Graham's Myth

Once upon a time, Lindsey Graham told presidential candidate Donald Trump to "go to hell" and that he is "a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot."

Graham later visited Donald Trump at the White House and played golf at the President's golf resort, and came out as an enthusiastic Trump supporter. Otherwise, he didn't "come out" and clearly is still in the Trump loyalist phase of his personal journey

Graham: I tell you what, if Trump were President, Putin wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine because he’s afraid of him pic.twitter.com/yREEQtDG4S

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 1, 2023

That is absurd. While speaking on Sunday in Sioux City, Iowa and giving a shout-out to Sioux Falls (South Dakota), Trump boasted "about threatening to abandon U.S. allies, even if Russia attacked one of them." He

notably also said he had threatened to withhold U.S. military aid from NATO members unless they paid the bloc more. He said, at one point, he told member state leaders, “We’re not going to protect you any longer.”

“The head of a country stood up, said, ‘Does that mean if Russia attacks my country, you will not be there?’ That’s right, that’s what it means,” Trump said to applause. “I will not protect you.”

“And the money came!”

Trump’s refusal to step in even in the case of a Russian attack is notable considering how much he loves Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin. Trump and Putin enjoy a particularly cozy relationship, and Trump has repeatedly praised the Russian president.

Given the fact that Republican support for the war in Ukraine is on the wane, Putin must be overjoyed that the party’s presidential front-runner is actively advocating letting Russia attack whichever countries it wants.

In an early August interview on NewsNation, John Bolton, a national security adviser in the Trump Administration

called the deal with the Taliban that led to the U.S. withdrawal a “disastrous mistake” and said that his dealings with Iran fell short. He also said Trump threatens the U.S. relationship with NATO.

“In a second Trump term, we’d almost certainly withdraw from NATO,” he said.

Obviously, if Donald Trump had won re-election, Vladimir Putin would have been more eager to invade Ukraine. Without support from NATO which President Biden has been able to cobble together, Ukraine would have been overrun swiftly. And Hamas terrorists would have invaded Israel, made easier because Benjamin Netanyahu, once a Trump favorite, and Israel's security forces dropped the ball.

Nonetheless, there is good reason, aside from being compromised by Trump, for Graham to remark

I believe, if Trump were President, none of this would be going on. If he gets to be President in 2025, this would end pretty quickly. Whether you like Trump or not, there was order in the world that's been lost.

There may not have been order in the world when Donald Trump was President. Hamas was eyeing the opportunity to do its imitation of genocide by slaughtering Israelis, and Putin had his eye on Ukraine. But with the misleading nature of hindsight, we believe that there had been order, that the world was topsy-turvy. And Trump, as the prior President, is perfectly situated to exploit this feeling which voters have.

He was, after all, President before Biden was President. In George Orwell's classic Animal Farm, Squealer rhetorically asked ".... it is for your sake that we drink the milk and eat those apples. Do you know what would happen if we pigs failed in our duty? Jones would come back!"

The horror of it all! The animals would be better off if Jones returned but exclaiming, without explanation, "Jones would come back!" creates the assumption that things were worse. When Lindsey Graham asserts "whether you like Trump or not, there was order in the world that's been lost," he's addressing independent-minded voters, who are less ideological than Republicans or Democrats and are vulnerable to an assumption that things were simply better in an earlier time.

It's a deceptively strong argument in the court of public opinion with low-information voters, particularly those less committed to either political party.  It may not be rational but this is a country which once voted for Donald Trump for President and which counts among its Senators a guy who is now a passionate advocate for a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot." 

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Rhetoric By Molotov


“One false step and our enemies would be upon us surely comrades you don’t want Jones to come back?”

-George Orwell, Animal Farm (p. 22), 1945



Before the President found his inner progressive on Tuesday evening, he dialed up his usual rhetoric about the deficit.   He stated

Yes, the biggest driver of our long-term debt is the rising cost of health care for an aging population. And those of us who care deeply about programs like Medicare must embrace the need for modest reforms. Otherwise, our retirement programs will crowd out the investments we need for our children and jeopardize the promise of a secure retirement for future generations. But we can't ask senior citizens and working families to shoulder the entire burden of deficit reduction while asking nothing more from the wealthiest and the most powerful.
(APPLAUSE)

We won't grow the middle class simply by shifting the cost of health care or college onto families that are already struggling or by forcing communities to lay off more teachers and more cops and more firefighters. Most Americans -- Democrats, Republicans and independents -- understand that we can't just cut our way to prosperity. They know that broad-based economic growth requires a balanced approach to deficit reduction, with spending cuts and revenue, and with everybody doing their fair share. And that's the approach I offer tonight.

