Trump and the Press

The feud between Trump and his people and members of the traditional media is amusing to watch, at least for people who both have strong stomachs and enjoy a good farce.  There is certainly something comical in watching people  for whose attitude and  behavior  toward Obama the terms “cheerleader” and  “lickspittle”  were often too mild suddenly discovering  the sacred duty of the press in this  great republic to take an adversarial and skeptical approach to those in power.  It is fine low humor when they disclaim any political or ideological motives or biases and profess, usually with fairly straight faces, a disinterested commitment  to give us just the facts ma’am.  It gets lower and broader when they whine about being picked on and misunderstood and not getting their due respect as arbiters of what is good and true.  Then  we have Trump tweeting and blustering  in ways beneath the dignity of the presidency of either the United States or the Delta house at Faber College.   (This does not mean Trump is wrong about the malice, dishonesty, and bias. He’s not, but he surely could deal with the situation in less strange ways.) There is entertainment there too. 

Many  people take this dust up  seriously, but I see no reason  to do so.  Some of Trump’s supporters  worry that this is a slow moving coup d’etat, and that the Democrats and their servants in the press will be able to depose Trump as they  brought down Nixon.  This seems unlikely for several reasons. Nixon handled  the business over Watergate in ways which gave his enemies something  to work with.  Despite months of effort  Trump’s enemies have found nothing comparable to attach to him.  The Democrats controlled both houses of Congress  and had almost  all the important media organizations with them when they went after Nixon.  This time the Democrats are in the minority in both houses, and there are important nontraditional media people and organizations who are not working with them and often opposing them. So it seems very unlikely  that Trump will be run out of office or even be harmed much at all.

Some of Trump’s opponents  fret that the spats between Trump and  his enemies in the traditional media are a threat to freedom of the press or even a danger to constitutional government.  This seems almost paranoid if sincere.  There is no evidence of Trump or his people attempting to harm, threaten, or silence anyone in the media.  (They have not, for example,  put a reporter from a network they didn’t like under criminal investigation as Obama’s  people did.)  They are just criticizing their critics, often rudely, and pointing out their bias.  Criticism in response  is what one should expect when one makes continual public attacks on a president not named Bush.  Obama and his people  had no reluctance about  saying what they thought of Limbaugh and various others on TV or radio, and few if any in the traditional media complained that that might be a threat to the First Amendment.  Unless things change there seems to be no reason in this stuff to be concerned about freedom of the press.

The questions and issues  of policies in the government and  honesty and trustworthiness in the media are important.  The feud  is a sideshow, and at times a fairly funny one.  

Anti-Defamation League

I got a mailing from the Anti-Defamation League today asking for a donation.  It accurately warned  about the increasing danger of anti-Semitism and rightly pointed to the need  to oppose it and to the ADL’s record of success in opposing anti-Semitism in the past.  However it led me to worry how successful the league will be in the future.

 It is an obvious and well understood truism that one must identify an enemy or threat before one can defeat  or neutralize it.   The serious  anti-Semitism in the  world today comes from jihadist Muslims and from leftists in America and Europe among whom fashionable anti-Zionism and multiculturalism have  led to acceptance of or   become mixed with stealthy or overt anti-Semitism.  Jew hating Muslims are the only large group in the world who have the means and have expressed the desire to  kill large numbers of Jews.  In this country the Democrats are the only large political organization which tolerates vocal anti-Semites among its local and national leaders and spokesmen.

Yet the mailing from ADL ignores all of that and focuses on the few insignificant and powerless Klansmen, white supremacists,  and wanna be Nazis who show up in the news from time to time. There was a time when people such as these were a threat. The Klan almost took over the Democratic party in the 1920s, and the Bund was something to worry about in the 1930s.  However that is no longer  true.  As the joke goes, there are probably more Americans who think they have been abducted by aliens  than who think they are Klansmen.  The white supremacists are generally despised or ignored by people of all races, and the pretend Nazis are laughed off as sadly deranged and pathetic losers.

It is of course easier to stick with these safe targets.  Identifying and mentioning the serious  threats would require violating rules of politically correctness, and that would take nerve. But I don’t see how the ADL can be successful without doing so – any more than someone could expect to be successful  in crusading to prevent lung cancer while being afraid to mention smoking.    

Midway at Seventy Five

Seventy five years ago in the seas near Midway Island in the Pacific  the United States navy fought and won the most important and decisive naval battle since Trafalgar.  American forces with three carriers and their escort ships (including one carrier which had been patched up in short order after being damaged  heavily in an earlier battle)  defeated a far  larger Japanese force led by  four large and two small carriers – sinking all four of the large Japanese carriers and deciding the war in the Pacific.  In the six months before Midway the Japanese had enjoyed a remarkable series of victories and conquests over American, British, Dutch, and other forces in the Pacific. After Midway the Japanese never launched a successful offensive operation against American forces.  Only a few weeks after the battle American forces went on the offensive with the invasion of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands and remained on the strategic offensive until the end of the war.

Most of the men who fought at Midway are now gone.  Soon all of them will be. While Americans rightly remember and celebrate the great deeds of their army  at Normandy in early June of 1944, they should equally remember and honor the great deeds of their navy in early June 1942. 

Bill Maher

Bill Maher got in  trouble this week for saying, in declining a Nebraskan’s invitation to  join his state’s farmers in their fields, that he was a house nigger.  It was a harmless joke, drawing on the difference on pre-Civil War southern plantations between domestic servants and field hands, a distinction which has been mentioned, sometimes humorously, in books and  films such as Gone with the Wind.  There was nothing in it bad or worth noting.  He was not disparaging black people in any way.  The gods did not make the volcano erupt because someone had uttered a taboo word.  There was no reason for Aunt Pittypats  of all ages and both sexes  to need the smelling salts.  Yet all hell broke loose.  Maher was accused of racism and insensitivity and who know what else and required to offer the standard perfunctory apology and eat the required volume of  dirt in public for offending those privileged both to decide what is offensive and to demand never to be offended.   It’s nuts, and he could have done all of us a favor by instead just telling them all  go to hell. Maybe the next person up will have the guts to do that.