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Summertime Is Puppy Time
“Have any big plans for the summer?” people sometimes ask by way of small talk. I reply literally: “Yes, housetraining a new puppy.”
Our newest family member is a 12-week-old Labrador Retriever mix – jet black from the top of his nose to the tip of his slightly odd long tail. When I phoned the local vet to make his first appointment, the receptionist asked his age (he was then 8 weeks), his sex (a choice of just two when it comes to canines), and his breed. I replied, “He’s a mutt.” She corrected, “We say mixed.” She was kidding . . . I think.
We adopted this pup through Lonely Hearts Animal Rescue. I wish I could say that we did it entirely to save a dog who would otherwise possibly have been euthanized. But in truth that was only part of the reason. Our last dog, Cali, a gorgeous, exuberantly loving Golden Retriever, broke our hearts when she died of cancer at age 7. Goldens are the number one victims of cancer in the dog world, and other pure breeds also suffer from a variety of ailments that mutts are far less prone to. The genetics are pretty straightforward. When you select for certain traits – beautiful coats, particular colors and sizes, head shape – you necessarily breed from a limited pool. You get the good traits but also a higher concentration of bad ones (like susceptibility to disease).
People worry that “you don’t know what you’re getting” when you adopt a rescue. That’s true, which is why, despite the midnight awakenings, razor sharp teeth, and destructophilia, we elected to get a puppy. Breeding for temperament is very much a real thing (see the famous Russian experiment that selected for tameness in foxes), but we figure that dogs are dogs and that most bad behavior is the result of negative experiences. Also, we applied the Parker family temperament test to the puppy whose picture on Petfinder had first attracted our interest. He flunked.
He was black and tan like a Rottweiler, but with big floppy ears like a Labrador. Completely adorable. But when we met him, he seemed oddly aloof. Alone of those in his litter, he didn’t approach us head up and tail wagging when we entered the enclosure. When we took him outside and offered to play, he was passive and unresponsive. I speculated that he might just not be feeling well. But we had only these 30 minutes to decide, and he didn’t seem like a people person (if you’ll forgive the expression). His brother, by contrast, was all wobbly fun. He cuddled in our laps, and also kept a sharp eye on the comings and goings of the rescue lady. And so we chose the black one. My son drove while I cradled the skinny, warm package of fur on a towel in my lap. (The towel came in handy when he threw up. Experience!)
We’ve named all of our dogs after U.S. presidents. The first was Gipper. The second Teddy. The third Cali. And now our sleek black mutt whose fur looks and feels like velvet is Ike. I hereby promise (fantasize?) that if the junior senator from Nebraska is elected president we will immediately adopt a female and name her Sassy.
Note that I described our summer as “housetraining.” When I was a kid, people of spoke of “housebreaking” a dog. The received wisdom was that when your puppy had an accident indoors, you thrust his nose in it, shouted “bad dog,” and rushed him outside. Some also recommended spanking him with a rolled-up newspaper. The new wisdom, dispensed by most trainers, is “positive training.” Our preferred guru, Ian Dunbar, recommends paying close attention to your puppy’s behavior, knowing the likely times of need (right after meals particularly), and rewarding your pet for every successful evacuation with praise and a treat.
Ike got the hang of it within about 10 days, but he still has some accidents. Dunbar advises that if your pet continues to err, that you roll up a newspaper and whack yourself with it, since you obviously did something wrong. Like many dog people, Dunbar takes a dim view of humans. But who devised positive dog training anyway? Not a dolphin.
Ike can come, sit, stay, go down (sloppily), wait, give a high five, and let go (“off”). Ok, not consistently. But no matter what, he has already achieved the most important milestones – the overjoyed greeting when you’ve been gone for only a little while, and the way he rests his chin on your foot as he sleeps. You can have your lake or European vacation, my summer is complete.
There’s More Than One Kind Of Corruption
When people think of corruption in high places, they tend to think of elites feathering their own nests. Bill and Hillary Clinton monetized political power into a personal fortune of hundreds of millions, and played the system better than any couple since Napoleon and Josephine. Paul Manafort is alleged to have sold his services to sketchy foreign powers (including a Putin puppet in Ukraine), pocketed multiple millions, evaded American taxes, and according to evidence presented in his trial, spent up to a million dollars on cashmere suits and ostrich jackets (being rich doesn’t mean having taste).
President Trump is defending his former campaign chairman: “Paul Manafort worked for Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole and many other highly prominent and respected political leaders. He worked for me for a very short time. Why didn’t government tell me that he was under investigation. These old charges have nothing to do with Collusion – a Hoax!” The president might answer a few questions too. Why didn’t he do any background investigation of Manafort? His career representing tainted foreign leaders like Ferdinand Marcos and Jonas Savimbi was public knowledge. Allegations that he received off-the-books payments from overseas interests were also only a click away. In 2016, Manafort flatly denied the allegations: “The simplest answer is the truth: I am a campaign professional. . . .I have never received a single ‘off-the-books cash payment’ as falsely ‘reported’ by The New York Times, nor have I ever done work for the governments of Ukraine or Russia.” That didn’t age well.
Another question for President Trump: Didn’t it strike him as odd that a man of Manafort’s tastes and lifestyle would agree to work for Trump (supposedly a billionaire) for free? Didn’t he pause and reflect, “Hmm, I wonder what he expects to get out of this, and from whom?”
Manafort is the poster child for Washington corruption of the old-fashioned variety – the influence selling and pocket lining kind. A remarkable number of Trump’s people have displayed a similar foible. Just in the first 18 months, the Secretary of HHS (private jets at taxpayer’s expense), the Secretary for Veterans Affairs (vacations for the family at government expense), and the EPA chief (a soundproof booth inter alia), have all been forced out for misusing government funds for their own little luxuries. The Secretary of HUD (a $31,000 dining room set), the Interior Secretary (a land development deal adjacent to his property), the Commerce Secretary (shorting stocks on non-public information), and the Treasury Secretary (misuse of military aircraft) have all been accused of improper spending as well. Far from drained, the swamp has been stocked by this administration.
But there is another kind of corruption that is more disturbing for the health of our republic – the retreat from governing in favor of posturing.
As Yuval Levin notes in a Commentary essay “Congress is Weak Because Its Members Want it to be Weak,” the 21st century’s profusion of technologies permitting transparency have had some good but many baleful effects. Because virtually everything is televised, politics itself has become less and less about actual governing, with the trades and compromises that requires, and more like performance art.
This tendency among legislators to grandstand and to posture as the brave truth tellers condemning the “dysfunction” of their own institution, is actually the true dysfunction. When nearly every member seeks to be a cable or local TV star rather than a lawmaker, it’s no wonder that very little actual legislating gets done. As Levin notes, even controlling both chambers and with a Republican president poised to sign anything they send up, the Republican Congress has achieved very little. They passed a tax cut, but concerning the other priorities they campaigned on for years – reforming the health care system, adjusting the immigration laws, confronting the entitlement crisis – they have done nothing and seem to have no plans. As for the chief job of Congress, developing a budget, well, for the first time in 40 years, neither chamber has even considered a budget resolution. And while Republican leaders demur, the President is again threatening a government shutdown.
That we have a president who struts and howls and shows little interest in the mechanics (to say nothing of the norms) of governing, is well known. But the Congress, designed by the founders to be the most powerful branch, is willingly surrendering its intended role for the pleasures of a few hits on MSNBC or FoxNews. That is an outcome that the founders didn’t anticipate and will likely outlast our current Tweeter-in-Chief.
Can Feminists Cure What Ails Men?
“Boys need feminists’ help too,” declares Feministing.com founder Jessica Valenti. Writing in the New York Times, Valenti worries that women are “protest[ing], run[ning] for office, and embrac[ing] the movement for gender equality in record numbers, [while] a generation of mostly white men are being radicalized into believing that their problems stem from women’s progress.”
Valenti cites the “manosphere,” the network of websites that peddle misogyny, and she’s right that it is disturbing. But Valenti undermines her case by citing the popularity of Jordan Peterson as more evidence of woman hatred. On the contrary, Valenti and other feminists would do well to remove their women-centric blinders and examine the situation of young men more sympathetically.
Valenti imagines that girls are doing great because when the mainstream culture gets them down, they can always repair to “feminist blogs and magazines” while “female college students who have critical questions about how gender shapes their lives can take women’s studies courses.” Actually, it’s very much an open question as to whether feminist interpretations of life make women happier. In my new book, Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense, I argue that in many respects it has made them less happy. Certainly, polls such as the General Social Survey suggest that women have become steadily less happy every year since 1972.
As for men, there is lots of evidence that the sexual ecosystem we’ve evolved since the feminist/sexual revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s has left many men less fulfilled too. A small percentage of “players” may think they benefit from readily available sex without commitment, but many men are not so suave and find that forming relationships is out of reach. A fringe few describe themselves as “incels” (involuntarily celibate) and fulminate against women. As for the average guy, well, they are more likely to be out of the workforce, unmarried, and alienated from their children than any previous generation in American history. Deaths from suicide, and other diseases of despair are rising so steeply that overall life expectancy in America is declining.