President Obama won't ask elderly people and the working class to shoulder the entire burden of deficit reduction- only a large portion of it.  Similarly,  he won't 'grow' the middle class simply by shifting the cost of health care or college onto struggling families or by forcing communities to lay off more teachers, police officers, and firefighters.  That is part of the plan, not its entirety.

But that's not all.  Obama noted "the biggest driver of our long-term debt is the rising cost of health care."  But then he cleverly added "for an aging population," thereby suggesting that the cost of health care is due to the elderly people receiving it- and the Medicare program paying for it.    Dean Baker, however, recently debunked the argument that baby boomers entering retirement are dumping the costs of Social Security and Medicare onto the younger generation.  He explained

The imbalance on the Medicare side stems from the fact that we pay twice as much per person for our health care as the average for people in other wealthy countries. This is not the result of us getting better care; we don’t generally have better outcomes than people in other countries. It is the result of the fact that we pay more for our care. This means that our doctors get paid much higher salaries (our autoworkers and retail clerks don’t), we pay far more for our drugs, our medical equipment and everything else in our health care system.

This is a story of class war: rich people getting richer from the inefficiency and corruption in the health care system. 

"The problem," Baker had observed on another occasion, "is not the American people getting what they want" but "the health care industry using its political power to extort incredible sums from the rest of us."

Intent on deception, Obama pledged "on Medicare, I'm prepared to enact reforms that will achieve the same amount of health care savings by the beginning of the next decade as the reforms proposed by the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission."

There was no reform proposed by the Simpson-Bowles commission; there was nothing proposed by the commission because there was no report issued by the commission.   Today, Baker noted

Just as little kids like to believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, Washington insiders like to believe that the Bowles Simpson commission issued a report. Of course the commission did not issue a report.

The commission's by-laws state that a report would need the support of 14 of the 18 members of the commission. There was no report that met threshold and in fact no formal vote was ever taken on any report. The document in question should properly be referred to as the report of the co-chairs, former Senator Alan Simpson and Morgan Stanley director Erskine Bowles.

It might be painful to accept the truth, but there is no Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy or Bowles-Simpson Commission report.

If there was an intent to deceive on Medicare and Simpson-Bowles, Social Security could not be far behind.  And it wasn't.  The President contended  

To hit the rest of our deficit reduction target, we should do what leaders in both parties have already suggested and save hundreds of billions of dollars by getting rid of tax loopholes and deductions for the well-off and the well-connected. After all, why would we choose to make deeper cuts to education and Medicare just to protect special interest tax breaks? How is that fair? Why is it that deficit reduction is a big emergency, justifying making cuts in Social Security benefits, but not closing some loopholes? How does that promote growth?

In George Orwell's classic Animal Farm, Squealer (representing Vyacheslav Molotov) stated "surely, comrades, you don't want Jones back?"  Asked in that fashion, it was obvious no one should want Farmer Jones to return.  Similarly, President Obama asks, rhetorically, "Why is it that deficit reduction is a big emergency, justifying making cuts in Social Security benefits but not closing some loopholes?"  That leaves the mistaken and injurious impression that deficit reduction requires both.  By saying that deficit reduction requires not only "cuts in Social Security benefits (but also) closing some loopholes," he conflates the deficit and Social Security.

Before going on to the liberal, reality-based portions of his address, President Obama first tried to establish his credentials on the economy by appealing to the crowd that worships bipartisanship.  If he had to enhance fallacies about entitlements and the deficit reduction panel he created, it was all, he might suppose, in a good cause.


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"Do you know what would happen if we pigs failed in our duty? Jones
would come back! Yes, Jones would come back! Surely, comrades," cried
Squealer almost pleadingly, skipping from side to side and whisking his
tail, "surely there is no one among you who wants to see Jones come back?"

- Squealer, in George Orwell's Animal Farm, 1947



Taxation Disinformation From The GOP


In Orwell's classic, Squealer spoke on behalf of Napoleon, analogous here to Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who recently whined

I get sick and tired of the demagoguery that goes on in Washington about taxing higher-income people. How high do taxes have to go to satisfy the appetite of people in this Congress to spend money?

How high do taxes have to go. Surely, comrades, none of you wants to see Jones come back! Stated in this way, how could any of the animals but believe things must have been much worse under Jones? And if a United States Senator includes as his premise "how high do taxes have to go," surely they are going up, up, and up!

But they're not. Federal income taxes have been declining nationally both as a proportion of the gross domestic product and as a percentage of an individual's income, as McClatchy documents (chart, below):

The post-World War II historic average is that federal revenues equal about 18 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, the broadest measure of annual economic production. In the year 2000, after the longest economic expansion in U.S. history, federal revenues equaled almost 21 percent of the economy. As a result, Washington cut taxes in 2001 and 2003.

