With the help of Dr. Leo Niehorster’s outstanding website, World War II Armed Forces Orders of Battle and Organizations, I did some quick calculations and came up with an eye-opening factoid. Among the units assigned to US First Army for Operation Overlord, the 1944 Allied invasion of France, were 33 quartermaster truck companies. Each company had 48 2½-ton cargo trucks and 1-ton trailers. In total, these 33 companies had 1,584 trucks and trailers, exclusive of additional vehicles assigned to the company and platoon headquarters. First Army also had 10 fuel supply companies, each with 16 2½-ton trucks and trailers, an additional 160, for a grand total of 1,744. Not counted are the many additional trucks in other units. For example, a 105mm field artillery battalion had 27 2½-ton cargo trucks. 

Besides the hundreds of thousands of deuce-and-a-half trucks, as the GI called them, that were supplied to the US armed forces, more than 400,000 were supplied to the Soviet Union via the Lend-Lease program. By 1945 over 30% of all trucks in Red Army service were American. In all, American factories produced 2,382,311 military trucks between 1941 and 1945, mostly 2 ½- and ¾-tonners. The latter, going by the name of weapons carrier, was produced in many variants: light cargo trucks, command vehicles, ambulances, etc. 

No wonder we won the war.

Posted by tmg110 at 12:05 PM EDT

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HBO’s next big thing is a series titled Confederate, set in an alternate America where the South won the Civil War, becoming an independent nation and preserving the institution of slavery. Because contemporary progressivism had perfected the technique of virtue signaling via willful stupidity, the announcement of this new project has produced a backlash, as if HBO is planning to produce a pro-slavery polemic. Whether the nosebleeds protesting Confederate really believe what they’re saying is a good question; probably, in the spirit of doublethink, they do and don’t simultaneously. In contemporary America, the issue of race has become an ideological depth charge, guaranteed to roil the waters of the leftie fever swamp. 

Very likely Confederate will turn out to be a tiresome Cautionary Tale for Our Time along the lines of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale. HBO knows full well that it must kowtow to every piety of the Left regarding race or risk being subjected to a public shaming in the style of Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Thus the free exercise of the imagination, so necessary to make a project like Confederate succeed, is pretty much off the table. And that’s too bad, because with the possible exception of an Axis victory in World War Two, a Southern victory in the Civil War is the most written-about scenario in the genre of alternate history: a rich vein of the imagination from which to mine the raw materials for a riveting dramatic series. 

Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee (1953) is perhaps the best-known novel on the theme of an alternate Civil War and embodies several ideas that could be very useful to the producers of Confederate. Moore envisions a Union defeat at Gettysburg in July 1863, followed by the occupation of Washington and a march on Philadelphia by General Lee’s victorious Army of Northern Virginia. Union resistance collapses and the US government capitulates on July 4, 1864. The ensuing Peace of Richmond consigns Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, Kansas, the American Southwest and California to the Confederate States of America, and also requires the United States of America to pay large reparations in gold. Thus by 1940, when Moore’s narrative commences, the CSA is a global superpower. The truncated USA, its economy ruined by postwar inflation, its dwindling population beset by chronic poverty and hopelessness, is a powerless and despised backwater. 

In Moore’s CSA slavery has been formally abolished but blacks, though no longer property and humanely treated, have no political rights. In the USA, however, the situation is very different. Rage against defeat in war and the humiliations that followed finds its focus in virulent racism. Blacks—on whose behalf, it is said, the ill-advised President Lincoln precipitated the nation into civil war—share the blame with the despised Abolitionists for all the ills of the war and its aftermath. Mass lynchings are common, often perpetrated by members of a secret terrorist organization, the racist, nativist Grand Army of the Republic. 

A TV series based this background material could be as arresting and provocative as Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle. But for all its imaginative power, Moore’s alternate history offers no space for a politically correct narrative. By and large, the people of his imaginary America accept their world as it is. There is no heroic black resistance movement. There is no abolitionist movement. None of our contemporary assumptions about race and politics are operative. Moore shows, in short, that an America in whose history the South won the Civil War would be a different America. But I’m sure that HBO, anxious to placate its progressive critics, will depict the boringly familiar: all those pieties concerning race, politics and economics with which contemporary progressivism feels comfortable. No doubt modernized slavery will be organized on a corporate basis, with wicked plutocrats exploiting black labor for the benefit of the shareholders. And no doubt progressives themselves will be cast in the role of heroic, enlightened abolitionists—with blacks, just as they are in reality, condescendingly regarded as a mascot group. 

