1st Debate Quick Notes

No real long post or thoughts on this, just some quick points and strategies I think we'll see tonight and what each will need to do to "win."

Trump is going to seize on the 10.8% murder increase as a sign that the country is more dangerous. The details don't really support that, but still, expect him to hit this point early and often.

Clinton, likewise, will seize on the 5% income bump in middle class earnings as her "Things are getting better, yay!" moment. Again, devils are in the details here, but debates are broad strokes at best, policy wise, and reinforcing the feelings in the headlines is going to both candidates strategies either way.

Trump is trying to look like a big boy by releasing a white paper on economic policy that has all the usual prescriptions- tax cuts, deregulation, etc. etc., he'll try to make this into a "new" thing.  Clinton should hammer it home that we've already had that with Bush the Younger and it failed, miserably.

For Clinton to win this debate, she has to to stick to policy and what her own policies will do.  If she makes the debate about Trump and his shenanigans like the Republicans did in the primaries she'll lose just like the rest of them. You can't out cheap shot him, so to win this she has to stick to the high ground and run circles around him in policy discussions and results.  If she tries to trade barbs with him, she's screwed.

Trump, on the other hand, will do everything he can to make sure the opposite happens.  He'll bait Clinton with the Crooked Hillary jabs and other bullshit like he did last year with Little Marco and Lyin' Ted.  When those candidates and the moderators tried to corral him, he stuck to his insults and made it look like everyone was just ganging up on him because he was speaking truth to these people and nobody wanted those things said.  The more playground he can make it, the more he'll have a chance of winning.

I'll update later with some of the low-lights to talk about how they did, and where this sad circus will go from here.

Where We Are, Where We Can Go

As this election season has dragged on, the public has come to treat it like waiting for biopsy results from your doctor:you have a feeling that whatever the answer is, it's going to be bad, but you just want everything to be over so you can get on with preparing how to deal with whatever comes.  There is an inescapable air over this election that no matter what President we wake up to November 9th, the country will be worse off for it.  The only question is how bad and for how many.  This feeling of despair naturally leads people to ask "How did we get here?" and the answer is, well, pretty easily.

What's interesting about this election is that both candidates represent the very worst aspects of their respective parties.  On the Democratic side, you have Hillary Clinton, who helped bring about and implement the Third Way brand of politics that the Democrats have been following for the last twenty-five years.  On paper the strategy seeks to build a "compromise" position between the fringes  of Republicans and Leftist Democrats so laws could have the most sensible, best-of-both-worlds type of approach.  What this led to in practice, of course, were things like NAFTA and the repealing of the Glass-Steagall Act, two things which directly contributed to both the middle classes stagnant wages and the economic crisis that we still haven't fully recovered from.  There was also things like the Defense of Marriage Act, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", and the 1994 Crime Bill that's contributed to us having the highest prison population in the world.

And that's just the stuff the Clintons were directly responsible for.  On the whole, the Democrats did nothing to stop the Iraq War or the rampant civil liberties abuses racked up by Baby Bush after 9/11.  Sure, they were happy to use those things and how awful they were as cudgels to win the 2006 midterms, but once they were in a position to actually do something about those issues then well, government is a process, you know?  It's hard to change things for the better, especially when you're not all that interested in doing so. So cut them slack, all right? I mean, Obama made a huge deal about protecting whistle-blowers like it was a sacred duty before he prosecuted more of them than any other President in history.  After all, it's one thing to protect people who rat out the bullshit acts of  other Presidents, but when they were spilling his, well, he just can't have that, can he?

There's also been a lot of crowing about the newest Census data showing a 5% bump for middle class incomes last year, which Obama is all too happy to take the credit for and is a "trend" Hillary is promising to continue.  All this glad handing is so people don't remember that way back in 2009 Obama set up a mortgage relief program for victims of the subprime loan programs so they wouldn't get evicted under the terms of their bullshit loans.  Spoiler alert: the program was purposefully neglected and hasn't achieved much of anything.  One can forgive Obama for doing so, seeing how busy he was pumping trillions of dollars into the banking and financial industries while doing an epic press tour saying that sure, they crashed the world economy, but no, they weren't criminals, and no, they shouldn't face any accountability in any way shape or form.  We must look forward, after all.  It was in this instance that Obama, and his super-majority Democratic Congress, displayed a quality that isn't usually associated  with Democrats: bravery.  See, Dems are usually seen as weak, mealy-mouthed, pansies without a backbone, but that's not really fair.  When the chips are down and backs are against the wall, Democrats always find it within themselves to take a stand for the rich donors who sign their campaign donation checks and who will later sign their personal paychecks in the face of the angry voters who actually elected them.  It's a bravery born out of greed and corruption, sure, but still, it's a quality they never get proper credit for.

