Petti's Shooting

 

There are some things about the killing of Alex Pretti that are obvious even without having full information. It is hard to claim self defense for shooting a man lying or kneeling down on the ground helpless. The fact that an American citizen with a concealed carry permit has a concealed weapon on his person is not evidence that he is a crazed terrorist out to shoot up a bunch of feds, and certainly not justification for shooting him. The interesting thing about the government’s story on the killing is what its people are no longer saying. They now do not claim Pretti fired, brandished, or even drew his pistol. Instead they are saying only that he was armed. The evidence I have seen so far points to murder, followed by a very weak cover up and a lot of lying.

An observant person expects politicians and bureaucrats to lie. There is nothing unusual about that (though Trump is a bigger and more frequent liar than most). What is a little unusual in this case is how poorly and ineptly the lying was done, and how easily video evidence refuted it. An observant person also expects politicians to be unprincipled and willing to ignore or even contradict and reject their professed beliefs when it is expedient to do so. Still it was somewhat unusual for officials of the party and administration claiming to support the Second Amendment and the right of self defense to announce that the fact that an American citizen with a concealed carry license had a gun on him proved that he needed killing or at least brought his death on himself. That should cause some pro-Second Amendment people to wonder if Trump is really on their side or just playing them for useful suckers.

People are right to worry about the authoritarian tendencies of Trump and his administration. But they can take some consolation and feel some relief in noticing how seriously incompetent many in  Trump’s gang are.   It may not be much in the way of good news, but it is something.

Being the World's Boy Scouts

 

I like having been the world’s boy scouts. I like having a country that did so much good in the world. I like having a country that saved the world from fascist tyranny in World War II. I like having a country that rebuilt western Europe and Japan after that war and led former tyrannies to become stable, fairly liberal democracies. I like having a country that fought and won a decades long cold war with Soviet communism that led to the liberation of the countries of central and eastern Europe. I like our country being that last, best hope of which Lincoln spoke.

Donald Trump does not. He has no use for liberal principles, liberal societies, or the cause of liberty in the world. His ideas on foreign policy and international relations are closer to those of Putin or Mussolini than those of FDR, John Kennedy, or Ronald Reagan. (It is an interesting experience to listen to speeches by any of those three and then read one of Trump’s screeds on Truth Social.) In a very deep way his behavior is both anti-American and a repudiation of Americanism. In regard to Greenland it is also nuts. He is a disgrace, and he is doing his best to disgrace this country. Regardless of the various and conflicting things we are for politically, decent Americans need to stand up together and make it clear that this is something we are against.

TTU and Oregon

 

Texas Tech’s football team had a very good season, winning the Big 12 twelve conference championship and being seeded as one of the top four teams in the country for the playoffs. Then it lost to Oregon 23-0. Some people took the loss as a sign that the program was not ready for prime time and unable to compete against the top teams in the country. I think they were wrong. TTU’s defense performed very well in the game. The offense failed completely from play calling, to line play, to the running backs, receivers, and especially the quarterback, but I do not think this indicated Tech being completely over matched. Oregon had a good team, but its defense had given up 34 points to James Madison, 24 points to a Penn State team so bad that its coach got fired in the middle of the season, and , of course, got humiliated against Indiana in the next round of the playoffs. Experts say offenses need to get in a rhythm. TTU’s got off to a bad start, and things just went downhill. I have seen similar things in super bowls where it is safe to assume both teams were ready for prime time. To me it seems better to write the game off as one where the offense picked a bad time for its worst performance and not to relapse into the old TTU inferiority complex.

HItting New Lows

 

It is hard for a man like Trump to hit new lows, but in the last couple of weeks he has managed. His decision to crush the hopes of Venezuelans who wanted their country liberated and side with the Marxist dictatorship instead of the elected opposition was execrable. I do not know if he did it because he was jealous that Maria Machado won the Nobel peace prize that he wanted (though that surely sounds like him), and it really does not matter. What matters is that it not merely shows but broadcasts that as of now the government of the United States is not on the side of freedom in the world, but just another grasping gang of international bandits out to steal what they can (oil in this case). The sleazy lawfare attack on Chairman Powell shows not only contempt for the legal status of the federal reserve, but a thug’s notion that the way to deal with opposition or resistance is intimidation. The whole fiasco with ICE, but especially not only attempting to justify the killing of Renee Good but effectively proclaiming that anyone else getting in the way might expect a dose of the same is simply something that should not be tolerable in America. The scheme to occupy Greenland by force, which legally would require all our NATO allies to go to war with the hostile invading power, us, is so completely absurd, so vilely un-American, and so manifestly harmful to our actual national interests and security that it is reasonable to wonder if it is the work of a literal raving madman who should be removed via the 25^th Amendment.

