Was Joan Didion foreseeing something like the Trump presidency during her 1970 Gulf Coast swing?

"Didion saw her era more clearly than anyone else, which is another way of saying that she was able to see the future. . . . How could the hidebound South, in its perpetual disintegration and defiant decadence, at the same time represent the future? Didion admits the idea seems oxymoronic, but she is onto something. . . .

"An unquestioned premise among those who live in American cities with international airports has been, for more than half a century now, that Enlightenment values would in time become conventional wisdom. . . . Two decades into the new millennium, however, a plurality of the population has clung defiantly to the old way of life."

-- Nathaniel Rich, in "Joan Didion in the Deep South" (NYRB, 3/9)

by Ken

Our story thus far: In summer 1970 Joan Didion took a swing along the Gulf Coast, gathering notes for a piece she never wrote describing how something important for the future of the country was observable in the South. Didion has now published those notes, along with notes she gathered during a trip to San Francisco in 1976 to cover Patty Hearst's trial for Rolling Stone, in book form, as South and West.

The book is almost self-recommending just for the extended look it gives us at the working method of one of the great nonfiction writers of this or any other time. It is, as Nathaniel Rich described it, "in one regard, the most revealing of Didion’s books" a seemingly "far-fetched claim to make about an author who has written about her ancestry, her marriage, her health, and, with painful candor, her grief -- Didion’s readers are, after all, on familiar terms with the personal details of her life."

But the writing itself -- the cool majesty of her prose, written as if from a great, even empyreal distance, elevating personal experience into universal revelation -- has an immaculacy as intimidating as Chelsea porcelain. South and West offers for the first time a glimpse inside the factory walls.

So, Rich writes, while "Didion’s notes . . . surpass in elegance and clarity the finished prose of most other writers," and provide "a fascinating record of this time," he argues that

they are also something more unsettling. Readers today will recognize, with some dismay and even horror, how much is familiar in these long-lost American portraits. Didion saw her era more clearly than anyone else, which is another way of saying that she was able to see the future.

So what did Didion, Californian to the core, see along the Gulf Coast in 1970? In her notes she reports --

a sense which struck me now and then, and which I could not explain coherently, that for some years the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be: the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center.

We've already seen Rich respond, "How could the hidebound South, in its perpetual disintegration and defiant decadence, at the same time represent the future?"

Didion admits the idea seems oxymoronic, but she is onto something. Part of the answer, she suspects, lies in the bluntness with which Southerners confront race, class, and heritage -- “distinctions which the frontier ethic teaches western children to deny and to leave deliberately unmentioned.” "In the South such distinctions are visible, rigid, and the subject of frank conversation."

Rich proceeds, as I noted Friday, to look a bit at the nature of that "frank conversation," that "bluntness with which Southerners confront race, class, and heritage," with those "visible, rigid distinctions," then writes:

This kind of thinking seemed retrograde in the Seventies. From the vantage of New York, California, even New Orleans, it still seems so today. But this southern frame of mind has annexed territory in the last four decades, expanding across the Mason-Dixon Line into the rest of rural America. It has taken root among people -- or at least registered voters -- nostalgic for a more orderly past.

I left off Friday asking, "Do you see where Rich is heading? At this point, the smart thing to do, it seems to me, is to turn the floor over to him.

This kind of thinking seemed retrograde in the Seventies. From the vantage of New York, California, even New Orleans, it still seems so today. But this southern frame of mind has annexed territory in the last four decades, expanding across the Mason-Dixon Line into the rest of rural America. It has taken root among people -- or at least registered voters -- nostalgic for a more orderly past.

What is this "nostalgia for a more orderly past" that has drawn rural America to "this southern frame of mind"? It's a past, Rich suggests,

in which the men concentrated on hunting and fishing and the women on “their cooking, their canning, their ‘prettifying’”; when graft as a way of life was accepted, particularly in politics, and segregation was unquestioned; when a white supremacist running for public office was “a totally explicable phenomenon”; when a wife knew better than to travel through strange territory with a bikini and without a wedding ring [i.e., as Didion herself did during her Gulf tour].

At this point, I remind readers of the connection I set out to make between Didion's '70s discoveries and the mind-blowing changes in American culture represented by sitcoms like The Middle, with its quietly subversive caustic look at traditional "family values," and especially The Real O'Neals, gleefully thumbing its nose at traditionally reflexive, mindless Christian pieties and homophobia. These seem to confirmt the feeling a lot of us have that American society has changed irrevocably on ways that ever so recently would have seemed unimaginable.

As indeed it has -- for many Americans. But not for a significant bloc of Americans. Here's Rich again:

An unquestioned premise among those who live in American cities with international airports has been, for more than half a century now, that Enlightenment values would in time become conventional wisdom. Some fought for this future to come sooner. Others waited patiently. But nobody seemed to believe that it would never arrive. Nobody, certainly, in Los Angeles or the Bay Area, which since Didion’s reporting has only accelerated in its embrace of an ethic in which the past is fluid, meaningless, neutered by technological advancement. In this view the past is relegated to the aesthetic realm, to what Didion describes in “California Notes” as “decorative touches” -- tastefully aged cutlery and window curtains. In this view the past was safely dead and could not return to bloody the land.

"Nobody seemed to believe that it would never arrive," this time when Enlightenment values would become conventional wisdom.

Two decades into the new millennium, however, a plurality of the population has clung defiantly to the old way of life.

I've paused here only for effect, to allow the proposition to sink in. Rich goes right on:

They still believe in the viability of armed revolt. As Didion herself noted nearly fifty years ago, their solidarity is only reinforced by outside disapproval, particularly disapproval by the northern press. They have resisted with mockery, then rage, the collapse of the old identity categories. They have resisted the premise that white skin should not be given special consideration. They have resisted new technology and scientific evidence of global ecological collapse. The force of this resistance has been strong enough to elect a president.

"A writer from the Gulf South," Rich notes, "once wrote that the past is not even past."

Didion goes further, suggesting that the past is also the future. Now that we live in that future, her observations read like a warning unheeded. They suggest that California’s dreamers of the golden dream were just that -- dreamers -- while the “dense obsessiveness” of the South, and all the vindictiveness that comes with it, was the true American condition, the condition to which we will always inevitably return. Joan Didion went to the South to understand something about California and she ended up understanding something about America.

IT ALL GOES BACK TO RONALD REAGAN

The groundwork for what eventually became the Age of Trump, I've argued repeatedly, was laid during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who told America that it didn't have to be bound by reality if it found the real thing unpleasant -- that it could in fact choose the reality it wished to believe in." In the decades since, the American Right has gone way beyond this. By the time of George W. Bush, they were fully off the truth standard. All that mattered was sounding the lies that Americans wanted to hear, and in crafting those lies he had the masterful assistance of one of America's greatest lie-mongers, Karl Rove.

Nowadays every right-winger is his own Karl Rove, or has one of the dime-a-dozen imitators to call on. Some of us still find it hard to believe that it's really possible to get away with lying of the scope and scale practiced by the creature no esconced in the Oval Office.

And now, merely by managing to deliver a speech in which the Man of Orange didn't appear as a raving psychotic, in many circles his presidency is deemed to have been "rebooted." Not everyone was fooled, though. As John Cassidy begins his newyorker.com response, "Don't Be Fooled. Donald Trump Didn't Pivot":

The instant reviews of President Donald Trump’s speech to Congress on Tuesday night are in, and some of them are raves. Trump had scarcely left the House chamber when Fox News’s Chris Wallace credited him with reinventing the art of giving speeches to joint sessions of Congress. “I feel like, tonight, Donald Trump became the President of the United States,” Wallace opined. His colleague Dana Perino didn’t go quite that far, but she did rate the performance “the best speech he”—Trump—“has ever given.”

To be sure, these were two Fox News analysts speaking, albeit two of the more independent-minded ones. But the praise for Trump’s performance wasn’t confined to the conservative media. Over on CNN—the President’s least favorite “fake news” network—David Axelrod, the former Obama adviser, commented, “If I’m on the Trump team, I’m very, very happy with this speech. . . . There will be an afterglow from this speech. He should get a bump in the polls.”

Eying these Christians offering praise to the lion that is out to devour them, Slate’s Jacob Weisberg remarked on Twitter, “Enemies of the people giving Trump positive reviews for not sounding like a ranting dictator.” It certainly seemed that way. If there was anything fresh about what Trump said to Congress, it was largely stylistic. He didn’t pivot; he merely pirouetted, and then he dug into the same political ground he has already claimed.

