A Grim Thanksgiving

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Sometimes people you admire just don’t seem to be paying attention. This is one of those times.

As we celebrate on this day, Thanksgiving 2019, we are as close to losing our Republic as we have ever been. What makes our current threat uniquely dangerous is that doesn’t come from abroad, at least not primarily. For the first time ever, it comes from our own White House.

On some days, the president lies so much and so obviously that he seems crazy. On others he just seems a hopeless narcissist, beguiled by his own fictional glory. On still others he seems a master showman who cares all for the show and little for reality. But what if he’s really crazy like a fox? What is he’s able to corrupt and bend others to his will without even causing a stir?

Let’s look at the record. He invited the Russians to intervene in our presidential election. “Russia, if you’re listening, . . .” he pleaded on national TV. After all seventeen of our intelligence agencies opined, with “high confidence,” that Russia had indeed helped him win, he and his lackeys did little but try to downplay their reports.

You don’t have to know exactly what our Founders meant by the words “treason, bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Just think of the Trojan Horse.

The Trojan warriors who pulled the Horse inside their gates probably weren’t traitors. They may have just been stupid. They might have thought the Horse a gift. They may even have thought it was a sign that the Greeks had abandoned their siege of Troy.

But Troy fell all the same. The Trojan Horse is now a metaphor for being duped into complete destruction.

Perhaps Trump’s narcissism so deluded him as to make him think that Putin’s helpful “intervention” in our election was a gift to the nation. Virtually everyone serious in government warned him to the contrary. Nevertheless, he let a second Trojan Horse in when he promoted the Russians’ disinformation that Ukraine, not Russia, had tried to hack our election, and in Hillary Clinton’s favor. Then he invited a third Trojan Horse in when he pressed Ukraine to investigate the Bidens.

As James Bond’s creator Ian Fleming once wrote: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” For action by our own president, that means treason.

Trump now persists in telling everyone who will listen that the Horses are not dangerous, that maybe they’re even on our side. Doesn’t that sound even more like treason? In a New York Times column Tuesday, pundit Michelle Goldberg properly called his behavior “world-historic treachery.”

Vladimir Putin must have a soundproofed, electronically shielded room somewhere deep inside the Kremlin. He must go there at least once a day to let rip the explosion of hysterical laughter that he feels every time he thinks of our president. How else but through Trump’s agency could a failing strongman of a failing state, with an economy the size of Italy’s and no world-class institution but the KGB (now the “FSB”), have brought the world’s leading nation to such ruin?

But Trump has not just immeasurably weakened us, making his “MAGA” caps the cruelest of mockery. He’s also corrupted and subverted us in unprecedented ways.

Robert S. Mueller III spent two years and an estimated $30-40 million meticulously documenting Trump’s world-historic treachery and his lame attempts to cover it up. Yet Mueller refused to draw the obvious conclusions, apparently hoping that readers would draw their own. He was out of touch: he expected his audience to read and write, not Tweet. He thought readers might look outside of their own information silos. He was wrong.

What did Trump do? He fired the FBI director supervising the investigation, and later his own hand-picked AG. He appointed a new AG, a lackey. The lackey “spun” Mueller’s 400-plus page report in a 19-page memo with Tweet-sized conclusions, and the rest of the GOP lackeys joined the “witch hunt” chorus. The world-historic treachery simply disappeared, drowned in a sea of lies, spin and distractions. And there it lies today.

So what is Trump doing now? He just restored a rogue Navy Seal’s Trident pin. Is that just another distraction? Think again. Trump may be making a play for our military, just when, if the Supreme Court enforces all Congress’ subpoenas, the men with guns might become the “court” of last resort.

Where do you think lie the hearts and minds of every rogue warrior, everyone with a grievance, and everyone who’s broken the rules, the laws of war and our military’s Code of Honor? They’re with Chief Petty Officer Gallagher, Trump and their backer Fox.

Richard Spencer, former Secretary of the Navy—the one who believes that “good order and discipline . . . [are] deadly serious business”— is out of a job. Will someone more like Gallagher replace him? Will someone like Bill Barr do to Defense what Barr did to Justice? Do we want people of the “quality” and “morality” of Barr, Gallagher, Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity giving our warriors marching orders?

It gets worse. Tuesday Nobel-Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman made the case that Trump is subverting our business titans, too. He’s already tried to corrupt them by giving them undeserved tax cuts and repealing regulations. Now, says Krugman, he’s also doing it with tariff exemptions. He’s had an apparent effect in subverting Tim Cook of Apple, at least with respect to Cook’s public statements. Trump was probably trying to punish Jess Bezos when, to everyone’s astonishment, Trump’s regime awarded a huge cloud data-storage contract to Microsoft, instead of Amazon, for no apparent technological reason.

When you look at Trump in this way, he no longer looks so crazy. He looks just like a would-be tyrant using precisely the same tricks that every tyrant in history has used to corner absolute power. First commandeer the apparatus of law. Second, take over or neutralize the press. If you can’t easily take it over because it’s strong, take over a weak branch (Fox) and de-legitimize the rest.

Next pack the courts with your lackeys, even if doing so takes one flying into a convenient theatric rage. Then stiff the legislature and its subpoenas, hoping the courts back you up. If not, get the guys with guns on your side, by putting your loyalists in their leadership. And just in case anyone with money and clout might oppose you, buy them off or silence them with carrots or sticks.

The game plan is easy to summarize. Play to everyone’s lust for power and cash. Sideline everyone with a conscience, scruples, expertise or a sense of professionalism—not to mention fealty to our Constitution. Push the just and competent out and wait for the scum to rise to the top after you appoint them to positions for which they have no experience or qualifications.

Does anyone notice that Trump is now getting down to the last few steps? Still think he’s a crazy old man? Or is he a Fox with his snout stuck right in middle of the henhouse, gnawing on his first killed hen?

Next to all this, the difference between Medicare for All who Want It and forcing Medicare on All is not just mere peanuts. It’s a politically suicidal distraction. What have Sanders and Warren been thinking?

Next to this, the Ukraine affair is a mere data point on the way to proving world-historic treachery. It’s not even a very good one, at least in the court of public opinion, because Ukraine eventually got its aid and weapons and never investigated the Bidens. So should we really be betting impeachment wholly on this charge alone? Isn’t that like playing roulette by placing all your bets on double-green-zero?

The people we admire, the ones we are counting on, are all focused on minutiae, not the big picture. Sanders and Warren debate the details of health-insurance policy that won’t take shape for years, if at all. Sanders focuses on bashing billionaires, including the ones like Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and Tom Steyer, who are trying to help, or at least not to hurt.

Adam Schiff devotes himself single-mindedly to making the single Ukraine data point crystal clear, neglecting all the other means by which Trump has been and is reaching for tyranny. Nancy Pelosi appears to be encouraging him.

Who’s looking at the big picture? It shows a president busy scorning all others, monopolizing the news, and distracting everyone while he works systematically to pull every lever of corruption and tyranny at once.

So far, Republicans in Congress don’t seem to think he’s inept. On the contrary, even former “never Trumpers” and Republicans who’ve announced their retirement seem scared to death of him. House members refuse to consider his “inappropriate” behavior impeachable. Senators say they’re reserving judgment but give every appearance of falling in lockstep behind him. Both make excuses for him ranging from the implausible to the absurd.

Trump seems to control some dark magic that compels those who have every reason to hate him to fall into line behind him. No one can know he’s inept for sure until he’s gone.

So when will the people we trust to save us wake up? when journalists start suffering Khashoggi’s fate here at home? when Trump’s most outspoken opponents start disappearing into Guantánamo? Won’t it then be too late?

The Democrats’ somnolence makes this Thanksgiving a grim one. But we can be thankful for reasons to hope. These men and women are indeed good and powerful. They just need to wake up to the main threat. We also have a whole bureaucracy full of men and women who have consciences, superb training and a lifetime of professional, dedicated service to our Constitution.

Now all we have to do is get all these strong horses pulling in the same direction. We have to focus on dumping our would-be tyrant before he destroys us and our Republic. It’s that simple, and that stark a choice.

To that end, the Dems have to show Trump’s own loyalists the entirety and enormity of his misdeeds, incessantly and relentlessly. They need to find words and pictures that can penetrate the fog of propaganda and alternate reality in which Trump’s supporters live.

At the same time, the Dems must show them how much better their life will be with him gone. To do so, they need a roughly unified program of long-delayed citizen benefits. They must all bang pretty much the same gong. Democratic candidates must start marching in rough lockstep, just like the Republicans in Congress, while competing on the savvy, thick skin, decisiveness, tactical skill and sheer brass they will need to beat Trump.

Nothing else matters in comparison, not even global warming. For if Trump gets re-elected and we lose our Republic, the world will degenerate into economic and even military discord. Then the goal of reducing greenhouse gases enough to avoid planetary catastrophe will pass beyond our species’ reach. As long as Trump is our supreme leader, he and global warming will be connected, and he will be the more immediate threat.

To beat him, the Dems must unwind their circular firing squad and face their common enemy. If they continue to fight about nuances of policy, Trump will likely win a second term and become our first emperor.

