The latest Q Poll came out Monday. It was seriously good news. Last week had been called the president’s best ever. The Washington press corps likes to measure success in “wins” and “losses.” The Senate acquitted Donald Trump. So that meant he “won.”

But even as the president and confederates were high-fiving each other (and plotting vengeance against the patriotic men and women of honor who spoke the truth), the electorate was less celebratory. The new poll by Quinnipiac University, considered to be a superlative survey, has Trump losing to every one of the Democratic candidates.

Josh Jordan, a well-known numbers guy, said: “If these are Trump’s numbers after his ‘best week ever,’ he’s going to have a really bad time in November. Absolutely brutal poll for Trump.” Historian Aaron Astor said: “There is no scenario where a Democrat wins the popular vote by 6-plus points and doesn’t win the Electoral College. So either this poll is just wrong or Trump is losing to every possible Dem after his ‘best week.’”

I don’t mean to pick on Jordan or Astor. They know the Q Poll is just one. But I do think it’s important to bear in mind a couple of things. One: States vote for presidents, not people. Two: We are living in abnormal times. Politics isn’t what it used to be.

If people voted for presidents — i.e., if the popular vote mattered — the Q Poll would be devastating. It measures the nation’s mood, not a state’s. If the president is losing to every Democrat now, given his “best week ever,” yes he should be well and truly freaked. (To some extent he is, according to Saturday’s New York Times; his campaign strategists are trying to reclaim white suburban voters lost to Hillary Clinton in the last cycle.)

People do not vote for president, however. States do — i.e, only the Electoral College matters. More accurately, a handful of states do. In recent times, one or two or three states determined the outcome (Florida in 2000; Ohio in 2004; Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania in 2016). Polls measuring the nation’s mood can have a distorting effect absent in state-based polling. So please don’t start high-fiving each other just yet. We need to know what voters are thinking and feeling in, say, Pennsylvania.

Astor is right in arguing that a six-point margin in the popular vote would virtually guarantee an Electoral College victory. But that presumes we live in normal times.

The president was acquitted of involving a foreign leader in a global conspiracy to rig the 2020 election. That was after having gotten away with inviting interference in 2016. There’s no way Trump isn’t going to repeat himself. The only question is how.

Unlike the last the two times, the Republicans are fully on board this time. Lindsey Graham and two other Senate leaders are gathering “evidence” against Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, in case the former vice president takes the Democratic nomination. They are preparing to pick up where the Ukrainians left off in smearing Joe Biden into oblivion. (If Biden isn’t the nominee, don’t worry; the Republicans will smear any Democrat.)

Worse, the US Department of Justice has created an “intake process” by which the president’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, can feed federal investigators “information” about the Bidens gathered in Ukraine. The official rationale is anti-corruption, but in essence, this process sets the stage for criminalizing politics.

Bear in mind, a real crime need not be committed. All that’s required to smear any Democratic opponent is the public announcement of an open investigation into an alleged crime. It was an open investigation by the FBI into alleged fraud and corruption at the Clinton Foundation that hurt Hillary Clinton. It was an open investigation into alleged fraud in Ukraine that Trump hoped would hurt Biden.

The “intake process” also has potential to turn a Kremlin lie into reality: that the Ukrainians attacked in 2016, not the Russians, and that the Democrats conspired with foreigners, not Trump’s campaign. Rudy Giuliani’s goal has always been twofold — to smear Biden and legitimize Trump. He might be seen as a legitimate president if more people believed Ukraine attacked America. When Attorney General Bill Barr created an “intake process,” he made room for the institutionalization of a malicious lie.

We tend to think about national politics as if voters are working with the same quality of information and as if voters know what to do with it. That’s a political fiction. Moreover, the boundaries that used to restrain our politics have disappeared. The contest is no longer between two teams fighting according to the same “rules.” Election Day is now a flash-point in an ongoing asymmetric information war.

Let’s not presume these or any polling numbers reflect anything normal.

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: 11 February 2020
Word Count: 793
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Ankara’s administration, a coalition of hard-core Islamists and relentless nationalists led by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is the elephant in the room whose presence is felt by EU members and some countries in the MENA region. Those countries, once encouraged by Turkey’s growing economy and democratisation prospects, are in shock and unsure of how to address Ankara’s bold violation of international norms.

Looking through the UN Human Rights Council Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of Turkey, I noticed that many countries had adopted low-key stances in their assessments and in their recommendations about Ankara’s policies. Countries that took a bolder line, such as those in North America or Western Europe, are merely shouting into an echo chamber.

Altogether, Turkey received 450 recommendations as part of the review, highlighting its dire human rights record.

The UPR review is a 5-year process in which a country’s human rights record and respect for rule of law are “X-rayed” and subjected to critiques that it is expected to respond to promptly.

In Turkey’s case, none of the expectations was met. When it was hit with a barrage of criticism in the United Nations’ grand hall in Geneva, the Turkish delegation responded with full defiance and arrogant hostility. It refused to acknowledge any concerns and reverted to its tired pretext of “fighting terrorism.”

The fact that Turkey tops the league of oppressive regimes, keeping more than 55,000 dissidents — which it labels “domestic enemies” — as political prisoners was not seriously discussed nor were the myriad other ways Turkey disregards the rule of law.

The fact that more than 130 journalists and many more intellectuals have been unjustly held in detention seemed not to worry the Turkish delegation, whose chairman, Deputy Foreign Minister Faruk Kaymakci, argued, in a nutshell, that such imprisonments were all about fighting terrorism. No one, especially journalists, he argued, are above the law.

Another issue not brought up in the UPR session but was addressed at side events in which I took part was Turkey’s widespread use of torture which, of course, it categorically denies. However, as documented by Sebnem Korur Fincanci, the president of the Human Rights Foundation in Turkey, torture is being systematically used throughout the country, often against Kurdish and alleged Gulenist prisoners.

Most of the bitter facts are on the record. As pointed out by the International Observatory of Human Rights, Turkey has not come close to upholding its UPR promises.

It stated: “In the period under review, the government has weaponised the legal system and terror legislation to restrict free expression. By means of freedom of expression and freedom of press Turkey now stands far below where it was back in 2010, when the first UPR cycle was compiled.”

I could not help but notice the sense of helplessness in diplomats and Western NGO representatives in my talks with them. Most did not hide the fact that all forms of “friendly ammunition” to persuade Ankara to return to respect for rule of law had nearly run out. Erdogan’s administration is increasingly defiant towards outside criticism as his regime grows into one of the most oppressive in the world.

The day after the UPR session, further confirmation of Turkey’s misconduct landed on their desks. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), in its annual activity report issued January 29, ranked Turkey first in terms of violations of freedom of expression in 2019.

Of the 68 judgments in which the court found violations of freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, 35 were filed by Turkish citizens.

The EHCR report reminded us that Turkey’s intolerance for dissent was becoming a chronic feature of the state: “The country single-handedly committed more violations regarding this issue than the rest of the member states combined throughout 1959-2019, committing 356 of the total 845 violations,” ECHR stated.

It added: “In 2019, the ECHR delivered 113 judgments on Turkey, finding at least one violation in 97 of these cases. During the period of 1959-2019, the court delivered 3,645 judgments for cases coming from Turkey, finding the country at fault in 3,225 of these cases.”

This harsh indictment, combined with Turkey’s expansionist ambitions and militarised foreign policy, shows a need to urgently revise the appeasement policies being pursued in the European Union’s top circles.

One thing is clear: Ostrich patterns from Turkey’s concerned allies, if continued, will not only create a monster but inflict deeper damage on large parts of Turkish society.