About all that happened was that Trump, perhaps feeling saddled by low approval ratings, caved to the normal conventions of political communication. These rules dictate that, on august occasions such as a speech to Congress, Presidents talk politely and try to avoid giving offense. They leaven the heavy fare they are bearing with moments of optimism and humanity, promise the viewers some goodies, and offer up some notes of inclusion. Trump did all these things, and he even deployed some uplifting prose. If his Inauguration speech sounded like it had been written by Steve Bannon suffering from a migraine, Tuesday’s appeared to have been the work of a professional speechwriter.

Rather than starting things off with his dystopian world view, Trump began the speech with a reference to Black History Month, saying, “We are reminded of our nation’s path toward civil rights and the work that still remains to be done.” He condemned the recent wave of anti-Semitic incidents, and he also mentioned the shooting of two Indian immigrants last week, in Kansas, which, hitherto, he had shamefully ignored. His message, he said, was one “of unity and strength.” Channelling Ronald Reagan, he added, “A new chapter of American greatness is now beginning.”

This tone was markedly different from the one Trump had struck as recently as last week, at the cpac conference, and the television pundits swallowed it whole. In substantive terms, however, Trump didn’t give an inch, or even a millimetre. . . .

The president appears to have relearned the rhetoric of happy-sounding goals, things he wouldn't know how to do even if by chance he wanted to do them.

[D]etails of how he would bring about his ambitious goals were lacking. But rhetoric wasn’t. “Crumbling infrastructure will be replaced with new roads, bridges, tunnels, airports, and railways, gleaming across our very, very beautiful land,” he promised. He also pledged “massive tax relief for the middle class,” and much lower corporate taxes, too. He also said, “I am going to bring back millions of jobs,” and that he would work with Congress to create “a better health-care system for all Americans.”

Absent from Trump’s discussion of these issues was any proper explanation of how any of his proposals would be paid for. He did say his trillion-dollar infrastructure plan would be “financed through both public and private capital,” but he didn’t provide any details, and the words “budget deficit” didn’t once cross his lips.

Nor did he mention Russia or climate change or the robust job growth he inherited. His only use of the word “environment” came in reference to the violent crime wave that he falsely claims is sweeping the nation. “We want all Americans to succeed,” he said, “but that can’t happen in an environment of lawless chaos.” . . .

Does anyone believe the American people won't go right on buying Trump bullshit as long as it's couched in this nonpsychotic way?

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Trump Is Just About Trump-- His Supporters On The Other Hand, Are Looking For A White Valhalla

Yesterday, Nick Kristof offered 5 reasons why certain types among our countrymen and women might want to vote for Trump:

• voters who worship at the alter of ignorance
• voters who feel it's time to embrace a paragon of fraud
• voters who want to be entertained by the country's leader
• voters who feel extremists have a role to play just like everyone else (diversity)
• voters who want a new approach to psychological norms

Deep in our heads, resting on the spinal cord, is what scientists sometimes call our “reptilian brain.” In evolutionary terms, this is the oldest part of our brains and it governs primal instincts such as hunger, sex and fear; it helps trigger the fight or flight response.

This reptilian brain has been updated with a cerebral cortex and other modern brain structures that are the seat of reason-- but Trump is bypassing them. Neuroscientists have noted that he preaches directly to the lizard in our heads.

“We do experience a primitive apprehension welling up from our ‘reptilian brain,’” Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychology professor, tells me, but we still interpret it in light of our belief system. The modern world has developed science, journalism, a judiciary and similar institutions to curb our primal impulses-- but Trump blows these off.

Our reptilian brains evolved to be hyper-alert to dangers, which was lifesaving in an age of pterodactyls. Trump activates these vigilant instincts, Pinker says, and channels them into the most primitive interpretive circuits of our cortex, the ones rooted in tribalism. And so he wants us to join him in making scapegoats of Muslims, refugees, Mexican “rapists” and black “thugs.”

This historic election thus presents a choice: To decide how to cast our ballots, do we rely upon our reptilian brains or our human brains? To put it another way: Are we fearful, instinctive reptiles? Or nuanced, reasoning humans?

John Cassidy is an Englishman who's been writing for the New Yorker for just over two decades. He decided to tackle a question many people have been asking themselves and everyone they know: why does Trump still have do much support? It was inspired, at least in part, by his wife asking him "how can Hillary Clinton be losing to a mentally unstable megalomaniac and sexual predator who doesn’t pay income taxes?" Fair question-- and one we need to get to the bottom of for the good of the country, once he's been defeated Tuesday. One never goes wrong by pointing out "it's the economy, stupid."

In the past few days, Clinton supporters have offered up at least three explanations, or culprits, for why the race is so close: James Comey; “false equivalence” in the media; and sexism. In each case, they are onto something. But the bigger story is one my colleague George Packer wrote tellingly about last week in the magazine: an America bitterly divided along class, racial, and cultural lines. To quote Benjamin Disraeli, the nineteenth-century British statesman, we now have “two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets.”

Disraeli was writing about the rapidly industrializing England of the eighteen-forties, and the two nations he referred to were the rich and the poor. In the United States, because of its history of slavery, the Civil War, and mass immigration, the divisions have never been that simple: vertical cleavages along racial, ethnic, and regional lines have often trumped the horizontal class divide. But the gulf between Clinton’s America and Trump’s America, even though it can’t be traced entirely along economic lines, is now a yawning chasm.

The polls say that just less than forty per cent of voters in America have a favorable opinion of Trump. Whatever their views of him as an individual, they like what he stands for: nationalism, nativism, and hostility toward what they consider a self-serving élite that looks down on them. In addition to these confirmed Trump supporters, there are a number of other folks-- moderate Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, mainly-- who may harbor serious reservations about Trump personally, but who may also be willing to vote for him to keep Clinton out of the White House.

When members of this latter group have been confronted with the most grotesque aspect of Trump’s behavior-- such as his willingness to attack the family of a U.S. serviceman who died in Iraq, or his history of treating women like chattel-- they have tended to back away from him, causing his poll numbers to falter. But whenever Clinton takes center stage in the news, and Trump fades into the background for a bit, her numbers also tend to fall. Thus the “sine wave” pattern we’ve seen in the polls over the past few months.

...Some of Clinton’s defenders blame the media for this. News outlets, they say, treat her minor transgressions, or alleged transgressions, in the same way they treat outright demagoguery, mendacity, and grotesquery on Trump’s part. This is another argument that needs some context. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has accused Clinton of operating a fraudulent business that bilked tens of thousands of dollars from people on modest incomes, stiffing tradespeople on a routine basis, making a mockery of the tax laws and not paying a cent of income tax for twenty years, boasting about charitable giving while not donating any of her own cash, or sexually assaulting women. Who brought these stories to the public’s attention? The news media. During the Republican primaries, some outlets, particularly on television, indulged Trump shamefully, while using him as a ratings booster. Ever since he got the nomination, though, much of the print media’s coverage, and even some of broadcast media’s, has been negative.

...From Trump University to Trump’s tax records to the parade of women alleging that he harassed and assaulted them, reporters have done a pretty thorough job of illuminating and investigating Trump’s checkered past, the hollowness of many of his claims, and what sort of person he is. Meanwhile, the pundits, including many conservatives, have portrayed Trump as an existential danger to the Republic. And yet none of these journalistic endeavors has had the desired effect: to snuff out Trump’s candidacy.

Some of the blame here may belong to the Clinton campaign. While it has done an effective job of highlighting Trump’s race-baiting and sexism, it hasn’t done enough to exploit his other vulnerabilities, to paint the Republican candidate as a con man whose schemes have victimized many ordinary, hard-working Americans. To be sure, the Clinton campaign has gone some way in this direction. But they should be ramming home every day the message that Trump is a serial chiseler of the little guy, not his savior. Why isn’t Clinton regularly appearing alongside some of the people who lost their savings to Trump University? Where are the ads featuring tradesmen and suppliers and charities that Trump has stiffed?

But the explanation of Trump’s enduring appeal must go beyond political tactics. In a divided but social-media-saturated America, people on either side of the divide communicate over each other, rather than with each other. They regard news stories not as new information to be ingested and considered but as potential ammo to hurl at the other side. They see their political opponents not as well-meaning if misguided fellow-citizens but, to borrow a phrase, as deplorables who have no political legitimacy.

On the Trump side, there is a siege mentality, evident in the constant vilification of the Clintons, the chants of “Lock her up,” and the fury toward the mainstream news media. If you tune in to conservative talk radio, as many Trump supporters do, you will hear a constant discourse of resentment, conspiracy theories, and alienation from the institutions of economic and political power-- including the Republican Party establishment. Sean Hannity, of Fox News, for example, daily presents the vote on November 8th not merely as a chance to select a new President but as a last chance to save the country from politicians and liberals who are out to destroy its very essence.