P.S. What I’m suggesting here has absolutely nothing to do with being “moderate” or “middle of the road.” Voters who so self-identify may indeed lack enthusiasm for Warren or Sanders. But voters enthused by Warren or Sanders may also lack enthusiasm for “moderate” or “middle of the road” candidates.

Trying to pick the bigger or more important camp is a fool’s errand. The Dems may need both to win. Anyway, immediately after the Dems pick a nominee, voters in both camps will have nowhere else to go.

So the trick of the primary campaign is to arrive at a common ground for policy that almost all Democratic voters can support, and that can evoke strong enthusiasm from many, without killing many voters’ enthusiasm. Coddling candidates for non-presidential office shouldn’t even enter the equation: we’ve got to keep all hands on deck and all eyes on the ball: retiring Trump ASAP.

So the primaries are not tests of nuances of policy; they’re tests of political skill. As much as the Dems can (maybe in conclave), they should agree on a program of progressive benefits that is neither too rash and unattainable nor too weak and ineffective to garner real and widespread enthusiasm.

Then they should compete in showing the leadership and tactical skill needed to bring Trump down, while refraining religiously from bashing each other. Every punch thrown against a fellow Dem risks knocking out some votes against Trump.

This approach will require running the Democratic primaries by new rules, with new goals. But the old rules haven’t done so well for the Dems, have they? The only Dem to make president this century was Obama, a political “natural” of the kind who appears maybe twice a century. If we wait for another like him to save us, we may have to wait a long time.

Nuances of policy among Dems won’t beat Trump. Likely, he won’t even recognize them, let alone address them. He couldn’t remember them if he tried. (Have you see that simplistic, inch-high, all-caps list of talking points, some identical, that he used to recall his claim to be innocent of extortion?) All Dems’ debates over nuances will do is confuse voters, set Dems against each other, and take their eyes off the ball of the vast chasm between Trump and every single one of them.

Trump is a shape-shifter. He will lie about his past and his plans. He can shift his “program” on a dime, to fit the needs of his campaign or a single rally. So the nominee will have to be well-versed in his sordid history, and skillfully tactical in calling him out and quickly debunking his self-praise. The rest of this election season is not about the alloys used to make the lance, but the nominee’s skill in wielding it.

The trial of that skill among the field of Democratic candidates has not yet even begun. On this Thanksgiving 2019, we can all be thankful that there’s still time.

Endnote: Careful readers may object that I’m describing a very unusual primary campaign. I am. In normal primary campaigns, candidates compete on the substance of their programs, their ability to explain and justify them, their personal histories, and their skill and delicacy in contrasting their rivals’ programs and histories.

For three reasons, all that will be impossible in the coming general election. First, there has never been a candidate anything like Trump. He had no experience in political office prior to becoming president and so has no relevant early history to recall and compare. Second, he lies about his past, his present and the future consequences of his policies. So assessing his brief presidential history will be anything but normal. Finally, nothing about Trump is delicate, ever; the successful candidate must be prepared for everything from name-calling and gross insults to schoolyard taunts.

So it makes no sense to run a traditional primary campaign, or for the candidates to compare their proposals rationally, as if minor differences in their approaches had decisive relevance to the general election. It might be better if some Silicon-Valley genius, using artificial intelligence, could create an android model of Trump. Then each Democratic candidate could practice “debating” the android, like a medieval knight practicing jousting against a dummy.

Barring that, the candidates have to show somehow who is most likely to beat Trump in the general election. That’s the only criterion that matters.

But that criterion is devilishly hard to assess. Biden’s accumulated trust among voters is relevant. So are Sanders’ doggedness and Warren’s unmatched intellect and gift for simplicity. So are Buttigieg’s combat experience and flawless, succinct articulation. But there’s no way short of a trial by fire to determine which trait best augurs success against Trump, or which candidate has the instincts to find and hit his soft spots on the fly. It’s even possible—maybe likely—that Trump will shun debates and rely on his media skill and his big donations.

All this requires the focus to be on Trump during the primaries, however much it may have to shift to policy in the general election. Against an utterly unprecedented general election, old polls, old programs and old loyalties, let alone nuances of policy, are no better predictor of the “electability” of any Democrat than the Democrats debating among themselves as if this were a normal election cycle.

This one is going to be unique. Only the most flexible, adaptable and skilled tactician has a good chance of winning. No one now has any idea who that might be.

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An Open Letter to Elizabeth Warren

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Dear Senator Warren,

You are now, by far, my preferred candidate. You are the only one to whom I make monthly contributions. Sometimes I lie awake at nights, thinking how much more promising our national future would be if you were in the White House, and wondering what I can do to help you get there.

But in order to realize the waking dream of me and millions of others, you have to win. And I fear you are now making a grave mistake—one of the same kind that contributed to Hillary Clinton’s unexpected loss.

We Americans hate being told what to do. That’s been true since an early revolutionary flag appeared, the one with the coiled snake and the legend “Don’t Tread on Me.” It’s still true today.

Surveys have shown Americans’ appalling ignorance of the details of our Bill of Rights. What “freedom” means to most of us, especially recent immigrants from controlled societies, is control of our own private lives as we see fit. Virtually every American considers this freedom his or her birthright or hard-won right as a naturalized immigrant.

Now you want, in effect, to tell over 150 million Americans to give up the private health insurance that they like. You would have them accept a government-run program that has yet to take shape. You want to force on them something that doesn’t exist yet, in lieu of what they have and know. To most of us, that smells like government coercion.

There’s also a huge timing problem here. Even if your plan would ultimately be better for all, voters will not know that when they have to vote. All they will know for sure is that they will have no choice. They will have to vote for coercion in advance, without knowing precisely what the result will be.

They will also have to reconsider and re-agonize the whole matter of health insurance, as part of the presidential campaign, with inadequate information. Inevitably they will rely on opposition propaganda, at least in part.

How can that possibly help your campaign? In farmers’ terms, you are asking voters to buy a pig in a poke.

It doesn’t matter how good you think your numbers are. It doesn’t matter how much your program ought to reduce costs. As the brilliant realist that you are, you know how unreliable economists’ predictions are, especially on something this complex, with so many variables, whose details are years away from becoming fixed.

Being told what to do is a simple, compelling issue that any voter can understand. Your rivals will demagogue it to death, both within and without the Democratic Party. You will lose ground that you have no good reason to give up.

On this point your recent change to a phase-in is no change at all: it merely delays the coercion. In any event, coercion is unnecessary, especially if delayed. If the price and other advantages of expanded voluntary Medicare are as decisive as you suggest—and I believe they will be—consumers will switch from private insurance to expanded Medicare on their own. They may take a bit more time than you or I hope now, but they will switch of their own free will.

History teaches how dangerous coercion is. Although Obama started out avoiding coercion in his 2007 campaign, both he and Hillary Clinton adopted so-called “mandates” (penalties for not buying insurance) by the end of their 2008 campaigns. They did so under the influence of economists’ projections, which suggested mandates could make their programs affordable.

What was the result? For all of the crying need, Obama’s immense political skill, and Nancy Pelosi’s leadership as House Speaker, “Obamacare” passed the House by three votes. Three votes out of 435, in a House much less radicalized toward the right than today’s! Not only that: during the legislative process and for years afterward, opponents whittled “Obamacare” down by a thousand cuts.

Today, after years of GOP opposition, with no credible alternative offered, “Obamacare” hangs by a thread. The mandates are gone, killed by litigation. Yet some 20-million-plus people who never had health insurance before have it now, and they like it.

They like it in part because most of them chose it voluntarily. They weren’t forced into it. History has rendered the economists’ optimistic projections about mandates as irrelevant as most business-projection spreadsheets become after the marketplace does its work.

Projections, after all, are little more than educated guesses. Neither legislators nor the public trusts them, and rightly so. They are too often subject to hidden assumptions, wishful thinking, bad or missing data, conscious and unconscious bias, and simple mistakes. Trust projections too much or too often, and voters will stop trusting you.

Obama is the only American pol since Ike to have won two terms as president with clear popular-vote majorities. He did so against a still-appalling tide of racism. Until we pick a nominee for 2020, he will remain our Party’s leader, with good reason.

More than that: you are trying to duplicate his “miracle.” He broke the “glass ceiling” for African-Americans, despite all the conscious and unconscious racism we now know to exist. You are trying to do something similar, against a tide of residual sexism and misogyny of unknown and unknowable strength.

So you should listen to Barack Obama above everyone else. When he speaks about what’s politically possible, in his indirect and understated way, naming no names, you should treat him as the oracle he is. He’s telling you, in effect, that the opposition of doctors, hospitals, and nurses—who all think that any expansion of Medicare will cut their incomes—is quite enough to take on. The unnecessary opposition of over 150 million insureds who are happy with what they have now, coupled with the do-or-die-opposition of the entire existing health-insurance industry, is too strong to overcome.

You can easily adopt the “mainstream” Democratic position: “Medicare for All Who Want It.” The very title belies coercion. It’s a heavy enough political lift all by itself, as Obama recognized twelve years ago. It’s no less a heavy lift now, with “Obamacare” hanging by a thread against the gravitational force of alternative-less but relentless GOP opposition.

