Jason Riley on Chautauqua; Dominic Cummings on Ukraine; Christopher Caldwell on Ukraine; Bari Weiss interviews Bill Barr; Pierre Lemieux on affective polarization
Regarding the lack of coherent ends in Ukraine, our involvement is driven variously by ideology, by power-seeking, and by grift, all covered by specious moral justification. Defense contractors (i.e. munitions manufacturers) lavishly fund neo-con pro-intervention think tanks like the Kagan family's Institute for the Study of War (ISW), as well as individual politician's campaigns. Clausewitzian analysis is beside the point. There is no effort to understand the situation which would involve entering into consideration of the opposition's (i.e., the Russians') concerns and motivations
The "coherent ends" argument against assisting Ukraine is a generic cheap shot that can be used in any geopolitical context. In a complex game in a shifting world you can't have a fixed end goal and worse still in a contest you should not be advertising the desire for an "exist strategy".
Russia is trying to invade Ukraine. The the west is trying to make that more difficult, more expensive and less successful than it otherwise would be. It's impossible to know in detail what the results of that would be: but that is the nature of existence.
Caldwell can promote any foreign policy he wishes, but he ought to have known better than to make it about opposition to 'traditionalism'. The traditionalism of the current Russian elite is of the same sort as American liberals' solicitude of the welfare of blacks. They do suppress LGBT promotion in schools, but other than that, Russia is as far, or even farther, from Caldwell's traditionalist ideals as any Western country. By divorce rates, abortion rates, fertility rates and family structure Russia is no better, or worse, than the median Western country. It has a significant immigration problem of unrelated populations from Central Asia (Navalny started his political career protesting against illegal immigration). It's a low-trust society with almost zero civic spirit and only nominally Christian. Even in the LGBT department, there is by all accounts a lively gay scene in Moscow. The habits of the elite itself are hardly 'traditionalist' either. Putin himself divorced and put away the wife of his youth, who stuck with him through the bad times of the late 80s-early 90s, and had illegitimate children by at least two mistresses, neither of whom he married. His retainers follow his example en masse; just today Kamil Galeev wrote about similar circumstances of the Russian ex-defense minister Serdyukov.
Caldwell also repeats silly talking points about Ukraine which he ought to have researched better. For instance, he says, "By then the U.S. had spent $5 billion to influence Ukraine’s politics, according to a 2013 speech by State Department official Victoria Nuland." Now it happens that I researched this very claim back in 2014 (https://candide3.wordpress.com/2014/03/26/putinophilia-and-ukraine/), going over old USAID data to verify the $5B figure and what it was spent on. Ironically, it was mostly spent on disarmament and nuclear safety; I suppose it counts as 'influencing Ukraine's politics' at a big stretch, but it's unlikely to be what Caldwell had in mind. Incidentally, I also found out that Russia received 3-4 times as much American money as Ukraine over the same period. There are several other such examples. Caldwell's claims about Russia reacting against a threat of Crimea being in NATO have been shown to be bunk by Russia's shrugging off the accession of Finland and Sweden, as I mentioned in another comment to this post. I won't stop over the egregious 'Russian roots of Ukrainian public life and high culture', and I will smile at the spectacle of the traditionalist stalwart Caldwell quoting as an authority on the internal politics of Ukraine a Marxist who was educated at Soros' university in Budapest and who writes for The Jacobin, The Guardian and The New Left Review.
Re: "Our policy from the beginning should have been to seek a negotiated settlement. Our aid to Ukraine should be calibrated to try to get both sides to realize that is in their interests to negotiate. We want neither side do think it can achieve its ends militarily. Does this mean trying to produce a stalemate? Preferably not a long-term stalemate, but a condition in which each side realizes that it is better off negotiating to end the conflict."
The USA has actively taken one side in every way -- diplomacy, intelligence, finance, materiel -- since before Maidan, so cannot broker peace. NATO and the EU have followed the USA. Who can mediate? Turkey?
