Foul language, debasement and politics

Posted on October 10, 2024 by Joe Weber

Just how far down can we go?

When the sketch comedy show “In Living Color” debuted on Fox in 1990, it introduced America to a wonderful phrase, “Clutch the pearls.” And, as our culture has continued to descend toward some unfathomable bottom, pearl-clutching has become ubiquitous, moving beyond shocked high-society ladies.

So, gentle reader, kindly indulge me while I engage in a bit of it (though I own no pearls).

Actor Sam Elliott, known for portraying cowboys and other men’s men, has just broken some new ground in this area in a fresh ad for Kamala Harris, available here:

In his deep, sonorous tones, Elliott says the vice president has “more courage, more honor, more guts” than Donald J. Trump has ever had. And he tells the bros — presumably the targets of the ad — to shake off anything holding them back. “If it’s the woman thing, it’s time to get over that … it’s time to be a man and vote for a woman.”

Will it work? Who knows? It takes a lot to cut through the clutter, especially with young male voters. Some 36 percent of likely male voters between 18 and 29 favor Trump, compared with only 23 percent of young women, according to the Harvard Youth Poll. While such results suggest that Harris enjoys a commanding lead among young people of both sexes, chipping away at Trump’s support among the bros can only help her.

But one thing about the ad is a bit unsettling — and here comes my pearl-clutching. “Are we really going back down that same f—-ing broken road or are we moving forward …?,” Elliott asks. So, unless there’s some editing, that ad — produced by a Republican anti-Trump group, The Lincoln Project — will not run on network TV.

Perhaps the language — including a word many of us have been known to use at times — is just fine, given the places on social media where the ad runs. That’s where the target demographic is, after all.

Howard Stern and Harris, source: Rolling Stone

Indeed, such demographics and all others are being keenly pursued by Harris and her vice presidential nominee. Tim Walz. That’s why Harris has appeared in such media as Howard Stern’s satellite radio show, “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and the Call Her Daddy podcast and Walz opted for “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” To be sure, Harris has also sought out the older demographics by sitting for a “60 Minutes” interview, but she wants the younger folks, too.

Still, the unsettling thing about the Elliott ad is that it’s part of a continuing debasement of political culture. Coarse language is just a part of that, a symbol of it.

Sadly, we can lay the blame for this squarely on Trump. This process began, of course, in 2016 with Trump’s juvenile nicknaming of his opponents — Crazy Hillary, Birdbrain for Nikki Haley, Pocahontas for Elizabeth Warren, etc. And that has continued with Crazy Kamala, Comrade Kamala and Tampon Tim. Trump is also known for his coarseness in his rallies, dropping f-bombs with regularity. “Let’s indict the motherf—-er,” he infamously said of Biden at a California GOP meeting last year.

To be sure, some Democrats have aired once-private vulgarities in public, too. In 2019, then newly elected Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib in vowed to “impeach the motherf—-er,” referring to Trump, in a meeting of the liberal group MoveOn.org.

And, as reported by The Washington Post, Harris has been known to be proud of her proficiency in profanity in private — but rarely in public. Last May, though, she bluntly described her thoughts about breaking barriers in a conversation at the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies.

“We have to know that sometimes people will open the door for you and leave it open,” Harris said. “Sometimes they won’t, and then you need to kick that f—ing door down.”

But Trump and his followers degrade language in public on a regular basis. As president, he referred to African nations as “s—holes” and called Joe Biden a “son of a b—-” and, earlier, famously boasted of grabbing women “by the p—-,” of course. His supporters have gleefully echoed his vileness at rallies, wearing T-shirts that say “Biden sucks, Kamala swallows.” Trump’s crowds seem to exult in the freedom he gives them to act, well, like a “basket of deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton memorably put it.

As the Post pointed out, there is a long history of presidents swearing in private, and maybe a growing level of acceptance for public profanity from leaders. But now Americans are hearing a woman in Harris’s position using unbecoming language, an unfamiliar reality, according to presidential historian Tevi Troy.

“There’s the question of whether it’s appropriate for a president to be cussing. Then there’s the second question of whether it’s considered ladylike to be cussing,” said Troy, who has studied presidents and profanity. “So she’s operating in both spheres, and we’re in uncharted territory.”

This goes beyond public language, though. After all, using decent language — in any setting — is just a matter of showing respect for others. And Trump is a master of disrespect. Recall how he mocked a disabled reporter, Serge Kovaleski, by mimicking his physical challenges.

Trump seems to delight his crowds by waxing profane about many people— Blacks, gays, immigrants, non-Christians of all sorts. In her criticism, Clinton derided Trump followers as racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and Islamaphobic, and those labels likely still apply to many of them. The attacks work for Trump.

Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, have displayed extraordinary disrespect for legal Haitian immigrants, for instance, in their attacks on residents of Springfield, Ohio. Their demonization and villainization works to whip up fear and racism among his white followers, as it confirms their sense of superiority by invoking tropes such as the eating of household pets.

“The power of such baseless accusations by Trump and Vance lies not in their factual basis, but in their resonance with long-standing racial fears about Black and brown people,” Princeton Prof. Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús writes in Time Magazine. “These anxieties transcend the specific moment of misinformation. Rather they tap into a fears rooted in Christian bias and cultural stigma and then perpetuated by law enforcement, animal rights groups, politicians, and white communities who see non-white immigrants as existential threats to the purity of American neighborhoods.”

Ever since Trump derided southern border-crossers as criminals and rapists in 2016, he has found a ready market among fearful white followers. One hears of people in lily-white areas rushing out to buy guns to protect themselves from the invading hordes Trump has described.

“Fear, like hope, can be very motivating and is not inherently bad. The challenge is to identify when fear is being used deceptively,” Dolores Albarracin, a professor of psychology, business, and medicine at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said in an American Psychological Association piece in 2020. “For example, intentional distortion of evidence is within the realm of disinformation and often foments fear for political purposes.”

Certainly, the denigration of Haitian immigrants falls into the latter category. Trump campaign lies about the pets were denied by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine and local Springfield, Ohio, officials, but Trump followers breezed right on by the facts. “Bomb threats, school closings, rallies, and more have come at the cost of misinformation and baseless claims,” the Columbus Dispatch reported. “Associating eating pets with immigrants is often considered a longstanding trope that exposes racism and discrimination.”

Such cultural debasement by Trump extends to the media and other institutions, as well, of course. The former president has long excoriated the media and his recent refusal to appear on “60 Minutes,” for fear that his misstatements would be called out by fact-checkers, just underscores that.

He has also demeaned the legal system (and not exclusively over his 34 felony convictions, as well as the $88 million in judgments he must pay a woman he raped, E. Jean Carroll). And he has similarly discredited the FBI, intelligence agencies and the military.

Of course, if Trump wins on Nov. 5, we can expect more of the same. If he loses — and if the GOP consigns him to the political dustbin — perhaps we can hobble back to a culture of normalcy. The Elliott video for Harris is not an official campaign ad and it’s highly unlikely Harris would greenlight such language in forthcoming ads. We could also expect that a President Harris would likely keep her salty language behind closed doors.

Celebrating the best of American culture is a lot of what Harris is about. Trump is all about something else entirely.

Catching the antisemitism of the day

Posted on October 7, 2024 by Joe Weber

Ta-Nehisi Coates comes up short after his visit to Israel

In 1596, Shakespeare caught the antisemitic spirit of the age with “The Merchant of Venice.” His Shylock lends money to a Christian, Antonio, on the condition that the moneylender can slice off a pound of Antonio’s flesh if he defaults. When Antonio fails to pay, he’s spared the knife only because another character argues that the security was about flesh, not blood, and thus Shylock couldn’t collect.

Still, Shylock comes up even shorter. He is charged with conspiring against a Venetian citizen and his fortune is seized. He gets to keep half his estate by converting to Christianity – something his daughter separately does when she runs off with a Christian man.

The Nazis loved the play. More than 50 productions were mounted in Germany between 1933 and 1939, Smithsonian Magazine reported.

Today, we see a similar phenomenon with a celebrated modern author, Ta-Nehisi Coates. Though his work is nowhere near as distinguished as The Bard’s, Coates reflects today’s widespread antisemitic sensibility with his latest offering, “The Message.” And, like Shakespeare, his work is generating a lot of heat. The book “is a masterpiece of warped arguments and moral confusion,” argues one critical writer, Coleman Hughes. Others differ, of course.

Coates offers a central chapter in the book about his visit in the summer of 2023 to the West Bank. There, he writes, he saw cisterns on the roofs of Palestinian homes that collected rainwater that the householders depend on. He contrasted the primitive plumbing with Israeli settlements on the West Bank where “you can find country clubs furnished with large swimming pools.”

To Coates, the different systems smacked of the segregated South. “On seeing these cisterns, it occurred to me that Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and fountains but the water itself,” he wrote. “And more, it occurred to me that there was still one place on the planet—under American patronage—that resembled the world that my parents were born into.”

His writing offers what a reviewer in The New Yorker called Coates’s version of moral clarity. It seeks to join the struggles of brown Palestinians with Black Americans, echoing views that have long been interlaced with antisemitism.

Jay Caspian Kang, source: Character Media

“Palestinians and Black Americans share a profound connection, and it is the duty of people of conscience who would oppose Jim Crow to oppose the oppression of Palestinians,” reviewer Jay Caspian Kang writes. “The struggles cannot be disentangled and written off as foreign or complicated.”

