The Rise of "Revisionist" America

One of the numerous things that drives me to distraction is the ignorance of much of the American population when it comes to know accurate and true history, both of America's own past but perhaps even more so of the world at large. Hand in hand with this phenomenon is the inability of a startling number of Americans to identify countries in the world if given a blank map.  This ignorance sets the stage for revisionist ranging from Neo-Confederates who continue the lie that slavery was not the cause of the American Civil War to the Christofascists who push the myth that America was founded as a "Christian nation." If one is utterly ignorant of history - which too often gets short shrift in American public education -  the stage is set for a population easily duped by demagogues and liars  - a description that applies not only to Neo-Confederates, Christofacsist, and much of the Republican Party, but also to the liar-in-chief in the White House.  A piece in The Atlantic  looks at revisionist history being pushed by Trump and his enablers.  Here are highlights:

H. R. McMaster, Donald Trump’s former national-security adviser, used to warn of the dangers of “revisionist powers.” He had in mind countries like China and Russia that are newly ascendant and determined to amend to their advantage the global status quo: a decades-old, U.S.-led international system of free trade, military and diplomatic alliances, and liberal rules and institutions that govern how countries conduct themselves. But [Trump's] the U.S. president’s recent Europe trip, which whisked him from a confrontational breakfast with the secretary general of NATO to a conciliatory lunch with the president of Russia, made one thing clearer than it’s ever been before: The call is also coming from inside the house. Trump is a revisionist, even if many of his advisers may still conceive of the United States as the world’s leading status-quo power.

Trump’s revisionist streak was on display in Belgium when the president reportedly threatened to reconsider America’s involvement in NATO if the military alliance’s members don’t spend far more on their own defense. When Fox News’s Tucker Carlson questioned this week why the United States should be obligated to defend another NATO member if it came under attack—the commitment at the very heart of the alliance—[Trump] the president shook his head in disbelief and responded, “I understand what you’re saying. I’ve asked the same question … That’s the way it was set up. Don’t forget, I just got here a little more than a year and a half ago.” The implication was that he needed more time to shake things up.

The streak was on display in the United Kingdom, when Trump actively encouraged defection from the European Union by offering Britain a trade deal with the United States only on the condition that it make a clean break with the EU.

“We are cracking down right now on the European Union,” he told The Sun, in reference to the raft of tariffs he has imposed or threatened to impose on the bloc. He argued, as he has since the 1980s, that in certain ways traditional U.S. allies pose a greater threat to the country than longtime adversaries because they are essentially friendly pickpockets: exploiting America’s military protection and preferential treatment on trade to get rich at the expense of the United States. 

And it was on display in Finland, . . . At a joint press conference, [Trump] the American president refused to take Russia to task for interfering in democratic elections, or even to call out any specific instance of Russian bad behavior—be it committing and abetting atrocities in Syria or allegedly ordering the poisoning of a former Russian spy with a nerve agent in Britain. . . . Instead, Trump blamed rotten relations with Russia on “many years of U.S. foolishness. 

But whatever you call it—a reset, strategic renovation, or America First revisionism—Trump’s agenda of upending the international status quo is reorienting the United States as an actor in the world, even if [Trump's] the U.S. president’s ambitious plans have often been frustrated by resistance from his own advisers, Congress, and the inertia of a global system that the United States has invested in for decades. 

And if three of the world’s top powers—the United States, China, and Russia—are all acting like revisionists, that suggests the world is poised to change a whole lot, even as U.S. allies such as the European Union, Canada, and Japan strive to uphold the status quo. . . . At the moment, Europe “is not strong enough to uphold this system by itself,” Belin continued. It “still needs big allies like the U.S.”

Be very afraid.  America and the world is rapidly moving towards the same unstable international framework that set the stage for WWI and WWI - not that Trump and his Fox News viewing base have a clue of how dangerous this path will be.  They merely enjoy being the petulant bully that "shakes things up" with no long view of what they are potentially doing to themselves of the nation.  Ignorance is not always bliss. 