The thought, that the USA can and would calibrate "aid" to achieve a productive short-term military stalemate, which (a) would induce negotiation but (b) would not become entrenched, smacks of illusion of control. Playing with fire was a major cause of the war.
A stalemate might mean: 'Bleed Russia to the last Ukrainian.'
Ukraine's demography and history entail challenges for constitutionalism and political culture. The population includes a large Russian minority, which is concentrated in eastern and southern regions. Those regions have Ukrainian minorities. Internal peace requires protection of minority ethnic interests (e.g., language, representation, media) at the national, regional, and local levels.
However, ethnic-linguistic majority rule is new nationalism in Eastern Europe.
There are three main alternatives to political decentralization and protection of ethnic minority interests:
1) Migration of ethnic minorities to more hospitable countries; in this case, migration of several million ethnic Russians from Ukraine to Russia. Calls for Russian population exit have been a rhetorical motif in Ukrainian nationalism since Maidan.
2) Conflict, which can range from chronic friction to civil war -- and to international war, if a great power has strong demographic and political stakes in the country, deems the country within its sphere of influence, and observes that other powers contest its sphere.
3) Partition.
Each alternative is tragic in its own way.
War (the extreme version of alternative 2) induces large-scale emigration (a partial version of alternative 1).
Control in war is often an illusion. War brings risk of escalation in two key dimensions: international scope of conflict and intensity of conflict (even nuclear war?).
White collar crime: this is more than street crime one of calculated costs and benefits. Although increasing the probabilities of apprehension is still more important than long sentences -- hence the benefits of the increase in IRS enforcement capacities -- the expected value of punishment matters more in white collar crimes than in street crimes.
The UK Guardian newspaper… or Grauniad as it is popularly known, for its abysmal record on spelling… once it got its own name wrong… over there on the Left, once lamented that Britain’s prison population was at a record high despite crime rates being at a record low.
As Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum slug it out for post of Chief Poo Bah in No 10 to replace defenestrated BoJo (Gardyloo), with plenty to say about Ukraine, they have nothing cogent to say about, nor care about, the energy crisis they helped cause in the UK - not sanctions against Russia although they haven’t helped - but the reckless ‘climate change’ Government (both Parties) policies of the last 30 years with the absurd target of Net Zero Carbon (whatever that nonsense phrase actually means) so household energy bills will rise by 80% this Autumn after a 54% rise this Spring, to over £3 500 ($4 200).
But it’s good to see they have their priorities right: destroying Russia, saving the Planet and flooding the Country with illegal immigrants that paddle across the Channel from France on Li-los escorted by the French Navy and which the Royal Navy is incapable of stopping, and which coincidentally deflate and start to sink by the time they reach British Territorial waters requiring Lifeguard and Coastguard boats to be scrambled to the rescue, and mostly young Muslim men are then landed and escorted to 3 and 4 star hotels with meals and pocket money provided, thereafter a life of comparative luxury at the British taxpayers’ expense. No worries for them about paying energy bills.
When I read Bill Barr's interview, I was sure Arnold would like it. It's the best Trump critique I've read, yet what are Barr's actual criticisms, other than Orange Man Bad?
"Trump is his own worst enemy. He’s incorrigible. He doesn’t take advice from people. "
Arnold also claims Trump surrounds himself with lousy folks - so not taking advice from lousy folks should actually be better, no?
+"Russiagate was very unjust and I was suspicious of it from the very beginning. I was also upset at the way the criminal justice process has been used and, I thought, was being used to interfere with the political process."
"continued to be self-indulgent and petty and turned off key constituencies that ultimately made the difference in the election."
No mention of the increase from 62 million up to almost 75 million in votes. No key constituency was turned off. No mention of 65% voting turnout, far far higher than the usual 58-ish% since WW II except 1960's 60% (when JFK stole the election from Nixon with dead votes in Chicago).
+"these [Russia hoax] ideas really got going because of a political ploy by the Clinton administration to try to hang Putin around Trump’s neck and claim they were in cahoots. I never thought there was any basis for this. ... It was pretty clear not too long after the election that this whole thing was a farce. Yet that’s when both the F.B.I. doubled down on it, and the mainstream media kicked in."
