When news broke this morning, I wasn’t surprised. I was sad, though. Elizabeth Warren really is the kind of American we need as a president. I’ve never seen so much corruption, so much inequality, so much betrayal of my country. But various forces — knowable and unknowable — prevented her from ascending. She dropped out today.

Again, not surprising. She hadn’t performed well during the early nominating states. She came in third Tuesday in her own state of Massachusetts behind Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden. The Democratic Party is consolidating rapidly around the former vice president. It’s pushing a factional senator back to the margins where he belongs. Half of her supporters are ready to break for Biden. Half of them are ready to rally around Sanders. (I’m guessing about the proportions.) There’s no way forward for the working man’s superwoman. She’s indeed right for the time. The time sadly wasn’t right for her.

You don’t know what you can’t know until the moment has arrived in which it’s possible to know. And even then, you might not realize it until after the fact. That’s rule of thumb seems applicable to Warren. Some say her best shot at the presidency was in 2016. She could have beaten Sanders and then Hillary Clinton, they say. I suppose there’s something to that. I know I would have voted for her. But no one can claim that with any certainty. Even if someone could, it makes no difference now.

That she dropped out after Super Tuesday, rather than beforehand, is worth pondering a bit. She must have known there was an even chance of losing her home state. Losing your home state is humiliating. Most candidates, seeing there’s a chance, would pull out in a heartbeat. Perhaps she believed she could win other states to compensate. Polling didn’t suggest that, though. Even if she did win other states, coming in third is just humiliating. Warren is no dummy. Why didn’t she drop out before it was too late?

I think she was taking one for the team.

Her supporters hate it when I say this — it sounds like I’m blaming her for Sanders’ struggle — but the fact is that Warren probably took a sizable share of Sanders’ votes in states like Maine, Minnesota, and Massachusetts, all states Biden triumphed in. In other words, Warren stayed in long enough to help the party’s elder statesman.

You don’t stay in a race you’re losing. You don’t stay in a race you know is going to humiliate you. You don’t — unless it’s in the service of the greater common good. The future of the republic depends on defeating President Donald Trump. Biden is seen as the best chance of beating a criminal authoritarian threat to American freedom. Warren is a superwoman. It makes total sense that she’d sacrifice herself for that.

This is probably as close as Warren will get to appearing to take a side, though. As I said, half of her supporters are pragmatic enough to go wherever the mainstream is going (Biden) while the other half is ideologically inclined to rally around a foundering Sanders’ campaign. There will be intense pressure to endorse one. She probably won’t.

That she probably won’t — and that she sacrificed herself for her country — indicates to me that there isn’t as much of a gulf between the left-flank of the Democratic Party and the so-called establishment as we are made to believe. It indicates something else, too. Unlike Sanders, Warren has always understood that structural reform — anti-corruption, greater equality and getting the government to serve normal people — isn’t going to come from attacking the party. It’s going to come from working within it.

I’m convinced sexism played a huge role in bringing down Warren’s campaign. But I’m equally convinced that sex — meaning, the female sex—is what will save us in the end. Warren wasn’t just building a presidential campaign. She was building a coalition, a women’s movement, by going woman to woman — girl to girl — creating from the ground up networks of like-minded Americans who believe our nation is stronger together.

Though they are cut from the same cloth, Warren never demagogued the way Sanders does. She faced skepticism of her many — many — policy proposals head on. She didn’t, as Sanders nearly always does, lump critics with enemies later to be destroyed. Her greatest strength was getting skeptics to see her point of view by way of reasoning, evidence, perseverance and patience. She’s no radical. She a small-r republican liberal.

Biden is likely going to win. Sanders is likely going to lose. Neither indicates that the Democratic establishment struck back nor that the progressive movement, such as it is, was defeated. Both however are vestiges of the past, not harbingers of the future.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 05 March 2020
Word Count: 794
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Imagine, just for the sake of argument, that the president of the United States was an arrogant, information-challenged, would-be autocrat with a soft spot for authoritarian leaders from China, Russia, and North Korea to Egypt (“my favorite dictator”), Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. And then, suppose that very president, while hollowing out the State Department and slamming its diplomats as “Deep State” troublemakers, were to name a voluble wheeler-dealer attorney as his unofficial, freelance White House go-between with shady characters worldwide. Imagine further that the president would do an end run around the professionals of the U.S. intelligence community — more Deep Staters, natch — and rely instead on conspiracy theories trundled back to Washington in that attorney’s briefcase.

Now, one last unimaginable thing, but humor me: accept that the attorney in question went by the name of Rudy Giuliani.

That, of course, is a reasonable description of the state of America in 2020. Three-plus years into Donald Trump’s misshapen presidency, as the “adults” fled the room one by one or were pushed to the exits, the president was left with a rump collection of family loyalists and third-tier yes-people around him.

Rarely, if ever, do mainstream media types take a step back to survey the classic Star Wars bar-like crew of know-nothings, Bible-thumpers, and connivers who’ve been assembled as Trump’s “team” and their breathtaking incompetence and perfidy. Luckily, with Giuliani in the mix, there’s at least one figure so wildly over-the-top that analysts and pundits have heaped scorn or ridicule on his head, and often his alone, as a person so outrageously unfit, so borderline deranged, so nakedly in it for profit that it’s impossible to consider him without marveling at the tragicomedy of it all.

Since 2017, however, Rudy Giuliani has emerged as Trump’s shadow secretary of state with his hands in American foreign policy and politics from Iran to Russia, Turkey to Ukraine and beyond. That means anyone, anywhere in the world, with a few million bucks to proffer and an angle to pursue in Washington can avoid Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the Christian-right uber-hawk from Kansas, and sidle up instead to the former U.S. attorney from the Southern District of New York and mayor of New York City.

During most of 2019, as is well known to anyone who even casually followed the impeachment proceedings in Congress, Giuliani had a starring role in President Trump’s conspiracy-laden efforts to prove that Ukraine, not Russia, intervened in the 2016 election and that Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, were mixed up in something nefarious there. (To those in the reality-based world, of course, it was Russia, not Ukraine that meddled massively in 2016. And the Bidens, it’s clear, did nothing illegal in Kyiv.)

As we shall see, the Trump-Giuliani conspiracy theory about that country originated with and was “fertilized” by three individuals who’d earlier been caught up in Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation of the White House: Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, the disgraced former national security advisor in the White House; Paul Manafort, who chaired Trump’s election campaign; and Manafort’s Ukraine partner and ally, an apparent operative for Russia’s GRU intelligence service, Konstantin Kilimnik. In other words, the Trump-Giuliani Ukraine adventure did indeed get a boost from Vladimir Putin’s secret service and Moscow’s propaganda machine.

You’ll remember, perhaps, or maybe you’ve forgotten, that before Mike Pompeo was secretary of state, before his predecessor Rex (“Rexxon”) Tillerson even took the job, it looked for a while like Giuliani was going to get it. He and Donald Trump had been political friends-with-benefits since the mid-1990s, as evidenced by a cringe-worthy 2000 video of Trump placing his lips unbidden on Giuliani-in-drag’s “breast.” The former mayor had quietly sought to reposition himself as the reincarnation of Roy Cohn, the mob-connected lawyer who had been a mentor to the up-and-coming New York real estate tycoon. (“Where’s my Roy Cohn?”) It’s hardly surprising then that, following Trump’s surprise victory in November 2016, Giuliani began lobbying hard for the secretary of state job. At the same time, he was fervently urging the president-elect not to select never-Trumper Mitt Romney for it. (Giuliani did, however, also endorse John Bolton, Washington’s warmonger-in-chief, for the job.)