Indeed, Coates seeks to simplify the long pained Middle Eastern conflict. And he gives the century-old tensions an odd – and strained — racial cast. Coates “is casting off what he sees as the white standards of writing and its addiction to ‘complexity’ and stating, instead, his version of moral clarity,” Kang writes.

Really now — “white standards of writing”? Where might one find such things?

For his part, Coates describes his book as an effort to debunk the complexities he claims that journalists invoke to obscure Israel’s occupation, as The Free Press reports. The writer complained in an interview with New York magazine that the argument that the conflict was “complicated” was “horseshit.” That was just how defenders of slavery and segregation described these plagues a century ago. “It’s complicated,” he said, “when you want to take something from somebody.”

Never mind how much Palestinian terrorists have sought – over decades and by the bloodiest means possible – to obliterate an entire state. Never mind that just a year ago, such terrorists raped, murdered and pillaged, demonstrating a savagery far exceeding the treatments West Bank residents get, even in the admittedly lopsided Israeli military courts.

In fairness, Coates visited months before the ghoulish violence of Oct. 7th last year, and before the Gaza and Lebanese wars. His 10-day trip was his first in-depth encounter with the conflict. As The Jerusalem Post reports, half of the trip was guided by writers associated with the Palestine Festival of Literature, or Palfest, and the other half was led by Israeli left-wing activists associated with the anti-occupation group Breaking the Silence.

Clearly, he was not deeply immersed in the area and that showed. But, even given his shallow — and perhaps heavily propagandized — acquaintance with the issues, one has to wonder how he could be so blind to the reasons Israelis fenced off the Palestinian territories. Was he that ignorant of the Intifadas of 1987 and 2000, when thousands on both sides died?

Was he that unaware of the infamous Passover Massacre of 2002, when terrorists killed 30 people in the Israeli city of Netanya. Did he not know that this spurred the reoccupation of the West Bank and spawned the fences? Was he blind to the very many peace deals that Palestinians walked away from?

Simplicity and simple-mindedness are two different things. A journalist – and Coates is foremost a reporter – needs to bring a basic understanding of history to his work. Just looking around doesn’t cut it. But Coates seems to prefer simple-mindedness.

Since his book came out, the press has been filled with a good bit of argument over sharp questions that a CBS journalist, Tony Dokoupil, posed to Coates on Sept. 30 on the usually light-fare CBS Mornings show. The reporter challenged Coates’s one-sided view, mainly for its gaps:

“Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it?,” Dokoupil asked. “Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it? Why not detail anything of the First and the Second Intifada, the cafe bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits? And is it because you just don’t believe that Israel in any condition has a right to exist?”

Coates responded that there is “no shortage in American media” of reporting about such matters. He is most concerned, he argued, with “those who don’t have voice.” Further, he said he is offended by states built on the idea of “ethnocracy.” He claimed there are two tiers of citizenship in Israel, one for Jews and one for Palestinians.

Never mind that coverage on CNN and other outlets overwhelmingly deals with the sufferings of Gazans and West Bank residents, paying relatively little mind to the displacement and deaths among Israelis. Never mind that those allegedly lacking a voice have found plenty on American campuses. Never mind, too, that Israeli Jews include people of a crazyquilt of ethnicities and that the single largest group, in fact, are brown peoples of Sephardi backgrounds. Never mind that Palestinian Israelis vote and have had elected representatives in the Knesset since the founding of the state.

Really, Coates, how can you omit so much?

For Dokoupil’s probing questions in a fairly short exchange, he was criticized by a top executive at CBS, Adrienne Roark, who was reportedly seconded by network chief Wendy McMahon. In a staff meeting on Oct. 7, of all dates, Roark argued the interview was not in line with the network’s commitment to neutrality and did not uphold the network’s standards. Without elaborating on the punishment for Dokoupil, if there was one, she said the matter had been addressed internally.

To be sure, Dokoupil, who has written about his conversion to Judaism, did bring some passion to his questions. That’s perhaps not surprising because his ex-wife lives in Israel along with their two children. Indeed, he said that the book “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist,” given its characterization of Israel. He said the book “delegitimizes the pillars of Israel.”

Still, the journalist didn’t raise his voice. And he did what a good journalist does – he elicited answers from Coates that shed light on the author’s views.

And Dokoupil’s questions were defended by the network’s chief legal correspondent, Jan Crawford. “I thought our commitment was to truth,” Crawford said, according to an audio recording of the meeting published by the Free Press. “And when someone comes on our air with a one-sided account of a very complex situation, as Coates himself acknowledges that he has, it’s my understanding that as journalists we are obligated to challenge that worldview so that our viewers can have that access to the truth or a fuller account, a more balanced account. And, to me, that is what Tony did.”

At least one other journalist touched on the same ground days before the network host did.

In a piece for The Atlantic, author Daniel Bergner wrote: “The more relentless Coates becomes in his prosecution of Israel, the more he loses his way. His habitual unwillingness just to recognize conflicting perspectives and evidence, even if only to subject them to counterarguments, undermines his case. Might it have been worth noting that Israel is surrounded by Arab states and populations committed to its annihilation? That to a great degree, Palestinian leadership as well as many Palestinian people share this eliminationist view, which might help explain the forbidden roads and onerous checkpoints? That Baruch Goldstein’s unforgivable mass murder came on the heels of others, by Muslims of Jews, near the same sacred tomb? That, some would argue, the Palestinians have rejected two-state proposals running back to the late 1930s, when the British put forth a plan that would have granted the Jewish people only about 20 percent of the land that is now controlled by Israel?”

Regrettably, Coates’s views are not out of line with those of many in the progressive ranks. One Black writer on X said Dokoupil’s approach reflected “his Jewishness, his feelings, his knee-jerk Zionist defense mechanisms – but what’s also present is a very white, very American thing: his white supremacy.” The Palestinian-Italian comedian Dean Obeidallah claimed the journalist “repeatedly attacks and smears Ta-Nehisi Coates for daring to discuss Palestinian humanity in his new book.”

There’s no doubt that Coates is remarkably talented. His candor about his tortures at the hands of an abusive father and his fear of other Black people in Baltimore, described in Between the World and Me, is exceptional (he ultimately sees his mishandling as a product of white racism). And his imaginative flights in The Water Dancer are entrancing and powerful.

But his lack of a basic understanding about the Middle East reveals a huge gap in his knowledge. He lacks the substance of a Thomas Friedman, who has written eloquently and fairly about the region, for instance, or any number of other journalistic observers who’ve spent a lot longer than 10 days in the area.

Do his generalizations and simplifications add up to antisemitism? If not, they come awfully close. They echo much of what Americans have heard in coarser form from such figures as Louis Farrakhan and even the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

Certainly, the pathology can be surprisingly subtle. Even today, scholars debate whether Shakespeare was indulging in antisemitism or merely exploring it. After all, the playwright gives Shylock one of the more moving monologues in the play:

“Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.”

Shakespeare appeared to offer some human fellowship and even sympathy for Jews in that monologue, at least. Coates, for his part, showed little understanding even in a visit to Yad Vashem, where he saw a row of soldiers there “safeguarding nothing less than the evil of the Jewish state,” Bergner wrote. Coates saw an evil barely obscured by the “moral badge of the Holocaust.”

It’s extraordinary how a person who can see so many other things so clearly can be so blinded.

Dickens would have been proud

Posted on October 2, 2024 by Joe Weber

JD Vance’s performance on the debate stage was quite Dawkins-like

In 1838, Charles Dickens gave us a most memorable character in Oliver Twist. His Jack Dawkins is a masterful pickpocket, a marvel at skillful deception. He’s known as the Artful Dodger.

JD Vance makes the fictional character look like a piker.

To be sure, Yale Law School can point to the GOP vice presidential nominee as a superbly trained graduate. He’s articulate, can be gentlemanly and can master complex facts well.

Consider what another grad of the school had to say about him:

“At our shared alma mater Yale Law School, I used to have to debate people like JD Vance all the time— phony strivers who will lie and say anything to get ahead,” former Obama Administration aide and CNN commentator Anthony Kapel “Van” Jones tweeted before last night’s debate. “They are hard to beat. Coach Walz will be constrained by his decency. Let’s see if a good, big hearted man can beat a pretender with a high IQ, but low integrity.”

Vance told a lot of whoppers, but give some thought to his biggest dodge of the night. When Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic nominee for vice president, pressed him on whether Donald J. Trump lost the 2020 election, Vance ducked. He was unwilling to contradict or offend his senior running mate, who still maintains he won. “Tim, I’m focused on the future,” he said. Walz’s retort: “That is a damning, that is a damning non-answer.”

As for his focus on the future, Walz pushed on Trump’s efforts to lay the groundwork for the public to not accept a Trump-Vance loss. Vance’s flagrantly dishonest answer was that Trump “peacefully gave over power on January the 20^th.” Huh, did he forget Jan. 6, 2021, as so many Republicans seem eager to do?

As The Wall Street Journal recounted, “JD Vance deflected when asked about comments he made after Jan. 6, 2021, saying that he would have allowed Congress to entertain alternative slates of electors from key swing states, a power that the U.S. Constitution and federal law don’t grant to the vice president.”

But Walz, to his credit, hammered home the point.

“He lost the election,” Walz said. “This is not a debate. It’s not anything anywhere other than in Donald Trump’s world, because, look, when Mike Pence made that decision to certify that election, that’s why Mike Pence isn’t on this stage. What I’m concerned about is where is the firewall with Donald Trump? Where is the firewall if he knows he could do anything, including taking an election and his vice president’s not going to stand to it. That’s what we’re asking you, America. Will you stand up? Will you keep your oath of office even if the president doesn’t?”