+"The F.B.I. is like all of our institutions. I wish the F.B.I. was the extent of the problem, but government institutions are generally infected by this. All our other institutions—the medical profession, journalism, science—are also being politicized. "
"BW: Did you underestimate Trump’s disregard for the truth and disregard for the results of the election?
AG BARR: I underestimated how far he would take it. ... very whacky legal theories"
"the president came downstairs early in the morning and started saying there was major fraud underway and pointing to the fact that votes at the end of the evening were overwhelmingly Democrat. ... The Department of Justice has control over investigating fraud, but not challenging rule changes or allegations that the rules weren’t being followed. ...
I thought it was irresponsible to keep on talking about the election being stolen unless we had some evidence of it. And there was none at that point. "
Pres. Trump was basically correct - it was NOT a 100% free and fair election (this means "fraud" unfair). The censorship of Hunter Biden's laptop info, after FBI having it since Dec 2019 and "knowing" it was true, not Russian dis-info. How much does this censorship affect the election? 10%? 5%? at least 1%?
How much of the $450 million of Zuckerberg unfairly, tho maybe not illegally, targeting only high Dem areas for vote increases counts as unfair? 5%?
"[Trump had] already wasted five of your six weeks with this crazy stuff about the Dominion machines. He’d wheeled out this clown show of lawyers"
voting machines that can not always be audited, over which there are questions. But the machine counts mostly matched hand recounts.
The fraud was based on mail-in ballots without good signature verification, not miscounting accepted ballots. 1-2% rejection is usual with absentee ballots, less than 1% for many mail-in states with much higher volume expecting a higher than usual rejection rate.
"the legal community in the administration was telling him that there was not sufficient evidence of fraud. ...
what he should do was focus on all his achievements and leave with dignity. Whether he thought there was fraud or not, he had his day in court and he lost. "
Actually, most of the courts refused to look at the evidence and threw out the lawsuits - so he mostly didn't have a day in court, including the multiple states complaining to SCOTUS. The US legal system doesn't have a good method for resolving mail-in signature questions of fraud.
"I was demoralized that he was going out the way he was. I thought it was very unfair to all the people, especially the younger people, who had worked in the administration. It hurt them getting jobs and it also hurt the Republican Party, which I thought up until then, could take the high ground as the party of law and order."
Bill Barr would rather be a good loser - like most GOPe professionals. Trump is NOT a good loser; Rep voters tired of losing in the culture wars AND the economic issues want more winning and are enraged by the Dems cheating, and by GOPe blaming Trump for being upset that the Dems cheated.
+"I just want to make it clear that I supported President Trump. I liked his policies."
"I think things went off the rails after the election because I think he felt he had nothing to lose at that point." No. Trump is convinced the Dems stole the election. I, too, think the election was stolen -- so 'what is to be done' now? Barr & Weiss are both assuming the election was 100% free and fair; the fact that it wasn't isn't mentioned nor addressed.
+"he did accomplish a lot. And it was historic. The economic growth and the fact that people who had been left out previously were starting to participate more."
"[Jan 6 protest] This is outrageous, and the federal agencies have to get up there and clear those people out. That was my reaction. I couldn’t believe that this thing had been allowed to get out of control. The next day, I said to a reporter that I thought the president’s behavior was shameful.
“Where’s the F.B.I.? Where’s federal law enforcement?" "
Where WAS the FBI??? How many agents were there, who were they, and what were they doing? In testimony, FBI director Wray refuses to be honest about the FBI. Which had, in Oct. 2020, done some entrapment type activities to create a conspiracy to kidnap Michigan Gov. Whitmer, 2 of 4 not guilty, recently 2 found guilty (tho it looks a bit unfair in trial).
I believe the FBI helped incite more violence from the peaceful, unarmed protesters, and lots more illegal trespassing that didn't justify getting locked up without trial for 18 months and counting. Not mentioned by BW nor Barr.