Some will call you a “flip-flopper.” But many, including me, will admire you more for having the flexibility and humility to understand when you’ve overreached and move on. And you will have lots of political “cover” from your Democratic-Party rivals, most of whom support Medicare’s voluntary expansion.

Please let your points of distinction be your fine mind, your clear sight through the oligarchs, your superb debating, your general realism on how to campaign, your adroit dodging of code words like “socialism,” and your other plans for economic justice—not a Quixotic quest for the impossible in our time. Please don’t get caught up in a counterproductive Democratic bidding war for victory-deprived progressive voters. That’s a prescription for any nominee losing the general election.

So please change your stance on this critical kitchen-table issue. Your doing so will appeal to many undecided voters. It will unify the party—except for Sanders, who bears the burdens of age, suspected ill health, and incessant demagoguery against his “Democratic socialism.” It will unite Dems behind behind a popular and defensible health-insurance plan: “Medicare for All who Want It.” Thus it will help any eventual nominee win.

If you “pivot” on this issue now, voters will see you as gaining practical wisdom and experience and strengthening party unity. They will see your decisiveness, strength and independence as a leader.

If you pivot after winning the nomination, voters likely will see you as a weathervane and hypocrite, a female Mitt Romney. The Internet will let no one forget: there will be video clips to play in endless loops.

This issue is also a test of your ability to control and direct your campaign. Your awkward shift to a phase-in shows that you already sense something is wrong. But a phase-in is a transparently inadequate half-measure. It doesn’t address the fatal flaw: depriving nearly half our population of a choice, with inadequate information about its consequences now.

You have a much needed-chance to demonstrate your strength as a leader and “decider.” Obama did that in his own campaign when he cut the much-defamed Reverend Jeremiah Wright loose, despite a long friendship. At a critical stage in her campaign, Hillary Clinton failed to act decisively with Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Huma Abedin, who had made serious errors in judgment regarding party procedure and/or e-mails. Obama won, and Clinton lost. Therein lies one of many lessons of a flawed campaign.

Admitting and correcting an error requires as much decisiveness as being right the first time, maybe more. You will need that sort of decisiveness in the White House. Never having held an executive post in politics, you will have to show voters that you have that trait in order to win. That’s one reason why Pete Buttigieg, one of only two hardened veterans in the Dems’ debate lineup, would be your best running mate. Nothing hones tactical skills like combat.

Your plans are generally good. Your mind and spirit are excellent. Your stamina is impressive, especially as your strongest rivals approach 80. You are a superb thinker and debater. With more conviction and specificity than any other candidate, you see precisely what has brought our egalitarian democracy down. (Billionaires are not the problem. What they do with their wealth and how they keep and grow it is.)

Practical politics and showing decisiveness under pressure are the biggest obstacles to your getting the chance to make your good plans real. For your own sake and our nation’s, please don’t blow that chance.

Please stop pledging to force Medicare on all. Please do so now, and announce your change publicly and dramatically, so as to show the world your wisdom and strength as a leader.

With this single decisive move, you can plant your flag firmly on that hard-fought ”middle ground” over which Dems and mainstream pundits struggle so obsessively. You cannot “finesse” something so big, controversial and visible, let alone with mere delay. Trying to do so only makes you look weak, indecisive and shifty.

With the greatest respect and admiration and hope for your success,

Jay

P.S. In the last few weeks, three new candidates have entered the Democratic race: a serious, experienced state-level executive, Deval Patrick, and two billionaires: Michael Bloomberg, with city-level executive experience, and Tom Steyer, with no experience in public office at all. Could it be that all three see you gaining in the primaries but fear you might lose the general election tarred an “extremist” or “socialist”?

Bloomberg offers a more specific lesson. His first dramatic act of campaigning was to go down South and apologize for “stop and frisk” before a largely African-American audience. It doesn’t matter whether “stop and frisk” was a wise or effective policy at the time. It’s political suicide now, when a robust and enthusiastic African-American vote, especially in the South, is absolutely critical to Democrats and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

That’s the kind of don’t-look-back tactical decisiveness that you will need to win the general election and lead this nation as president. You will need it almost every week. Renouncing forced Medicare could be your first big show of leadership, as distinguished from abstract thinking—at which voters paying attention already know you excel.

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What’s the GOP’s Real Game Plan?

Two Regulatory Heroes

Amidst all the drama of the impeachment hearings and Democratic debates, two regulatory heroes—one in Canada and one in the United States—quietly did something extraordinary. They wrote e-mails expressing long-overdue skepticism regarding software that can kill lots of people. Their subject was Boeing’s “Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System,” or MCAS. Already it has contributed to the deaths of 346 air travelers in two separate “total fatality” crashes of Boeing’s now-grounded 737 Max aircraft. The Canadian expert, Jim Marko, wrote that MCAS “has to go.” American regulator Linh Le expressed misgivings about Boeing’s proposed fixes. Why are these two men heroes? Because they are apparently the first people in positions of regulatory authority to understand and reveal the uniqueness of software. It doesn’t work like any of the mechanical, optical, hydraulic, airfoil, control-surface, or electrical/electronic systems that aircraft producers have been using and testing for decades. It’s nonlinear. A tiny error in programming, like a misplaced comma or parenthesis, or a miscalculation of a range of data storage, can cause the software not to work at all, or to produce bizarre and potentially fatal output. Software’s output can vary enormously, far out of proportion to changes in input, when the input crosses arbitrary digital boundaries. These sorts of errors are extremely hard to find and fix. Even skilled programmers who go over the code line by line and character by character, again and again, can fail to see them. Why? The human mind, like all conventional (non-software) aircraft systems, is linear, not to mention forgetful and inattentive. And nothing can be more boring than scanning through hundreds or thousands of lines of computer code and finding nothing that seems out of the ordinary. The only way to test a program like MCAS fully and reliably is to attach it to a flight simulator and program the simulator to methodically test every possible combination of variables (e.g., angle of attack, airspeed, wind speed and direction, and weather conditions) that might occur within the range of physical conditions that MCAS is supposed to address. That approach, analogous to what particle physicists call “Monte Carlo” testing, essentially runs the software through all permutations and combinations of conditions that it might possibly encounter in real life, or at least a carefully constructed statistical sample of them. Such “Monte Carlo” testing would probably take months to set up and program and at least a few days to run. Yet as far as I know, it’s the only conceivable way to thoroughly test software like MCAS, which depends on multiple real physical variables that can change unpredictably in practice, and which can kill people in numbers if the results it produces are wrong. Although I’ve followed public reports of the MCAS story, nothing I’ve read suggests that anyone at Boeing has suggested, let alone tried, this or any similar approach. Yet until this or something equally effective is done, no one can have complete confidence that MCAS will work as specified in all the conditions for which it was designed. The only safe alternative is to rely on pilots’ experience and skill as a backstop, train them to use MCAS on flight simulators, and put a big, red “kill switch” in easy reach, so they can turn off the software quickly if and when it acts up. What makes this point vitally important is not just the 346 innocent people who’ve already died. Issues like this will arise again and again as software and AI are used to control more and more of what lawyers call “hazardous instrumentalities,” e.g., planes, commuting trains, and self-driving cars and trucks. Software, its characteristics and control are unique in the history of science and engineering. Up to now, it has mostly produced, stored, manipulated and transmitted information, which can be analyzed and corrected after the fact without risk to human life. When seemingly “minor” programming errors have the potential to cause tragedy in real time, the design and testing of software require a whole new, unprecedented regime. If software for aircraft and self-driving vehicles suffers the same lack of care and perfection that Internet users discover and curse in websites every day, modern life will rapidly get a whole lot more dangerous. Messrs. Marko and Le are heroes for being, apparently, the first regulators to recognize and point out this unfortunate reality.

[For a quick read on Wednesday’s Atlanta debate, click here.]

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Faithful readers of this blog may have been wondering why I’ve posted nothing about impeachment until now. The reason is pretty simple: I thought, and I still think, that Trump’s own conduct and admissions are ample cause for impeachment and removal. There’s nothing much to say or do except get on with the process of dumping him.

To me, once an Articles Editor on the Harvard Law Review, it’s an open and shut case. Trump has committed—and continues to commit—impeachable offenses almost every day. He propagates falsehoods habitually, relentlessly and recklessly. Like a Mafia capo, he intimidates and bullies (outside of normal and legal channels) private individuals, members of his own Executive, and members of co-equal branches of government. He regularly makes decisions that have no visible rationale but financial benefit to him and his family personally. Isn’t that what we used to call “corruption”?

He neglects the duties of his office. He and his minions (especially Giuliani, who has no official or legitimate governmental role whatsoever) trample the Constitution with gusto. He relentlessly slanders our allies, our military leaders, our dedicated civil servants and our courts. And far beyond failing to faithfully execute our laws, he gives every indication of not even giving a damn what they are.

Trump’s Tweets and behavior make plain that, in his own mind, he is the law. He won an election by minority vote with the aid of our Electoral College’s malapportionment, so he’s become our first emperor. “L’etat c’est Trump!” All the rest of government and the people have to do is read his Tweets, believe and obey.