Yavuz Baydar is a senior Turkish columnist, and news analyst. A founding member of the Platform for Independent Journalism (P24) in Istanbul, he has been reporting on Turkey and monitoring media issues since 1980. A European Press Prize Laureate in 2014, he is also the winner of Germany’s ‘Journalistenpreis’ in 2018.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 05 February 2020
Word Count: 742
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We don’t know the outcome of the Iowa Democratic caucus. The app required for reporting the results of over 1,700 precincts malfunctioned. Precinct captains resorted to calling a hotline that was quickly overwhelmed. Here are a few initial thoughts.

First and foremost: Technological and human error are to blame, not some secret bad-faith scheme to deny a candidate the glory of victory. When the stakes are high, and emotions run as high, bone-headed mistakes can take on the face of conspiracy. While I understand the temptation to identify malevolent actors, Occam’s Razor says structural flaws or incompetence are the correct analysis. Importantly, let’s remember this is a democracy. Let’s not sow doubts and foment suspicions about a system of republican government we all want to see endure.

Everyone needs to chill. Each precinct captain knows the results of his or her precinct. They are written down, on paper, with witnesses available to verify them. That’s the upside to caucuses. Everything is public. The only unknown is what the aggregate statewide caucus results are. That’s just a matter of time. So everyone, please take a time-out. That goes double for a national press corps that has made a fetish of Iowa and its quirky ways of doing the people’s business.

Don’t believe the hype. The candidates have good reason to declare victory, or hint at declaring victory, before the official results are known. But don’t make too much of it. Those reasons are political. They are not empirical. They are not an indicator of the health of a certain kind of democratic process. Each candidate wants to give the impression that he or she has “the momentum” going into New Hampshire, the first-in-the-nation Democratic primary. Each candidate wants the national press corps to talk about them as if they really did have momentum.

No one is going to have “the momentum.” Unless the winner prevails by double-digit percentage points, all talk of momentum is fictional. That, however, doesn’t prevent people from talking about it. There is something about the American brain that desires a clear leader in the race for the presidency. We want clarity for what is an inherently messy democratic process the way we want instant gratification after buying sneakers on Amazon Prime. If anything is an indicator of the ill health of our democracy, it’s this obsession with knowing right now.

Amanda Carpenter said the Democrats did what the Russians would have done, creating conditions ripe for conspiracy theory. “Donald Trump couldn’t have asked for better circumstances to weave a conspiracy theory if he tried,” she wrote today in The Bulwark. That sounds convincing, another reason the Democrats are in disarray. But come on. We know this president doesn’t predicate public statements on the truth or falsehood of news events. Indeed, we all know this president would invent some conspiracy theory out of whole cloth even if the Iowa caucuses ran like clockwork.

This isn’t to say the Iowa Democrats shouldn’t be embarrassed. They should sooper embarrassed. But we should be honest, too. Caucuses are relics of 19th century America. They exclude modern voters more than they include them. I think Senator Dick Durbin is right: “The Democratic caucus in Iowa is a quirky, quaint tradition which should come to an end. As we try to make voting easier for people across America, the Iowa caucus is the most painful situation we currently face for voting.”

But let’s not stop there. Let’s get rid of all caucuses and single-state primaries. My friend David Perry recommends the following and I think he’s just about right:

1. National primary in July with ranked choice voting to ensure a winner.
2. Conventions in September.
3. General election in November.

These are drastic reforms, but they have much to offer. One primary would mean:

• Iowa and New Hampshire, which are very white, would not have as much national influence on a multi-racial and multi-cultural political party.
• The sequence of states would no longer be relevant. Imagine all the talk of “momentum” just disappearing! Imagine “electability” being forgotten!
• Adversarial nations, like Russia and China and Iran, would have fewer opportunities to spread disinformation during that sequence. The impact of their propaganda and lies would be limited to one day’s outcome, not several in a row.
• It would be truly democratic in that people would be voting for their presidential nominee, not states. “One person, one vote” would be well and truly realized.

Most importantly, the national press corps would focus on a single day that mattered, instead of hyping the run-up to a state that usually doesn’t matter.

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 February 2020
Word Count: 765
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In 1827 Admiral Edward Codrington, in command of a British squadron observing the ongoing war between Greek rebels and the Ottoman sultan, sailed past the entrance to Navarino Bay, caught sight of the Turkish fleet lying at anchor, and blasted it to the bottom of the bay. The absence of a state of war between Great Britain and the Ottoman Empire notwithstanding, Codrington was celebrated and promoted because beating up on Turks seemed to a lot of Brits like an intuitively good thing to do. Then, since the overextended Ottomans did not respond militarily, the incident was officially declared “an untoward event.”

How does the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani stack up as a modern parallel? No state of war exists between Iran and the United States, but most Americans do seem to believe that beating up on Iran is an intuitively good thing to do. No credible casus belli has been adduced to justify the drone strike on Baghdad airport that killed Soleimani. Iran chose to make only a token military response, even though it was universally acknowledged that a more severe response would have had both right and reason on its side. And after a few tense days everyone let out their breath. Nothing done. Just one of those things. An “untoward event.” But events do have consequences, even though “untowardness” may make them hard to clarify.

The path of clarification starts with asking how a general like Qassem Soleimani achieves celebrity status, and thereby martyr eligibility, in a clerical quasi-democracy that has not formally been at war with anyone for thirty years. What distinguishes the Iranian Revolution of 1979 from the Arab Spring events of 2011 is the success the Iranian revolutionaries had in removing from military command the colonels and generals who had been personally vetted by the Shah, that is, all of them. Those who were not executed or put on the retirement list made their way into exile, where some of them actively encouraged military action against the Islamic Republic. They achieved their greatest success by helping persuade Saddam Hussein to initiate a war that lasted for eight years, ending in a stalemate. This war, called by the Iranians “The Imposed War,” ended up cementing two potentially opposing currents of Iranian public opinion: nationalism and support for a regime dominated by clerics. This ideological fusion brought the regime a generation of domestic support and still contributes to its relative — by Middle Eastern standards — stability.

Catastrophic as the Iran-Iraq War was, the post-Arab Spring civil wars in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya have done greater damage to those countries. Iran emerged from its war in 1988 more-or-less unscathed physically and with incipient internal unrest among Kurds and Baluchis firmly tamped down. In addition, the leftist Mojahedin-e Khalq counter-revolutionaries had been either executed or forced into exile during the war years. Even those American neocons who continue to worship at the altar of regime change do not visualize the Iranian population dividing into rival ethnicities, sects, or regions. The same cannot be said of the four Arab countries where wars continue.

Given the close relations between the Arab militaries and their foreign backers, primarily, in recent decades, the United States and Russia/USSR, it should not be surprising, I suppose, that army officers and militia commanders, ended up coopting the popular disorder generated by the Arab Spring. But I was surprised anyway. I had argued since well before the Arab Spring that the Arab officer corps based their dominance less on military competence than on two quite different sources of support: first, ever since the 1950s, the ideological belief among imperialists in both East and West that modern armies were the vanguard of national modernization and that bonds of clientage generated by weapons sales guarantee regional stability; and second, a 700-year legacy of internal political and economic domination focused on the role of senior military officers. Where Western theorists were inclined to see military officers as “change agents,” I saw them as neo-Mamluks wedded to government of, by, and for the officer corps. The shift to European-style officer training that began in the nineteenth century had failed to eliminate a long-standing tradition of officer privilege even when the recruitment of officers evolved away from the traditional preference enjoyed by Turks and Circassians.

Neo-Mamluk officers, I opined, paid more attention to building villas, marrying their children into the civilian elite, and gaining a preponderant influence in all parts of the economy, both military and civilian, than they did to economic efficiency, competent satisfaction of human needs, and listening to public grievances. Because the avowedly Muslim political movements and parties of the late twentieth century promised to correct these horrific governmental failings, I thought they should be allowed to run for office and, if elected, to enjoy at least a brief trial period to see whether they might do better. This vision of what the Arab Spring might accomplish collapsed in every country but Tunisia; but there, where the officer corps shaped by Habib Bourguiba was weakest, it has not done too badly.