It is a hell of a mess. Republicans used to claim, and often back their claim up, that they were better than Democrats on issues of individual freedom, national security, the cause of liberty in the world, and respect for the Constitution. Well, that was then. This is now.

There are various definitions of a fascist. There is the formal one that a fascist is one who advocates a program for setting up a centralized autocratic national regime with severely nationalistic policies, exercising regimentation of industry, commerce, and finance while allowing the existence of nominally private property, and practicing rigid censorship and forcible suppression of opposition. There is the colloquial one that a fascist is someone who desires a government characterized by racial or ethnic bigotry, military aggression, suppression of dissent, and the glorification of the all powerful leader as the manifestation of the nation. There is the ostensive one that a fascist is somebody who wants to be like Franco, Peron, or the Duce. A person can take his pick.

Babbitt and Good

 

On the premise that cops should not shoot people when there is no good reason for it, I think it is wrong that Ashli Babbitt was killed and wrong that Renee Good was killed. If I judged by what I have been seeing on the internet this week, I might have to conclude that that opinion puts me in a very small minority. Many Democrats and leftists are arguing that rioter Babbitt got what she had coming to her, while Good was a murdered, mainly innocent protester. Many Republicans and Trumpists are arguing that obstructionist Good got what she had coming to her while Babbitt was a murdered, mainly innocent protester. Still the optimist, I am not going to reach that conclusion. I think the country is not yet at a point where most of those on side A think killing those on side B is acceptable, and most of those on side B reciprocate. But we need to be careful, and politicians and their flacks need to learn to show some sense and decency.

Venezuela

 

Deposing Maduro in Venezuela was a good thing for which Trump should be commended. Leaving Maduro’s regime in place to be headed by his vice president is not. It may be that this action is a short term expedient to get time to neutralize the forces of the dictatorship before elections or turning the government over to the already elected opposition. That would be acceptable and perhaps even the best course the situation would allow. However, Trump and his people mainly have been suspiciously quiet about elections and the freedom and interests of Venezuelans. Instead Trump is talking about running the country and taking its oil for uses he alone will determine and bragging about having the new dictator under his thumb. (Some people  have suggested that Trump is shunning the opposition because its leader beat him out for the Nobel peace prize. That would be a crazy assertion about other American presidents, but with Trump one never knows.) If it turns out that this operation has nothing to do with freedom and justice for Venezuelans, but only with grabbing the country’s oil and replacing a dictator Trump could not control with one he could, it will be a disgrace and a repudiation of the good things America stands for and of the good things it has done in the world since 1941. I hope I am wrong, but that seems to be the direction things are going. We should know soon.

Terrorists in Boats

 

The usual argument that Trump’s supporters make to try to justify the attacks on the boats is that the people on them are terrorists, and the president has a mandate to attack and destroy terrorists wherever they are found. That does not work. Terrorism is distinct from ordinary criminal or illegal behavior. It is the act of making or planning violent attacks against civilian targets for political, religious, or ideological reasons. (Some might want to narrow or broaden that definition a little, but it or something very similar to it is what reasonable people mean by the term.) A terrorist is someone who practices terrorism. Dope smugglers in boats do not fit that definition. The argument of Trump’s apologists reduces to the claim that the smugglers are terrorists because Trump says they are terrorists, not because of their actual behavior. Liberally minded people will be likely to disapprove of a president having the arbitrary power to designate people as terrorists when they have committed no acts of terrrorism. Conservatives and Trumpists should be bothered as well. They would not like it if a future Democrat president declared some people he did not like – say AR-15 owners or Southern Baptists or fans of Charlie Kirk – to be terrorists and started eliminating a few of them.

