lives Matter takeover of a Bernie Sanders rally, and the result of the paranoia about the Jade Helm 15 military exercises. Plus, I’ll discuss two excellent articles about abortion, the teacher exodus from Kansas, and a few other things, before closing with a chase scene. Expect to see that maybe 10 or 11.

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Inexpensive Indulgences

August 3, 2015 – 10:59 am

Sometimes I wonder whether these various forms of giving back have become to our era what the papal indulgence was to the Middle Ages: a relatively inexpensive way of getting oneself seemingly on the right side of justice, without having to alter the fundamentals of one’s life.

— Anand Giridharadas, quoted by David Brooks

This week’s featured post is “If This Is Munich, We Must Be Germany“.

This week everybody was talking about another policeman killing a black man

Once again, an unarmed black person pulled over for a traffic stop winds up dead. This one is Sam DuBose in Cincinnati. The video here is maybe the worst I’ve seen. DuBose is sitting in his car, cringing backwards and holding an arm in front of his face, when the officer shoots him in the head.

The officer has been indicted for murder and has pleaded not guilty. The two officers who initially backed his made-up story (of being dragged and fearing for his life) have not been charged, apparently because they testified more accurately to the grand jury and did not directly contradict the video.

The more such cases we have on video, the more you have to wonder about the cases where there wasn’t video, and prosecutors or juries believed what the police told them.

and Cecil the Lion

An American dentist and big-game hunter killed a tagged lion who had been a major attraction in a national park in Zimbabwe. Apparently Cecil was lured out of the park to a place where he could be killed. Zimbabwe claims the killing was illegal anyway, and is asking the U.S. to extradite Dr. Walter Palmer of Minnesota.

Black activists on Twitter made very clever use of the incident with the hastag #AllLionsMatter. They have imitated all the things usually posted about victims of police shootings:

why talk about lions being killed by humans when lion on lion crime is at an all time HIGH? they’re killing their own kind!

was a thug. If he hadn’t been so intimidating, he’d still be alive today.

Here is a picture of Cecil the Lion being violent against his own that the media won’t show you. They want to always point fingers at dentists that kill lions, but never talk about the rampant lion on lion crime that takes place everyday in the wild. In addition, Cecil The Lion was found to have traces of tall yellow grass in his system, which has never been known to correlate with violence, but we will just mention it just because. If he had showed the dentist his ID and not have been outside of the Safari, this would have never happened

and Iran

The featured post lists most of the craziest things critics of the Iran deal have been saying. Slate‘s William Saletan watched the committee hearings and came away with this:

Republican senators and representatives offered no serious alternative. They misrepresented testimony, dismissed contrary evidence, and substituted vitriol for analysis. They seemed baffled by the idea of having to work and negotiate with other countries. I came away from the hearings dismayed by what the GOP has become in the Obama era. It seems utterly unprepared to govern.

This is why the GOP deserves what Trump is doing to its presidential process. In a democracy, responsible political leadership is an interface between Reality and the public will. So it combines two roles: representing the public and educating it.

As you know if you’ve ever been elected to the leadership of your church or club or neighborhood group, half of your job is to do the research the members don’t all have the time to do, and then to explain Reality to them, particularly if it doesn’t work the way they think it should.

During the Obama years, Republican politicians have abandoned that educating role. They have brought out the worst in their followers, and whenever possible have taken advantage of any counter-factual notions the base might have. Why not encourage conspiracy theories like Birtherism or Jade Helm? Why not claim that cutting taxes will lower the deficit? Why make people face up to the bad news about climate change?

Trump is the logical outcome of that trend. When he says he’s going to build a wall at the border and make Mexico pay for it, or order Ford to move its factories back to the United States — well, that sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? At this late date, no other candidate is in the position to say, “Wait a minute. Reality doesn’t work that way.” Because none of them speak for Reality any more. It’s been a long time since anyone has told the base that Reality matters.

and Thursday’s Republican debate

The latest polls mostly just confirm what we’ve been seeing: Trump in the lead, with Walker, Bush, and Carson in the next tier. The rest of the debate stage looks like Paul, Rubio, Cruz, Huckabee, Christie, and Kasich. Rick Perry is the first man out (though he’s not that far behind Kasich). Santorum, Jindal, Fiorina, Pataki, Graham, and Gilmore won’t be there.