Given the horror of combining religion with politics that most liberal-minded Americans express — based on a near total ignorance of both political and religious forces in the Islamic world — I now realize that any effort by elected Muslim activist governments to forcibly retire all of the senior commanders in the Egyptian, Syrian, Libyan, or Yemeni armies would have been read by the West, Russia, and the Gulf monarchies as an intolerable threat to regional security, a threat serious enough to warrant outside intervention of one sort or another. Yet officer corps destruction is exactly what the Americans did in Iraq after the 2003 invasion. Whether the resulting chaos there contributed to how the United States appraised the responses of regional military forces to the Arab Spring demonstrations in 2011 is hard to say. It is possible that a mass forced retirement of Egyptian generals with whom the US military had long-standing dealings was literally unthinkable inasmuch as it would have resembled the revolutionary elimination of the Shah’s generals. To this day, I wonder whether the United States actively or tacitly endorsed beforehand the Saudi and Kuwaiti-supported coup that toppled the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt and installed yet another incompetent and insensitive neo-Mamluk dictatorship under General Sisi.

It may be that American policy-makers, looking back at the Iranian Revolution as an unparalleled disaster — those poor hostages were held, unharmed, for over a year! — felt among themselves that military dictatorship of any stripe was more desirable than Muslim political activism. Their fairly consistent posture, since 1980, of seeing the Islamic Republic as an evil theocracy and a regional sponsor of terrorism suggests that they deeply regret not prodding the Iranian army in 1979, perhaps with American military help, to slaughter protesters in the streets in order to keep the Shah in power. If so, then perhaps the hope I had nourished of new ideological forces supplanting the Arab neo-Mamluk officer corps and introducing democratic government was never more than a fantasy.

Though Egypt is safely, from an American point of view, back under military control, the 1950s model of officers being the vanguard of modernization is in tatters. The generals precipitously cashiered by American occupying forces in Iraq collaborated in establishing ISIS. Most Syrian army officers have remained loyal to the Assad regime through a series of atrocity charges. And Ali Abdullah Saleh, the late dictator in Yemen, along with the current General Haftar in Libya, actively participated in fragmentation of their countries. Meanwhile, the rulers of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the UAE have switched from bribing other Arab states to support their regimes to aggressively intervening in Yemen’s civil war and rattling their (or America’s) sabers when talking about the future of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Gulf.

In the midst of all this chaos, General Soleimani was the one and only military figure to gain public distinction as someone who had the skill, resources, and political backing to achieve his mission… whatever that mission may have been. Three way of thinking about Soleimani’s mission come to mind: the Shi’ite crescent, defense in depth of Iran’s borders, and strengthening within Iran a neo-Mamluk alternative to clerical rule.

Shi’ite Crescent It is often argued that Soleimani’s mission was to build a coalition of pro-Iranian Shi’ite forces, both state-sponsored and quasi-military, for the purpose of furthering Iranian hegemony in the Middle East, threatening Israel and Saudi Arabia, and expelling the United States from the region. This interpretation dominates official US thinking about Iran and has been adopted/fostered by Israel and America’s allies in the Gulf. It has so far been a poor predictor of Iranian actions, however.

Defense in depth It can alternatively be argued that the role of the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) as the out-of-the-country strike force of the Iranian military is less to cobble together an unwieldy coalition of militias and proxies, whose goals do not always align with those of the Islamic Republic, than to sustain a degree of ferment outside Iran’s borders sufficient to dissuade potential foes from waging war directly on Iran and thereby risk opening a Pandora’s box brimming with unimaginable perils. Throughout its forty years of existence, a conviction that imperialist powers and their regional friends are determined to eliminate the only regime that institutionally bases itself on Islam has been a given in Iranian governing circles. Defense of the revolution has always outweighed the dream of spreading it.

Neo-Mamluk aggrandizement The third possibility pertains to the steady growth in power and entrenchment of the Revolutionary Guard elite in Iran. For years, I have wondered about what IRGC officers serving in Syria talk about with their senior counterparts in the less-than-formidable Syrian army. Luxury housing? Business opportunities? The IRGC earned its war fighting credentials in prolonged combat during the eight-year conflict with Iraq. The Syrians, on the other hand, prior to 2011, hadn’t fought a serious war since 1967. Yet the officer corps enjoyed extensive perquisites and was deeply entrenched in the country’s economy. Did the visiting Iranians envy their Syrian counterparts’ privileges? Did the thought arise in their minds that their fellow countrymen back in Iran should learn to esteem the IRGC leadership more highly?

To my mind, this question of what General Soleimani stood for should be at the center of an assessment of his targeted assassination. If you follow the Shi’ite crescent theory, you may argue that the general was the linchpin in a very broad, long-term strategy of Iranian regional hegemony, and hence a proper and important target. (Ignoring the addled presidential mind that proclaims that Soleimani also “said bad things” about the US, had the blood of hundreds of Americans on his hands by virtue of “inventing” IEDs, and was planning immediate, or maybe not so immediate, attacks on some US assets somewhere.) If you kill the spider at the center of his web, doesn’t that also rip apart the web? I don’t believe that any policy-make anywhere thinks this, or thinks that Soleimani cannot be replaced with by an IRGC commander of parallel skills.

On the other hand, from a defense in depth standpoint, the assassination was a proof of concept. The U.S., for whatever reasons, wanted to do something warlike to Iran so it launched a drone strike assassination and almost simultaneously sent third party messages saying: “No further action is in the works, so please don’t raise the stakes with lethal counterstrike.” Result? The U.S. flexes its muscle at the cost of creating a popular Iranian martyr. No other damage done to Iran, but the U.S. has demonstrated, as it did following the rocket attacks on the Saudi oil fields, that it wants to steer clear of making an attack on Iran proper. Kim Jong Un must wish that he had a proxy war crumple zone of his own somewhere so the U.S. could vent its supreme leader’s yearning for headlines in a similarly harmless demonstration.

Whichever take one prefers between these two formulations of General Soleimani’s mission, the IRGC shoot-down of a Ukrainian jetliner taking off from Tehran airport threw a monkey wrench into the works. Should demonstrators weep for the martyred general? Or for the dead air passengers? Or for their country’s military ineptitude? America’s chest-beating at having blown up another evil mastermind and shown the world that it knows how to win the war on terror drops to page eight as everyone’s fear of an airliner crash takes over the front page. Iran’s eagerness to mourn its dead hero is dimmed by news that his organization can’t maintain trigger discipline. America’s supreme leader makes light of the injuries his troops sustained during the Iranian response strike on a base in Iraq. And Iran’s supreme leader, who has a long history of championing the IRGC going back to the Iran-Iraq War, implies that one dead general is more of a tragedy than 176 innocent travelers, and fails to charge the top command of the IRGC, which initially lied about its involvement, with incompetence. I cannot imagine that even a President Trump, in the event of, say, Secretary of Defense Esper’s plane being downed over Iraq by a SAM, would continue to lash the American citizenry into a revenge-seeking frenzy if the U.S. Air Force, on alert, shot down a fully loaded Emirates jetliner the very next day.

I think it is fair to speculate that Ayatollah Khamenei’s support for the IRGC goes beyond political expediency and betrays a growth in IRGC power that threatens the integrity of the clerical state. As it continues to expand its already massive footprint in Iran’s military and civilian economy, and as it continues to conduct successfully its in-depth defense of its homeland, the IRGC may be reaching the point of being invulnerable in the Iranian political arena, just waiting for a ripe opportunity to formally institute an Arab-style neo-Mamluk regime. The succession to 80-year-old Khamenei as Supreme Leader may tell the tale.