Valenti imagines that feminist ideas can help men through “the rejection of expectations that men be strong and stoic or ending the silence around male victims of sexual violence.” In other words, an invitation to men to see themselves as victims, just as feminists have encouraged women to do for decades. Most women aren’t crazy about embracing victimhood – a 2016 YouGov poll found that only 32 percent of women identified as feminists — and men are probably even less likely to respond enthusiastically.
Perhaps men actually don’t want to be freed from the expectation of being strong? Perhaps they are attracted to Jordan Peterson because he is a refreshing voice of masculinity traditionally understood? I haven’t read him (one of his books is on my nightstand), but from what I gather he encourages young men to take responsibility for their lives and is critical of our culture’s feminist-influenced refusal to acknowledge differences between males and females. (I’m already sure I agree about that!)
What Valenti and other feminists do not see is that many of the traits they despise in modern men, for example, their expectation that they are “entitled to sexual attention” and their attraction to misogynist websites, are outgrowths of the sexual revolution that feminists themselves promoted. By devaluing marriage and family, feminists helped to create a world in which many men grow up without fathers. About 50 percent of American children will now spend some or all of their childhoods in a single parent home.
And while feminists spend a great deal of time and attention to decrying the flaws of men, they would be well advised to think about how crucial men are as fathers. This is no data to prove this, but it seems extremely likely that the majority of men who turn to the manosphere for guidance about how to be men – or to use Valenti’s phrase “get manly quick” – are growing up or have been raised without dads. MIT economist David Autor and his colleagues, among others, have shown that boys raised without fathers suffer even more than girls do. They compared fatherless brothers and sisters in Florida and found that the boys were less likely to graduate from college, have ambitions for their futures, or be employed as adults than their sisters.
Boys will always seek to be manly. It’s in their natures. Feminists do men (and women) a disservice by scorning it. Boys raised by good dads will find manliness in marriage, responsibility, and self-control. A better feminism would cherish those things.
Putin Speaks Code. Does Trump Understand?
Back when word first leaked that Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and Donald Trump, Jr., had met with a Russian lawyer and others offering dirt on Hillary Clinton, President Trump seemed to think he was supplying an exculpatory cover story. Flying home from Germany on Air Force One, Trump reportedly instructed Don Jr. to claim that he and the Kremlin-linked lawyer had “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children.” There is apparently some debate about whether that misleading statement places the president in any legal jeopardy, but there is another aspect to the story that has received less attention. It came up again during the Helsinki debacle – Putin, the world’s richest man and most successful thief, is obsessed with the Magnitsky Act.
In fact, the very mention of Russian adoptions was a tipoff that Ms. Veselnitskaya was probably representing Vladimir Putin. Whether Trump knew this at the time is unclear. After all, he could not say what the nuclear triad was and endorsed “Article XII” of the U.S. Constitution. Maybe he thought mentioning that they discussed Russian adoptions was the most anodyne-sounding explanation for the meeting.
Except it wasn’t. If they spoke of adoptions, it means they spoke of the Magnitsky Act, the sanctions bill the U.S. enacted at the urging of William Browder, a hedge fund manager and, at one time, the largest foreign investor in Russia. Funny, Browder’s name came up again in Helsinki, when Putin accused him of tax evasion and theft and contributing to the Hillary Clinton campaign (all totally false) and suggested that the U.S. should hand him over for questioning in exchange for permitting Robert Mueller to question the 12 GRU agents just indicted for meddling in our election. Putin later added former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul to the list of those his goons would interrogate. Our stable genius president leaped at this as an “incredible offer.” A few days later, he scaled back.
Those who follow relations with Russia know that Vladimir Putin used the fate of Russian orphans as a way to retaliate against the United States for the Magnitsky Act. If they were talking adoptions at Trump Tower it’s because they were talking about sanctions relief, a matter dear to Putin’s heart. In exchange for what?
Sergei Magnitsky was the accountant who worked for William Browder. When Browder’s firm, Hermitage Capital, was the victim of a fraud and embezzlement scheme, Magnitsky patiently pieced together the truth. Those responsible, it turned out, were Russian government agents, living large and enjoying BMWs and seaside apartments. Magnitsky’s reward was to be arrested and tortured to death. Oh, and to add a nice Soviet-style touch, Putin’s government pinned the embezzlement on Magnitsky. Putin’s retaliation, halting adoptions of Russian babies by Americans, was another human rights abuse.
Browder was shaken to his core by Magnitsky’s fate and has since devoted his life to passing Magnitsky laws in every country he can convince. Ours passed in 2012. The law forbids Americans to do any business, including banking, with those who had a part in Magnitsky’s torture and death, thus making it more difficult for Russian criminals (i.e. state actors including Putin) to stash stolen money in the U.S. or other countries that have adopted such laws. It would not be strange for a president of the United States to award someone like Bill Browder a medal. It is pathetic for a president of the United States to be so obtuse or ignorant or both as to agree before all the world that such a man might be questioned by Putin’s trained attack dogs.
If you watched the Helsinki press conference, you saw Trump bowing and scraping to ingratiate himself with Putin. He kept thanking the Russian for attending the meeting, stressed that using the word “competitor” was intended as a compliment (in contrast to his treatment of NATO allies), and whined that the Mueller investigation had “kept us separated.” The man who swore to put America first blamed America first for poor relations with Russia.
What you saw in Putin was the cat who’d swallowed the canary. He was calm. He smiled. We later learned that on his way to Helsinki, his plane had violated NATO air space by flying over Estonia without permission. He is rubbing our noses in it.
“There was no collusion,” President Trump keeps saying. It may be true or it may not. But his behavior in Helsinki, like so much of what he says and does, reveals a shallow, unworthy, power-worshipping man who does not understand what he is sworn to uphold.
What the Cave Boys Teach About Abortion
Photo credit: shutterstock.com
Twelve boys and their adult coach trapped in a dank, oxygen-deprived cave in Thailand riveted the world’s attention for two weeks. Why, people ask at times like this, are we so focused on these individuals when half a million Rohingya refugee children are in danger of starving on the Bangladesh border, or when 400,000 Yemeni children are severely undernourished?
The answer is drama. We saw images of these particular boys crouched in that cave. We learned of the long odds against a successful rescue – their debilitated health after so many days without food and water, the sharp rocks, narrow passages, and nearly complete darkness of the cave, and waters that challenged even experienced divers (as the death of a Thai Navy seal underscored). Some of the boys didn’t even know how to swim, far less scuba dive.
As for the thousands of abused, terrorized, and starving children in the world, they remain mostly an abstraction. That is, for better or worse, the way our brains operate. We saw those boys as individuals and thus our sympathy was engaged.
Something similar is happening with regard to the way we see unborn babies. When Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, ultrasound technology was not in common use. By the end of the 20th century, most pregnant women were having at least one scan. As Malcolm Nicolson, author of a history of ultrasound, told LiveScience, “Overwhelmingly, pregnant women expect to be scanned, and are moved and excited by seeing the fetus,” Nicolson said. And some women report not feeling pregnant until they’ve seen the ultrasound image.
Once grainy and hard to interpret for non-experts, ultrasound images are now clear and unambiguous. They reveal that fetuses as young as 15 weeks old will move to avoid a bright light shined on the mother’s belly. They reveal fetuses placing their hands in front of their faces, palm out, sucking their thumbs, getting hiccups, and smiling. Some interpret these smiles as random muscle movements rather than true smiles since born babies rarely smile until six weeks old. But try telling the besotted parents who glimpse a smile on a sonogram that it means nothing. That’s the way we’re wired. Ultrasound is like those cameras in the cave. It reveals the humanity of those inside a dark, inaccessible place.
We are now poised to have the national debate on the legality of abortion that has been thwarted by the Supreme Court for 45 years. If Judge Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed, and if Roe v. Wade is overturned sometime in the next several years (a big if), individual states will be forced to confront the morality of terminating pregnancies instead of hiding behind the Supreme Court to manage our most fraught controversies.
Some Republican lawmakers who have been fundraising and campaigning on opposition to Roe will doubtless be revealed as towers of Jello when the issue is finally confronted. Despite recent hyperventilating about politicians’ enslavement to donors or “special interests,” the pedestrian reality is that they are much more in thrall to public opinion. And the public is conflicted. As polling analyst Karlyn Bowman has pointed out, the same Americans will say that they believe abortion to be murder, and that it should be a personal choice made by a woman and her doctor.
Most Americans favor restrictions on abortion like parental and spousal consent, limits on late term abortions, and also favor exceptions in cases of rape or incest.
According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, four states have laws on the books that would outlaw abortion if Roe were overturned. Another 10 retain their pre-Roe abortion bans, obviously unenforced, on the books. Nine states affirm the right to abortion prior to viability or to protect the life or health of the mother.
If Roe were overturned, all of those laws and many more would be up for debate. How 50 state arguments would turn out is anyone’s guess, but even leaving the merits to one side, it would be a very healthy thing for our democracy to grapple with tough questions instead of bowing to the nine lawyers on the court. Even Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg acknowledged in 2013 that by taking the question out of the hands of legislatures (and thus of voters), the Supreme Court did a disservice to the nation. “That was my concern,” she said, “that the court had given opponents of access to abortion a target to aim at relentlessly. … My criticism of Roe is that it seemed to have stopped the momentum that was on the side of change.”
I believe that abortion is a moral wrong. But above all I believe that Americans deserve to be heard on the subject, and that is now a true possibility for the first time in decades.
