Thursday, September 3, 2020
The Platform
Statesman, yet friend to truth! of soul sincere, In action faithful, and in honor clear; Who broke no promise, served no private end, Who gain’d no title, and who lost no friend.— Alexander Pope, Moral Essays, letter to Mr. Addison
It is impossible to consider the entire document. It is, after all, 81 pages in length. But having created such a monumental document only four years ago, it’s easy to see why the Republicans in charge of such things did not want to waste their time and effort creating another one that might, like its predecessor, be in large part ignored. In addition, had it been rewritten it would have been necessary to excise certain sections that would, in light of the events of the last four years, have made the Republican party and the trump look foolish had they remained part of the platform. And preparing a new platform with the embarrassing sections removed, would have drawn attention to the trump’s many failures. What the platform sets forth as aspirational remains aspirational and, thus, became fodder for the trump’s nomination acceptance speech.
In the section of the platform entitled: “America Resurgent,” one of the subsections is: “A Dangerous World.” That section lists places in the world that need stabilization. One of the listed places is the United States. The platform states that the United States faced: “a national security crisis, and only by electing a Republican to the White House will we restore law and order to our land and safety to our citizens.” That part of the platform was ignored during the trump tenure as recent events show, thus making it possible for him to say in his acceptance speech in late August that: “Your vote will decide whether we protect law-abiding Americans or whether we give free rein to violent anarchists, agitators and criminals who threaten our citizens. And this election will decide whether we will defend the American way of life or whether we allow a radical movement to completely dismantle and destroy it.”
In addressing U.S. Leadership in the Pacific, the platform said, of Taiwan: “As a loyal friend of America, Taiwan has merited our strong support, including free trade agreement status, the timely sale of defensive arms including technology to build diesel submarines, and full participation in the World Health Organization, International Civil Aviation Organization, and other multilateral institutions.” Since the trump announced the United States’ withdrawal from the World Health Organization on July 7, 2020, reference to Taiwan being able to join the WHO would seem to be no longer relevant.
Another part of the 2016 platform falls under the heading of “Reducing the Federal Debt.” In that section the authors state: “We must impose firm caps on future debt, accelerate the repayment of the trillions we now owe in order to reaffirm our principles of responsible and limited government , and remove the burdens we are placing on future generations. . . . Spending restraint is a necessary component that must be vigorously pursued.” In the section entitled “Balancing the Budget” the authors observe that: “The current Administration’s refusal to work with Republicans took our national debt from $10 trillion to nearly $19 trillion today. Left unchecked it will hit $30 trillion by 2026.” Thanks to the spending restraint that the trump vigorously pursued, the national debt is expected to get to $30 trillion a year sooner than the platform said it would if the democrats remained in charge. On September 3, 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported that “the U.S. debt had reached its highest level compared to the size of the economy since World War II and is projected to exceed it next year. . . .” This gives the trump yet an opportunity to demonstrate his skill and bring it down to where the Republican 2016 platform thought it should be.
There is one section of the platform that, to everyone’s surprise, still applies, although during much of the four-year trump rule, none would have thought that would be the case. In the section entitled “U.S. Leadership in the Asian Pacific” the platform says the “United States will continue to demand the complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program with full accounting of its proliferation activities. We also pledge to counter any threats from the North Korean regime.”
Notwithstanding that unfriendly tone and the trump’s UN speech in which he referred to Kim Jong Un as “Little Rocket Man,” within a year they had a wonderfully friendly and almost rapturous encounter in Singapore. Before that meeting, the trump said he anticipated a “terrific relationship” with Kim and after that meeting Trump described the correspondence that followed saying: “He wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters,” At a September 2018 rally in West Virginia the trump said euphorically: “We fell in love.” As probably occurred in many of trump’s relationships, falling in love can be transitory. A subsequent meeting in Hanoi was less cordial and the love affair seems to be, as often happens to trump, over. Hence the 2016 platform language remained valid and would have needed neither emendation nor elimination.