The Trump movement, like the Tea Party movement it supplanted, is a reaction to the socially liberal, polyglot America that is rapidly emerging in the twenty-first century. Representing an older, whiter, and more embattled tradition, it is constantly evoking what it sees as a lost Valhalla-- a place of plentiful jobs, rising living standards, conservative social values, fewer immigrants, and minorities who knew their place. To a large extent, this lost America is a myth. Since its inception, practically, the United States has been roiled by technological change, large-scale migration, economic conflicts, and ethnic and religious tensions. But it is a powerful myth, which Trump-- Mr. Make America Great Again-- plays to shamelessly and effectively.

On the Democratic side, the liberal mentality comes out in suggestions that Trump’s supporters, almost by definition, are uncouth, ill-educated bigots. If you adopt this attitude, vigorously opposing Trump isn’t just a political decision; it is a moral duty and a social necessity. To assert your identity as part of the enlightened America, you need to disassociate yourself from the racist hillbillies, rednecks, and suburban dolts supporting Trump.

“Liberals and Democrats are not really part of a party, as much as they are part of a new America that looks and thinks differently and has little interest in looking back, wherever that might be,” Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who spends much of his time studying Islamic societies, pointed out in a thought-provoking piece a few months back. “More than a party, it is a lifestyle, a culture and a sensibility, with its own media, institutions, norms and values.” Hamid probably understates the importance of policy differences that divide the two parties, especially now that Trump has proposed things like introducing religious tests for immigrants and reintroducing the use of torture in interrogations of terrorist subjects, as well as promising to appoint Supreme Court Justices in the mold of the late Antonin Scalia. But the larger point, about the gaping cultural divide, stands.

Despite the recent narrowing in the polls, liberal America still has demographics, early-voting patterns, and the Electoral College map on its side. But even if Trump loses next week, the great divide his campaign has brought to the fore won’t go away. Indeed, as Hamid noted, “The risk is that as whites become a smaller majority-- and eventually an outright minority-- the tendencies toward ethnic politics we’ve witnessed in this election season might very well intensify.” And if, in the coming years, robots and algorithms provide another big shock to the economy, destroying tens of millions more decent-paying jobs, how many former truck drivers and displaced white-collar workers will be receptive listeners to a future Trump?

Would it matter to Trump voters if it turns out -- and THEY FIND OUT -- that The Donald pays zero income tax?

This is the first of seven hand-written pages (click to enlarge( used to canvass 249 potential recipients of Trump donations as reported in the Washington Post's David A. Farenthold and Danielle Rindler's "Searching for evidence of Trump's personal giving." All the hand-written materials are reproduced, along with printouts and extensive annotations.

by Ken

As I've indicated, I'm trying my darnedest to pay as little attention as is humanly possible to the orgy of insanity that is our 2016 presidential race. Of course it's inescapable, though. And the question I keep coming back to is: How the hell does The Donald keep getting away with it? And by "it" I mean all of it -- the nonstop lies, the psychotic delusions, the incessant borderline (if not across-the-border) criminality -- all of it.

So reading John Cassidy's newyorker.com post Does Donald Trump Pay Any Income Taxes at All?," a fine -- and fastidiously documented -- compendium of some fine reporting on The Donald's tax-related finances, the question that kept running through my head was, well, the one in the post title above. If the people who are actually considering voting for the creep knew that he pays no income taxes, assuming for the moment that this is the case (which it seems increasingly doubtful that we'll ever be able to find out), would it make any difference to them?

John backtracks first to the dogged search that the Washington Post's David A. Fahrenthold and colleagues have been making "on Donald Trump’s charitable giving, or the lack thereof."

The Washington Post’s David A. Fahrenthold is rightly getting a lot of attention for his stellar reporting on Donald Trump’s charitable giving, or the lack thereof. Fahrenthold and his colleagues have spent more than six months contacting hundreds of charities that Trump claims to have given money to through his family charity, the Donald J. Trump Foundation.

“So far, the Post’s search has turned up little,” Fahrenthold and Danielle Rindler wrote in August. “Between 2008 and this May—when Trump made good on a pledge to give $1 million to a veterans’ group—its search has identified just one personal gift from Trump’s own pocket.” As Fahrenthold and Rosalind S. Helderman had already revealed, in April, many of the donations that Trump claimed to have made turned out to be gifts in kind from his businesses, such as free rounds of golf for charity auctions.

Then he turns to "Fahrenthold’s latest revelation, which the Post published on Sunday," namely "that Trump has 'found a way to give away somebody else’s money and claim the credit for himself.' "

Apparently, the Trump Foundation raises money from other charities, and from individuals with whom Trump has done business. Then it gives away the money with Trump’s name on the check. The last donation Trump made to his charity, Fahrenthold reported, came in 2008. Since then, nada.

SO, DOES THE DONALD PAY INCOME TAX?

"Which," John says, "brings us back to an interesting question: Is it possible that Trump is also paying nothing in income tax?"

A number of journalists and tax experts who have looked at Trump’s finances think it may well be.

Last month, James Stewart, a Times columnist, wrote about Trump's taxes, and compared him with Mitt Romney, who was criticized in 2012 for paying just $4.9 million in federal income tax. “No one should be surprised, though, if Donald J. Trump has paid far less—perhaps even zero federal income tax in some years,” Stewart wrote. “Indeed, that’s the expectation of numerous real estate and tax professionals I’ve interviewed in recent weeks.” These experts explained to Stewart that the federal tax code is so generous to real-estate developers—so stuffed with deductions, credits, and loopholes they can exploit—that it may well have allowed Trump to bring his taxable income down to nothing, or next to nothing. Which might help explain why he is so reluctant to release his tax returns.

To put it another way, I doubt that was among the first million people to suggest in the public prints (if you count this as a public print) that our Donald's refusal to release his tax records had nothing to do with principle, except perhaps the principle of self-preservation, but that it had to do rather with his keen awareness that those returns contain something (or things) extremely dangerous to his continued well-being, and possibly not just as a candidate.

So, could the explosive secret be that, for all the massive profits he insists continue to pile onto his wealth, he manages simply not to pay any income tax? John Cassidy speculates how this might in fact be connected to the discoveries about Trump's virtually non-existent charitable giving -- stressing first that it is just speculation.

To be clear, the latest revelations about the Trump Foundation didn’t contain any explicit information about Trump’s personal tax returns. (Fahrenthold himself has pointed out that the unavailability of Trump’s returns has made it a lot harder to track his charitable activities.) But the two stories could well be connected. Perhaps one of the reasons that Trump didn’t give any money to his foundation was that he didn’t need any charitable deductions to reduce his tax bill—because it was already zero, or close to it.

We know for sure that Trump does everything he can to avoid sending money to the I.R.S. In May, he told ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos, “I fight very hard to pay as little tax as possible.” We also know that one way wealthy people reduce their tax bills is by making contributions to qualified charities, contributions that are usually fully deductible. Surely a man as determined and tax-averse as Trump, in seeking to reduce his tax obligations, would exploit every option that the tax code offers, including this very obvious one. Unless, of course, he didn’t need to.

“If you have little or no taxable income, then why would you make a charitable contribution?” David Cay Johnston, a veteran investigative journalist who recently published a biography of Trump that includes extensive discussions of his financial affairs, told me on Thursday. “The fact he hasn’t made any contributions to his foundation since 2008 is another strong indication he doesn’t pay income taxes.”

Cay Johnston was the tax reporter for the Times from 1995 until 2008, and in 2001 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the loopholes in the federal tax code that favor corporations and rich people. He pointed out that court documents and other public records show that Trump paid no income tax in 1978, 1979, 1992, and 1994. More recently, Cay Johnston said, New York State tax records show that Trump has several times received a type of tax rebate that is restricted to property owners who report taxable income of less than half a million dollars, known as a STAR credit.  “It is likely that Trump has not paid any income tax since 1978, or maybe a little bit in a couple of years,” Cay Johnston told me.

Of course, it’s still possible that Trump gave money to charities directly and privately, rather than through the Trump Foundation. That is what he claims to have done, and if this is true he could have deducted those donations from his income for tax purposes. But neither Fahrenthold nor Cay Johnston has been able to find much trace of this type of philanthropy, either. “There is absolutely no evidence that he has given these charitable gifts,” Cay Johnston said. “Can you imagine Donald Trump making anonymous gifts to anybody?”