So back to Admiral Codrington’s “untoward event.” The phrase connotes something unexpected and irregular conceived on the spur of the moment to advance an as yet unformed policy. Queen Victoria was embarrassed by what happened, but once the Greeks won their independence, the British saw the Battle of Navarino as not such a bad thing. Similarly, if Soleimani’s martyrdom, followed by the IRGC air defense calamity, should be followed within the next couple of years by a coup in Tehran formalizing an IRGC neo-Mamluk regime, won’t that make the policy-makers in Washington happy? They “understand” generals and juntas. They’ve been dealing with them for decades, even when they are vociferously anti-American. Besides, Washington has never put much effort into understanding Muslim clerics, or their popular appeal.

So one shouldn’t be surprised if yesterday’s untoward event becomes tomorrow’s shrewd military intervention.

Richard W. Bulliet is professor emeritus in history at Columbia University.

Copyright ©2020 Richard Bulliet — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 03 February 2020
Word Count: 2,469
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The shame of child poverty in the age of Trump
by

The plight of impoverished children anywhere should evoke sympathy, exemplifying as it does the suffering of the innocent and defenseless. Poverty among children in a wealthy country like the United States, however, should summon shame and outrage as well. Unlike poor countries (sometimes run by leaders more interested in lining their pockets than anything else), what excuse does the United States have for its striking levels of child poverty? After all, it has the world’s 10th highest per capita income at $62,795 and an unrivalled gross domestic product (GDP) of $21.3 trillion. Despite that, in 2020, an estimated 11.9 million American kids — 16.2% of the total — live below the official poverty line, which is a paltry $25,701 for a family of four with two kids. Put another way, according to the Children’s Defense Fund, kids now constitute one-third of the 38.1 million Americans classified as poor and 70% of them have at least one working parent — so poverty can’t be chalked up to parental indolence.

Yes, the proportion of kids living below the poverty line has zigzagged down from 22% when the country was being ravaged by the Great Recession of 2008-2009 and was even higher in prior decades, but no one should crack open the champagne bottles just yet. The relevant standard ought to be how the United States compares to other wealthy countries. The answer: badly. It has the 11th highest child poverty rate of the 42 industrialized countries tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Winnow that list down to European Union states and Canada, omitting low and middle-income countries, and our child poverty rate ranks above only Spain’s. Use the poverty threshold of the OECD — 50% of a country’s median income ($63,178 for the United States) — and the American child poverty rate leaps to 20%.

The United States certainly doesn’t lack the means to drive child poverty down or perhaps even eliminate it. Many countries on that shorter OECD list have lower per-capita incomes and substantially smaller GDPs yet (as a UNICEF report makes clear) have done far better by their kids. Our high child-poverty rate stems from politics, not economics — government policies that, since the 1980s, have reduced public investment as a proportion of GDP in infrastructure, public education, and poverty reduction.  These were, of course, the same years when a belief that “big government” was an obstacle to advancement took ever-deeper hold, especially in the Republican Party.  Today, Washington allocates only 9% of its federal budget to children, poor or not. That compares to a third for Americans over 65, up from 22% in 1971. If you want a single fact that sums up where we are now, inflation-adjusted per-capita spending on kids living in the poorest families has barely budged compared to 30 years ago whereas the corresponding figure for the elderly has doubled.

The conservative response to all this remains predictable: you can’t solve complex social problems like child poverty by throwing money at them. Besides, government antipoverty programs only foster dependence and create bloated bureaucracies without solving the problem. It matters little that the actual successes of American social programs prove this claim to be flat-out false. Before getting to that, however, let’s take a snapshot of child poverty in America.

Sizing up the problem Defining poverty may sound straightforward, but it’s not. The government’s annual Official Poverty Measure (OPM), developed in the 1960s, establishes poverty lines by taking into account family size, multiplying the 1963 cost for a minimum food budget by three while factoring in changes in the Consumer Price Index, and comparing the result to family income. In 2018, a family with a single adult and one child was considered poor with an income below $17,308 ($20,212 for two adults and one child, $25,465 for two adults and two children, and so on). According to the OPM, 11.8% of all Americans were poor that year.

By contrast, the Supplementary Poverty Measure (SPM), published yearly since 2011, builds on the OPM but provides a more nuanced calculus. It counts the post-tax income of families, but also cash flows from the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (CTC), both of which help low-income households. It adds in government-provided assistance through, say, the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF), the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), Medicaid, subsidies for housing and utilities, and unemployment and disability insurance. However, it deducts costs like child care, child-support payments, and out-of-pocket medical expenses. According to the SPM, the 2018 national poverty rate was 12.8%.

Of course, neither of these poverty calculations can tell us how children are actually faring. Put simply, they’re faring worse. In 2018, 16.2% of Americans under 18 lived in families with incomes below the SPM line. And that’s not the worst of it. A 2019 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine study commissioned by Congress found that 9% of poor children belong to families in “deep poverty” (incomes that are less than 50% of the SPM). But 36% of all American children live in poor or “near poor” families, those with incomes within 150% of the poverty line.

Child poverty also varies by race — a lot. The rate for black children is 17.8%; for Hispanic kids, 21.7%; for their white counterparts, 7.9%. Worse, more than half of all black and Hispanic kids live in “near poor” families compared to less than a quarter of white children. Combine age and race and you’ll see another difference, especially for children under five, a population with an overall 2017 poverty rate of 19.2%.  Break those under-fives down by race, however, and here’s what you find: white kids at 15.9%, Hispanic kids at an eye-opening 25.8%, and their black peers at a staggering 32.9%.

Location matters, too. The child poverty rate shifts by state and the differences are stark. North Dakota and Utah are at 9%, for instance, while New Mexico and Mississippi are at 27% and 28%. Nineteen states have rates of 20% or more. Check out a color-coded map of geographic variations in child poverty and you’ll see that rates in the South, Southwest, and parts of the Midwest are above the national average, while rural areas tend to have higher proportions of poor families than cities. According to the Department of Agriculture, in rural America, 22% of all children and 26% of those under five were poor in 2017.

Why child poverty matters Imagine, for a moment, this scenario: a 200-meter footrace in which the starting blocks of some competitors are placed 75 meters behind the others. Barring an Olympic-caliber runner, those who started way in front will naturally win. Now, think of that as an analogy for the predicament that American kids born in poverty face through no fault of their own. They may be smart and diligent, their parents may do their best to care for them, but they begin life with a huge handicap.

As a start, the nutrition of poor children will generally be inferior to that of other kids. No surprise there, but here’s what’s not common knowledge: a childhood nutritional deficit matters for years afterwards, possibly for life. Scientific research shows that, by age three, the quality of children’s diets is already shaping the development of critical parts of young brains like the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex in ways that matter. That’s worth keeping in mind because four million American kids under age six were poor in 2018, as were close to half of those in families headed by single women.

Indeed, the process starts even earlier. Poor mothers may themselves have nutritional deficiencies that increase their risk of having babies with low birthweights.  That, in turn, can have long-term effects on children’s health, what level of education they reach, and their future incomes since the quality of nutrition affects brain size, concentration, and cognitive capacity. It also increases the chances of having learning disabilities and experiencing mental health problems.

Poor children are likely to be less healthy in other ways as well, for reasons that range from having a greater susceptibility to asthma to higher concentrations of lead in their blood. Moreover, poor families find it harder to get good health care. And add one more thing: in our zip-code-influenced public-school system, such children are likely to attend schools with far fewer resources than those in more affluent neighborhoods.

Our national opioid problem also affects the well-being of children in a striking fashion. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), between 2008 and 2012, a third of women in their childbearing years filled opioid-based medication prescriptions in pharmacies and an estimated 14%-22% of them were pregnant. The result: an alarming increase in the number of babies exposed to opioids in utero and experiencing withdrawal symptoms at birth, which is also known as neonatal abstinence syndrome, or NAS, in medical lingo. Its effects, a Penn State study found, include future increased sensitivity to pain and susceptibility to fevers and seizures. Between 2000 and 2014, the incidence of NAS increased by a multiple of four. In 2014, 34,000 babies were born with NAS, which, as a CDC report put it, “is equivalent to one baby suffering from opioid withdrawal born approximately every 15 minutes.” (Given the ongoing opioid crisis, it’s unlikely that things have improved in recent years.)