Waving the Bloody Shirt

 

The actions of one murderer do not imply that all Americans should be denied the right to self defense and disarmed. The actions of one Afghan refugee do not imply that every resettled Afghani is a threat, much less that everyone from the “third world’ should be kept out of the country. That is not how issues of rights and policies should be considered or decided. Conservatives are right in criticizing leftists for ghoulishly and irrelevantly waving the bloody shirt after every politically convenient shooting to stir foolish people up to support unthinkingly their schemes for gun control. It will be interesting to see how many of Trump’s conservative supporters criticize him for ghoulishly and irrelevantly waving the same shirt to stir foolish people up to support unthinkingly his schemes to expel immigrants and block new ones from places and races he does not like. Whatever the posted odds, it might be a good idea to take the under on that one.

Non-Contradictory Angst

 

There are people I respect who believe that Trump is dangerously unfit to be president, that he probably would like to become our Duce, and that too many Republicans have wrongly abandoned their former beliefs in limited government, free trade, and America’s essential role in the world, making them unfit to govern. There are people I respect who believe that for all Trump’s personal failings, ignorance, and incompetence, he and the Republicans have done some needed and sometimes necessary things that have benefited the country.

There are people I respect who believe that too many Democrats’ embrace leftist dogmas, and favor radical identity politics and a general dangerously expansive statism, making them unfit to govern. There are people I respect who believe the Democrats are doing the necessary work of upholding norms, defending settled, law abiding illegal immigrants from mass deportations, and opposing Trump’s authoritarian tendencies.

These opinions are conflicting by not contradictory. All them can be true, and the saddening fact is that they are. Neither party is fit to govern or deserves the political allegiance of the citizens. People should accept political homelessness, favoring one party or the other on particular issues but not fully throwing in with either, and certainly not expecting too much from either. One would not want to encourage either bunch.

Elections This Week

 

Some people who dislike Trump are presenting the results from elections this week as a “wave” for the Democrats. I do not care for Trump either, but I do not think the elections were as significant or predictive politically as some are saying and hoping. In New York City a leftist Democrat defeated a less farther left Democrat for mayor. There was a Republican on the ballot, but it is fair to say the Republicans did not have a horse in that race. In New Jersey a Democrat won a race to succeed another Democrat against a Trumpist Republican who had tried once before and lost. Democrat voters in California voted the way their Democrat governor told them to. The main gain for the party was in Virginia where a Democrat will replace a term limited Repuiblican governor. That was no surprise since northern Virginia is home to many federal employees and others whose jobs depend on  the government who had reasons to be annoyed at Trump and the Republicans. It strikes me that all of this predicts very little about the elections next year and maybe nothing, and that Trump will ignore it. Trump needs to be taken down a peg, but it will have to happen in the courts, particularly the supreme court, rather than with the results from Tuesday.

Now It's Piracy

 

There is a term for attacking ships on the open seas in peacetime. It is called piracy. That is what Trump is guilty of in ordering attacks on boats or ships of another country in international waters. The excuse is that the vessels that were destroyed were bringing illegal drugs from Venezuela to the United States. If so, there was a legal way to stop them – waiting until they entered American territorial waters and having the Coast Guard board them, arrest their crews, and seize the contraband. This is another case of Trump violating laws and customs and an especially bad and potentially counterproductive one. America is the world’s leading maritime power. Our navy is charged with protecting shipping lanes and enforcing freedom of the seas throughout the world. It is a crucial and honorable job, and Trump has made it harder and once again shown disregard for the moral capital this nation has created for itself over the last two hundred and forty nine years. It figures.

National Conservatives vs. Lincoln

 

Having finished with Jefferson, the national conservatives have moved on to dumping Lincoln. They ditched Jefferson with their rejection of the notion that the United States is based on and made exceptional by ideas – the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the continuing thinking and work to live up to them. Now they have repudiated the idea of America having and being dedicated to a fundamental proposition – fairly clearly choosing the word “proposition” to reject Lincoln’s words that the nation was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal (probably because Lincoln believed anyone could become an American and that this country was the world’s last best hope because of its ideas).

People should take them at their word and, understand that they are dismissing the country’s founding and basic principles as irrelevant and worse. They think enlightenment liberalism was a mistake and one they plan to correct. Accepting their premises requires rejected Americanism as the term is usually understood and the patriotism associated with it and replaced them with traditionalism and an atavistic tribal/religious sort of patriotism. Critics say the national conservatives want to go back to the American 1950s. That gives them too much credit. Their ideology points to going back much farther to times long before 1776 and places far from here.