"I was disgusted and mortified and feeling very angry. I felt this whole thing had hurt the Republican Party and hurt the reputation of the administration even more than before. I was angry about that. Everyone I knew in the administration was angry about that. I also felt that it was just a Keystone Cops exercise. There wasn’t a genuine threat of overthrowing the government, as far as I was concerned, it was just a circus. That’s true of a lot of things that Trump arranges. ...
I would say that it was a riot that got out of control. People breached the Congress, and were attacking police. Obviously not all the demonstrators were doing this.
I would say it was an effort to intimidate Congress and the vice president. I haven’t heard words from the president that I would consider incitement under the law. That’s a very high bar because of our First Amendment, and it should be a high bar. But I did feel that he was morally responsible for it because he led these people to believe that something could happen on Capitol Hill that would reverse the election. That there’s something they could do involving pressuring the vice president and Congress that would overturn the election. ...
it was a shameful episode. It was a shameful riot. And the president certainly precipitated it. "
The Capitol Police shot and killed Ashli Babbitt a small, white, unarmed women climbing thru a broken door window (somebody else broke, who?) -- far worse brutality than against George Floyd.
I think a massive protest against a Deep State stolen election is not so shameful - but the FBI, CP, and US Congress response to the protest has been.
Barr being OK with MAL is marking him as likely untrustworthy now. Garland as AG and FBI director Wray need to verify, first, their justification for further persecution of Trump - before I trust them. They have proven themselves untrustworthy.
No intellectually serious critiques of Trump by Barr, but plenty of Orange Man Bad along with more substantive credit for his policies.
Caldwell: Ukraine does need to "be there" becasue otherwise Russian troops would have fallen into the abyss when they came across to border.:) That Ukraine could not as successfully defend itself w/o NATO assistance is true. What conclusion does Caldwell want to draw from this?
Ukraine objective? How about to reach a negotiated settlement that makes it less likely for countries to invade each other in the future, especially countries with less liberal forms of government invading countries with more liberal forms of government.
The Michael Glennon argument in "National Security and Double Government" is that Liz Truss is not running for a real government position. Truss is just running for something like that of a minor royal or to put it less charitably, a gussied up student council. Glennon makes his argument in the line of Bagehot's about the terminal decline of the House of Lords in the 19th century. Both houses of the US congress became quite a lot like the House of Lords in the postwar era, and eventually the presidency underwent the same sort of transition.
The decisions about what to do with Ukraine are being made by the unelected national security apparatus. Unfortunately, the unelected national security apparatus isn't making much better decisions than a Twitter mob would. This is perhaps the final failure mode of the method of double government. Eventually, the successors of the viziers to the child-king become just as stupid and inept as the child-king himself. This type of failure mode should be something familiar to students of Middle Eastern and Asian history.
For awhile now, Ukraine has settled into WWI Western front style stalemate. If young vigorous societies full of optimistic nationalism couldn't move the line in four years, how are Ukraine and Russia, two societies who clearly have none of that same verve, going to do it. What 40 year old drunk slav is going to go over the top and charge into artillery shells for either side?
>>Our aid to Ukraine should be calibrated to try to get both sides to realize that is in their interests to negotiate. We want neither side do think it can achieve its ends militarily. Does this mean trying to produce a stalemate? Preferably not a long-term stalemate, but a condition in which each side realizes that it is better off negotiating to end the conflict.
I agree in principle, but in practice I think it's impossibly difficult to calibrate precisely the amount of aid that would bring a stalemate without a large risk of defeat for the side you're supporting. War is just too contingent and hard to predict. Indeed, from what I can tell it's likely that our aid to Ukraine so far is not sufficient to make it in Russia's interests to negotiate.
Re Barr's point about white collar crime, surely white collar criminals are more responsive to deterrence than typical violent criminals. If your purpose in crime is to make money, seeing someone like you with their head on a pike for attempting the same crime is going to make you think twice. This is a matter of deterrence, not retribution.
Lemieux is wrong. Most of us on the right don’t hate our opponents; we fear them and would be very happy just to be left alone.
