Whatabotism

 There has been discussion in the last few weeks about “whataboutism”. Whataboutism is the act of responding to a true accusation of  character flaws in or bad actions by someone one favors by pointing out  the same or similar flaws in or actions by those the accusers favor.  It has appropriate and  inappropriate uses.

Whataboutism is invalid as a means to excuse  bad character or  conduct.  If the candidate of party A is a worthless, low life, chicken thief, it does not make him any less so for his supporters to point out that the candidate of party B is also a worthless, low life, chicken thief.

However it can be valid for other purposes. It can be used to demonstrate the hypocrisy of accusers who tolerate and accept things in those they like while making a show of moral outrage over the same things in those they dislike. More important it can present useful evidence that  those favored by the accusers also fail to meet appropriate standards.  Some people have a tendency to believe that if one person is bad, his opponents must be good and need reminders that that  is not necessarily true.   The chicken thieves of party B can be about as likely to raid your hen house as the chicken thieves of party A.

In the present controversy, Republican whataboutism  about riots, incitement, big lies,  authoritarian tendencies, divisiveness, and disdain  for constitutional limits and processes in no way exonerates or excuses Trump. He is guilty. But it does show many Democrats’ phoniness and that they too cannot be trusted to govern well.  

Next

 Trump is gone, and that is a good thing. The Republicans made a bad mistake during the primaries in 2016.  They selected a man who was neither decent as a human being nor qualified to hold office. He was defendable, if at all, only on the idea that his administration’s policies, as distinct from his behavior and desires, were less bad that what the Democrats would do. Many people who were no fans of the Democrats decided before the election that the behavior and desires were bad enough, and the record on policies mixed enough that he needed to go. His inexcusable behavior since the election should have been enough to make those who voted for him reach the same conclusion.  Prior to December 14^th, it was only foolish, mendacious, disgraceful, and harmful to the country. From then to January 6^th it was also a blatant attempt to remain in power by illegal and unconstitutional means.  He deserves impeachment and conviction for that, irrespective of whatever blame he should have for the riot on the 6^th.

Now the Democrats are in control of the executive branch, and that is a bad thing, necessary to get rid of Trump, but still bad. Biden is not an America-hating leftists, but he is a dishonest, wrongheaded, big government Democrat who will do the country a good amount of harm. His policies on taxes and regulation and his choices for judges likely will be worse than Trump’s. He will be worse on school choice, energy, the right to self defense, and maybe spending and deficits  though he would have to go some to outdo Trump there. (On the other hand he should be better on trade, NATO, foreign relations in general, holding local police responsible for their actions, and far better on public behavior and demeanor. He at least is not an enemy of the republic, and at the end Trump was.) 

The behavior of the bureaucrats likely will become much worse.  Biden will follow Trump's practice of getting what he wants by executive order, and many of those orders will give officials more authority. There likely also will be a change of tone apart from anything official.  There are envious, power hungry, resentful people out there who are eager to show  their fellow citizens who is boss, and many of them are employed in the federal bureaucracy.  They now will have more weight to throw around and probably feel freer to throw it. The country still has an independent judiciary, and people probably will need to be ready to take advantage of that and file lawsuits  as needed.

Then there is the risk of political persecution.  John Brennan has declared that libertarians should be treated as enemies of the state. One can hope that this is only an isolated rant from a  nasty authoritarian, but I have not heard of any of Biden’s people disagreeing.  Reporters should ask the new press secretary how the president feels about turning the secret police loose on political dissidents.  A wrong answer there would immediately make his administration  more authoritarian than Trump’s ever was.

In politics the next couple of years will not be fun, and people who believe in the liberal ideas of liberty and individual rights will have a fight on their hands.  Trump and his flavor of bad are gone, but the game has not gotten any easier.

The Myth of Trump's Political Magnetism

 There has been a common belief among Republican politicians and their allies in the media that Trump has helped the party by being a powerful force politically who attracts and “energizes” people to vote for him and other Republicans.  It has been one reason and perhaps the main one that many Republican politicians stayed with him.  I think it is also largely a myth. It has become commonplace to say Twitter is not the world, and that taking what one sees there as indicative of public opinion is a mistake. It is also true that a Trump rally is not the world, and that  a few thousand fired up,  ardent supporters are not indicative of public opinion either.

