What a life Casey Stengel had! He lived to the ripe of age of 85, passing away in 1975, and he spent about 50 of those years in baseball. He always had a reputation, deservedly, as a clown who like to have fun with the game, but at the same time he was a serious life-long student of the game, and he loved the game of baseball. His passion for the game was unsurpassed.
He played and managed for a number of teams. After 3 years of managing the Oakland team in the old Pacific Coast League and winning its championship in 1957, he was hired for the DREAM job of managing, that of managing the most storied team in the history of major league baseball, the New York Yankees. His good fortune came because he was a long-time friend of George Weiss, who by chance became the Yankee general manager in 1948.
So at the age of 58 Casey Stengel began his march to baseball immortality with the 1949 season. Under Stengel the Yankees won 5 straight World Series championships. That's still the record and I can't imagine it will ever be surpassed.
Casey Stengel won 10 American pennants in 12 years of managing the Yankees. He was fired after losing the Series to the Pirates in 1960. He concluded his career by managing the hapless expansion NY Mets from 1962 to 1965. The Mets were woeful but nobody blamed Stengel.
The usual 5-yr. waiting rule was waived and Casey was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1965.
In the annals of baseball history, there is only one Casey Stengel. I can still see him on the game of the week charging the mound as the Yankee manager to change pitchers. He was known for how he charged the mound.
To this point, this is the definitive biography of this baseball great.
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Robert W. Creamer - Stengel: His Life & Times
I am learning some things about Casey Stengel, the great baseball manager (and player).
He grew up Charles Dillon Stengel in Kansas City, Missouri. Because he was from "KC" he picked up the nickname Casey.
He played in Montgomery in 1912. Hard to believe that Casey Stengel played a minor league season in Montgomery, Alabama.
Apparently he never finished high school and yet was able to enter dental school in Kansas City. Had he not made it in baseball, Casey Stengel would have been a dentist.
From the beginning he was a clown, always liked to have a good time, but played the game seriously. Indeed, he was thoroughly dedicated to the game of baseball, a great and continuing student of the game all his life.
His managerial mentor was John J. McGraw, the legendary manager for many years in the early decades of the 20th century of the NY Giants.
Stengel's inside the park homerun won the first game of the 1923 World Series against the Yankees in the first game played in the then brand new Yankee Stadium.
He grew up Charles Dillon Stengel in Kansas City, Missouri. Because he was from "KC" he picked up the nickname Casey.
He played in Montgomery in 1912. Hard to believe that Casey Stengel played a minor league season in Montgomery, Alabama.
Apparently he never finished high school and yet was able to enter dental school in Kansas City. Had he not made it in baseball, Casey Stengel would have been a dentist.
From the beginning he was a clown, always liked to have a good time, but played the game seriously. Indeed, he was thoroughly dedicated to the game of baseball, a great and continuing student of the game all his life.
His managerial mentor was John J. McGraw, the legendary manager for many years in the early decades of the 20th century of the NY Giants.
Stengel's inside the park homerun won the first game of the 1923 World Series against the Yankees in the first game played in the then brand new Yankee Stadium.
Auburn Grad Does Good
Navy SEAL team that killed Osama bin Laden founded by Auburn graduate (Talbot)
Published: Wednesday, May 04, 2011, 8:30 AM Updated: Wednesday, May 04, 2011, 9:31 AM
By George Talbot from al.com
U.S. Navy SEAL Team Six — the elite special forces group that took down Osama Bin Laden on Sunday — was founded by an Auburn University graduate.
Richard Marcinko, known affectionately as “Demo Dick,” includes a master’s degree in political science from Auburn on his extensive resume.
Marcinko, 70, built the Navy’s premiere counter-terrorism unit in 1980, following a tragic failure by the U.S. military to rescue a group of American hostages in Iran.
That debacle — known as Operation Desert Claw — contributed to President Jimmy Carter’s defeat by Ronald Reagan later that year. It also highlighted the Navy’s need to upgrade its special forces capability.
Marcinko, a combat veteran in Vietnam, was tasked with creating the elite unit and served as its commanding officer from 1980-83.
Published: Wednesday, May 04, 2011, 8:30 AM Updated: Wednesday, May 04, 2011, 9:31 AM
By George Talbot from al.com
U.S. Navy SEAL Team Six — the elite special forces group that took down Osama Bin Laden on Sunday — was founded by an Auburn University graduate.
Richard Marcinko, known affectionately as “Demo Dick,” includes a master’s degree in political science from Auburn on his extensive resume.
Marcinko, 70, built the Navy’s premiere counter-terrorism unit in 1980, following a tragic failure by the U.S. military to rescue a group of American hostages in Iran.
That debacle — known as Operation Desert Claw — contributed to President Jimmy Carter’s defeat by Ronald Reagan later that year. It also highlighted the Navy’s need to upgrade its special forces capability.
Marcinko, a combat veteran in Vietnam, was tasked with creating the elite unit and served as its commanding officer from 1980-83.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Why We are Democrats
Because we DO feel moral outrage.