Back in 2016, a week or so after the election, a New York Times editorial drily noted that the appointment of Giuliani as secretary of state “would be a dismal and potentially disastrous choice,” that he lacked “any substantive diplomatic experience and has demonstrated poor judgment throughout his career,” appeared “unhinged,” and would come with a “flurry of potential conflicts of interest.” And keep in mind that, back then, Giuliani was only getting started.

In recent years, much has been written, and accurately so, about the exodus of veteran diplomats — ambassadors to toilers in the ranks — from a gutted Foggy Bottom and its global outposts under both Tillerson and Pompeo. Writing last October for Foreign Affairs, for instance, former diplomat William Burns noted that fewer people took the department’s entrance exam in 2019 than in any year in previous decades. “Career diplomats,” wrote Burns, “are sidelined, with only one of 28 assistant secretary-rank positions filled by a Foreign Service officer, and more ambassadorships going to political appointees in this administration than in any in recent history.” He added: “One-fifth of ambassadorships remain unfilled, including critical posts.”

At the State Department, as one ambassador told the Hill, morale “is at a new low, although I am not sure it could fall much lower than where it has been for the past three years.” And that decline only accelerated after the humiliating dismissal of the U.S. ambassador in Kyiv, Marie Yovanovitch, whose ouster was orchestrated by Giuliani.

To be sure, the State Department was never a progressive bastion, not during the Cold War years nor in the era when America was the global hyperpower. It is, nonetheless, the main vehicle for any president wishing to use the levers of diplomacy rather than the oft-chosen military option. Now, with the adults gone and the diplomats increasingly neutered, we’re left with Trump and Giuliani. Neither hawks nor doves, they’re vultures, viewing every country as part of a vast veldt where they can pick at carcasses of every sort for their own business or political gain.

How to become a shadow secretary of state Giuliani’s foreign policy portfolio extends far and wide, though it was in Ukraine — specifically with that country’s many corrupt, Russian-leaning oligarchs — that he rocketed to world attention and helped trigger the president’s impeachment. In his world travels, Giuliani has combined his roles as businessman, security consultant, political fixer, and the president’s personal attorney into a mishmash of overlapping identities. He has, in other words, become a kind of walking, talking conflict-of-interest machine.

Before zeroing in on Ukraine, however, let’s consider just a few of Giuliani’s other foreign ventures. Since leaving office as New York’s mayor, through Giuliani Partners, the Bracewell & Giuliani law partnership, and (after 2016) the giant law firm of Greenberg Traurig, along with Giuliani Security & Safety and Giuliani Capital Advisers, the former mayor has pulled in millions of dollars working on behalf of foreign clients, including highly controversial ones. Among those deals, contracts, and maneuvers, before and after Trump became president and hired his old friend Rudy to serve as his personal attorney in 2018, Giuliani has been involved in a far-flung series of deals: he’s been a paid lobbyist in Romania; had a cybersecurity contract in Qatar; had deals in Colombia, Argentina, and El Salvador; worked shadow diplomacy (with a business angle) with Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro; operated in Japan, Serbia, and Guatemala; and that only begins to tell the story.

Consider Turkey, starting in 2017. Back then, when Lieutenant General Michael Flynn was forced to resign after just a few weeks as national security advisor, it turned out that he had quietly (and without reporting it) been working on behalf of Turkey’s autocratic government, led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, during the 2016 election campaign. Erdogan was disturbed by the presence of a dissident, Fethullah Gulen, in the United States. As an unregistered advocate for Turkey, Flynn lobbied in 2016 to have the United States expel Gulen and send him back to Turkey. Early the next year, Flynn was gone, but no fear, Rudy Giuliani promptly took up the same cause. He began urging President Trump to extradite Gulen to Turkey, where Erdogan was accusing him of having plotted an attempted coup d’état. (In the end, Gulen wasn’t expelled.)

Given Giuliani’s ability to mix policy with business, you won’t be surprised to learn that he was also enmeshed in more lucrative efforts in Turkey. At around the same time, he was lobbying Trump to endorse a prisoner swap involving one of his clients, an Iranian-born Turkish gold trader named Reza Zarrab whom the FBI had arrested in 2016 on charges of money laundering and trying to do an end run around economic sanctions on Iran. According to the New York Times, Zarrab had been working with Halkbank, a major Turkish bank with close ties to Turkish Finance Minister Berat Albayrak who is also President Erdogan’s son-in-law, to “funnel more than $10 billion in gold and cash to Iran.”

At first blush, it might seem odd for Giuliani to offer his services on behalf of an Iranian expat accused of trying to break U.S. sanctions whose family, it turned out, had close ties to former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Curious, yes, but for Giuliani, business is business and there were bucks to be made. That he would use his connections to the Oval Office in an ultimately unsuccessful appeal for his client is even odder, given that Giuliani is otherwise a militant hardliner when it comes to demanding the overthrow of the Iranian government.

Case in point: his long-time affiliation with the People’s Jihadists, otherwise known as the Mujaheddin-e-Khalq, or MEK. Like many of Giuliani’s escapades abroad, his efforts with MEK were a money-making project. Along with John Bolton, the late Senator John McCain, former National Security Advisor Jim Jones, and former Attorney General Mike Mukasey, Giuliani has for years been affiliated with the MEK, making perhaps a dozen appearances, mostly paid speeches, at its conventions and rallies.

The MEK has almost no support inside Iran, not only because it’s conducted a terror campaign against that country’s top officials since 1981, but because it operated with the backing of Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein during and after the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. It’s also widely regarded as a cult. Last year, in the midst of his anti-Joe Biden skullduggery in Ukraine, in his 11th appearance at an MEK confab, Giuliani traveled to Albania, of all places, where the group has established a military and political base. There, he called Trump “heroic” for “doing away with the reckless nuclear agreement and putting [Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] on the terrorist list.”

In 2018, this reporter attended one of the MEK’s large-scale events, held at a hotel in midtown New York City. General Jim Jones, who became an ultra-hawk after being ousted as President Obama’s national security advisor in 2010, spoke to the gathering first, noting proudly that he is supposedly on a list of people the government in Tehran plans to assassinate.

Rising to speak after Jones, Giuliani seemed jealous. “I hope I say enough offensive things that they’ll put me on that list to kill me,” he commented. Needless to say, both Jones and Giuliani are still alive and kicking, and there’s no evidence that either one is on any Iranian kill list. However, thanks in part to Giuliani’s hardline, anti-Iran advice to the president, that country’s top general, Qassem Soleimani, was indeed placed on a presidential kill list and drone assassinated as 2020 began.

And then there was Ukraine It was, of course, in connection with Ukraine that Giuliani’s freelancing came to the world’s attention. In the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s impeachment report, his name is mentioned about 160 times. He’s cited, first and foremost because, in that infamous “perfect” July 2019 phone call of his, Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to work through him; because the former mayor was the primary organizer of the smear campaign against the actual ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who was subsequently fired; and because it was he who, starting as early as May 2019, masterminded a months-long political witch hunt against the Bidens, demanding over and over that Ukraine carry out an ersatz investigation of the man the president then expected to be his chief 2020 election opponent.

Numerous figures, including Ambassador Bill Taylor, who succeeded Yovanovitch at the U.S. embassy in Kyiv, would express dismay over Giuliani’s role as the “irregular” channel for the Trump administration’s Ukraine policy — the “Giuliani factor,” as Ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker called it. The story of how all this led to the president’s impeachment is too well known to be rehashed here.