HOW TO PUT AN END TO ALL THIS SPECULATION

Simplicity itself, says John.

To be sure, the theory that Trump hasn’t paid any income taxes is just speculation. But it’s informed speculation based on knowledge of the tax laws and inspection of the limited information about Trump’s finances that is publicly available. And, of course, if Trump wants to put an end to this type of theorizing, he knows how to do it: put out those returns.

Which still leaves my original question: Would potential Trump voters care? Or would they simply admire him for finagling his way around the corrupt system -- the one they think he's going to change somehow. By way of comparison, try to imagine what would happen if it were disclosed that Bill and/or Hillary Clinton pay zero income tax.

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Why does The Donald lie?

[Click to enlarge.]

"In returning to this sort of language now that he’s got the nomination—and escalating it with his use of the phrase 'founder of ISIS'—Trump is, on the face of it, harming his prospects for November. . . . He sounds like he is talking to his angry base, and supplying them with an inflammatory narrative that can be trotted out for years, and decades, to come."

-- John Cassidy, in a new newyorker.com post, "Why
Trump's Crazy Talk About Obama and ISIS Matters"

by Ken

Idea for a post: "Prophetic utterances uttered by a young imp known as The Donnie." As for example: "Someday I'm gonna be so rich, people will have to laugh at my jokes." Not for today, but still safely lodged in the Idea Hopper. Meanwhile, now all grown up, or as grown up as it appears he's ever going to get, The Donald sprinkles his little "jokes" all over the damn place, most recently inspiring this Borowitz Report:

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—Clarifying his position on a key national-security issue, Donald Trump said on Friday that as President he would be willing to use nuclear weapons, “but only in a sarcastic way.”

“People who are worried about me having the nuclear-launch codes should stop worrying, O.K.?” Trump told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “If I ever used nuclear weapons, it would be really obvious that I was just being sarcastic.”

Pressed by Blitzer to explain the difference between a sarcastic and non-sarcastic nuclear attack, Trump responded, “You’d use the weapons and everything, but then you’d say, ‘Just kidding.’ ”

Trump did not specify which nations he would target for a sarcastic nuclear attack. “I can’t say right now,” he said. “But there are a lot of countries that need to lighten up.”

Stunning as this latest round of Donald-esque delusions and lies is, it's hardly a novelty, in that by now we have learned to expect pretty much anything when our boy opens his yap. Now I've already argued that this isn't in itself ground-breaking -- that, after all, we had a president who served for eight years (2001-09) without ever intentionally uttering a public word of truth. (I say "intentionally" to allow for the possibility that on occasion, in his usual slapdash, devil-may-care way "Chimpy the Prez" Bush may have delivered an accidental word of truth.) And in 2008, we had a presidential campaign in which the Republican candidate not only did the same but upped the ante, nestling lies within lies, and even lies within lies within lies. What's more, at least as of that magical year 2008 it appeared that every campaigning Republican in the country had fully adopted the new GOP fuck-the-truth standard

Still, there is something different about The Donald: the sheer brazenness of his lying. As witness the present case. As The New Yorker's John Cassidy puts it in the newyorker.com post from which I quoted up top, "Why Trump's Crazy Talk About Obama and ISIS Matters":

On Thursday morning, Donald Trump doubled down on his latest verbal outrage: the claim that President Obama was the “founder” of ISIS. Actually, the Republican Presidential nominee tripled down. Appearing on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” he described himself as “a truth teller” and went on to say that the President was “the founder of ISIS absolutely, the way he removed our troops.” Referring to Hillary Clinton, Trump added, “I call them co-founders.”

Peripatetic as ever, Trump gave another interview, a short time later, to Hugh Hewitt, the conservative radio host, who said to him, “Last night, you said that the President was the founder of ISIS. I know what you meant. You meant that he created the vacuum, he lost the peace.”

Trump wasn’t having it. “No. I meant that he’s the founder of ISIS,” he said. “He was the most valuable player. I gave him the Most Valuable Player award. I give her”—Clinton—“too, by the way.” Hewitt evidently thought that this was unfair to Obama. “But he’s not sympathetic to them,” he said. “He hates them; he’s trying to kill them.” Trump was unabashed. “He was the founder,” he said, referring to Obama. “His, the way he got out of Iraq, that was the founding of ISIS.”

If this rings a bell, perhaps it's from the similarly loony rewrite of history done by The Donald's hand-picked running mate, The Unspeakable Pence, who managed -- in distancing himself from the still more extreme position of the man who has chosen him to be a heartbeat away from his presidency -- to "explain" that Capt. Hamayun Khan's killing in Iraq in 2004 was the fault of the devil Obama and the chaos he created in Iraq, even though at the time of Captain Khan's death Chimpy the Prez not only was still president but would still serve another full term.

And the problem for the country is that this may seem quite believable to the people who are prepared to vote for The Donald. Which is not only terrifying but ironic, because clumsily buried beneath the Trump and Co. lies about Iraq is a truth that the country has never been prepared to face: that indeed all sorts of humongous international problems were created, or at least exacerbated, by American actions in Iraq (and also Afghanistan) -- except not the devil Obama's, but none other than Chimpy the Prez and the invasion that was "justified" by an entire fabric(ation) of out-and-out lies.

From which episode two lessons need to be remembered, it seems to me:

(1) The country as a whole swallowed Chimpy and the Neocons' lies pretty much whole.

It's not as if absolutely nobody was in possession or at least in search of the truth about Iraq (and Afghanistan). Enough of it was already gleaned that it should have made a difference if the country had given a damn about the truth. And, as we've noted frequently, even in the aftermath of the disaster of our involvement in Iraq, the people who had advocated for the truth were almost uniformly punished, while the people who had formulated or at least propagandized for the lies were almost uniformly rewarded.

(2) Similarly, the country ignored the real-world effects of our military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Again, there were observers pointing out that our actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, far from combatting terrorism, were laying the groundwork for a whole new generation of terrorists, for wider-spread and more destructive terrorism. But the country as a whole made it clear that it didn't want to hear anything about that. Only to be easy pickings for the Trump and Co. rewrite of history. Does this make any sense?

As a matter of fact, it does. Because at some point in the above-alluded-to second term of Chimpy the Prez, that same broad middleground of America, people who had once treated Chimpy as divinity, and denounced even the mildest criticism as "Bush-bashing," lost its devotion to the lies of Chimpy and Co. Partly it was the inescapability of the messes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the contrast of the reality with the bright and cheery lies Chimpy had fed them and they had swallowed so eagerly. Partly it was the visible ineptitude of the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina. Partly it was assorted other first-term Chimpy-chickens coming home to roost. And eventually there was economic catastrophe presided over by Chimpy and his team. This idea of creating your own reality and pretending it's actual reality is fun as far as it goes, but sometimes the real thing has a way of getting in the way.

Interestingly, though, when the former Chimpyites turned on their onetime idol, it didn't take the form of them blaming him for what he'd done. He simply disappeared from their consciousness. By the time of the 2008 presidential campaign, it was as if he had never existed, even though he was still the president of these United States. Barack Obama, by contrast, gets blamed for everything that Chimpy never did get blamed for.

As I argued at the time, it wasn't that the Chimpyites were prepared to come to grips with reality. No, it was more like they had become passionately disillusioned with the years' worth of lies Chimpy and his people had told them but they were demanding, often angrily, newer and better lies.

And now they're getting 'em. And, I worry, swallowing 'em.

This scares me for two reasons. First, I'm still not persuaded that The Donald can't win. If people are sufficiently determined to reject reality in favor of a more "acceptable" concocted version, they can do it. And the degree of Hillary hatred makes this possibility substantially less impossible. But second, even assuming the Trump candidacy crashes and burns, the broad national disaffection he's tapped into, and the descent into delusion he's proposed as a response, will remain fixtures of the political landscape going forward.

Which, as it happens, is the very subject John Cassidy pursues in this post of his. Following the chunk from the post I quoted above, he asks, "What are we to make of all this?" And he continues:

At this stage, some will argue that it isn’t worth the effort to interpret Trump’s misstatements, or to point out the truth of the matter—in this case, that a Jordanian named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi founded ISIS, in 2004. At the very least, it should be obvious to everyone by now that Trump doesn’t deal in reality; he deals in mythmaking, demagoguery, and carnival barking.

When he’s not tied to a teleprompter, Trump often seems to say the most provocative thing that comes into his head, with little thought for the consequences for his campaign, or for the campaigns of other Republicans. He’s like a small child, trying to be the center of attention, even if that means he has turned himself into an object of outrage and ridicule.