As I thought about all this, an idea occurred to me. What if slavery in the CSA had evolved in such a manner as to replicate apartheid-era South Africa, with most blacks concentrated in “homeland” areas? And what if, to control these homelands, the white government had created a class of blacks receiving special privileges in return for serving as administrators, police officers, etc.? And what if the nucleus of resistance to the CSA developed among those black men and women? The dramatic possibilities are obvious—and, alas, obviously unacceptable to the doubleplusgoodthinkers of contemporary progressivism.

Posted by tmg110 at 9:57 AM EDT

Updated: Friday, 4 August 2017 1:04 PM EDT

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A remarkable feature of Trumpian populism is its malignant influence over both the supporters and the opponents of President Donald J, Trump. Among the former we find celebrity pundits like Sean Hannity, retailed to their fans for years as conservative stalwarts, abruptly transformed into shameless apologists for every offense against truth and morality perpetrated by Trump and his cronies. Listening to Hannity’s denunciations of the “deep state” and his vilification of Trump’s critics, I have often felt like pitching my glass into the TV screen. So to avoid a sad waste of good liquor, I no longer inflict upon myself the raving and ranting of that sycophantic phony.

But let us give Donald Trump his due. He also brings out the very worst in those who loathe and despise him. Assassination porn, fantasies of impeachment and dystopian malarkey send thrill after thrill up the collective leg of the Left. Trump’s supporters are routinely denounced as crazed gun-toting, racists, homophobes, misogynists, etc., etc. The hate-Trump Left, no less than the Love-Trump Right, seems incapable of seeing the man for what he is.

And what is he? Well, he’s nothing particularly new in American history. Trump didn’t invent populism, that not-really-conservative, dumbed-down, lowest-common-denominator, know-nothing ideology of the ignorant aggrieved. The shade of Huey Long no doubt beams with admiration of Trumpism. Perhaps even William Jennings Bryan nods approval from time to time. What’s new about Trump is not his populist message but his mode of operation, an amalgam of the celebrity culture and contemporary social media. This magnified his presence on the political stage and opened channels of communication bypassing those self-nominated gatekeepers of American political culture, the traditional mainstream media. Trump refused to play by the rules so therefore he couldn’t possibly win: thus reasoned the journalistic and political establishments. (I include myself in this criticism.) Not until the game was almost up did anybody see it coming: the knockout punch that floored Hillary Clinton, clearing Trump’s path to the White House.

Yet the substance of Trump’s populism is actually rather traditional: suspicious of free trade, inclined to protectionism, nationalist, isolationist, anti-immigrant, celebratory of “average Americans,” deeply suspicious of the Establishment, not particularly conservative. When Trump does mention a conservative principle, it seems as deeply felt as “Have a nice day.” In some respects, indeed, his populism resembles that of Bernie Sanders, the equally dumbed-down champion of that ideological oxymoron, “democratic socialism.”

What makes Trump distinctive is his open contempt for both propriety and the truth. He seems literally not to care whether the things he says bear any relation to reality. Last week the Commander-in-Chief supposedly banned transgendered people from service in the armed forces. But he did so via a tweet that, so far as anyone knows, has not been followed up by the kind of presidential directive necessary to give effect to such a ban. Also via Twitter, Trump has carried out a campaign of public vilification directed against his own attorney general. Before that, he fired the Director of the FBI in the most brutal and humiliating manner possible. Recall the dust-up over the relative sizes of his and Barack Obama’s inaugural crowds. Directly against the evidence of everybody’s eyes, Trump and his cronies insisted—insist to this day for all I know—that The Donald’s crowd was bigger. This ludicrous episode proved to be an omen, for Trump’s conduct in office since then has been very effective in driving his enemies on the Left over the screaming edge of madness.

And it’s not a pretty sight. Sean Hannity’s behavior may be unforgivable, but I can’t condemn the Rust Belt, Middle American voters who pulled the lever for Trump. They have a legitimate grievance against the political class—which seems, to put it no more pointedly, unconcerned about Middle America’s problems and priorities. Trump didn’t corrupt American politics but merely took advantage of a preexisting condition. Nor is the Left’s dislike of and contempt for his supporters anything new. The Left considered Middle America to be deplorable long before Hillary Clinton made the sentiment explicit. The unspoken assumption behind the theory of the ascendant Democratic majority was a belief that working-class white Americans would soon become extinct—and good riddance. The Trump Ascendancy has merely liberated the Left to say plainly what it really thinks about its fellow Americans: “You are stupid, ignorant, hateful and retarded.”