Paul Ryan's Moral Barbarism
Jonathan Chait
Karl Rove's column the other day joined the many conservatives expressing their hurt and anger that President Obama would depict Paul Ryan's budget as harming sick and vulnerable citizens:
Mr. Obama likes campaigning more than governing. And for this president, campaigning means knocking down straw men and delivering a steady stream of misleading attacks. It means depicting opponents as indecent, heartless people who take special delight in targeting seniors and autistic children.
In fact, Obama has never accused Ryan, or anybody, of having a "special delight" in targetting seniors and autistic children. But he has accused them of pursuing policies that would harm, among others, seniors and autistic children. That's because it's incontrovertably true. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities delves into the details of Ryan's plan to slash Medicaid by more than a third over the next decade, and in half over the next two decades:
Seniors: An overwhelming majority of Medicare beneficiaries who live in nursing homes rely on Medicaid for their nursing home coverage. Because the Ryan plan would require such deep cuts in federal Medicaid funding, it would inevitably result in less coverage for nursing home residents and shift more of the cost of nursing home care to elderly beneficiaries and their families. A sharp reduction in the quality of nursing home care would be virtually inevitable, due to the large reduction that would occur in the resources made available to pay for such care.
People with disabilities: These individuals constitute 15 percent of Medicaid beneficiaries but account for 42 percent of all Medicaid expenditures, mostly because of their extensive health and long-term care needs. Capping federal Medicaid funding would place significant financial pressure on states to scale back eligibility and coverage for this high-cost population, many of whom would be unable to obtain coverage elsewhere because of their medical conditions.
Children: Currently, state Medicaid programs must provide children with health care services and treatments they need for their healthy development through the Early Periodic Screening, Diagnostic and Treatment (EPSDT) aspect of Medicaid, which provides regular preventive care for children and all follow-up diagnostic and treatment services that children are found to need. A block grant would likely permit states to drop EPSDT coverage, meaning that children, particularly those with special health care needs, would not be able to access some care that medical professionals find they need (because Medicaid would no longer cover certain health services and treatments for children, and their parents wouldn’t be able to afford to pay for that care on their own).
Working parents and pregnant women: Many state Medicaid programs already have extremely restrictive eligibility criteria for parents. In the typical state, working parents are ineligible for Medicaid if their income exceeds 64 percent of the poverty line (or $14,304 a year for a family of four), and unemployed parents are ineligible if their income exceeds 37 percent of the poverty line ($8,270 a year for a family of four). Under a block grant, states could cut these already low eligibility levels even further, cap enrollment, and/or require low-income parents to pay more for health services. States could do the same for low-income pregnant women who rely on Medicaid for their prenatal care, resulting in them forgoing services that are critical to ensuring a healthy pregnancy.
Now, Rove appears to be a pathological liar, or at least so deeply enmeshed in partisan spin it's not clear that a distinction exists in his mind between objective truth and claims that are useful to his side. But many other conservatives have likewise expressed what has the ring of genuine outrage that Obama would accuse Ryan of snatching medical care away from people in nursing homes, very poor families, special needs children, and so on. I think it reflects, in part, an inability or lack of desire to think with any specificty about the concrete ramifications of imposing extremely deep cuts to Medicaid. Who do they think is on Medicaid? Prosperous, healthy people?
No, Medicaid is a bare-bones program throwing a lifeline to people who are in bad shape. Cutting Medicaid may be the politically easiest way for Ryan to clear budget room to preserve Bush-era revenue levels, as Medicaid patients have little political clout. But it is, well, deeply immoral. I'm actually surprised that conservatives not only can't seem to imagine (or care about) the consequences of such policies, but they can't even imagine that people like Obama would actually feel moral outrage at their plan. They can't imagine a liberal objection as representing anything other than an attempt to score political points. It's bizarre. I mean, of course Obama finds it morally objectionable to take away medical care to people in nursing homes and children with special needs. That's why he's a Democrat.
Paul Ryan's Moral Barbarism
Jonathan Chait
Karl Rove's column the other day joined the many conservatives expressing their hurt and anger that President Obama would depict Paul Ryan's budget as harming sick and vulnerable citizens:
Mr. Obama likes campaigning more than governing. And for this president, campaigning means knocking down straw men and delivering a steady stream of misleading attacks. It means depicting opponents as indecent, heartless people who take special delight in targeting seniors and autistic children.
In fact, Obama has never accused Ryan, or anybody, of having a "special delight" in targetting seniors and autistic children. But he has accused them of pursuing policies that would harm, among others, seniors and autistic children. That's because it's incontrovertably true. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities delves into the details of Ryan's plan to slash Medicaid by more than a third over the next decade, and in half over the next two decades:
Seniors: An overwhelming majority of Medicare beneficiaries who live in nursing homes rely on Medicaid for their nursing home coverage. Because the Ryan plan would require such deep cuts in federal Medicaid funding, it would inevitably result in less coverage for nursing home residents and shift more of the cost of nursing home care to elderly beneficiaries and their families. A sharp reduction in the quality of nursing home care would be virtually inevitable, due to the large reduction that would occur in the resources made available to pay for such care.