The Joe Biden/Hunter Biden part of the Ukraine story was straightforward enough in its own way. Far more complicated and troubling was the adherence of the president and Giuliani to a weird conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, used its intelligence service to try to sway the 2016 election. According to various official reports and in the opinion of virtually every expert who’s studied the matter, it was Russia that intervened to boost Trump’s election campaign. According to Trump and Giuliani, however, Ukraine meddled in 2016 on behalf of Hillary Clinton and indeed, they argue, the actual Democratic National Committee server somehow found its way to Kyiv, thanks to a computer security firm called CrowdStrike, which Trump claimed was owned by a wealthy Ukrainian. (It is not.)

Naturally enough, this Trump-Giuliani theory was nonsense, but according to the Washington Post, it had its origins — perhaps not surprisingly — in propaganda generated in Moscow. The Post reported that Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, and Manafort’s partner, Konstantin Kilimnik, “played a role in convincing Trump that Russia did not actually interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, despite what both Mueller and the U.S. intelligence community have concluded, and that it was actually Ukraine.”

According to Rick Gates, Manafort’s deputy, the Ukraine conspiracy theory originated with his boss who “parroted” the line from Kilimnik. And both Manafort and Kilimnik — who was indicted by Mueller — had ties to Moscow operatives and pro-Russian forces in Ukraine, while Kilimnik himself was identified by Mueller and the FBI as part of Russia’s GRU.

As the Post concluded: “So we have two men [Manafort and Flynn] who have been convicted of offenses related to their Russia ties, have both lied to investigators about their interactions with Russian interests, and who apparently played a significant role in pushing a theory to Trump that Russia did not actually interfere in the 2016 election. They instead pointed the finger at Russia’s nemesis, Ukraine, and that has apparently stuck with Trump for more than three years.”

And it was that line that would be spread eagerly by pro-Trump writers like the Hill’s John Solomon. In a review of Solomon’s pieces, released this month, the Hill’s editors analyzed 14 of his columns with titles like “As Russian collusion fades, Ukraine plot to help Clinton emerges.” In doing so, they found numerous troubling facts about Solomon, his sources, and his overall reporting. As the Hill report put it:

“Giuliani has indicated he was a key source of information for Solomon on Ukraine, telling the New York Times in November 2019 that he turned over information about the Bidens earlier in the year to Solomon. ‘I really turned my stuff over to John Solomon,’ Giuliani said.

“The former New York City mayor later told the New Yorker he encouraged Solomon to highlight information on the Bidens and Yovanovitch, stating, ‘I said, “John, let’s make this as prominent as possible,”’ adding, “‘I’ll go on TV. You go on TV. You do columns.’”

Two colorful characters who acted as Giuliani’s Ukraine go-betweens, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, have been indicted on conspiracy charges and, according to Fortune, Giuliani, too, could be indicted in that case. As CNN noted in January, it’s nearly unheard of for a U.S. Attorney’s office — in this case the one for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) — to end up indicting a former U.S. attorney who led the same district. CNN added: “The SDNY community has watched in disbelief as Giuliani continues to seek the spotlight even as the investigation has unfolded and expanded into new fronts on a nearly weekly basis. The impeachment inquiry has also unleashed new evidence regarding his role performing shadow diplomacy on behalf of President Donald Trump as recently as [mid-January].”

Indeed, Giuliani is still at it. In concert with a collection of corrupt ex-prosecutors in Ukraine and in his ongoing role as shadow secretary of state-cum-intelligence chief, Giuliani is still gathering conspiracy-riddled information on the Bidens in Kyiv — and Attorney General William Barr has obligingly created an “intake process in the field” to absorb Giuliani’s work product straight into the Department of Justice. One thing is guaranteed: “Secretary of State” Giuliani will have a clear field in Kyiv, since Ambassador Taylor was unceremoniously fired on January 1st of this year.

Bob Dreyfuss, an investigative journalist and TomDispatch (where this article originated) regular, is a contributing editor at the Nation and has written for Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, the American Prospect, the New Republic, and many other magazines. He is the author of Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.

Copyright ©2020 Robert Dreyfuss — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 05 March 2020
Word Count: 2,863
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The campaign press corps is again using the word “comeback” to describe Joe Biden’s super performance on Super Tuesday. This, as you know, is wrong. Biden was always the favorite of the Democratic Party’s base. The Democratic Party’s base is black. That black Democrats in southern states voted for Biden was entirely predictable. That it was entirely predictable means no self-respecting journalist should be surprised.

But acting surprised in the absence of good reason for being surprised has injurious outcomes. It gives citizens the false impression that early nominating states have more clout than they do. It shrouds the role of delegates in the party’s nomination process — meaning the number of delegates won, not states won, is the only thing that matters. Worse, it overlooks the intense anti-Donald Trump feeling among Democrats of color. Voting for Biden wasn’t an expression of their policy views. It’s an act of survival.

Politico’s Jack Shafer tweeted last night, as the results were coming in, that “African Americans seem to be spurning democratic socialism.” That’s not quite right. The question isn’t whether black Americans embrace universal health care, higher wages, affordable housing, quality education and so on. Black history is a history of fighting, bleeding and dying for these and similar things. The question isn’t about policy. It’s about politics. Black politics in this country has always stood against tyranny.

For the first time in my life, affluent white suburban voters are practicing black politics.

Indeed, the best way to misunderstand Super Tuesday’s results is analyzing them from Shafer’s white-centered perspective. From that viewpoint, which is also practiced by the Bernie Sanders campaign, it’s plausible the Democratic establishment coordinated with Wall Street potentates to rig the primary process in favor of the former vice president. Plausible yes, but clearly wrong — unless you’re willing to say the 62 percent of southern black voters who went for Biden are representative of the party’s elite.

But even a class perspective, as Sanders’ would prefer, conceals what’s really going on. Super Tuesday confirmed a timeless truth obscured quadrennially by journalists acting surprised when there’s no good reason for being surprised. The white working class — households earning less annually than $50,000 — doesn’t want a socialist revolution in America any more than it wants a fascist takeover. Like their black counterparts, most white working class voters chose Biden. They bet on a “winner” as an act of survival.

This isn’t to say some white working class voters didn’t choose Sanders. Some did. Nor is this to say no black voters chose Sanders. Some did. Those who did, however, were probably young — and there’s your problem. Young people just don’t vote at anywhere close to the same rates as older people do. Of all voters in 14 states on Super Tuesday, only 13 percent were under 30. That number rises 10 points for ages 30 to 44. It’s more than double for 65 and over. Thirty-five percent were between the ages of 45 and 64.

Sanders has always been a factional candidate. A gambler, too. He bet on changing the electorate in order to bend the Democratic Party to his will. (Remember, he’s an independent senator.) If he could do that, he figured, he could defeat the incumbent.

But doing that required driving out more young voters than any candidate has ever driven out in the modern history of presidential campaigns. (No one — no one — ever won relying on the youth vote.) He needed to drive out that many because he needed to replace regular Democratic voters he’d chase away during the primary season and “moderate” white voters he’d chase away during the general election in the fall.

Super Tuesday confirmed those voters aren’t there. At the very least, he can’t depend on them. Not being a member of the Democratic Party was always a major liability for Sanders. So was running for president in a year in which Hillary Clinton was not.