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Amy Coney Barrett’s “Cult”
When Notre Dame law professor and possible Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett was nominated for the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, her affiliation with a religious group called People of Praise raised red flags. It was some sort of cult, they implied. Sen. Dianne Feinstein famously reproved the nominee by intoning that “the dogma lives loudly within you and that’s of concern.”
It was an echo of the kind of anti-Catholic bigotry that characterized American life for centuries. When the Democrats nominated the first Roman Catholic for president, Al Smith in 1928, opponents warned that all Protestant marriages would be annulled and all Protestant children declared bastards if the Catholic were elected. Republicans circulated pictures of Smith posing before the almost-completed Holland Tunnel with a caption declaring that instead of emptying into New Jersey, it really led 3,500 miles under the Atlantic Ocean to the basement of the Vatican. After his loss to Herbert Hoover, Smith was reputed to have quipped that he had sent a one-word telegram to the Pope: “Unpack.”
But Feinstein’s comment and others’ insinuations that her religion is somehow creepy or suspicious reveals a broader anti-religious bias.
Barrett and her family are reportedly members of a religious group called People of Praise. The New York Times implied that the group, most, but not all of whose members are Catholic, departed from mainstream Catholic ideas and doctrines. My EPPC colleague Ed Whelan disposed of those suggestions.
Curious, I looked at their website. I suppose it’s possible that the benign image they attempt to convey to the world is mere window dressing. But then again, Pope Francis appointed one of their members as an auxiliary bishop in Portland, Oregon. It seems doubtful, bordering on impossible, that he would have conferred that honor on a cult member.
Founded in 1971 as part of the lay Catholic ministries movement, People of Praise provides spiritual community, support for those in need, prayer and counseling, and guidance for successful marriages, among other things. More than 1000 couples have completed their Marriage in Christ program that instills habits of prayer and – this is shocking – conversation to improve relationships.
The first thing you see on the People of Praise website is a Louisiana picnic attended by a notably inter-racial group. One might have thought that such membership groups are far too rare – especially in the current climate. As Dorothy Anderson, an older African American woman put it, “In almost all of his speeches, Martin Luther King spoke about blacks and whites living together in unity. I didn’t think I’d live long enough to see it, but I saw it last Thursday night at the barbecue.”
People of Praise is ecumenical, with Lutheran, Methodist, Anglican, and other Christian members in addition to the Catholics. It contains both Democrats and Republicans, rich and poor. Like churches, they send missions to needy communities in the United States. More than 100 members have helped to build and renovate homes, run summer camps for thousands of kids, and found schools.
As for Barrett herself, it seems that she lives her faith. She and her husband have seven children including one with special needs and two adopted from Haiti. Her former colleagues on the Notre Dame law school faculty, many of whom have disagreements with Barrett, unanimously endorsed her nomination to the Circuit Court, describing her as “brilliant” and also “generous” and “warm.” They wrote: “She possesses in abundance all of the other qualities that shape extraordinary jurists: discipline, intellect, wisdom, impeccable temperament, and above all, fundamental decency and humanity.”
If Barrett is a glazed-eyed cultist, she’s done an incredible job of hiding it. She fooled her fellow clerks on the Supreme Court when she worked for Justice Antonin Scalia. Dozens of clerks, including some who worked for Justices Ginsburg and Breyer, endorsed her previous nomination, calling her a “woman of remarkable intellect and character.” She fooled her students, hundreds of whom signed an endorsement reading in part “Our religious, cultural, and political views span a wide spectrum. Despite the many and genuine differences among us, we are united in our conviction that Professor Barrett would make an exceptional federal judge.” And she fooled all of the Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee along with three Democrats, who voted to approve her nomination.
The words “people of praise” raise hackles among secularists. Considering their charitable work and trans-racial, trans-class appeal, they deserve at least the benefit of the doubt. And that Barrett is reportedly a member is the best testimonial of all.
Being Decent
Not too long ago, I returned to my parked car and found a sheet of paper on the windshield bearing an expletive-laden message. The anonymous poster had obviously gone to some effort to make these flyers on his home computer – complete with color cartoon figures and such. It let me know what a $#@&*%! I was. My sin was having parked my car a tiny bit over the white line. I confess. I’m guilty. The garage was full of empty spaces, mind you, and it was only a few inches, but still, it was wrong. But did it require that response? If he had to vent his rage, couldn’t he have left a note saying “It’s inconsiderate to park over the white line”? My offense seems to have been merely an excuse. This person, clearly overflowing with hostility to his fellow men, had preprinted these vulgar missives, and delivered them to everyone who offended him.
Is it my imagination or has the tone of the Internet seeped into daily life? People often suggest that Twitter’s cruelty and misanthropy are unique to the format. Announcing that he was deleting Twitter from his phone, Andrew Sullivan advised: “Social media has turned journalism into junk, has promoted addictive addlement in our brains, is wrecking our democracy, and slowly replacing life with pseudo-life.”
The comments sections of websites are sewers, some have suggested, because they’re anonymous. I used to think that. Now I’m not so sure. While anonymity clearly unleashes some of the darker sides of human nature (which is one of the reasons mobs are so dangerous), and while real life is somewhat more civilized than “pseudo life,” the indecency is now quite open in our politics, our entertainment, and, as noted in the car story (and others I could tell), in daily life.
What happened when Samantha Bee used the “C” word with reference to Ivanka Trump? She ought to have been greeted with shocked silence. Instead, she got applause. When Robert De Niro unloaded the “F” bomb on Donald Trump, he got a standing ovation at the Tony Awards. These cultural figures are clearly not thinking things through. If they object to Donald Trump’s vulgarity and norm violating, they forfeit their standing by responding exactly in kind. If you find him offensive, maybe you shouldn’t emulate him?
Almost exactly sixty-four years ago, the subject of decency became a national show stopper. At the Army/McCarthy hearings, attorney Joseph Welch, representing the Army, punctured the pretensions of Roy Cohn, Senator Joe McCarthy’s aide, by demanding that he release the senator’s list of 130 subversives “before sundown.” Cohn couldn’t, as Welch well knew. The list wasn’t real. (There were communists in the State Department, but McCarthy threw wild charges in all directions and tainted the entire anti-Communist cause.) When Welch raised the matter of Roy Cohn’s use of taxpayer dollars to wine and dine his friend, and Cohn’s abuse of his government post to pester the Army to afford his friend special treatment, McCarthy responded (as he usually did) with an accusation of his own. Instead of answering the criticism, he did something die-hard Trump fans would love: He leveled a new accusation, this time against a lawyer in Welch’s firm, who had been a member of the left-wing National Lawyers Guild. Welch responded, “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness . . . Have you no sense of decency sir?”
McCarthy didn’t. And in the 1950s, it proved his undoing. Nor did Roy Cohn, who went on to a lucrative, if dodgy career marked by corner cutting and allegations of professional misconduct (he was disbarred in 1986). His most significant role in history may well have been taking a young Donald Trump under his wing and modeling the “never back down, never apologize” style we’ve come to know so well.
This entire administration, taking its cue from the president, has engaged in indecency on an unprecedented scale. We’ve elected the boarding school bully. Just a day before the president reversed his position on tearing children from their parents’ arms, Corey Lewandowski, confronted with the story of a 10-year-old Down Syndrome child forcibly separated from her mother at the border, scoffed “Womp, womp.” That’s the Trump spirit.
Republicans keep mostly silent about Trump’s assaults on basic morality because they fear his popularity with their voters. It’s small and cowardly. But the Democrats have nothing to fear from modeling basic integrity, civility, and fidelity to truth. They should try it.
Historic Snooker
The headline writers adore the word “historic.” It was ubiquitous in reporting on the April meeting between Kim Jung Un and Moon Jae-in. Kim shook Moon’s hand and then guided him over the military demarcation line to step onto North Korean territory. This prompted swoons. What rot. If that was a bona fide gesture of peaceful intent, time will tell. In the meantime, let’s assume it was a stunt.
So too with the summit between Kim Jung Un and Donald Trump, though in this case the media hype couldn’t compete with Mr. Trump’s own. He has basked in talk of a Nobel Peace Prize and predicted that he and the butcher of Pyongyang were “going to have a great discussion and a terrific relationship.” Obviously panting for a meeting, Trump was reportedly livid with National Security Advisor John Bolton, whose May comments about a “Libya solution” to the nuclear weapons problem apparently spooked Kim into withdrawing from the summit. Trump insisted that it was he who canceled, just as he did with the Philadelphia Eagles’ White House visit.
But he showed quite a lot of ankle in his note. “I felt a wonderful dialogue was building up between you and me,” he cooed, closing with words conceding that it was Kim, not Trump, who had actually canceled. “If you change your mind having to do with this most important summit, please do not hesitate to call me or write.” Kim reeled in his catch. He sent an oversized letter Trump could pose with, grinning like a winner of the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes.
Why is our president smiling? You can always argue that democratic leaders must treat with dictators and even villains of various stripes for the sake of winning a war or securing the peace. You can even argue that sometimes presidents flatter unsavory leaders to build trust and ease tensions. But no historical comparisons can illuminate Trump’s ricochets between hysterical threats (“fire and fury”) and pusillanimous praise (“very talented”) without any substantive change on the part of the dictator. What has changed since the State of the Union address in which Trump honored the memory of Otto Warmbier and detailed the atrocities of the North Korean regime? In gratitude for the exchange of pleasantries, the release of a few hostages, and vague offers of “denuclearization” Trump has made himself Kim’s doormat.