People with disabilities: These individuals constitute 15 percent of Medicaid beneficiaries but account for 42 percent of all Medicaid expenditures, mostly because of their extensive health and long-term care needs. Capping federal Medicaid funding would place significant financial pressure on states to scale back eligibility and coverage for this high-cost population, many of whom would be unable to obtain coverage elsewhere because of their medical conditions.
Children: Currently, state Medicaid programs must provide children with health care services and treatments they need for their healthy development through the Early Periodic Screening, Diagnostic and Treatment (EPSDT) aspect of Medicaid, which provides regular preventive care for children and all follow-up diagnostic and treatment services that children are found to need. A block grant would likely permit states to drop EPSDT coverage, meaning that children, particularly those with special health care needs, would not be able to access some care that medical professionals find they need (because Medicaid would no longer cover certain health services and treatments for children, and their parents wouldn’t be able to afford to pay for that care on their own).
Working parents and pregnant women: Many state Medicaid programs already have extremely restrictive eligibility criteria for parents. In the typical state, working parents are ineligible for Medicaid if their income exceeds 64 percent of the poverty line (or $14,304 a year for a family of four), and unemployed parents are ineligible if their income exceeds 37 percent of the poverty line ($8,270 a year for a family of four). Under a block grant, states could cut these already low eligibility levels even further, cap enrollment, and/or require low-income parents to pay more for health services. States could do the same for low-income pregnant women who rely on Medicaid for their prenatal care, resulting in them forgoing services that are critical to ensuring a healthy pregnancy.
Now, Rove appears to be a pathological liar, or at least so deeply enmeshed in partisan spin it's not clear that a distinction exists in his mind between objective truth and claims that are useful to his side. But many other conservatives have likewise expressed what has the ring of genuine outrage that Obama would accuse Ryan of snatching medical care away from people in nursing homes, very poor families, special needs children, and so on. I think it reflects, in part, an inability or lack of desire to think with any specificty about the concrete ramifications of imposing extremely deep cuts to Medicaid. Who do they think is on Medicaid? Prosperous, healthy people?
No, Medicaid is a bare-bones program throwing a lifeline to people who are in bad shape. Cutting Medicaid may be the politically easiest way for Ryan to clear budget room to preserve Bush-era revenue levels, as Medicaid patients have little political clout. But it is, well, deeply immoral. I'm actually surprised that conservatives not only can't seem to imagine (or care about) the consequences of such policies, but they can't even imagine that people like Obama would actually feel moral outrage at their plan. They can't imagine a liberal objection as representing anything other than an attempt to score political points. It's bizarre. I mean, of course Obama finds it morally objectionable to take away medical care to people in nursing homes and children with special needs. That's why he's a Democrat.
Why the North Fought the Civil War
Why the North Fought the Civil War
By ERIC FONER
Published: April 29, 2011
Among the enduring mysteries of the American Civil War is why millions of Northerners were willing to fight to preserve the nation’s unity. It is not difficult to understand why the Southern states seceded in 1860 and 1861. As the Confederacy’s founders explained ad infinitum, they feared that Abraham Lincoln’s election as president placed the future of slavery in jeopardy. But why did so few Northerners echo the refrain of Horace Greeley, the editor of The New York Tribune: “Erring sisters, go in peace”?
THE UNION WAR
By Gary W. Gallagher
Illustrated. 215 pp. Harvard University Press. $27.95.
Excerpt: ‘The Union War’ (Google Books)
The latest effort to explain this deep commitment to the nation’s survival comes from Gary W. Gallagher, the author of several highly regarded works on Civil War military history. In “The Union War,” Gallagher offers not so much a history of wartime patriotism as a series of meditations on the meaning of the Union to Northerners, the role of slavery in the conflict and how historians have interpreted (and in his view misinterpreted) these matters.
The Civil War, Gallagher announces at the outset, was “a war for Union that also killed slavery.” Emancipation was an outcome (an “astounding” outcome, Lincoln remarked in his second Inaugural Address) but, Gallagher insists, it always “took a back seat” to the paramount goal of saving the Union. Most Northerners, he says, remained indifferent to the plight of the slaves. They embraced emancipation only when they concluded it had become necessary to win the war. They fought because they regarded the United States as a unique experiment in democracy that guaranteed political liberty and economic opportunity in a world overrun by tyranny. Saving the Union, in the words of Secretary of State William H. Seward, meant “the saving of popular government for the world.”
At a time when only half the population bothers to vote and many Americans hold their elected representatives in contempt, Gallagher offers a salutary reminder of the power of democratic ideals not simply to Northerners in the era of the Civil War, but also to people in other nations, who celebrated the Union victory as a harbinger of greater rights for themselves. Imaginatively invoking sources neglected by other scholars — wartime songs, patriotic images on mailing envelopes and in illustrated publications, and regimental histories written during and immediately after the conflict — Gallagher gives a dramatic portrait of the power of wartime nationalism.