The need to rise in the national polls so that you’ll be on that stage has been driving the wild rhetoric we’ve been hearing. (Christie has even been advertising, which usually nobody does this early.) Once you get onto the stage, though, you need to do something to get yourself in the next morning’s headlines. I can’t wait to see what they’ll come up with.

but I was thinking about religion

Changing U.S. Religious LandscapeAn updated Religious Landscape Study by Pew Research came out in May. According to a summary on the Pew web site, the big news is the continued growth of “Nones” (people who don’t identify themselves with any particular religion) and the decline of Christians.

The report is based on 2014 data and is compared with the previous 2007 data. (See table.) The percentage of the American adult population describing themselves as either atheist, agnostic, or unaffiliated rose from 16.1% to 22.8%, while the number identifying as Christian fell from 78.4% to 70.6%. Non-Christian religions grew from 4.7% to 5.9%, with Muslims (0.4% to 0.9%) and Hindus (0.4% to 0.7%) responsible for most of that increase.

That’s the kind of change I’d expect to see in a generation, not in seven years.

All major Christian groups declined (see graph to the right), but mainline Protestants and Catholics took the worst of it, with evangelical Protestants growing in number but still shrinking as a percentage of the population.

The composition of the Nones changed as well, as they shifted in a more radical direction. The percentage of atheists nearly doubled (1.6% to 3.1%), and agnostics were also up sharply (2.4% to 4%). Most of the Nones continue to describe themselves as “nothing in particular”, but within that group there was a shift towards those who said religion wasn’t important to them (as opposed to what I think of as the “spiritual but not religious” people).

As a group, the Nones are young and getting younger. Their median age declined from 38 to 36, compared to the median American adult age of 46. Among adults age 18-29, 36% are Nones compared to 56% Christian.

This is a political blog, so think about the politics of these numbers. Howard Dean took a lot of heat back in 2005 when he described Republicans as “pretty much a white Christian party“. But if you listen to the current crop of Republican presidential candidates, a lot of them really aren’t even talking to you if you’re not a white Christian. (Watch Ted Cruz’ announcement speech at Liberty University.) A lot has been made of the steady decline of whites as a percentage of the electorate, and what that means for the Republican strategy, but Christians are declining even faster.

Given that, what to make of this poll of Republicans from February? The headline was about their presidential preferences, but Question 17 was: “Would you support or oppose establishing Christianity as the national religion?” Support: 57%. Oppose: 30%. Not sure: 13%.

and white denial

David Brooks took a lot of heat two weeks ago when he wrote his response to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book Between the World and Me. Like here and here and here. And I had a prior opinion: Coates is a valuable voice I frequently quote on this blog, while Brooks’ NYT column is usually a waste of one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in all of Journalism. But I decided not to pile on, because I hadn’t read Between the World and Me. For all I knew, Coates had overstepped and Brooks had a valid point.

OK, I’ve read it now. BtW&M is a beautiful piece of writing. It’s hard to read at times, particularly if you’re white, but it communicates a view that whites are not going to find in a lot of other places.

Also, it’s rare that a writer this talented just lets it rip. Coates’ pieces for The Atlantic have a measured, let-me-lay-out-the-facts tone (similar to what I aspire to here). But BtW&M is written as a letter to his 15-year-old son, and Coates just doesn’t worry about whether he sounds too sentimental or too angry or too anything. He’ll throw an ambiguous image or metaphor out there and let you figure it out. He’s on a roll, and he’s not slowing down for you.