The resulting polarization of American politics, bred of mutual contempt and ill will, may well make this country ungovernable for years to come. For all the blather about bipartisanship nobody really believes in it any longer and it seems to me unlikely that either major party will be able to cobble together an effective governing majority. No matter who has control at the top there will be Resistance, gridlock, spreading lawlessness. But perhaps we need some such profound political crisis, whose climax would break the logjam and open a path forward. Because right now, America’s going nowhere fast.

Posted by tmg110 at 1:21 PM EDT

Updated: Wednesday, 2 August 2017 1:24 PM EDT

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You needn’t look very far to find evidence of Political Derangement Syndrome or PDS. It boxes the political compass, from the fever swamps of the loony left to the dugouts and bunkers of the alt.right. Its signs and symptoms are visible everywhere. Few seem immune. 

A recent outbreak of PDS centered around the GA 06 special congressional election. For weeks we were told that a referendum on the deeply unpopular President Donald J. Trump was shaping up in that Georgia congressional district, which Trump had barely carried in November. Also, it would for the GOP be a harbinger of disaster in the 2018 midterm elections. The broad Left (Democrats, liberals, progressives, the antifa mob) convinced themselves that their candidate, a 30-year-old documentary filmmaker with no political experience named John Ossoff, could flip what had long been a safe Republican district. And indeed, in the first go-round, Ossoff raked in 48% of the vote against a field of some fifteen GOP candidates. In last week’s runoff against Republican Karen Handel he was widely expected to pick up the handful of extra votes needed to bring off an upset. 

But the election-eve polls showed a tight race with a statistically insignificant lead for Handel. Gritting their teeth, Dem-friendly pundits and journalists forecast a long night and a squeaker of a victory for Ossoff. Because how could he lose? Trump had only carried GA 06 by one percent! And nobody likes the guy! 

Then came Election Day. The race was called at 11 pm. Karen Handel beat John Ossoff by four points. 

Well, so what? Everybody makes mistakes! That’s true enough, though in retrospect there were many reasons to think that the election would turn out more or less as it did. But in their detestation of Trump, the Dems and the media blinded themselves to the probabilities. Their predictions of an Ossoff victory, buttressed by reams of learned analysis, turned out to be the rationalization of a wish with a price tag of $24 million. That in itself was a manifestation of PDS— but merely the preliminary sniffle. 

Even as the dust of crushed Democratic and media hopes was still settling, reality was being twisted into a new shape. It was rather like the scene in Nineteen Eighty-four when a Party orator, haranguing the crowd on the theme of Eurasian war crimes, suddenly and without breaking rhetorical stride shifts to a denunciation of Eastasian war crimes. Oceania, Mr. Orwell remarks mordantly, was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally. And in the case of Ossoff versus Handel it turned out that GA 06 was GOP turf. GA 06 had always been GOP turf. Ossoff never had a prayer. 

That the new reality pretty much reflected reality does the broad Left and the media no particular credit. They adopted it only when their preferred reality didn’t work out. And they adopted it with scarcely a blush of chagrin. Suddenly this was what they had been saying all along: that GA 06 was a safe GOP seat, that Ossoff was probably going to lose, that the outcome wasn’t predictive of what would happen in the 2018 midterms, and that the broad Left had known this all along. 

Observing in a Quora answer that Democratic hopes has come to naught in GA 06, I myself was treated to a smarmy little lecture from another Quora denizen. Stuff and nonsense, she said in effect. Are we downhearted? No! We expected Ossoff to come up short. And besides, these special elections tell you nothing about the shape of electoral things to come. And so on and so forth. I was tempted to ask why, if all this was known, the Dems had poured $24 million into Ossoff’s campaign. But to what purpose? With crystal clarity, this comment on my answer paraded all the destructive, self-deceiving folly that PDS implants in the human brain. Contradicting it with a fact would have been an exercise in futility.