Regarding the lack of coherent ends in Ukraine, our involvement is driven variously by ideology, by power-seeking, and by grift, all covered by specious moral justification. Defense contractors (i.e. munitions manufacturers) lavishly fund neo-con pro-intervention think tanks like the Kagan family's Institute for the Study of War (ISW), as well as individual politician's campaigns. Clausewitzian analysis is beside the point. There is no effort to understand the situation which would involve entering into consideration of the opposition's (i.e., the Russians') concerns and motivations
The "coherent ends" argument against assisting Ukraine is a generic cheap shot that can be used in any geopolitical context. In a complex game in a shifting world you can't have a fixed end goal and worse still in a contest you should not be advertising the desire for an "exist strategy".
Russia is trying to invade Ukraine. The the west is trying to make that more difficult, more expensive and less successful than it otherwise would be. It's impossible to know in detail what the results of that would be: but that is the nature of existence.
Caldwell can promote any foreign policy he wishes, but he ought to have known better than to make it about opposition to 'traditionalism'. The traditionalism of the current Russian elite is of the same sort as American liberals' solicitude of the welfare of blacks. They do suppress LGBT promotion in schools, but other than that, Russia is as far, or even farther, from Caldwell's traditionalist ideals as any Western country. By divorce rates, abortion rates, fertility rates and family structure Russia is no better, or worse, than the median Western country. It has a significant immigration problem of unrelated populations from Central Asia (Navalny started his political career protesting against illegal immigration). It's a low-trust society with almost zero civic spirit and only nominally Christian. Even in the LGBT department, there is by all accounts a lively gay scene in Moscow. The habits of the elite itself are hardly 'traditionalist' either. Putin himself divorced and put away the wife of his youth, who stuck with him through the bad times of the late 80s-early 90s, and had illegitimate children by at least two mistresses, neither of whom he married. His retainers follow his example en masse; just today Kamil Galeev wrote about similar circumstances of the Russian ex-defense minister Serdyukov.
Caldwell also repeats silly talking points about Ukraine which he ought to have researched better. For instance, he says, "By then the U.S. had spent $5 billion to influence Ukraine’s politics, according to a 2013 speech by State Department official Victoria Nuland." Now it happens that I researched this very claim back in 2014 (https://candide3.wordpress.com/2014/03/26/putinophilia-and-ukraine/), going over old USAID data to verify the $5B figure and what it was spent on. Ironically, it was mostly spent on disarmament and nuclear safety; I suppose it counts as 'influencing Ukraine's politics' at a big stretch, but it's unlikely to be what Caldwell had in mind. Incidentally, I also found out that Russia received 3-4 times as much American money as Ukraine over the same period. There are several other such examples. Caldwell's claims about Russia reacting against a threat of Crimea being in NATO have been shown to be bunk by Russia's shrugging off the accession of Finland and Sweden, as I mentioned in another comment to this post. I won't stop over the egregious 'Russian roots of Ukrainian public life and high culture', and I will smile at the spectacle of the traditionalist stalwart Caldwell quoting as an authority on the internal politics of Ukraine a Marxist who was educated at Soros' university in Budapest and who writes for The Jacobin, The Guardian and The New Left Review.
Re: "Our policy from the beginning should have been to seek a negotiated settlement. Our aid to Ukraine should be calibrated to try to get both sides to realize that is in their interests to negotiate. We want neither side do think it can achieve its ends militarily. Does this mean trying to produce a stalemate? Preferably not a long-term stalemate, but a condition in which each side realizes that it is better off negotiating to end the conflict."
The USA has actively taken one side in every way -- diplomacy, intelligence, finance, materiel -- since before Maidan, so cannot broker peace. NATO and the EU have followed the USA. Who can mediate? Turkey?
The thought, that the USA can and would calibrate "aid" to achieve a productive short-term military stalemate, which (a) would induce negotiation but (b) would not become entrenched, smacks of illusion of control. Playing with fire was a major cause of the war.