As a matter of substance, the Singapore summit achieved less than nothing. It was a profound defeat for U.S. world influence and for democratic decency, arguably the worst summit outcome since Yalta. Kim promised to consider “denuclearization,” exactly as his father and grandfather had done repeatedly over the past several decades – breaking their promises each and every time. For this puff of cotton candy, Trump agreed to halt “U.S. war games” (using the North Korean term for joint military exercises with South Korea) which Trump himself called provocative! He invited Kim to the White House. He also issued the risible tweet announcing, ahem, peace in our time: “There is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea.”
It’s difficult to determine just how stupid Trump thinks the American people are. But there is no question that Trump’s affection for strongmen and thugs, evident before in his praise of the Chinese murderers of Tiananmen, and his warm words for Putin, Duterte, and Xi, has now extended to the worst tyrant/killer on the planet. Trump did far more than overlook Kim’s atrocious human rights abuses, he became Kim’s PR man. “he’s a very talented man and I also learned he loves his country very much.” He has a “great personality” and is “very smart.”
Trump granted Kim’s legitimacy: “His country does love him. His people, you see the fervor. They have a great fervor.”
In 2014, a United Nations report concluded that North Korea’s crimes against humanity “entail extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation.”
What of all that? Trump is understanding, even impressed. “Hey, he’s a tough guy. When you take over a country — a tough country, tough people — and you take it over from your father, I don’t care who you are, what you are, how much of an advantage you have. If you can do that at 27 years old, I mean, that’s one in 10,000 that could do that. So he’s a very smart guy. He’s a great negotiator.”
What was Trump’s chief argument in 2016? The U.S. had been the victim of “bad deals,” with other countries and he was the great deal maker. He fingered the Iran deal as the worst deal in history. His defenders will excuse the truckling to Kim as a clever gambit to extract concessions. But Kim has offered absolutely nothing. All of the concessions have come from the United States, including the most crucial one – we’ve put ourselves on the same moral plane as North Korea. That’s what Make America Great Again has achieved.
Children, ‘Animals,’ and Immigrants
Maybe you’ve seen the video of the hero the French have dubbed “Spiderman.” When he saw a toddler dangling off a fourth story balcony, he scaled the exterior of the Paris building in about 30 seconds to save the child. Turns out Mamoudou Gassama was a newly-arrived illegal immigrant from Mali. A grateful President Emmanuel Macron made him a French citizen a day later.
Or consider the story of Jesus Manuel Cordova. He illegally crossed the border from Mexico into Arizona and came upon a damaged car. Inside was a dead mother and an injured nine-year-old boy. Cordova stayed with the child for hours until help arrived.
So, does that mean all illegal immigrants are heroes? Obviously not, no more than the crimes of MS-13 or the murder of Kate Steinle prove that all immigrants are criminals.
Both parties are resorting to stereotypes and incitement. The Democrats, intent upon portraying the utter depravity of the Trump Administration’s approach to immigration, seized upon a story that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency had “lost” 1,475 illegal immigrant minors who were separated from their parents. A widely-cited story alleged that federal officials could not find these kids. Several pointed to a Frontline account alleging that at least some of the kids had been released to human traffickers.
But within a couple of days, the corrections flowed in. It wasn’t, the New York Times and others advised, that the kids were lost. Rather, these were among the “unaccompanied minors” who crossed the border in 2014. They were placed with adults. The Times quoted Ephrat Livni of Quartz, who explained: “It certainly sounds bad,” but “many of those missing kids may well be with their parents or families, and they may have gone off the grid deliberately to avoid Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) authorities.” As for the Frontline story, it referenced a government report from 2016, i.e., before the current administration could be held accountable.
But here’s the irony: The Trump Administration’s position amounts to saying “We weren’t responsible for separating children from their parents, but going forward, we will be.” Attorney General Jeff Sessions has announced that separating even very young children from their parents will now be policy – as deterrence. “If you are smuggling a child then we will prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you as required by law,” he said. “If you don’t like that, then don’t smuggle children over our border.”
Well, if deterrence of illegal immigration justifies visiting the sins (if that’s what they are) of the parents upon the children, why stop there? Why not confine the children in cages, feed them only bread and water, and confiscate their teddy bears? After all, the current policy is indifferent to the suffering the children will experience in the name of punishing the parents, so why not ramp it up? Surely that would be an even better deterrent.
The president and his advisors routinely recommend harsh immigration measures on the grounds of national security and crime, as if our borders are being overrun by terrorists and rapists. An RNC campaign spot shows Nancy Pelosi criticizing President Trump’s use of the term “animals” regarding gang members. Her comments are juxtaposed against a gruesome story of a Satanic murder committed by a “Guatemalan native,” and other stories of crimes committed by MS-13. The tagline: “Democrats’ midterm message: MS-13 killers . . . they aren’t so bad.” At his Tennessee rally, President Trump, with characteristic judiciousness, told the crowd that Pelosi “loves MS-13.”
But it’s flatly false to say that immigrants are disproportionately represented among offenders. The CATO Institute has published several studies showing that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than the native born, and illegal immigrants are the most law-abiding of all. Overall crime rates in the United States, despite an uptick in murders in certain cities since 2014, have declined by 64 percent since 1990, while immigration rates spiked (immigration rates have declined since 2005). A study by four universities found that the ten regions that had largest increases in immigrants all had lower levels of crime in 2016 than in 1980.
Of course there are awful cases. But the plural of anecdote is not data, and the appeal to fear is contemptible. Secretary of Homeland Security Kirsten Nielson expressed alarm that 300,000 would-be border crossers are apprehended yearly. But this is a stark drop from just 18 years ago, when more than 1.6 million were stopped. At the same time, more people are now leaving the US to return to Mexico than arriving from Mexico.
The dueling anecdote game can be played endlessly. ICE has arrested an illegal alien adult with Down Syndrome, whose three siblings and father live in the US. An armed ICE agent was videotaped using a crowbar to enter a home. When the occupants demanded a warrant, he said “You’ve been watching too many movies.”
Most ICE agents doubtless follow the law and shouldn’t be tarred by the bad acts of a few. The same can be said of immigrants.
The Commencement Speech You Never Hear
My youngest son’s college graduation ceremony was scheduled to be held outdoors. The invitation specified that it would be moved inside to the gym only in the event of “severe” weather. As it turned out, the day was unseasonably cold (low 50s) with occasional drizzle – probably about as nasty as the weather gets in May without qualifying for severe status.
Yet my husband and I huddled together in the stands of Franklin Field and wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Ceremonies are important. We need markers for the milestones of our lives. They seal the moment that is both an ending and a beginning.
So much changes so fast in our world that it is comforting to settle into honored rituals. As the strains of Edward Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” pipe through the stadium, you feel a stirring of memory and a sense of peace. It has always been like this. It always will be. Some things are timeless. Or so we hope.
Along with the usual assortment of Political Science, English, and Math majors, the University of Pennsylvania confers degrees in fields that scarcely existed when I was an undergrad. Students strode across the stage to accept diplomas for studies like biophysics, bioengineering, and something called the Vagelos Integrated Program in Energy Research (VIPER). We all smiled when the dean of the Engineering School presented his candidates by quoting a scientist: “The future is hard to predict. But the best way to predict it is to invent it.” Nice. And, if you’ll indulge a little chauvinism, innovation remains a great American strength.
Most commencement addresses are dull recitations of clichés, though some stand out. Penn’s award-winning psychology professor Angela Duckworth, who has made a splash with her research into the importance of grit in school and in life, delivered a modest and uplifting address about how her career meandered before she finally settled into her specialty. Her advice: It’s okay to not have things figured out.
But one cliché that dominates many commencement addresses really should be retired, and that’s the one that exhorts the graduates to go out and change the world.
High school and college graduates don’t know very much about the world. Maybe before they set out to change things, they should get a good grasp of how things actually work. Ask them the difference between term and whole life insurance, or how to change a tire, or how much to save every month, or whether you should call a cop after a fender bender. Ask them if they’ve ever organized a dance, far less a factory.
There are always things that need changing of course. Nor should we wish to curdle the natural idealism of the young. But along with calls for change, shouldn’t the young be reminded of the preciousness of their inheritance? So many of the things they take for granted were achieved by their forebears at great cost — and I’m not referring to what the parents spent for those fancy degrees. So many things about our society work well. Our supermarkets are stocked with food from around the globe. Our homes, offices, and cars are heated and cooled for our comfort. Emergency help is available nearly everywhere by dialing 911. Just as crucial as trying to fix what’s broken is taking the time to appreciate and shore up what is sound.
The great liberal virtue is impatience with injustice. The great conservative virtue is gratitude.
Before graduates are urged to change the world, perhaps they should be encouraged to change themselves, or at least, to look inward. How many people have vainly resolved to lose 10 pounds or to donate 10 percent of their income to the less fortunate? Change is hard, even when, or perhaps especially when you’re trying to change yourself. If you’ve been unable to reform yourself, take that humility to the world, and remember it when you notice others’ flaws. Each graduate can ask himself: How kind was I to my siblings this year, and how dutiful to my parents? Taking his place in the adult world, he should resolve first of all to do the things within his own power: to be a faithful spouse and a reliable parent.