We’re hearing a lot about “Bernie or Bust” post-Super Tuesday. This is natural. Feelings are raw. Paranoia is high. Most Sanders voters will settle down over time. Those who don’t are small in number (though very loud). They are joined by Republican or Russian operatives sowing division and distrust among Democrats. Don’t concern yourself too much with them. Focus instead on the job ahead.

There’s still a ways to go. In theory, Sanders could gain on Biden. But it’s hard to see that happening. The party is consolidating around its elder statesman, pushing Sanders to where he began, on the fringes of the party. Democratic superdelegates will go to Biden, not Sanders. Biden will get most, or all, of the delegates released by candidates who have stopped running. (Mike Bloomberg dropped out this morning.)

Joe Biden didn’t make a comeback.

He never went anywhere from which to return.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 04 March 2020
Word Count: 800
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Today is Super Tuesday. Can I get an amen?

After more than a year of being bombarded with campaign propaganda, voters head to the polls to choose a Democratic candidate. The results can’t come fast enough. We don’t live in normal times. The sooner the party settles on a nominee, the better.

In normal times, partisanship is vigorous, but not so much that it prevails during periods of emergency. In normal times, loyal partisans set aside normal politics and join forces with natural adversaries for the benefit of the greater common good.

Disloyal partisans, however, don’t do that. Instead of suspending ordinary partisan conflict during extraordinary crisis, they seek ways of exploiting crisis in the interest of gaining political advantage. Take what happened during the 2007-2008 panic.

President George W. Bush asked House Republicans to support a bill that would bail out Wall Street in order to prevent an economic collapse the size of the Great Depression. “If money isn’t loosened up, this sucker could go down,” Bush said.

John Boehner, then House minority leader, said no can do. His conference refused. Moreover, his Republicans would, under the Tea Party banner, spend the next two years attacking the Democrats after they backed Bush and saved the US economy. The result was a takeover of the House and total obstruction of President Barack Obama.

Disloyal partisans don’t think of themselves as disloyal, because their greatest loyalty is partisan, not patriotic. Today’s GOP can’t be faulted too much for that, though. The party has warred against the very notion of a greater common good for half a century.

It was Margaret Thatcher who said back in 1987: “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no governments can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first” (my italics).

Republicans used to make exceptions to that rule when it came to the economy, natural disasters and public health. But since the twin shocks of the financial crisis and the election of the first black president, the exceptions have rapidly narrowed.

After Hurricane Sandy slammed into New Jersey, New York and New England in 2012, devastating the local economies here, Senate Republicans, led by Ted Cruz of Texas, fought against emergency legislation providing disaster relief. No society meant no common good meant no help for fellow Americans. But when Hurricane Harvey hit Houston in 2017, Cruz changed his mind. There was such a thing as society after all.

There may still be an exception when it comes to the new coronavirus. Obviously, Republican voters get sick too. But even that window appears to be closing. The president isn’t so much concerned with containing what is now a pandemic. His greater concern is the outbreak might make his reelection all that much harder.

Donald Trump pressured the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates. He was hoping that would goose markets spiraling downward out of fear of the coronavirus’s spread. The gambit isn’t working. “Stocks are tanking,” Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal said today.

If he can’t goose the markets, the president can satisfy supporters in other ways. He can use the pandemic as a rationale for implementing fascist policies he already wanted but hadn’t had a convincing enough rationale to implement them with.

Trump wants to shut down travel from Muslim-majority countries. The pandemic gives the administration reason for expanding the “Muslim ban.” He wants to divert money allocated for other things to complete a border wall. The pandemic gives the administration reason for taking billions from the Pentagon. He wants to close the border entirely. The White House cited the coronavirus as reason for doing just that.

Discriminating against a religion is an abomination. So is spending money any which way he wants. The Congress has the power of the purse, not the presidency. But Trump can do these things and more because Senate Republicans betrayed their loyalty to the US Constitution when they acquitted him of crimes against America.

That’s to be expected, I suppose, from a Republican Party that refuses to recognize the political legitimacy of American citizens who are not members of the Republican Party. The common good is not common — unless you’re a Republican. The common good is not good — unless you’re a Republican. If you’re sick or jobless or struggling to recover from a natural disaster, you’re on your own — unless you’re a Republican.

Super Tuesday’s results can’t come fast enough. We don’t live in normal times.

The sooner the Democrats settle on a nominee, the better.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 03 March 2020
Word Count: 760
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Here’s the truth of it: I’d like a presidential pardon. Really, I would. And I think I deserve it more than Michael Milken or Rod Blagojevich or — because it’s obviously heading our way — Roger Stone (not to speak of Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort). Unlike the rest of them, I genuinely deserve a pardon because I don’t even remember being tried or know what I did. Yet somehow, here I am sentenced to what, if things don’t get better — given my age and his luck — could prove to be life not in prison but in Trumpland (once known as the United States of America).

Or here’s another possibility that came to mind as I was thinking over my predicament: maybe I can still use that old “get out of jail free card” I saved from my childhood Monopoly set. You know, the one at the bottom of which was written: “This card may be kept until needed or sold.” Well, I need it now. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work anymore, maybe because it was produced before financialization stopped being a kid’s board game and became one for presidents, presidential candidates, and those recently pardoned by you-know-who.

If only this were simply a game I found myself trapped in — Trumpopoly. Unfortunately, it’s no board game, though I must admit that, more than three years later, I’m officially bored with the man who has surely gotten more attention, more words spoken and written about him, than anyone in history. Even if you included Nebuchadnezzar, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong, I doubt he would have any serious competition.

Honestly, who could even contest that statement, given that nothing he does, no matter how trivial, isn’t dealt with as “news” and covered as if the world were ending? When you think about it, it’s little short of remarkable. And I’m not even talking about Donald Trump’s non-stop coverage on his own news service, also known as Fox News. No, what I had in mind was the Fake News Media itself, regularly identified by the president as his major enemy. (“Our primary opponent is the Fake News Media. They are now beyond Fake, they are Corrupt.”)

He’s not wrong, if by corruption you mean the over-coverage of him. The truth is that, whether you’re talking about the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, or MSNBC, none of them can get enough of him. Ever. They cover his rallies; they cover his tweets; they cover his impromptu news conferences in the north driveway of the White House, often as if nothing else on Earth were going on.

“Cover” might not even be the right word for it, unless you’re thinking about a thick, smothering, orange blanket thrown over our American world.