It would be a mistake to ignore these people. They are organized, form a powerful faction within the Republican party, and have a president who seems to see many things in their way. Be on the lookout and speak up.

Kaine vs. Jefferson

Recently Senator Kaine of Virginia said that people’s rights are creations of their government. Conservatives then griped that he was denying  the divine endowment of those rights. What they and others should have been objecting to is that what he said is fundamentally wrong and deeply illiberal. Whether one believes in individual rights out of religious conviction or from secular philosophical considerations is irrelevant in the context of rejecting Kaine’s claim. People own their own lives and have their unalienable rights regardless of the actions of their governments. Slaves in Cuba or North Korea have the same right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as citizens of the United States. They are unfortunate in being subject to tyrannies that violate those rights, while Americans are lucky in having a government that generally respects them. But the rights of human beings are the same everywhere. Better governments respect them. Worse governments suppress their exercise. No government creates them, and governments can justify and legitimatize themselves only by securing them. Better Virginians than Kaine have understood that.

 

Eighty Years

 

Yesterday was V-J Day, the eightieth anniversary of Japanese surrender ending World War II. My father and several of my uncles served in that war, my father and one of his brothers in the Pacific. They are all gone now, as are almost all of the other men who fought. Those of my generation, the generation of those men’s children, are getting old. V-J Day is now as far in the past as Appomattox was on V-J Day. I wonder if we boomers, most of whose fathers fought the war and almost all of whose parents lived through it, will be the last generation for most of whom it is more than somewhat remote history. I hope not, but regardless this is a good time to remember those men and what they did.

Tariffs and Fooling the Peasants

 

For American consumers, tariffs function effectively as a hidden sales tax they pay on goods produced in foreign countries and imported into the United States. They raise the prices of those goods above what they would have been otherwise. (Claims to the contrary by Trump and his supporters make no more sense than if some Texas politicians claimed that the eight and a quarter percent sales tax they lay on most things purchased in the state does not make those things more expensive to buy.) Increasing tariffs increases that tax, raising prices and contributing to price inflation. Years ago there was a cartoon in the Wizard of Id comic strip with the king and his henchmen plotting new taxes on the peasants. One suggested supplementing the income tax with an outgo tax. Another objected that not even peasants were dumb enough to go along with that, and so they decided to call it a sales tax. They could have gone for a tariff and hoped to fool the peasants into believing it would be paid by foreigners. That is pretty much what Trump is doing now.

The benefits of global trade are obvious both in economic theory and in the history of the eighty years since the end of World War II. Trump’s mercantilist notions on trade and tariffs have been refuted by economists from the time of Adam Smith to the present. Yet he and his gang plow ahead. He will cause discomfort in our country and probably real hardship in some countries where fairy open global markets have helped large numbers of people to rise out of real poverty. He will make people around the world angry and skeptical of the good will and good sense of the United States. The one place there is a good case for high tariffs and other restrictions on trade is with China. Economic dependency on hostile foreign powers is not beneficial, and China is one. But Trump seems to be going easier with China than with many others. It is a mess.

Watching Grande Illusion

 

This week Debby and I watched Renoir’s Grande Illusion for the first time in a good while. It was a good as I remembered. It is the best war movie I have ever seen and one of the best of any sort. Its fine performances, superb direction, and most of all wonderful humanity were just as I remembered. So was the sense of loss I felt not only for the characters but also for a splendid civilization that that war wounded grievously (and the next one may turn out to have killed). It was not only the end of the Rauffensteins and Boeldieus.  

Trump and Epstein

 

The big news story of the weekend is the printing of Tump’s supposed 50^th birthday note to Jeffrey Epstein. Trump claims the note is fake. Democrats claim it is not only genuine but hard proof that Trump knew about and perhaps participated in Epstein’s crimes.

To me there are two obvious points against authenticity. First the style does not seem like Trump’s. It is not at all like the stuff we have seen from him on X and Truth Social over the last ten years. The second is more important. It is very, very hard to believe that Biden’s DOJ had it, knew it was authentic, and gentlemanly declined to leak it to their friends in the media before the election. Of course people’s style of writing can vary both with time and situation, and the note may have turned up only recently. (I haven’t seen anything on that, and it may be discussed behind a paywall I can’t see over.)

