Bullies - I'm Against Them

This week all the talk is about Will Smith bounding up to the Oscar stage and slapping Chris Rock. Chris had joked about Will’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, who suffers hair loss due to alopecia areata. The joke was in very poor taste, and I confess I didn’t get it since it was based on Demi Moore’s shaved head in G I Jane which I have long forgotten about.

But, just food for thought, I wonder if Will Smith would have delivered the slap if the joke teller had been a different Rock, like, say Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson.

 

 

If you figure he wouldn’t have, which is the way I figure it, the whole thing comes down to bullying.

 

Bullies create most of humanity’s problems. These days, two of the world’s creepiest bullies – Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump –  are behind two of the world’s worst current problems. Number one is the war in Ukraine which has its roots in Vladimir Putin’s neurotic self-loathing. Putin is such a loser that, upon hearing Angela Merkel had a fear of dogs, he made it a point to have a large, black dog in the room with them when they met. He’s a pathetic case, but, with Russia’s military power at his disposal, his twisted nature is making life harrowing and painful for thousands of Ukrainians. Also, for thousands of Russians, apparently, as front-line Russian soldiers are beginning to show reluctance to attack the determined Ukrainian defenders.

 

Even more neurotic than Putin is Trump, a man [sic] who can’t even accept that 81 million Americans voted him out of office two years ago. As he thrashes recklessly around, throwing out preposterous accusations of a rigged election, he undermines Americans’ confidence in our democracy and so he undermines America itself.

 

I have always had a thing about bullies, and that thing is contempt. Ever since I was a child, I have despised people who belittle, steal from, or crush others just because they feel they have the power to do so. Which brings me back to the Will Smith question. He seemed to think he had the power to smack Chris Rock, but what about that other Rock?

 

Well, I’ll let this go for now. Smith had the decency to apologize for his actions, eventually even to Chris. So, he’s clearly a better person than either Putin or Trump. But then, so is almost everybody else.

 

Democrats versus Putinistas

I watched enough of the Democratic debate last Wednesday to see Elizabeth Warren beat up Mike Bloomberg and to see Amy Klobuchar show her irritable side to Pete Buttigieg. This was the feistiest debate of the season and quite a few observers fell back on the “circular firing squad” metaphor to describe it. Nonetheless, all the participants did survive, some a bit more wounded than others.

Bloomberg took the heaviest hits. If you believe Elizabeth Warren - and you’d be foolish not to – Mike Bloomberg is a racially insensitive old codger who talks about women as though he were a crude, arrogant jock in a 1950s locker room. Bloomberg’s failure to handle the  criticism from Warren, Bernie and other fellow Democrats [editor’s note: Bloomberg is a Democrat these days] was telling. Just as damaging as his stop-and-frisk policy and his misogyny were his total failure to prepare convincing responses to criticisms that a blind man could see coming. Why didn’t his team prepare him more effectively to counter these attacks?

Part of the answer, I believe, was revealed in comments by Andrew Yang who, having dropped out of the race, is now a commentator for CNN. Yang, whom I very much admire, seems not at all hostile to Mike Bloomberg, but he pointed out that the mayor can be resistant to change. Things did not go well for Mike during visits to Iowa and New Hampshire when he first planned to enter the race. He gradually realized that to succeed in those states, he was going to have to spend hours hanging out with anyone who wanted to talk to him, chatting in local cafes and people’s living rooms in order to win them over one by one. He decided that was not his thing and switched to his strategy of aiming for Super Tuesday delegates by swamping the media with thousands and thousands of ads that make him look like a capable leader who is best buds with Barack Obama. In other words, he decided to buy the nomination. I do not hate him for this, though it does make me think that our electoral processes need…some tweaking?

Maybe Bloomberg’s motto should be “I don’t have time for you, but vote for me, cuz…look at all my money!”

Let me be clear: If Bloomberg gets the nomination, I will vote for him in a New York minute.