One of the not-fully-explained terms in the book is “the Dream”. The Dream starts out as the idealized white suburban world Coates sees on TV as he’s growing up. It’s a place where people are secure and the institutions of society work almost all the time. Fears are isolated and often irrational; they get resolved before the credits run. It contrasted with the black urban Baltimore Coates was living in, where you had to choose your path to school carefully, and always be aware of who you’re walking with and whether there are enough of you. In Coates’ world, you didn’t solve problems by appealing to the proper authorities, because the authorities were a source of danger in themselves. So you lived in constant fear — everybody did. Whether you hid in your room or joined a gang and bullied others or escaped into drugs or escaped into books, you were responding to that pervasive fear.

As the book goes on, “the Dream” grows to include the self-serving, self-reinforcing, reality-denying worldview of the people who believe that the white suburban world is the whole world, people who don’t understand why everybody doesn’t just solve their problems in the easy ways they would. In the Dream, nothing is fundamentally wrong with America, it’s just that some people don’t know how to take advantage of the opportunities it offers.

In other words, the Dream is where David Brooks lives. And he responds in the way that has become typical for the privileged classes: He acts as if Coates had claimed universality for his experience, and he denies that claim. It’s like the not-all-men response to the Isla Vista murders. Brooks writes:

I think you distort American history. This country, like each person in it, is a mixture of glory and shame. There’s a Lincoln for every Jefferson Davis and a Harlem Children’s Zone for every K.K.K. — and usually vastly more than one. Violence is embedded in America, but it is not close to the totality of America.

But why even stop there? The abject lives of the slaves was not the totality of the plantation, which also included the cultured, genteel lives of the masters. I’m sure many in the KKK lynch mobs were (at other times) good decent family men. For that matter, why do we focus just on the monstrous side of historic figures like Hitler or Stalin? No doubt there were moments in their lives where they were kind and generous and fun to hang out with. Why don’t we ever tell those stories?

The point is: You don’t have a complete picture of America if you don’t include the experiences of its underclasses. You don’t even have a complete picture of white suburban America if you don’t see how it sits next to and interacts with and (yes) oppresses those underclasses. If your knee-jerk reaction to any confrontation with underclass experience is to start waxing eloquent about Abe Lincoln and cute puppies, then you’re living in a dream world.

and seeing candidates for myself

The day after posting the Hillary Clinton edition of my 2016 series, I got to see her do a town hall meeting in a school gym in Nashua (a moderate walk from where I live).

Clinton does a really good town hall. She seemed knowledgeable about everything that came up. She’s personable, and I think the Grandma-in-Chief image is working for her. Somehow, she managed not to sweat while wearing a jacket in a hot room. She answered a lot of questions, but no one seemed to care about the email controversy.

It’s always fascinating to be at a news event and then see how the media covers it. This meeting made it to CNN (once again, I was on the wrong side of the room to be on camera), but only for the question Clinton didn’t answer: Whether or not she would approve the Keystone XL Pipeline. I will give her credit for dodging it directly: She said she wasn’t going to answer, and gave an explanation that was maybe-sorta plausible, rather than bamboozling us for a while and then claiming she had answered. (She says she started the State Department’s decision process and then handed it off to Kerry, so she won’t undercut him by saying what he should do.)

Here’s what you miss about the context: The crowd (maybe 600 people, I estimated) accepted her refusal to answer. There were no boos or protests or follow-up questions on that topic. If you just watch CNN, you’d get the impression that she’s really being dogged by this issue; if you were there, it came and went quickly.

Something I’ve noticed about townhall meetings is that certain candidates cast a kind of spell: Even if I don’t support all their policies, I start making up excuses that could allow me to vote for them. In the past I’ve noticed that effect from seeing John McCain and Wesley Clark, so I thought it was my weakness for military types. But since Tuesday I’ve been noticing the same thing with regard to Clinton. I have no explanation.

While we’re talking about Hillary, Vox‘s Jonathan Allen dissected the NYT’s botched scandal story:

This episode is a particularly illustrative example of how an unspoken set of “Clinton rules” govern the media’s treatment of Clinton and how that ends up distorting the public view of her.

The Clinton campaign wrote a scathing letter to the Times, which it refused to print. Josh Marshall writes:

The Times has a problem covering the Clintons. There’s no getting around that conclusion. It’s a longstanding problem. It’s institutional. I am really baffled as to why they can’t simply come clean on this one.