Job Losses From Trump’s Ill-conceived Tariffs Begin

I will admit that I have difficulty feeling any sympathy for Trump voters who are beginning to reap what they sowed when they threw away decency and morality and voted for the malignant narcissist in the White House who ignores the advice of true experts and instead believes the world is a zero sum game and listens to nasty Christofascists and white supremacists.  Many of these voters are finding their health care coverage disappearing or their premiums soaring.  Now, some are beginning to lose their jobs as a result of the bully-in-chief's ill-conceived tariffs and trade war.  Things will likely get worse for them and their dilemma at some point will be whether to continue to put Trump's calls to racially inspired hatred ahead of common sense. Given the actions and statements of some of our "friends" who voted for Trump, I suspect it will be the former - its as if they've had lobotomies and can no longer see reason or even common decency.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the first job losses coming home to roost.  Here are excerpts:

The first casualties of President Trump’s trade war are 60 workers at Mid-Continent Nail, America’s largest nail manufacturer. They lost their jobs on June 15 at a factory in a part of Missouri that voted overwhelmingly for Trump. The whole company could be out of business by Labor Day.

This is a potential game changer in Trump’s trade strategy, especially if it marks the start of more companies announcing layoffs. On Monday, Harley-Davidson said it will be moving some “production” offshore because of the trade war (Europe hit Harley with a 31 percent tariff in response to Trump’s steel tariffs on Europe). Harley won’t confirm whether jobs are leaving the United States, but the union representing many Harley workers, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, is worried.

The Trump administration has argued that these tariffs will save jobs and that the cost to America will be minor. But now there are real job losses. Now there is a human face to the pain that so many trade experts have been warning about.In Missouri, a state with a close U.S. Senate race, the layoffs are already becoming a hot election issue. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) is planning a visit to the nail plant on Friday.

Mid-Continent Nail blames the layoffs on Trump’s tariffs, and the company says all 500 employees could lose their jobs by Labor Day.

The next round of cuts could come in a matter of days.The trouble for the company started at the end of May when Trump put a hefty 25 percent tariff on steel imports from Mexico and Canada. Mid-Continent had been importing steel from Mexico that American workers would then turn into nails.

After the tariff, the company was forced to hike its prices, and customers fled. Orders are a mere 30 percent of what they were a year ago, said George Skarich, the vice president of sales. He suspects many customers are now buying Chinese nails.

The workers who lost their jobs on June 15 were contract workers paid about $10 an hour, but the next round of layoffs will hit longtime employees, many of whom are making $13 to $14 an hour, plus benefits. That's a middle-class job in Poplar Bluff, where the median income is just over $31,000 a year.

[T]he vast majority of economists and business leaders have warned that many more jobs are likely to be lost than saved.

The Tax Foundation predicts 48,585 job losses from the tariffs Trump has already enacted on imports of washing machines, solar panels, steel, aluminum and $50 billion in Chinese products. That figure would soar to over 250,000 job losses if Trump moves forward with tariffs on another $200 billion of Chinese products, the Tax Foundation said.

[S]ome parts of the country are likely to be hit hard. Europe, Canada, Turkey and China are targeting their tariffs at towns that voted for Trump.the situation in Missouri is a warning sign of how the tariffs are helping some workers and harming others, and that's tricky politics for Trump, who looks as though he is picking winners and losers.

[Trump’s] focus has been on saving jobs that make raw steel and aluminum, but there are many more jobs that are harmed by the tariffs because they turn raw metal into something else, such as a car or airplane. The longer the tariffs are in place, the more companies are likely to have to make cuts.Experts have warned Trump that the tariffs are likely to cause more job losses than jobs saved, and the early signs of that are starting to play out in small towns south of St. Louis.  As the job losses mount, so may the pressure on Trump.