A stalemate might mean: 'Bleed Russia to the last Ukrainian.'
Ukraine's demography and history entail challenges for constitutionalism and political culture. The population includes a large Russian minority, which is concentrated in eastern and southern regions. Those regions have Ukrainian minorities. Internal peace requires protection of minority ethnic interests (e.g., language, representation, media) at the national, regional, and local levels.
However, ethnic-linguistic majority rule is new nationalism in Eastern Europe.
There are three main alternatives to political decentralization and protection of ethnic minority interests:
1) Migration of ethnic minorities to more hospitable countries; in this case, migration of several million ethnic Russians from Ukraine to Russia. Calls for Russian population exit have been a rhetorical motif in Ukrainian nationalism since Maidan.
2) Conflict, which can range from chronic friction to civil war -- and to international war, if a great power has strong demographic and political stakes in the country, deems the country within its sphere of influence, and observes that other powers contest its sphere.
3) Partition.
Each alternative is tragic in its own way.
War (the extreme version of alternative 2) induces large-scale emigration (a partial version of alternative 1).
Control in war is often an illusion. War brings risk of escalation in two key dimensions: international scope of conflict and intensity of conflict (even nuclear war?).
White collar crime: this is more than street crime one of calculated costs and benefits. Although increasing the probabilities of apprehension is still more important than long sentences -- hence the benefits of the increase in IRS enforcement capacities -- the expected value of punishment matters more in white collar crimes than in street crimes.
The UK Guardian newspaper… or Grauniad as it is popularly known, for its abysmal record on spelling… once it got its own name wrong… over there on the Left, once lamented that Britain’s prison population was at a record high despite crime rates being at a record low.
As Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum slug it out for post of Chief Poo Bah in No 10 to replace defenestrated BoJo (Gardyloo), with plenty to say about Ukraine, they have nothing cogent to say about, nor care about, the energy crisis they helped cause in the UK - not sanctions against Russia although they haven’t helped - but the reckless ‘climate change’ Government (both Parties) policies of the last 30 years with the absurd target of Net Zero Carbon (whatever that nonsense phrase actually means) so household energy bills will rise by 80% this Autumn after a 54% rise this Spring, to over £3 500 ($4 200).
But it’s good to see they have their priorities right: destroying Russia, saving the Planet and flooding the Country with illegal immigrants that paddle across the Channel from France on Li-los escorted by the French Navy and which the Royal Navy is incapable of stopping, and which coincidentally deflate and start to sink by the time they reach British Territorial waters requiring Lifeguard and Coastguard boats to be scrambled to the rescue, and mostly young Muslim men are then landed and escorted to 3 and 4 star hotels with meals and pocket money provided, thereafter a life of comparative luxury at the British taxpayers’ expense. No worries for them about paying energy bills.
More Barr critique here, mostly not repeated below: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/trumps-attorney-general-explains-raid-trumps-lloyd-billingsley/
When I read Bill Barr's interview, I was sure Arnold would like it. It's the best Trump critique I've read, yet what are Barr's actual criticisms, other than Orange Man Bad?
"Trump is his own worst enemy. He’s incorrigible. He doesn’t take advice from people. "
Arnold also claims Trump surrounds himself with lousy folks - so not taking advice from lousy folks should actually be better, no?
+"Russiagate was very unjust and I was suspicious of it from the very beginning. I was also upset at the way the criminal justice process has been used and, I thought, was being used to interfere with the political process."
"continued to be self-indulgent and petty and turned off key constituencies that ultimately made the difference in the election."
No mention of the increase from 62 million up to almost 75 million in votes. No key constituency was turned off. No mention of 65% voting turnout, far far higher than the usual 58-ish% since WW II except 1960's 60% (when JFK stole the election from Nixon with dead votes in Chicago).
+"these [Russia hoax] ideas really got going because of a political ploy by the Clinton administration to try to hang Putin around Trump’s neck and claim they were in cahoots. I never thought there was any basis for this. ... It was pretty clear not too long after the election that this whole thing was a farce. Yet that’s when both the F.B.I. doubled down on it, and the mainstream media kicked in."