Revenues plunged to around 15 percent of the economy in 2009 and 2010 amid the deep financial crisis, and dipped even further this year, to 14.4 percent, the lowest level since 1950....

Americans across all income classes paid lower effective tax rates in 2007, the last year of complete Internal Revenue Service data, than they did in 2000. The effective tax rate is what people pay after all exemptions and deductions. This is according to the most recent comprehensive look at taxes by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office....

Americans on average saw 17.3 percent of their income go to federal taxes in 2009 and 2010. The last time the percentage was this low was 1975, and during the late 1960s.

If you exclude social insurance taxes on wages — for Medicare and Social Security — the share of taxes as a percentage of income drops to 9.4 percent in 2009 and 9.3 percent in 2010, the lowest since 1950.






That was in 2007. Since then, however, the "total tax burden — for all federal, state and local taxes — dropped to 23.6% of income in the first quarter, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis data. By contrast, individuals spent roughly 27% of income on taxes in the 1970s, 1980s and the 1990s."

The good news: of we still were taxed at 27%, it "would mean $500 billion of extra taxes annually today, one-third of the estimated $1.5 trillion federal deficit this year." The bad news: one party continually trout out its slick talking point- "Washington has a spending problem, not a revenue problem." Washington's real problem, however, is that the GOP is in constant pander mode, brazenly dishonest, and delights in misleading the nation's taxpayers.

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My Vote, Reluctantly

"I can tell you, comrades, with all the brainwork we have to do nowadays, You would not rob us of our repose, would you, comrades? You would not have us too tired to carry out our duties? Surely none of you wishes to see Jones back."

-"Squealer" in Animal Farm, chapter 6
George Orwell
1944

And so it goes, that the events of the past week in the Democratic presidential race reminded me of the great World War II-era novel in which the animals, who take over the farm from the oppressive human beings, come to forget that Farmer Jones was in fact no worse than their current regime.

It is in that context that I read this past week the eloquent commentary on the Op-Ed pages by Caroline Kennedy, daughter of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Caroline wrote "I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president — not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans."

This fits nicely with the soaring, inspirational rhetoric of the Obama campaign, infused with a post-partisan appeal. Perhaps his campaign theme was best summarized when on December 2, 2007 the Illinois Senator said at a fund-raiser in Boston “I don’t want to spend the next four years re-arguing the same partisan arguments that we had all through the 1990s. I don’t want to pit red America against blue America."

And Obama has been drawing huge, rancorous crowds for months, drawing comparisons to a youthful, energetic JFK and largely avoiding detailed descriptions of policy proposals. But his rhetoric criticizing "the same partisan arguments" of the 1990s and the urge to "build a bridge back to the 1990s" has touched a chord with millions of Americans, disproprotionately (understandably) the youth whom it appears Caroline Kennedy has been talking to.

I find it a curious, disturbing argument, though no more curious than the remarks of Senator Kennedy reported in a 1/28/08 article in the New York Times. Obama, he said, "will be a president who refuses to be trapped in the patterns of the past,”whose campaign will help the nation "rise above the old politics that parses us into separate groups and puts us at odds with one another." Then, we read, the Massachusetts senator headed west with Obama, "helping him firm up support from unions and Hispanics, as well as the party base." So much, I guess, for avoiding "pars(ing) us into separate groups."

At least Ted appears to be avoiding the naivete infecting Caroline and many of the Obama supporters. The latter, could, of course, question the Clinton campaign's embrace of huge campaign funds from the pharmaceutical and energy industries. But, alas, widening the rift between generations, between young and old, has been more enticing to the Obama contingent. It is ironic that the first black candidate with a serious chance at the presidency, who has assiduously avoided a race-based campaign, has been supported by multitudes embracing distinctions predicated on age.

Obama himself should not escape criticism here. Typically, in November, 2007 he told Fox News "I have no doubt that we represent the kind of change Senator Clinton can't deliver on.... and part of it is generational." A candidate who wants to bridge the divide between black and white and increase it between old and young cannot apply a salve to the nation's wounds. He has, as in this interview with the National Journal, referred to Social Security as a "crisis," which New York Times columnist Paul Krugman noted is "in large part.... the result of decades of scare-mongering about Social Security’s future from conservative ideologues, whose ultimate goal is to undermine the program."

It is an appeal to the young voter, who has, throughout, his life, been told by Republicans and the corporate media that Social Security is facing a crisis which it demonstrably has not. Further, it is an element of Obama's post-partisan appeal. Krugman quotes Obama as claiming "“we can’t tackle the big problems that demand solutions” because “politics has become so bitter and partisan.”