Yes, Walz often came across as fuzzy, even inarticulate. Until he was pressed, for instance, he didn’t own up to misspeaking about being in Hong Kong during China’s suppression of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989. He had, in fact, been to China soon afterward and, mostly on school trips, visited some 30 times later. Walz also botched a reference to Iran, instead garbling his words and saying: “But the expansion of Israel and its proxies is an absolute, fundamental necessity for the United States to have the steady leadership there.”

Chalk that sort of thing up to nervousness and, as some commentators have suggested, to his and Kamala Harris’s refusals to grant more major new outlet interviews. Such interviews can be great opportunities to hone answers to difficult questions. Mark it down, too, to a congressman and governor who spent most of his career teaching high school kids and serving in the Army National Guard, not polishing untruths at the likes of Yale.

By contrast, consider Vance’s tapdancing on abortion, a major challenge for Republicans who crave the independent non-evangelical women’s vote. Vance denied his documented past support for a national ban on abortion, insisting he sought only to set “a minimum national standard” – whatever that means.

And consider his dodge on choice, as he insisted that abortion should be a states’ rights matter, with different states free to set different policies – no matter whether that forces women to travel to find such care (which caused the death of one such Georgia woman, as Walz noted). Vance also repeated the anti-abortion movement’s saccharine and insincere arguments about giving women other choices:

“I want us, as a Republican Party, to be pro-family in the fullest sense of the word. I want us to support fertility treatments,” Vance said.” I want us to make it easier for moms to afford to have babies. I want it to make it easier for young families to afford a home so they can afford a place to raise that family. And I think there’s so much that we can do on the public-policy front just to give women more options.”

There were many more such examples in Vance’s too-smooth-by-half presentation.

“Vance repeatedly stretched, twisted and abandoned the facts (e.g., minimizing climate change as ‘crazy weather patterns,’ denying increased manufacturing under the Biden-Harris administration, claiming the administration ‘lost’ more than 300,000 children, misrepresenting his own position on abortion, claiming Trump saved the Affordable Care Act), or simply ducked the question (e.g., deporting children, seizing federal lands for housing, refusing to certify the 2020 election),” Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post put it in her newsletter.

For his part, she wrote, “Walz landed jabs on Vance’s extremism and went after felon and former president Donald Trump for ‘fickle’ and irresponsible leadership (e.g., brushing off traumatic brain injuries inflicted on soldiers by Iran as ‘headaches,’ calling climate change a ‘hoax’).”

Rubin also gave the Democrat high marks for a couple scorching lines: On gun violence: “Sometimes it is just the guns,” Walz said. And on abortion rights: “How can we as a nation say that your life and your rights, as basic as the right to control your own body, is determined on geography?”

She argued that “Vance came across as slick, rude (interrupting the moderators and whining about being fact-checked) and preprogrammed.” By comparison, she argued that Walz was a “happy warrior.”

Maybe, maybe not. But some of the best assessments of the night came from opinion-writers for The New York Times, most of whom gave the debating victory to Vance – but only on style points. Consider their left-handed compliments:

“Vance did an excellent job of impersonating a decent man,” Farah Stockman said. And Binyamin Applebaum added: “He made Trumpism sound polite, calm and coherent.” Maybe the most trenchant view came from Jamelle Bouie, who said: “Vance won this debate. It’s not hard to see why. He has spent most of his adult life selling himself to the wealthy, the powerful and the influential. He is as smooth and practiced as they come. He has no regard for the truth. He lies as easily as he breathes.”

Some voters may make up their minds based solely on these debate performances. And, if they read the fact-checks, that may be enough for them to see Vance for who he is, not who he cast himself as. Certainly, they ought to look past the hail-fellow-well-met façade that Vance presented, paying mind instead to the Vance who feeds red meat to the mobs at Trump campaign events.

“Less obvious is the disconnect between the Vance we saw last night and the Vance who’s been stoking fear with tales of pet-eating immigrants and problematic elections on the campaign trail,” Fortune’s Diane Brady wrote.

In the end, few voters will make their choice based on the No. 2 men on the tickets. Surely, Trump and Harris will stand at the fore on Nov. 5.

Hulu’s The Artful Dodger, source: The Michigan Daily

Still, the artful dodger did show up his boss in one major respect. Trump’s lies are often easy to read, sometimes given away by his capo-like rage-filled body language (and dutifully recorded by legions of fact-checkers). Vance tells his at times with a doe-eyed ease and conviction that almost masks an Ivy League sneer.

“I cannot imagine many voters would switch sides based on this outing,” Rubin wrote. “But perhaps some voters will conclude that someone as condescending and nasty as Vance should not be a heartbeat from the presidency.”

Marketing can move from silly to dangerous

Posted on October 1, 2024 by Joe Weber

Trump’s badly timed opportunism is anything but PresidentiaL

On a recent Southwest flight, the attendant gave out little bags of pretzels bearing some peculiar language. “My mom and I created Stellar Snacks in 2019 with a dream of crafting pretzels infused with passion,” the writing on the bag said. “It’s not just a pretzel … it’s a labor of love.”

Oh, really now.

Yes, marketing is important. And yes, it’s normal for marketers to stretch the truth just a bit to sell their wares.

But there are times when we must call BS for what it is. That’s kinda the way it is in our presidential election race now, too.

There’s an extraordinary amount of BS out there as we get closer to Nov. 5. Today, for instance, Donald J. Trump offered this reaction to the missile attack by Iran on Israel:

“Under ‘President Trump,’ we had NO WAR in the Middle East, NO WAR in Europe, and Harmony in Asia, No Inflation, No Afghanistan Catastrophe,” Trump posted on his Truth Social outlet. “Instead, we had PEACE. Now, War or the threat of War, is raging everywhere, and the two Incompetents running this Country are leading us to the brink of World War III. You wouldn’t trust Joe or Kamala to run a lemonade stand, let alone lead the Free World.”

Never mind that in 2018 Trump pulled the U.S. out of a U.S.-Iran nuclear deal, ratcheting up hostilities between the countries. Ignore the fact that an Iran-backed group then, in December 2019, launched rockets at an Iraqi military base, killing a U.S. contractor and wounding our soldiers and others, and provoking retaliatory strikes in Iraq and Syria by the U.S. Never mind that in the following month, the U.S. killed the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, triggering missile attacks on U.S. forces and killing some of them.

This was peace?

The truth – as opposed to the marketing – is that tensions between Israel and Iran, as well as between Iran and the U.S. have been a constant for many years. They are erupting now, all in the wake of the October 7, 2023,invasion in Israel by Iran-backed Hamas. That triggered Israel’s Gaza invasion and led to increasing rocket attacks on Israel by Hezbollah. And that, in turn, set off the Israeli reaction in Lebanon that has led us to today’s missile attacks by Iran.

But none of those historical facts deter Trump from arguing that these eruptions — and others — would never have happened had he been in the White House again.

“If I was in charge, October 7th never happens, Russia/Ukraine never happens, Afghanistan Botched Withdrawal never happens, and Inflation never happens,” Trump claimed. “If I win, we will have peace in the World again. If Kamala gets 4 more years, the World goes up in smoke.”

His claims sound wonderful. They are also ahistorical nonsense.

How would Trump have halted Hamas, whose members built extraordinary tunnel networks in Gaza for years, including during his term? What could he have done to deter the group that he hadn’t done before, as it burrowed beneath Gaza? The terrorist group’s timing likely had more to do with it seeing a chance to take advantage of tumult in Israel over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s domestic problems. Indeed, Hamas’s war-triggering actions likely had even more to do with the threat it saw in then-growing Saudi-Israel rapprochement and diminishing support in Gaza for the group.

As for Russia and Ukraine, the latest war’s roots go back at least to 2014, a couple years before Trump’s ascension to power. Back then, Russian paramilitaries took over Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk areas and Russia then invaded Crimea, taking control of the region. Thousands of Russian soldiers flooded in over the next several years and fierce fighting raged between 2017 and 2019, during Trump’s term. Did Trump do anything to toss Russia out? Despite a peace agreement, Russia then began its fullscale invasion in early 2022. It was all of a piece.

And, as for Afghanistan, one can only wonder why Trump maintained U.S. troops there during his entire term. It was clear for many years that the U.S. had won nothing enduring in the country since 2001. So why did Trump leave the withdrawal from one of America’s longest and least successful wars to his successor? Why were American soldiers still dying there on his watch?

Trying to rewrite history in the self-serving way Trump is doing may fool some of his backers. After all, they likely see him as a strongman who can set the world aright and cure domestic and foreign ills. In his rhetoric, Trump offers strength, harmony and peace.

But was there really harmony and peace during his tenure – at home or overseas? Recall that George Floyd, a Black man, was killed by police in May 2020, in Minnesota, during Trump’s last year in office. The event triggered protests nationwide, with disturbances in well over 100 cities. As for peaceful relations overseas, recall the coronavirus tensions with China in 2020 and Beijing’s clampdown on Hong Kong, as tensions between the U.S. and China grew. Were these times of tranquility?

For all of his business failures – which include six bankruptcies – Trump is a clever marketer. “The Apprentice” turned him from a struggling developer with a bad rep in New York into a national emblem of tough-minded leadership, never mind that the show was a venue in which facts never mattered.