Collusion! In this Trumpian prison of ours, you really have little choice. Whether you like it or not, whether you want to or not, you’re a witness to the vagaries of one Donald J. Trump, morning, noon, and night, day in, day out. I mean, you know what film the president thinks should have won the best-picture Oscar this year, right? Gone With the Wind, which, after he brought it up, promptly shot to number one on topics trending on Twitter. You have a sense of how many years he expects to remain in the White House (up to 26, as he told one of his rally crowds recently, or assumedly until Barron is ready to take over); you know that he’s a “germophobe” (small tip: don’t cough or sneeze in his presence and the next time you meet him, don’t try to shake his hand); you’re probably aware that his properties in India (as well as his pronunciation of Indian names) leave something to be desired, but that the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas is buzzing along (especially when he visits while on the campaign trail). And here are some other things you might have caught as well: that you and I have spent quite a little fortune (up to $650 a night per agent) putting up the Secret Service people protecting him at Trump properties; that, thanks to a tweeted photo of him on a windy day, he has quite a tan line (or that, as he tweeted back, “More Fake News. This was photoshopped, obviously, but the wind was strong and the hair looks good? Anything to demean!”); or that he hates being told, especially by American intelligence officials, no less “Shifty Schiff,” that Vladimir Putin would like to lend his reelection a hand, but loves it that the Russian prexy may have a yen to promote Bernie Sanders in this election season; that his greatest skill (à la The Apprentice and The Celebrity Apprentice) may be firing people he considers personally disloyal to him (even if it’s called purging when you’re the president and they’re government officials or bureaucrats), hence his three years in office represent the greatest turnover in Washington officialdom in presidential memory; or perhaps the way he tweets charges and claims of every sort (that, for instance, Mitt Romney is a “Democratic spy”); or all the people he actually knows but claims he doesn’t; or his urge to slam every imaginable, or even unimaginable, figure ranging from the forewoman of the Roger Stone jury (“She somehow weaseled her way onto the jury and if that’s not a tainted jury then there is no such thing as a tainted jury”) to the 598 “people, places, and things” the New York Times counted him insulting by May 2019, including John McCain (23 times, “last in his class”) and his daughter Meghan (four times, “obnoxious”); oh, and let’s not forget his threats to unleash nuclear weapons on North Korea (“They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”) and Afghanistan (“And if we wanted to do a certain method of war, we would win that very quickly. But many, many — really, tens of millions of people would be killed…”). And that, of course, is barely a hint of the world we now inhabit, thanks not just to Donald J. Trump, but to the very Fake News Media that he denounces so incessantly.

We’re here in Trump’s version of a prison in part because he and the Fake News Media he hates so much are in eternal collusion as well as eternal collision! Much as they theoretically dislike each other, both the non-Fox mainstream media and the president seem to desperately need each other. After all, in a social media-dominated world, the traditional media has had its troubles. Papers have been losing revenue, folding, drying up, dying. Staffs have been plunging and local news suffering. (In my own hometown rag, the New York Times, undoubtedly because many copyeditors were dumped, small errors now abound in the paper paper, which I still read, in a way that once would have been unimaginable.)  On TV, of course, you have cable news networks that need to talk about something quite literally 24/7.

So what a godsend it must be to be able to assign reporter after reporter and commentator after commentator to the doings of a single man, his words, acts, impulses, tweets, concerns, bizarre comments, strange thoughts, odd acts. Who could doubt that he has, in these years, become the definition of “the news” in a way that once would have been inconceivable but couldn’t be more convenient for a pressed and harried media?

And however much he may endlessly denounce them, he desperately needs them, too. Otherwise, what would he do for attention? They’re, in effect, his servants and he, in some strange way, theirs. No matter what they officially think of each other, this is the definition of collusion — one that has, in the last three years, also helped redefine the nature of our American world. No matter what they say about each other, in his own fashion, he’s always ready to pardon them and they, in their own fashion, him.

And here I am — don’t think I’m not feeling guilty about it — covering him, too, today. It seems I can’t help myself. After all, I’m in the same prison world as everyone else in this country, including reporters.

Pardon him? You bet! By the way, give you-know-who credit where it’s due. He may be 73 years old, but he’s grasped the tweetable moment in a way that’s been beyond impressive from that fateful day in June 2015 when he rode a Trump Tower escalator into the presidential race, praising his future “great, great wall” (to be paid for by Mexico), and denouncing the “Mexican rapists” who had to go. In attention-getting terms, he had anything but a 73-year-old’s sense of how this world actually works and, let’s be honest, that was impressive.

At some basic level, the results of what he grasped are no less so. After all — god save us — he might even find himself in the White House for a second term (if the coronavirus or Bernie Sanders doesn’t take him down first).

Donald Trump is obviously no founding father but, despite his weight, you could perhaps think of him as something like a founding feather, a phenomenon carried by the latest political winds into the grim future of us all. And what a future it’s likely to be if this president, a genuine arsonist when it comes to heating the planet to the boiling point, gets reelected. (He could singlehandedly give William Blake’s classic poem, “Tyger, Tyger, burning bright, in the forests of the night,” new meaning.)

I, on the other hand, find myself trapped in his world but, in a sense, from elsewhere. Sometimes I wonder if I’m really living in the world I seem to inhabit or if I’m not already, in Australian terms, in some kind of midsummer night’s dream or rather nightmare?

I’m just a couple of years older than The Donald and yet if he represents the most modern of 73-year-old realities, then I’m from a past age. I can’t even tweet, having never learned that modern form of conspiracy haiku.  Has anyone, no matter how much younger than him, grasped as fully or creatively as he did the all-too-modern sense of how to demand and command attention on a 24/7 basis? There has been nothing like him or his version of a presidency in our history.

Now, to be honest with you, I’m sick of both Donald Trump and the fake news media. No, I mean it.  Sometimes, I dream of bringing back my long-dead parents and showing them our Trumpian world in which, for instance, Americans fight a range of endlessly unsuccessful wars across a remarkable swath of the planet. Meanwhile, the Pentagon is indulged in its urge to recreate a militarized version of the Cold War, including a new multi-trillion dollar nuclear arms race; a world in which, however — and this would have been beyond comprehension to them — “infrastructure week” in Washington, the very idea of putting significant sums of money into rebuilding the crumbling basics in this country, has become little short of a joke. Oh, and of course, I’d have to tell them that, since their deaths, we — some of us at least — have accepted that the planet itself, thanks to the burning of fossil fuels, is now overheating in a radical way.

There is, however, one thing I’ve never doubted about The Donald: that, as he did with his five flaming, bankrupt casinos in Atlantic City in the early 1990s, when the moment comes, he’ll jump ship in the nick of time, money in hand, leaving the rest of us to go down on the USS Constitution (with no get-out-of-jail-free card in sight).

Pardon me? Don’t count on it. Pardon you. I wouldn’t hold my breath. But pardon him? You bet! Consider it a done deal.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs TomDispatch.com (where this article originated) and is a fellow of the Type Media Center. His sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.

Copyright ©2020 Tom Engelhardt — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 03 March 2020
Word Count: 1,967
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Given the number of falsehoods uttered by US President Donald Trump it is difficult to believe what he says and tweets and to separate facts from fiction.

Trump, unfortunately, chooses to see only one side to every dispute — his. He professes to know more about every topic than the professionals trained to do the job.

This has been a constant with Trump in nearly all matters, including volatile ones such as the work by the intelligence community and delving into the complexities of the Middle East.

In the Middle East, Trump has demonstrated his ability to promote failure while falsely preaching success. The president’s so-called Middle East peace plan, intended to put an end to the more than 70-year Palestinian-Israeli conflict, was stillborn as Trump and members of his administration assigned to the peace project failed to consult the Palestinians and, in their political naivety, thought they could succeed in a few months where others, far more qualified at resolving conflicts, failed time and again.

Coming after the United States closed the Palestine Liberation Organisation office in Washington, the recognition of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights as belonging to Israel and moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Trump’s plan showed the Palestinians that there was no room for their position in an eventual resumption of the peace talks.

Trump’s failure in the Israeli-Palestinian issue adds up to more shortcomings of US policies in the region.

The United States has been politically on the retreat in the Middle East as it reversed from decades of pushing diplomacy while discreetly relying on the might of the US military.

Since Trump found his way into the Oval Office, the United States’ foreign policy has been conducted much like the rest of the hot issues handled by this administration: by Twitter diplomacy, with the president making important decisions on his own, often without consulting his advisers and staff.

At best the United States has been spinning its wheels when it comes to the status of the US military in the region. At worst, the United States has lost much of the prestige it once commanded. The Trump administration has angered long-time allies and opened the door to long-time nemesis and Cold War foe Russia.