The Illinois senator and I have been living in different worlds. A Democratic Congress was elected to end the war; instead, Democrats have made only half-hearted attempts to end it and generally have acquiesced in President Bush's effort to continue it. A recession looms- and Speaker Pelosi and President Bush come together in mere days to forge a stimulus package- not including extended unemployment benefits, home heating assistance, a minimum wage increase, or a public works program, all items one might expect Democrats, and liberals, to promote. (Even conservative Republican Mike Huckabee has recommended a program to give the unemployed jobs building highways!) Bill Clinton was impeached (though acquitted) for lying to a grand jury about sexual activity- sex!- and barely a peep has been heard from this Democratic congress about impeachment- and oversight of the Executive has been grievously insufficient. Partisanship? Hardly. As Gary Younge has written in The Nation, "the terrible truth about the past seven years is not that the country has been divided but that the wrong side has been winning. The right has fought for its agenda and has never been in doubt about who its enemy is." (Even John McCain, whom many Republicans excoriate for "sticking his finger in the eye of" conservatives, has taken to attacking some Democrats for waving "the white flag in surrender in Iraq.")


The obsession among some Democrats with bipartisanship has serious practical implications. The New York Times, in an article dated February 3, 2008, tells of residents of Illinois complaining to Senator Obama about radioactive leaks tolerated by the Exelon Corporation.


Mr. Obama scolded Exelon and federal regulators for inaction and introduced a bill to require all plant owners to notify state and local authorities immediately of even small leaks. He has boasted of it on the campaign trail, telling a crowd in Iowa in December that it was “the only nuclear legislation that I’ve passed.”

“I just did that last year,” he said, to murmurs of approval.

A close look at the path his legislation took tells a very different story. While he initially fought to advance his bill, even holding up a presidential nomination to try to force a hearing on it, Mr. Obama eventually rewrote it to reflect changes sought by Senate Republicans, Exelon and nuclear regulators. The new bill removed language mandating prompt reporting and simply offered guidance to regulators, whom it charged with addressing the issue of unreported leaks.

The bill eventually died, but nevertheless is testimony to bi-partisan politics as usual. And while Democrats pursue the moral high ground of bipartisan purity, Republicans invariably are at work pursuing conservative legislation that continues to drag the middle class ground.

Senator Clinton is not the perfect progressive candidate, as demonstrated by her arguable coziness with special interests and regrettable vote in 2002 authorizing force in Iraq, indicate. And Barack Obama deserves credit for wise judgement in opposing that authorization, though he was able to do so from a cozy, liberal legislative district in a nominally Democratic state. Many Democrats who voted with the President no doubt feared that otherwise they would be accused by the GOP of a lack of patiotism and a desire not to "support the troops." (Over the past year, one of John McCain's most aggressive supporters, Independent Senator Joe Lieberman, has nearly accused Democrts who opposed the surge as treason- even as he has, not coincidentally, maintained the admiration of the mainstream media, who describe him favorably as a "maverick" or "centrist" man of integrity.) The confidence that a Senator Obama would have voted against authorization of military force is belied by two related factors: State Senator Obama apparently on six occasions availed himself of a rule quirk in Illinois that permits a legislator to vote one way on a bill- and then make a public statement supporting the opposite point of view (Obama says that he mistakenly hit the wrong button each time); and his unfortunate tendency to miss controversial votes in the U.S. Senate, such as the condemnation of moveon.org for its Petraeus ad and the declaration of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as a "foreign terrorist organization."

This suggests a man who has the right perspective and positions, but may lack the fortitude or persistence ideal in a progressive president. The positions held by Mrs. Clinton, generally like Mr. Obama and unlike the Republican field, are sound and sensible, whether on health care (where she unquestionably supports universal coverage), taxation, energy independence, or education. And I have no doubt that Mrs. Clinton possesses the knowledge, industriousness, and determination which would help advance the progressive agenda. Thus, in an imperfect field, one lacking a candidate who would make poverty and the slow decline of the middle class his focus, or one who would make environmental degradation his focus (and who, presciently, supported Gulf War I and opposed Gulf War II), I'll cast my vote for the candidate who is more likely to effect the change we Democrats know is necessary. That is Hillary Clinton.

(And what of Farmer Jones? Really, he was no worse than Napoleon and the crowd of dictatorial animals which succeeded him, though the rhetorical question "surely none of you wishes to see Jones back," helped convince the animals otherwise. And surely, President Kennedy must have been better than Presidents Johnson and Clinton? Right? Right?)