To her credit, Hillary has promised to reverse all of these positions she's held for decades.  Honest.  If we could all just do her the favor of forgetting how she spent all of last year and most of this one dismissing and disparaging Bernie Sanders agenda before largely adopting it as her own, that'd be great.  Also, if we could stop asking questions about how receiving reams of money from Wall Street will affect her (reluctant and recent) support of things like a $15 minimum wage, higher taxes on the rich, and tougher Wall Street regulation, she'd greatly appreciate it. And, remember how she disappeared for a few weeks after the Convention because it turned out she was having secret fundraisers with rich people?  Don't, please.  Really, it makes her look bad.  On the plus side, we won't have to forget whatever she said to Goldman Sachs that made her worth $200,000 a pop, because we'll never actually know.  Oh, one last thing, if we could just blank out that she bragged about hiring people to go online and get into fights with people who said mean things about her.  If people keep bringing that up it just delegitimizes any positive thing people say about me and makes it seem like the only reason people will say they want her to be President is it's their literal job to do so.

In contrast to the Democrats strategy of bending every which way to make it look like they actually stand for something, Republicans took a more direct and straight forward approach to being the worst thing that happened to the people they governed.

The story on this side starts in the 1960's after Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights act.  As many, many Republicans are fond of pointing out these days, it was the support of the northern Republicans who made the passing of the Civil Rights Act possible.  That point will usually be followed by a rapid and breathless recitation that it was actually the Democrats who kept blacks as slaves and instituted the Jim Crow laws and started the Klan and so, obviously, black people should vote Republican know because they were on the right side of the Civil War and legislating away the abuses that came afterwards.  Of course, it never crosses these peoples minds that it's odd to celebrate their Confederate heritage in one breath and than condemn the practices of said heritage in another.  And, naturally, it never seems all that weird to them that the only thing that they can name check as Republicans doing good things for black people happened fifty-fucking-years ago and maybe there should be some recent examples if they cared so much about the plight of the oppressed?  Here in the real world, of course, we know that the signing of the Civil Rights Act basically made the Republicans in the North who supported it and the DixieCrats in the South who fought against it switch their party registrations and that switch has stayed permanent until this day.  And we can thank Tricky Dick Nixon for that.

Nixon implemented the Southern Strategy in his election bid in 1968 and 1972. The whole point of the strategy is to votes by stroking the racial resentments of white people. I'll let Lee Atwater explain it a bit deeper:

"You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger"

 You'll recognize the similarities between that and Romney's 47% of people don't pay taxes bullshit and Paul Ryan's comment "Urban Voters" cost their ticket the election.  The goal of the strategy has always been to coach the same racist ideologies and prejudices in more mundane language.  And it's worked so well that there isn't a Republican talking point that doesn't include them, even leading to things like this idiot in Maine who actually said on camera that racism wasn't a thing until Obama became President.  (She's since resigned, because even in a Trump America some shit is still too stupid to say and walk away from.) The danger with this, though, is the more you do it, the more you edge closer and closer to the white power movement that you know, is decent enough to be openly racist and not pretend otherwise.  And that thin line of separation has finally given way, with even David Duke feeling like the Republican platform has extended low enough for him to comfortably stand on it and run on its ticket for a state senate job.  Hillary's "basket of deplorables" comment drew a lot of flack, but seriously, non-racist Republicans, isn't at least a little worrying to you that your nominee has brought so many white supremacists into the tent, and doesn't it worry you even more that once inside they fit in so comfortably?

There are some conservatives trying, vainly, to act they're going to take a principled stand and "take their party back" from the clutches of Trump and his raging repulsiveness.  Jennifer Rubin, a columnist at The Washington Post, is one of them.  She just wrote a column saying that more moderate Republicans must take back the soul of the party because a party that is willing to have something as vile as Trump and his bitherism represent the party doesn't deserve to succeed.  The thesis is true, but the impact of of Rubin's sudden principled conservatism is somewhat lessened by the fact that she was a major supporter of Rick Perry in both the 2011 and 2015 primaries.  Apparently, his birther lunacy was fine, but Trump's is just beyond the pale.