Humility, duty, self-examination, gratitude. Perhaps those are not the most inspiring words. But heeded, they stand the best chance of truly changing the world.
Making Sense of Eric Schneiderman
The former attorney general of the state of New York had a pattern of slapping and choking women with whom he was intimate. He also spat at them, demanded threesomes, insulted them, threatened them, and called one (who had dark skin) his “brown slave.” Without warning, he slammed a girlfriend so hard that he broke her eardrum. In another case, his palm left a red welt on a woman’s face that remained visible the following day.
These and other details about Eric Schneiderman were disclosed by Ronan Farrow and Jane Meyer in The New Yorker. Keep that in mind the next time someone suggests that the liberal media are untethered to reality and serve only partisan purposes. Schneiderman is not only a Democrat, he was a key Trump antagonist, and a champion of the MeToo movement.
This has left a number of feminists both furious and bewildered. It’s disorienting to see people you admired and assumed to be moral betray everything they supposedly believed in – something conservative women (and men) have experienced too. Samantha Bee, who had often lionized Schneiderman on her show, fumed “This is especially infuriating given his supposed woke bae-ness,” she said. “Schneiderman positioned himself as a feminist crusader, he championed the #MeToo Movement … he helped craft an anti-choking law even though he’s now accused of choking his girlfriends.”
The Huffington Post consulted a psychologist to help explain how it was possible that “male allies” can become “abusers.” Katha Pollitt, who once flippantly warned “never trust a male feminist,” is almost to the point of condemning all men now. “How simple life would be if only conservatives, or liberals . . . were abusers,” she wrote. “In fact, though, the only thing one can say with assurance is that they’re men. Yes, I know women can be abusers, and I know some men are great, but at the moment #NotAllMen is looking more like a wish than a declarative statement.”
Samantha Bee’s defiant conclusion is “You know who’s a better advocate for women? Women. The future is female, or at least it better be, because I am done with this.” Katha Pollitt’s resolve is similar: “I have no answers. But here’s what I’m going to do: Vote for women. Support women. Protect women. Believe women.”
In my forthcoming book, (June 26) Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense, I push back against this feminist tendency to deride men as a class and to disparage masculinity itself as somehow pathological. In the 1970s, some second wave feminists like Ti-Grace Atkinson, president of the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women, were so possessed by hatred for men in general that they lost sight of basic morality. Atkinson urged NOW to take up the cause of Valerie Solanas, founder of SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men). Solanas shot and attempted to kill Andy Warhol.
The counterculture of the 1960s and 70s broke down social norms, and then regretted what was unleashed. Today, feminists are grappling with the long roster of supposedly “enlightened” i.e. feminist men who’ve turned out to be serial abusers or worse. Samantha Bee mentioned “powerful weasels” Harvey Weinstein, Garrison Keillor, and Charlie Rose. The roster also includes Louis C.K., Al Franken, John Conyers, Matt Lauer, Mark Halperin, Leon Wieseltier, Bill Clinton, and many more.
Why are feminists more despairing about these revelations concerning liberal men than conservative women are about equally ugly stories concerning conservative men?
The answer, I’d suggest, is that liberals tend to believe that one’s politics and one’s morality are the same thing. If you hold the correct views about abortion, the minimum wage, women’s equality, gay marriage, and guns, it means not just that you agree with me, but that you are a good person. A man who champions the MeToo movement would never hurt a woman, right?
There is some mirror imaging on the right. Some conservative women are stunned to discover that men they thought were adherents of traditional morality turn out to be louts and even rapists.
A key conservative insight is that character is a matter of behavior, not professed beliefs. Judge people by their conduct, not their branding. How do you mold decent conduct? Conscientious parents who teach right from wrong and a culture that reinforces those lessons. The feminists helped to weaken some of the mores and institutions that tended to control male lust and abuse. At the time, they thought they were fighting an unjust “double standard,” but the sexual revolution damaged all standards, and we continue to sift through the fallout.
Nobel Talk
If President Donald Trump’s incendiary threats have actually frightened the “dear respected comrade” Kim Jong Un to lay down his nuclear arsenal, he will deserve the Nobel Peace Prize his fans are demanding. But the suits in Oslo might want to hold off before awarding another premature Peace Prize to an American leader.
One expects the press to swoon whenever a blood-drenched tyrant smiles and shakes hands with a democratic leader, and they played their part this time. After Kim’s announcement that he was suspending the nation’s nuclear testing, CNN’s Will Ripley gushed to Wolf Blitzer that “This is an extraordinarily significant development, and frankly a huge win for President Trump going into these discussions, this potential summit, with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.” Trevor Noah softened his anti-Trump tone, saying “I know our first instinct is to hate, but if it wasn’t for his craziness, North Korea would never have come to the table.” And Senator Lindsay Graham enthused that if President Trump “can lead us to ending the Korean War” while “getting North Korea to give up their nuclear program” in a verifiable way, then he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize and then some.” South Korea’s president said the same.
With characteristic modesty, Trump tweeted: “With all of the failed ‘experts’ weighing in, does anybody really believe that talks and dialogue would be going on between North and South Korea right now if I wasn’t firm, strong and willing to commit our total ‘might’ against the North. Fools, but talks are a good thing!”
Perhaps it’s relief after the unsettling exchange of schoolyard insults and nuclear threats between Kim and Trump, but it seems that people are rushing to declare that something momentous has been achieved when we have no reason to believe that, yet.
Even the most hawkish must always remain open to the possibility of real change in an adversary. Mikhail Gorbachev was a different kind of Soviet leader and it was wise of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan to recognize that. Anwar Sadat was sincere in his desire to make peace with Israel (though he sadly paid for it with his life). South Africa’s president F. W. de Klerk dismantled apartheid and agreed to majority rule.
It’s possible that Kim Jong Un is such a figure, but it is more likely that he is following in the well-worn path of his father and grandfather – fire off some missiles or attack South Korea’s military installations and then make solemn promises to reform. Cash check in the form of concessions from the West. Oh, and then cheat.
In 1991, North Korea signed a Joint Declaration endorsing the “denuclearization” of the Korean peninsula. Both sides promised not to “test, manufacture, produce, receive, possess, store, deploy, or use nuclear weapons” or to “possess nuclear reprocessing and uranium enrichment facilities.” There were immediate problems with compliance. The Clinton Administration responded with a flurry of diplomatic efforts (Jimmy Carter was a special envoy to Kim Jong Il) which led to the Agreed Framework of 1994, in which North Korea once again promised not to pursue nuclear weapons. In exchange, the allies gave the North heavy fuel oil and two “light water nuclear reactors” for peaceful energy. President Clinton called it “a good deal for the United States.” North Korea’s negotiator Kang Sok Ju, described it as “a very important milestone document of historic significance” that would resolve his country’s nuclear dispute with the United States “once and for all.” The pact, he swore, would resolve “all questions of the so-called nuclear weapons development by North Korea” that have raised “such unfounded concerns and suspicions.”
The North cheated, and formalized it in 2003 by dropping out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
In 2005, negotiators agreed that North Korea would be removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, and would no longer be the under the strictures of the Trading with the Enemy Act. In return – all together now – North Korea committed to shutting down the Yongbyon nuclear facility. In addition, “all nuclear weapons” would be “comprehensively declared and completely, verifiably and irreversibly eliminated.”
North Korea has been selling the same promise to denuclearize for 27 years, getting a good price every time.
“Coming to the table” is not such a milestone for the North Koreans. It’s worked brilliantly for them. The question is whether our president, so fond of claiming victories, will understand that solemn promises from this regime are worthless.
Ironic Consequences of Europe’s War Guilt
Adam Armoush is, for the moment, the most famous Jewish victim in the world – and he’s not even Jewish. He’s a 21-year-old Israeli Arab who was visiting Berlin with his friends and decided to test their suspicions that it was unsafe to don a kippa (skullcap) in public. Strolling down the street in the Prenzlauer Berg, a gentrified neighborhood, Armoush was attacked and beaten with a belt by a Syrian refugee who shouted “Yedudi!”
Anti-Semitic attacks have become increasingly common in Germany and throughout Europe. The roster of homicides in France, for example, includes the 2015 murder of four shoppers in a Paris kosher supermarket, the 2012 murder of seven, including three children, at a school in Toulouse, and the stabbing murder and burning of an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor last month, to cite just a few. Jews also suffer nearly daily threats and contempt from their neighbors. Many French Jews have pulled their children from public schools due to harassment by other students.
A 2013 survey by the European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) asked Jews whether in the past year they had “personally witnessed anyone being physically attacked because he or she is Jewish.” Among the French, 9.7 percent said yes. Among Swedes, 6.7 percent said they had. In 2016, majorities of Jews in a number of European countries including Germany, France, and Sweden said they sometimes or always avoided displaying clothing or other items that identified them as Jewish (the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany cautioned Jewish men this week to hide their kippot), and large numbers say they’ve considered emigrating. In the past 12 years, more than 40,000 Jews have fled France. Most settle in Israel.