His emphasis on the preservation of democratic government and the opportunities of free labor as central to the patriotic outlook is hardly new — one need only read Lincoln’s wartime speeches to find eloquent expression of these themes. But instead of celebrating the greatness of American democracy, Gallagher claims, too many historians dwell on its limitations, notably the exclusion from participation of nonwhites and women. Moreover, perhaps because of recent abuses of American power in the name of freedom, scholars seem uncomfortable with robust expressions of patriotic sentiment, especially when wedded to military might. According to Gallagher, they denigrate nationalism and suggest that the war had no real justification other than the abolition of slavery. (Gallagher ignores a different interpretation of the Union war effort, emanating from neo-Confederates and the libertarian right, which portrays Lincoln as a tyrant who presided over the destruction of American freedom through creation of the leviathan national state, not to mention the dreaded income tax.)
Gallagher devotes many pages — too many in a book of modest length — to critiques of recent Civil War scholars, whom he accuses of exaggerating the importance of slavery in the conflict and the contribution of black soldiers to Union victory. Often, his complaint seems to be that another historian did not write the book he would have written.
Thus, Gallagher criticizes Melinda Lawson, the author of “Patriot Fires,” one of the most influential recent studies of wartime nationalism, for slighting the experiences of the soldiers. But Lawson was examining nation-building on the Northern home front. Her investigation of subjects as diverse as the marketing of war bonds, the dissemination of pro-Union propaganda and the organization of Sanitary Fairs, where goods were sold to raise money for soldiers’ aid, illuminates how the nation state for the first time reached into the homes and daily lives of ordinary Americans.
Gallagher also criticizes recent studies of soldiers’ letters and diaries, which find that an antislavery purpose emerged early in the war. These works, he argues, remain highly “impressionistic,” allowing the historian “to marshal support for virtually any argument.” Whereupon Gallagher embarks on his own equally impressionistic survey of these letters, finding that they emphasize devotion to the Union.
Ultimately, Gallagher’s sharp dichotomy between the goals of Union and emancipation seems excessively schematic. It begs the question of what kind of Union the war was being fought to preserve. The evolution of Lincoln’s own outlook illustrates the problem. On the one hand, as Gallagher notes, Lincoln always insisted that he devised his policies regarding slavery in order to win the war and preserve national unity. Yet years before the Civil War, Lincoln had argued that slavery fatally undermined the nation’s ability to exemplify the superiority of free institutions. The Union to be saved, he said, must be “worthy of the saving.” During the secession crisis, Lincoln could have preserved the Union by yielding to Southern demands. He adamantly refused to compromise on the crucial political issue — whether slavery should be allowed to expand into Western territories.
Gallagher maintains that only failure on the battlefield, notably Gen. George B. McClellan’s inability to capture Richmond, the Confederate capital, in the spring of 1862, forced the administration to act against slavery. Yet the previous fall, before significant military encounters had taken place, Lincoln had already announced a plan for gradual emancipation. This hardly suggests that military necessity alone placed the slavery question on the national agenda. Early in the conflict, many Northerners, Lincoln included, realized that there was little point in fighting to restore a status quo that had produced war in the first place.
Many scholars have argued that the war brought into being a new conception of American nationhood. Gallagher argues, by contrast, that it solidified pre-existing patriotic values. Continuity, not change, marked Northern attitudes. Gallagher acknowledges that as the war progressed, “a struggle for a different kind of Union emerged.” Yet his theme of continuity seems inadequate to encompass the vast changes Americans experienced during the Civil War. Surely, he is correct that racism survived the war. Yet he fails to account for the surge of egalitarian sentiment that inspired the rewriting of the laws and Constitution to create, for the first time, a national citizenship enjoying equal rights not limited by race.
Before the war, slavery powerfully affected the concept of self-government. Large numbers of Americans identified democratic citizenship as a privilege of whites alone — a position embraced by the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision of 1857. Which is why the transformation wrought by the Civil War was so remarkable. As George William Curtis, the editor of Harper’s Weekly, observed in 1865, the war transformed a government “for white men” into one “for mankind.” That was something worth fighting for.
By ERIC FONER
Published: April 29, 2011
Among the enduring mysteries of the American Civil War is why millions of Northerners were willing to fight to preserve the nation’s unity. It is not difficult to understand why the Southern states seceded in 1860 and 1861. As the Confederacy’s founders explained ad infinitum, they feared that Abraham Lincoln’s election as president placed the future of slavery in jeopardy. But why did so few Northerners echo the refrain of Horace Greeley, the editor of The New York Tribune: “Erring sisters, go in peace”?
THE UNION WAR
By Gary W. Gallagher
Illustrated. 215 pp. Harvard University Press. $27.95.