If you take this view of Trump, there isn’t much more to be said. He’s the melting figure on the cover of this week’s Time magazine [see image above -- Ed.]: a reality-television shyster who somehow captured the nomination of a major political party and is now dissolving in front of us. The only remaining questions for you are how big a majority Clinton will rack up, and whether the Republicans can limit the damage in the Senate and the House of Representatives.

"I’ve got a lot of sympathy for this interpretation.," John writes. "But, just for the sake of argument, let’s assume that Trump is smarter and less myopic than he seems."

Let’s assume that what he’s really focussed on isn’t winning this year’s election, a task he now realizes is beyond him, but creating a long-term Trumpian movement. A nationalistic, nativist, protectionist, and authoritarian movement that will forever be associated with him, but which also has the capacity to survive beyond him.

And he cites the current reactionary movements in France, Austria, and the U.K., not to mention the similar movements in our own history.

History tells us that for right-wing populist movements to succeed, a number of things need to be in place. For one thing, they need a narrative that mainstream political leaders, and political parties, are guilty of not merely incompetence but betrayal.

And John refers us to "the 'stab-in-the-back' myth" in post-1918 Germany, which led to the rise of Hitler, and to post-de Gaulle French right-wingers' accusation that the Général had betrayed France by "giving up" Algeria and that later French governments had betrayed France by embracing the European Union. Looked at this way, John argues, the kinds of anti-Obama indictments The Donald has been pronouncing (he notes, for example, that Trump "first suggested that Obama and Clinton created isis seven months ago, long before this week’s comments") suggest a larger purpose than merely electioneering for 2016. Which brings us to the quote atop this post. Here it is again, with a sentence I omitted in the middle restored, and with the continuation included:

In returning to this sort of language now that he’s got the nomination—and escalating it with his use of the phrase “founder of ISIS”—Trump is, on the face of it, harming his prospects for November. He certainly doesn’t sound like he’s trying to win over the soccer moms in Columbus, or the office workers in Tampa, that he needs to win the election. He sounds like he is talking to his angry base, and supplying them with an inflammatory narrative that can be trotted out for years, and decades, to come. It’s a tactic that politicians outside the United States, such as Jean-Marie Le Pen and Jörg Haider, have used to good effect in building up far-right nationalist movements.

John goes on to make quite a nice case about the potential effectiveness -- in the context of building a longer-term movement, of The Donald's blithering about the election being stolen -- a scenario to which a lot of Americans are apparently susceptible, as long as it doesn't include that actual attempts at election-fixing by the soldiers of the Right, with some interesting backup from other scribes.

You may be relieved to learn, as I was, that John doesn't really believe The Donald is masterminding "an enduring America First movement that will eventually supplant the Republican Party."

I wouldn’t give him that much credit. He’s precisely the self-centered, shortsighted, and insecure figure he appears to be, and he’s now flailing around for excuses to explain a humiliating defeat in the making. In his interview with CNBC, he said, “If, at the end of ninety days, I’ve fallen short . . . it’s O.K. I go back to a very good way of life.”

But that doesn't mean the country will pick up as if nothing happened in the event that The Donald simply leaves the mess behind him and "go[es] back to [his] very good way of life."

Four years from now, or eight years from now, a more disciplined and self-controlled figure could take up where he left off. If at that time the United States were facing a serious economic or national-security crisis, more Americans—conceivably even a majority of them—might be willing to accept the argument that regular politicians have failed and betrayed them, and that drastic measures are called for. Healthy democracies don’t decay overnight. They gradually rot from within, with termites like Trump undermining their foundations.

Which is kind of what I've been trying to say, John, only you've said it much better.

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Yes, let's give thanks to Pope Francis for trumping Chuanpu,* at least for a while, in the 24/7 news cycle

*Chuanpu = Trump, "as he is known in Mandarin," according to The New Yorker's Evan Osnos in a Sept. 28 "Comment" piece, "Dinner Talk," on the state visit of People's Republic of China President Xi Jinping

If you'd like to "continue reading," click here.

"If you read the speech in its entirety -- as I did after watching it being delivered -- you will find something more coherent and substantial: a polite but firm request for the United States to stand up for, and live by, some of the things it claims to represent and, at times, has actually represented."

-- John Cassidy, in a newyorker.com post a few hours
ago, "Pope Francis's Timely Message to Congress"

by Ken

Even a few days of low-trumpery would be a blessing. When last heard from, The Donald was screeching his stinking guts out like a diseased, wounded hyena over -- among other things -- the "foul language" uesed by National Review editor and Fox Noisemaker telling fellow Noisemaker Megyn Kelly that Carly Fiorina had cut The Donald's balls off. The Donald is demanding that the FCC fine Fox Noise -- which he is of course famously boycotting in the latest phase of his feud with the Noisybunch.

Really?

Now if I say that The Donald is a giant stinking pile of shit, I know that that's foul language. I might risk it anyway since calling him a giant stinking pile of doody or feces doesn't give the full measure of his turditude. However, I'm not sure where the "foul language" is in saying that someone's had his balls cut off, especially when you consider the volume of filth that has come out of The Donald's campaign since he announced it.

(If the objection is that Rich Lowry is a moron, and that saying Carly had cut The Donald's balls off was moronic, I'd say that's two for two. But once we go down that lane, most of what comes out of The Donald's maw is moronic too, and most of the gibberish spewed on Fox Noise by the legion of Noisemaking morons. Fortunately, though, from a First Amendment-wise standpoint, the FCC has no jurisdiction over morons or moronitude.

But to return to The Donald's cut-off balls, is the idea here that "balls" is foul language? Really? So, like, baseball announcers now have to give hitting counts as, say, "three uh-uhs and two strikes," or else The Donald will demand that the FCC fine them?

Oh, you're saying that if "balls" refers to the male sex organs it's foul language? So it would be okay if Rich had told Megyn that Carly cut The Donald's testicles off?


WELL, THE POPE IS HERE IN THE BIG APPLE NOW

And we New Yorkers are keeping track of his itinerary by monitoring the zillions of street closings and bus reroutings (or is it vice versa?). I know he's got a  tight schedule, so there doesn't seem much point in my suggesting some spots for him to hit. (At least those spots won't become temporarily inaccessible to the rest of us.)

There's a lot of good will toward the pope here, as witness this photo taken by a reader of the Brooklyn blog Brownstoner on Brooklyn's Court Street on Tuesday afternoon, the day of the start of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the most holy day in the Jewish calendar -- when the traditional greeting is "Good yom tov" (or "yontif"), "yom tov" meaning literally "good day," or holiday.

Brownstoner asks: "Is it kosher? Or should
Peter Shelsky atone for this joke?"

AS FOR THE POPE'S ADVENTURES IN WASHINGTON --

Here's the start of John Cassidy's newyorker.com post, "Pope Francis's Timely Message to Congress":

If you watched Pope Francis’s historic address to a joint session of Congress on Thursday, and judged it by the standards of contemporary politics and discourse, it perhaps seemed a bit disappointing. The Pope spoke slowly and in a thick accent. He ranged widely, making it tricky to discern a common thread. Some of his language was elliptical; some of his rebukes were implied. Soundbites and applause lines were few and far between.

But if you read the speech in its entirety—as I did after watching it being delivered—you will find something more coherent and substantial: a polite but firm request for the United States to stand up for, and live by, some of the things it claims to represent and, at times, has actually represented. Speaking in a legislature dominated by a party that is increasingly held hostage to the doctrines and interests of individualism and free enterprise, the visitor from the Holy See delivered a timely defense of communal values and solidarity with the poor and dispossessed. While he was at pains not to appear partisan or to give offense to his hosts, there was a reason why some Republicans were nervous about what the Pope might say. Between the follower of Saint Francis of Assisi and the leadership of the G.O.P. lies a gulf that no politesse can disguise.

To the delight of the assembled, the Pope began by saying that he was grateful for the opportunity to speak “in the land of the free and the home of the brave.” But he quickly made clear that his concept of liberty and freedom doesn’t jibe with the one promoted by the Republican Study Committee or the Club for Growth. Citing Abraham Lincoln’s call for “a new birth of freedom,” he said, “Building a future of freedom requires love of the common good and coöperation in a spirit of subsidiarity and solidarity.” The “common good” isn’t a concept that gets discussed often in Washington these days, but Pope Francis invoked it several times. And in reminding the senators and representatives sitting before him of their obligation to pursue this goal, he said that they had a particular obligation to protect “those in situations of greater vulnerability or risk.”