That’s the way he plays it. And that’s how Fox and the GOP play it, following, in goosestep, right into Trump’s empire, which exists mostly in his own mind but is becoming more real every day. Nearly eight years ago, when I wrote an essay re-analyzing Germany’s Nazi psychosis, I asked “Could it happen here?” I never imagined it would start to happen so soon.

Beyond that, there’s the nature of impeachment. I’m not an expert on the subject, but I’ve had a fine legal education and have read most of what the experts have published during the present contretemps. Despite the Constitution’s use of the words “crimes and misdemeanors” (modified by the adjective “high”), impeachment is not primarily a criminal matter. Some Founders worried about the process, in partisan times, giving the White House a revolving door. But there was general agreement that it should be a cure for corruption, abuse of power and gross neglect of duty, not just narrowly defined crimes.

In other words, our Founders intended impeachment to be the sole remedy, apart from infrequent elections, for a rogue president’s maladministration. If Trump is not a rogue president, who is? What more would he have to do?

Yet to understand what the GOP is doing and why, you need to think outside the box. You need to think about historical context. When you do, you come to the conclusion that focusing so intently on Trump’s attempt to extort Zelensky is a big, big mistake.

Today’s GOP has become a permanent nationwide popular-minority party making an extended last stand. It’s doing its damnedest to exploit the malapportionment of our Senate and Electoral College and the temporary (we hope) power that Trump’s demagoguery provides, while entrenching itself on our Supreme Court. The GOP and the oligarchs who back it are doing all they can to stay on top, before the stout brooms of history and demographics sweep them, the Old South and white supremacy into the dustbin where they belong.

Their prolonged last stand is, of course, probably doomed to failure, unless Trump and his followers succeed in converting our nation to empire. But however badly and quickly they fail—or worse, if they succeed—their last stand is likely to have immense world-historical consequences, as impactful as the Fall of Rome in its day. Among them could be the decimation or devastation of our species in runaway global warming or nuclear war. The fall of our nation to second or third rank, with China henceforth leading our species, is almost assured, and the consequence most likely to occur soonest.

But today’s so-called “Republicans,” like their leader, don’t care. Their thinkers have all fled, renounced the party or ducked into the shadows. All that’s left are temporizers who live for the moment. Keep the bosses, including oligarchs, whites and Christians, on top as long as you can. Hold back the tides of history as long as you can. Why else “normalize” an abysmal excuse for a leader and a man such as Trump?

Up until yesterday, the GOP’s public defense in Trump’s impeachment pretty much followed this “game plan,” if you can call it that. Say anything, no matter how illogical, patently false or outrageous, to create confusion and doubt and give Trump and Fox their fig leaves. The whole enterprise resembled a doomed World War II fighter spewing out chaff in a last-ditch effort to keep from being shot down. I didn’t (and couldn’t) comment because chaff does not lend itself to reasoned analysis.

But all that changed yesterday. Yesterday the GOP developed a strategy. It’s a strategy for “winning” the impeachment battle on the field of public opinion, which is all Republicans care about. For that limited purpose, it’s not a bad strategy.

Their goal is not to win the argument, or even to win the eventual trial in the Senate acting as “decider” on the question of Trump’s removal—at least not by any means resembling serious and honest democratic debate. Their goal is to use their raw majority power in the Senate to defeat the removal process, regardless of merit, but in a way that prevents serious diminution in Trump’s so-far solid 40% minority. If they can reach this goal, they can hope to eke out a second term for Trump by the same means as before: exploiting the Electoral College’s malapportionment.

The GOP’s new “impeachment-defense” strategy is simple to state and understand. But it’s not the point. It’s really a footnote, so I explain it in one below.

The main point is that the GOP has no intention of allowing Trump to be convicted and removed by the Senate as long as his 40% minority holds. So the fine points of the Constitution, law, Reason and justice are irrelevant. All that matters is whether the GOP and Fox can keep the Trumpets on Trump’s side until next November. That’s the game, and the GOP is wholly focused on winning it.

If this conclusion is correct, then the Dems’ strategy of seeking clarity by focusing narrowly on Trump’s apparent extortion of Zelensky is precisely the wrong one. For the Zelensky-extortion charge lends itself to a good defense in the court of public opinion. It won’t work for anyone who’s attended even the first year of law school, but most Trumpets have not.

The Dems’ best hope is a long shot at best. They have to peel some Senate Republicans (at least 20) off from the herd. The only chance of doing that is to get Trump’s poll numbers to dip sharply. They can’t do that with the Zelensky charge alone because the GOP now has a legally and logically faulty but facially plausible defense.

So the Dems have to throw everything they have at Trump. They have to reveal the staggering breadth and depth of Trump’s wrongdoing to a substantial number of people who now believe he can do no wrong, and who put their trust in Fox.

It’s a heavy lift, maybe an impossible one. But as hard as it may be, it’s easier than getting the GOP Senators to abandon the raw-power approach they’ve been taking for so long and treat the Zelensky affair seriously. They’ve been making a last-ditch stand at least since Trump won the 2016 election, and they’re not about to abandon it now, far less for the weak embrace of sweet Reason.

Footnote: the GOP Defense of the Zelensky-Extortion Charge. To see how the GOP hopes to defend the Zelensky extortion charge in the court of public opinion—which is the only court that matters to Republicans—you have listen to the rant of Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) toward the end of the hearings yesterday.

The defense is clear and simple enough for any Trumpet or Fox viewer to understand: no harm, no foul. Trump’s alleged extortion ultimately didn’t work. Neither Zelensky nor anyone in Ukraine ever investigated the Bidens. Ukraine got its security aid, including Javelin man-portable anti-tank weapons. The Russian incursion into Ukraine came to a grinding halt, albeit after causing much destruction and many casualties. Russia is back at the bargaining table and has even (according to Jordan) returned some of the marine hardware it stole by force from Ukraine.

As for motive, Ambassador Volker credibly testified that Trump’s motives were at worst mixed. Legitimate doubt about Ukraine’s new administration’s commitment to fighting corruption was a plausible alternative reason for withholding the security aid for 55 days. Jordan’s praise for Volker, a highly intelligent and skilled diplomat who was instrumental in getting the whole debacle to end well, helps obscure that fact that the main obstacle was Trump himself. But the praise rings true and is well deserved. Volker is a professional instrumentalist, not an ideologue, and he got what he wanted and our nation and Ukraine needed.

Anyone who’s attended the first year of law school knows that an attempt or conspiracy to commit a crime is also a crime, even if the underlying crime never happens. Conspiracy in particular requires only a single overt act in furtherance of the criminal agreement, like Trump’s firing Ambassador Yovanovich at Giuliani’s suggestion. So Trump could well be an unindicted co-conspirator guilty of conspiracy to extort, just like Nixon in Watergate—“unindicted” only because of the DOJ memo that purports to prohibit indicting a sitting president.

But all this legal nuance goes right over the heads of Trumpets and viewers of Fox. To dent their support for Trump, you need to give them a sense of the vast scope of his impeachable misconduct. You need to take them back to the days when pols relied on Reason, not raw partisan power, and American government resembled majority rule.

You can’t do that with the Zelensky matter. So the impeachment inquiry must broaden considerably in order to have any realistic chance of removing Trump. The rifle-shot approach never really had a chance, and now it seems even more likely to fail.

The Dems’ Atlanta Debate: Practice Makes Better

The motley crew is both learning the trade and becoming a team. That’s my main takeaway from the Dems’ debate in Atlanta Wednesday night.

It was a good debate. It advanced the goal of retiring Trump, while putting each candidate’s best foot forward. The moderation and technical support were excellent. I don’t yet know whether there was easy non-subscription access, but I’ll try to update this post on that point.

In my view, the top four candidates remain the same afterward as before: Biden, Warren, Sanders and Buttigieg, in that order. Each helped his or her cause, Buttigieg the most and Biden next.

Buttigieg maintained his flawless articulation, offered cogent ideas and memorable phrasing and cited some rarely mentioned facts about farmers’ struggles. He was particularly moving in describing, with reference to his understanding of other minorities, his struggles as an openly gay man.

Biden made strong and often moving statements about climate change (“an existential issue”), keeping the Justice Department independent, Saudi atrocities and responsibility, restoring alliances, and women’s rights as human rights. He appears to have moved on from endlessly citing his own experience, which few remember or care about, to telling voters what he would do. Yet he did make one small gaffe, calling a female African-American Senator among his supporters the only such when she was just the first.

Warren held her ground and maybe advanced a bit. But she did little remarkably moving besides mentioning her janitor father in her closing statement. She continued her clear articulation, cited appalling statistics justifying family leave, made ringing and cogent pleas for cutting corruption, and powerfully endorsed real change. She showed a lot of abstract concern for our many unfortunate, but she seems not to understand that plans are not empathy. Jumping that hurdle, I think, would jet-propel her candidacy.

Sanders remained about where he was. He adroitly justified his own bold ideas and refrained from mentioning socialism even once. With his alacrity and apparent failure to tire, he also allayed some doubt about his recent heart attack. So the race among the top four is, in my view, still wide open.

The most remarkable and positive thing about the debate was what appeared to be an underlying sense of cooperation. There were devastating potshots at Trump all around, especially on questions of values and decency. Few potshots were taken, at least early on, against the other candidates on the stage.