Excerpt: ‘The Union War’ (Google Books)
The latest effort to explain this deep commitment to the nation’s survival comes from Gary W. Gallagher, the author of several highly regarded works on Civil War military history. In “The Union War,” Gallagher offers not so much a history of wartime patriotism as a series of meditations on the meaning of the Union to Northerners, the role of slavery in the conflict and how historians have interpreted (and in his view misinterpreted) these matters.
The Civil War, Gallagher announces at the outset, was “a war for Union that also killed slavery.” Emancipation was an outcome (an “astounding” outcome, Lincoln remarked in his second Inaugural Address) but, Gallagher insists, it always “took a back seat” to the paramount goal of saving the Union. Most Northerners, he says, remained indifferent to the plight of the slaves. They embraced emancipation only when they concluded it had become necessary to win the war. They fought because they regarded the United States as a unique experiment in democracy that guaranteed political liberty and economic opportunity in a world overrun by tyranny. Saving the Union, in the words of Secretary of State William H. Seward, meant “the saving of popular government for the world.”
At a time when only half the population bothers to vote and many Americans hold their elected representatives in contempt, Gallagher offers a salutary reminder of the power of democratic ideals not simply to Northerners in the era of the Civil War, but also to people in other nations, who celebrated the Union victory as a harbinger of greater rights for themselves. Imaginatively invoking sources neglected by other scholars — wartime songs, patriotic images on mailing envelopes and in illustrated publications, and regimental histories written during and immediately after the conflict — Gallagher gives a dramatic portrait of the power of wartime nationalism.
His emphasis on the preservation of democratic government and the opportunities of free labor as central to the patriotic outlook is hardly new — one need only read Lincoln’s wartime speeches to find eloquent expression of these themes. But instead of celebrating the greatness of American democracy, Gallagher claims, too many historians dwell on its limitations, notably the exclusion from participation of nonwhites and women. Moreover, perhaps because of recent abuses of American power in the name of freedom, scholars seem uncomfortable with robust expressions of patriotic sentiment, especially when wedded to military might. According to Gallagher, they denigrate nationalism and suggest that the war had no real justification other than the abolition of slavery. (Gallagher ignores a different interpretation of the Union war effort, emanating from neo-Confederates and the libertarian right, which portrays Lincoln as a tyrant who presided over the destruction of American freedom through creation of the leviathan national state, not to mention the dreaded income tax.)
Gallagher devotes many pages — too many in a book of modest length — to critiques of recent Civil War scholars, whom he accuses of exaggerating the importance of slavery in the conflict and the contribution of black soldiers to Union victory. Often, his complaint seems to be that another historian did not write the book he would have written.
Thus, Gallagher criticizes Melinda Lawson, the author of “Patriot Fires,” one of the most influential recent studies of wartime nationalism, for slighting the experiences of the soldiers. But Lawson was examining nation-building on the Northern home front. Her investigation of subjects as diverse as the marketing of war bonds, the dissemination of pro-Union propaganda and the organization of Sanitary Fairs, where goods were sold to raise money for soldiers’ aid, illuminates how the nation state for the first time reached into the homes and daily lives of ordinary Americans.
Gallagher also criticizes recent studies of soldiers’ letters and diaries, which find that an antislavery purpose emerged early in the war. These works, he argues, remain highly “impressionistic,” allowing the historian “to marshal support for virtually any argument.” Whereupon Gallagher embarks on his own equally impressionistic survey of these letters, finding that they emphasize devotion to the Union.
Ultimately, Gallagher’s sharp dichotomy between the goals of Union and emancipation seems excessively schematic. It begs the question of what kind of Union the war was being fought to preserve. The evolution of Lincoln’s own outlook illustrates the problem. On the one hand, as Gallagher notes, Lincoln always insisted that he devised his policies regarding slavery in order to win the war and preserve national unity. Yet years before the Civil War, Lincoln had argued that slavery fatally undermined the nation’s ability to exemplify the superiority of free institutions. The Union to be saved, he said, must be “worthy of the saving.” During the secession crisis, Lincoln could have preserved the Union by yielding to Southern demands. He adamantly refused to compromise on the crucial political issue — whether slavery should be allowed to expand into Western territories.
Gallagher maintains that only failure on the battlefield, notably Gen. George B. McClellan’s inability to capture Richmond, the Confederate capital, in the spring of 1862, forced the administration to act against slavery. Yet the previous fall, before significant military encounters had taken place, Lincoln had already announced a plan for gradual emancipation. This hardly suggests that military necessity alone placed the slavery question on the national agenda. Early in the conflict, many Northerners, Lincoln included, realized that there was little point in fighting to restore a status quo that had produced war in the first place.
Many scholars have argued that the war brought into being a new conception of American nationhood. Gallagher argues, by contrast, that it solidified pre-existing patriotic values. Continuity, not change, marked Northern attitudes. Gallagher acknowledges that as the war progressed, “a struggle for a different kind of Union emerged.” Yet his theme of continuity seems inadequate to encompass the vast changes Americans experienced during the Civil War. Surely, he is correct that racism survived the war. Yet he fails to account for the surge of egalitarian sentiment that inspired the rewriting of the laws and Constitution to create, for the first time, a national citizenship enjoying equal rights not limited by race.