The response among European leaders has varied. Some avoid the question or retreat to platitudes. Some police forces are reluctant to label attacks as “hate crimes.” Jeremy Corbin, leader of Britain’s Labour Party, is quite comfortable with leftwing anti-Semitism, which tends to bleed easily into every other kind. He defended the artist who painted a mural showing hook-nosed capitalists playing Monopoly on the backs of naked workers. He also calls Hezbollah and Hamas “friends.” France’s Emmanuel Macron has been much better. In January, when an 8-year-old Jewish boy was attacked in Sarcelles, Emmanuel Macron called it an “attack on our whole country.” Angela Merkel, addressing a crowd of 5000 who turned out to condemn bigotry, avowed that “Anyone who hits someone wearing a skullcap is hitting us all. Anyone who damages a Jewish gravestone is disgracing our culture. Anyone who attacks a synagogue is attacking the foundations of our free society.”
How can it be that only 70 years after the Holocaust, Europe’s Jews do not feel safe? It’s ironic, but one reason is guilt. Eager to live down their histories of colonialism and racism, Europe has welcomed millions of immigrants from the Third World. That’s admirable, since many of these migrants are grateful to receive asylum (and most never commit any crime, far less a hate crime). But for the Jews, tormented more than any other group in Europe’s history, this expiation comes at their expense. Many of the Muslim immigrants arrive with anti-Semitic animus. A recent survey in the United Kingdom found that 55 percent of Muslims harbored anti-Semitic attitudes, compared with 12 percent of the overall population. Asked whether they agreed that “Jews are responsible for most of the world’s wars,” 6 percent of Britons said yes, while 26 percent of British Muslims agreed.
Most of the anti-Jewish violence in Europe is the work of Muslim extremists. In France, for example, victims reported that 53 percent of their attackers were “people with extremist Muslim views,” 18 percent were “people with extremist leftwing views,” 4 percent were “people with extremist rightwing views,” and 3 percent were “people with extremist Christian views.”
Some call attacks on Jews and synagogues “anti-Zionism,” and strain to find justifications arising from the Middle East conflict. But Swedish Jews do not attack mosques in Malmo to protest Palestinian violence in Gaza. Imagine if such an attack did occur and the perpetrators claimed it was not anti-Muslim, but just “anti-Palestinian.”
The influx of immigrants has helped to spark the resurgence of rightwing nationalism in Europe, which is also chilling for the Jews. The Alternative for Germany is now the third largest party in Germany. Marine Le Pen heads the National Front, France’s second largest party. Hungary is led by an increasingly open fascist, Viktor Orban, and the Sweden Democrats (who are the opposite of their name) received 14 percent of the seats in the latest parliament.
Seventy-three years after the fall of the Third Reich and 27 years after the implosion of the Soviet Union, the western world is forgetting what can happen when the center does not hold. The Jews are now, as they have always been, a bellwether.
Playboy Comes to DC
Playboy Enterprises just announced that it has purchased a table at this year’s White House Correspondents Association Dinner. Swell. Just what we need.
The dinner, as you’ve probably heard, is an annual ritual of narcissism in which leading press figures don black tie and hope to see, or better yet, be seen with Hollywood stars. Like much of politics, much of journalism has become entertainment, and though journalists dub the dinner the “nerd prom,” the self-deprecation becomes more strained with each passing year as journalists themselves have become, literally and otherwise, “beautiful people.”
In 2011, President Barack Obama took the podium at the dinner to mock a particular guest – Donald Trump. Admittedly, Trump fired the first shots by seizing on the “birther” conspiracy, but even unprovoked, Obama had a weakness for scorn, and he ladled it on liberally. The cameras caught Trump glowering with no pretense of being a good sport. Seth Myers, the evening’s other entertainer, piled on: “Donald Trump has been saying he’ll run for president as a Republican, which is surprising as I just assumed he was running as a joke.”
It’s traditional for presidents to respond to the ribbing with a speech of their own, taking gentle swipes at the media and, ideally, themselves. Nancy Reagan was able to transform her image as a snooty Marie Antoinette when she performed a skit wearing rags and singing “Second Hand Rose.”
In 2017, President Trump, who has called the press “the enemy of the American people,” declined to attend, and says he will skip this year’s fest as well. It’s traditional for the president’s speech to be disarmingly self-deprecating, an unfamiliar mode for Mr. Trump.
Most will shrug at the inclusion of Playboy among the evening’s hosts. “The Bunny Beacon will be beaming from Washington” proclaimed the Washington Post, quoting Cooper Hefner’s diagnosis that “D.C. has a tendency to be sort of high-strung.” There were the pro-forma invocations of the First Amendment. The Post nodded to “Hugh Hefner’s clear interest in a free press,” but wondered why Playboy has waited until now to participate in the Correspondents dinner. The Hill’s reporting sheds some light on that. The invitation reportedly read: “Playboy has always been a passionate fighter for the First Amendment and for a free press in general.” Playboy’s participation this year will serve as an “appreciation for the work [journalists] do with a wink and nod to the culture and politics of D.C.”
Ah, so it’s a victory lap. The grandfather of porn, Playboy, is holding this party now to celebrate its triumph in every realm of American life. The “wink and nod” can be interpreted in many ways, but at least one immediately leaps to mind: The party of family values has elevated a man who has been featured on a Playboy cover and proudly displayed it in his New York office. Evangelical leader Jerry Falwell, Jr. and his wife posed in front of that cover with Trump, all three making the thumbs up sign, which, in context, was a gesture of surrender to the libertine culture Falwell’s father burned to resist.
And while the mostly liberal Washington press corps has a more benign view of pornography than evangelicals do, they do have some standards, don’t they? The White House Correspondents Association could have declined to include Playboy. After all, the supposed true purpose of the organization is to raise money for journalism students, though there are accounts suggesting that fewer and fewer of the proceeds have lately been going to scholarships. But simply for their sense of decorum and whatever seriousness of purpose they purport to uphold, they might have rejected Playboy’s money. They have been awfully censorious toward Sean Hannity (justifiably) for blurring the lines between journalism and sycophancy, so you might think they’d want to draw a line between what they do and what Playboy does. Sorry, I seem to have slipped into a reverie. Who are we kidding? Who doubts that some mainstream news organization will invite Stormy Daniels or Karen McDougal? As for Playboy, they’ve already invited Anthony Scaramucci, which is about perfect. Sleazy meets disgusting. I’ll leave it to you to decide which is which.
The Meaning of Ryan’s Departure
I’ve always felt a kinship with Paul Ryan. Maybe it’s the fact that we are both Jack Kemp acolytes. Maybe I have a soft spot for upright family men who are attracted to public policy by the desire to do good. Maybe I love conservative wonks. But Paul Ryan’s fate over the past several years is as good an indication as any of how far our politics has fallen.
Ryan’s departure will be not be mourned by Democrats or Trump loyalists. The Democrats caricatured Ryan as the goon throwing granny in her wheelchair off a cliff. They actually ran TV ads with a Ryan lookalike. Barack Obama singled him out for scorn at a White House meeting, claiming later that he was unaware Ryan was in the front row.
You might suppose that that would be enough to make Ryan a conservative hero, but life is often unjust, and when Trump came along, Ryan found himself a sudden symbol of the reviled “Republican establishment.” Though the anti-Ryan vitriol faded after Steve Bannon’s defenestration, he continued to be viewed with suspicion by the talk radio crowd and other arms of Trump Inc.
This was his reward for attempting to drag his party, and the country, toward a grown-up reckoning with our debt. Nearly single-handedly, Paul Ryan had managed to put tackling entitlements on the national agenda. As chairman of the budget committee, he convinced his colleagues to endorse modest entitlement reform. As he kept trying to explain, making incremental reforms now – with no changes for current beneficiaries or those in their 50s – can prevent drastic shortfalls and extreme benefit cuts that will be necessary in just 16 years when Social Security is depleted. The outlook is even worse for Medicare and Medicaid.
But Donald Trump arrived on scene with the supposedly blinding insight that changes to entitlements are unpopular. Well, no kidding. He promised never to touch Medicare and Social Security – not even to ensure their future solvency. And so, the responsible, future-oriented Paul Ryan found himself governing with a backward-looking, whistling past the graveyard president.
Even leaving aside the moral compromises that an alliance with Donald Trump necessitated, Ryan and the party he helped to lead also lost its compass on Ryan’s own signature issue – fiscal responsibility.
Tax reform may have been overdue, but it would have been nice if the party that fulminated about the dangers of deficits in the Obama years had found anything at all to cut – particularly when the economy is growing and unemployment is low. Instead, the budget and the tax bill combined will leave us with a federal budget deficit in excess of $1 trillion in 2020 and beyond. CBO budget director Keith Hall said that “Federal debt is projected to be on a steadily rising trajectory throughout the decade.” Under Republican guidance, the federal deficit will be roughly double what is was in the final year of the Obama administration. That is the reality of Speaker Ryan’s tenure in the age of Trump.
It is often suggested that Trump has much to teach the Republican Party about the importance of the white, working class and about the centrality of nationalism to Republican success.
But just as with entitlement reform, it’s one thing to say a thing is popular and quite another to say that it’s right.