Under the presidency of Vladimir Putin, who has shown all the slyness of the KGB operative he once was, Russia wasted no opportunity to slip in while Trump tweeted US forces out of northern Syria.

Trump’s inadequate and confusing policies regarding Syria and the Levant allowed Russian and Turkish troops to move into northern Syria. This left the Kurds, a valuable and loyal US ally, open to retaliation by the Turks and Syrian government troops and put the Russian military on the shores of the Mediterranean, giving the Russian Navy year-round access to warm water and deep-water ports, something the Russians had been working towards since the days of the tsars. Trump’s laissez-faire attitude has muddied the troubled waters of the Eastern Mediterranean.

These developments raise questions regarding NATO’s playbook. For example, what would be expected from NATO if Russia were to attack Turkey, a NATO country? A prime clause of the NATO pact stipulates that an attack against one member is equal to an attack against all 29 NATO members.

To be sure, the Middle East has long been a basket of discontent with turmoil bubbling away but rarely has the area been so close to experiencing large-scale chaos.

This is hardly the end of the region’s problems. Given the US presidential elections in November, Trump will do whatever it takes to win votes and remain in the Oval Office for another four years. He is likely to pull US forces out of an area that requires their presence if it would win him votes.

It would not be a great surprise if given that the so-called peace talks with the Taliban in Afghanistan, which are unlikely to yield concrete results, Trump would declare victory and return all US troops home.

His previous actions have shown that Trump will choose his personal interests before those of the country. Such a move this time would have a devastating effect on the region.

Claude Salhani is a regular columnist for The Arab Weekly.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 03 March 2020
Word Count: 694
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You’ve heard by now that Joe Biden made a comeback over the weekend. The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, CNN, Reuters, USA Today, Fox News—all the big media went with headlines over the last 24 hours using a variation of “comeback.”

Wrong, all of them.

The former vice president did not come back because he had not gone anywhere from which to return. Biden was always the favorite of the Democratic Party’s base. The Democratic Party’s base is black. That black Democrats in South Carolina voted for Biden was predictable. That it was predictable means no one should be surprised.

And yet here we are, talking about Biden as if gee golly he rose from the dead.

Fact: delegates are all that matter. They matter more than “winning” or “losing” states. Sanders has 58. Biden has 54. Pete Buttigieg has 26 (which will probably go to Biden now that Hizzoner has dropped out). Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar have eight and seven, respectively. A candidate needs nearly 2,000 delegates to win the nomination.

Which is to say, all commentary hyperventilating about Sanders has been premature at the very least. We already knew Sanders was going to perform in caucuses (Iowa and Nevada). We already knew he was going to perform in states without sizable minority populations (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada). We already knew he has struggled to gain traction among Democrats of color. In short, everything is going as expected.

That everything is going as expected, however, makes for boring copy. If the campaign press corps has a bias, it is against tedium. No self-interested reporter wants to spend days on end on the campaign trail chasing down outcomes informed people can foresee. She looks for ways to heighten drama, deepen uncertainty and tell a story.

Storytelling didn’t used to dominate. There was a time when news-gathering prevailed. Since Teddy White’s The Making of the President (1960), however, and since creative writing workshops churned out more writers than there are teaching jobs and book contracts to employ them, storytelling has become an indisputable good. The New York Times’ Dean Baquet once said presidential campaigns can’t be understood without it.

That’s wrong. What’s more, that’s dangerous. The campaign press corps isn’t telling a story so much as it is inventing one that satisfies its desire for drama, conflict, tension, uncertainty, etc. As I wrote last month, talking about something in the absence of something actually creates something. Reporters claim to be reporting what they find in the field. Often, however, they end up fabricating it, and injuring the citizenry.

That might otherwise be benign, but it can be destructive. Consider that some pundits, evidently in good faith, are calling on the former vice president to drop out of the race. After all, they say, he came in third in Iowa, fourth in New Hampshire.

Biden is not going to drop, nor should he. But he does feel the effect of all the talk of Sanders’ imaginary momentum. His numbers are sliding, even in South Carolina. This is in spite of the fact that South Carolina and other diverse states would, if they came earlier, virtually guarantee Biden’s bid to be Donald Trump’s Democratic challenger.

(Biden’s numbers didn’t slide that much, apparently.)

While reporters talk excitedly about Biden winning his first primary in decades of trying, an important fact is underappreciated. Yes, Biden won South Carolina. He won by a huge margin among black voters — 61 percent to Sanders’ 17. But there’s more, (per the Washington Post).

Around 528,000 South Carolinians turned out in the 2020 Democratic primary, a remarkable show of voter engagement compared to four years ago. Former vice president Joe Biden ran up his totals in black communities but also won areas dominated by groups he has struggled to connect with, notably white and higher income voters. These areas showed some of the largest turnout increases in the state. Overall, South Carolina’s vote total was a massive increase over the 373,000 turnout for 2016 and nearly matched the votes cast in Obama’s 2008 primary win. (My italics.)

It’s no surprise that Biden won. That his victory came close to Obama’s?

Holy moly!

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 02 March 2020
Word Count: 695
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It speaks to the tension of the moment that, when a car was driven into a crowd of people at a carnival parade in the small German town of Volkmarsen, the first thought was of terrorism — jihadist or far-right, one or the other.

As it turned out, Volkmarsen police said there was no sign the 29-year-old German driver had been politically motivated and that his action February 24 did not necessarily constitute a terror attack.

That seemed to rule out jihadist or far-right terrorism but it didn’t dispel persistent fears about a yet-unseen link or the possibility of a domino effect. In fact, authorities in Hesse, the state in which Volkmarsen is located, cancelled all carnival parades “as a precaution” after the incident.

It stands to reason. The Volkmarsen incident happened just days after Germany had its third deadly far-right attack in eight months. A man, identified as Tobias Rathjen killed ten people, most of them of immigrant origin, in two shisha bars in the Frankfurt suburb of Hanau.

The gunman reportedly expressed extreme right-wing views in a letter of confession that was found after he killed himself. In rambling writings and videos posted online before his shooting spree, the killer advocated genocide, expressed hatred of immigrants and peddled conspiracy theories spread by neo-Nazis, posting about the “great replacement,” the claim that Jews and liberals want “inferior” races to replace the white race.

Official condemnation was swift. German Chancellor Angela Merkel denounced the “poison” of racism and hatred in Germany. Justice Minister Christine Lambrecht expressed Germans’ growing concerns about the cancer within the body politic when she said the shisha bar killings showed that “right-wing extremism and right-wing terrorism are the biggest threat to our democracy today.” Interior Minister Horst Seehofer acknowledged that “the threat posed by right-wing extremism, antisemitism and racism in Germany is very high.”

Just how high is clear from the tragic and frightening toll it took last year. In October, an attacker killed two people and tried to storm a synagogue in Halle in central Germany. He streamed the assault live online and later admitted to a far-right motive. In June, Walter Luebcke, a regional politician who supported Merkel’s policy of welcoming Syrian refugees, was shot in the head at close range. The killer had far-right links. It was the first assassination of a politician by a right-wing extremist since the birth of the German Federal Republic in 1949.

Seehofer pointed to a longer timeline and a deeper trend, not least a 2016 attack on migrants in a Munich mall and a bloody trail that stretched from 2000-07 of the killing of immigrants by a group that called itself the National Socialist Underground.

Two points are worth noting. First, until very recently, the threat posed by white supremacists was underestimated in Germany and across much of the Western world. Until Christchurch, Charlottesville and the Finsbury Park mosque attacks, the focus was Islamist extremism.