The platform was, of course, aspirational. What is now aspirational is the hope that in four months the trump presidency will follow in the steps of the platform-past, and irrelevant for the future.
Thursday, August 20, 2020
The Pejorative and the trump
Sticks and stones can break my bones
But words can never hurt me. —Children’s Saying
All of us can remember the days of our youth when we would seek out words and expressions to express annoyance at those who had given offense. In many cases the parties needing remonstrance were siblings, and in some cases, one or both parents by whom we had been admonished or otherwise dealt with in a manner that we, as the child in the event, felt needed to be harshly addressed.
Although each person’s recollection of childhood will bring to mind different words used to address an offending party, in a more innocent time we were forced to use words that in most cases were words that by today’s standard would not be considered adequate to express outrage. It was before the time when the asterisk had ascended to the role of censor.
(The ascendancy of the asterisk is attributable to today’s common usage of words that when reported in reputable publications in days gone by could not appear without the asterisk serving as a buffer between the word and the reader’s sense of propriety.)
In this writer’s experience as a child, when really exasperated with a parent and wanting to let the parent know of the displeasure the offending parent had evoked, the most effective response that could be mustered was to let the parent know that he or she was a “skunk.” Such remonstration would on occasion prompt the appearance of a soap filled washcloth with which to cleanse the speaker’s mouth, but by today’s standards that particular word is not an example of how to meaningfully address an offending parent. For that, the small child has now been provided a tutor.
The tutor is someone who in calendar years has long since left the small child realm, but in mental development has never progressed beyond at most the 7-year level. The tutor is, of course, none other than the trump.
The trump’s use of the pejorative will someday be recorded as an example of the most interesting thing he accomplished while living in the White House-the degradation of the English language. Examples, of course, abound, and the small child will, as he or she develops his or her reading skill, learn to decide which words best describe an offending parent. Some helpful examples may be what the trump said about Kamala Harris following her selection by Joe Biden as his running mate.
Within a few hours after being named, the trump described her as “the meanest,” and “extraordinarily nasty” person without, however, offering evidence of how she had earned that status. In that same initial assessment of her personality he said she was “angry,” and in a fund-raising e mail called her “the meanest senator.” He also said that during the debates in the primary season she was “nastier than Pocahontas” to vice president Biden. For the child looking for something to say about an annoying parent, deciding to hurl that particular insult at a parent could be a good learning experiment because the child will have to study a bit of history to learn why Pocahontas was considered nasty.
Of course Senator Harris is simply one in what is an endless stream of name calling by the trump. That is because there are hundreds of people the trump dislikes, many of whom he liked for a brief period but, suffering from an attention deficit disorder, soon tired of. John Bolton is a good example.
In 2018 the trump made John Bolton his National Security Adviser. In a rally in Knoxville, TN, following Bolton’s appointment, the trump pointed him out to the crowd identifying him as “the great John Bolton.” He went on in his praise saying: “They think he’s so nasty and so tough that I have to hold him back, OK?” Less than 2 years later the trump fired him. He called Mr. Bolton “wacko” “incompetent” and a “boring fool who only wanted to go to war.” In a tweet he said, among other things: “What a dope.”
Other examples of trump invective abound. Jeb Bush was “Low Energy.” A child might find that effective when addressing a parent who outside the home has an important job. A few of the adjectives used to describe Hillary Clinton might also be useful when addressing an offending mother. Trump called her, among hundreds of other things, “crazy”, “Crooked” “Lying” “Heartless” and “skank” although the meaning of the last is unclear so the young should probably avoid it or do research before employing it. Other names he has used include weirdo, goofy, crazy, etc.
Not all of these pejoratives will fit into a small child’s mind who is seeking retribution for a perceived parental offense, but it will help the child understand the nature of the effective retort. Having the trump model in mind, the creative young child will, after reading this, get the idea and will certainly be able to conjure up more words to use to deal with specific situations.