Fall of the American Empire; the GOP's New Katrina

Thousands dying in Puerto Rico due to the Trump/Pence regime's failure to provide adequate hurricane relief seemingly failed to force far too many Americans to recognize the monster who had been elevated to the White House.  Thankfully, now - although at horrible human cost - the hideous force family separations going on at the nation's southwest border (Trump plans to double down on the barbarism) seem to be belatedly forcing recognize that Trump's election has triggered a national emergency while at the same time showing once and for all that the Republican Party is the party of cruelty and racial hatred.  The irony is that Trump's mind dead, racist and religious extremist base believes Trump is "making America great again" even as he destroys the country's moral standing in the world and is unraveling trade policies and alliances which will only diminish America economically.  One can only hope and pray - if one still believes in prayer - that the daily horrors will convince decent moral Americans and Hispanics in particular that they must turn out as never before and vote to defeat Republicans at every level come November 2018. While removing Trump and Pence from office may be difficult, the cancer they represent can be controlled. Two pieces are worthy of note.  One in Politico looks at how the cruelty on display may harm the GOP.  Here are excerpts:

Republicans want to talk about tax cuts. Instead, they’re talking about kids in cages.

Rather than touting lower taxes and a steady job market, House and Senate Republicans are being forced to answer for President Donald Trump’s contentious immigration policies — whether it’s separating migrant kids from their parents, removing DACA protections or building a border wall. And that’s likely bad news heading into November.

[A]s the White House blames Congress for the crisis at the border, GOP lawmakers are struggling to craft a proposal that unites their own party, let alone one that can win bipartisan support and become law. And with no congressional solution in sight, Hill Republicans worry that Trump’s immigration crackdown could swamp their success on the economy and overshadow all the things they want to run on in the midterm elections.

And the renewed focus on immigration is almost all self-inflicted, from Trump’s decision to end the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program to his relentless focus on the border wall to his “zero tolerance” policy for border-crossers, which has already led to more than 2,300 children being separated from their parents.

Hugh Hewitt, a leading conservative media voice, raised the prospect that the family separation crisis could become “the Republicans’ new Katrina and the president’s new Katrina” in an interview with Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) on Monday.

A new Quinnipiac University poll shows that 66 percent of Americans who participated in the survey oppose Trump’s move to separate migrant kids from their parents. But 55 percent of Republicans back the action.

A column in the Washington Post notes in part (take the time to view the picture and see what is being done in the name of every American citizen):

John Moore may have lost the midterm elections for the Republican Party and badly damaged the reelection prospects of President Trump. Moore is the Getty Images photographer who snapped a viral picture of a crying 2-year-old Honduran girl at the U.S.-Mexico border. 

A picture is worth a thousand words, the saying goes. But this one is worth a million tweets. In political consequence, it is like the one taken of President George W. Bush surveying the devastation of Hurricane Katrina— by peering out the window of Air Force One. As Bush himself later acknowledged, the photo made him look “detached and uncaring.” It reinforced his frat-boy image. 

Of course, Trump is nowhere near the crying Honduran girl. But his fingerprints are all over the picture. . . . Moore’s picture is of a very special category — the pain of innocent children. It is reminiscent of the one Nick Ut of the Associated Press took of a 9-year-old Vietnamese girl, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, fleeing a napalm attack in 1972.  

But back to the Politico piece.  Yes, you read the quote correctly: 55% of Republicans support Trump's horrific and cruel policy.  55% of Republicans support this!  Remember this on election day in November.  

As bad as the forced separation policy may be, the larger damage being done to America by the Trump/Pence regime and its Republican enablers is even more pervasive and seems intended to end the pax Americana that has existed for 70 some years.  All so Trump can appear "tough" and "winning" to his morally bankrupt base. Here are excerpts from a column in the New York Times:

The U.S. government is, as a matter of policy, literally ripping children from the arms of their parents and putting them in fenced enclosures (which officials insist aren’t cages, oh no). The U.S. president is demanding that law enforcement stop investigating his associates and go after his political enemies instead. He has been insulting democratic allies while praising murderous dictators. And a global trade war seems increasingly likely.

What do these stories have in common? Obviously they’re all tied to the character of the man occupying the White House, surely the worst human being ever to hold his position. But there’s also a larger context, and it’s not just about Donald Trump. What we’re witnessing is a systematic rejection of longstanding American values — the values that actually made America great.

America has long been a powerful nation. In particular, we emerged from World War II with a level of both economic and military dominance not seen since the heyday of ancient Rome. But our role in the world was always about more than money and guns. It was also about ideals: America stood for something larger than itself — for freedom, human rights and the rule of law as universal principles.