And the complications attributable to NAS don’t stop with birth. Though the research remains at an early stage — the opioid crisis only began in the early 1990s — it suggests that the ill effects of NAS extend well beyond infancy and include impaired cognitive and motor skills, respiratory ailments, learning disabilities, difficulty maintaining intellectual focus, and behavioral traits that make productive interaction with others harder.

At this point, you won’t be surprised to learn that NAS and child poverty are connected. Prescription opioid use rates are much higher for women on Medicaid, who are more likely to be poor than those with private insurance. Moreover, the abuse of, and overdose deaths from, opioids (whether obtained through prescriptions or illegally) have been far more widespread among the poor.

Combine all of this and here’s the picture: from the months before birth on, poverty diminishes opportunity, capacity, and agency and its consequences reach into adulthood. While that rigged footrace of mine was imaginary, child poverty certainly does ensure a future-rigged society. The good news (though not in Donald Trump’s America): the race to a half-decent life (or better) doesn’t have to be rigged.

It needn’t be this way (but will be as long as Trump is president) Can children born into poverty defy the odds, realize their potential, and lead fulfilling lives? Conservatives will point to stories of people who cleared all the obstacles created by child poverty as proof that the real solution is hard work. But let’s be clear: poor children shouldn’t have to find themselves on a tilted playing field from the first moments of their lives. Individual success stories aside, Americans raised in poor families do markedly less well compared to those from middle class or affluent homes — and it doesn’t matter whether you choose college attendance, employment rates, or future household income as your measure. And the longer they live in poverty the worse the odds that they’ll escape it in adulthood; for one thing, they’re far less likely to finish high school or attend college than their more fortunate peers.

Conversely, as Harvard economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues have shown, kids’ life prospects improve when parents with low incomes are given the financial wherewithal to move to neighborhoods with higher social-mobility rates (thanks to better schools and services, including health care). As in that imaginary footrace, the starting point matters. But here the news is grim. The Social Progress Index places the United States 75th out of 149 countries in “access to quality education” and 70th in “access to quality health care” and poor kids are, of course, at a particular disadvantage.

Yet childhood circumstances can be (and have been) changed — and the sorts of government programs that conservatives love to savage have helped enormously in that process. Child poverty plunged from 28% in 1967 to 15.6% in 2016 in significant part due to programs like Medicaid and the Food Stamp Act started in the 1960s as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Such programs helped poor families pay for housing, food, child care, and medical expenses, as did later tax legislation like the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit. Our own history and that of other wealthy countries show that child poverty is anything but an unalterable reality. The record also shows that changing it requires mobilizing funds of the sort now being wasted on ventures like America’s multitrillion-dollar forever wars.

Certainly, an increase in jobs and earnings can reduce child poverty. Wall Street Journal odes to Donald Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation policies highlight the present 3.5% unemployment rate (the lowest in 60 years), a surge in new jobs, and wage growth at all levels, notably for workers with low incomes who lack college degrees. This storyline, however, omits important realities. Programs that reduce child poverty help even in years when poor or near-poor parents gain and, of course, are critical in bad times, since sooner or later booming job markets also bust. Furthermore, the magic that Trump fans tout occurred at a moment when many state and city governments were mandating increases in the minimum wage. Employers who hired, especially in heavily populated states like California, New York, Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan, had to pay more.

As for cutting child poverty, it hasn’t exactly been a presidential priority in the Trump years — not like the drive to pass a $1.5 trillion corporate and individual income tax cut whose gains flowed mainly to the richest Americans, while inflating the budget deficit to $1 trillion in 2019, according to the Treasury Department. Then there’s that “impenetrable, powerful, beautiful wall.” Its estimated price ranges from $21 billion to $70 billion, excluding maintenance. And don’t forget the proposed extra $33 billion in military spending for this fiscal year alone, part of President Trump’s plan to boost such spending by $683 billion over the next decade.

As for poor kids and their parents, the president and congressional Republicans are beginning to slash an array of programs ranging from the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program to Medicaid — $1.2 trillion worth over the next 10 years — that have long helped struggling families and children in particular get by. The Trump administration has, for good measure, rewritten the eligibility rules for such programs in order to lower the number of people who qualify.

The supposed goal: to cut costs by reducing dependence on government. (Never mind the subsidies and tax loopholes Trump’s crew has created for corporations and the super wealthy, which add up to many billions of dollars in spending and lost revenue.) These supposedly work-ethic-driven austerity policies batter working families with young kids that, for example, desperately need childcare, which can take a big bite out of paychecks: 10% or more for all households with kids, but half in the case of poor families.  Add to that the cost of unsubsidized housing. Median monthly rent increased by nearly a third between 2001 and 2015. Put another way, rents consume more than half the income of the bottom 20% of Americans, according to the Federal Reserve. The advent of Trump has also made the struggle of low-income families with healthcare bills even harder. The number of kids without health insurance jumped by 425,000 between 2017 and 2018 when, according to the Census Bureau, 4.3 million children lacked coverage.

Even before Donald Trump’s election, only one-sixth of eligible families with kids received assistance for childcare and a paltry one-fifth got housing subsidies. Yet his administration arrived prepared to put programs that helped some of them pay for housing and childcare on the chopping block. No point in such families looking to him for a hand in the future. He won’t be building any Trump Towers for them.

Whatever “Make America Great Again” may mean, it certainly doesn’t involve helping America’s poor kids. As long as Donald Trump oversees their race into life, they’ll find themselves ever farther from the starting line.

Rajan Menon writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the Powell School, City College of New York, senior research fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, and a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His latest book is The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention.

Copyright ©2020 Rajan Menon — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 03 February 2020
Word Count: 2,717
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Lamar Alexander is a Republican senator from Tennessee heading for retirement. His last decision, the one perhaps to be memorialized on his tombstone, was voting against calling witnesses for the president’s impeachment trial in the US Senate.

More accurately, Alexander’s final act was doing his friend, Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, a big favor. With his vote, Collins, unpopular and facing reelection, could safely vote yes. She can now campaign at home with her moderate reputation intact.

With this vote, expected later today, the Senate Republicans will have acquitted the president of two articles of impeachment without hearing first-hand accounts from administration officials, subpoenaing new records, and entering new evidence. The Senate will have neutered itself as an effective check on executive power. It will have declared its complicity in covering up Donald Trump’s conspiracy against the people.

But it has done more. It has unleashed a president already dramatically unhinged. Trump welcomed foreign sabotage in 2016. He demanded it for 2020. Make no mistake: he’ll get it. As Nancy Pelosi said: “The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming.”

Worse, Trump will be emboldened to act with even more impunity. By acquitting Trump, the Senate will have established a precedent by which a president can do whatever he wants, because his interests are now one with the national interest. If that means investigating political opponents, so be it. If that means jailing them, fine.

He’s doing it for the people.

It’s difficult to imagine what Dear Leader the Unlimited might do. We have some inkling, though. Trump praised Saudi Arabia after it literally butchered a Washington Post columnist. The press, to this president, is the enemy of the people. Since the people’s interests are the same as his interests, and vice versa, what’s stopping an authoritarian president from following suit and making his problems just “go away”?

After all, he’s doing it for the people.

The Senate will clear Trump today but it will not have exonerated him. As Pelosi said, exoneration demands a legitimate process of deliberation — a due process that’s being denied. “He will not be acquitted,” she said. “You cannot be acquitted if you don’t have a trial. And you don’t have a trial if you don’t have witnesses and documentation.”