For the trump’s tutelage in the world of insults, small children can be grateful. For the rest of us, such instruction does nothing to compensate for the trump’s daily presence in our lives for what now seems like an endless four years.
Thursday, August 13, 2020
WSJ Redux
Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines.
— Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts
The month of July was an interesting month for two newspapers in different parts of the world with, in at least one respect, similar outcomes.
The first was reported in The Guardian on July 24, 2020. On that date it was announced that at Index, the only remaining major independent news outlet in Hungary, the editorial board and dozens of reporters had resigned two days after the editor-in-chief was fired as a result of what was perceived by those who resigned as “political interference” Some of those who left had been with the paper for more than 18 years. According to reports, the resignations were the result of the firing two days earlier of its editor-in-chief, Szabolcs Dull. In announcing their departure, the journalists who left the paper published an open letter on their website in which they said, (according to a translation provided by The Guardian) that: “The editorial board deemed that the conditions for independent operation are no longer in place and have initiated the termination of their employment.” More than 70 members of the editorial staff, including all the desk editors at the paper, left the paper on July 24.
The Index is not the Wall Street Journal. And no WSJ reporters left the paper in a protest. But there were similarities between the two papers during the week of July 19, 2020.
On July 23, 2020, more than 280 reporters, editors, and other employees at the WSJ submitted a letter to Almar Latour, the newspaper’s publisher. The letter writers expressed concern with what was described by them as a “casual relationship with facts which could causes problems with sources” in editorials and articles that appeared in the opinion section of the paper. Unlike the Hungarian newspaper people, they were not referring to the presentation of the news but to the facts as presented in the editorials that regularly appear in the WSJ.
According to a report of the letter in Vanity Fair, the letter says that many opinion pieces published in the WSJ contain factual errors or distortions of the truth. According to the letter, “Opinion’s lack of fact-checking and transparency, and its apparent disregard for evidence, undermine our readers’ trust and our ability to gain credibility with sources.” The letter also said that fact and opinion should be more closely identified rather than being mingled as, the letter writers allege, often happens on the editorial page side.
When news of the letter became public, Mr. Latour, to whom it had been addressed, said in response that: “We are proud that we separate news and opinion at the Wall Street Journal and remain deeply committed to fact-based and clearly labeled reporting and opinion writing. . . .” His response made it clear that he did not believe the concerns of the 280 letter writers had any merit.
Not content with the Latour response, three days after the letter’s existence became known, and Mr. Latour had responded, an editorial appeared in the WSJ entitled: “A note to readers.” The editorial observed that “In the spirit of collegiality we won’t respond in kind to the letter signers.” That was another way of saying that nothing in the letter was of sufficient importance or merit to require any kind of response from the editorial page side of the paper. and, therefore, no response to the letter was necessary. Instead of addressing the concern expressed by the letter that editorials frequently confuse fact and fiction, the rebuttal editorial, such as it was, suggested that the readers of the paper were better observers of the opinion page than the letters signers. It said it was “gratified this week by the outpouring of support from readers after some 280 of our Wall Street Journal colleagues signed . . . a letter to our publisher criticizing the opinion pages.” The editorial defense concluded saying that the opinion pages: “offer an alternative to the uniform progressive views that dominate nearly all of today’s media,” thus apparently justifying the 280’s concern that fact and fiction often present themselves with equal force in the WSJ editorials.
Although the staff in the newsroom did not leave the paper over its concern with the political slant and fact distortion presented in the opinion columns, at least one prominent person put his money where the newsroom’s mouths had been. He had a different take from the writer of the editorial who relied on an “outpouring of support from readers” to rebut the letter writers.
The week after the stories and editorial appeared James Murdoch, the son of Rupert who had served on the board of News Corp, the entity that owns the WSJ, resigned from the board. In his letter of resignation he mirrored in part what the 280 had said: “My resignation is due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.” Whatever influence he may have had over the paper, his departure almost certainly disappoints the 280 as well as many WSJ readers. It will almost certainly have no affect on the editorial page writers.