Manufacturing safe spaces

It's been fascinating (by which I mean "horrifying") watching the reaction to the revelation of Junior's meeting with the Russian lawyer, and his own release of the emails leading up to it.

Since way back during the campaign, Trump and his supporters have been resolute in denying any meaningful connection with the Russian government. Presumably they had a sense that cooperating with Russia in the campaign would be a bad thing (or would at least be viewed as a bad thing), or else why deny it?

Now we uncontested emails plainly documenting a connection, and the response ranges from Sebastian Gorka's blustery shouts of "fake news!" to numerous supporters repeating the same line about a "nothingburger."

But a commenter on Kos noticed an interesting pattern:

Leading up to the election the comments [at The Hill] were overwhelmingly crazy pro-Trump, then since the election most articles get comments that are anti-Trump by a large margin. The shift was so marked I had come to conclude that The Hill had been a big pre-election paid troll target. The comments last night looked like a reversion to the pre-election trend. Which makes me wonder if the paid troll army is being revved back up because the perception of danger to the cause has spiked with the Jr revelations.

And I got to thinking, Just what is the role of a paid troll army, or a set of bots flooding comment sections with chaff?

Predictably, a non-answer response

Apparently it's been just over a month since I last bothered contacting my representative's office.

My question then was quite specific: whether Mr. Faso had a position on James Comey's claim that Trump asked him for personal loyalty, rather than loyalty to the law.

Yesterday I got a "response" (as it says in the subject line of the email, "Response from Rep. Faso"), but not actually an answer - see the letter below.

Or maybe it's a "response" to another series of queries I made to his office about Trump having shared Israeli intelligence with Russia.

But it's not an answer to that, either.

Rationality in government.

This post is a response to Jason Antrosio’s comment on my previous post, about the persistent conviction that success in business is an indicator that you’d be good at governing, too. He references Richard E. Hartwig’s book on the politics of transportation infrastructure in Colombia: “The author argues that the whole idea that you can find ‘efficiencies’ or ‘rationality’ in government such as in business is misguided. Because government encompasses everyone in the population (or should), it operates on a very different rationality than that of the consumer.”

You can talk about rationality and efficiency in government, but you have you to be careful what you mean by those terms.

I find it useful to think about two distinct types of efficiency:

1. Are you pursuing the right goals?
2. Whatever goals you’re pursuing, are you achieving your end at the least cost?

(And if you’re wondering about what quality you’re getting for your low cost, the level of quality can be included as part of the choice of goals in the first point.)

Idolaters of the market assume that markets achieve both types of efficiency through the wonders of competition.

An old delusion

You've probably heard remarks to the effect that government should be run more like a business - or, similarly, that we need an accomplished business executive to step in and bring their experience at "getting things done," as opposed to those useless politicians who've never had a real job in their lives and who just care about getting re-elected, rather than doing what's right for the country.

At a facile level, you might hope that the election of Trump would dispel the notion that success in business is any sort of voucher for being effective at actually running government.

(Then again, there's a strong argument to be made that Trump is a successful showman, hardly a successful businessman, so his incompetence in the Oval Office shouldn't have any bearing on the potential efficacy of someone who's actually run a business profitably.)

But beyond the easy knocks on Trump, there are various reasons why the yearning for a successful businessman is misguided.

Mix-n-match movie night

Over dinner, the boys and I got talking about Tintin, the series of comic books about the plucky Belgian "boy reporter" of indeterminate age who does a bang-up job fighting ne'er-do-wells.

from http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/the-adventures-of-tintin

A mental misfire led me to refer to "when Clinton goes into the ..." instead of "when Tintin goes into the ...".

We immediately started trying to recast the Tintin books using figures from contemporary politics.

Party time!

I read a comment today arguing that we needed to get beyond the mindless "rah-rah us-against-them game" of the nonfunctional two-party system.

I half agree.

The Democratic Party has for decades been more sensitive to the needs of high finance than to the situation of the median American, and it has in that respect been a "kinder, gentler" version of the Republican Party. And there is certainly an element of people who identify with one party or the other lambasting a particular behavior when done by someone from the "other side," then turning around and excusing similar behavior from one of "their own."

Another comment today (don't remember where) observed that Trump has mobilized the progressive base like nothing before. And I remembered reading in 2009 about Rahm Emanuel chewing out and slapping down progressive activists, essentially asking/ordering a "stand down" by people who should have been, in theory, his allies.

The best defense of Emanuel's position (presumably sanctioned by Obama) was that the activists were going to gum up the works and interfere with the actual work of legislating. But at the same time, Obama's election was skillfully used by regressive forces to mobilize the Tea Party. So while Democratic activists' enthusiasm was being frustrated, Republicans' energy was being stoked.

Emanuel's decision was, at best, political malpractice, hurting his own cause by undercutting its support. More likely, the cause of progressive activists was not the same as the cause of Rahm Emanuel, who was more interested in doing things for the party's big donors.

So yes, the Democrats as a party are too beholden to some of the same interests that are served by the GOP.

At the same time, I don't have much patience with the claim that there's no meaningful difference between the parties.