Now, Trump’s efforts to rewrite history will likely con some of his devotees just as the “reality” show did. Perhaps they are the sort of folks who can believe that pretzels can be “infused with passion.”

But will he fool anyone with a passing acquaintance with facts? Anyone who has some understanding of history?

What is happening now in the Middle East is extraordinarily dangerous. Keeping full scale war at bay will require delicate diplomacy, and even with that a far greater explosion may well be unavoidable. If Trump were a decent leader, he would keep his mouth shut about that and, maybe, even support President Biden’s efforts.

But then, this is a man who sells sneakers, Bibles and even a picture book bearing a cover with the image of him raising his fist after being grazed by a bullet. You can get Trump’s signature on the book for $499. This is a man who brought public a social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group, through a shady offering, only to have it fall from its March 2022 high of $97.54 a share to the current $16 (no doubt, with many of his followers taking the hit).

The would-be president’s marketing is shameless. Now, at a time of global peril, it’s also dangerous.

Easy fixes sometimes are anything but

Posted on September 25, 2024 by Joe Weber

Contrasting the Trump and Harris economic planS

Politicians like easy-sounding solutions to complex problems, particularly on the economic front. Their fixes often are aimed at pleasing voters who know little or nothing of economics. At times, their efforts smack of pandering and might even be harmless.

But, at other times, they can be quite dangerous — as seems likely with the plans of Donald J. Trump. Just mull over what 16 Nobel laureate economists have to say:

“The outcome of this election will have economic repercussions for years, and possibly decades, to come,” warns a letter signed by Columbia Prof. Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist at the World Bank; Harvard Prof. Claudia Goldin, former director of the Development of the American Economy program at the prestigious National Bureau of Economic Research, and 14 other Nobelists. “We believe that a second Trump term would have a negative impact on the U.S.’s economic standing in the world and a destabilizing effect on the U.S.’s domestic economy.”

They caution that Trump’s plans, including his goal to impose tariffs of 10 percent to 20 percent on foreign goods and 60 percent on Chinese-made products, will do exactly the opposite of what he’s been promising as he has attacked the Biden-Harris administration for inflation. Just as inflation rates are coming down, those duties would kickstart a price-spiral anew.

“Many Americans are concerned about inflation, which has come down remarkably fast,” the economists argue. “There is rightly a worry that Donald Trump will reignite this inflation, with his fiscally irresponsible budgets. Nonpartisan researchers, including at Evercore, Allianz, Oxford Economics, and the Peterson Institute, predict that if Donald Trump successfully enacts his agenda, it will increase inflation.”

And listen to some of those folks, who’ve crunched the numbers on Trump’s plans:

“The Peterson Institute for International Economics think-tank in Washington calculates that 20 per cent across-the-board tariffs combined with a 60 per cent tariff on China would trigger a rise of up to $2,600 a year in what the average household spends on goods,” reports the Financial Times. “They say that the tariffs would disproportionately hit the low-income households that Trump claims his economic policies help protect.”

And the Peterson Institute is hardly alone. The Tax Policy Center, concurs, albeit with slightly different figures because Trump has floated both 20 percent and 10 percent global tariffs.

“A worldwide 10 percent tariff and a 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods proposed by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump would lower average after-tax incomes of US households in 2025 by about $1,800, or 1.8 percent,” writes center senior fellow Howard Gleckman, a former BusinessWeek colleague. “They’d reduce imports into the US by about $5.5 trillion, or 15 percent, from 2025–2034.”

The consensus among the experts is that Trump’s plan would hit consumers hard. The effect would show up not only in finished goods made overseas, but in anything manufactured in the U.S. with foreign-made components, as the higher costs would filter through the system. Thus, there would be no escaping the higher prices.

Beyond just ratcheting up inflation, Trump’s plans could drive down gross domestic product and employment.

“Candidate Trump has proposed significant tariff hikes as part of his presidential campaign; we estimate that if imposed, his proposed tariff increases would hike taxes by another $524 billion annually and shrink GDP by at least 0.8 percent, the capital stock by 0.7 percent, and employment by 684,000 full-time equivalent jobs,” says another nonpartisan group, the Tax Foundation.

The kick in the teeth that Trump could deliver to the nation may also come at a tough time, as the economy slows under the Federal Reserve’s so-called “soft-landing” approach. The Fed, the independent group that has the job of reining in inflation, recently lowered interest rates by a substantial half-point in the federal funds rate. That’s because its leaders believe that inflation is moving toward a sustainable 2 percent annual rate, the Fed’s target, without driving unemployment up to unacceptable levels.

The Federal Reserve, source: Investopedia

As the Fed tries to balance employment and inflation, it is no doubt mindful that the national jobless rate recently rose to 4.2 percent after dipping as low as 3.4 percent, a 54-year-low, earlier in the year. The Fed is following classic economic theory: when the jobless rate is too low, higher wages kick up inflation; when unemployment is too high, of course, that’s a red light for the economy.

In time, the lower interest rates that the Fed has engineered should deliver an upward jolt to the economy. That will set the stage for the next president – whoever that is – to bask in the glow of sustainably low unemployment with reasonable inflation. But that president’s policies, if they are inflationary, could tip the balance.

As the experts see it, the outlook under a Trump presidency is hardly cheerful, particularly if his tariffs trigger an all-out global trade war. “The last time we were in a trade war under Trump, the global manufacturing cycle went into a recession,” Julia Coronado, a former Fed economist who now runs the MacroPolicy Perspectives consultancy, told the Financial Times.

Recall that, during Trump’s term, the economy slipped into recession from February to April 2020, a few months before his tour in the White House ended. Covid drove that downturn, which was marked by a jobless rate of 14.8 percent in April of 2020. When Trump left office, the jobless rate had fallen to 6.4 percent and it fell substantially after that, in part thanks to the infrastructure-spending policies of President Joe Biden.

Contrast Trump’s plan with Harris’s blueprint for stimulating housing construction, particularly for the middle class. She wants to boost housing supply by expanding the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, providing incentives for state and local investment in housing and creating a $40 billion tax credit to make affordable projects feasible for builders. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s, and Jim Parrott, a housing adviser under the Obama administration, estimate that America has a shortfall of three million homes right now, and Harris aims to close that gap. The two are advising her campaign on these plans.

Ben Harris of the Brookings Institution, a former chief economist of the U.S. Treasury, concurs that the plan is sound. “Critics assail the high cost of subsidies to developers, but they are the best tool the federal government has to incentivize homebuilding,” he writes. “We desperately need more affordable homes in America – millions of them – and the only practical way to boost supply quickly and meaningfully is to offer financial incentives to local governments to expand zoning for affordable housing and to developers to build it. The vice president proposes to do both.”

To be sure, Harris’s plan to provide $25,000 to first-time homebuyers is drawing less praise.

Calling that “a really bad idea,” Michael Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, says: “The ultimate beneficiary of that credit is not going to be first-time home buyers. It’s going to be people selling homes.” Economics writer Peter Coy of The New York Times echoes that, saying the plan would do nothing to boost housing stock, but only demand. “Sellers surely would take advantage of the increased demand by raising their prices,” Coy writes. “So a big portion of the taxpayer money that was intended for home buyers would wind up in the pockets of sellers.”

But it’s far from clear how the construction stimulation efforts and the aid to homebuyers would offset one another. A rush of homebuilding in theory should lead to lower prices, and the numbers of people likely to be involved in her $25,000 support effort seem relatively small.

Moody’s estimates that Harris’s down-payment plan would help some 11.7 million more first-time homebuyers, including 2.75 million first-time Black and Latino homeowners. This is just 3.2 million more first-time homebuyers and 1 million more Black and Latino first-time homebuyers than would take place without her plan.

For her part, Harris is doing some pandering by proposing to attack alleged price-gouging, particularly in grocery costs. Quoting a campaign statement, The Washington Post reported that Harris wants to implement “the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries — setting clear rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive corporate profits on food and groceries.”

The details were not clear, the Post reported. But it said Harris would aim to enact the ban within her first 100 days, in part by directing the Federal Trade Commission to impose harsh penalties on firms that break new limits on so-called gouging. The statement did not define gouging or excessive profits.

As Alexander Henke, an economics professor at Howard University, told the school newspaper, Harris’s “vague” plan appears to be more like a political economy move than an economic one, tapping into popular sentiment against price gouging by delivering poll-tested messaging. And Harris should know better — she studied economics at Howard and her father, Donald, is a retired Stanford University economics professor.

What’s more, this horse long ago left the barn. Most of the inflation is now behind us, suggesting that the economy is resolving the inflation on its own and there would be few prosecutions.

Just look at the numbers. Prices for food overall rose 9.9 percent in 2022, faster than in any year since 1979, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The hike was especially sharp in so-called food-at-home prices, up 11.4 percent. But the rises have slowed since then, climbing last year by 5.8 percent overall and by 5 percent for food-at-home. This year, the department expects prices for all food to increase 2.3 percent, with food-at-home prices rising just 1.2 percent.

What drove up prices in prior years? Were greedy corporations taking advantage of consumers? Were nefarious or misguided Biden-Harris policies driving up the price of eggs (something VP nominee JD Vance embarrassingly got wrong in a Pennsylvania grocery store photo-op)?

Not according to experts at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. They point to post-Covid volatility in global commodity prices and a sharp rise in wages for grocery-store workers (likely related to a shortage of such workers). When such “input” costs rise, everyone in the production and retail chain tries to sustain their profit margins. As it happened, foodmakers showed no margin gain in recent years, while retailers showed only a modest uptick in already-thin margins.