It made sense, at a time when London, Madrid, Paris, Brussels and other European cities faced repeated jihadist attacks but tunnel vision meant another, equally dark and virulent terrorist threat stayed under the radar. That is changing and demonstrably so in Germany and Britain.

For two years, Britain’s domestic counterintelligence and security agency MI5 has carried out serious investigations of suspected far-right plots, which police describe as the fastest-growing terrorist threat in the country.

Recently, the German government approved a bill to crack down on hate speech and online extremism, including of the sort advanced by Germany’s anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

Though the AfD does not explicitly espouse violence, its rhetoric may nurture it. After the Hanau killings, for instance, the AfD issued a formal condemnation but also suggested that Merkel’s open-door refugee policies were the reason that ordinary Germans “flipped out.”

The AfD’s fulminations are potent. While the party is just 7 years old and garnered less than 13% of the national vote in the last election, it has members in all 16 of Germany’s state legislatures and is the largest opposition party nationally.

The AfD’s increasing ability to influence German political discourse brings us to the second, key point at issue: the rise in Western democracies of nationalist and right-wing populist movements. Their stock-in-trade is xenophobia. They use the guarantee of free speech to advance those views and win a place in legislatures by means of the democratic tools freely afforded to all who seek them.

It is time for the West to wage an all-out battle to preserve those freedoms by confronting all forms of hatred and exclusivism.

Rashmee Roshan Lall is a regular columnist for The Arab Weekly. She blogs at www.rashmee.com and is on Twitter @rashmeerl

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 02 March 2020
Word Count: 760
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Hold on to your helmets! It’s true the White House is reporting that its proposed new Pentagon budget is only $740.5 billion, a relatively small increase from the previous year’s staggering number. In reality, however, when you also include war and security costs buried in the budgets of other agencies, the actual national security figure comes in at more than $1.2 trillion, as the Trump administration continues to give the Pentagon free reign over taxpayer dollars.

You would think that the country’s congressional representatives might want to take control of this process and roll back that budget — especially given the way the White House has repeatedly violated its constitutional authority by essentially stealing billions of dollars from the Defense Department for the president’s “Great Wall” (that Congress refused to fund). Recently, even some of the usual congressional Pentagon budget boosters have begun to lament how difficult it is to take the Department’s requests for more money seriously, given the way the military continues to demand yet more (ever more expensive) weaponry and advanced technologies on the (largely bogus) grounds that Uncle Sam is losing an innovation war with Russia and China.

And if this wasn’t bad enough, keep in mind that the Defense Department remains the only major federal agency that has proven itself incapable of even passing an audit. An investigation by my colleague Jason Paladino at the Project On Government Oversight found that increased secrecy around the operations of the Pentagon is making it ever more difficult to assess whether any of its money is well spent, which is why it’s important to track where all the money in this country’s national security budget actually goes.

The Pentagon’s “base” budget This year’s Pentagon request includes $636.4 billion for what’s called its “base” budget — for the routine expenses of the Defense Department. However, claiming that those funds were insufficient, Congress and the Pentagon created a separate slush fund to cover both actual war expenses and other items on their wish lists (on which more to come). Add in mandatory spending, which includes payments to veterans’ retirement and illness compensation funds and that base budget comes to $647.2 billion.

Ahead of the recent budget roll out, the Pentagon issued a review of potential “reforms” to supposedly cut or control soaring costs. While a few of them deserve serious consideration and debate, the majority reveal just how focused the Pentagon is on protecting its own interests. Ironically, one major area of investment it wants to slash involves oversight of the billions of dollars to be spent. Perhaps least surprising was a proposal to slash programs for operational testing and evaluation — otherwise known as the process of determining whether the billions Americans spend on shiny new weaponry will result in products that actually work. The Pentagon’s Office of Operational Test and Evaluation has found itself repeatedly under attack from arms manufacturers and their boosters who would prefer to be in charge of grading their own performances.

Reduced oversight becomes even more troubling when you look at where Pentagon policymakers want to move that money — to missile defense based on staggeringly expensive futuristic hypersonic weaponry. As my Project On Government Oversight colleague Mark Thompson has written, the idea that such weapons will offer a successful way of defending against enemy missiles “is a recipe for military futility and fiscal insanity.”

Another proposal — to cut A-10 “Warthogs” in the Pentagon’s arsenal in pursuit of a new generation of fighter planes — suggests just how cavalier a department eager for flashy new toys that mean large paydays for the giant defense contractors can be with service members’ lives. After all, no weapons platform more effectively protects ground troops at a relatively low cost than the A-10, yet that plane regularly ends up on the cut list, thanks to those eager to make money on a predictably less effective and vastly more expensive replacement.

Many other proposed “cuts” are actually gambits to get Congress to pump yet more money into the Pentagon. For instance, a memo of supposed cuts to shipbuilding programs, leaked at the end of last year, drew predictable ire from members of Congress trying to protect jobs in their states. Similarly, don’t imagine for a second that purchases of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, the most expensive weapons system in history, could possibly be slowed even though the latest testing report suggests that, among other things, it has a gun that still can’t shoot straight. That program is, however, a pork paradise for the military-industrial complex, claiming jobs spread across 45 states.

Many such proposals for cuts are nothing but deft deployments of the “Washington Monument strategy,” a classic tactic in which bureaucrats suggest slashing popular programs to avoid facing any cuts at all. The bureaucratic game is fairly simple: Never offer up anything that would actually appeal to Congress when it comes to reducing the bottom line. Recently, the Pentagon did exactly that in proposing cuts to popular weapons programs to pay for the president’s wall, knowing that no such thing would happen.

Believe it or not, however, there are actually a few proposed cuts that Congress might take seriously. Lockheed Martin’s and Austal’s Littoral Combat Ship program, for instance, has long been troubled, and the number of ships planned for purchase has been cut as problems operating such vessels or even ensuring that they might survive in combat have mounted. The Navy estimates that retiring the first four ships in the program, which would otherwise need significant and expensive upgrades to be deployable, would save $1.2 billion.

The Pentagon’s slush fund: the Overseas Contingency Operations account Both the Pentagon and Congress have used a war-spending slush fund known as the Overseas Contingency Operations account, or OCO, as a mechanism to circumvent budget caps put into place in 2011 by the Budget Control Act. In 2021, that slush fund is expected to come in at $69 billion. As Taxpayers for Common Sense has pointed out, if OCO were an agency in itself, it would be the fourth largest in the government. In a welcome move towards transparency, this year’s request actually notes that $16 billion of its funds are for things that should be paid for by the base budget, just as last year’s OCO spending levels included $8 billion for the president’s false fund-the-wall “national emergency.”

Overseas Contingency Operations total: $69 billion

Running tally: $716.2 billion.

The nuclear budget While most people may associate the Department of Energy with fracking, oil drilling, solar panels, and wind farms, more than half of its budget actually goes to the National Nuclear Security Administration, which manages the country’s nuclear weapons program. Unfortunately, it has an even worse record than the Pentagon when it comes to mismanaging the tens of billions of dollars it receives every year. Its programs are regularly significantly behind schedule and over cost, more than $28 billion in such expenses over the past 20 years. It’s a track record of mismanagement woeful enough to leave even the White House’s budget geeks questioning nuclear weapons projects. In the end, though — and given military spending generally, this shouldn’t surprise you — the boosters of more nuclear weapons won and so the nuclear budget came in at $27.6 billion.