The main arguments for authenticity are the reputation of the Wall Street Journal and the riskiness of making that sort of attack on the president of the United States without being able to back it up. There is something to both of them. The news side of the Journal is not the public relations team for the Democrats that many other papers are, and its editorial side usually favors the Republicans. And with all the threats (sometimes real and successful) of lawsuits by Trump against media companies, one would think that on a story such as this one, prudent editors would want to make sure their reporters had the goods before publishing. As against that Trump’s defenders can argue that some reputations earned in the past may no longer be justified and remind people that well known media organizations have published false stories about Trump before.

It will be interesting to see both how it plays out and whether it matters. My guess is that it will not matter much. It is well known that Trump and Clinton and various other wealthy and/or powerful people knew and socialized with Jeffrey Epstein. It is well known that in his younger days Trump was what people used to call a playboy.  If the note is authentic and can be shown to be so, it probably will not make many of his supporters turn against him.  If it is a forgery and can be shown to be so, it probably will not make many of his opponents less prone to believe the worst about him immediately. If nothing is determined either way, the whole thing probably will just fade away and fairly quickly.

Bombing Iran

 

I do not think Donald Trump is qualified to be president by either knowledge, character, demeanor, judgment, or temperament. I wish the Republicans had nominated someone else in the last three presidential elections. I think the only valid reason for voting for him last November was a decision that Harris and Walz likely would be worse. Regardless of that, I am proud of President Trump for ordering the attack on Iran’s atomic weapons production sites. It was the right thing to do and, together with the actions of Israel’s armed forces, has made the world safer and the geopolitical situation better for liberal civilization. He deserves credit and respect for doing it.

On the other hand, many leftist Democrat politicians and many of their public relations people in the traditional media deserve contempt and ridicule for their behavior. From silly claims that all would have been well if Obama’s agreement effectively allowing Iran to develop atomic weapons but maybe a little more slowly had still been in place, to fairly obviously hoping the attack had been a failure, to in some cases directly siding with the Iranians, their behavior has been despicable. There is a joke going around that Democrats are angry about the attack because it destroyed the only Obama/Biden infrastructure project that actually got built. That is unfair, but some of the Dems and their friends deserve the mockery. So do Tucker Carlson and the rest of the anti-Israel, isolationist, and at least somewhat antisemitic gang on the right.

Trump was right on this one, and it does not hurt those of us who do not like him to see it and say so.

Pride in June, and also Remembrance and Gratitude

 

In the summer of 1939 much of the world was either at war or about to be. Nazi Germany had broken its promises of the year before and occupied more of Czechoslovakia. Franco’s nationalists had won the Spanish civil war. Japan’s invading forces had seized much of the coastal and some of the interior areas of China. The three most powerful armies in the world were the German, Soviet, and French, with the French army along with the British navy considered to be the bulwark against Hitler’s Germany. The United States at that time had a powerful navy (though not one ready for a two ocean war) and an army smaller than the one Belgium would field in 1940. In August Hitler and Stalin made an agreement of partnership, splitting up east central Europe between them. In September Germany and Russia invaded and partitioned Poland, starting World War II in Europe. In May of 1940 Germany attacked and defeated France, destroying the French army. By the end of that awful summer, Hitler was master of continental Europe with almost every continental nation allied with, occupied by, or friendly toward Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union as a de facto ally in the east, Asia’s greatest power Japan an ally in the Pacific, and only the British Empire as an active enemy. That was a crisis of civilization.

The United States responded by aiding and supplying Britain and later the Soviet Union after Hitler the broke the pact and invaded Russia and by strengthening its own defenses while remaining officially neutral in the war. Neutrality ended on December 7^th 1941 when Japan attacked the American navy base at Pearl Harbor, sinking or damaging the battleships of the Pacific fleet. In the next few days Germany declared war on the United States leaving America at war with great powers in both Europe and the Pacific. In less than four years after Pearl Harbor and despite early defeats, American forces accepted the unconditional surrenders of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, ending history’s greatest war in complete victory.