Other key elements of the plans of both candidates suggest far different approaches — Trump would take a largely top-down tack while Harris, as she puts it, aims to build the economy from the middle class out. She hit hard on this theme in a Sept. 25 address on the economy and her idea are spelled out on her website.

Harris would boost the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent and she has promised not to raise taxes on people making less than $400,000 per year. She wants to restore and expand the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit, including a $6,000 child tax credit for the first year of a newborn’s life. She would also increase the tax deduction for start-up businesses from $5,000 to $50,000, a move she argues would stimulate innovation among all-important small businesses.

By contrast, Trump wants to reduce the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 15 percent for companies that make their products in the U.S. He already cut the rate from 35 percent during his 2017-2021 presidency. It’s long been known that such moves deplete government revenues. Trump also said he would end taxes on overtime pay and on tips (the tips idea is one Harris also suggests). And Trump also aims to exempt Social Security income from taxes, unmindful apparently of how the Social Security system, even under the current system, will likely be insolvent by 2035 unless policymakers impose a fix.

Trump also wants to extend individual tax cuts he pushed through Congress in 2017, including for the wealthiest Americans. Experts estimate that would reduce revenue over a decade by about $3.3 trillion to $4 trillion.

Harris has also proposed hiking taxes on high-income earners. Americans earning below about $100,000 annually would continue to pay no taxes on long-term capital gains and higher-income families earning up to $1 million would continue paying up to a maximum rate of 20 percent. But those who earn $1 million a year or more would see a rise in the tax rate on their long-term capital gains to 28 percent.

Whether soaking the rich a bit, as Harris proposes, is good or bad economically, it may sell politically. And, if nothing else, it’s likely to do far less harm than Trump’s tariffs would.

Nebraska may matter again

Posted on September 22, 2024 by Joe Weber

How antidemocratic efforts could sway a presidential election

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” French journalist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote in 1849. “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Consider 1968 and 2024. There are big differences, of course, but in some ways the years are echoing one another, especially in the pivotal role Nebraska may again play in a presidential election.

Nebraska’s public TV station in 2008 produced a documentary about the state’s key role in the election of over a half-century ago. The piece, “‘68: The Year Nebraska Mattered,” ably charted the ways presidential contenders courted support in the state.

The documentarians may have even more reason to revisit the theme about this year.

Recall that in 1968, the country was beset by often-violent polarization. Vietnam was tearing us apart, pitting young people against old, conservatives against liberals. Racism was a huge issue, as the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. provoked rioting across the country.

An openly racist strongman candidate for president thought Nebraska was so important to his campaign that he appeared in Omaha. George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, came to the state to court voters for his American Independence Party. His visit triggered rioting in the then-small city and he drew condemnation from the state’s Republican governor, Norbert Tiemann, among many others.

Meanwhile, Democrats also stormed the state for their primary. Sens. Robert F. Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy both came to woo convention delegates, hoping to beat incumbent Vice President Hubert Humphrey for the nomination. On the Republican side, Richard Nixon vied with New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller to his left and Ronald Reagan on the party’s right. Nixon, who was trying for a comeback after losing the 1960 presidential election, stumped for voters in Omaha, too.

As it turned out, Nixon swept Nebraska for the GOP ticket. While Kennedy won over the Nebraska Democrats, his assassination on June 5 left the party ultimately with Humphrey. And, in the end, Nixon prevailed nationally, overwhelming both Wallace and Humphrey that November.

Now, Nebraska is looming large again – even larger this time — as Donald J. Trump presses legislators in the state to overturn its practice, dating back to legislation in 1991, of splitting its Electoral College votes by Congressional district. Nebraska will have five such electoral votes and Trump fears that he will lose one such vote, that of the 2^nd District, comprising Omaha and its suburbs. While the state overall went for Trump in 2020, he lost that Omaha area electoral vote.

The district has gone twice for Republicans and twice for Democrats in the last four presidential elections, as reported by the Nebraska Examiner. To avoid a repeat of his 2020 loss, Trump wants the state legislature to switch over to the winner-take-all system that prevails in other states, a change that would, in effect, disenfranchise many Omaha-area voters, as the rest of Nebraska tends to go GOP.

As polls suggest that there will be a tight vote nationally, just a single vote in the Electoral College could put Harris over the top, giving her the 270 she would need. Thus, Trump’s electoral gamesmanship.

Unsurprisingly, the opportunistic Republican governor of Nebraska, Jim Pillen, backs Trump’s efforts. But, so far, he hasn’t amassed enough support among the state’s legislators to do this. Pillen went so far as to bring a couple dozen Republican legislators to his mansion to hear an in-person pitch for eliminating the electoral rule from Sen. Lindsey Graham, as the Examiner reported. Trump also spoke by phone beforehand with some of the attendees.

The only other state to have a similar split-vote rule is Maine, which has taken that approach since 1969. So far, however, legislators in the Democratically dominated state have balked at making a change, even though that could help Democrats by taking away a likely GOP single electoral vote. Trump carried a single Maine district in both 2016 and 2020, getting one of the state’s four votes.

The states each award a single Electoral College vote to the winner in each of their congressional districts, plus two votes to the statewide winner of the popular vote.

Maine pioneered the split-vote system as part of an effort to push the country toward a system where the popular vote matters more than the Electoral College does, as the Bangor Daily News reported. Recall that five presidents, including George W. Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016, lost the popular vote but prevailed in the college vote. Trump was swamped in both in 2020, though he continues to deny that.

Trump’s effort to overturn the Nebraska split-vote practice is of a piece with his general antidemocracy approach, of course. His supporters recently enacted a rule in Georgia to require counting ballots by hand, which would likely delay results and, according to critics, could lead to many errors. The change is being challenged in court.

Recall that Trump infamously tried to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes to put him over the top in the state in 2020. Trump’s phone call to the official was filled with a slew of false claims by the former president, as the Brennan Center documented.

Recall, too, Trump’s efforts to discredit elections all across the country. More than 60 court cases went against him, including many that involved judges appointed by Trump and other Republicans.

If he does win this fall, Trump’s intentions to subvert democracy are troubling, whether they involve electoral manipulation, concentrating more power in the White House or summoning the military to suppress dissent. His plans — some of which are based on Project 2025, despite his disavowal of the document — have been criticized by such nonpartisan groups as the ACLU and Protect Democracy, along with Democratic leaders from President Biden on down.

Trump has long been an admirer of autocrats, even praising one, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, by name in his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. The former president warmed to the idea of being a dictator on day one in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity. And his vice presidential nominee, JD Vance, recently shared a stage with autocrat-loving Tucker Carlson, a disgraced former Fox News host turned podcaster. Carlson did a fawning interview with Vladimir Putin and recently gushed over a Holocaust denier on his podcast.

If Trump defeats Harris — with or without overturning the Nebraska system — his bid to upend the longstanding split-vote approach in Nebraska may just be a sign of what more is to come. Much has changed since the state made a difference in 1968, but we again see a racist demagogue with a strongman approach trying to make a mark in Nebraska at a time of great polarization. The biggest difference this time is that he’s got much of the state’s Republican establishment behind him.

State Sen. Mike McDonnell, source: Nebraska Examiner

The choice of whether to toss out split-voting could be close — maybe even a matter of a single vote in Nebraska’s Republican legislative ranks. Fittingly, that may hinge on local Omaha politics, according to the Examiner. State Sen. Mike McDonnell, a labor leader and Democrat-turned-Republican, aspires to run for mayor of the city.

Would his constituents want to support someone who made their votes irrelevant? When he switched parties, McDonnell said he opposed a shift to winner-take-all. A spokesman said he’s sticking with that stance — for now.

And will antidemocratic efforts prevail nationally? If so, the path to those may begin in the state capitol of Lincoln, Nebraska.

Unfinished business

Posted on September 18, 2024 by Joe Weber

As the Trump-Harris race shows us, sexism remains alive and well

Fifty-four years ago this Sept. 19, Mary Tyler Moore launched an eponymous hit series on CBS about a young woman who was “gonna make it after all” as a TV journalist in Minneapolis. “Mary Richards” would build a life for herself as an independent woman. The show ran for seven seasons and won a stunning 29 Emmys. Widely hailed for being part of so-called Second Wave Feminism, which focused on equality and discrimination, the series dealt with sex, sexism, birth control and other hot-button topics of the time.

Debuting as women were surging into the workplace in larger numbers, the Mary Tyler Moore Show paved the way for other TV efforts that revolved around women demanding to be on equal footing with men. Among them were “Rhoda,” “Murphy Brown,” “30 Rock” and, in some respects, “Friends” and “Cheers,” all heavily influenced by Moore’s groundbreaking effort.

How can it be that a half-century on from then America has still not left the battles over sexism behind? How can it be that for the current generation of women political figures such as Donald J. Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, are doing their best to remind us of what, in many respects, were the bad old days? How can it be that gender remains an issue for many Americans as they ponder whether a woman can serve as president?

Women now approaching their 60s — such as Vice President Kamala Harris, 59 — were children when “Mary Richards” was challenging glass ceilings on Moore’s show. But, all around them, real women were doing the same.

Harris’s late mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, for instance, came to the United States from India alone at 19, earned a doctorate in nutrition and endocrinology from the University of California Berkeley, and went on to make important contributions as a researcher focusing on breast cancer. As a single mom, moreover, she raised Harris and her sister after splitting up with Harris’s father.