By the end of World War II, we and our British allies had in effect conquered a large part of the world. We could have become permanent occupiers, and/or installed subservient puppet governments, the way the Soviet Union did in Eastern Europe. And yes, we did do that in some developing countries; our history with, say, Iran is not at all pretty.

But what we mainly did instead was help defeated enemies get back on their feet, establishing democratic regimes that shared our core values and became allies in protecting those values.

The Pax Americana was a sort of empire; certainly America was for a long time very much first among equals. But it was by historical standards a remarkably benign empire, held together by soft power and respect rather than force. (There are actually some parallels with the ancient Pax Romana, but that’s another story.) 

[T]he modern world trading system was largely the brainchild not of economists or business interests, but of Cordell Hull, F.D.R.’s long-serving secretary of state, who believed that “prosperous trade among nations” was an essential element in building an “enduring peace.” So you want to think of the postwar creation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade as part of the same strategy that more or less simultaneously gave rise to the Marshall Plan and the creation of NATO.

So all the things happening now are of a piece. Committing atrocities at the border, attacking the domestic rule of law, insulting democratic leaders while praising thugs, and breaking up trade agreements are all about ending American exceptionalism, turning our back on the ideals that made us different from other powerful nations.

And rejecting our ideals won’t make us stronger; it will make us weaker. We were the leader of the free world, a moral as well as financial and military force. But we’re throwing all that away. . . . Trump isn’t making America great again; he’s trashing the things that made us great, turning us into just another bully — one whose bullying will be far less effective than he imagines.

Mexico Hits Back With $3 Billion in Tariffs

The foul occupant of the White House is quickly learning that his bullying on international markets will have a cost as Mexico hits backs with $3 billion in tariffs tailored to hit GOP controlled states the hardest.   As in everything else, Trump views everything as a zero sum game and, like a petulant child - or malignant   Mafia boss - insists on having his way and "winning."  With luck, these tariffs imposed by Mexico along with those imposed by Canada will cause significant economic pain in Trump supporting states where his toxic base will get to experience what "winning" feels like. Yes, I do wish these people ill.  They deserve to reap what they have sown.  Iowa in particular needs to suffer for having thrown away its progressive history and embracing racism and religious extremism as embodied by Trump and his policies. Here are highlights from the Washington Post:

Mexico said it would impose import duties on $3 billion worth of U.S. products, including cheese, bourbon, pork and others, making good on its threats that it would retaliate for U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum.

With its presidential election 26 days away, Mexico’s government imposed a 20 percent tariff on U.S. pork, apples and potatoes and 20 to 25 percent tariffs on cheese and bourbon. Mexico tailored the list of retaliatory duties to hit states governed by senior Republicans, such as the bourbon produced in the home state of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.).

Trump is trying to use the threat of tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, as well as other goods, to force numerous countries to agree to trade concessions. He’s in standoffs with Mexico, Canada, China, Japan and members of the European Union, the largest U.S. trading partner.

In talks in Beijing over the weekend, China offered to buy close to $70 billion in U.S. agriculture, energy and manufacturing products over a year as part of a package meant to ward off U.S. tariffs, according to a senior administration official who was briefed on the talks. . . . even that amount “would not address the underlying, long-run concerns the United States has with China.”

Those include China’s assistance to state-owned enterprises, investment restrictions on foreign firms, forced technology transfer, industrial policy and the protection of intellectual property.

Even with the weekend’s developments, all the trade talks appear to be moving slowly or stalling, leading to angst on Capitol Hill and among business leaders.

Trump and Kudlow are traveling to Quebec this week for a meeting of leaders from seven of the world’s leading economies, and several of those officials have expressed frustration at Trump for his protectionist approach to trade.

A Canadian government official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss diplomatic relations, said there have long been one-on-one talks as part of the NAFTA negotiations but noted that the trade pact is a three-country agreement and that any resolution would require all three countries to sign on together.

Of course, it will not be just Trump supporting states that suffer.  All of us can expect higher consumer prices, especially for cars and trucks. 