Over twelve million men served in the U.S. armed forces in the war, and millions of American women and older men worked on the home front to produce the arms and equipment for both America and its allies and co-belligerents. My father and most of my uncles served in the war. My mother and several of my aunts worked on the home front in various jobs. I am proud of them and grateful to them for it. Americans today should remember and be proud of all the Americans who helped win that war. Early June is an especially appropriate time to express that pride. Between June 4^th and 6^th in 1942 an outnumbered and outgunned U.S. naval force defeated the Japanese navy in the most decisive and historically important naval battle since Trafalgar, ending Japan’s offensive in the Pacific. On June 6^th 1944, American forces landed in Normandy, securing their beachhead and beginning the great campaign leading to the destruction of Nazi Germany.

It’s a free country, and people can select what they want to be proud of and when they want to show their pride. For me each June, it will be the men and women of World War II. They deserve it along with  gratitude and remembrance. The made the world we enjoy. Very few of them are still alive. Soon all will be gone.

A Suggestion on Comey

 

To avoid the appearance of a political vendetta, the attorney general should appoint a special counsel to direct the DOJ’s professionals in investigating Comey’s case. The counsel should be a prominent, well respected person with no connection to the administration. I think Martha Stewart would fill the bill nicely.

Trump and Deportations

 

Some of what Trumpists have been saying about immigration is true. The number of illegal aliens in the country was much larger at the end of Biden’s administration than at its beginning. Unlimited immigration of poor people into a welfare state increases the burden on those being taxed to support that state. People in the Biden administration opened the southern border intentionally, probably at least partly because Democrat politicians have long term political incentives to increase the size of the government-dependent economic underclass. The open border made it easier for criminals, gangsters, and suspected terrorists to enter the country, and some of them did. Preventing almost all future illegal immigration is a good idea.

None of this justifies the things Trump’s people are doing. Officials should be required to get an order of deportation from a court before deporting a person. They should be required to use appropriate diligence in verifying that an apprehended person who they think has an existing order of deportation against him really does. They certainly should not be allowed to change a person’s status from legal to illegal alien because of his politics or opinions. Neither should they be allowed to ship even properly deported people directly to prisons in foreign countries. If they want to jail someone, they can charge him with a crime.

Beyond that, they should show some humanity. There are valid questions about what welfare and governmental services should be available to illegal aliens, but those are separate from the issue of mass deportations. The claim that illegal aliens are criminals by definition because they are illegally in the country is false. A crime is an unjustified actual or threatened act of physical violence against another person, the theft of property through robbery, extortion, or fraud, or the severe damage of property through vandalism. A criminal is someone who has committed a crime. Being in the country illegally is against the law but is not a crime and does not make an illegal alien a criminal, any more than breaking the speed limit laws makes most of the rest of us criminals. While they should not be voting or offered a path to citizenship, most otherwise law abiding illegal aliens who have been here a good while and have made a life for themselves should be left alone. Certainly those in that group with children or spouses who are citizens and those who have spent most of their lives here should be.

St. Patrick's Day Note a Month Late

 

Consider the following axiomatic system:

1. Leprechauns exist.

2. Leprechauns are non-human humanoids all of whom are three feet tall or less.

3. Leprechauns occur only in Ireland.

4. Leprechauns’ clothing and possessions consist only of things producible by the technology of the late Middle Ages.

5..Some leprechauns have hair and beards.

These axioms seem consistent. Their consistency is as nearly obvious as that of axioms in some other well known systems.

One can use these axioms to prove meaningful theorems such as

1. Every humanoid over five feet tall is not a leprechaun.

2. Leprechauns do not have cell phones.

3. The clothing of leprechauns is made from natural materials.

One can elaborate the system by adding another axiom such as

“6. A red unicorn lives in the same part of Ireland as the leprechauns do”,

and argue that both it and its denial likely are consistent with the first five. This axiom would be useful in proving theorems not provable by the first five alone.

Of course the system and its conclusions are false and have nothing to do with reality. There are not any leprechauns. One can create a very similar system by replacing the original axiom 1 with “Leprechauns are fictitious creatures of stories and legends.” The new system would be demonstrably consistent and also true, since one easily could display a storybook containing leprechauns satisfying all five axioms.

This fairly silly example illustrates the fact that in considering systems of axioms, one has to look at each axiom and decide whether it is really axiomatic, that is .whether it should be accepted as true about something. One cannot escape from the need to consider meaning. The same thing holds in cases that are not silly.