Several times, one candidate or another referred to everyone on the stage as having similar values, in gross contrast to Trump. In the heat of debate, not everyone may have realized how important that was, and will be, in bringing Democrats and some independents together and making them all comfortable with the eventual nominee. My fiancée and I independently remarked how we would like to see almost everyone on that stage in the next Cabinet, especially Yang, with his bold and fresh economic ideas, and Steyer, with his business experience and absolute commitment to slowing climate change.

Yet there were some rough spots. Klobuchar enhanced her “get along” credentials by making a gracious statement about Buttigieg (one of the few pols with executive experience) deserving to be on the stage. Later, she seemed to take that graciousness back by unnecessarily belittling his experience as compared to hers. Tulsi Gabbard was the worst in this respect, smugly hitting Buttigieg with an obscure “gotcha” about sending troops to Mexico, which he claimed was distorted, and later citing the “aloha spirit” of her state. That and Booker’s joke that Biden may have been “high” in proposing to decriminalize marijuana may have been the night’s most jarring moments.

Kudos are due to the four female moderators. They made the candidates the foci of attention, as good moderators should. They covered every important issue but gun control. Their questions were short and tailored gently to each candidate, without seeming unfair, abrasive or “inside baseball.” No “gotchas” for them! They followed up to make sure no question went by without a clear answer. They made the trains run on time.

If past debates were any measure of moderators’ general skill and impartiality, the Dems would be wise immediately to sign these four up for all their remaining debates. It wouldn’t hurt at all, before elections that female voters likely will decide, to recognize and reward these ladies’ patently superior performance.

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Facing the Revenge of the Nerds

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Let’s face it. The nerds of Silicon Valley have pulled off an historic swindle. Through high-tech legerdemain and Internet hype, they have done what no printer, broadcaster or publisher in Anglo-American history has been allowed to do, at least for long. They have let or even helped our enemies, criminals, agents provocateurs, and countless useful idiots subvert our government and our democratic culture with lies and “fake news” made up out of whole cloth.

Yet so far the nerds have managed to evade even a smidgeon of legal responsibility for the social, political and cultural chaos that they let loose.

The principal villains here are Facebook and its absolute master, Mark Zuckerberg. But Twitter has also played a pivotal role. Our Congress, courts and regulatory authorities have largely been supine, pinned down by diffidence about their online expertise and a peculiarly American myth that the Internet can do no wrong.

And then there’s Trump. Never in human history has an actual or putative emperor had such a facile means as Twitter for promulgating impromptu edicts and lies. Roman emperors had scribes to handwrite their edicts on parchment, or laboriously to engrave them in stone. When they wanted to tar a previous emperor’s legacy, they had skilled stone-workers chisel away the names on their predecessors’ statutes and substitute their own.

Not Trump. He can wake from a Fox-inspired fever dream at 3:00 am to fire honest and competent civil servants on a whim, to defame President Obama and his administration, or to set the world aflame with a couple of minutes sleepy work on a Tweet. What modern efficiency for disseminating edicts and falsehoods!

Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO, may have disabled many lies by refusing to accept more paid political advertising. But what about the hordes of domestic trolls and foreign intelligence operatives who do it all for free?

And what about Trump, who’s converted deliberate, thoughtful and careful government by experts into a dopamine rush of early-morning Tweets? Nero and Caligula never had it so good.

Our forebears in England and America understood both the power and the responsibility of those who make a career and a business of “speaking” to the masses. Their action to protect democracy and rational public discourse evolved slowly over centuries.

So we have laws and regulations against libel and slander (collectively, “defamation”), trade libel (bashing a competitor falsely), and false advertising. All of them can apply to politics and public discourse. All of them have at their core an effort to curtail wide propagation of falsehoods.

In law as in life, there’s a relentless struggle between truth and falsehood. For fear of empires just like the one Trump is now building, our First Amendment prohibits government from deciding what’s true or false. Yet it doesn’t prevent private publishers from deciding what’s worth publishing. Therein perhaps lies our salvation, as long as we can induce our Internet publishers to step up to the plate.

To keep government from “chilling” free political speech, we have an especially high standard for suing publishers and broadcasters for slandering pols and other public figures. Not only must a slander be proven false; the offending publisher must also have propagated it with “malice,” i.e., more than mere negligence, amounting to reckless disregard for the truth. Our Supreme Court established this rule judicially, in the seminal case of New York Times v. Sullivan.

Despite the constraints of American First Amendment, our recent forebears found ways to manage political lies far more effectively than we do now. Once we had a “Fairness Doctrine” for broadcast political speech. A pol attacked in a broadcast program or ad had a legal right, for free, to broadcast a reply over the same station(s) that had aired the attack. This doctrine tended to even the score of attack ads. Better yet, it restrained broadcasters from airing the worst political lies, for fear of having to give away too much free air time.

Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of modern so-called “conservatives,” did away with the Fairness Doctrine by presidential edict. In so doing, he left our public sphere with only weak and slow defenses against deliberate and calculated falsehood. He left us open to the same type of political propaganda (from private, not governmental, sources) that the Soviet Union once had made famous in its so-called “newspapers” Izvestia (“news”) and Pravda (“the truth”).

That was the state of affairs in our country when the Internet became an open communications medium in 1996. With nothing in law or policy to tamp them down, the Internet became, in a single generation, a playground for falsehood and political fiction. A generation of highly paid “professional” liars, aka PR folk and political “operatives,” grew up to fill the perceived need for experts in misleading the public.

Historically, we Americans have always been optimists. We believe that the principal cure for lies and other bad speech is more speech, not “censorship.” This theory undergirds our legal interpretation of our First Amendment. Pols and scholars have repeated endlessly that the “truth” will emerge, as if by some beneficent magic, out of the cacophony of nearly random speech of a nation of 320 million individuals all authorized and encouraged to speak at once.

As Sarah Palin might say, “how’s that theory workin’ out for us now?”

When you think about it, the theory of self-corrective speech resembles the now-discredited economic theory that free markets always self-correct. Both theories assert that human institutions, if left to their own devices, will always self-correct in their own way and their own time, as long as complete freedom prevails. Both theories are first cousins to what the aristocrats who lost their heads in the French Revolution believed: that we all live in the “best of all possible worlds.”

The economic self-correction theory failed badly in—and in fact helped cause—the Crash of 2008. Its principal apostle, then Fed Chief Alan Greenspan, formally recanted the theory in testimony before Congress.

So far, no one of the same stature has yet recanted the similarly pollyanna-ish theory that more speech always cures lies. But its failure is self-evident in the state of our public discourse and politics today, not to mention a the rise of a whole class of well-paid PR mavens and political operatives whose work, stripped of euphemisms, is lying without getting called out. What’s more, the pernicious influence of Russia’s and China’s intelligence services, not to mention millions of private trolls, is clear and acknowledged by every one of our own intelligence services.

The optimistic “more speech cures all” theory may have had some rational basis when Americans got their news from three television networks, all pledged to a code of journalistic professionalism exemplified by Walter Cronkite. It has no rational basis in a world where 2.2 billion Facebook users can lie, mislead and cook up fake news all they want, even anonymously, and face no effective sanctions whatsoever.

Can you imagine anyone—even a big multinational corporation—having the time, money and sheer patience to sue a million trolls for libel? when each can churn out dozens, if not hundreds, of different bits of fake news a day? when those with resources and programming skills can even automate their torrents of lies?

No, the Internet is a different animal. It’s a medium through which, in theory, every human being on this planet can “speak” with any other. It’s a medium in which Facebook has already come close to achieving that reach in fact, having recruited nearly one-third of the human race as regular users.

The Internet is a “many-to-many” communications system, the like of which has never existed before in human history. It’s been around for barely more than a generation, since Bill Clinton, on Al Gore’s recommendation, released it for general, free-of-charge public use in 1996. And it’s taken most of a generation to reach the apex of its power to distort reality for millions.

Already it has given us our sole president with zero years of political experience—and the morals of an alley cat. It has set our people against each other, as never since the War in Vietnam and our own Civil War, anomalously in a time of peace and relative prosperity at home. And now it threatens to destroy the checks and balances that our Founders hoped to give us for the ages, by depriving the House of Representatives of the power to subpoena witnesses in an impeachment investigation that our Constitution specifically authorizes.

Can anyone who faces these facts squarely maintain that our theory of truth emerging from the cacophony works in practice today? when every one of our federal agencies charged with facing facts (even secret ones) believes the contrary? when our civil society is dissolving in the acid bath of opposing conceptions of reality, based largely on falsehoods and fake news, transmitted with precise targeting to susceptible minds over the Internet?

For those accustomed to facing facts, however unpleasant they may be, the question is not “is all this really happening?” It most definitely is. The question is what to do about it.

It should be self-evident that the “truth will out” theory no longer works, if it ever did. It should likewise be self-evident that other remedies don’t and won’t work. You can’t impose legal responsibility on millions of anonymous trolls worldwide, or on thousands of foreign intelligence agents now deliberately subverting our society and government. You can’t do so without starting a war because the foreign trolls and foreign agents are beyond our legal jurisdiction.