Perry is also an exemplar of another strategy that dragged Republicans off into la-la land, the Christian Right.  The influx of evangelical Christians and their dogmatic, Biblical literalism slowly transformed political positions into religious tenets.  These days, if you're a Republican that says anything against free-market, tax cutting, no regulation economic policy, than you were no Republican at all. Being pro-choice is to aide and abet the American Holocaust, LGBT rights are merely the first steps toward all Christianity being outlawed.  And God help you if you're caught admitting that climate change and evolution are actual things.  The marriage of political ideology with the ignorance and fanaticism of religious fundamentalism has made being a "true conservative" into being an enemy of reality.  That's why they still believe that tax cuts lead to prosperity even in the face of a bankrupt Kansas, and why shutting down Planned Parenthood in Texas still counts as pro-life even though Texas now has the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world.  The righteousness of the positions is what's important, the results are immaterial.

Which brings us to Trump.  There isn't actually anything daring or original in his strategy to be as bigoted as possible and riding that to success in the Republican primary; rather, he's a political remora fish getting fat in the shitstream of bigotry and ignorance that conservative elite and media have been feeding their viewers for decades now.  He also benefits from the iron bubble conservatives have created for themselves to close them off from any contradictory information; he's the biggest liar on the campaign trail? That's just the usual liberal lamestream media bullshit.  His tax cuts will cost $10 trillion?  That's just the same educated "expert" bullshit talk that they all get paid by the liberal conspiracy to justify the government taking money out of our pockets!  His whole image of being a tough guy is also dependent on people ignoring literally everything else that happens in the world.  When Trump went to Mexico last month Enrique Pena-Nieto told him flat out that Mexico would not pay for his proposed border wall.  In Mexico, Trump lays down and accepts it, and can't even admit that they even discussed the issue to the press.  But a couple hours later in Arizona, in front of a friendly crowd, Trump is strutting about like a WWE performer saying Mexico will pay for the wall no matter what.  Just recently, in Flint, Michigan, Trump was cut off by a pastor in a black church before he went on one of his patented rambling rants.  In the church, Trump backed down, looking like a meek little school boy, and kept his mouth shut.  But later, on Fox and Friends, he was back in full fire mode, railing against the pastor as a hysteric woman who could barely control herself.  The point of all this is, when Trump is in front of a friendly, approving audience, he struts around like he's the big dick on campus and nothing and no one can stop him.  But, put him in front of literally anyone who doesn't already agree with him, he shrivels up like the worthless prick that he is.

But for all the political foolishness and chicanery, the real blame for all this bullshit lies with the voters.  See, we were the ones who let the parties get away with all this bullshit in the first place.  It was voters who show up in force during presidential elections and than barely remember that the midterms even exist.  And it was voters who never bothered to write, call, or have any interaction with their Congress people on any level once the elections were over.  Governments represent the people who show up, the people  who put the effort into making things work for them.  If voting is the only thing that you ever did and than just left it at that, than you can't really be surprised that the government you elected doesn't give a fuck about your opinions or wishes.  After all, if you're not going to spend the time and effort making your issues known, why should they do anything to find out?  America is where it is because we, as a people, stood by on the sidelines because we assumed we were worthless and didn't matter.  So, naturally, our politicians treated us as such.  If we want this country to be anything that we think it should or want to become, we have to put in the work.

Most importantly, we need to kill the narrative of the lesser evil.  That whole idea is built on voter resignation that we can't do any better than two piles of shit, so might as well pick the smaller one to swallow.  Fuck that.  If all you have is two bad options, than yes, you go with least terrible one. But after they win, you hound them and pester them until they have no choice but to be something better or maybe worthwhile.  If we're ever going to have a country worth living in, we'll have to make it that way.  And the more we just bemoan how shitty everything is, the longer it'll stay that way.

If Only We'd Known

We are now seven weeks out from Election Day and the sky is falling. Donald Trump has taken a lead in both Ohio and Florida. Hillary's approval numbers among independents are, shall we say, less than promising. There are surrogates and other supporters writing somewhat desperate and frantic pleas for people to put aside their feelings for Hillary and vote for her to ward off the impending apocalypse that is a Trump Presidency. Underneath all that, there's a sense of despair, a baffled and depressed question of "How could this happen?" Well, it turns out if you nominate the second most hated candidate in election history, people aren't all that willing to vote for her. Oops.

At the heart of this problem is that no one in the Democratic establishment took any of these problems seriously. Clinton's whole election strategy has been built around just attacking Trump as a lunatic who would drag the country back to the dark ages and pretty much drive the nail in the coffin of America as a respected world power. And while those arguments are true, it doesn't actually inspire any confidence in Clinton to be any better. "I'm less horrible than the other guy" isn't really a winning strategy, since it doesn't actually address or even recognize the issues people have with the Clinton campaign.