It was perhaps predictable that Francis would bring up Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., two Americans who have achieved secular canonization, and to whom politicians across the political spectrum pay lip service. But the other two Americans he cited as inspirations were both figures of the left: Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, and Thomas Merton, a Catholic theologian and mystic, whose enthusiastic support for the civil-rights movement and participation in protests against the Vietnam War attracted criticism from some conservative clergy. . . .

THERE'S A PROBLEM, THOUGH -- THE SEX-ABUSE VICTIMS

When I saw the link to this piece, my first response was, oh, some people always have to find a dark side. Then I started reading, and it wasn't hard to see why there are people who are upset. Note that in the set of remarks referenced here, Pope Francis was speaking not to Congress as the head of the Catholic Church but to his middle-management team as chief executive of the company -- and getting applause for a line he's going to hear a lot more about.

Here's the start of the piece:

Why advocates for clergy sex abuse victims call Pope Francis’s remarks a ‘slap in the face’

By Abby Ohlheiser, Michelle Boorstein and Terrence McCoy | September 23 at 9:15 PM


In a midday prayer at Saint Matthew's Cathedral in Washington, Pope Francis said that sex crimes must "never repeat themselves." [Watch video at the link.]

Speculation began almost as soon as Pope Francis’s first visit to the United States was announced months ago.

Would the popular pontiff – who has spoken boldly on so many controversial topics – address the clergy sexual abuse scandals that have caused many American Catholics to fall away from the church and detracted from his optimistic message of renewal? Would he take time to meet with survivors?

In his address to U.S. bishops at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle, he at least partially answered that question.

Francis lauded the bishops for their “courage” in the face of what he called “self-criticism and at the cost of mortification and great sacrifice.”

“I realize how much the pain of recent years has weighed upon you and I have supported your generous commitment to bring healing to victims – in the knowledge that in healing we, too, are healed – and to work to ensure that such crimes will never be repeated,” Francis said.

But it wasn’t the answer that many victims’ advocates had hoped to hear. They criticized Francis for offering comfort and
sympathy to the bishops and praising their bravery while saying little to address the suffering of clergy sex abuse survivors.

“To characterize the response of American Bishops to clergy abuse victims as ‘generous’ and ‘courageous’ is bizarre,” said John Salveson, president of the Philadelphia-based Foundation to Abolish Child Sex Abuse and a survivor of clergy sex abuse.

“In reality, the American church hierarchy has treated clergy sex abuse victims as adversaries and enemies for decades,” he said. “His concern about how the abuse crisis has weighed on the bishops’ spirits, and his hope that all of their good deeds will help them heal from the crisis, reflects a profound misunderstanding of the role the church has played in this self-inflicted crisis.”

Barbara Dorris, victims outreach director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, called Francis’s remarks “a slap in the face to all the victims, that we’re going to worry about how the poor bishop feels.”

“You’re the ones who created it, and now we’re going to feel sorry for what you created?” Dorris said.

It is not yet clear whether Francis will address the scandal again, or meet with survivors during his visit, which will also include stops in New York City and Philadelphia, where he will address a global meeting on family issues in a city that has been rocked over the last decade by abuse allegations.

Several top U.S. church officials said that the pope would meet with survivors, but have been reluctant to give specifics.

A Vatican spokesman declined comment on the pope’s remarks at the cathedral, which were met with lengthy applause by the bishops. . . .

FINALLY, LOOKING AHEAD TO THE END OF THE PAPAL
VISIT: "POPE FRANCIS AFTER ONE WEEK IN THE USA"

Daily Kos Comics' Lalo Alcaraz writes:

Pope Francis is the "Pope of the People" and arrived this week to his first ever visit to the USA. I hope he had a good time, and I'm sure he adapted well to American culture. This is how I see El Papa after five long days in our fabulous country.

NOTE: HOWIE WILL HAVE LOTS MORE TO
SAY ABOUT THE POPE'S SPEECH TODAY --

with extended excerpts and a team of guest commenters, in his post at 9pm PT/12am ET.

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It's too bad the president led people to expect fireworks in a speech that was far from un-serious

by Ken

Here's what I think about the president's speech: I don't know why he made such a big production about it. That set it up fora big whuppin', and decreased the amount of attention likely to be paid to what he actually said. The people who thought he's "soft on security" will still think so. (They mostly won't have any idea what the heck he was talking about.) The people who thought he's a traitor on civil liberties will still think so too.

I didn't see or hear the speech, but I did read it. I don't say I studied it, but I do go back over several sections that left me puzzled. Sometimes the puzzlement was because I suspected the president didn't know what he meant, like the whole business about Paul Revere and also the Civil War balloon surveillance. Washington Post blogger Alexandra Petri had some fun trying to parse this, but beyond the fun, she established pretty effectively that those cases don't have much of anything to do with any of the present-day questions we face. (Alexandra, you'll recall, had by far the most savvy take I saw on Gov. Kris KrispyKreme's two-hour piece of performance art the other day. I see she graduated from Harvard only in friggin' 2010 -- that's scary.)

After I read the speech, before I had a chance to find out what the smart people thought, I was thinking, well, that's certainly not revolutionary, but seeing as how he's the guy who has to try to actually do whatever he claims he's going to in his speech, I don't know what more we could have expected. I mean, did anyone really think he was going to, say, call a complete halt to phone-data collection?

Writing yesterday, The New Yorker's John Cassidy, a writer readers may recall I sincerely admire, said ("Obama and the N.S.A.: Why He Can't Be Trusted"):

In his speech on Friday, the President will probably follow his usual tack and seek to portray himself as a reasonable man hewing to the middle ground between opposing views. In this instance, though, such a depiction doesn't withstand inspection.

He proceeds to cite a number of "moderates" (like Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Sen. Patrick Leahy) and not-even-moderates like the president's own Review Group on this subject expressing opinions skeptical of the legality of the data collection. But that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of people on the other side, who didn't get quoted.

And while I don't expect that Cassidy will have changed his overall opinion much after encountering the actual speech, the fact is that the information he was basing it on -- reports about what the speech would contain -- were seriously not right. Most notably:

The news reports say that Obama has rejected the Review Group's main recommendation, which was to end the N.S.A.'s bulk collection of metadata, such as the phone records of hundreds of millions of Americans. The panel, which issued a long report in December, said the N.S.A. should continue to have access to these records under the auspices of the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, but it said that the data should be held by the phone companies, or by a third party. Having thrown out this suggestion, Obama is set to leave the current system in place and hand its ultimate fate over to Congress, which is tantamount to doing nothing.

Oops! That's pretty much what the president did propose, except that he was honest enough to say that we still have to figure out the who and the how. Which will probably provide critics with an opportunity to dismiss what he said, because the likelihood is that there aren't going to be any good answers.

I was thinking about this after I wrote my post the other day about that clown Bob Gates's denunciation of the president for not enthusiastically enough supporting his own Afghanistan policy and doubting that it would work. I pointed out that anyone who didn't have doubts that it would work was a halfwit (this means you, Gates), but sure enough, the pea-brained warriors of the Right have already pounced on this as proof that Obama lost Afghanistan. What I didn't point out in my post, I guess because I thought it was too obvious, was that however much the president's plan sucked, every other "plan" sucked worse.

So again, I wonder mostly why the president thought it would be smart to make a big production of this. It was a speech that was bound to satisfy pretty much nobody, and even the one thing I thought he might actually have hoped to accomplish, which was to open some of these security and secrecy issues to national debate, almost certainly won't happen, at least going by the reactions I've seen so far, where everybody is saying exactly the same things they were saying yesterday and the day before and the day before that. And if you'll excuse me, a lot of those things are blockheaded.

If, for example, I hear one more person say that the phone data collection is a "clear" or "unequivocal" or "flagrant" violation of the Fourth Amendment, I will have to suggest that for once in their lives they use their effing brains. Here's what the Fourth Amendment says:

AMENDMENT IV
Protection from unreasonable search and seizure.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Maybe mass phone data falls into the category of "persons, houses, papers, and effects," and maybe it doesn't. We always make fun of the loony right-wing original intentionalists, but this seems to me pretty clearly a question beyond the contemplation of the founders. And I would suggest that if and when the question is put before the present Supreme Court, the unequivocal unconstitutionality may be as far from unequivocal as you can get.