The only practical solution is to impose legal responsibility on the choke points: the many-to-many media themselves. That means Facebook, Twitter and their respective managers, as well as other similarly situated social media.

As a matter of practical possibility, that’s all we as a society can do. If we don’t do it, we can expect our society’s decay to accelerate rapidly, pushing us into the dustbin of history far faster than Rome’s decline after its Pompeian Civil Wars.

Imposing that responsibility is not without poetic justice. The promoters of so-called “innocent platforms” have become super-rich. In less than a generation, they’ve vaulted from complete obscurity into membership in our oligarchy, with exalted reputations and social and political power to match. Even Congress (improperly) treats them with something approaching awe.

By virtue of their reputations as business geniuses, the digital oligarchs have managed, so far, to avoid all the traditional controls set up to keep publishers and broadcasters from subverting our society with falsehoods. Zuckerberg, in particular, has sent primitive algorithms to do responsible humans’ jobs, likely in order to avoid diverting human and programming resources from his vast river of easy advertising money.

While honestly admitting that his algorithms are not working, Zuckerberg disclaims knowledge of any more effective expedient. Yet there is an expedient that’s always worked before: holding his and his likes’ feet to the fire with stiff legal responsibility. That will focus their minds and incentivize real action.

From those to whom much is given, much is expected. That’s a key difference between a democracy, on the one hand, and a monarchy, empire, aristocracy or oligarchy on the other. Zuckerberg, Dorsey and their ilk have failed miserably to curtail a clear and present danger, which they helped create, to our society, our Republic and our way of life. So the law must “incentivize” them to do so, and quickly, or, in the worst case, shut their platforms down.

That means, at a minimum, repealing or drastically revising the blanket immunity from all liability for falsehood in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. There is nothing “decent” about letting profit-making publishers promulgate falsehoods and propaganda indiscriminately—enough to subvert our culture and our democracy—and make mountains of money from facilitating our societal decline.

Nor should lawmakers succumb to the nerds’ routine technological condescension. True, lawmakers may not understand all the nuances of the software, how it’s used, and the way the algorithms sent in (in lieu of human intelligence) to protect us ought to work but do not. But they understand in their souls, or ought to, how these platforms are destroying our public discourse, perverting our politics, dividing us from each other, and subverting our governance and civil society. They understand that much of this chaos is deliberately sown by foreign intelligence agents and anonymous trolls, foreign and domestic. They also understand full well that nothing the nerds have proposed or tried yet, as a mere momentary diversion from their raking in the cash, has been enough. That’s all the understanding they need.

That said, imposing real and substantial responsibility should be neither vengeful nor punitive. The goal is not to punish the digital oligarchs, but to let what we all love about our United States of America survive and grow. If the nerds can figure out ways to do so that are more efficient and less costly than legal liability, let them try. But impose the liability in the interim to give them an incentive.

Of course the same law that imposes liability for doing next to nothing ought also to exclude liability doing something, i.e. for taking down things thought to be lies or fake news, even if erroneously. That is, the law should be generous in reducing liability for good-faith and effective removal of falsehoods from the stream of social-media traffic. A proposed redrafting of Section 230(c) to accomplish these ends appears below.

But the ultimate responsibility must lie on the social-media oligarchs, as people not as programmers. They created this mess, for profit, and they may be the only ones able to clean it up without shutting the whole enterprise down.

Lest you think shutting it all down is also impossible, recall that that’s exactly what China has done and what Russia and Iran are now in the process of doing. As painful as these authoritarian societies may be to people living in them, they prefer social stability to the elusive promise of “progress” at the risk of chaos. And chaos is exactly what forcing ordinary people to swim in a sea of lies forebodes.

Our current president and his administration are proof positive of that. If the torrent of Internet-spread falsehoods continues unabated, Trump will be a pale harbinger of what’s to come.

Endnote: Drafting a Better Law

It’s not hard to turn the existing Section 230 into something that might work. Section 230(c) is the heart of today’s law. It gives Internet platform providers a blanket exemption from the same responsibility that publishers and broadcasters have had for centuries. Here’s how it could be revised to level the playing field between print and Internet and stem the tide of lies (The section’s current language appears in regular type; additions are in italics.):

47 U.S.C. Section 230(c) Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material

(1) Treatment of publisher or speaker

No provider or user of an interactive computer service who satisfies the standard of care of paragraph (3) shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

(2) Civil liability

No provider or user of an interactive computer service who satisfies the standard of care of paragraph (3) shall be held liable on account of—

(A)any action voluntarily taken in good faith, in accordance with the standard of paragraph (3), to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, materially false, slanderous, libelous, defamatory, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or

(B)any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).

(3) Standard of care

In publishing or republishing information under paragraph (1), and in restricting access to information under paragraph (2), the standard of care shall be as follows:

(A) With respect to information about an identified or identifiable individual public figure, living or dead, avoiding reckless disregard for truth or falsity; and

(B) With respect to all other information, including information about political parties, causes, and allegedly factual events and occurrences not involving an identified or identifiable public figure, avoiding simple negligence.

In either case, failure to check surprising, unexpected or intrinsically implausible information against two sources independent of the other information content provider, or against three such sources if the other information provider is anonymous or unknown, shall be prima facie evidence of failing to meet the standard.

(4) Legal action

Any person, institution, corporation, association or other organization injured by publication or republication of information not exempted from liability under paragraphs (1) and (3) shall have standing to sue for damages and declaratory and injunctive relief. Any person, institution, corporation, association or other organization injured by action or restriction not exempted from liability under paragraphs (2) and (3) shall have standing to sue for declaratory and injunctive relief only. Actions relating to paragraph (1) shall be brought within six months of the publication or republication complained of, and the defendant shall have the burden of proving satisfaction of the standard of care of paragraph (3). Actions relating to paragraph (2) shall be brought within three months of the action or restriction complained of, and the plaintiff shall have the burden of proving failure to satisfy the standard of care of paragraph (3). Actions under this section shall take priority over all other actions in the district courts and shall be expedited on appeal. In actions under this subsection, the pleadings, trial record, depositions, and all written decisions shall be made public as soon as filed, except to the extent that the presiding judge determines national security requires otherwise, in a written, reasoned decision filed under seal.

[Note: the provisions for legal actions for publication and for refusal to publish are purposely asymmetrical, in order to encourage platforms to take down suspected falsehoods. Nothing in the First Amendment requires private parties, as distinguished from branches of government, to republish information believed in good faith to be false or defamatory. In any event, foreign intelligence operatives and political trolls (whether hired or voluntary) are far less likely to sue than persons or organizations injured by Internet-propagated falsehoods.]

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“Populist”: An Epithet of Modern Propaganda

For an update on naming “black” Americans more precisely than by presumed continent of origin, click here.

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

What’s a good litmus test for telling whether a print reporter is in the oligarchs’ pockets? (Except for PBS and Rachel Maddow, most video reporters are already irredeemably in the oligarchs’ pockets, so we need no litmus test for them.)

Just count the number of times a reporter uses the term “populist” or its cognates. Then count how many times he or she uses term to describe followers of Trump versus followers of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. The larger the first number, and the more equal the latter two, the deeper in the oligarchs’ pockets the reporter dwells.

Why is this so? The answer is simple. As used today, the word “populist” means everything and nothing. When reporters use it to describe both Trump and his most committed opponents, that fact is clear. But “populist” also has a decidedly negative connotation: it’s the next best thing to labeling a pol and/or his followers parts of an unruly mob.

Oligarchs can’t tar Elizabeth Warren as “socialist” anymore because she has forthrightly declared herself a “capitalist.” They can and do tar Bernie Sanders with that epithet. Most of his followers either don’t care, or they long for the mild democratic socialism of Scandinavia. But the oligarchs can discourage more people from joining Sanders’ crusade by comparing a hypothetical, future democratic-socialist-leaning America with Maduro’s Venezuela. The comparison is absurd, but it’s effective propaganda nevertheless.

In its etymology, the term “populist” is much, much simpler than this. All it means is “of or pertaining to the people, or working and advocating in their interest.”

The word derives from the Latin word “populus,” meaning simply “people.” The ancient Romans often used it in the phrase “Senatus Populusque Romanus” (“the Senate and the People of Rome”) or its abbreviation “SPQR.” That was the legend they used to stamp their public documents and proclamations. (In Latin, the suffix “que” at the end of a word was the same as the conjunction et or “and” before it.)

What could be more democratic (with a small “d”) than stressing the authority of the people and their elected representatives? Yet the oligarchs want you, when you read or hear the term “populist” today, to think “lock and load, the Trumpian mob or the Commies are coming, and they’re pretty much the same thing.”

Using the term “populist” for both Trumpets and followers of Sanders and Warren is just factually wrong. There is no rational basis for comparing the goals, plans and programs of the two camps. Trumpism is not about the people and never was. It has been, is, and will be all about Trump himself. Sanders’ and Warren’s campaigns, in contrast, are nothing about themselves and all about the people. Specifically, they worry about the great mass of middle-class Americans that comprises the backbone of this nation but has been hammered into submission and stagnation for two generations while our law, policy and culture made the oligarchs super-rich.