+"The F.B.I. is like all of our institutions. I wish the F.B.I. was the extent of the problem, but government institutions are generally infected by this. All our other institutions—the medical profession, journalism, science—are also being politicized. "
"BW: Did you underestimate Trump’s disregard for the truth and disregard for the results of the election?
AG BARR: I underestimated how far he would take it. ... very whacky legal theories"
"the president came downstairs early in the morning and started saying there was major fraud underway and pointing to the fact that votes at the end of the evening were overwhelmingly Democrat. ... The Department of Justice has control over investigating fraud, but not challenging rule changes or allegations that the rules weren’t being followed. ...
I thought it was irresponsible to keep on talking about the election being stolen unless we had some evidence of it. And there was none at that point. "
Pres. Trump was basically correct - it was NOT a 100% free and fair election (this means "fraud" unfair). The censorship of Hunter Biden's laptop info, after FBI having it since Dec 2019 and "knowing" it was true, not Russian dis-info. How much does this censorship affect the election? 10%? 5%? at least 1%?
How much of the $450 million of Zuckerberg unfairly, tho maybe not illegally, targeting only high Dem areas for vote increases counts as unfair? 5%?
"[Trump had] already wasted five of your six weeks with this crazy stuff about the Dominion machines. He’d wheeled out this clown show of lawyers"
voting machines that can not always be audited, over which there are questions. But the machine counts mostly matched hand recounts.
The fraud was based on mail-in ballots without good signature verification, not miscounting accepted ballots. 1-2% rejection is usual with absentee ballots, less than 1% for many mail-in states with much higher volume expecting a higher than usual rejection rate.
https://www.maciverinstitute.com/2021/02/wisconsins-miraculous-vanishing-ballot-rejection-rate/
"the legal community in the administration was telling him that there was not sufficient evidence of fraud. ...
what he should do was focus on all his achievements and leave with dignity. Whether he thought there was fraud or not, he had his day in court and he lost. "
Actually, most of the courts refused to look at the evidence and threw out the lawsuits - so he mostly didn't have a day in court, including the multiple states complaining to SCOTUS. The US legal system doesn't have a good method for resolving mail-in signature questions of fraud.
"I was demoralized that he was going out the way he was. I thought it was very unfair to all the people, especially the younger people, who had worked in the administration. It hurt them getting jobs and it also hurt the Republican Party, which I thought up until then, could take the high ground as the party of law and order."
Bill Barr would rather be a good loser - like most GOPe professionals. Trump is NOT a good loser; Rep voters tired of losing in the culture wars AND the economic issues want more winning and are enraged by the Dems cheating, and by GOPe blaming Trump for being upset that the Dems cheated.
+"I just want to make it clear that I supported President Trump. I liked his policies."
"I think things went off the rails after the election because I think he felt he had nothing to lose at that point." No. Trump is convinced the Dems stole the election. I, too, think the election was stolen -- so 'what is to be done' now? Barr & Weiss are both assuming the election was 100% free and fair; the fact that it wasn't isn't mentioned nor addressed.
+"he did accomplish a lot. And it was historic. The economic growth and the fact that people who had been left out previously were starting to participate more."
"[Jan 6 protest] This is outrageous, and the federal agencies have to get up there and clear those people out. That was my reaction. I couldn’t believe that this thing had been allowed to get out of control. The next day, I said to a reporter that I thought the president’s behavior was shameful.
“Where’s the F.B.I.? Where’s federal law enforcement?" "
Where WAS the FBI??? How many agents were there, who were they, and what were they doing? In testimony, FBI director Wray refuses to be honest about the FBI. Which had, in Oct. 2020, done some entrapment type activities to create a conspiracy to kidnap Michigan Gov. Whitmer, 2 of 4 not guilty, recently 2 found guilty (tho it looks a bit unfair in trial).
I believe the FBI helped incite more violence from the peaceful, unarmed protesters, and lots more illegal trespassing that didn't justify getting locked up without trial for 18 months and counting. Not mentioned by BW nor Barr.