Because for as much as Clinton supporters love to complain about how the Clinton controversies are overblown in comparison to Trump's issues, there are legitimate reasons for people to be distrustful of her. 

Take the email scandal, for example. Clinton was cleared of any criminal activity by both the State Department's Inspector General and the FBI. But what both of those reports revealed is that Clinton had acted with a complete disregard for record keeping protocols and, by keeping a private email server to store government communications, had put those systems at greater risk for intrusion. Both reports also explicitly stated that the defenses Clinton had been making in public regarding the issue- that Colin Powell had done the same thing, that State knew from the beginning what she was doing, that the State IT department had approved the server's use- were all, in no uncertain terms, completely false. And yet, in both cases, the Clinton campaign immediately issued press releases claiming the reports backed her stories up 100% and asked everyone to please move on. 

This is, unequivocally, a lie. To pretend that voters shouldn't be leery of a candidate who so easily and effortlessly lies about official investigations into their behavior is myopic to the point of hypocrisy.

Dovetailing with the email scandal were questions surrounding whether or not donors to the Clinton Foundation were leveraging that money for special considerations when Clinton was Secretary of State. From FOIA document releases, we know now that there wasn't any pay-to-play or outright bribery going on, there still was the issue of donor countries to the Foundation getting there arms deals approved quicker than those who weren't. There was also the issue of private donors getting face time with Clinton to voice their concerns and hopes for policy outcomes. This was largely dismissed as another non-issue, since a meeting is hardly a promise of anything. But again, this misses why people are so uncomfortable with this business, because in a democracy, sometimes the most important factor in getting what you want is just the simple act of being heard  by someone in power.

When people with money and access get to use those things to press their case, it tells the large majority of voters who don't have those things that their concerns are getting left out of their government's choices because there's never anyone in the room to speak for them. Yes, it isn't illegal, but it's a murky enough situation of who, exactly, does our government work for that telling people to just ignore it only convinces them that Clinton will continue that pattern and that a vote for her won't guarantee she actually gives a shit about their interests in return.

Whenever anybody brings up these points though, or brings up Hillary's long history of interventionism and her spotty record on environmental and civil rights issues, the first words out of everyone's mouths are usually "Well, Donald Trump (insert awful thing here.)" The problem with this strategy is that it doesn't actually argue the points about Clinton. In fact, that argumentative style implicitly concedes them. So if you are a Hillary supporter wondering why people won't get behind her, it's probably because the only argument you've been making is "Yes, you're right about how awful she is, but her awfulness doesn't stack up as high as Trump's, so that shouldn't matter." With such a compelling argument, how is anyone able to resist it?

So here's my advice for the closing weeks of the campaign: When you talk about Hillary Clinton, talk about what she's going to give people. Talk about how her policies will actually do some good for people. Make the campaign about how voting for Hillary is a vote for something to gain instead of a vote for not losing. (The nice thing about all that is it doesn't even need to be true, because if politics teaches us anything, it's that the truth of things is hardly a relevant point.)

Also, change that hashtag. #ShesWithYou at least tries to pretend that the campaign is about something more than her own vanity and ego. Basically, if Clinton keeps up this strategy of being the best of all horrible choices, it's going to continue to suck the energy out of her campaign and hamper her ability to motivate people who are skeptical of her to vote for her instead of voting 3rd party or skipping the election entirely.

I doubt anything significant is going to change, though. Clinton's horrible polling with young voters, independents, and pretty much everyone outside of the Democratic base that voted for her in the primary has existed since May; and both the party's and her response was "Eh, they'll come around. Let's go chase that Republican money." Any attempt to point out that this was a horrible plan and that if she wanted to win she had to heavily target those voters she was weak in or else risk losing them entirely was met with derision and dismissed as just sour grapes from the primary. And now well, we are where we are.  The only sure thing I know now is that, come November, if Trump wins the election, Democrats will spend the next four trying to figure how, when they nominated a candidate hated by pretty much everyone, that it was everyone's else's fault but their own.

The Alt-Right, Free Speech, and Trump

Over the last couple of months, there has been renewed focus on the alt-right movement and what they actually believe in.  Unfortunately, this also gives these assholes a media platform to pretend that they are anything but the white supremacists that they are, so I want to take this opportunity to punch them in nethers and bring them down a notch, as it were.