As gains that women have made are under siege now, it’s no surprise that Harris should adopt as one of her campaign mantras “We are not going back.” In counterpoint to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” evocation of a mythical American past, Harris’s tagline suggests progress in matters such as reproductive freedom, LGBTQ rights, Black and other minority rights, and a modern version of feminism — one in which a woman can become not only the first female vice president, but president.

Harris would have America “turn the page” — another tagline — on Trumpism. That, pathology, as she sees it, is the 78-year-old former president’s use of racial divisiveness, his juvenile treatment of opponents, and his well-recorded disrespect for the military, his disregard for the law (as his felony criminal convictions suggest) — along with his sexism.

Trump’s attitudes and actions toward women, of course, seem like something on which turning the page seems well overdue. Recall Trump’s lewdness in the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape. Take note of his sexual abasement of E. Jean Carroll, after which juries found him liable for abuse and defamation, costing him more than $90 million. Don’t dismiss his hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and his extramarital affair with Playboy model Karen McDougal, part of his well-documented pattern of cheating on three wives.

Remember that about two dozen women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct dating back to the 1970s. Recall that his first wife, Ivana, accused him of rape during their 1990 divorce (she later retracted her claim). Another woman accused him of “attempted rape” in 1993 at his Mar-a-Lago resort, but settled a separate breach of contract case and forfeited the rape claim. Still another alleged that Trump attacked her on a flight to New York. Trump denied it all.

Just how vile is he? He looks on own daughter, Ivanka, in, well, a less than fatherly way. “If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her. Isn’t that terrible? How terrible? Is that terrible?,” he said in 2006 on ABC’s “The View.” And, in a 2015 interview with Rolling Stone, Trump reportedly celebrated her “beauty,” adding, “If I weren’t happily married and, ya know, her father …” He was even rebuked by his former chief of staff for sexual remarks about Ivanka in front of White House staff.

Trump’s extraordinary litany of public comments define him, too. To pick three from a very long list, he labeled his own former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. and former Gov. Nikki Haley “birdbrain,” said “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband, what makes her think she can satisfy America?,” and said of talk show host Megyn Kelly “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” He slandered Harris as “Dumb as a Rock,” only to be humiliated by the former California State Attorney General and former U.S. Senator’s brilliance in skewering him in their debate.

Fortunately, many American women have long had Trump’s number. “President Joe Biden won women by 15 points over Trump in 2020, according to exit polls, up from former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s 13-point victory among women in 2016,” The Washington Post reported. “Polls suggest that this year, women prefer Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris over Trump by similar margins. Harris led Trump by 13 points among women in an ABC News/Ipsos poll” released in early September.

Disdain for Trump is especially pronounced among younger women — even while younger men don’t shun him quite as much. “Sixty-seven percent of women 18 to 29 supported Vice President Kamala Harris in a New York Times/Siena College poll in six swing states last month, compared with 40% of young men,” The New York Times reported. “Fifty-three percent of young men in those states backed Donald J. Trump, compared with 29% of young women.”

Still, substantial numbers of women back Trump, in spite of his misogyny and coarseness. Trump has implied that Harris’s former romantic relationship with Willie Brown, a former San Francisco mayor, fueled her political success. And as the Times reported, he recently shared a screenshot on Truth Social showing an image of Harris and Hillary Clinton, appended with commentary from another user, with a reference to oral sex.

Asked by a Times reporter what she thought about Trump posting that image, co-founder of Moms For Liberty Tiffany Justice stammered: “You know what, I think that, uh, a lot of people say a lot of things. And we’re focused on the issues that are hurting American voters.”

Women who support Trump seem willing to turn their eyes away from a lot. Like Melania Trump, who suggested that her husband’s celebration of sexual assault in the Hollywood Access tape was just “locker room talk,” they wave aside his depravity.

Evangelical women who back him may see Trump as the sinner who is G-d’s tainted vehicle in areas such as abortion, although his waffling on the matter — declining to endorse a national ban — lately has irked many of them and smacked of betrayal. As he has sought to win over women concerned about such bans, Christian leaders have suggested his backpedaling could dissuade religious voters from showing up on Election Day. R. Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminar, told The New York Times’ The Run-Up podcast that Trump faces the “grave danger” of evangelicals staying home on Nov. 5.

Harris and her team, however, are busy reminding voters that Trump just last spring proudly claimed to have destroyed the protections of Roe v. Wade by appointing Supreme Court justices who gutted the longstanding legal precedent. “After 50 years of failure, with nobody coming even close, I was able to kill Roe v. Wade, much to the ‘shock’ of everyone,” Trump said on his social media platform.

Trump, moreover, has lost some of his base even among evangelical women. The Rev. Billy Graham’s granddaughter, Jerushah Duford, famously condemned Trump in 2020. “How did we get here?,” she asked in a USA Today piece exhorting others to abandon him. “How did we, as God-fearing women, find ourselves ignoring the disrespect and misogyny being shown from our president? …. Jesus loved women; He served women; He valued women. We need to give ourselves permission to stand up to do the same.”

In mid-August, Duford made her support of Harris clear, taking part in an “Evangelicals for Harris” Zoom call. “Voting Kamala, for me, is so much greater than policies,” Duford said. “It’s a vote against another four years of faith leaders justifying the actions of a man who destroys the message Jesus came to spread, and that is why I get involved in politics.”

Will more women turn out for Harris? They might if they look into Trump’s history more closely, along with the views of his “childless cat ladies” running mate, Vance. The GOP vice presidential nominee apparently would have many women of the Mary Tyler Moore generation revisit their child-rearing days with grandchildren and give parents more voting power than childless Americans.

“In 2020, [Vance] did not demur when the podcast host Eric Weinstein asserted that helping care for youngsters was ‘the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female, in theory,’” The Atlantic reported. “The next year, Vance suggested that parents should have ‘more power—you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic—than people who don’t have kids.’ He also tweeted, “‘Universal day care’ is class war against normal people.’”

In past elections when Trump ran, the gender gap was substantial. This time around, it could prove to be a yawning chasm. And when one explores why, the question arises: How could any self-respecting woman, of any age and any religion and any race, support this man?

“Shining city on the hill” or “a nation in decline”?

Posted on September 15, 2024 by Joe Weber

The facts don’t bear out Trump’s doomsaying — at least in economic terms

In a memorable election debate with President Jimmy Carter on Oct. 28, 1980, GOP nominee Ronald Reagan asked Americans: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”

Amid the stagflation and rising unemployment of the time, many were not. So Reagan went on to turn Carter into a one-term president. Reagan even won the popular vote (unlike Donald J. Trump in 2016). And he went on to serve two terms.

That “better-off” question is rising again, of course (as it often has in presidential races). As one might expect, Fox News has bruited it, citing a poll the outlet took last spring that suggested 52% of voters felt worse off. Still, in a poll a bit later by The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Siena College, the outlook was similar, as more than half of registered voters in six battleground states rated the economy as “poor.” Many Americans even wrongly think we’re in recession.

Like many of those voters, some of my relatives are answering “No” to the “better-off” question, saying they felt richer during the Trump years than they have during the Biden-Harris term. And a libertarian friend argued the same point, contending that the reasons many Americans back Trump are not based in racism or sexism, but rather on economics. They just don’t think Democratic policies have helped them, he said.

But are we, in fact, better off? Do the data substantiate or undercut the often-partisan feelings, deeply felt as they may be?

Without seeing their tax returns, of course, we can’t know whether certain individuals have fared better or not since January 2021. We don’t know how their businesses have done or how they have coped if they are on fixed incomes (though Social Security boosts for costs of living of 8.7% in 2023 and 3.2% this year may have helped).

But we can explore the so-called national “vibecession” to see if it is based in facts or is just a matter of hazy memories. And recall that some of those memories have been demagogically reinforced by Trump’s inaccurate bravado about overseeing the greatest economy in world history.

“Nostalgia’s rosy glow makes almost all presidents more popular after they leave office,” Los Angeles Times journalist David Lauter writes. “[T]hat effect may have been especially sharp this time because the steep inflation of 2021 and 2022 caused voters to fondly recall the good economy of Trump’s first three years in office; and younger voters may have only vague memories of Trump controversies that took place in their teenage years.”

Certainly, we must concede that inflation has been a bear, especially for lower-income folks:

Indeed, because higher prices are baked in, it may not help former Vice President Kamala Harris that inflation has moderated substantially this year. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Sept. 11, the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers rose just 0.2% on a seasonally adjusted basis in August, the same increase as in July. Over the last 12 months, the all-items index increased just 2.5% before seasonal adjustment.

It also may make little difference to voters that presidents don’t control inflation and can only modestly influence it. Reining in price hikes is the province of the independent Federal Reserve, which is poised to lower interest rates for the first time in four years because of recent progress on the price front. The rollback could make housing and other things more affordable for many, though not for a while yet.

Despite that, of course, Trump has trumpeted inflation as a reason Americans should elect him. He knows all too well that a price spiral has cost incumbent presidents — notably Carter and Gerald Ford — the White House. It helped Reagan to get in, too, so Trump understandably figures it could be a winning issue for him.