You see much the same thing when some Trump fanboy or -girl, confronted with the latest example of their hero’s instability or dishonesty, tortures it into some wonderfully convoluted political masterstroke. PDS makes a person impervious to facts, contemptuous of evidence and blind to elementary reality. What Trump is, and is not, is pretty clear—obvious even. But a supposedly savvy journalist like Mika Brzezinski thinks—and what is more, says on the air—that she sees in the President an aspiring dictator along the lines of North Korea’s Kim Jon Um. This bespeaks a definite abnormality of mind, albeit one that is, no doubt, confined to the sphere of politics. Certainly it explains why so much of what you read or see concerning politics turns out to be dead wrong. All those credentialed pundits and savvy journalists suffer from PDS.

The corruption of our political culture—its triviality, crudity, dishonesty, sneering viciousness—is roundly decried. Much less remarked upon is the malady that underlies all these vices: the disconnect from reality that enables otherwise sane and decent people to behave like bullies and idiots, all the while remaining convinced that they’re enlightened, virtuous and heroic. Political Derangement Syndrome: It’s hazardous to America’s civic and spiritual health.

Posted by tmg110 at 12:39 PM EDT

Updated: Friday, 23 June 2017 9:28 PM EDT

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Only one man bears the guilt for yesterday’s shooting in Virginia that targeted Republican members of Congress: the now-deceased shooter. He and he alone “has blood on his hands,” as the saying goes. I want to make that clear in the minds of readers because what follows will no doubt provoke the Left. 

In cases of political violence, the guilt of the shooter is separate from the responsibility of others and it’s legitimate to inquire whether society’s general political atmosphere, the general state of political discourse, played some role in setting yesterday’s events in motion. Regarding the current case, the Left summarily rejects any such suggestion, its escape hatch being the claim that the shooter was “mentally unstable”—a term, it must be noted, that’s somewhat lacking in precision. And Jay Cost, no leftie, has somewhat supported this defense, commenting yesterday that after all, America has a long tradition of overheated political rhetoric that usually does not spill over into actual violence. 

Cost’s point is fine as far as it goes but, after all, context matters. That political opponents said ugly things about one another fifty or a hundred years ago without sparking violence does not necessarily validate the point for present-day America. In Weimar Germany, for instance, extreme political rhetoric and actual political violence went hand in hand. The rhetoric of National Socialism—talk of the “Jew republic,” the “November criminals,” etc.—was meant to and did lead to violence, from street brawls to assassinations. In no way, shape or form was the violent political rhetoric of that time and place disconnected from political violence. 

So the current case must be judged, first, on the terms of contemporary American political culture and only second in the light of history. 

There can be no denial that in recent years violent rhetoric has proliferated, and that it has insinuated itself into the political mainstream, Right and Left. Militaristic and revolutionary themes abound. Those opposed to Trumpism style themselves as “the Resistance,” as if they were battling a dictatorial regime or a foreign invader. Meanwhile, on the Right, progressives are excoriated as globalists, un-American rats, even traitors. Both sides characterize themselves as “fighting to take the country back.” 

From the Left, much of the vitriol is flung directly at President Trump. He is routinely excoriated as a Russian stooge, guilty of actual treason, a fascist, an aspiring dictator seeking to shred the constitution, a sexist, a homophobe, a racist, etc., and so forth, on and on. And this hymn of hate is not restricted to the goons of the so-called antifa (anti-fascist) movement. Coming from extremists and head cases like Noam Chomsky or Naomi Wolf, such rhetoric could be disregarded. But nowadays, with increasing force and volume, it comes from respected academics, celebrities and, yes, supposedly mainstream progressive and Democratic politicians like Bernie Sanders and Nancy Pelosi. 

Naturally those who support Trump or even say anything positive about him come in for their own share of this hate speech—for that, literally, is what it is. Hillary Clinton’s dismissal of Trump voters as “a basket of deplorables” set the standard. In the eyes of the Left, there can have been no legitimate reason for people to vote for Trump, only racism, sexism, and hate. And this comforted the Left before Election Day, for surely such an ogre with such a following could never be elected president. 

So when Donald J. Trump was actually elected president, the broad Left went into a three-foot hover of utter rage. 