Mexico’s Revenge on Trump - and His Supporters

While Donald Trump's attacks on Hispanics and non-whites in general has played well with the most most ignorant - evangelical Christians are the least educated of any religious group in America - and racist/xenophobic elements of his base, the economic results could prove catastrophic if Mexico decides to exact revenge against Trump's America.  Already, talk of Mexico shifting its agricultural purchases to Argentina and Brazil has Mid-West farmers sweating bullets at the prospect of severe economic and financial damage.  Indeed, the repeal of NAFTA, one of Trump's favorite whipping boys, does not play well in these farming states. But Mexico's revenge could prove even more damaging.  In addition to Mexican intelligence services ending their cooperation with their American counterparts - something that could increase illegal immigration into America - Mexico could tilt toward China as its new found favorite trading partner.  Needless to say, the ignorant, loud mouthed, bullying, narcissist in the White House has never thought of these types of  consequences.  A long piece in The Atlantic looks at the Mexican revenge Trump may be setting into motion. Here are highlights:

When donald trump first made sport of thumping Mexico—when he accused America’s neighbor of exporting rapists and “bad hombres,” when he deemed the country such a threat that it should be contained by a wall and so clueless that it could be suckered into paying for its own encasement—its president responded with strange equilibrium. 

Since then, the Mexican political elite has begun to ponder retaliatory measures that would reassert the country’s dignity, and perhaps even cause the Trump administration to reverse its hostile course. With a presidential election in just over a year—and Peña Nieto prevented by term limits from running again—vehement responses to Trump are considered an electoral necessity. Memos outlining policies that could wound the United States have begun flying around Mexico City. These show that Trump has committed the bully’s error of underestimating the target of his gibes. As it turns out, Mexico could hurt the United States very badly.

The Mexico–U.S. border is long, but the history of close cooperation across it is short. As recently as the 1980s, the countries barely contained their feelings of mutual contempt. Mexico didn’t care for the United States’ anticommunist policy in Central America, especially its support of Nicaraguan rebels. In 1983, President Miguel de la Madrid obliquely warned the Reagan administration against “shows of force which threaten to touch off a conflagration.” 

The grandiose promise of trade is that it binds countries together, breeding peace and cooperation. This is a risible overstatement when applied generally to the world. But in the case of the countries separated by the Rio Grande, it has proved wondrously true. A generation after the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the United States and Mexico couldn’t be more interdependent. Anti-Americanism, once a staple of Mexican politics, has largely faded. The flow of migrants from Mexico to the U.S. has, more or less, abated. Economic ties have fostered greater intimacy between intelligence services and security agencies, which are today deeply enmeshed in each other’s business. 

But the Trump administration has come dangerously close to trashing the relationship—and, in the process, unleashing a terrifying new reality.

The Chinese invested heavily in places like Peru, Brazil, and Venezuela, discreetly flexing soft power as they funded new roads, refineries, and railways. From 2000 to 2013, China’s bilateral trade with Latin America increased by 2,300 percent, according to one calculation. A raft of recently inked deals forms the architecture for China to double its annual trade with the region, to $500 billion, by the middle of the next decade. Mexico, however, has remained a grand exception to this grand strategy. 

Mexico also happens to be the one spot in Latin America where the United States would respond with alarm to a heavy Chinese presence.

That sort of alarm is just the thing some Mexicans would now like to provoke. What Mexican analysts have called the “China card”—a threat to align with America’s greatest competitor—is an extreme retaliatory option. Former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda told me he considers it an implausible expression of “machismo.” Unfortunately, Trump has elevated machismo to foreign-policy doctrine . . . And while a tighter Chinese–Mexican relationship would fly in the face of recent economic history, Trump may have already set it in motion.

The painful early days of the Trump administration have reminded Mexico of a core economic weakness: The country depends far too heavily on the American market. “Mexico is realizing that it has been overexposed to the U.S., and it’s now trying to hedge its bets,” says Kevin Gallagher, an economist at Boston University who specializes in Latin America. “Any country where 80 percent of exports go to the U.S., it’s a danger.” . . . . The presence of Trump, with his brusque talk of tariffs and promises of economic nationalism, makes that an urgent task.