"I was disgusted and mortified and feeling very angry. I felt this whole thing had hurt the Republican Party and hurt the reputation of the administration even more than before. I was angry about that. Everyone I knew in the administration was angry about that. I also felt that it was just a Keystone Cops exercise. There wasn’t a genuine threat of overthrowing the government, as far as I was concerned, it was just a circus. That’s true of a lot of things that Trump arranges. ...
I would say that it was a riot that got out of control. People breached the Congress, and were attacking police. Obviously not all the demonstrators were doing this.
I would say it was an effort to intimidate Congress and the vice president. I haven’t heard words from the president that I would consider incitement under the law. That’s a very high bar because of our First Amendment, and it should be a high bar. But I did feel that he was morally responsible for it because he led these people to believe that something could happen on Capitol Hill that would reverse the election. That there’s something they could do involving pressuring the vice president and Congress that would overturn the election. ...
it was a shameful episode. It was a shameful riot. And the president certainly precipitated it. "
The Capitol Police shot and killed Ashli Babbitt a small, white, unarmed women climbing thru a broken door window (somebody else broke, who?) -- far worse brutality than against George Floyd.
I think a massive protest against a Deep State stolen election is not so shameful - but the FBI, CP, and US Congress response to the protest has been.
Barr being OK with MAL is marking him as likely untrustworthy now. Garland as AG and FBI director Wray need to verify, first, their justification for further persecution of Trump - before I trust them. They have proven themselves untrustworthy.
No intellectually serious critiques of Trump by Barr, but plenty of Orange Man Bad along with more substantive credit for his policies.
Caldwell: Ukraine does need to "be there" becasue otherwise Russian troops would have fallen into the abyss when they came across to border.:) That Ukraine could not as successfully defend itself w/o NATO assistance is true. What conclusion does Caldwell want to draw from this?
Ukraine objective? How about to reach a negotiated settlement that makes it less likely for countries to invade each other in the future, especially countries with less liberal forms of government invading countries with more liberal forms of government.
The Michael Glennon argument in "National Security and Double Government" is that Liz Truss is not running for a real government position. Truss is just running for something like that of a minor royal or to put it less charitably, a gussied up student council. Glennon makes his argument in the line of Bagehot's about the terminal decline of the House of Lords in the 19th century. Both houses of the US congress became quite a lot like the House of Lords in the postwar era, and eventually the presidency underwent the same sort of transition.
The decisions about what to do with Ukraine are being made by the unelected national security apparatus. Unfortunately, the unelected national security apparatus isn't making much better decisions than a Twitter mob would. This is perhaps the final failure mode of the method of double government. Eventually, the successors of the viziers to the child-king become just as stupid and inept as the child-king himself. This type of failure mode should be something familiar to students of Middle Eastern and Asian history.
For awhile now, Ukraine has settled into WWI Western front style stalemate. If young vigorous societies full of optimistic nationalism couldn't move the line in four years, how are Ukraine and Russia, two societies who clearly have none of that same verve, going to do it. What 40 year old drunk slav is going to go over the top and charge into artillery shells for either side?
>>Our aid to Ukraine should be calibrated to try to get both sides to realize that is in their interests to negotiate. We want neither side do think it can achieve its ends militarily. Does this mean trying to produce a stalemate? Preferably not a long-term stalemate, but a condition in which each side realizes that it is better off negotiating to end the conflict.
I agree in principle, but in practice I think it's impossibly difficult to calibrate precisely the amount of aid that would bring a stalemate without a large risk of defeat for the side you're supporting. War is just too contingent and hard to predict. Indeed, from what I can tell it's likely that our aid to Ukraine so far is not sufficient to make it in Russia's interests to negotiate.
Re Barr's point about white collar crime, surely white collar criminals are more responsive to deterrence than typical violent criminals. If your purpose in crime is to make money, seeing someone like you with their head on a pike for attempting the same crime is going to make you think twice. This is a matter of deterrence, not retribution.