The assault on congressional Republicans cannot really be isolated from the escalating violence of the protests against President Trump. Groups like the antifa movement employ the tactics of intimidation and actual violence—and they do so, it must be said, with the tacit approval of establishment progressivism, the media and the Democratic Party. Which leading Democratic politicians have stood up to denounce antifa street violence or suppression of conservative speech and activity on college campuses? Which mainstream media outlets have decried the rising tide of leftist street violence? Few if any. And this is hardly surprising, for the hostility of, say, CNN to Trump is only somewhat less unhinged than that of, say, MoveOn.org. Mainstream progressivism, though perhaps made uncomfortable by the violent rhetoric and actual violence of the Resistance, doesn’t really disapprove of it. 

In New York City, the much-respected Public Theater is currently presenting Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. It has often been remarked that this play is a timeless commentary on politics and political ambition, capable of being staged against any backdrop. The Public Theater’s offering has its actors costumed in contemporary clothing—and Caesar himself is made up to look just like Donald J. Trump. Since Julius Caesar’s first climax is the title character’s bloody assassination, the Public Theater has come in for a great deal of criticism. The critics call it “assassination porn”; the Public Theater’s defenders appeal to the sanctity of art. How it actually differs from Kathy Griffin’s severed-head-of-Trump stunt is a good question. Both it seems to me are the product of the extremist rhetoric and occasional violence of the Resistance. 

And so we circle back to a disaffected leftist’s shoot-up of the GOP House baseball team. The broad Left, knowing that it had a problem on its hands, wasted no time trying to distance itself from the shooter. He was, we were told, mentally ill. It was, we were told, really the Republicans’ own fault because they oppose more gun control. And of course it was just disgraceful to claim, as some conservatives and Trump supporters immediately did, that the Left as a whole has blood on its hands. 

The last point is actually correct, though you’d think that Democrats & etc., who instantly blamed Sarah Palin for the shooting of former Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords despite a lack of evidence of a connection between Palin and the killer, would blush to make it. (That shooter, incidentally, turned out to be a genuine head case: a paranoid schizophrenic, long obsessed with Giffords, who believed among other things that the rules of English grammar had been cooked up by the deep state as a mind-control measure.) No, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and the Pussy Hat Brigade et al., are not guilty of murder. But on the other hand, they do bear responsibility for the climate of fear and hate in which the attack on the GOP congressmen took place. 

By all accounts the shooter, though he could certainly be described as a social misfit, was not clinically insane. He wasn’t ordered to open fire by his dog or some invisible friend. He was, rather, a man of radical progressive views, a heavy consumer of anti-Trump agitprop, a volunteer for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. His stated reasons for attempting to kill Republican members of Congress were political. To claim, as the Left is doing, that the atmosphere of seething hatred and imperfectly contained violence in its ranks played absolutely no role in motivating the shooter is simply not credible. In fact—there can be no disputing this—it was one factor among several that led this man to pick up the gun. 

And I suspect that his desire to kill is shared by many others. The fervor with which Trump assassination porn is embraced by people describing themselves as progressives, devoted to social justice and all good things, shines a not-very-flattering light on the Left. Like many of the Roman senators who stood by while the conspirators stabbed Caesar to death, the progressives would not raise a hand against Trump themselves—but many wouldn’t mind seeing someone else bump him off. And before my conservative and Trump-supporting readers start feeling smug, I advise them to sample some of the rhetoric of the Right that gets put out, for instance, on Twitter. The only difference is that on the Right, there are many people who not only deplore but decry such extremism. On the Left, supposedly responsible leaders overlook it or make excuses for it. 

Posted by tmg110 at 12:55 PM EDT

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Every time I get fed up with Donald Trump, along comes someone like Kathy Griffith to remind me just how dishonest and vile his progressive opponents truly are. 

Yesterday the President announced that the US is pulling out of the Paris climate accord—and the response from progressive quarters was predictably unhinged. Take California billionaire  Tom Steyer, a climate-change fundamentalist who donated more than $85 million to the Democrats last year. Just before Trump’s announcement he Twitter-shrieked that the President was “committing a traitorous act of war against the American people.” And that wasn’t all! Steyer went on to moan that Trump’s action was “assault and battery on the future of the American people.” 

Jeez. Take a chill pill, there, Tommy. 