First off, I just want to make something clear: the alt-right isn't actually a thing. This whole idea of them being a "new" twist on conservatism or a legitimate alternative to mainstream ideas is, in technical terms, bullshit. They are just the latest iteration of white supremacy and antisemitism that stretches back to The John Birch Society, Father Coughlin, and the Klan. Their idea that race is an actual thing with a hierarchy that white people sit at the top is an idea that puts them in league with well, every popular European nation and American public thinker up until, oh, 50 years ago.  That's not even mentioning their ideas on the roles of women and gay people, or who should be allowed to vote. These guys sat and had a good long think to come up with original ideas to introduce to the body politic and came up with things that have been common practice the world over for thousands of years. We should all be so gifted.

But the alt-right wouldn't be a regressive right-wing movement unless they had some story about how they're the actual victims here, and that's where Milo Yiannopoulos comes in. In July, Milo was banned from Twitter after he bragged about inciting and encouraging the users who were bombarding Leslie Jones with racist and sexist messages and images. Milo, predictably, cried foul soon afterward, saying that Twitter was censoring him and infringing on his right to free speech by not letting him be a complete dickbag for kicks. I know it's becoming something of an internet cliche, but seriously, anytime people complain about their free speech being violated by a private actor, just refer to this xkcd comic:




What's most galling about Milo and his ilk bitching and moaning literally every fucking time some tells them to go be worthless somewhere else, they always try to act like they are, somehow, being victimized. 

If you're going to be political provocateurs, at least try to have integrity when the push back comes. 

I mean, if you're going to devout all your time and energy- and really build your entire philosophy around- the idea that all of modern society is corrupt, weak, and pussified, than when you get shown the door by that culture because they're sick of listening to you, don't be a pussy in return. No one is stopping Milo from going on, at length, about how he's been unfairly censored and maltreated by the vile liberal conspiracy that is our culture. Shit, he was on CNBC last week, trying pass off the Alt-Right as anything other than white supremacy that swapped their sheets for suits a day before other Alt-Right leaders held a press conference that involved a dude saying the best future for America is making it an all-white country.

To be fair, it's not like Milo is going out and saying this bullshit because he wants people to not think of his ilk as horrible shitbags. No, he does it so the people that already buy what he's selling stay loyal and committed. See, if you bought into an ideology that's basically bigot bingo, you may eventually examine why you're being ostracized and figure out that hey, those are shitty beliefs and leave them behind. 

Since any awakening of common decency would completely destroy the alt-right's customer base, they create this narrative of victimization so when society tells them to go fuck off to the racist fever swamps they came from, it's not because they're the new Nazi's, no, it's because all those Social Justice Warriors just can't handle anyone coming in to tell people THE TRUTH!!! about how they've destroyed the world. Creating this narrative of victimization essentially guarantees that the adherents of this bullshit will double their support and effectively shut out any criticism or honesty about what their beliefs actually are because anyone who doesn't agree with their principles is either one of (((them))) or one of (((their))) useful idiot sheeple. That this whole tactic is based on the victimization culture the alt-right is so fond of accusing practically everyone of exploiting is an irony that, of course, goes completely over their heads.

Here's the thing: when people collectively decide what is and what is not acceptable to say in public discourse that's culture, nothing else. The 1st amendment was only meant to protect speech from government prohibition, it does nothing to protect you from other people saying "Shut the fuck up, already." Yes, cultural censorship can go horribly wrong and be misguided, but kicking these dregs back to the fringe isn't a mistake or something to cry over.  

So, the natural question is why do these people suddenly feel like they can say these things in the light of day and get a cheering crowd? The answer is pretty easy: it's because of Donald Trump. Now, I don't think Trump is actually a white supremacist or neo-Nazi like the idiots that cheer him on, mainly because having a political ideology requires you to think of the world as something larger than yourself, which I think he is literally incapable of doing. Trump's only real skill is realizing when there's a marketing opportunity afoot; so he spoke to those white, disaffected voters, people who felt like they were left behind because, in large part, as uneducated, poor, white people that is the bedrock of his base, they were. In response, they turned to a set of beliefs that was actively hostile to the culture they saw as demeaning and humiliating to them.

But what Trump is doing is courting and establishing a movement that, the longer it goes on, becomes more and more toxic. And the more he gets a free pass from journalists like Matt Lauer, or gets petted like a Chia Pet on Jimmy Fallon, the more he looks like just another politician saying outrageous things to get elected and the more the alt-right gets legitimized and accepted in mainstream culture. 