Before the war, slavery powerfully affected the concept of self-government. Large numbers of Americans identified democratic citizenship as a privilege of whites alone — a position embraced by the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision of 1857. Which is why the transformation wrought by the Civil War was so remarkable. As George William Curtis, the editor of Harper’s Weekly, observed in 1865, the war transformed a government “for white men” into one “for mankind.” That was something worth fighting for.
Monday, May 2, 2011
Bin Laden
Like everyone else I was totally caught by surprise when NBC interrupted Donald Trump last night around 9:45 to announce that the President had an important annoucement. We were told he would tell us that Osama Bin Laden had been killed. Indeed, this was the case. Today we are all celebrating this amazing accommplishment. I've been listening to the commentary on NPR. Let's see where we go from here. This is certainly a deserved boost to Obama's stature.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Trump and the Republicans; Dumb and Dumber
We can only hope that the Republicans have reached ground zero in their descent into ignorance and dumbness with Donald Trump. Just when you thought Palin and Bachmann were it, here comes Donald.
Friday, 29 April 2011
by Johann Hari
Since the election of Barack Obama, the Republican Party has proved that one of its central intellectual arguments was right all along. It has long claimed that evolution is a myth believed in only by whiny liberals – and it turns out it was on to something. Every six months, the party venerates a new hero, and each time it is somebody further back on the evolutionary scale.
Sarah Palin told cheering rallies that her message to the world was: "We'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way!" – but that wasn't enough. So the party found Michele Bachmann, who said darkly it was an "interesting coincidence" that swine flu only breaks out under Democratic presidents, claims the message of The Lion King is "I'm better at what I do because I'm gay", and argues "there isn't even one study that can be produced that shows carbon dioxide is a harmful gas."
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That wasn't enough. I half-expected the next contender to be a lung-fish draped in the Stars and Stripes. But it wasn't anything so sophisticated. Enter stage (far) right Donald Trump, the bewigged billionaire who has filled America with phallic symbols and plastered his name across more surfaces than the average Central Asian dictator. CNN's polling suggests he is the most popular candidate among Republican voters. It's not hard to see why. Trump is every trend in Republican politics over the past 35 years taken to its logical conclusion. He is the Republican id, finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and all reality.
The first trend is towards naked imperialism. On Libya, he says: "I would go in and take the oil... I would take the oil and stop this baby stuff." On Iraq, he says: "We stay there, and we take the oil... In the old days, when you have a war and you win, that nation's yours." It is a view that the world is essentially America's property, inconveniently inhabited by foreigners squatting over oil-fields. Trump says America needs to "stop what's going on in the world. The world is just destroying our country. These other countries are sapping our strength." The US must have full spectrum dominance. In this respect, he is simply an honest George W Bush.
The second trend is towards dog-whistle prejudice – pitched just high enough for frightened white Republicans to hear it. Trump made it a central issue to suggest that Obama wasn't born in America (and therefore was occupying the White House illegally), even though this conspiracy theory had long since been proven to be as credible as the people who claim Paul McCartney was killed in 1969 and replaced with an imposter. Trump said nobody "ever comes forward" to say they knew Obama as a child in Hawaii. When lots of people pointed out they knew Obama as a child, Trump ridiculed the idea that they could remember that far back. Then he said he'd "heard" the birth certificate said Obama was Muslim. When it was released saying no such thing, Trump said: "I'm very proud of myself."
The Republican primary voters heard the message right: the black guy is foreign. He's not one of us. Trump answered these charges by saying: "I've always had a great relationship with the blacks."
The third trend is towards raw worship of wealth as an end in itself – and exempting them from all social responsibility. Trump is wealthy because his father left him a large business, and since then companies with his name on them have crashed into bankruptcy four times. In 1990, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston studied the Trump accounts and claimed that while Trump claimed to be worth $1.4bn, he actually owed $600m more than he owned and you and I were worth more than him. His current wealth is not known, but he claims he is worth more than $2.7bn.
Johnston says that in fact most of Trump's apparent fortune comes from "stiffing his creditors" and from government subsidies and favours for his projects – which followed large donations to the campaigns of both parties, sometimes in the very same contest. Trump denies these charges and presents himself as an entrepreneur "of genius".
Yet for the Republican Party, the accumulation of money is proof in itself of virtue, however it was acquired. The richest 1 per cent pay for the party's campaigns, and the party in turn serves their interests entirely. The most glaring example is that they have simply exempted many of the rich from taxes. Johnston studied four of Trump's recent tax returns, and found he legally paid no taxes in two of them. In America today, a janitor can pay more income tax than Donald Trump – and the Republicans regard that not as a source of shame, but of pride.