What has Trump taught? That trade wars are the way to improve the lives of the working class? They are popular, at least with Republicans. A Politico/Morning Consult poll found that 65 percent of Republicans favored Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs. But if Republicans believe, as the overwhelming majority do, that tariffs are stupid and dangerous, then it would seem obvious that they have something to teach the president rather than the other way around.
I can’t say for sure, but I suspect that Paul Ryan’s diagnosis of what ails America is pretty similar to my own. We are not behaving as responsible adults. Our greatest political challenge is out of control debt. Our greatest social challenges are declining families, increasing dependency, and eroding social cohesion. The debt could have been addressed by government. The other trends continue to degrade our culture, our economy, and our personal lives. And the ascension of Trumpian politics – slashing, mendacious, corrupt, and polarizing – aggravates everything that was already going wrong.
Paul Ryan didn’t belong in Trump world. So much for worse for us.
When $63 Million Doesn’t Buy Working Toilets
When 450 students arrived at Anacostia High School in the District of Columbia’s southeast neighborhood on April 4, they found that few of the sinks or toilets were functioning and the cafeteria was flooded. They were advised by the Department of General Services to use the facilities at a middle school two blocks away until repairs could be completed.
Exasperated teachers organized an impromptu, hour-long walkout to protest, which is why this particular dysfunction made the news. A casual reader might note the plumbing fiasco and chalk it up to neglect of poor students and poor neighborhoods. That is the interpretation urged by DC Council Member Trayon White, Sr. who attended the walkout and declared that “The students and teachers need support from the leaders of the city because of the constant neglect happening at Anacostia.”
But it’s far from so simple. The District of Columbia has one of the worst performing public school systems in the country. It is also one of the most generously funded. Anacostia High School itself received a $63 million renovation in 2013. According to the DC school’s website, the project included “Full modernization and renovation of the existing high school using an adaptive re-use approach. Modernization . . . included; exterior restoration, roofing, systems replacement, ADA improvements, phased occupancy, technology enhancements, and sustainable design initiatives.” But not, it seems, working toilets.
Average per-pupil spending nationwide is about $11,000 per year, but according to the National Center for Education Statistics, Washington, DC was spending an average of $27,460 per pupil in 2014, the most recent year for which data are available. While most states spend about half of their funds on instruction – California is typical, expending $11,043 per pupil, with $5,757 going to instruction – the District spends only about a third of its total on instruction. It vastly outspends all of the other states. The next biggest spender is New York at $21,213 ($14,124 on instruction).
Where does the money go? “A great chunk seems to wind up in administration,” notes the Cato Institute’s Neal McClusky. Even cautioning, as McClusky does, that DC’s administrative costs may look elevated because it is required to do everything a state would do, the spending still far exceeds small states like Montana and Wyoming.
Teachers in DC are not slighted. The National Education Association lists Washington, DC as offering the highest starting teacher salary in the nation.
Ask the average voter if we should be spending more on K-12 education and you will get thunderous agreement, though people become a little less enthusiastic when they learn the true scope of current spending. While education spending has tripled over the past 40 years, student performance has remained flat.
But back to Anacostia High. Why in the world would a newly renovated school have malfunctioning plumbing? If you suspect corruption, I’m with you. According to the City Paper, between 2000 and 2013, the District spent more than $1.2 billion on school modernization. Yet auditors could not find evidence that $168,997,484 worth of expenses had been approved. City Paper quotes the audit as surmising that “The District may have paid fraudulent or inaccurate invoices.”
Anacostia High School’s enrollment is 100 percent minority and 100 percent poor. If these students are to have any shot at a decent life, they need to earn at least a high school diploma. Yet only 19 percent of seniors are on track to graduate this year. Is it all the responsibility of the public school system? Clearly not. These kids come overwhelmingly from disadvantaged neighborhoods and single-parent families. Their environments are characterized by disorder, crime, and drug abuse.
But if parents, religious leaders, and yes, community activists were serious about confronting this decades-long disaster, they would look to what works. There are schools in DC with healthy graduation rates, followed by college attendance. Some are regular public schools, but more are charters. Many of the successful schools draw from the same pool of applicants as the failing ones.
It’s appalling that the plumbing failed at Anacostia High, but the far greater travesty is the non-education it is providing to the neediest kids. Schools should be launching pads, not sink holes.
This Is What You Call a Conservative Budget?
Donald Trump woke up on Friday, March 23 and realized that a deficit-ballooning $1.3 trillion “omnibus” spending bill was awaiting his signature. The law increases defense spending but otherwise completely fulfills the spending priorities of the Democratic minority. Some have even said that the omnibus was “Barack Obama’s budget.”
Suddenly distressed by the “crazy” bill (doubtless due to something he saw on television) – the president snorted and pawed the ground. He threatened to veto the measure, panicking Washington for a few hours (most members of Congress had already left town for spring recess) until aides were able to summon Defense Secretary James Mattis to talk Trump off the ledge.
He signed it.
It fully funds Planned Parenthood. It increases outlays for Pell Grants and Head Start, and boosts funding for the Department of Labor and the Department of Education not only above the requests Trump had made, but above the levels in Obama’s last budget. It fails to deregulate the private health insurance market or to reform federal permitting rules on construction projects. Not a single agency was eliminated, though Trump’s original budget proposal had called for 18 to be scrapped. It makes no changes to entitlement programs, and oh, here’s something interesting, it actually forbids construction of a border wall in the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge in the Rio Grande Valley – the very place Trump supposedly wanted to begin construction.
From a conservative perspective, there was almost nothing to like in this budget. Yet, what did Trump single out as the reason he was miffed? Leaving “800,000+ DACA recipients totally abandoned by the Democrats.”
Okaay. Look, the premise of Trump’s entire campaign was that he was a brilliant dealmaker, and a real boss who knew how to get things done. But he hadn’t a clue as to how to develop a budget and achieve his priorities through the legislative process.
The president posed as the wounded party in this charade. Somehow a “crazy” process had landed a grotesque bill on his desk. He vowed that he would never sign another one. But did he make a single speech about the budget? Did he hold White House events, capture the news cycle (he IS good at that) on behalf of his legislative priorities, or parlay with Democrats to iron out compromises? Did he tweet about spending? Not exactly. Instead of carefully crafting a responsible budget that would begin to reduce deficits and debt, what was Trump doing? He was firing his Secretary of State via tweet, feuding with his Attorney General, holding campaign-style rallies, firing his lawyers, exchanging schoolyard taunts with Joe Biden that are beneath the dignity of the average 13-year-old, and congratulating Vladimir Putin on his “victory.”
During the presidential campaign, Trump had lambasted the Obama Administration for the immense debt over which it presided, urging that the country needed “someone like me” to sort out the mess. The debt, Trump promised, would be eliminated “over a period of eight years.”
As for the Republicans in Congress, a few voiced objections to the morbidly obese budget. “It just boggles my mind that we continue to spend at a level that’s no different than the last three or four years of the Obama administration,” marveled Rep. Mark Walker (R, NC). But most Republicans had little difficulty quieting their consciences and voting for a bill that a Heritage Foundation analyst acknowledged “supercharges our growth in deficits and the debt.”
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan used to bring charts explaining the risk of a debt crisis to his town hall meetings. During the 2012 campaign, he used the “debt clock” as a prop, noting that it was not a “scorecard” and warning that “the debt will weigh down our country like an anchor.”
That Paul Ryan hasn’t been seen in some time.
Mitch McConnell warned in 2011 that “spending and debt” was “the nation’s biggest problem.” That McConnell has also been AWOL. If anyone knows of their whereabouts, please contact the authorities.
But alas, we have no authorities. Republicans have used their control of both branches to enact a huge tax cut without offsetting spending reductions, to increase domestic discretionary spending to levels that delight Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, and to leave entitlements – the great drivers of unsustainable debt – untouched.
Both parties and the people who elected them are marching straight off a completely avoidable financial cliff.
A Little Too Much Reality in the Show?
Watching the parade of porn stars, reality TV contestants, and former Playboy models lining up to lambaste the President of the United States, as well as the daily trove of stories of wife beating, naked nepotism, gambling, and official corruption among his cabinet members and White House staff, I was reminded of a story Bill Buckley once told.
He had been nominated by the Nixon Administration to serve as one of our delegates to the United Nations. The FBI called around to his friends and colleagues, and one, William Rusher, groaned that he had already answered all of their questions when Buckley had been nominated for an earlier assignment. The agent replied: “I know, but it is my duty to ask whether Mr. Buckley might have done anything since 1969 to embarrass the president.” The sly Rusher responded, “No, but the Nixon Administration has done a great deal to embarrass Mr. Buckley.”
Imagine the FBI interviews with nominees like Gov. Nikki Haley or Gen. James Mattis. “Have you done anything that could embarrass President Trump?” It’s mind-bending. They are honorable people with stellar careers and he is a failed casino magnate, serial adulterer, swindler of ambitious naïfs (see Trump University), sexual predator, and all-around louse. Yes, he’s the president, but is he even capable of embarrassment?
You might say that Trump isn’t pretending to be a saint, and that he’s tough and strong and ready to be “our” son of a b—- (to paraphrase FDR’s supposed description of a Latin American despot), but it’s not quite that cut and dried. Trump maintains his innocence, which is where things get confusing.