This is a fundamentally dangerous thing, because it means that when the next election rolls around, these fascists and Klan members and neo-Nazi's will be treated as a normal, acceptable part of American culture. The polls are close, but I still believe Clinton will win. It'll be by the skin-of-her-teeth, but she'll win. And since Trump is already laying the groundwork for saying that the only way he loses is if the election is rigged, his supporters aren't going to accept it. So they'll spend the next four years regrouping, reforming, crafting their brand so they can take another run at Hillary.  

Because that is what's going to happen, because Trump isn't an anomaly for the Republicans, he's their prototype. So tell me, in a world where Hillary is barely clinging to a national lead against the biggest piece of shit to run for President, what do you think her chances are when someone in a better suit, better hair, and can speak in complete sentences espouses the same shit Trump is, but takes a six point lead? Because the worst thing about this whole Trump business and the alt-right is sooner rather than later, they're going to be the mainstream conservatives they're lambasting now, and then, well, I guess we'll just have to find somewhere else to be, won't we?

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

I remember I was late for school, as usual.  My mom is quite easily the worst person to ask to get you anywhere on time, and always has been.  We had watched the footage of the towers being hit and burning on the edge of her bed, me wondering if I would get to stay home like when the Columbine shootings had happened three years earlier.  But, my brother was already at school, so reluctantly, she took me to the car and dropped me off.  Walking through the halls, all the doors were open, no one was giving a lecture, all eyes on the T.V's and the smoldering buildings, the cameras catching people leaping to their deaths to escape the fire and trying to lessen the blow by cutting back to the anchors, the impact written over their faces that didn't have the luxury of being to look away from the feed.

And then the towers fell.  And as they crumbled everyone was trying to grapple with the new world that was taking shape around them.  I imagine it must have been harder for my teachers than it was for us.  They had all lived through the Cold War under the constant threat of a nuclear annihilation via the U.S.S.R., but they had also seen that great enemy crumble.  The wolves had been at the door, but America had beaten them back, free to bask in a world where it reigned supreme above and beyond anything that could threaten it.  I wonder if, after the horror, they felt a sense of comfort in the old habit of being afraid of an evil out of the East lurking in the dark, waiting to strike.

Mostly I remember wanting vengeance, we had been hurt, and the world would suffer for it.  And holy shit did that come to pass.  The war in Afghanistan was met with a bloodthirsty glee, a nation ecstatic to bring down death and destruction on a country who's leaders had harbored Bin Laden and other al-Qaeda personnel.  Did it matter that the actual civilians could've cared less for any of the jihadi movements and wanted nothing to do with them?  Fuck no.  They were going to die in the cross fire and we didn't care, because we wanted to prove a point; that however many Americans you kill, we can kill yours ten times over.  A hundred, even, if we feel like exercising.  To date, there are an estimated 31,000 civilian deaths as a result of the war.  So, point taken, I guess.

But this being America, we always have to go bigger.  The civilian death toll from the Iraq War varies based on who's doing the counting, but the range goes from 165,000 on the low end to 1.3 million.  To put that in perspective, that's a 9/11 every day, for either 55 or 433 days straight.  And then there are the drone wars which range from 462-1,459.  But whenever these numbers are pointed out as the enduring cause and motivation for terrorism, the usual response is "Well, we didn't mean to kill those people.  So they don't count."  There are no safety switches on bombs or bullets so that only kill who you want or mean to kill.  Whether by intent or mistake, the dead are still dead.  And a society that refuses to own up to its responsibility in making the dead doesn't have any moral high ground to stand on when it seeks to avenge its own.

Every year we say "Never Forget", every year we seek out new places to bomb and wreck more devastation for longer periods of time on people who had nothing to do with events on one terrible day that's over a decade gone.  The most enduring, and frightening, lesson that 9/11 taught us is that we are as just a part of the world as everyone else.  For a country that has been so war-happy over the last century, we've never actually had to bear any of the costs of the those wars on our own soil.  We've never had to worry checking our farms for undetonated artillery shells or sweeping open fields for landmines.  We've never had to to rebuild our cities after years of air raids and infantry battles.  We'd never been really scarred before 9/11, and the idea that even a fraction of the violence we send out to the world could find its way back home is still, to this day, the most terrifying thing anyone can think of.