In a way, the “flexibility” of the word “populist” recalls the word “democracy” and its cognates as used on the international stage. Kim Jong Un calls his absolute tyranny “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” The word doesn’t appear in our nation’s title, but we all claim it as a descriptive.

If people use the same word to describe North Korea and our own imperfect democracy, can it have any real meaning? What about using “populist” to describe the governance of people as diametrically opposed in goals, methods, means, restraint and culture as Trumpets and supporters of Warren or Sanders?

If the word “populist” came from something like a small-d “democrat,” then there’s no question which camp, Trump’s or Sanders’/Warren’s, best fits its meaning. No one in the latter camp shouts “Lock Her Up!”, wants to rip immigrant kids from their parents in order to discourage immigration, habitually bashes and disrespects racial and ethnic minorities, or applauds giving $1.5 trillion in tax breaks mostly to the rich and big corporations, rather than using it to rebuild our dilapidated infrastructure and provide good, non-outsourceable jobs for our middle class.

In fact, the myriad deep and grave distinctions between the two camps is precisely what the 2020 election is all about. It’s also a motivation for the impeachment process, which seeks to remove a supreme leader who has worked assiduously (assuming he’s worked consistently at anything) to rip power from Congress, our superb expert bureaucracy, and the people and put it all in his own unstable hands as president.

So when a print medium or a reporter calls both Trumpets and the followers of Sanders or Warren “populists,” let alone in the same story or paragraph, his or her goal is clear. It’s to get you to see the two camps as equivalent, dangerous mobs.

The goal is to scare you and get you to vote for someone too old (like Biden) or too anodyne (like Klobuchar), who will likely leave the oligarchs alone on their economic thrones, from which they can control us, rule us and propagandize us some more. The oligarchs and their lackeys are subtle and clever, and words are weapons in their hands.

Endnote: Turning Good Words into Epithets

As I’ve noted in several posts, including this one and this one, right-wing propagandists in America have mastered the art of turning once-good, descriptive words into political epithets. I call their skill the art of “applied philology,” i.e., applying the science of words and their meanings to pre-determined ends.

Applied philology is to propaganda and reality distortion as physics is to engineering. It’s the underlying science that allows grave falsehoods to become implanted as “reality” in the minds of people unaccustomed to thinking abstractly, i.e., most of us. It’s the primary method by which the GOP and the right wing have transformed the US, in a mere two generations (since Reagan), from a generous, cohesive, cooperative and egalitarian society into the oligarchs’ playground.

Propaganda organs like Fox, and subtler ones in our mainstream media, use applied philology to influence and distort our politics and culture in ways that Caesar, Hitler, Stalin and Mao never imagined. And our modern Internet, especially social media, allows them to recruit useful idiots to their cause by the millions, often unwittingly.

Unfortunately, applied philology mostly goes over the heads of liberal intellectuals, who are accustomed to thinking in terms of abstractions rather than labels. But as applied to ordinary voters who decide elections, it might be the most powerful force in politics since Caesar invented “bread and circuses.”

That’s why everyone who loves democracy must stay on constant guard against this sort of word theft. That’s why I, a writer’s son with faith in brevity, try to use “African-American” instead of “black.” At seven syllables, the longer phrase loses the brevity race badly. But the word “black” is false in so many ways it’s hard to enumerate them.

All “African-Americans” are not black in color. Many are as white as I, or nearly so, and “pass” for white in everyday life. Just like the rest of us and America as a whole, they’re a true “rainbow.”

But the word “black” in this context is not just chromatically wrong. It’s genetically wrong, lumping millions of people from highly diverse racial, ethnic, cultural and geographic backgrounds into a single class. Worse yet, it recalls the oppressive “one-drop rule” of the racist South, which subjected anyone with “one drop” of black “blood” to a lifetime of slavery or Jim-Crow discrimination and oppression.

From a simple scientific-genetic point of view, let alone the perspective of racial justice, nothing could be more absurd. So I try to swallow my lust for brevity and use the longer term, only occasionally putting “black” in quotes where brevity seems essential.

Is this “political correctness” or bending over backwards? I don’t think so. It’s simple accuracy and faith in reality. Not all “blacks” are black, and assuming they are recalls the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow, their all-too-recent legal foundation, and the dark shadow of four centuries of counterfactual racial oppression that still chills us all.

The moral of this story is that words matter. Those of us who oppose the oligarchs’ shadow rule and want a thriving, generous, egalitarian society have to monitor carefully how the oligarchs’ stooges steal words and subvert them to the oligarchs’ ends. (We did that well by substituting the word “progressive” for the word “liberal,” which right wing propagandists had distorted in their hall of mirrors. Who can oppose progress?)

Now we have to work on distinguishing the egalitarian utopia of Sanders and Warren from the corrupt, top-down, Caligula-like empire that Trump’s America is becoming. If both are “populist,” then good and evil are the same.

As for our still-bleeding racial divide, we must swallow a seven-syllable neutral substitute for a one-syllable word that reeks of historical injustice and factual inaccuracy. At least we must do so until the people so long and unfortunately labeled themselves come up with a better one-syllable description, which emphasizes our common humanity and avoids inadvertently validating our nation’s dismal racial history.

Footnote: The term “African-American” itself can be inaccurate. There are many Africans (mostly Muslims in North Africa) who are as white as I. Yet their descendants in America don’t fit the term “African-American” as used today.

Today the term has come to mean an American of non-white African descent. It has the advantages of avoiding the gross chromatic and genetic inaccuracy of “black,” not to mention its historical baggage. It also recognizes that—but for four centuries of near-continuous legal and cultural oppression—African-Americans are in the same class as other hyphenated Americans, like “Italian-Americans” and “Jewish-Americans.” Some day, we can hope, all these distinctions will fade into history, and we can all call ourselves simply “people,” if not “populists” in the original Roman sense.

Update (11/15/19): “Blacks” as Real Hyphenated Americans

How might we perceive African-Americans if we hyphenated them as we do whites, by their country and culture of heritage, rather than a whole continent? Wouldn’t that tell us more about each of them individually? Does the bare fact that one’s forebears evolved biologically in a sunny, equatorial climate requiring better protection against sunburn and skin cancer really tell us much about his or her culture or character as a person?

Let’s take a look at a few real individuals and see how a more nuanced approach might work. Colin Powell contributed mightily to our nation as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Secretary of State. He avoided the folly of invading Baghdad in Gulf I, and he defused a serious diplomatic crisis with China while at State. In a different America not so hog-tied by racial stereotypes, he might have been our first “black” president. He’s a Jamaican-American on both sides.

Kamala Harris is young enough yet (and talented enough) to become our second (or maybe first) female president. She’s a Jamaican-(East)-Indian American. Could it be that Jamaica’s culture of strong families, which Powell describes in his autobiography My American Journey, is partly responsible for both his and Harris’ success?

Then there’s family origins. Barack Obama is descended from an African tribal leader. His grandfather on his father’s side was “a respected chieftain [of the Kenyan Luo tribe], known as one of the first in his Lake Victoria village to befriend British colonialists, learn English and adopt their style of dress.” Could it be that our best president since JFK, maybe since FDR, was born to rule, just like FDR and our other wealthy aristocrats?

One of the many tragedies of our naming convention for “black” people is that it’s willfully blind to their individual heritage, both national and familial. For descendants of American slaves, that’s an inevitable consequence of our original sin of slavery, which forbade nearly all slaves from learning to read and write.

How can you maintain a family history if you can’t read or write? if the ruling culture treated your ancestors as property and didn’t much care where it stole them from? As talented and rich a person as Oprah Winfrey couldn’t have discovered her own ancestry in West Africa until the advent of DNA sequencing.

We can’t replay the past and correct four centuries of white evil retroactively. But maybe we can start treating “blacks” in the United States today better by labeling them, as we do whites, with their heritage as people, including nation or region, culture and class. Isn’t lumping them all together by continent of presumed origin just another dismal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow?

Thus does the study of words—applied philology—lead us to yet another (of many) good reasons to pay reparations to descendants of American slaves. The very act of enslaving their ancestors, coupled with forbidding them to speak their native tongues or learn to read and write ours, deprived the slaves’ descendants of an ethnic or cultural history and any knowledge of or pride in it. Surely that deprivation, which rolled down the generations to the present day, is as worthy of just compensation as the theft of their ancestors’ labor and personhood for up to two and a half centuries of slavery and another century of Jim Crow.

Yes, only today’s diehard racists and white supremacists are personally guilty of these crimes against humanity, but our culture and our nation committed them and benefitted from them. The longstanding debts due to theft of labor, personhood, and family history will fester until paid, as will the many pathologies of a society that refuses to come to grips with its historical responsibilities honestly.

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How New York Can Help

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

New York made Donald Trump. Both the city and the state made him what he is today. The “anything goes” culture of the city’s financiers and real-estate developers let him inherit and make whatever riches he actually has. The city’s and state’s courts and regulatory agencies looked the other way while his dad reportedly discriminated against minorities, and while Trump himself reportedly stiffed contractors, defrauded students, built his own media empire on fantasy, and generally acted like a minor Mafia capo.