Hyperbolic rejoinders in this vein were characteristic of the broad Left’s reaction to what was, after all, the fulfillment of a campaign pledge. Though Trump’s behavior in office has been erratic, it must be said that on some issues—border security, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and now the Paris accord—he has delivered as promised. In the run-up to yesterday’s announcement there was much breathless media speculation about the struggle to change the President’s mind, in which I placed little stock. Given the fact that (a) the Paris accord was tilted radically against American economic interests, (b) embodied no enforcement mechanisms ensuring that other nations would live up to their promises, (c) would do little or nothing to affect the planetary climate and (d) was a treaty with absolutely no chance of being ratified by the US Senate—what reason was there, really, for Trump to change his mind? 

That last point—(d)—has been somewhat overlooked, but it bears analysis. The Paris climate accord was negotiated by President Obama, as was his right under the United States Constitution. But the right of the Senate to “advise and consent” to a treaty so negotiated was disregarded by Obama, who seldom had time for such niceties as respect for constitutional norms. He was quite well aware that the Paris accord, if submitted to the Senate, would be rejected. So Obama simply ignored the Senate, pretending that he alone, as president, possessed the necessary authority to bind the nation to an unpopular and, in the view of many, economically harmful agreement. 

Don’t expect President Trump’s progressive critics to grapple with the realities of the situation, however. When it comes to The Donald, they’ve completely lost their minds. According to Amy Davidson, writing in the New Yorker, his decision was an “insult” to poor Angela Merkel—because, you know, “addressing climate change speaks to the most fundamental of values.” Progressives do have a habit of deciding what other people’s fundamental values should be, presumably including the values of American coal miners whose jobs, if climate-change fundamentalists got their way, would be destroyed. And this is one reason why they hate Trump so much: because he so often states the opposite of their most deeply cherished beliefs. When he said yesterday, “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” the denizens of the broad Left recognized this quip for it was: a smackdown directed at them. And their response was characteristically intemperate, not to say kooky.

So I have no doubt that in the months and years ahead there will be two, a dozen, many Kathy Griffins. We will be regaled with calls for the President’s impeachment or assassination, prayers that he’ll develop a brain tumor, crude sexist gibes directed against his wife and daughters, ever-more-zany conspiracy theories, etc. and so forth—all this in place of the well-reasoned and carefully considered criticism that he will undoubtedly deserve. I’m no fan of President Donald J. Trump. I thought—still think—that he’s unfit to be president. But there he is, sitting behind the big desk in the Oval Office and so when he does right in my view, as he did yesterday by withdrawing the US from a dumb and damaging climate agreement, I’ll say so. But when he does something ill-considered or stupid I’ll point that out as well. And I have to add that along the way I shall relish the spectacle of the broad Left’s accelerating descent into its chosen abyss of insanity and nihilism. 

Posted by tmg110 at 9:15 AM EDT

Updated: Friday, 2 June 2017 9:57 AM EDT

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The specious comparison is a staple of progressive rhetoric, especially popular on those frequent occasions when the Enlightened seek to bash the Land of E Pluribus Unum. For instance: “Among developed countries, the United States [insert unflattering factoid].” And yes, indeed, it seems shocking that the United States has a higher rate of this or a lower rate of that than other developed countries—until you stop to ponder just what is meant by the term “developed countries.” 

Here are five countries that are usually classed as “developed”: the United States, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, the Czech Republic. How much do these countries actually have in common? Or to put it another way, how probative are comparisons between and among them? It may be true, for example, that the murder rate in Denmark is much lower than it is in the United States—but is it really possible to put one’s finger on two or three specific factors that make the difference? Yes, say progressives who employ the “developed countries” comparison. But an argument is only as good as the assumptions on which it rests, which in this case is the “developed countries” model. 

According to Wikipedia, a developed country is defined as “a sovereign state that has a highly developed economy and advanced technological infrastructure relative to other less industrialized nations. Most commonly, the criteria for evaluating the degree of economic development are gross domestic product (GDP), gross national product (GNP), the per capita income, level of industrialization, amount of widespread infrastructure and general standard of living.” Which criteria should be used and how they should be applied is, according to Wikipedia, a subject for debate among experts, but this definition will do for present purposes. 

Now obviously the five nations listed above— the United States, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, the Czech Republic—each fit within this definition. That is, both the US and, say, the Czech Republic are “developed.” But there the similarities end, for the definition of “developed country” excludes a myriad of factors—historical, cultural, social, demographic, economic, political—that give the two countries their unique national characters. And when comparisons are made between and among “developed countries,” all these factors are, literally by definition, left out of consideration. 

