So much winning

Are we tired of winning yet?

Birdwatching

The New York Times notes a silence in the District. The deficit hawks in the Republican Party are not screeching at the new deficits in the president's tax proposal.

WBD promises a "middle class miracle." In a comment I submitted to the Times (not yet accepted as I write this), I promised something better than a miracle. Miracles don't happen.

But magic is real. You just have to know the trick. RtO knows it. Here is what I wrote:

 Growth is in reality very large. As a percentage of all activity, it is low, but that's because output is YUUUGE. Growth could be even better, but increases by whole percentage points are improbable under any policy.

Reaganomics has directed nearly all of the increases in the past 30 years to the tippy top. Sending more there will not goose growth. The overlarge administrative costs in our healthcare trainwreck are so YUUUGE that if they were reduced to the levels paid by, eg, Canada, so many people would be thrown out of work and so many monetary transfers would be X'd out that the economy would go into recession.

But a great deal of capital would thereby be released so that any growth objectives desired by cutting taxes would follow automatically without cutting taxes. Money is fungible, after all. Growth and deficit hawks should adopt single-payer. It would be like magic.

We used to welcome immigrants and refugees

Once upon a time, when America believed in itself, before it was taken over by frightened,  incompetent nativists, we used to welcome immigrants and refugees.

Like the Forty-eighter Carl Schurz, who became a Civil War general and later an influential United States senator. He was a refugee. Or Alexander Graham Bell. No one contributed more to the expansion of the United States economy than he did. He was an immigrant.

In 1904, Alton Parker, Democratic candidate for president, said:

"The display of great military armaments may please the eye, and, for the moment, excite the pride of the citizen, but it cannot bring to the country the brains, brawn and muscle of a single immigrant, nor induce the investment here of a dollar of capital."

An immigrant of that period -- a Dreamer since he entered at the age of 5 -- was Irving Berlin, who wrote "America the Beautiful." Refugees included Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, who patented the atomic bomb.

Here on Maui we couldn't survive without the inventions of Luis Alvarez, grandson of an immigrant to Hawaii in Kingdom days who later emigrated to California. His grandson developed Ground Control Approach radar. Without that, we'd all have to take ships to Las Vegas. An immigrant who settled on Maui was George Harrison.

What have the slobbering racists in their MAGA hats contributed?

Coming out party

This week the Republican Party, which has been genteelly racist since Nixon's time, came out as openly and proudly racist. I'll speculate as to timing in a moment, but the key event got little attention:

Nigel Farage will speak in Fairhope, Alabama on Monday night, in support of Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore.

The Guardian has learned that the former leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (Ukip) will join former White House advisor Steve Bannon and Duck Dynasty TV star Phil Robertson at an election eve rally.

(An aside: The Guardian has become a strange news outlet, an English paper that is trying to migrate itself to the United States, digitally. It is well worth reading, because it has stories about our politics that American papers overlook, and because it has an outsider perspective that expands the discussion.)

Farage is Britain's most prominent racist. American candidates seldom, almost never, invite foreigners to campaign for them. I've never heard of it during a primary election.

Moore has not been primarily known as a racist, since he's made his career as a theocrat, but it's Alabama, the vacated seat was held by the career racist Jeff Sessions, so ginning up the racist vote should pay dividends in the polling booth.

Nobody missed the other shoe dropping: Trump's Huntsville Decree. That was Trump in his brown shirt, pressing, pressing, always looking for openings to see how far Americans will accept Nazi policies.

His Huntsville Decree that football players who do not worship the flag should be dismissed mirrors Hitler's Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service, and his demand that citizens boycott the National Football League mirrors the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses.

I do not suggest that Trump consciously modeled his racist tirade on German precedent. It was instinctual, but there are only so many channels a politician can direct his discourse into. Trump is a natural nazi.

The invitation to Farage, reportedly engineered by the neonazi Breitbart News, looks much more consciously racist, especially since it is a step in an electoral strategy:

The Bannon ally said a win in Alabama would set the stage for primary fights in 2018 in states including Nevada, Mississippi, Tennessee and Arizona.

As for the timing, I suggest it was accidental. There are at least three factions in the Grand Old Party: the old-line regulars, who would not wave treason flags and are insulted to be called racists although they are; the Bannonites, who have no aloha for the party and are just using it to develop a new party; and the Trumpeters,  who are on board with only part of the old-line program but are yearning to let their racist feelings out.