At this stage in the campaign, candidates are mostly rallying their supporters or likely supporters, so it’s a little tricky to figure out where they’re going to be. (I found Tuesday’s meeting by walking into Clinton headquarters on Main Street in Nashua and asking.) This week I bit the bullet and signed up for the Trump campaign’s email updates. I’m waiting to see if I start getting junk mail about buying gold or joining the NRA.

and you may also be interested in …

Steve Hogarty tweeted:

Another embarrassing u-turn for climate “scientists”. First they said June was the hottest month ever recorded. Now they’re saying it’s July.

I believe this is satire, but it’s so hard to tell these days.

I don’t know if you’ve seen the Facebook meme claiming that Congress made Confederate veterans into U.S. veterans in 1958. But surprise! The notion comes from the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and they were lying, just like they lie about most history relating to the Civil War.

Kayaking Greenpeace protestors in Portland delayed a Shell Oil ship headed to the arctic.  Others rappelled off a bridge to get in the way.

 

and let’s close with a view from an alternate universe

Key and Peele show us a world where teachers are followed like sports stars.

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If This Is Munich, We Must Be Germany

August 3, 2015 – 7:52 am

The public debate is framing the Iran nuclear deal exactly backwards.

As Congress prepares to vote on the recent agreement with Iran, the deal’s Republican opponents have been competing to see who can describe it in the most horrifying terms. Mike Huckabee claimed President Obama would “take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven”. Senator Ted Cruz said “it will make the Obama administration the world’s leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism.” In a committee hearing, Senator Lindsey Graham scolded the Secretaries of State, Defense, and Energy, implying that the administration had been too eager to avoid war.

Could we win a war with Iran? Who wins the war between us and Iran? Who wins? Do you have any doubt who wins? … We win!

In a speech whose video has been watched more than half a million times on YouTube, former congressman Alan West denounced the “weakling in the White House” saying:

How dare Barack Obama, how dare John Kerry, how dare Valerie Jarrett, or any of these other charlatans that occupy Washington D.C., surrender this great constitutional republic to the Republic of Iran!

Senator Marco Rubio also sees “weakness”:

President Obama has consistently negotiated from a position of weakness, giving concession after concession to a regime that has American blood on its hands, holds Americans hostage, and has consistently violated every agreement it ever signed.

Chris Christie said that President Obama was “giving Iran a nuclear weapon”. And he implied that they will bully more “gifts” out of us, now that the realize how weak our president is:

You give them your belt, they’ll want your pants next. That’s the way it goes

Defenses of the deal, by contrast, have been measured. The New Yorker‘s Steven Coll‘s positive analysis, for example, concludes:

The deal is imperfect but good enough, and it offers a tentative promise of a less dangerous Middle East.

Or, as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Martin Dempsey, put it:

Relieving the risk of a nuclear conflict with Iran diplomatically is superior than trying to do that militarily.

Listening to this discussion, particularly the portion that penetrates the conservative bubble and bounces around its echo chamber, you might reasonably imagine that whatever small concessions we got from Iran, we gave up far too much in return. Those hard-headed and hard-fisted mullahs bullied that hapless jellyfish that we call a president, who was so eager to get any kind of deal that he gave away the store.

If that’s what you believe, you have the story exactly backwards: There is a bully in the story, but it’s the United States. We got Iran’s lunch money, and we gave up nothing.

How can that be? And if it is that way, why doesn’t President Obama beat his chest and say so?

Who? Us? The central myth of the era of American dominance (i.e., since World War II) is that our power is benign. No matter how many countries we invade or bomb, or how many governments we overthrow (as we overthrew Iran’s fledgling democracy in 1953 and reinstalled the brutal Shah), we always act on the side of right and justice. Sure, we police the world, but we’re Officer Friendly. We’re never the kind of cops who throw their weight around.

In acceptable American political debate, neither Republican nor Democratic leaders are allowed to challenge that myth. And that puts the Obama administration at a significant disadvantage as it tries to claim credit for its diplomatic victory over Iran. Because this time we did throw our weight around, and we got something.