Because they denied the nation a legitimate process of deliberation, Republican Senators increased their burden many times over. As I wrote recently, the drip-drip-drip of incriminating evidence will not stop with acquittal. It will continue in ways we can’t predict. Every senator who voted to shield Trump from accountability will have to prove day after exhausting day that they were right. As Rahm Emanuel put it today, they have burdened themselves with becoming Trump’s “full-time exonerators.”

Another consequence of denying due process is that even if Trump wins the election in November, he will not be seen by a majority of Americans as a legitimate president. That was already the case for lots of people due to his losing the popular vote in 2016. That will pale, however, compared to knowing that he’s guaranteed to cheat in 2020. (Even if he didn’t cheat, which is unlikely, who would believe him but GOP partisans?) If his illegitimacy wasn’t certain before the Senate’s acquittal, it will be afterward.

Lest there be any doubt, the president will prove the point when he tries to get even. You know he will. Trump is widely known for returning insults at ten times the original force. The Democrats wounded his ego the moment they impeached him. Acquittal without exoneration can’t stop the bleeding. He’s going to find a way of seeking vengeance and when that too is exposed, it will add to the incriminating evidence and political illegitimacy that will trail Senate Republicans till November.

Illegitimacy doesn’t mean, of course, that a president can’t do great damage. Trump has already done so much already I don’t need to enumerate each injury. That’s why it’s so important for the Democratic Party to compete hard to take control of the Senate. Fortunately, the Republicans have given them a gigantic vise with which to squeeze incumbents between loyalty to the president and duty to the Constitution.

The best way we can fight back is making sure the House stays in Democratic hands (which I think it will) and flipping the Senate. The president will seek revenge, and he will commit impeachable and criminal acts in the process. Once those, and all the others, come to light, the stage will be set for a second round of impeachment.

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: 31 January 2020
Word Count: 753
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Things feel different today from what they felt like three days ago.

On Monday, we learned that John Bolton witnessed the president’s bribing of a foreign leader into interfering with the 2020 election. The former head of the National Security Council, in a forthcoming book, says he saw Donald Trump cheating.

That seemed like “a smoking gun.” Four Republicans, who had been vacillating between calling and not calling witnesses for the president’s trial, seemed to be tipping to one side. The Democrats had the advantage. Witnesses appeared inevitable.

Today feels quite different. Mitch McConnell said Tuesday he did not have 51 votes block of effect to call witnesses, but the Senate majority leader was not admitting defeat. He and others were admitting they had more work to do. No one, not even the four holdouts, wanted to hear from witnesses. They just needed reasons to say no.

I don’t know what those reasons are, but it looks like they found them. Witnesses now seem unlikely. If so, the president’s trial will conclude Friday. By acquitting Trump of abuse of power and obstruction of the Congress, the Republicans will be saying the president can do anything he wants as long as he can hold more than a third of the Senate. By clearing him of wrongdoing, they will be making Richard Nixon’s dream finally come true: “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

In other words, the president is above the law.

Not all presidents, of course.

Some of the same Republicans protecting Donald Trump from the consequences of conspiracy, bribery, and election-rigging are the same Republicans who supported Bill Clinton’s removal from office for perjury, a vastly less serious crime. Indeed, no one should expect the Republicans to give future Democratic presidents the imperial powers they are giving the current president. Make no mistake: They will hold the next Democrat to impossible standards, and prosecute brutally with the thinnest rationale.

That looks like it would be hypocrisy, and indeed, that’s what it would be. But if we are going to stop the Republicans from behaving treacherously, we need to look deeper. Indeed, if we stop at hypocrisy, we will be giving the Republicans too much credit.

To act hypocritically, one must genuinely believe in the civic, moral and legal virtue of acting in good faith. One must believe there is a shared set of laws, rules, values, institutions and norms applicable to all of us equally. If we believe this but act in a contrary manner, we are then hypocritical. That is not what the Republicans are doing.

The best way to understand Republican behavior is to imagine two sets of values systems. There’s one for them. There’s one for everyone else. Republicans are the exception to the rule, because they do not believe in rules having equal application. “Justice,” therefore, may or may not be equal justice. It depends. It’s conditional.

If a Democratic president breaks the law, even a minor one, then that president deserves the full force of Congressional investigation, prosecution and removal. But if a Republican president breaks the law, even with corrupt and treasonous intent, then that president deserves protection from accountability, the Constitution and the law.

The first outcome is just. So is the other.

They are separate but not equal.

Republican virtue is moreover conditioned on the opposition’s virtue. If the Democrats act out of bounds, it’s not occasion, from the Republican point of view, to demand the Democrats act in accordance with the values applicable equally to all. It is occasion, instead, to allege the Democrats don’t mean it when they say values are applicable to all. They believe this, because the Republican can’t believe the Democrats can act morally. And they believe that, because they believe the Democrats are the enemy.

The common view is that the Republicans are so partisan they are willing to follow Donald Trump to hell. But that explanation is unsatisfying. Partisanship is one thing. Surrendering to the enemy is another. That, to me, explains why Ted Cruz said, “If we call John Bolton, I promise you, we are calling Hunter Biden.” Cruz isn’t voicing ordinary partisanship so much as the political desperation of a suicide bomber.

I said yesterday the Republican Party is best understood as an insurrection. Perhaps “separatist movement” is a better phrase. That would communicate the binary thinking of the Republican value system. There are two, separate but not equal.

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: 30 January 2020
Word Count: 743
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TUNIS — US President Donald Trump disclosed his much anticipated Middle East peace plan January 28, outlining a two-state vision that would grant Israel new coveted territory and hamstring any future Palestinian state.

As expected, the blueprint to end one of the world’s most intractable conflicts was immediately dismissed by Palestinian leaders as one-sided, making the prospect of any negotiated settlement unlikely.

But the deal did put forward a framework that some Arab countries said could work as a “starting point” — including eventual Palestinian statehood with a $50 billion development plan and a temporary freeze of Israeli settlements. The provisions would also provide for a Palestinian capital on outer portions of East Jerusalem, such as the suburb of Abu Dis, and maintain the status quo at the central Jewish and Muslim holy sites known as the temple mount, or “Haram al-Sharif.”

For Israel, the deal would help achieve a series of longstanding objectives, including full sovereignty over the disputed city of Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley and settlement blocs within the West Bank. It would also assuage their security concerns by forbidding Palestine from developing a military or forging military or security ties with states not approved by Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, standing by Trump in the White House as the US president unveiled the deal, said the plan was a “historic breakthrough” and hoped to act on its parameters as soon as possible. He vowed to move forward on plans to annex the Jordan Valley and settlements within the West Bank, which Israel’s parliament is set to hold a vote on in several weeks.

The plan was not universally lauded by Israelis, however, receiving pushback from some right-wing settlers who objected to the prospect of any future Palestinian state at all.

“We can’t agree to a plan that includes forming a Palestinian state, which will constitute a threat to Israel and a great danger to the future,” said David Elhayani, head of the Yesha Council that represents settlers in the West Bank, highlighting a divergence of views among Israeli hardliners.

Some US allies in the West lent moderate support to the proposal, with UK Foreign Minister Dominic Raab calling it a “serious proposal” and urging Palestinians “to give these plans genuine and fair consideration.”

The European Union was more cautious, saying only that the initiative “provides an occasion to re-launch the urgently needed efforts towards a negotiated and viable solution.”

The deal drew stinging criticism from some of Trump’s Democratic opponents in the US, however, who are in the midst of a tough primary race ahead of presidential elections this year.

US Senator Bernie Sanders, a frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, said the deal was “unacceptable” and would “perpetuate the conflict, and undermine the security interests of Americans, Israelis, and Palestinians.”

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, also a contender for the Democratic nomination, called the deal a “sham” that was geared at accelerating Israeli annexation. “Trump’s ‘peace plan’ is a rubber stamp for annexation and offers no chance for a real Palestinian state,” said Warren. “…I will oppose unilateral annexation in any form — and reverse any policy that supports it.”