Until recently, a Mexican–Chinese rapprochement would have been unthinkable. . . . . But China has played the long game, and its patience has proved farsighted. The reason so many Chinese are ascending to the middle class is that wages have tripled over the past decade. The average hourly wage in Chinese manufacturing is now $3.60. Over that same period of time, hourly manufacturing wages in Mexico have fallen to $2.10. Even taking into account the extraordinary productivity of Chinese factories—not to mention the expense that comes with Mexico’s far greater fidelity to the rules of international trade—Mexico increasingly looks like a sensible place for Chinese firms to set up shop, particularly given its proximity to China’s biggest export market.

Let’s pause to consider the illogic. Trump says that China is a grave threat, both militarily and economically. He has accused China of “rap[ing] our country.” That’s not the way most analysts would put it, but a fairly broad bipartisan consensus holds that China’s expansionism should be contained and its mercantilism checked. Barack Obama’s vaunted “pivot” to Asia tried to keep China’s neighbors from succumbing to its gravitational pull. Thanks to Donald Trump, China is now better positioned to execute the most difficult maneuver in its own, North American pivot—pushing the U.S. and Mexico further apart.

What seems more likely is that relations between the security agencies will slowly decay, as trust between the two countries evaporates and warm feelings give way to tensions.

Trump’s rush toward hard-line immigration policies could yield a grim bonanza of other unintended consequences. Mass deportations of Mexicans could uproot hundreds of thousands and deposit them on the other side of the border, forcing their reintegration into lives they left, many of them long ago. Perhaps the Mexican economy, the 15th-largest in the world, has the capacity to absorb these refugees from Trump’s America. But it’s equally easy to imagine a scenario in which they inundate the labor market. And even that possibility doesn’t begin to capture the likely economic costs of deportation. The Mexican economy would be deprived of the remittances that immigrants send back to their relatives. It’s hard to speak hyperbolically about the importance of these transfers—in 2016, Mexican Americans sent $27 billion back to their Mexican families, more than the value of the crude petroleum Mexico exports annually. 

[W]ith Trump’s angry talk and the Mexican resentment it stirs, the best hope for the persistence of this improved relationship is inertia—the interlocking supply chain that crosses the border and won’t easily pull apart, the agricultural exports that flow in both directions, all the bureaucratic cooperation. Unwinding this relationship would be ugly and painful, a strategic blunder of the highest order, a gift to America’s enemies, a gaping vulnerability for the homeland that Donald Trump professes to protect, a very messy divorce.

The perverse part of me would love to see Mexico shift its agricultural product purchases from Mid-West sources.  The cretins in these states who put Trump in office deserve to suffer greatly.  As for the rise of China-Mexico relations, if it happens, it will be the fault of Der Trumpenführer.

Has Trump the Bully Hit a Wall?

I view both Donald Trump and Ted Cruz with revulsion.  Both would be an unmitigated disaster for America in the White House.  Trump is in many ways little more than a loud mouthed bully who excels at insults and nasty sound bites, but to date has offered zero in terms of any real substantive policies.  And when it comes to attacking his GOP rivals, he tends to prefer personal insults rather than debate and differences over policies and proposed initiatives.  Like a classic school yard bully, Trump has attracted those who like seeming confidence, especially when pandering to existing prejudices in his audience.  Ted Cruz, to my view, is equally despicable, but as a piece in Politico, Cruz just may be the one who can damage the Trump juggernaut.  Personally, I'd like to see both self-destruct.  Here are article excerpts:

Like all accomplished bullies, Trump understands that the real target is his opponent’s honor. Obeying the maxim that you haven’t gone far enough until you’ve gone too far, Trump slagged Bush’s wife last July, using Twitter to post a quotation from a tweet that said Bush “has to like Mexican Illegals because of his wife.” Trump deleted the tweet, which implied that Columba Bush was not in the country legally. Bush took personal umbrage over the tweet, which was deleted 24 hours after it was posted. “He’s doing this to inflame and incite and to draw attention,” Bush sputtered in the manner of someone whose honor has been wounded. The point of Trump's tweet was to lure Bush into defending Columba, his Spanish-speaking wife and the mother of his three children, thereby boxing him in as conflicted over immigration. It was a brilliant bully move.