It’s hard to imagine any other major American city but Chicago letting such a low-life rise so far so fast.

Now Trump has turned his back on New York, moving to Mar-a-Lago. No doubt he did so to escape taxes and whatever weak scrutiny the sleepy New-York watchdogs deigned to give him.

So Trump has turned his back on city that made him. Just so, he’s turned his back on Rex Tillerson, Jim Mattis, John Kelly, James Comey, Jeff Sessions, H.R. McMaster, John Bolton, Michael Flynn, Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon, Michael Cohen, and many, many lesser-known figures, whose names and photos you can find here. His administration has set an all-time record for turnover, including four officials whose tenures were the shortest ever in their respective offices.

New York has a lot to answer for. Its greedy and corrupt banking culture gave us the Crash of 2008, which added rocket fuel to Trump’s anti-establishment campaign. It gave us Donald Trump. And it has given us Rudy Giuliani, who finessed his way to becoming “America’s mayor” after a failing that helped kill many first responders on 9/11, and now has become, in Bolton’s words, “a hand grenade who's going to blow everybody up.”

But New York can begin to redeem itself. It can do so in two ways. First, it can use its state courts, subject to loose federal supervision, to pull Trump’s tax returns from his tight fist and make them public. Second, it can begin proceedings to disbar Rudy Giuliani, as well as try him for his various serious probable offenses against the rule of law.

Of all of Trump’s offenses against the Constitution, public order, morality, and decency, his compulsive and relentless falsification of basic facts may be the worst. But this offense has a handmaiden: his deliberate and relentless effort to conceal the truth.

Trump has taken extraordinary measures to conceal his college grades and test scores, as well as the details of his business dealings. Why do you think that is? Could it really be that his academic records portray him as a “very stable genius,” or that his tax returns—filed under penalty of perjury and designed to minimize his taxes—would paint him as an honest billionaire who never cuts corners or deals with shady foreign banks?

If so, then why doesn’t he make these records public voluntarily, as presidents after Nixon have done with their own tax returns? Could it be that his business affairs, if known in detail, would reveal him to be as much of a low-life as the rest of his public record does?

As the state of his domicile until recently, New York at least has control of his state tax records. True, there are federal financial privacy laws and laws that protect taxpayers. But Trump’s is a special case. There has probably never been, and there is unlikely ever to be again, a case in which the First Amendment so cries out for truth and accuracy in portraying a man—a president, no less—whose life and career is such a matter of public interest and subject to such spirited dispute.

Trump has built his house of cards on a foundation of falsehoods, deceit, and burying the truth. That house is starting to fall already, under the impact of investigating a single (albeit extended) incident: his apparent attempt to coerce Ukraine’s president to aid Trump’s political campaign. Maybe New York can make his tax returns public and reveal the full extent of his falsehoods, deceit and truth burial regarding his corrupt business career.

Then Trump’s house of cards and lies will collapse at last, and we Americans can get on with our damaged but still promising lives. However high the legal barriers may seem, it’s a project worth pursuing, in both criminal and civil courts.

The case against Rudy Giuliani is much easier. If there ever were a once-professional lawyer who’s gone rogue, it is he. He made his reputation prosecuting Mafiosi, including those who share his Italian heritage. Yet in “Ukrainegate” he has reportedly acted like a Mafioso himself, conveying and pushing threats to a foreign leader that have nothing to do with our national security and everything to do with domestic politics.

It’s immaterial whether Giuliani violated campaign-finance laws by seeking something of value (investigation of the Bidens) from a foreign country (Ukraine) to aid a political campaign (Trump’s). It’s also immaterial whether he violated the spirit and/or the letter of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause.

For lawyers are held to a higher standard than the rest of us. At least they used to be. The ethical canons of the legal profession require lawyers to do more than just refrain from committing crimes. They require the highest standards of ethics, probity, candor and decency, as befits what we used to call “officers of the court.”

Occasionally lawyers and other well-connected people serve as informal emissaries in aid of our foreign policy. But that’s not what Giuliani reportedly did. He reportedly served as Trump’s Mafia capo, took charge of the effort to bully Ukraine’s president into helping Trump’s campaign, intimidated duly appointed foreign-policy officers and staff (over whom he had no legal authority), and even secured an ambassador’s firing. And all for the purposes of advancing a president’s personal and private political goals.

It would be hard to find a more extreme case of choosing wrong over right and trampling over proper and lawful procedure. That’s not what lawyers are supposed to do, or what their ethical canons require. If lawyers can be disbarred for stealing a few thousand dollars from their clients, how about helping a rogue president violate campaign finance laws, subvert our Constitution and undermine our foreign policy and the agencies and officers duly charged to carry it out?

New York City and State made Donald Trump. They have given us the worst and most patently corrupt president in our history, one who makes Warren G. Harding look like a saint. The least New York can do, now that its monster spawn has repudiated it, is to help the winds of truth, right and change blow his house of cards and lies down.

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What if Warren is the One?

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll of Democratic-leaning voters nationwide presents an enigma [Item 13, about halfway through summary]. A plurality of these voters sees Elizabeth Warren as having the “sharpest mental ability” of leading Democratic candidates. A much bigger plurality thinks Sanders is not “in good enough overall health to serve as president.” [Item 14].

Sanders and Biden would each turn 80 within two years of becoming president. A plurality of these voters thinks Sanders is the “the most honest and trustworthy” and “best understands the problems of people” like them. Yet a strong plurality of 42% still thinks Biden has the best chance to beat Trump.

Isn’t there a bit of a contradiction here? If Sanders is most honest and sympathetic but too unhealthy, and if both he and Biden are too old, isn’t Warren the only viable leading candidate? If she is the smartest and most strategic of the lot, as many people (including me) believe, isn’t she the best as well? Isn’t Warren, who just turned 70 this summer, also the youngest and most vigorous of the candidates leading now?

What if the “electability” issue is simply a cover for Democratic-leaning voters’ insecurity and fuzzy thinking?

What if these voters, including a huge chunk of women, are still just reeling from Hillary’s unexpected loss? What if most of them still haven’t come to grips with Hillary’s deficiencies?

What if they haven’t yet seen Warren, who knows and tells precisely how Wall Street has corrupted and failed us, as nothing like Hillary, who made millions by speaking to Wall Street in secret? What if voters have yet to remember that Hillary described herself as befuddled by politics, while Warren forthrightly describes herself as a “capitalist” who just wants to bring back rules of the game that are fair and give the little guy and gal a chance?

Until a male mentor realized how talented Warren is, she was well into her adulthood. No one would ever have predicted that she would become a distinguished professor of law at Harvard and later the most promising female candidate for president ever. She rose from the lower-middle-class masses in Oklahoma, of all places. She rose out of nothing and nowhere, by dint of her intelligence, wisdom and hard work. Isn’t that what we all used to call “merit”?

Which brings us back to the sorry, sordid, stupefying gender “issue.” Yes, our species’ evolution from alpha-male-dominated clans has made female supreme leaders extremely rare. But two of the best leaders in human history have been women: ancient Egypt’s Queen Hatshepsut and England’s Queen Elizabeth I.

Queen Hatshepsut took took a religion-heavy hierarchy and turned it toward a more secular, rational nation based on commerce and cooperation. Queen Elizabeth I did even more: she took an island nation riven by internecine warfare and assassinations and turned it into the thriving trade-, law- and science-based culture that still, despite Brexit and Trump, inspires the world.

Remember Barack Obama? Remember how, from the very beginning, he was the best candidate? Remember how everyone worried that the US could never elect a “black” man as president? Remember how surprised everyone was when he won?

What if Warren is just like that? What if worry about electability is not a cover for near-universal and deep-rooted sexism, but a genuine, honest but misguided fear? What if most Dems want to vote for Warren because she is the smartest, most strategic and youngest leading candidate but honestly think that others won’t?

What if, in short, the “electability” issue vanishes like a whiff of putrid cigarette smoke after Warren wins Iowa and New Hampshire and makes a strong showing, if not first place, in South Carolina? Isn’t that just what happened with Obama?

More than that. What if being a woman is actually an advantage? What if voters want somebody totally unprecedented in order to shake things up? What if that still-unsatisfied craving was part of what elected Obama, with his dual racial heritage and funny name? What if that’s what helped elect Trump himself? What if Trump’s total lack of experience, his brutal and stupid honesty, and the other aspects of his “uniqueness” actually made him an attractive candidate, especially as compared to Hillary, who was practically an establishment mannikin?

What if, after Obama’s clean and honest but only partially effective presidency, and after Trump’s raucous and crazy failure to do anything but corrupt us and enrich the rich, voters still want someone to shake things up and drain the swamp? Then mightn’t being a woman with a firm but gentle hand actually help? After three years of ego-driven testosterone-crazed chaos, might a woman’s steady and nurturing hand be just the thing?

What if Warren is just the right person, at just the right time in history, to put this badly derailed nation back on track? What if she personally is just at the peak of her intelligence, experience and wisdom? What if her candidacy is an avalanche just starting to gather mass and speed? What if the mainstream media are subconsciously underrating her, using the elusive test of “electability,” for fear she might jog their bosses, the oligarchs, from their privileged roosts?

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