How are these tax exemptions for the super-rich paid for? Here's one example. The Republican budget that just passed through the Senate slashed funding to help premature babies to survive. The rich riot while the poor shrivel. Trump offers the ultimate symbol of this: he won't even shake hands with any ordinary Americans out on the stump, because "you catch all sorts of things" from them. Yes: the Republican front-runner is a billionaire who literally won't touch the poor or middle class.
The fourth trend is to insist that any fact inconvenient to your world view simply doesn't exist, or can be overcome by pure willpower. Soon, the US will have to extend its debt ceiling – the amount of money the government is allowed to borrow – or it will default on its debt. Virtually every economist in the world says this would cause another global economic crash. Trump snaps back: "What do economists know? Most of them aren't very smart." Confront the Republicans with any long-term social or economic problem, and they have one response: it would go away if only we insisted on our assumptions more aggressively.
This denial of reality runs deep. So Trump says "it's so easy" to deal with rising oil prices. He says he would call in Opec, the cartel of oil-producing nations, as if they were contestants on his show The Apprentice, and declare: "I'm going to look them in the eye and say, 'Fellows, you've had your fun. Your fun is over.' "
It's the same, he says, with China. He will order them to stop manipulating their currency. When he was informed that the Chinese had some leverage over the US, he snapped: "They have some of our debt. Big deal. It's a very small number relative to the world, ok?" This is what the Republican core vote wants to be told. The writer Matthew Yglesias calls it "the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics". It's named after the Marvel comics superhero the Green Lantern, who can only use his superpowers when he "overcomes fear" and shows confidence – and then he can do anything. This is Trump's view. The whiny world simply needs to be bullied into submission by a more assertive America – or the world can be fired and he'll find a better one.
Trump probably won't become the Republican nominee, but not because most Republicans reject his premisses. No: it will be because he states these arguments too crudely for mass public consumption. He takes the whispered dogmas of the Reagan, Bush and Tea Party years and shrieks them through a megaphone. The nominee will share similar ideas, but express them more subtly. In case you think these ideas are marginal to the party, remember - it has united behind the budget plan of Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan. It's simple: it halves taxes on the richest 1 percent and ends all taxes on corporate income, dividends, and inheritance. It pays for it by slashing spending on food stamps, healthcare for the poor and the elderly, and basic services. It aims to return the US to the spending levels of the 1920s – and while Ryan frames it as a response to the deficit, it would actually increase it according to the independent Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Ryan says "the reason I got involved in public service" was because he read the writings of Ayn Rand, which describe the poor as "parasites" who must "perish", and are best summarized by the title of one of her books: 'The Virtue of Selfishness.'
The tragedy is that Obama needs serious opposition – but not from this direction. In reality, he is funded by similar destructive corporate interests, and has only been a few notches closer to sanity than these people. But faced with such overt lunacy, he seems like he is serving the bottom 99 per cent of Americans much more than he really is.
The Republican Party today isn't even dominated by market fundamentalism. This is a crude Nietzscheanism, dedicated to exalting the rich as an overclass and dismissing the rest. So who should be the Republican nominee? I hear the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were considering running – but they are facing primary challenges from the Tea Party for being way too mild-mannered.
Friday, 29 April 2011
by Johann Hari
Since the election of Barack Obama, the Republican Party has proved that one of its central intellectual arguments was right all along. It has long claimed that evolution is a myth believed in only by whiny liberals – and it turns out it was on to something. Every six months, the party venerates a new hero, and each time it is somebody further back on the evolutionary scale.
Sarah Palin told cheering rallies that her message to the world was: "We'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way!" – but that wasn't enough. So the party found Michele Bachmann, who said darkly it was an "interesting coincidence" that swine flu only breaks out under Democratic presidents, claims the message of The Lion King is "I'm better at what I do because I'm gay", and argues "there isn't even one study that can be produced that shows carbon dioxide is a harmful gas."
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That wasn't enough. I half-expected the next contender to be a lung-fish draped in the Stars and Stripes. But it wasn't anything so sophisticated. Enter stage (far) right Donald Trump, the bewigged billionaire who has filled America with phallic symbols and plastered his name across more surfaces than the average Central Asian dictator. CNN's polling suggests he is the most popular candidate among Republican voters. It's not hard to see why. Trump is every trend in Republican politics over the past 35 years taken to its logical conclusion. He is the Republican id, finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and all reality.
The first trend is towards naked imperialism. On Libya, he says: "I would go in and take the oil... I would take the oil and stop this baby stuff." On Iraq, he says: "We stay there, and we take the oil... In the old days, when you have a war and you win, that nation's yours." It is a view that the world is essentially America's property, inconveniently inhabited by foreigners squatting over oil-fields. Trump says America needs to "stop what's going on in the world. The world is just destroying our country. These other countries are sapping our strength." The US must have full spectrum dominance. In this respect, he is simply an honest George W Bush.