When discussing the art of the verbal bully, you really can’t spend too much time on honor. The bully undermines his foes by stripping them of whatever esteem, standing and face they may have acquired. When a man’s mother, wife or daughter is disparaged in most cultures, he must defend her honor or risk losing his manliness. This prompted only more Bush sputtering that Trump must apologize to Columba; Trump’s resopnse (“I won’t apologize, I didn’t do anything wrong”) sliced Bush’s cojones right out of his trousers. 

So how do you beat a verbal bully? We’re actually starting to see it happen. Stanley Elkin sketched a strategy in his 1964 short story, “A Poetics for Bullies.” In it, a young bully named Push torments and leads all the kids in the neighborhood until he is undone by a princely newcomer John Williams, whose accent can’t be mocked, whose skin has no blemish, whose intelligence is impervious to insult. 

Nobody would ever mistake Ted Cruz for John Williams. No Adonis, he looks like a broken-nosed character actor in a film noir. He even whines when he talks. But inside his own head, Cruz is John Williams. He has been polishing the Cruz act for his entire life, making himself a perfectly smooth, unchanging object upon which no New York bully can get a grip. Although Trump may have bested Cruz on several topics in last night’s presidential debate as they fought toe-to-toe for the first time, the mogul seems unable to get under Cruz’s skin the way he has with Bush, Carson, Rand Paul (ridiculing him for being short, just 5’8”!), and the other candidates.

Like Trump, Cruz commands an alpha male’s ego. When towel-snapped, he does not shriek. When denigrated or teased, he does not frown or wince. He does not have to be perfect because he already thinks he’s perfect, which is just one of the reasons why the rest of Congress despises him.

The best way to beat a trash-talking bully is to convincingly pretend you cannot hear him. Donald Trump, you have met your John Williams.

   

Chris Christie - Just a Big Fat Bully?

Chris Christie has worked to build an image of being a direct, no excuses politician who speaks his mind.  But now this image is unraveling as it becomes clear that he is also a petty bully willing to screw over constituents when seeking to punish those who do not yield to his demands.  What else explains the now exposed deliberate decision to punish commuters at the George Washington Bridge that connects New Jersey to northern Manhattan.  The paper trail - or should we say e-mail trail - isn't pretty and Christie seemingly is not going to get off easy.  A main editorial in the New York Times takes Christie to task for trying to throw subordinates under the bus to protect his more than ample ass.  Here are excerpts:

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has explanations to make, apologies to give and an administrative house to clean now that his top aides and political cronies were shown to have been fully and gleefully aware of the chaos they caused by ordering up lane closings — and a four-day traffic jam — in September at the George Washington Bridge.

New Jersey residents had suspected for months that the sudden, mysterious shutdown of traffic lanes to the bridge in Fort Lee, N.J., may have had something to do with the refusal of the town’s mayor, Mark Sokolich, a Democrat, to endorse Mr. Christie for re-election. 

That sounded far-fetched, even for someone known to be as sensitive to slights and as politically belligerent as Mr. Christie. He and his aides said such speculation was crazy talk

Turns out it was his old friend David Wildstein, whom Mr. Christie had appointed as director of interstate capital projects at the Port Authority, who ordered the closings. Text messages and emails made public on Wednesday show that Mr. Wildstein and Mr. Christie’s deputy chief of staff, Bridget Anne Kelly, discussed the closings as political payback for Mr. Sokolich, who had no idea the closings were coming. 

The correspondence shows that the lane closings were indeed a stunningly stupid act of petty revenge. They were also an egregious abuse of power. 

“Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee,” Ms. Kelly said in an email to Mr. Wildstein in August, a few weeks before the closings. 

When the Port Authority’s executive director, Patrick Foye, learned what was happening in Fort Lee, he immediately ordered the lanes reopened, calling the closings dangerous, “abusive,” and probably illegal. 

Mr. Christie, caught out on Wednesday, could no longer scoff at or dismiss the scandal, or blame Democrats for it. There were two possible explanations: either he had been pathetically misled by his scheming staff, and failed for months to get to the bottom of the scandal, or he had spent those months dissembling to any and all. His excuse? He was a dupe. 

Mr. Christie can start by getting rid of every one of his aides and cronies who knew about this scheme and show what actions he will take against the person with ultimate responsibility for his administration: himself. 

 My opinion of Christie certainly has been lowered.  I suspect that I am not alone.