In some sense of course all countries are “developed”; that is, their present condition is the outcome of all the factors that called them into being and shaped their character. “National character” is, indeed, a slippery concept that has often been put to intellectually dishonest uses. But a France without the French Revolution, an England without tea or suet pudding, would hardly be the France and England we know. Every country is unique, even those that grew from the same root. A Dane would hardly thank you for lumping his country together with Sweden, nor would a Canadian appreciate having her country caricatured as America Lite. Consider the so-called Anglosphere countries: Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. Certainly they have their similarities but a visitor from one to any of the others would be equally if not more greatly struck by the differences. 

For a comparison between the United States and some other developed country to be valid, all historical, cultural, social, demographic, economic, political factors ought to be taken into account. This being plainly impossible—no one person or group of persons is capable of weighing them all and a large number are unknown and perhaps even unknowable—any such comparison must surely be regarded with skepticism. This is not to say that such comparisons are without value. There’s nothing wrong in principle with looking at the Swiss healthcare system and asking one’s self if it could serve as a model for US healthcare reform. But that’s not where progressives are coming from with their specious comparisons between the US and other “developed countries.” For them it’s all about cosmic justice and virtue signaling. “Why can’t we be more like Canada, Denmark, France…?” progressives ask. The question is rhetorical in their minds but there’s an answer and it’s obvious: because we’re not Canadian, Danish or French. 

Conservative solutions to social problems are often dismissed by progressives as “simplistic,” for instance when the former opine that the most effective way to fight crime is to arrest, convict and imprison more criminals. But this, we are told, takes no account of the “root causes” of crime, nor does it address the challenges of rehabilitation, etc. and so forth. In short, the problem is defined as being too complex to be solved by straightforward law enforcement methods. That poverty programs and rehabilitation of criminals have had no discernable effects on the crime rate, while on the other hand locking up more criminals correlates strongly with a decades-long fall in the crime rate, are inconvenient facts that are waved aside with appeals to “complexity.” But virtually in the same breath we’re told that the United States lags behind other “developed nations” in this or that category, as if the French tax system of France or the welfare systems of Scandinavia would be workable in a country so unlike them. Few comparisons are as simplistic—and specious—as that.

Posted by tmg110 at 1:16 PM EDT

Updated: Wednesday, 2 August 2017 2:48 PM EDT

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First let me say that you really should read Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parks. In excruciating detail, it describes a candidate and a campaign so inept that they managed to lose the 2016 presidential election to a reality TV star trailing two ex-wives, a pride of former girlfriends and enough miscellaneous baggage to blow up a dozen political careers. If you hate the fact that Donald J. Trump is sitting in the Oval Office, blame Hillary Clinton—whose incompetence, paranoia and mendacity paved his way with flagstones of platinum. 

But I come not to praise Shattered, for there’s something else about this book, something that I found even more interesting than its story line. To illustrate what I mean, here are a couple of extracts from Chapter One, “Or I Wouldn’t Have Run.” The first: “The time would come for her to speak into the winds of history, but, as much as she knew Iowa wasn’t the place, she also knew that her moment hadn’t yet come.”  And a little farther on: “Obama had been relentlessly superb at telling voters why he was running and giving them a window into how he would govern.” 

Let us pause for a moment to contemplate the avoidable awkwardness of these two extracts. The first one should really be two sentences, and it needs further surgery to eliminate excess commas and that maladroit turn of phrase, “speak into the winds of history.” For example: “At the right time, in the right place, she would speak to history. But the time was not yet and Iowa, she knew, was not the place.” The other sentence suffers from both adjectival excess and metaphorical lameness. Superb skirts the perimeter of hyperbole, and relentlessly pushes it over the line. Then we’re asked to envision Obama as a building contractor, giving people a window through which to peer. Far better to put it this way: “Obama had been superb at explaining to voters why he was running and how he would govern.” 

Shattered is replete with similar examples of bad writing. All the literary vices are on display: convoluted sentence structure, moribund metaphors and similes, boringly familiar clichés, adjectival and adverbial overkill. We’re told that a certain campaign apparatchik had “tremendous autonomy”—not considerable or substantial but tremendous. Admittedly the phrase “the dynamics of American politics” is boilerplate—but is it really improved by tweaking it to read, “the thermodynamics of American politics”? And do we really need to know that a particular Clinton loyalist is “possessed of a tiny frame, a warm, toothy smile, and a high-pitched voice that belie her penetrating intellect and epic snark”? 