Similarly, the blithe assertion that there have been no cases of this phone data preventing a hostile action just because committees haven't been able to find one is silly. The fact remains that lots of things that are done in secret are, you know, done in secret. Of course secrecy can be used to hide things that shouldn't be hidden, but in the real world it is also used to hide things that have to be hidden. As the president pointed out, while we hear frequently about intelligence failures, we rarely hear about intelligence successes, and we're not going to -- it's the nature of the beast. (I might add that while the knee-jerk critics are quick to point out that investigators haven't turned up evidences of intelligence coups from the phone data, they gloss over the president's point that his Review Group "turned up no indication that this database has been intentionally abused.")

Sure, I have lots of questions about what the president proposed -- not least, in many areas, what exactly he was proposing. But what, in addition to the major restructuring of the phone data collection and requirements for access to the data base, did the president talk about?

• Some serious loosening of the absolutely secrecy in which the FISC is shrouded. He pointed out that the administration has already begun a process for declassifying rulings of the court (already, he said, "we have declassified over 40 opinions and orders"), and he wants to regularize that with a view to making public whatever is determined can safely be made public. It won't be enough, but it will be something, and will shatter the assumption that everything the court does is by definition forbidden from public view.

Perhaps more important, for the first time the FISC will hear from someone other than the petitioner for the ruling. "To ensure that the Court hears a broader range of privacy perspectives, I am calling on Congress to authorize the establishment of a panel of advocates from outside government to provide an independent voice in significant cases before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court."

• He has "approved a new presidential directive for our signals intelligence activities, at home and abroad," and he listed a bunch of considerations that would go into it, but as far as I can tell, he didn't say anything about what's actually in the directive.

* With regard between Americans and overseas parties: "I am asking the Attorney General and DNI [Director of National Intelligence] to institute reforms that place additional restrictions on government’s ability to retain, search, and use in criminal cases, communications between Americans and foreign citizens incidentally collected under Section 702."

• With regard to National Security Letters, "which can require companies to provide specific and limited information to the government without disclosing the orders to the subject of the investigation," and which John Cassidy's advance information said wouldn't be touched, he has "directed the Attorney General to amend how we use National Security Letters so this secrecy will not be indefinite, and will terminate within a fixed time unless the government demonstrates a real need for further secrecy." They "will also enable communications providers to make public more information than ever before about the orders they have received to provide data to the government."

* An overhaul is also promised in foreign data collection, and again contrary to John Cassidy's advance information he will ban eavesdropping on friendly foreign heads of state. This in any case seems to me to have been a wildly overblown issue, despite the obvious embarrassment of the disclosure of our spying on Chancellor Merkel. Ask yourself if there's any intelligence service that wouldn't be happy to be able to eavesdrop on foreign leaders, definitely including friendly ones.

• "I have also asked my Counselor, John Podesta,"

to lead a comprehensive review of big data and privacy. This group will consist of government officials who—along with the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology—will reach out to privacy experts, technologists and business leaders, and look at how the challenges inherent in big data are being confronted by both the public and private sectors; whether we can forge international norms on how to manage this data; and how we can continue to promote the free flow of information in ways that are consistent with both privacy and security.

The president had talked earlier about the enormous and growing problem of data security and privacy in the private sector, and this really is part of the same discussion. And again, he seems genuinely interested in fostering discussion, which might be his answer to a piece like the Washington Post's Sean Sullivan's "How the public is unhappy with surveillance but unmoved, in one chart," which argues the surveillance issue is one --

on which the public opinion can be summed up like this: We don't like what we see, but it's not that big a deal for the government to address compared to other things.

Recent Gallup polling shows a couple of notable points: 1) A clear majority of Americans (63 percent) say they are dissatisfied with the state of the nation as it pertains to government surveillance of U.S. citizens and 2) It ranks low on the list of priorities they'd like to see Congress and the president address in the next year. Just 42 percent say it is an extremely or very important priority — placing it lower than more than a dozen other matters.

You can look at the chart yourself to see whether it explains anything for you. But perhaps the thinking is that bringing these issues out into the open for discussion may energize public thinking.

I'm sure the president had other proposals and discussion points. These are just the ones I picked out. They're hardly un-serious.


SO WHAT DIDN'T THE PRESIDENT TALK ABOUT?

One criticism of the president that I've encountered I can wholeheartedly second: that with the fixed concern on the necessity of the phone data collection, he gave no consideration to the blatantly worrying security concern many of us have over the dysfunction of our myriad security-involved agencies. By and large, when someone comes up with an example of a situation in which the meta-data could have saved the day, what should have saved the day was (a) better intra-agency handling of information already in its possession and (b) systems for inter-agency sharing of information. To a large degree, it seems clear, our intelligence people aren't suffering from too little information but from ineffectiveness at processing the information they already have. It would have been nice to know if the president had any thoughts about that.

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What will NYC's post-Mayor Mike era look like? The New Yorker's John Cassidy foresees "a test case for liberal reformers everywhere"

"Some people remain skeptical, especially the establishment types who would gladly have handed [Mayor Michael] Bloomberg yet another four years. But, given the skillful campaign that [Democratic mayoral candidate Bill] de Blasio has run and the huge mandate that a record-breaking victory would confer, he could well prove to be a more formidable mayor than they suggest. In any case, a de Blasio mayoralty will be widely viewed as a test case for liberal reformers everywhere."

-- John Cassidy, in this week's New Yorker
"Comment" piece, "Liberal Agendas"

by Ken

"New York is often described as a liberal city," The New Yorker's John Cassidy reminds us at the start of his "Comment" piece, "Liberal Agendas," in this week's magazine, "but it is a long time since it has had an avowedly liberal Democrat as mayor." It's not just that we haven't had a Democratic mayor since David Dinkins left City Hall almost 20 years ago, but that Dinkins and the Democrats who preceded him governed as centrists (or farther right). The closest thing we had to a liberal, ironically, was the Republican John Lindsay, who nevertheless was, as Cassidy points out, elected as a Republican.

Barring developments that no one I'm aware of expects to develop tomorrow, Bill de Blasio will be elected to succeed Emperor Mayor Mike in January, and by a likely tumultuous margin. The Republican candidate, Joe Lhota, whose public-sector jobs have included a deputy mayorship under Rudy Giuliani and most visibly chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates most of the mass transit not just in the five boroughs but in the suburbs to the north and east. As far as I can tell, he didn't do a bad job in any of his public positions, and he might have run credibly on his administrative experience along with his business-first ideology, except that his disastrous polling position forced him to make the most spectacular noise he could. He did, and it was repellent bordering on scary. As Cassidy writes:

From Pelham Bay to Staten Island, New Yorkers seemed to be ignoring Lhota's warnings that a de Blasio victory would return their neighborhoods to the days of rampant crime and burned-out buildings. The voters are "not caught up in what the city was like twenty years ago," de Blasio said last week, in the final mayoral debate. "They want to talk about solutions today."

De Blasio, Cassidy says, "has been commendably clear about his priorities throughout the campaign."

During the debate, he reiterated that his primary aim was to "address the inequalities of this city." Last year, the poorest twenty per cent of the city's households earned, on average, $8,993, and the richest five per cent earned, on average, $436,931. De Blasio spoke again of "doing something very meaningful to increase wages and benefits"; expanding pre-K and after-school programs; repairing the relationship between the police and the residents of many communities; and making "substantial progress" toward his goal of constructing two hundred thousand affordable housing units.

This is not a kind of talk that has been heard much even on what passes for the Left "since the days of Bill Clinton and the New Democrats," as Cassidy puts it. According to this agenda, "the key to lifting up the lower ranks lies in downplaying social and economic conflicts, cozying up to business interests, and tackling inequality covertly, through largely invisible subsidies such as the Earned Income Tax Credit." De Blasio, by contrast, "in pledging to raise taxes on the rich to finance his education programs, has challenged this formula, and turned himself into the standard-bearer for what some see as a new era of urban populism."

Cassidy notes that de Blasio has "created some expectations that will be tough to meet," both because the city's financial powers-that-be are, after all, the powers-that-be and because "the forces responsible for rising inequality -- technical progress, globalization, the decline of labor unions and a broader attack on workers' rights, a culture of overcompensation on Wall Street and many corporate boards -- are largely beyond the purview of any mayor."

What's more, notwithstanding the shrieks of right-wing panic-mongers, de Blasio has a demonstrated history of working with pragmatists and championing pragmatic positions, including "the rezoning of great swaths of the city, which made it easier for developers to override local opponents."