I keep waiting for people to realize that letting this fear of an attack from anywhere by anyone at anytime is toxic, that it's deforming who we are as a people.  I keep waiting for people to realize that we're better than this, that choosing to live this way is for fools and cowards.  But every year I see us languish over our damage and then use it to justify the deaths of so many more without considering the consequences and it hits home that no, actually, we're not.

No More Pretending

One of the more interesting things to happen over this election cycle is to see how many liberal pundits don't actually care about liberal causes or principles.  After the 2010 Citizens United decision, the idea that money is an inherently corrupting force in politics was a standard thing.  Obama alluded to it in his State of the Union address the following year, and with the rise and popularity of Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown, the party had enough capital to stake out a position where it stood against the free flow of money and corruption and wanted to clean politics up.  But then Hillary Clinton runs for President on the backs of a lot of dark money fundraising and well, suddenly, who's to say that campaign donations are a bad thing?  Surely she's only getting that money because all those industries think she's the better qualified candidate, right?  They certainly don't expect anything in return for those donations, oh no.

Leading the way in abandoning policy positions and goals because they make Clinton look bad,has been Vox, Ezra Klien's pet project originally launched with the mission to provide deep-dive policy wonk articles but written so people would actually find those discussions interesting.  Whether or not it ever really was that is a matter for another time, but for now, let's just say the site as done an admirable job doing ideological cover for Clinton in painting every criticism of her from the left as being just like when Republicans shout "Benghazi!" or "Vince Foster" when they drag out the classics. So now that the idea of an open and transparent government via the Freedom of Information Act is causing trouble for Hillary Clinton, it's Matthew Yglesias to the rescue in his Tuesday "Against Transparency" piece.

The thesis of the piece is basically that emails shouldn't be held to the same record keeping standards or FOIA requests as paper documents because they're more informal and that the eventual release of those communication records will make people speak less in policy or conversational terms but more in "how is this gonna look on Politico five years from now" terms.  It's an incredibly stupid and painful article to read, but I do have to give points for Yglesias to actually force this nonsense out into the world.  It's commitment, if nothing else.

It is entertaining though, to imagine Yglesias flail about as he tries to find some way or rhetorical trick to make it seem like people can't communicate in their emails.  He seriously spends the majority of the piece trying to spin this tale of a government that is hapless to do anything official because if they use email those emails will someday be *gasp* read by the people.  It seems strangely odd that Ygelsias thinks that for a government to be more effective, it has to actively hide more of its activities from the people they represent.  Yglesias even makes the argument at one point that since emails are subject to archival and public release like paper memos, that the people in the emails will be less interested in discussing the issues of the day in real terms and more concerned with how they'll look in history or the political tabloids.

The hysterics Yglesias works himself into while discussing these things is, like I said, entertaining, but so, so, pitiful.  For one thing, if people in say, the State Department, want to have a in depth discussion about their own personal and their policy goals over email, they can.  Those emails will more likely than not be slapped with some level of classification and those emails aren't released until the executive branch deems it appropriate.  So, absent a leak or a hack those emails aren't coming out in any immediate future, so Yglesias can stop worrying about people's hurt feelings when someone says something mean about them when discussing who to assign a specific project.

Also, if anyone wants to avoid those records, they can just talk to each other, in person.  Yglesias knows this, because he makes a big to-do over how people will end up having face-to-face meetings to talk about anything important to scuttle disclosure laws.  Look, I'm all for transparency, but I realize that some conversations need to had without people taking notes so that you can figure out what those positions will be when you actually do go on the record.  That's fine, a bit underhanded when abused, sure, but there has to be a give and a get.  But the Yglesias speaks as if this isn't a practice that's already happening, he makes his point in such dire bad-moon-on-the-rise language that I honestly wonder what he ever did that justified the position he has as a respected and deep thinker.

The other argument Yglesias makes is trying to draw a distinction between what he sees as useful and non-useful disclosures.  He says that things like the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other government agencies who collect and release statistical work are the good kinds of disclosures because they keep the country informed, basically, of how things are going.  he even makes an interesting suggestion about letting the IRS and BLS share data so the latter can have a better data set about what pay goes with what jobs in all fields.  Officials emails though, he claims, are in no way a part of the public interest like those statistics so they should just be locked away forever where no one can see them.  That anyone can make this argument in the era of Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning is incredible.  Knowing what the government is doing and who they are doing that business with is always, pretty much by definition, going to serve the public interest.  That a journalist can't see that, or, more accurately, is working to obfuscate that point has decided that the only thing that matters is making sure powerful people will want to pat him on the head and call him a good boy so he can get a good treat.