But the issue was predictably most contentious in the Arab and Muslim world, where the US has aggressively lobbied for support from some governments traditionally sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.

The United Arab Emirates Saudi Arabia  and Egypt, all strong US allies, issued statements granting some legitimacy to the US effort.

The UAE’s Ambassador to the US said the plan was an “important starting point for a return to negotiations,” while Egypt’s foreign ministry said the proposal warranted “thorough consideration.”

Officials from Iran, Turkey, Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement and Yemen’s Houthis, however, were all deeply critical of the deal.

Some analysts said the deal seemed less achieved at securing a real solution than at jumpstarting Israeli annexation and shifting the parameters of any future negotiations, even as it included more concessions to Palestinians than had been anticipated.

“Front-loading the annexation seems to destroy the plan on the very day it’s released,” David Makovsky, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told the New York Times. “It reaffirms the worst fears that this is more an annexation plan than a peace plan.”

Palestinian leaders from all sides were equally pessimistic. Angered by a process they believe has been stacked against them from the start and hopeful that more favourable conditions could be reached under a future US Democratic administration, all major Palestinian representatives came out against the plan.

“When we are united, neither Netanyahu nor Trump dares to take away our rights,” said senior Hamas official Khalil al-Hayya after a rare meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah.

Meanwhile, thousands took to the streets in the besieged enclave of Gaza to denounce the US administration’s proposal, and greater unrest is expected if Israel proceed with annexation plans.

Stephen Quillen is an Arab Weekly correspondent in Tunis.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 30 January 2020
Word Count: 809
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Attorney General William Barr’s campaign to expand the powers of the presidency to unprecedented imperial levels has been misinterpreted as an attempt to raise Donald Trump to the level of his strongman heroes like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, and Jair Bolsonaro. Fake news! It’s really been an attempt to boost him into the same league with the strongman heroes of far too many American men: the head coaches of our major sports, especially football. As a gang of anti-democratic, anti-intellectual, authoritarian bullies dedicated to winning at any cost, they have paved the way for Donald Trump and his “base.”

If the American political class were interested in electing a decent president, perhaps even one with moral courage, personal dignity, and an inspirational vision, they would be concentrating on the character, philosophy, and background of the candidates, right? But since those in the political arena, at least brand Republican, are mostly concerned with donor dollars, expanding that base, and the charisma of their macho leader, many of them are all too ready to follow a big, loud, glad-handing figure eager to lead us deep into crises that he — and yes, it is a “he” — will claim only he can bulldoze through.

We’re talking, in other words, about the presidential version of a football head coach, as sports leads the way into… maybe not just the end zone, but The End. Examples of such men are abundantly in the news right now, since the college football season has ended and pro football has reached its orgiastic holy day, the Super Bowl, this Sunday. College and pro teams are scrambling to hire new head coaches, predominantly white men, of course, who score high (as does Donald Trump) in the five main criteria for the job.

1. The Head Coach must offer purpose and meaning to people who feel powerless by offering them membership in something bigger than themselves: the tribe of a team that will be “great again.” To wear the orange or crimson or purple, to be part of a crowd screaming for the Tigers or Raiders or Redskins (or The Donald), is to dream that tomorrow will be so much better because the new head coach, manager, skipper, top dog can deliver. The aura that he brings is invariably short-lived, but it can linger as hope, before it dwindles into immortal nostalgia.

In football, there have been plenty of incredible shrinking coaches. In politics, think John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama, all of whom still make their fans breathless with possibilities unrealized.

The prototype head coach was undoubtedly the Norwegian-born Knute Rockne, who actually delivered on many of the possibilities he promised. A showman as well as a football savant — he popularized the forward pass in the 1920s — he leveraged publicity from winning games to turn Notre Dame into a nationally recognized university with a cultish following. In the process, he became rich and famous before dying in 1931, at age 43, in a plane crash en route to Hollywood to appear as himself in a movie.

Among the myths he invented along the way was winning “one for the Gipper” — George Gipp, one of his young stars who died of pneumonia in his senior year in college. In 1940, actor Ronald Reagan played the Gipper onscreen, creating the basis for his own future head-coach presidency.

The most iconic National Football League head coach was Vince Lombardi of the Green Bay Packers, who came to fame in the early days of the pro football boom. He’s best known for the quote, “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” Lombardi was too smart to have said that and too smart to deny it once it burnished his legend. Too bad, since that sentiment is so often the defense of bad behavior in political life — from future president Lyndon Johnson stealing his first election to the Senate to President Trump betraying the Kurds, among other crimes and misdemeanors.

What Lombardi probably said was something more like: “Winning isn’t everything. Trying to win is.” That’s the kind of self-help motto that fits a classic head coach’s larger message to both his players and the fans: Follow me. Do what I say. Only I know the way. 

2. The Head Coach, college variety, must sell “the program,” the preferred term for the corporate-style athletic department of this era. He does it with a shape-shifting charm that can seduce both small-town working-class families and global financial wolves. In that way, the head coach should remind us of presidential hopefuls who can work both everyday Midwestern diners and waterfront East Hampton fund-raisers for the corporate elite.

In a living room with a talented teenager, he can convincingly promise mom and dad that he will act in loco parentis, not only by keeping junior out of trouble, but by giving him enough playing time to assure him either a pro career or a Wall Street job via successful alumni. At the least, he will make a man out of him.

In a banquet hall filled with those alumni with deep pockets, all the booster whales, he can convincingly promise winning seasons that will include them personally. As an irresistible perk in return for donations to the program (and perhaps a few no-show off-season jobs for athletes), there’s always the chance for donors to mingle in the locker room and to breakfast with the coach, to engage in team scuttlebutt and manly jock talk, not to mention all those photo ops. It’s like lunch at Mar-a-Lago with the president and some cabinet members. (Think: assistant coaches.)

That kind of salesmanship is critical because the salaries of head coaches are obscenely high and have to be justified. In most states, the head football coaches at public universities are also the highest-paid public employees. At the top of the heap right now is Clemson University’s hard-driving, God-promoting coach Dabo Swinney who has promised, for a mere $93 million over the next decade, to keep the Tigers great.

Indeed, his team did win the national championship the year before, but recently lost this year’s title game to Louisiana State University‘s Ed Orgeron whose salary is only 30th on the college coach list (at a paltry $4 million annually). President Trump earns one-tenth of that as president, a salary that he gives away. Little wonder that he needs to bolster his income with emoluments galore and constantly pump up his presidential powers. How else will he keep up with the jock elite?

3. The Head Coach is dedicated to winning by any means necessary. Cutting corners, bad behavior, even cheating is proof that he has true fire in his belly.

While his wealth, power, prestige, and the frequency of recruiting scandals have made the college football head coach a frequent target of media indignation, the leaders of other top sports are probably as culpable when it comes to cheating. As a group, they make a good case for the dark side of all our games as breeding grounds for Trumpism.

And that phenomenon, in turn, seems to have lowered our outrage about everything else in our American lives, including sports. Think of it as a kind of boomerang effect. Cheating has been normalized and, most of the time, we just shrug. Take, for example, the current Houston Astro sign-stealing scandal that helped win that team a World Series in 2017. Despite a few coach departures, compared to other scandals in major league baseball’s Hall of Shame, including the 1919 Black Sox attempt to fix an earlier world series, spitball use, and steroids, it’s made remarkably small waves.

Thanks to Donald Trump’s record of dishonor, it’s been hard to crank up anger over cheating to win at mere games. No wonder the New England Patriots’ Bill Belichick, despite the many accusations of wrongdoing lodged against him, is considered the greatest pro coach of all time based on his record six Super Bowl victories (in nine appearances) and a lifetime 304-137 record.

In short, every year it seems all the more as if the end zone justifies the means.