Trump won a very close race in 2016 against the most unlikeable and disliked candidate either major party had nominated for a long time. Polls after the election showed he defeated her  by doing better among voters who disliked both of them. Two years later Republican candidates got hammered in the midterm elections of 2018 mainly because of voters’ dislike for Trump.

 Then Trump lost the presidency as an incumbent to a slow moving, uninspiring, elderly  career politician who scarcely campaigned and whose main selling point was that he was not Donald Trump.  Since 1900 only four elected incumbent presidents before Trump have lost their attempt at reelection. Two, Taft and Bush senior,  were damaged by major third party candidates.  The other two, Hoover and Carter, were running after years of very bad times in the country that many voters blamed on them.  Trump had neither excuse.  After losing the election, his egregious behavior likely tipped the two races in Georgia to the Democrats.

People in the media have focused on the former non-voters or Democrat voters in so-called blue collar occupations Trump added to the Republican party, and there have been some. They need to think about what he has subtracted. Self-supporting, college educated men and women who work in the private sector tend to have values and interests  usually more in line with the Republicans than the Democrats. According to polling and supported by results of elections in suburban areas, Trump has managed to drive a lot of them away. Based on the results the net from his efforts and behavior looks like a loss.

In the last week many Republicans have decided that Trump is no longer a political asset. Going forward and thinking about the place for Trumpism in their party, they should consider whether he ever really was.

 

Impeach Now, Convict at Leisure

 The Democrats in the house are planning to impeach Trump this week. I think they are right to do so. I hope the Republicans go along. His  actions last Wednesday probably were not legally a felonious  incitement to riot, but they were an  impeachable attempt to use a mob to pressure the congress to overturn an election he lost. Even apart from that,  his ordering Pence to discard the results of the election and keep him in power illegally should be enough to justify impeachment and conviction.

The senate is not in session and will not be taking up any business until after the inauguration. That would mean Trump’s trial would be after he was out of office.  Some people have objected that a trial then would interfere with the senate’s business of confirming Biden’s appointments and slow an already delayed transition.  Representative Clyburn has suggested holding off on sending the articles of impeachment to the senate for a few months to avoid that, and that seems reasonable.  The purpose of the trial would not be to remove Trump from office, since he would already be gone, but to allow the senate to vote after convicting him to ban him from seeking office again.  

Others have argued that Trump needs to be tried after breakfast and convicted before lunch one day this week to keep him from doing something worse in the next few days. Such worries may have sounded paranoid three months ago, but they are worth considering now. However any really bad actions would require the cooperation of the armed forces or one or more of the armed civilian agencies, and I think people can be confident that will not happen.  He probably will issue a bunch of improper pardons, but that would  not be really significant with one exception.  If he includes  one for himself,  it should be a good case for the Supreme Court to declare self-pardons unconstitutional.  

The Enemy of Your Enemy

 I never thought much of Donald Trump as a human being, but his behavior since election day has been far worse than I would have guessed. It has been so bad, dishonest, arrogant, un-presidential, and harmful that people need to be reminded to be careful not to make the naïve mistake of assuming that because one  person is very bad, his enemies must be good or at least acceptable.  For  Democrat politicians are neither.

Their wrongheaded and often dangerous plans, agendas and prejudices are well known. Besides that, many of them are  repulsive, hypocritical phonies and con artists. They condemn the rioting  by Trumpist goons Wednesday but  were unbothered and  sometimes  supportive when leftist thugs rioted and looted in cities around the country during  summer.   (The  mess in Washington Wednesday was as much “mainly peaceful” as the events they defended all summer.) They criticize Trump’s stirring up his mob with false stories about a stolen election but were happy to stir up mobs they liked with  false claims that George Floyd’s death was  due not a handful of bad cops but to an imagined systematic racism pervading the country. They claim concern over  Trump’s  threat to their beloved American democracy after embracing  the Marxist Black Lives Matter organization in apparent unconcern for the fact that dictatorships of the proletariat  are not big on democratic elections.  They correctly worry about Trump’s authoritarian tendencies but are unbothered  by the way that their mayors and governors often arbitrarily, sometimes  needlessly, and occasionally  simply meanly  ordered people around and disrupted  their lives during the epidemic.  Pelosi casually calls Trump’s riot a manifestation of “whiteness”  but would demand the resignation of a Republican politician who called the trouble this summer an example of blackness.