What’s more, real incomes haven’t been growing much. As polls expert Nate Silver writes, real disposable personal income, basically how much money people have left after taxes and inflation, is historically one of the best predictors of election outcomes. And it’s been flat during Biden’s tenure: people’s incomes aren’t growing much. Part of that, he notes, was due to spikes caused by COVID stimulus spending — but even over the past year, it’s barely kept up with population growth:

But to maintain that things haven’t been getting better economically — overall — is simply false. If one looks at gross domestic product, for instance, the trend line has been markedly up:

And unemployment rates reflect gains, too. Recall that Trump’s term was marked by a Covid-induced recession that lasted from February to April 2020 (hardly the sort of thing one can look back on fondly). After Trump left the Biden-Harris team a jobless rate of 6.4% in January 2021, the climb back economically challenged the Democrats. It took the labor market a bit less than two years to recover to pre-recession levels. Now, we’re just above historic lows in joblessness, with a 4.2% national rate.

Moreover, one’s feeling of well-being has a lot to do with housing costs and prices. And for homeowners, times could scarcely be better, at least insofar as their wealth is tied to the value of their homes (the story is different, of course, for renters and would-be home buyers):

To point to just one example, the home of my relatives in suburban Jackson, New Jersey, is now worth $570,000, a good bit more than the $120,000 they paid in 1990 (and that $120K equals $296,500 today, so they’ve had dramatic inflation-adjusted gains), according to Redfin. By that measure alone, they are much better off than in the past.

But much of that data above is backward looking. At the moment, it seems, many consumers are hardly feeling impoverished, and some are beginning to believe Harris would be a better choice than Trump on the economic front.

“Consumer sentiment was essentially unchanged for the fourth consecutive month, inching up 1.4 index points,” the director of the much-watched University of Michigan consumer survey reported in an early assessment of August survey results. “With election developments dominating headlines … sentiment for Democrats climbed 6% in the wake of Harris replacing Biden as the Democratic nominee for president. For Republicans, sentiment moved in the opposite direction, falling 5% … Sentiment of Independents, who remain in the middle, rose 3%.”

“The survey shows that 41% of consumers believe that Harris is the better candidate for the economy, while 38% chose Trump,” survey director Joanne Hsu writes. “Overall, expectations strengthened for both personal finances and the five-year economic outlook, which reached its highest reading in four months….”

Of course, big-picture facts may matter little to folks who are convinced the past was better. Indeed, with its Make America Great Again theme, the Trump candidacy is based on a rosy view of the past, one that under scrutiny seems beyond saccharine and, for many Americans, is just inaccurate. His negativism, with comments such as “we are a nation in decline,” play well with some, but will they with most?

To be sure, there is plenty of reason to be concerned about various social pathologies in the United States — school shootings come to mind first and foremost. Despite my libertarian friend’s view that racism and sexism are well back in the country’s rear-view mirror, moreover, many Americans are concerned about such ingrained traits in our national psyche — even if we have had progress there.

“Voters overall have mixed views of the impact of Harris’ gender and race and ethnicity on her candidacy,” a recent report by the Pew Research Center finds. “More say the fact that Harris is a woman and that she is Black and Asian will help her than hurt her with voters this fall. Somewhat more voters see Harris’ gender as a potential negative (30%) than see her race and ethnicity this way (19%).”

“Harris supporters are far more likely than Trump supporters to say the vice president’s gender and race will be a liability,” the report continues. “More than twice as many Harris supporters (42%) as Trump supporters (16%) say the fact that Harris is a woman will hurt her with voters. Fewer Harris supporters think her race and ethnicity will be a hindrance (31%), but just 8% of Trump supporters say the same.”

With comments such as “she happened to turn Black,” Trump is doing his best to rouse the racists among his devotees while trying to undercut Harris’s support among Blacks. Certainly, Trump doesn’t seem to be succeeding in the latter regard, with some 82% of Black voters “definitely” or “probably” in her corner, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll.

In the end, to the extent that Harris can get people to focus on facts, she may even persuade some that things have been getting better, Trump’s incessant focus on the negative notwithstanding. And there’s a decent shot things will get even better going forward. Focusing on a sunny future — America as a “shining city on the hill” — helped Reagan. Might that work for Harris, too?

“Me, debate again? You crazy?”

Posted on September 13, 2024 by Joe Weber

Trump can’t afford another disaster, but the first may make little difference

Of course, he won’t debate her a second time.

For the benefit of his followers and his ego, Donald J. Trump declared that he bested Kamala Harris in a debate that even conservatives – smart ones anyway – declared was a hands-down disaster for him.

“Kamala Harris baited Trump with surgical precision, triggering his insecurities — about his crowd sizes, his wealth, his racism, his criminal record — while giving him full scope to wallow in his delusions. In the 90-minute debate, she exposed Donald Trump and broke him,” Charlie Sykes wrote on Substack. “Trump was undisciplined, unprepared, and easily goaded into his signature tantrums of grievance, which were as incoherent as they were divorced from reality … Tens of millions of voters watched a live reality television show in which a bitter, confused, and diminished old man was falling apart in front of their eyes.”

Another conservative, David Frum, weighed in in The Atlantic: “He repeated crazy stories about immigrants eating cats and dogs, and was backwards-looking, personal, emotional, defensive, and frequently incomprehensible. Harris hit pain point after pain point: Trump’s bankruptcies, the disdain of generals who had served with him, the boredom and early exits of crowds at his shrinking rallies. Every hit was followed by an ouch.”

Certainly, much of the public appeared to agree that Vice-President Harris mopped the floor with Trump. Shortly after the Sept. 10 fracas, a CNN poll showed Harris winning 63% to 37% among debate-watchers and a YouGov poll showed her winning 54% to 31% among registered voters who watched at least some of the melee, with 14% unsure, according to The Washington Post.

So, with his animalistic smarts, Trump is wise to avoid a second debate. How could he possibly want a second round of his angry squinting, venting and waxing irrational and conspiratorial? By contrast, when he controls the stage and speaks to true believers in his rallies, he’s the master of his own domain (reference intentional), the TV-savvy demagogue who can appear slick and poised (despite many slips).

For Harris backers, however, the problem is that the debate may not have moved the needle much with the few undecided folks out there. The latest polls barely budged, with Harris ahead of Trump by just 2.8 points, at 47.1% to Trump’s 44.3%.

Despite Harris’s national lead, the model that polls expert Nate Silver uses still gives Trump a higher chance of winning the necessary 270 Electoral College votes in November, as Newsweek reported. It shows Trump taking the critical battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada and North Carolina. The other swing states, Wisconsin and Michigan, are a toss-up.

How can this be? How can such an inarticulate boor, a proven criminal and business and political failure, still have the slightest bit of credibility? After his disastrous performance, how can his party still rally around him, unlike the Democrats and President Biden?

The answer is complicated. But I suggest it starts, paradoxically, with the fact that Harris won the debate. In her triumph, she is many things that Trump’s followers can’t abide: smart, young, female and Black.

On the smart point, Trump has long been popular with undereducated voters. In 2016, only 29% of Trump voters had college degrees, compared with 43% of Hillary Clinton’s voters. And while non-college whites made up a majority of Trump’s voters (63%), they constituted only about a quarter of Clinton’s (26%). As Trump famously said after winning a Nevada primary in 2016, “I love the poorly educated.”

Did many of them even watch the debate? Some 67.1 million Americans tuned in, more than the 53.1 million who watched Biden self-destruct in the June 27 faceoff with Trump, but less than the 73 million who watched the first Trump-Biden match in 2020 and far less than the 84 million who watched Clinton and Trump battle the first time in 2016.

And let’s remember that Clinton was widely pronounced the winner in her three debates with Trump back then. Only some 32% of those polled pronounced him the winner in his best performance in the second debate. Just 24% judged him favorably in his first outing with Clinton.

With both Clinton and Harris, I submit, the fact that both women ran circles around Trump intellectually was a negative with much of the undereducated electorate. Recall that such folks likely spent much of their time in school resenting the smart kids, so they likely would give Clinton and Harris little credit for their debating savvy.

Second, Harris at 59 is relatively young, especially compared with the 78-year-old Trump. Middle-aged voters tend to support Trump, while those over 65 are split evenly, and are up for grabs. Thus, we see Harris pounding away on the Biden Administration’s efforts to cut insulin costs, its moves to let Medicare negotiate with drugmakers and its $2,000 cap on out-of-pocket drug costs. We also see Trump’s plan to exempt Social Security payments from income taxes.

A lot of the older folks turned away from President Biden after his debate debacle. Will the Trumpers among them do so now after the former president’s poor performance? Will they see the signs of cognitive decline that have long been evident to mental health professionals?

Psychiatrist Richard A. Friedman, source: Weill Cornell Medical College

“If a patient presented to me with the verbal incoherence, tangential thinking, and repetitive speech that Trump now regularly demonstrates, I would almost certainly refer them for a rigorous neuropsychiatric evaluation to rule out a cognitive illness,” Weill Cornell Medical College professor and psychiatrist Richard A. Friedman wrote in The Atlantic. “A condition such as vascular dementia or Alzheimer’s disease would not be out of the ordinary for a 78-year-old.”

Still, let’s not forget the potent impact of identity politics. For all her brilliance, her achievements and her skills, Harris is female and Black, guaranteeing an uphill fight. According to the latest Pew Research Center polling, most Harris supporters say Trump’s race will help him (59%), as will his being male (56%). Most Trump supporters, by contrast, say the former president’s race and gender will not make much of difference (66% say this about Trump’s race, 61% say the same of his gender), but the latter numbers are hardly encouraging in a tight race.

Another element in Trump’s favor is the weariness many voters feel about the race, a sentiment the non-stop headline-grabbing nonsense and divisiveness from Trump has fueled. Some Trump supporters in my family, for instance, are just tired of it all and want the election behind them. They don’t want to hear criticisms of their golden boy, no matter how valid. As Harris has noted, even Trump rally-goers drift out of his gatherings early out of exhaustion and boredom.