Retelling the story. So let’s put aside the myth of benign American power and retell the story of the current agreement, beginning with the basic issue: Will Iran construct a nuclear weapon? In other words, will Iran do something that we did 70 years ago, that Israel did 50 years ago, and that Pakistan (Iran’s rival in the looming Sunni/Shia conflict) did almost 20 years ago?

I grant that in many parts of the Middle East, Iran funds and supplies groups that fight against our allies (though we find ourselves on the same side against ISIS). I grant that we (and Israel and Saudi Arabia) have good reasons to want to keep Iran from building a bomb. But let’s not pretend that Iran was doing something monstrous and unheard of when they built a secret complex capable of producing (eventually) a weaponizable quantity of fissionable material.

Iran is a moderately large country (with a population larger than traditional nuclear powers like United Kingdom or France) with oil wealth and a heritage of civilization going back to Cyrus the Great (who freed the Jews from the Babylonian Captivity). It sees a club of great nations (plus a few lesser nations) and believes it deserves to join. The fact that we have reasons to want to keep them out does not imply that their desire to join is illegitimate.

Threats of war. OK, so what have we done to stop them? During the Bush years, we negotiated a few sanctions, but mainly we rattled our sabers. (The Bush U.N. ambassador, John Bolton, is still rattling. And Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker has said “the next president could be called to take aggressive actions, including military action, on the first day in office”.) Every few months, the press would publish rumors that we (or Israel with or without our approval) were planning an attack on Iran’s nuclear laboratories and reactors, as Israel attacked Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981.  Presumably, at least some of that buzz came from intentional leaks meant to intimidate the Iranians. When the Obama administration came in, it continued to insist that “all options are on the table“. In other words, if we don’t get what we want, we might launch an attack.

If you look for any corresponding Iranian saber-rattling at us, what you mainly find are threats to counter-attack if we attack them. (These threats usually get covered in the American press as if hitting back were barbarous.)

So if there’s a Munich analogy here — I wouldn’t go there, but Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, John Bolton, and many other Obama critics did (including The Drudge Report photoshopping Obama’s face onto Neville Chamberlain in the photo above)  — the only way it can make any sense is if we are in the Hitler role. We’re the ones who have been threatening war unless another nation agrees to our demands.

Economic warfare. But the saber-rattling wasn’t working, so the Obama administration opened a second front: Through diplomacy, it got the UN Security Council to impose far harsher sanctions on Iran than the Bush administration had managed. We had to convince Russia and China to go along with us on that, which wasn’t easy. (Russia’s desire to oppose the West in Iran goes back the Great Game between the Czars and the British Empire.) But President Obama and Secretary Clinton got it done.

The sanctions took a serious bite out of the Iranian economy, which pushed them to the negotiating table. In the negotiations that just concluded, they agreed to restrictions on their nuclear program that should prevent them from having nuclear weapons for the near-to-medium term. (Whoever is president when the agreement expires will still have all of his or her options on the table.)

Who’s the bully? In exchange for those very real concessions, we agreed to a gradual relaxing of the sanctions that we created. What we’re “giving” the Iranians are their own frozen assets. And we’re going to allow them to participate in the world economy, like any other country would.

In what sense is any of that a “concession” on our part? Imagine you’re in school, and you get a smaller kid in a headlock. He gives you his lunch money and you let him go. Have you “conceded” anything to him, really?

Your fellow bullies might claim that you let him off too easy, that if you’d squeezed a little harder he might have given you his sneakers too. And maybe they’re right: By walking away unscathed, the kid gained much more than you did, compared to the scenario where you beat the crap out of him and took his lunch money anyway. (As Senator Graham says, if it comes to war, “We win!”)

But in a larger sense, all you’ve done is let him out of a situation that you created. You have his lunch money and he has nothing of yours.

That’s the Iran deal: We have an agreement to keep them from building a bomb any time soon, and an inspection regime to make sure they keep that agreement. They got nothing from us.

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