Look, I get it.  The Clinton email story won't go away.  There aren't any bombshells, no bribes, no nothing.  All they reveal is that Clinton, like every other politician, gives face time and access to people who give them lots of money.  The Sun set in the West today, film at 11.  So, because of that, the liberal punditry is desperately trying to get people to move on to something, anything else, and they keep failing to do so.  What Ygelsias and his ilk still can't seem to understand that a political system that doesn't blink at donors making donations to private foundations run by political figures while they're out of office than leverage those same donations for access when they go back in to office is a shitty system.   People's problem isn't that someone handed the Clintons a bag of money for the foundation in exchange for whatever they wanted.  People's concern is that, when push comes to shove, who does the government actually work for?  Who's interest will it pursue?  And the answer to that question basically comes down to who is in the room while you're making those decisions.  The main reason the email story won't go away is because none of hagiographers have ever dealt with the core issue that bothers people about them; sure, they don't reveal anything criminal, but they do confirm that if you're rich and give enough money to people, that's going to open a door and give you a chance to be heard above the din of well, everyone else.

Maybe, in later years, people can look back on this time and mark this election as the beginning of the end for our current era of journalism, one where the media failed to pass itself off s objective and intelligent while acting as the propaganda arms of  one or the other political party.  At least, I hope that happens, because if we have to live with disgraces like Yglesias for much longer and they're still seen as credible, I think we'll forget what actual journalism or just intelligent, principled, thought in general is supposed to even look like.

Hell or High Water Review

Hell or High Water is the second movie from Sicario scribe Taylor Sheridan, directed by David McKenzie, that follows bank robber brothers Toby and Tanner Howard (Chris Pine and Ben Foster, respectively) as they're hunted by Texas Rangers Marcus Hamilton and Alberto Parker (Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham).  Like Sicario before it, this movie has an exaggerated sense of realism that grounds the story has the stakes climb higher. Unlike its predecessor though, this film never quite achieves the level of tension as the hunt goes on and it never feels like the brothers are in any danger of being caught in a ever tightening noose.

That's not to say that the movie is not without it's strong points.  Foster and Pine have a very loose chemistry of brothers who are getting along for the moment  by managing the tension of past injuries and slights that keep bubbling up to surface and have to be kept in check at all times.  Bridges and Birmingham also have a loose, steady rapport as the Rangers hunting the brothers down.  The movie is also gorgeous to look at, with McKenzie following the lead of Breaking Bad and No Country for Old Men in letting the wide, desolate desert landscapes become a character in and of themselves.  The film also does a great job of making each podunk town scattered across West Texas as places whose time has come and gone, with the only thing left for them to do is rot back into the land they sprang from.

Another vastly appreciated tack this movie takes is that it doesn't treat itself has "important" or drag out a soapbox to berate the audience with its message.  Yes, there is a running theme of how theft by individuals and institutions is a cyclical thing that's playing itself out yet again, but aside from pretty much three lines from Parker that explicitly lay this out, the movie doesn't dwell on it longer than it has to.

But, there are problems.  Mainly, the pacing never really takes off.  For much of the movie, we're  just cruising along watching the brothers robbery scheme go of without any kind of hitch.  Which leads to the second problem of the movie, the investigation never seems like an actual threat, so for all intents and purposes when we're watching the Ranger sections of the movie it just seems like we're watching two people just kinda putter around hoping to stumble on the people they're chasing.  At no point in the movie do the Howard brothers even mention that any law enforcement could be investigating them, the very thought seems so meaningless and inconsequential that neither brother, even first time criminal Toby, can't bring himself to worry about it.  Thing is though, if this a cops and robbers movie, than the robbers have to at least, in theory, consider the cops a threat.  Basically, if the cops aren't seen as dangerous to their in-movie enemies, the audience isn't going to have much a reason to worry about them, either.

The lackadaisical pacing also hurts the movie by making the turn to the climax really telegraphed and mostly ineffective.  Both partnerships make their move to the final robbery independently and pretty much on a lark on both sides.  Also since this last robbery has "this is the one that goes bad" written all over it, so when things do go sideways, there's no real hell breaks loose moment or escalation of, well, anything.  Everything just happens, and then the movie pretty much ends.

Qualms aside though, this is a pretty solid movie.  The directing isn't anything spectacular, but it gets the job done; all the actors turn in good, subtle performances, and the movie isn't filled with pointless scenes to pad itself out or dialogue trying to make itself sound important.  In the end, it's good but not great, which at this point in the summer, pretty much makes it the best thing around.

Grade: B