I suspect that Trump didn't plan this kerfluffle; he was carried away by his crowd. But overnight, when he saw that knees pushed everything else off the news, he ramped up. Otherwise, this week the news would have been dominated by Trump and Republican disasters: no wall, no Obamacare repeal, no Muslim ban, no Middle East strategy, no Afghanistan strategy, failure at North Korea, rejection at the UN, no infrastructure stimulus, no trade renegotiations, no tax changes.

That's the most comprehensive failure of a party in our history and while some of it is beyond the control of any American politician (Afghanistan), the failure to write a tax policy or an infrastructure policy is mere incompetence.

The Farage invitation must have been in process before, so the near simultaneous, open appeal to racists was accidental.

Health-care fraud

I have not seen it stated explicitly, although the fact is implicit in analyses of the Graham-Cassidy Obamacare Repeal Bill, but it's a short-change scam.

If the bill were an actual repeal-and-replace effort, then it would have to provide more money than Obamacare does, not just a redistribution of the current amounts. That is because Obamacare resulted in a very uneven distribution of benefits.

About three-quarters of the states chose to expand  benefits through Medicare, thus drawing more money out of the national fisc. If Graham-Cassidy were evenhanded, then it would either provide less for the nonexpansion states, or more in order to bring benefit levels up to an even level throughout the country.

The Kaiser Family Foundation analysis finds an overall reduction in funding, but even if funding were at the same levels, it would be  a reduction for most Americans.

If it were labeled the Graham-Cassidy Health Care Erosion Bill, that would be accurate, but then it's a rightwing plot.

Additionally, some critics of Obamacare made much of the claim that it amounted to rationing. I have not heard  even one of them complain about the greater rationing in the Graham-Cassidy bill.

Screech of the chicken hawk

Trump is the first antiAmerican president. Let's allow the waspish eunuch of Roanoke to explain:

The military parade which meets the eye in almost every direction  excites the gall of our citizens; they feel a just indignation at the sight of loungers, who live upon the public, who consume the fruits of their honest industry, under the pretext of protecting them from a foreign yoke. They put no confidence, sir, in the protection of a handful of ragamuffins.

From an address by Representative John Randolph to the first session of Congress

Echoing history

There are several problems with using history to illuminate the present.

First, there's too much of it. Second, no two of us learned the same history. Third, most of us never learned any of it. Fourth, the more we need to know history, the less time we have to do so.

Nevertheless, I keep trying.

In the Sept. 7 issue of the London Review of Books, Michael Wood reviews a volume of letters between Alfred Dreyfus and Marie Arconati Visconti, the most recent of which was written in 1923, and in French. Wood never mentions Trump. Yet so much of it sounds instructive.

  ‘The moment they can’t persecute anyone, they consider themselves martyrs’

That's Madame Arconati Visconti, daughter of a famous anticlericalist, writing about Catholics. Here in America, we don't even have any anticlericalists, we have to import them from Europe, like Christopher Hitchens.  But it sounds like it was written about our evangelicals.

The Dreyfus Affair teaches us, among many other things, that evidence is easily faked, and that when the fakes don’t work or you don’t want to use them, you can plead national security: you can claim to have documents you can’t show.

That's Wood, summing up. L'affaire Dreyfus was all about fake news, and even after the reality was clearly exposed, there were many who preferred to believe the fake version. As Wood says,

Who do you have to be to believe X? And what else are you likely to believe if you do?

I don't know that recognizing that the Trumpeters' embrace of  falsehoods galore -- an embrace deftly summed in today's Washington Post by Greg Sargent -- had a nearly exact analogue among French rightwingers 120 years ago tells us anything useful about how to deflect political discourse into honest streams, but in fact Dreyfus was exonerated.

He always thought he would be. Wood writes:

 ‘As for those who have made themselves my executioners,’ Dreyfus wrote in his diary while still on Devil’s Island, ‘ah, I leave their consciences to them as judges when the light is shed, when the truth is revealed, for sooner or later, everything in life is revealed.’ 

But, Wood adds,  "Not quite everything, perhaps." We do, after all, have a birther who whips up his followers by whining about fake  news.

(Wood's review is behind a paywall. It will be worth your while to go to the public library and read the review on paper, and, while you're at it, also look at Malise Ruthven's article "The Saudi Trillions" and Amia Srinivasan's review of books about octopuses.)