Finally, there’s the matter of faulty memories. Despite such evidence as the Covid-induced rise in unemployment to 14.8% in 2020 and the 6.4% rate Trump left to Biden, Trump claims his tenure produced the greatest economy in the history of the world. That is simply false, and yet his repetition of the claim appears to have lulled Trumpers into believing it.

“In the U.S., average annual GDP growth during the past eight years has been almost constant in real terms, except for the Covid period (2020 and 2021): 2.6% in 2017-2019 and 2.3% since 2022,” economist Enrico Colombatto wrote in August.

When Biden took office in January 2021, the unemployment rate was 6.4%, Colombatto added. The rate gradually declined to the low of 3.4% in early 2023 before climbing to 4.2% under an inflation-fighting economic slowdown engineered by the high interest rates set by the Federal Reserve.

Let’s recall, moreover, that presidents can influence economies but they don’t control them. The Fed has far more to do with inflation – admittedly very high under Biden – than a president does. And lately it appears that the Fed will move to lower interest rates.

Back in 2016, Trump’s demagoguery and stagey anger proved remarkably effective. But is the sequel playing badly now? It’s possible that Harris’s efforts to paint an optimistic future, with programs to help housing get on track and tax credits for parents of young children – “the opportunity economy,” as she calls it – will sell better than Trump’s rage. So, too, may her plans for reviving a border-fixing bill that Trump quashed early this year so he could run on that troubling issue.

Nonetheless, given all the possible pitfalls in coming weeks and the shortcomings of polling, it would seem the election remains either candidate’s to win. It may prove to be a matter of voter turnout, which could rest on which candidate can generate more enthusiasm. It may be a matter of knocking on doors, the key for Barack Obama’s victories. So far, Trump’s “ground game” seems weak, as he relies on rallies and headlines.

Certainly, Democrats have been winning the dynamism race ever since Biden yielded to Harris. Can Harris sustain that? Can she convince voters that the exhausting politics of division and the chaos that Trump tends to sow are better left behind rather than repeated for another four years? The questions remain open.

Taking his marbles and going home

Posted on September 9, 2024 by Joe Weber

A Brown trustee’s resignation doesn’t help the fight against antisemitism

Brown students discuss divestment; source: Brown Daily Herald

Hedge fund manager Joseph Edelman has made a lot of good decisions in his career. Forbes pegs his net worth at $2.5 billion.

But this week he made a bad choice with respect to Brown University, where he served as a trustee from 2019 until now. He quit the board, angry that it will hold a vote on whether the school should divest itself of securities related to Israel.

Brown President Christina H. Paxson agreed last April 30 to consider divestment after anti-Israel protests erupted at the school, as they did on many campuses.

“I find it morally reprehensible that holding a divestment vote was even considered, much less that it will be held—especially in the wake of the deadliest assault on the Jewish people since the Holocaust,” Edelman wrote in a Sept. 8 Wall Street Journal op-ed. “The university leadership has for some reason chosen to reward, rather than punish, the activists for disrupting campus life, breaking school rules, and promoting violence and antisemitism at Brown.”

He added: “I consider the willingness to hold this vote a stunning failure of moral leadership at Brown University. I am unwilling to lend my name or give my time to a body that lacks basic moral judgment.”

Edelman’s stance, in my view, is principled, understandable and wrong.

There should be a trustee vote, as is expected on Oct. 17-18; fittingly, that is within two weeks of the anniversary of Hamas’s animalistic savagery in Israel. And that vote should be preceded by a full-throated, campus-wide discussion of the issues involved. After all, isn’t education all about discussing the big things?

And aren’t the 120 or so Brown students who set up an encampment to protest the war in Gaza last spring sorely in need of education, in dire need of learning some big things? Shouldn’t those who are pressing anew for divestment be taught why the idea is so damn wrong?

That discussion, if it occurs, needs to be based on facts. It should begin, for instance, with some history about Israel and Jews:

For starters, the discussion should explore how long Jews have been in the land. The oldest Hebrew text ever found was discovered at the ancient Israelite settlement, near modern-day Beit Shemesh, that dates to between 1050 and 970 BCE. The academic consensus, based on archeological and other evidence, is that a United Kingdom of Israel existed in the 10th and 9th centuries BCE.

Of course, Jews moved in and out of what is now Israel over many centuries since then. Exiles followed the two destructions of the Temple in Jerusalem, in 586 BCE by the Babylonians and in 70 CE, when the Romans sacked the place. But, even through those events, Jews remained, keeping a consistent presence, as scholars have long noted.

As Cornell University Prof. Barry Strauss has written, for instance, in a piece detailing that continuous presence: “To sum up, the Jews have an ancient history in Palestine going back three thousand years. Their yearning for Zion goes back well more than two thousand years. Jews are indigenous to Palestine.”

So, in other words, the oft-shouted argument that Israel is a colonial project is hogwash. Brown students and many others need to learn that.

Second, the discussion should deal with the number of times Arabs have refused deals that could have settled the century-long fighting between them and Jews in the region. Palestinian rejectionism dates back at least to 1937, when the Jerusalem Mufti Hajj Amin Husseini suggested to the British that Jews should be deported. He went so far as to make his case against the Jews with a soulmate, Adolf Hitler, in 1941:

The Grand Mufti and Hitler in 1941; source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1987-004-09A / Heinrich Hoffmann, CC BY-SA

A few years later, the Jerusalem Arab leader rejected a UN partition plan to create two states. A long string of Palestinian leaders has echoed that rejection of various deals since. Their intransigence gave rise to the often-noted comment by Israeli diplomat Abba Eban in 1973: “The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”

Hamas, of course, has squandered many opportunities. Among others, in its effort to build tunnels and its war machine, it blew the chance to turn Gaza into something like a Singapore on the Mediterranean over the last couple decades. Instead of using millions of global aid dollars to develop an economy, it created a subterranean fortress, and it repeated its rejectionism of coexistence publicly as recently as 2017:

“Palestine, which extends from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean in the west and from Ras al-Naqurah in the north to Umm al-Rashrash in the south, is an integral territorial unit,” Hamas asserted. “It is the land and the home of the Palestinian people. The expulsion and banishment of the Palestinian people from their land and the establishment of the Zionist entity therein do not annul the right of the Palestinian people to their entire land and do not entrench any rights therein for the usurping Zionist entity.”

Hamas at that point declared null and void the Balfour Declaration, the British Mandate Document, the UN Palestine Partition Resolution “and whatever resolutions and measures that derive from them or are similar to them.” It rejected the Oslo Accords, signed by the PLO in 1993 and 1995.

Third, turning to current issues, the discussion should detail how rape and savagery were the means that Hamas used on Oct. 7^th to kill some 1,200 Jews, as verified by the United Nations, among others. The discussion should include video evidence of those crimes that students should be required to watch. They should appreciate the monstrousness of the group some of them are championing, should understand what the popular “by any means necessary” placards really mean.

The discussion should include details about the more than 240 hostages the group took, many of whom are now dead. Some, of course, were wantonly slaughtered recently, within days of rescue. It should address how Hamas released videos of the murdered afterward in bids to torment their families and pressure Israel into a bad deal that would assure Hamas’s rearmament and continued existence.

Fourth, it should include information about how in Israel Muslims are free to pray on the Temple Mount, how Arabs in the country have the right to vote and have elected representatives, and about how the charge of “apartheid” falls apart in the face of such rights and the peaceful coexistence of Israelis of many colors and religions in the land.

Yes, the discussion should also explore the areas where Israel has fallen short. Its treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and other areas needs to be examined, as does the country’s right-wing settler policies. Many of those are opposed by Israelis, though Palestinians in the territories hardly help their cause by allying with Hamas. The state isn’t perfect and its problems need to be fully aired, as well.

But there’s no excuse for the ignorance that gives prominence to those problems and not to other more compelling realities. For instance, the discussion should elaborate on the meaning of the oft-chanted phrase “from the river to the sea.” The slogan refers, of course, to purging the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean of Jews and replacing them with Muslims, as described in the Hamas documents; that would be a real genocide.

Once that sort of discussion takes place at Brown, there should be a vote on divestment. The trustees, of course, should oppose it unanimously.

If most of Brown’s 38 trustees vote otherwise, Edelman might then have been morally obligated to quit – as other dissenting trustees might then be, as well. But they would have had the chance to make their case based on the points above. And they could then feel assured that the antisemites simply outnumber sensible people at the school — a sign that, maybe, sensible folks of any persuasion or creed should avoid Brown for good.

Taking one’s marbles and going home before the game is done, however, doesn’t solve the problems of antisemitism, nor does it remedy the historical and political ignorance that plague many American campuses, especially the elite ones. Academics at schools such as Brown should know better than to propagate the ahistorical anti-Zionist nonsense that too many students appear to be swallowing.

And, if they don’t, trustees and administrators need to install academics who do.

Universities exist to educate. As proven in last year’s national turmoil, they need to do a far better job of that. In their ignorance, students last year broke university rules at Brown, albeit for a relatively short time (less than a week). One idea is that during this term, those students should be required to take and pass coursework that explores the matters raised above, taught by professors who do know their stuff.

As for trustees and administrators, their job is fix the problems. Unless Edelman was pretty sure the problems are irreparable at Brown, he should have stuck around and cast his vote. It would have helped.

The Big Picture

Category Archives: Politics