Another point Andrew Yang made as a CNN discussant was that Bloomberg’s people (he has a lot of people) were calling donors encouraging them not to support other Democrats now that Bloomberg is on the rise. Yang knows this because one of his donors told him he had received such a call. It’s not clear that Bloomberg’s campaign to cut off his rivals’ funds is working, but it is true that some candidates are so strapped for cash that they may well drop out within a couple of weeks. This is true of Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and Warren. Bernie is doing well with his army of enthusiastic small-scale donors. Biden could also be in trouble. However, if he does quite well in the South Caroline primary (February 29), and particularly if Bloomberg continues to look like an arrogant jerk, Joe may start to attract donors who have been skeptical up till now.

But the upshot of all this is that the Democratic convention might be contested. If I were going to predict - and at this point why not? – I would say some combination of Bernie, Bloomberg, and Biden will roll into Milwaukee with significant delegates, but none with a majority. The rules, to which Bernie objects these days, say that the nomination will go to whichever candidate can garner a majority of delegates. On the first ballot, when delegates are pledged to abide by their primary voters’ preferences, there are 3,979 available delegates and a majority would be 1,990. If nobody wins a majority on the first ballot (quite likely, the way things are going), delegates are released from their pledges and can vote as they please. Plus, about 800 more “super delegates” will now be eligible, and these are likely to be traditional Democrats, more sympathetic to a Joe Biden or Amy Klobuchar than to Bernie. Of course, Bernie’s enthusiastic army of supporters can’t be dismissed, and neither can Bloomberg’s billions, so, a contested convention could be a very newsworthy event. But not, let us hope, a suicidal bloodletting.

Sixty years ago, in July of 1960, I was at Boy Scout camp during that year’s dramatic Democratic convention. My family was Republican, so I wasn’t excited about it, but all the other guys in our cabin were and they anxiously watched the delegate count as it stacked up throughout the evening. John Kennedy was favored to win, but Lyndon Johnson had threatened to block him on the first ballot. If Johnson had succeeded in blocking Kennedy, LBJ might well have won on a second ballot vote. However, when the last state, Wyoming, cast all of its 15 votes for Kennedy, JFK was over the top with his majority and my cabin went crazy with joy. That was the first time I witnessed the effects of Kennedy’s charisma. My Boy Scout buddies were besotted with it. In any case, the good news is that despite the bitter struggle between Johnson and Kennedy, they united at the convention and went on to win the White House.

No matter who gets the Democratic nomination, I hope from the bottom of my weary and battered heart that he or she will pull the party together and win the election. 

The incompetent crook now occupying the White House has recently dismissed his Director of National Intelligence, after he was told by that DNI that Putin is once again interfering in our election and, as in 2016, trying to help Trump win. The fired DNI has been replaced with Richard Grenell, a devoted Trumpian utterly lacking in experience in intelligence. I’m tempted to add “and utterly lacking in intelligence,” but, to be fair, I know little about this particular Trumpian.

Putin to Trump: “You keep your base fired up while I handle these other trouble-makers.”

So here we are, America, the Democrats – including, among others, Bernie the Independent Democratic Socialist, Bloomberg, the former Republican, and Joe the holding-on-for-dear-life traditionalist – are banging away at each other, while Trump works on his swagger. Meanwhile, back in the Kremlin, Trump’s soulmate concocts ever more fiendish schemes aimed at poisoning our democracy.

But, we can handle this, America, am I right?

World War III - It's On

About one hundred years ago, Germany’s leaders, then at war with Russia, decided to undermine the Russian government by infecting it with the political equivalent of a dread disease. To do this, they put Vladimir Ilyich Lenin on a train and sent him off to Petrograd. According to British historian Edward Crankshaw, the Germans saw Lenin as “one more bacillus to let loose in tottering and exhausted Russia to spread infection.” The German scheme worked. Within a year Lenin took over Russia and pulled out of the war against Germany.