Nuclear Weapons Budget total: $27.6 billion

Running tally: $743.8 billion

“Defense-related” activities At $9.7 billion, this budget item includes a number of miscellaneous national-security-related matters, including international FBI activities and payments to the CIA retirement fund.

Defense-Related Activities total: $9.7 billion

Running tally: $753.5 billion

The intelligence budget Not surprisingly, since it’s often referred to as the “black budget,” there is relatively little information publicly available about intelligence community spending. According to recent press reports, however, defense firms are finding this area increasingly profitable, citing double-digit growth in just the last year. Unfortunately, Congress has little capacity to oversee this spending. A recent report by Demand Progress and the Project On Government Oversight found that, as of 2019, only 37 of 100 senators even have staff capable of accessing any kind of information about these programs, let alone the ability to conduct proper oversight of them.

However, we do know the total amount of money being requested for the 17 major agencies in the U.S. intelligence community: $85 billion. That money is split between the Pentagon’s intelligence programs and funding for the Central Intelligence Agency and other “civilian” outfits. This year, the military’s intelligence program requested $23.1 billion, and $61.9 billion was requested for the other agencies. Most of this funding is believed to be in the Pentagon’s budget, so it’s not included in the running tally below. If you want to know anything else about that spending you’re going to need to get a security clearance.

Intelligence budget total: $85 billion

Running tally: $753.5 billion

The military and Defense Department retirement and health budget While you might assume that these costs would be included in the defense budget, this budget line shows that funds were paid by the Treasury Department for military retirement programs (minus interest and contributions from those accounts). While such retirement costs come to $700 million, the healthcare fund costs are actually a negative $8.5 billion.

Military and Department of Defense Retirement and Health Costs total: -$7.8 billion

Running tally: $745.7 billion

The Veterans Affairs budget The financial costs of war are far greater than what’s seen in the Pentagon budget. The most recent estimates by Brown University’s the Costs of War Project show that the total costs of the nation’s main post-9/11 wars through this fiscal year come to $6.4 trillion, including a minimum of $1 trillion for the costs of caring for veterans. This year the administration requested $238.4 billion for Veterans Affairs.

Veterans Affairs Budget: $238.4 billion

Running tally: $984.1 billion

The International Affairs budget The International Affairs budget includes funds for both the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Numerous defense secretaries and senior military leaders have urged public support for spending on diplomacy to prevent conflict and enhance security (and the State Department also engages in a number of military-related activities). In the Obama years, for instance, then-Marine General James Mattis typically quipped that without more funding for diplomacy he was going to need more bullets. Ahead of the introduction of this year’s budget, former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Admiral Mike Mullen told congressional leaders that concerns about great-power competition with China and Russia meant that “cutting these critical investments would be out of touch with the reality around the world.”

The budget request for $51.1 billion, however, cuts State Department funding significantly and proposes keeping it at such a level for the foreseeable future.

International Affairs Total: $51.1 billion

Running tally: $1,035.2 billion

The Homeland Security budget The Department of Homeland Security consists of a hodgepodge of government agencies, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Transportation Security Administration, the U.S. Secret Service, Customs and Border Protection, and the Coast Guard. In this year’s $49.7 billion budget, border security costs make up a third of total costs.

The department is also responsible for coordinating federal cyber-security efforts through the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Despite growing domestic cyber concerns, however, the budget request for that agency has fallen since last year’s budget.

Homeland Security total: $52.1 billion

Running tally: $1,087.3 billion

Interest on the debt And don’t forget the national security state’s part in paying interest on the national debt. Its share, 21.5% of that debt, adds up to $123.6 billion.

Interest on the debt total: $123.6 billion

Final tally: $1,210.9 billion

The budget’s too damn high In other words, at $1.21 trillion, the actual national security budget is essentially twice the size of the announced Pentagon budget. It’s also a compendium of military-industrial waste and misspending. Yet those calling for higher budgets continue to argue that the only way to keep America safe is to pour in yet more tax dollars at a moment when remarkably little is going into, for instance, domestic infrastructure.

The U.S. already spends more than the next seven countries combined on a military that is seemingly incapable of either winning or ending any of the wars it’s been engaged in since September 2001. So isn’t it reasonable to suggest that the more that’s spent on what’s still called national security but should perhaps go by the term “national insecurity,” the less there is to show for it? More spending is never the solution to poor spending. Isn’t it about time, then, that the disastrously bloated “defense” budget experienced some meaningful cuts and shifts in priorities? Shouldn’t the U.S. military be made into a far leaner and more agile force geared to actual defense instead of disastrous wars (and preparations for more of the same) across a significant swath of the planet?

Mandy Smithberger writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is the director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project On Government Oversight (POGO).

Copyright ©2020 Mandy Smithberger — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 02 March 2020
Word Count: 2,128
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The president spoke to the nation Wednesday about the spread of the coronavirus. It didn’t go well, just as it never goes well when Donald Trump must be presidential. It’s worth quoting Bloomberg Opinion’s Jonathan Bernstein at length. Today, he wrote:

It’s quite rare when the president appears to know what he’s talking about. That’s clear from the daily gusts of bluster coming out of the White House. This is, as you will recall, the same president who says he knows more about more things than anyone who’s ever known anything. He knows more than the generals. He knows more than the financiers. He knows more than the scientists. Only God Himself knows more.

And maybe not even Him.

That the president does not know much in general about anything, and that he does not know much in particular about the coronavirus (or influenza, for that matter), is of little consequence to most of the people who support him. The right-flank of the Republican Party was a hothouse of anti-intellectualism and hostility toward the authority of evidence and reason long before it took over the center of the party. In speaking utter gibberish yesterday to a citizenry hungry for facts and steady leadership, Trump was putting a capstone on historical trends already in motion.

Most people don’t understand that. What they know, if they are paying attention, is that a few wacko birds, to use John McCain’s famous phrase, are the problem, as if they were more marginal than they actually are. What most people don’t understand is that paranoia among Republicans is a feature, not a bug. When the world is sorted between friends and enemies, there is no legitimate authority that’s independent of those camps. Facts are true when they favor us. They are false when they don’t.

This is why it makes sense to the president and his followers that the stock market slump was not caused by fear of an outbreak of the coronavirus. It was the Democrats’ fault; they are trying to undermine Trump. This is why is makes sense to the president and his followers that “the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump,” as Rush Limbaugh said. Forget that people are getting sick. Forget that people are scared. Your disease is making Trump look bad.

(There is no bottom, by the way. If the Rapture happened today, and took all evangelical Christians to Heaven, where they can’t vote for Trump, Limbaugh would say God’s love and salvation was being weaponized to bring down the president.)

There’s something else most people don’t understand. None of what I’m talking about is partisanship. If it were, we could reasonably expect some elected Republicans, especially the president’s hardliners, to snap out of it. We could expect them to say to themselves, OK, enough is enough. People could die. We need to set aside politics and empower experts and medical authorities to do what needs doing for everyone’s sake.

That’s asking too much of the paranoids now constituting the heart of the Republican Party. To expect them to defer to the authority of evidence and reason is to expect them to defer to the authority of something other than their egos and self-interest.

They can’t do that because nothing exists independent of their egos and self-interests. The president does not believe he’s above the law. He is the law. The president does not believe he represents the state. He is the state. The president does not believe he must act for everyone’s sake, because what’s good for him is good for everyone.

The history of fascism is a history of regimes bumbling into disaster. That’s probably what we are going to see in the weeks and months ahead. Will people snap out of it?

Don’t hold your breath.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 27 February 2020
Word Count: 790
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