The second trend is towards dog-whistle prejudice – pitched just high enough for frightened white Republicans to hear it. Trump made it a central issue to suggest that Obama wasn't born in America (and therefore was occupying the White House illegally), even though this conspiracy theory had long since been proven to be as credible as the people who claim Paul McCartney was killed in 1969 and replaced with an imposter. Trump said nobody "ever comes forward" to say they knew Obama as a child in Hawaii. When lots of people pointed out they knew Obama as a child, Trump ridiculed the idea that they could remember that far back. Then he said he'd "heard" the birth certificate said Obama was Muslim. When it was released saying no such thing, Trump said: "I'm very proud of myself."
The Republican primary voters heard the message right: the black guy is foreign. He's not one of us. Trump answered these charges by saying: "I've always had a great relationship with the blacks."
The third trend is towards raw worship of wealth as an end in itself – and exempting them from all social responsibility. Trump is wealthy because his father left him a large business, and since then companies with his name on them have crashed into bankruptcy four times. In 1990, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston studied the Trump accounts and claimed that while Trump claimed to be worth $1.4bn, he actually owed $600m more than he owned and you and I were worth more than him. His current wealth is not known, but he claims he is worth more than $2.7bn.
Johnston says that in fact most of Trump's apparent fortune comes from "stiffing his creditors" and from government subsidies and favours for his projects – which followed large donations to the campaigns of both parties, sometimes in the very same contest. Trump denies these charges and presents himself as an entrepreneur "of genius".
Yet for the Republican Party, the accumulation of money is proof in itself of virtue, however it was acquired. The richest 1 per cent pay for the party's campaigns, and the party in turn serves their interests entirely. The most glaring example is that they have simply exempted many of the rich from taxes. Johnston studied four of Trump's recent tax returns, and found he legally paid no taxes in two of them. In America today, a janitor can pay more income tax than Donald Trump – and the Republicans regard that not as a source of shame, but of pride.
How are these tax exemptions for the super-rich paid for? Here's one example. The Republican budget that just passed through the Senate slashed funding to help premature babies to survive. The rich riot while the poor shrivel. Trump offers the ultimate symbol of this: he won't even shake hands with any ordinary Americans out on the stump, because "you catch all sorts of things" from them. Yes: the Republican front-runner is a billionaire who literally won't touch the poor or middle class.
The fourth trend is to insist that any fact inconvenient to your world view simply doesn't exist, or can be overcome by pure willpower. Soon, the US will have to extend its debt ceiling – the amount of money the government is allowed to borrow – or it will default on its debt. Virtually every economist in the world says this would cause another global economic crash. Trump snaps back: "What do economists know? Most of them aren't very smart." Confront the Republicans with any long-term social or economic problem, and they have one response: it would go away if only we insisted on our assumptions more aggressively.
This denial of reality runs deep. So Trump says "it's so easy" to deal with rising oil prices. He says he would call in Opec, the cartel of oil-producing nations, as if they were contestants on his show The Apprentice, and declare: "I'm going to look them in the eye and say, 'Fellows, you've had your fun. Your fun is over.' "
It's the same, he says, with China. He will order them to stop manipulating their currency. When he was informed that the Chinese had some leverage over the US, he snapped: "They have some of our debt. Big deal. It's a very small number relative to the world, ok?" This is what the Republican core vote wants to be told. The writer Matthew Yglesias calls it "the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics". It's named after the Marvel comics superhero the Green Lantern, who can only use his superpowers when he "overcomes fear" and shows confidence – and then he can do anything. This is Trump's view. The whiny world simply needs to be bullied into submission by a more assertive America – or the world can be fired and he'll find a better one.
Trump probably won't become the Republican nominee, but not because most Republicans reject his premisses. No: it will be because he states these arguments too crudely for mass public consumption. He takes the whispered dogmas of the Reagan, Bush and Tea Party years and shrieks them through a megaphone. The nominee will share similar ideas, but express them more subtly. In case you think these ideas are marginal to the party, remember - it has united behind the budget plan of Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan. It's simple: it halves taxes on the richest 1 percent and ends all taxes on corporate income, dividends, and inheritance. It pays for it by slashing spending on food stamps, healthcare for the poor and the elderly, and basic services. It aims to return the US to the spending levels of the 1920s – and while Ryan frames it as a response to the deficit, it would actually increase it according to the independent Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Ryan says "the reason I got involved in public service" was because he read the writings of Ayn Rand, which describe the poor as "parasites" who must "perish", and are best summarized by the title of one of her books: 'The Virtue of Selfishness.'
The tragedy is that Obama needs serious opposition – but not from this direction. In reality, he is funded by similar destructive corporate interests, and has only been a few notches closer to sanity than these people. But faced with such overt lunacy, he seems like he is serving the bottom 99 per cent of Americans much more than he really is.
The Republican Party today isn't even dominated by market fundamentalism. This is a crude Nietzscheanism, dedicated to exalting the rich as an overclass and dismissing the rest. So who should be the Republican nominee? I hear the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were considering running – but they are facing primary challenges from the Tea Party for being way too mild-mannered.
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