And now Putin, it seems, has followed the German example by helping put Trump in control of the U.S. Will Putin’s plan work as well as the Germans’ scheme worked a century ago? And, by the way, given Putin’s hatred of the U.S., why are so many Republicans loyally supporting Donald Trump, a leader whom Putin, by his own words, wanted to see in the White House? Where does your ultimate loyalty lie, Republicans – with the U.S. or with the GOP? Or are you just throwing our well-being under the bus for the sake of your personal careers?

German meddling in Russia in 1917 and Russia meddling in the U.S. today are not perfect parallels. Lenin neutralized Russia and helped Germany in World War I through his political acumen, while Trump has strengthened Russia’s hand by virtue of his incompetence and his contempt for democracy.

Evidence for Trump’s anti-democratic sentiments is everywhere, but just as an example, let’s highlight one minor clue to this point. Last June when Putin had declared that Western liberal democracy was obsolete, Trump, in a news conference in Osaka, Japan, utterly failed to defend democracy. Instead he went off on a bizarre rant about the Democratic party in California.

Here’s an excerpt from Trump’s response when he was asked about Putin’s claim that “Western-style liberalism is obsolete.”

TRUMP: Well, I mean he may feel that way. He’s sees what’s going on, I guess, if you look at what’s happening in Los Angeles, where it’s so sad to look, and what’s happening in San Francisco and a couple of other cities, which are run by an extraordinary group of liberal people.

What an idiot.

But more to the point, what a pathetic excuse for a defender of American values. He apparently doesn’t know what Putin and other authoritarians mean when they use the phrase “western liberalism.”

Note to Trump: It means democracy and you are failing to defend it.

We can think of the democratic alliance as including North American, European, and Pacific rim democracies like Japan and Australia, as well as those nations in Latin America, Africa, and Asia whose governments embody “Western-style liberalism.” Traditionally, the U.S. has played a central role in this liberal-democratic coalition, but today, with Trump in the White House, it cannot. And, consequently, the entire coalition is starting to come loose. God help us if it falls apart completely.

What we are about to face is a kind of World War III. This war will most likely not involve massive armies and navies maneuvering across oceans and continents. It will be focused on cyber warfare and a general struggle for influence through economic means and control of information. Trump, who is widely despised in the world at large, is not a positive force on the side of democracy in this struggle. Quite the opposite.

Democracy’s main adversary these days is not Putin, but rather Chinese President Xi Jinping. Like Putin, Xi Jinping hopes to see democracy decline. China’s rapid economic growth and increasingly aggressive international posture has made it the primary opposition to the worldwide spread of democracy. If the American-led coalition of democracies holds together, the anti-democratic push of Xi Jinping will fail. But if the coalition falls apart, as it has been starting to do under Trump, Chinese authoritarianism will most likely prevail.

The ideal scenario right now, as I see it, is for Trump to be replaced in January 2021 by a leader who believes in America’s traditional role as a leading defender of institutions like freedom of the press, independent judiciaries, and national leaders who are accountable to voters. With such an American leader, and, given enough time, Xi Jinping’s (and Putin’s) war against democracy will probably fail.

Since World War II, the world’s democracies have generally held the high ground, both morally and economically. I realize I have to disregard, for the sake of this brief argument, a host of bad actions by the western democracies. But I hope a brief mention of colonialism, Vietnam, and Iraq will suffice for the moment as acknowledgement of this bad behavior. But even given these sins, I believe the world will be much better served in the future if “Western-style liberalism” holds its own against the current authoritarian thrust.

A better world would be one in which China, Russia, and other governments join the established democracies on the high ground and we all find issues to argue about that do not include “whether or not individuals should be jailed or murdered for criticizing their leaders.” Such a world is not an impossibility, but it can only come into being when Donald Trump, with all his moral and intellectual failings, gets out of the way.