- Trump doesn’t need to keep his promises because he’ll just claim that he has, and blame his enemies when it’s obvious he has not;
- How the threat of government shutdown reveals the Republicans as the party of “no”, recalling William F. Buckley;
- In Louisiana, don’t say vaccine;
- How to reduce crime via proven solutions, and not faith.
NY Times, Frank Bruni, 19 Dec 2024: What if Trump Doesn’t Need to Keep Any of His Promises?
Short answer: all Trump has to do is tell his fans that he *has* kept his promises, and they’ll believe him. After all, they don’t trust the mainstream media, or government statistics, so how are they to know? If grocery prices go up, Trump will find some way to blame Biden, or the deep state. This sort of thing could go on for quite a while. But indefinitely? And what will happen when Trump has had enough of Musk running the show? Bruni:
No president in my lifetime has been elected in such a corrupted information environment, and no president has so shamelessly participated in its corruption.
If Trump fails by established metrics, he’ll declare those metrics bogus and delegitimize the experts and agencies that calculate them. And there’ll be no shortage of partisan players in the Babel of news media and social media to support him in that scheme. We saw that when they indulged his lies after the 2020 election. They’ve grown only more submissive since.
If Americans under Trump are demonstrably and undeniably hurting as much as they were under President Biden, he’ll weave stories and hurl accusations that absolve him of responsibility and assign it to his political foes. And he’ll find many more takers than he would have before we could all customize the reports we receive so that our designated heroes remain unblemished, our appointed villains irredeemable, our biases affirmed.
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Just say no.
Washington Post, Megan McArdle, 20 Dec 2024: Republicans’ obsession with saying ‘no’ will get them nowhere, subtitled “The GOP’s latest flirtation with a government shutdown shows the lack of a meaningful agenda.”
Every great nation has its great romantic tragedies, those star-crossed lovers who succumb to reckless passion, heedless of convention or personal cost. Ancient Rome had Antony and Cleopatra. France had Napoleon and Josephine. And modern America has the Republican Party’s helpless, hopeless love affair with shutting down the government.
As with all great loves, their fervor is wholly irrational. Shutdowns annoy voters, who tend to blame Republicans for that annoyance. Nor does it save any appreciable amount of money, because the major entitlement programs keep rolling out checks, and the furloughed federal workers eventually collect back pay for the time they spent twiddling their thumbs. As for using a shutdown as a political bargaining chip … well, as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) told reporters last year, “They never have produced a policy change, and they’ve always been a loser for Republicans politically.”
Why, then, do Republicans keep flirting with this destructive, abusive old flame? Because too many Republicans haven’t grasped a basic political lesson: In the game of politics, it is not enough for your enemies to lose. You actually have to win.
Try to think back to the last time the Republican Party had an agenda that didn’t boil down to “no”? It’s pretty difficult, isn’t it?
As William F. Buckley once said, conservatives are those who simply want to stop history. They’re comfortable with they learned as a child (i.e. what their religion taught them). And they would deeply prefer that everyone not bother them with any inconvenient facts about the world or the other people in it that would challenge those verities and oblige them to possibly, oh however inconveniently, change their minds. The horror. They would remain, in some intellectual sense, children forever. Perhaps adults who manage to think past childhood myths are to adults who don’t, as those adults are to children. I should write this down.
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In Florida, it’s Don’t Say Gay. Now in Louisiana, it’s Don’t Say Vaccine.
NPR, from Morning Edition, 20 Dec 2024 (via): Louisiana forbids public health workers from promoting COVID, flu and mpox shots
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Faith vs. Reality.
OnlySky, Phil Zuckerman, 19 Dec 2024: Reducing crime in the coming years is easy—and we actually know how
The article’s subtitle gives away its premise: “Will the future include more or less violent crime? It depends on whether we rely on prayer, as many politicians are suggesting, or apply proven solutions.”
In the Middle Ages, in the villages and hamlets of Northern Europe, when a spate of violent crime would erupt, local chieftains and magistrates would call for “roaming prayer groups” to combat the societal scourge.
Nah, just kidding. That’s Republican leaders spitballing in the here and now.
Take for example former Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin, who once put forth a “plan” to fight an uptick in crime by having faith leaders walk corner to corner in 10-block sections of various neighborhoods and pray. Yep. Two to three times a week was determined to be the most effective frequency.
As the good governor tweeted: “Prayer WILL change things.”
No, it won’t. Grow up; acknowledge reality. Such as.
Study after study over the course of a half-century or more has demonstrated the ways in which positive, active engagement with vulnerable populations can significantly reduce crime.
Then follow examples of social programs that helped people, the kind of things conservatives are against.
There are so many more such programs out there, not just within the United States, but around the world, that focus on vulnerable populations, provide them with supportive help, and thereby effectively decrease overall criminal activity. Such programs certainly cost money, but they are much cheaper and more cost-effective than not having them. Indeed, it is much more efficient, to say nothing of being more humane, to invest in preventative social welfare programs than to build and staff prisons.
The writer concludes,
It’s pretty easy to understand how much of this works: when people live in poverty and do not have jobs or good job prospects, when vocational training is scarce, when they can’t get a good education, when they can’t afford decent housing, when they don’t have access to health care, when they feel a deep sense of hopelessness — all of this breeds despair, humiliation, and shame. And this in turn creates unstable homes wracked with frustration, anger, and violence. Add drugs and alcohol into the mix, and things only gets worse. Such households are more likely to produce children who – experiencing insecurity, abuse, and neglect — are much more likely to become violent and criminally-involved as they grow up. It is thus no coincidence that nearly all of the states with the highest murder rates – such as Louisiana, Alabama, Missouri, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas – also tend to have the highest poverty rates.
To reduce violent crime, reduce poverty and inequality by providing health care, quality education, job training, affordable housing, and a variety of needed social services for all. Do this, and violent crime will plummet.
No prayers needed, no gods required.
