Trump’s Advantage
A kidnapper demands ransom, and his threat to kill the abducted child is credible. Assuming the child’s parents have the means to pay the ransom, is there any reason they would not yield? The only reason I can think of ...
Read MoreElizabeth Warren
I’ve been putting off blogging about any of the numerous prospective Democratic 2020 presidential candidates, but of course there was no way that I was going to maintain that restraint. We now have one big-name prospective candidate who has declared, ...
Read MoreThe Wall and the Shutdown, Made Simple
Happy New Year! It certainly promises to be an interesting year politically. I haven’t paid close attention to the various partisan maneuvers over the federal government shutdown. There really are only a few basic things to be kept in mind. ...
Read MoreAn exceptional liar
Here I am blogging yet again about Donald Trump’s mendacity, but the guy really is remarkable. Speaking to assembled troops in Iraq, Trump claimed to have given them a whopping 10% raise. The president recounted how he generously over-ruled the ...
Read MoreLeaving Syria
The United States has never had any good options in confronting the grim realities of the Syrian civil war. Trump’s decision to get out may or may not be a good one. It may not have been made for the ...
Read MoreMore on the GHW Bush Legacy
I only touched on one strikingly negative aspect of the GHW Bush legacy in my last post, but this is a pretty good compendium of Bush’s offenses that I mostly agree with. The tone is relentlessly harsh and the numbers cited ...
Read MoreRemembering Willie Horton
The custom of saying only good things about the recently departed is well-established and mostly harmless in everyday life, but it should be rooted out of our public discourse. The death of a major political figure is and should be ...
Read More“…and maybe he didn’t.”
Donald Trump has made it clear that he intends to do nothing—literally, nothing—in reaction to the near certainty that Saudi Prince MBS ordered the brutal murder of the moderate dissident journalist Khashoggi. Trump’s typically dishonest, weasel-like whitewash of Jared’s soul ...
Read MoreA Wave, not a Tsunami
Expectations were high, and so the disappointments were sharp. A tsunami would have put Gillum and Abrams in the Florida and Georgia statehouses; it would have saved US Senate seats for Missouri and Florida and flipped another in Arizona; it ...
Read MoreAsymmetric Craziness
Whenever I hear someone bemoaning the dangerous polarization of our politics, I unerringly point out that the polarization is asymmetric. The term “political polarization” suggests two political parties and their respective supporting networks moving away from the center in roughly ...
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