4. Alpha male that he is, the Head Coach has absolute control over the brutes. After all, in the locker-room and on the sidelines of the game, he’s the commander-in-chief, the beast-master of the raw young power he sends into battle.

For so many American men, there seems to be something thrilling in the head coach’s utter, unquestioned authority over the bodies and fates of the young players on his team. The fantasy of such dominance — for most, available only in video games — affects not only the fans, but the coaches themselves. They tend to believe in the righteousness of their power over those strong young men pledged to help them win, no matter what kind of bad actors they may prove to be in their lives out of uniform. (Similarly, by the way, our head coach of a president puts his faith in his control over his administration team, his legal team in those impeachment hearings, and those roaring fans at his rallies.)

Coaches, in fact, tend to love the dark wildness of bad boys, especially if they think that they alone have command over their pit-bull jocks. They love their bad boys so much that they’ll turn a blind eye when they act up and bail them out when they get in trouble for anything from being a bully in the hallway to assault with a deadly weapon or rape.

Among the most famous and successful of such beast-master coaches was Tom Osborne who headed the University of Nebraska’s football team for 25 years, overseeing stars like the psychopathic Lawrence Phillips who should have been in jail rather than lionized as a college hero.

Twenty-five years ago, at an awards banquet at which he was honored, I asked Osborne how he could justify any of this. He answered coldly and cynically, “Would you rather they were on my team or loose in your neighborhood?”

Later, as a three-term congressman, he received a lifetime rating of 83 from the American Conservative Union. Coming to feel that politics offered him so much less, however, he returned to Nebraska’s football team, his eternal place of power and glory.

Osborne’s example, hardly unique, offers insight into President Trump’s intervention in the case of disgraced Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, an out-of-control killer in Afghanistan where fellow Seals accused him of murdering civilians, among other crimes.

As Trump’s version of Lawrence Phillips, Chief Petty Officer Gallagher gave the president that head-coach patina of macho supremacy. He could handle the tough guys! Trump even invited him to Mar-a-Lago.

5. The Head Coach who can check off those first four criteria will be qualified to check off this one, too: ascension to the top ranks of million-dollar-plus power leaders. He will then be perceived as a Strong Man, sport’s version of the top dogs of global politics.

So how does the president match up with, say, three of the most famous and revered head coaches of his own lifetime?

There was Bear Bryant of the University of Alabama’s Crimson Tide, known for his harsh discipline and almost religious passion for “his” school. “If you want to walk the heavenly streets of gold, you gotta know the password, ‘Roll, Tide, Roll.'”

There was Woody Hayes of Ohio State who attacked an opposing player during a game and was fired the next day. A military history professor as well as a coach, he’s been quoted as saying that the soldiers involved in the My Lai massacre, a 1968 American slaughter of more than 500 Vietnamese civilians, killed men who deserved to die “and I wouldn’t be so sure those women were innocent. The children are obviously innocent — if they are less than five.”

Finally, there was Joe Paterno of Penn State, a much beloved philanthropist and father figure known as JoePa, whose legend was tarnished by the proven pederasty of one of his assistant coaches. Paterno had known enough, early enough, to stop the man and prevent further abuse. He was fired soon after his 409th victory, a record, and died several months later. His statue on campus was carted away.

And the current crop of top coaches has yet to prove itself any better. This is important because head coaches clearly serve as father figures, cult leaders, models of masculinity — perhaps particularly to the disaffected millions who see in Trump the strong man who can guide them, speak for them, protect them from everything that seems to be going wrong in their lives.

For those of us who don’t quite view him that way, perhaps the only saving grace of the head-coach connection at this moment of the 54th Super Bowl is how easily college and pro teams are willing to dump their coaches when they don’t fulfill expectations.

Alas, it doesn’t seem to work that way with presidential head coaches. So far.

Robert Lipsyte writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He was a sports and city columnist for the New York Times. He is the author, among other works, of SportsWorld: An American Dreamland.

Copyright ©2020 Robert Lipsyte — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 30 January 2020
Word Count: 2,153
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Let’s talk about what we’re really talking about when it comes to the president’s impeachment trial. Fixating on the details can often obscure what’s going on. Fixating on conflict, as the press corps is wont to do, can blur what might otherwise be clarity. Yes, no one knows precisely what’s going to happen, but there’s a lot we do know.

In theory, Donald Trump could be removed from office, but that would require two-thirds of the Senate. That’s 66 out of 100 senators. We already know, thanks to Rand Paul, that 45 Republicans are ready to acquit. The numbers don’t add up for conviction.

Try imagining removal from a practical GOP point of view. Removing a president during a presidential election year means what precisely? Running the vice president?

I suppose it’s possible. But even if the Republicans could gin up enthusiasm for Mike Pence, they’d face a lethal backlash from Donald Trump diehards. Removing a president would be a form of political suicide. Let’s be real, and not expect that.

This is irrespective of the question of whether he should be removed from office. The practical considerations are so fierce that Republicans like Lindsey Graham aren’t bothering to ask the question. Indeed, he doesn’t need to. He’s from South Carolina. His seat is safe (for now). The GOP has long been southernized. The Confederate States of America were home to the original domestic fascists. Republicans there don’t mind abuse of power and obstruction, as long as they’re doing it, not the enemy.

So what are we talking about?

Again, from the Republican point of view, especially from the point of view of safe Republicans, the impeachment trial is an opportunity to turn the tables on the Democrats. At least they think it is. They tried convincing the public Joe Biden was so corrupt the president was justified in asking the Ukrainians to investigate him. The subliminal message here amounts to a smear campaign of Trump’s most worrisome rival. There was, in fact, no corruption on Biden’s part. The Republicans were lying.

You’d think lying of such magnitude and in such a coordinated fashion would result in some kind of accountability so the Republicans would be deterred from lying again. But there are currently no consequences for lying among Republicans. Rick Scott, senator of Florida, made a video in which he complains of being held “hostage” at the Capitol. He also accuses the Senate Democrats of covering up Biden’s “corruption.”

You’d think hypocrisy of such magnitude and in such a coordinated fashion would result in some kind of accountability so the Republicans would be deterred from acting hypocritically again. But there are currently no consequences for hypocrisy among Republicans. Graham in particular led the charge in 1998 to impeach Bill Clinton for perjury. He and others now say even if Donald Trump did abuse his power, by exacting a quid pro quo from Ukraine’s government, that isn’t a removable offense.

Lying is grounds for removal — if you’re a Democrat.

Bribery isn’t — if you’re a Republican.

What are we talking about then when we talk about the impeachment trial? The GOP won’t removal Trump, but the Democrats can force vulnerable Republicans to choose between loyalty to the president and duty to constituents. The Republicans hate the idea of calling witnesses. The public hates the idea of not calling witnesses. The Democrats, from the start, have been putting the GOP in a vice-like squeeze play.

The vice got tighter after John Bolton, the former head of the National Security Council, was determined this week to have witnessed the president’s bribery of Ukraine. That won’t compel the Republicans to remove Trump. Remember that removal is suicide. But the trial was never about that. For Democrats, the trial is about wearing down the GOP one senator at a time in the hope of regaining the majority. If squeezing the Republicans results in wounding the president, so much the better.

I can’t end my explanation here, though. Losing the Senate wouldn’t change Republican behavior. Losing the presidency wouldn’t either. The only thing that can change GOP behavior is widespread recognition of what the party is: an insurrection.

The Republicans long ago decided the Democrats and democracy itself were not only impediments to getting what they want. They had become the enemy. When fighting an enemy, you are willing do anything, because failure means extinction. That means lying as if there are no consequences. That means acting hypocritically as if there are no consequences. That means protecting a president even if he betrayed his country.

There are two solutions to a party that has become an insurrection.

First, stop giving it the benefit of the doubt. Second, start seeing it as the enemy.

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: 29 January 2020
Word Count: 787
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