Trump will be gone in a few days.  The Dems will still be around – more powerful and with some unpleasant  things on their minds.  People need to be alert and see them for what they are. The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend. Sometimes he is just another flavor of enemy.

Sympathy for the Suckers

I have no sympathy for the thugs who broke into the capitol yesterday. As with  all the other rioters and looters of the last year, they should get what is coming to them. However I do have some  for the earnest,  peaceful protesters who came to Washington yesterday on a fool’s errand and could not see they have been played as marks by a vicious con artist. A usually ignored part  of Trump’s  generally  egregious behavior since November 3^rd has been his treatment of  the people who not only voted for him but believed in him as a trustworthy person. His lies and scare stories have left many of them angry, despondent, deluded, nervously mistrustful, belligerent, and even worried about the survival of the country and their way of life.  

They should have paid attention and seen what was going on. Trump has made what he is  pretty obvious, but one can still feel sorry for them. They gave their faith to a scoundrel  who had made them believe he took them seriously and cared about their values, and they are paying for it.  

Why Make a Big Deal of It?

 Some people wonder why others are making a big deal of the things Trump's allies have been doing since December 14^th after the legal challenges failed, and Biden was officially elected president. They point out correctly that none of it is going to change anything.  They say, also correctly, that  politicians in both parties routinely put on shows for their rubes of striving for outcomes they have no notion of (and often no interest in) achieving.  They see the actions  of some Republican politicians in the last three weeks as just another example of that, perhaps a  particularly outré example, but nothing to get worked up over.

They make good points, but they miss something important. The evidence is that  Trump is not just putting on a show for the rubes  but is actually scrambling for some illicit way to stay in power.  If he is in on the gag, he hasn’t shown it.  It is not enough that he will fail. People need to understand that he should fail. Americans need to repudiate the idea of what he is trying to do, and Republican politicians have a responsibility to help that happen.  They can play to the rubes later.

Please Think It Over and Stop

 It is not really surprising that Trumpist lawyer Lin Wood is reported as calling for martial law to keep Trump in office,  accusing the chief justice of being a murderer and child molester,  and demanding  the arrest and execution of the vice president.  One can find a lawyer somewhere who will say just about anything one might imagine no matter how nasty or absurd. The surprising and unpleasant thing is that, based on a few searches on DuckDuckGo, there are people out there taking Wood seriously and liking what he is doing.The man may be nuts, using the Nazi and communist technique of the big lie, or both, but he has a following.  So does  Sidney Powell. So do General Flynn and a bunch of other so-called conservatives who are advocating or coming close to advocating the overthrow of the republic -  to save Donald Trump for gosh sake. 

The madness needs to stop.  The election is over. Biden won.  A belief in a conspiracy having stolen  the election from Trump would need an assumption that  the conspirators were slick enough to bring the thing off without leaving  evidence anyone can find of what they had done.  It now probably also would need  to include the entire Supreme Court, dozens of other judges, Bill Barr, Republican secretaries of state and other election officials in several states, the FBI and homeland security, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, several voting software and hardware companies, people  who did hand recounts in  various states, the Republican governor of Georgia, and the Republican controlled legislatures in several states among the conspirators or their fellow travelers and cowardly enablers.  That’s a hard sell.

Of course many people  still  think the election was won by Trump and stolen by Biden, millions of people according to polls. So given that a person believes that, what should he do?  By now he has only two main choices - realize that his side failed to prove its case and accept the (to him) bogus results or join those who seek to save Trump by at least partially overthrowing the republic.  The answer should be easy for any patriotic conservative.  He should accept the results irrespective of whether he likes or trusts them.  Preserving the republic and the constitution is more important than whether Trump or Biden will be in the White House.

Trump’s attempts to get people to believe the election was stolen and to fight  the results in court were foolish, wrongheaded, and disgraceful, but they were not an attack on the republic. What has happened since  December 14^th is.  Any politician or person in the media who has participated in that stuff has behaved as an enemy of the republic.  That will go double for participants in or supporters of the clownish and doomed attempted coup planned for Wednesday in the congress.  It will be very difficult to take those who are  part of that seriously as a patriots, believers in the rule of law, or supporters of the constitution for a long while. It will be easy to laugh them off as silly scoundrels. They will have deserved it. For their own good as well as the country’s, they should think about that and change their plans. Trump will be gone soon and with  him the short term political benefits of playing along with him. The disgrace from going through with this thing would stay with them much longer.