Trump's Tariffs

 

People have known all along that Trump’s ideas on trade were bad. Now we are getting to see how bad. His tariffs will create more price inflation for Americans, annoy America’s allies (and perhaps alienate some of them), damage American exporters, harm innocent people around the world dependent on trade for their livelihoods, and probably cause a recession and a bad stock market. Other than that, they are just a massive tax increase on Americans delivered by the party that claims to believe in keeping taxes low. (His people are claiming between six hundred and eight hundred billion dollars a year, none paid by the man behind the tree.) I hope his sycophants are right in claiming that they are a ploy to get other nations to cut their tariffs, but I doubt it. Besides being deeply economically ignorant, I think he and his supporters are also motivated in this by a general crude nativism that shows up in some of their other policies and desires. If this goes on, we all may be paying a big price for showing them durn furriners who the big dog is.

There is a useful aspect to all this though. With Republican politicians suddenly turning back flips over a tax increase, it can be a useful lesson to people on just how phony and unprincipled these public servants are.

There is an exception. Nations should not engage in free trade with a hostile foreign power, and particularly should not have a hostile foreign power as a source of any important products. The only hostile foreign power with whom there is much trade is China. It would have made sense for Trump to act to restrict that trade, but that trade alone.

Lesser Evil

 

In November I voted for Donald Trump for the first time in either a general or a primary election. It was entirely a case of trying to select the lesser evil. I knew he was unqualified in ability, knowledge, temperament, and character for the job. I thought his behavior after losing in 2020 and his later demands to overturn the Constitution and return him to power disqualified him from holding any office in the United States. I regretted that the voters in the Republican primaries did not agree. But I finally decided that he was likely to harm the country less than a fourth and farther left Obama administration led by a committed leftist with an unconvincing phony moderate act, a frightening running mate, and an inability to side unequivocally with Israel and civilization against Hamas and savagery.

I still think I probably was right. In just a few weeks Trump has done some good things and some harm. The tariffs and their capriciously changing implementations have been a mess, but there has been a successful beginning on work to cut bad programs and expenditures in the government and shrink its workforce. Trump’s absurd claim that Ukraine started its war with Russia was despicable, and cutting off support for Ukraine even temporarily was inexcusable. Yet he may be able to negotiate an acceptable peace. He selected some poorly qualified people for some important jobs in his administration, and picked a few who were totally wrong for the jobs they got. But he also has selected some strong people who are doing things that needed doing.

As with any other president, we should hope Trump succeeds when he tries to do something good and fails when he tries to do something wrong. I expect there will be plenty of each, and I still wish Republican voters had shown better sense in the primaries.

Trump and the Courts

 

It has been interesting to read and listen to reactions from conservatives to federal judges blocking some of Trump’s orders. Most have been irritated. Some have wanted Trump to ignore or defy the rulings. At least one site, the Federalist, has proposed ignoring not only lower courts but also the supreme court if it comes to that. They have argued not only against specific rulings, some of which may be wrong and may be reversed by higher courts, but against the idea of a mere federal district judge thwarting the desires of the president and his administration. They are completely wrong. It is .the job of the federal judiciary to rule on the legality and constitutionality of the actions of the federal government., and cases usually start at a district court. Presidents and other officials have no authority to do whatever they want, irrespective of any claimed mandates, but only what they legally are allowed to do.

It is a little saddening and a reminder of the general phoniness and hypocrisy of people in politics and the political media to recall that many of these conservatives used to claim that as a matter of principle, they were for limited government, constraints on executive power, and the rule of law and generally supported rulings by district court judges blocking power grabs by the Biden and Obama administrations. That changed when their guy got in. They need to reconsider. Questions of honesty and principle aside, they at least should ask themselves if they want the next Democrat president to be able to do as he or she likes by executive orders not subject to review by courts.

.Much of what Trump wants to do with the bureaucracy is right. A lot of what the Doge people have discovered is wrong or even disgraceful. There are many federal jobs, programs, grants, and organizations that should be eliminated. Trump should be free to take any actions in that direction for which he has legal authority and should have to request legislation to accomplish or authorize the rest. The courts and probably the supreme court will have to decide where the limits are. Donald Trump must and his fans should accept the final decisions as binding.