In fashioning his populist campaign message, de Blasio was reacting to a changed political environment, one that was buoyed by the energy of the Occupy Wall Street movement. He was also pointedly contrasting his vision with what many New Yorkers had come to perceive as the imperial mayoralty of Michael Bloomberg. But his critique of Bloomberg was narrowly drawn. De Blasio differs with the Mayor on issues like taxation and policing, but he agrees with him on many others. In addition to supporting Bloomberg's pro-development policies, he has embraced his smoking ban and other public-health measures, his climate-change initiatives, and his decision to seize direct control of the city's schools. It is simply inaccurate to depict de Blasio as Bloomberg's polar opposite -- a left-wing bogeyman who will send the bankers fleeing to Greenwich. The bankers, like many highly paid New Yorkers, will stay in the city, because it provides them with proximity to others in the same industry, the ready availability of finance and labor, and the cultural benefits of living in one of the world's great metropolises.

Cassidy notes de Blasio's lack of administrative experience and its dangerous intersection with New York City's fragile financial framework, then concludes:

Will de Blasio be able to make the step up from critic and advocate to leader and administrator? Will he be able to reach agreements with the municipal unions and wring out of the budget more services for the city's residents? Can he persuade Albany to raise taxes on the rich? Does he have the flexibility to deal with upsets, such as last week's federal appeals-court decision to block a court order reforming the stop-and-frisk policy? Some people remain skeptical, especially the establishment types who would gladly have handed Bloomberg yet another four years. But, given the skillful campaign that de Blasio has run and the huge mandate that a record-breaking victory would confer, he could well prove to be a more formidable mayor than they suggest. In any case, a de Blasio mayoralty will be widely viewed as a test case for liberal reformers everywhere.

All in all, this seems to me as sound a reckoning of where we New Yorkers stand on this Election Day than we could hope to encounter.

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Of course Bradley Manning won't be pardoned, but that doesn't mean the people who prosecuted him won't be shamed

"The cancer of over-classification is threatening the very fabric of our free society. Over-classification hinders debate. It hinders what we know about our government. It hinders finding solutions to common problems [such as] how do we keep our way of life in a post-9/11 world."

-- Lt. Col. David Coombs, Bradley Manning's lawyer,
quoted in Dana Milbank's WaPo column, "Bradley Manning's
sentence and the zealous national-security state"

"From the beginning, the Pentagon has treated Manning extremely harshly . . . . It certainly looked like an instance of powerful institutions and powerful people punishing a lowly private for revealing things that they would rather have kept hidden."

-- John Cassidy, in a newyorker.com blogpost, "History
Will Pardon Manning, Even If Obama Doesn't"

"When a soldier who shared information with the press and public is punished far more harshly than others who tortured prisoners and killed civilians, something is seriously wrong with our justice system."

-- Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU's Speech, Privacy,
and Technology Project (quoted by John Cassidy)

by Ken

We learn from Bradley Manning's lawyer, Lt. Col. David Coombs, that Manning has sent a statement to President Obama, and that the statement includes a request for a pardon. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank attended yesterday's sentencing at Fort Meade, and the subsequent press conference held at a nearby hotel by the lawyer -- "free to speak his mind at the end of the three-year legal saga." At the press conference Coombs read from his client's statement.

I understand that my actions violated the law. I regret if my actions hurt anyone or harmed the United States. When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others. If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society. I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have a country that is truly conceived in liberty.

It's a good thing Manning is prepared for the possibility of no pardon being issued, because no pardon is going to be issued. Even apart from the fact that the president has said that Manning's fate is a matter for the military, there's no reason to imagine that he is in any way inclined to leniency. On the contrary, all indications are that he has enthusiastically supported the persecution of Manning.

The official line, as John Cassidy puts it in his New Yorker post ""History Will Pardon Manning, Even If Obama Doesn't," is --

to frighten other would-be leakers. "There is value in deterrence, Your Honor," one of the military prosecutors told [Judge Denise] Lind. "This court must send a message to any soldier contemplating stealing classified information."

But Cassidy isn't so sure that deterrence is what was on the prosecutors' minds. You'll recall that they asked for a sentence of 60 years, but even at 35, the sentence they got, as Cassidy points, "the whistle-blower still faces the same sort of prison term handed out to murderers and gangsters." He understands that "military justice is meant to be harsh," being "designed to maintain discipline on and off the battlefield." But, he says, "this isn't a case of a solider deserting his post or handing secrets over to the enemy."

As I've quoted Cassidy arguing at the top of this post, "It certainly looked like an instance of powerful institutions and powerful people punishing a lowly private for revealing things that they would rather have kept hidden."

Though I'm not sure why Dana Milbank feels it necessary, or even appropriate, to use Manning to flog NSA leaker Edward Snowden, I like his summation of what the Manning prosecution came to represent.

Manning's dignity is a good model for Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency leaker now hiding from American justice in Russia. Manning admitted what he had done, and he used his trial and its conclusion to argue for the righteousness of his cause. That cause was artfully described by Coombs, who with the shaved head of a military man and the business suit of a civilian lawyer, stood before 20 TV cameras and took as many questions as reporters could ask.

"Under the current administration, an unauthorized leak to the media of classified information is viewed as being tantamount to aiding the enemy," a capital offense, Coombs said. "The government-wide crackdown on whistleblowers and the extension of this crackdown to journalists threatens to stifle the flow of information that is vital to our public." A country in which "you are faced with a death-penalty offense" for the simple act of disclosing information to a journalist, Coombs added, "is not the America that I would hope that we live in."

Milbank has made clear before and continues to make clear that he doesn't approve of Manning's actions. "I think he went too far, making some valid disclosures but losing his moral authority by dumping all kinds of government documents that embarrassed U.S. officials without serving any public good." And his sentence ("he will be eligible for parole in seven years") -- which you've no doubt heard he has announced he plans to serve as a woman, Chelsea Manning -- "could have been a lot worse."

But whatever you think about Manning, his trial and his pretrial treatment exposed how zealous the national security state has been, even under this Democratic president. The tiny offender, little more than a boy, was initially held under 23-hour lockdown in a small cell and denied clothing. Coombs said his hundreds of military clients have included murderers and child molesters -- "and those types of clients receive less time than Pfc. Manning."

It's not just those murderers and child molesters of Colonel Coombs's who've gotten off easier than Manning. One of John Cassidy's central points in his post is: "Much of the wrongdoing that Manning exposed hasn't been dealt with nearly as harshly as he has."

Amid all the discussion of the rights and wrongs of whistle-blowing and WikiLeaks, it's easy to forget what exactly Manning revealed. In an article last month calling for him to be pardoned, the New Republic's John Judis provided a useful reminder of some of the incidents captured in the battleground reports that Manning released:

American troops killing civilians, including women and children, and then calling in an airstrike to destroy evidence; the video of an American Apache helicopter gunship shooting civilians, including two Reuters reporters; American military authorities failing to investigate reports of torture and murder by Iraqi police; and a "black unit" in Afghanistan tasked to perform extrajudicial assassinations of Taliban sympathizers that killed as many as 373 civilians.

What has happened to those responsible for these acts? In most cases, not much. For example, no charges have been brought against the U.S. military personnel who were in the Apache helicopter when it opened fire in Baghdad, in July, 2007 -- an incident that my colleague Raffi Khatchadourian wrote about at length in his 2010 article on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. "When a soldier who shared information with the press and public is punished far more harshly than others who tortured prisoners and killed civilians, something is seriously wrong with our justice system," the A.C.L.U.'s Ben Wizner said in a statement. Could anybody disagree with that?

"As he does his time at Leavenworth," Dana Milbank writes, "Manning can know that he contributed to an important debate about the reach of the national security state."

The administration, [lawyer David] Coombs pointed out, has suggested that reporters can be prosecuted for receiving classified information, and it has prosecuted more leaks than all previous administrations while roughing up whistleblowers. On top of that, he said, the prosecution of the WikiLeaks leaker "does send a message and it's a chilling one and it's endorsed at the very highest levels of this administration."

You don't need to agree with what Manning did to agree with Coombs that government secrecy has gone too far.

And John Cassidy feels strongly, as the title of his post indicates, that "even if President Obama doesn't pardon Manning, history will." He evokes the example of Pentagon Papes leaker Daniel Ellsberg. (As I've noted here, no one has endorsed the analogy more forcefully than Ellsberg himself.)

In helping to reveal that the U.S. authorities had repeatedly misled the public about the war in Vietnam, Ellsberg also broke the law, of course. So do most whistle-blowers who are employed by the government. But history tends to be kinder to them than the courts, and I doubt that this case will be an exception. In fifty years, people will look on the Manning case as another blot on a dark era for the United States and the values that it claims to hold dear. As for Manning himself, future historians will surely agree with Ellsberg, who, speaking to the A.P. yesterday, described him as "one more casualty of a horrible, wrongful war."

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