Trump vehemently denies the accusations of groping and affairs, but this week it seems that the elaborate and expensive efforts he has undertaken to conceal his behavior are unraveling a bit. The resulting prurient press party was entirely predictable.
Stormy Daniels alleges that she had an affair with Trump. At first, the world yawned. But since then we’ve learned that Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen paid her $130,000 in hush money in October 2016. (Such nice lawyers Mr. Trump hires!) That may be a violation of campaign finance laws if Trump did not report it as an in-kind contribution. Beyond that, it reveals the contempt with which Trump treats the public. There was no affair, but Cohen had a sudden urge to make a charitable contribution to Stormy? And now Trump is suing Daniels for breach of the confidentiality agreement – in the amount of $20 million – though the official Trump position is that the agreement doesn’t exist. Got that?
Some are attempting to link this to the #MeToo movement – women must speak “their truth,” lawyer Gloria Allred explained – but it’s a safe bet that Stormy is thinking finances, not feminism. Mr. Trump, who stresses that winning is the only virtue he upholds, should admire that.
The same cannot be said of Summer Zervos, one of the 16 women who accused Trump of groping after the release of the Access Hollywood tape. If you recall, Trump claimed that all of the women were lying and that he would sue them after the election. Zervos, who was a contestant on The Apprentice, has now received the go-ahead from a judge for her lawsuit to proceed. She said he groped. He called her liar. She is suing for defamation. Trump’s lawyers had argued that his depiction of Zervos as a liar was “political speech clearly protected by the first amendment.” The judge rejected that argument, and citing the Paula Jones precedent, noted that no president is immunized against suits for purely private acts. This could open the door to sworn depositions, and possible further suits.
And because character is destiny, yet another Trump acquaintance, Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model, is also attempting to invalidate her secrecy agreement. Thanks to Donald Trump, we’ve learned that the gossip magazines have a practice called “catch and kill” for stories they want to suppress. The parent company of the National Enquirer apparently performed this service for Trump, paying McDougal $150,000 for the rights to her story.
Nevertheless, McDougal seems ready to tell her tale, and Daniels will tell hers (including allegations of threats emanating from Trump world). And perhaps, just perhaps, as they settle in this weekend to watch “60 Minutes,” the party of family values will wonder whether they really wanted to sign up for all this.
Much More Than Economics
There are so many things to lament about the modern world – fracturing families, the rise of authoritarianism, the rage for torn jeans — but there is also much to celebrate and savor. One is the abundance of great conversation available through podcasts. There’s my own, of course, Need to Know, and then there is the master.
If you’re not familiar with Russ Roberts’ EconTalk, you are in for a treat. Once a week, for 12 years, Roberts has been taking the dismal out of the dismal science. An economist and fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Roberts has a knack for identifying the next big thing. I had heard about driverless cars, Bitcoin, and machine learning, for example, long before these developments became widely discussed, because EconTalk had tackled them — and in the most engaging way.
For most of the topics Roberts covers, no specialized knowledge is required. By now, everyone knows that driverless cars are coming. But in one of the first discussions of the technology, EconTalk considered not just how it would affect jobs (an estimated 3.5 million Americans are employed as truck drivers), but how it might change many aspects of life. If everyone had a driverless car, everyone would, in effect, have a chauffeur. Time spent commuting could become much more productive, as people worked on their laptops while being ferried to and from the office.
But wait, would people even need to own their own cars anymore? If you could summon a driverless car with your phone app, you could get where you needed to go, and then release the car to the next person who required it. Many fewer vehicles would be needed. Think of all the garage space in office buildings and in homes that could be freed up for other uses. You could call a car to take you to the supermarket – or maybe you wouldn’t need to go the supermarket at all. Deliveries would be cheap. Traffic jams might be a thing of the past.
The podcast on price gauging laws should be required listening for every well-meaning politician. Duke University’s Mike Munger joined Roberts to discuss the effect of such laws after natural disasters like hurricanes. Bottom line: If prices are allowed to spike temporarily for essentials like gasoline, suppliers will have the incentive to invest in generators and so forth to provide them. The sooner gas is flowing, the sooner everyone’s power will be back up and running, at which time, prices will fall. Anti-gauging laws, though they sound good (“Why should unscrupulous merchants profit from disaster?”) actually prolong the crisis.
Often Roberts agrees with his guests, but when he doesn’t, he is the model of polite demurral. It’s a cliché that we should approach all subjects with an open mind, but to encounter Roberts is to realize, with force, how rare a truly open mind actually is. Always prepared to be convinced by a good counterargument, Roberts gives his interlocutors the opportunity to make their best case. He’s willing to say, “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” or “I might be wrong.” Tied into his open-mindedness is a skepticism about dogma in general and also an awareness of the fallibility of science.
On several podcasts, Roberts has explored the “replicability crisis” in psychology and other disciplines, and biases of various kinds in economics, climate science, medicine, and other fields. He’s also sensitive to the law of unintended consequences. One guest that I recall from a few years ago spoke of the irony that as we make appliances more energy efficient, we can actually increase energy usage rather than reducing it. Gas stations take advantage of the lower price of refrigerators, for example, by stocking sodas and other drinks. Each refrigerator is more efficient than its predecessor, but the result can be more overall energy use.
Roberts is unyielding on the topic of the bank bailouts. Several podcasts have explored the run-up to the financial crisis of 2007-2008. Roberts’ explanation of how we came to be a country that privatizes bankers’ profits and socializes their losses is soon to be a book.
Though the podcast is titled EconTalk, it’s really about much more – from organ selling, to empathy (an overrated virtue according to Paul Bloom), to how museums hoard art, to food waste (it’s okay!), to the moral (not just economic) insights of Adam Smith. The podcast stimulates the soul as well as the mind.
Man of Steel
“If you don’t have steel, you don’t have a country” declared President Donald Trump at a press availability with the Swedish prime minister. He was explaining his decision to impose a tax on steel and aluminum. Why these products?
Well, the president had just met with steel executives, who tend to press government officials to spare them from the burden of providing quality products at low prices. But it’s probably also traceable to Donald Trump’s sentimentality regarding steel. “When I was growing up, U.S. Steel, that was the ultimate company,” he said wistfully.
Not to engage in the argumentum ad Hitlerum or anything, but you know who else was transfixed by the talismanic image of steel? Joseph Stalin, the man of steel himself. Stalin believed that heavy industry was the key to gaining parity with western nations and so imposed on feudal Russia an enormous industrialization program focused on steel, coal, and oil. “Comrades” were dragooned into working in heavy industry; many literally became slaves. One government project, the White Sea Canal, used hundreds of thousands of slave laborers. During the years of the canal’s construction, between 100,000 and 200,000 laborers (many of whom were women) died or were shot. The massive development of steel and other heavy industry did indeed increase the USSR’s output, but the vast bulk of the production went to military uses while basic consumer goods like clothing, refrigerators, and washing machines remained extremely scarce.
Am I comparing our impulsive, petulant president to one of the worst mass murderers in human history? Only in this sense – both men thought they knew a lot about how things should run, and both were convinced that “I alone can fix.”
Stalin, of course, knew less than nothing about economic development, and plunged his country into famine and ruin from which it has not yet completely recovered.
Trump has no such power and no such ambition, but he does seem to share Stalin’s obsession with heavy industry. Our “man of steel” has overlooked quite a bit though. As the Wall Street Journal points out, only about 140,000 American workers are employed in steel production, whereas at least 6.5 million Americans work in industries that use steel such as autos, airplane parts, machine tools, and construction, to name just a few. Or, in other words, steel-using industries employ 80 times as many people as steel-producing industries.
So a tiny number of domestic steel makers will get to raise their prices and grab market share at the expense of steel consumers, both businesses and individuals. Beyond the industries that use steel, what happens to other key American products when our trading partners retaliate with tariffs of their own?
Trump justifies this crony capitalist move by reference to section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which grants the president the authority to impose tariffs in cases involving national security. This is transparent bad faith. We get two-thirds of our steel from domestic producers. Among the nations from whom we buy the rest, adversaries like China (2.2 percent) and Russia (8.7 percent) contribute trivial amounts. Our biggest suppliers are Canada, Brazil, South Korea, and Mexico. Moreover, Trump has also suggested that the steel tariffs could be dropped in exchange for concessions in NAFTA negotiations, proving that the national security argument is disingenuous.
The United States is largely responsible for the system of free and open trading that has gradually taken hold in the post-World War II world. It has enriched all of us immeasurably. Do nations cheat? Sure. China subsidizes and dumps and steals intellectual property. There are targeted duties that can be imposed upon cheaters. But if the United States is perceived to be cheating itself – by offering the absurd justification of national security to protect one favored industry – a key foundation of the international trading system could be undermined. One can easily imagine other nations imposing tariffs on American agricultural products (which, by the way, we subsidize) on the grounds that “food security” is key.
The lure of protectionism, like that of socialism, seems eternal. In 1807, under Thomas Jefferson’s guidance, Congress passed the Embargo Act, which cut off all international trade. Jefferson believed that Europe needed our agricultural goods and would buckle. You might say he thought trade wars were “easy to win.” Within a year, the American economy collapsed. Congress repealed the act.
Most economists, businessmen, and politicians have learned from history. Unfortunately, the man calling the shots prefers to get his information from the National Enquirer.