Now of course a book of this type needn’t aspire to the literary standard of, say, Julius Caesar. (I cite Shakespeare’s play because it prefigures some of the themes of Shattered.) And yes, I realize that the authors and their publisher had a potential best seller on their hands, knew this, and were under considerable pressure to bring it out at the earliest possible moment. But there’s really no excuse for literary malpractice of such magnitude. On every third page, it seems, there’s some rhetorical speed bump to break the reader’s concentration and leave him shaking his head. With the Iowa caucuses looking dicey for Clinton, we’re told that some of campaign manager Robbie Mook’s “internal critics began rattling their sabers” against him. On Election Night, “veteran Clinton consultant and summoner of gray clouds Mandy Grunwald” sounded an alarm about the returns from Virginia. 

This is the sort of thing you’d expect from a self-published book available through Amazon Unlimited. But Shattered is, supposedly, a professional production, written by two political journalists with the assistance, one presumes, of a professional editor. Given that background, the breezy incompetence of its prose style is all the more to be deplored. Surely it would not have imposed too much additional work on the authors and their editor to go through the book and touch it up. As I’ve demonstrated, some of its worst faults could easily have been remedied. 

Very likely, however, the badness of Shattered’s prose style was not even perceived by Allen, Parks and their editor. And that, you should pardon the cliché, is a sad commentary.

Posted by tmg110 at 10:01 AM EDT

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I should have seen this coming, really: Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, has been adapted for television. In the Age of the Demon Trump, it seems, no dystopian screed, however crude, is quite stupid enough to be passed over.

The Handmaid’s Tale was adapted for the big screen in 1990, starring Robert Duvall, Faye Dunaway and the late Natasha Richardson. One wonders why, after reading the novel and perusing the script, they nevertheless signed on. Atwood’s tale is set in a near-future America, some time after a cabal of religious fundamentalists calling themselves the Sons of Jacob toppled the US government and raised in its place the Republic of Gilead. The new regime is militant, militarized and totalitarian, and one of its first orders of business is to strip women of their rights—going so far, even, as to forbid them to read. As well, environmental contamination has drastically lowered human fertility. Thus one class of subjugated women in the new society is the Handmaids, women of child-bearing age conscripted to serve as stand-ins for the mostly barren Wives (capitalization intentional) of the all-male ruling group. The Handmaids are in effect slaves, attached to the households of the elite ruling class, closely supervised, and required to participate in a bizarre ceremony of intercourse for the purpose of producing children. The penalty for disobedience, resistance or failure to produce a child is death.

Atwood is Canadian and her patent dislike of the Colossus of the South perhaps explains the sheer preposterousness of The Handmaid’s Tale. Not that the basic idea—the rise in America of a fundamentalist religious dictatorship—is a bad one. Robert A. Heinlein used it for his 1940 novella “If This Goes On—” But he took pains to make his tale plausible. The First Prophet—the man who led the fundamentalist revolution that toppled constitutional government, got his start as a radio and TV evangelist. And though the office of president has been replaced by the Prophet Incarnate (whose personal regiment of guards is titled the Angels of the Lord) West Point, the Hollywood Bowl and Time magazine are still there. Heinlein's dystopia is still America, albeit an America that took a wrong turn. But Atwood’s Republic of Gilead, though existing in our near future, is virtually unrecognizable as America. And she takes no pains at all to explain how a nation of 300,000,000 diverse individuals could possibly have been reduced to the condition she depicts: in thrall to a small group of religious fundamentalists who make the most hard-shell Southern Baptist look like a left-wing liberal. Her scenario is, in the strictest sense of the word, incredible.

Now of course one could say the same of “If This Goes On—”But Heinlein, an accomplished professional, knew how to make his imaginary America appear plausible and besides that was mostly concerned with telling a good story. Atwood, alas, is addicted to progressive finger wagging and she hits all the mandatory stops: anti-American, anti-religious, feminist, environmentally conscious, etc. and so forth. The suspension of disbelief so necessary for the success of a story of this type never happens for The Handmaid’s Tale. Consciously or not, Atwood was preaching to the converted, for whom the racism, sexism, religious insanity and militarism of the United States of America are all givens. To satisfy that audience, plausibility was hardly necessary.

And this brings us to the zombie-like reappearance of The Handmaid’s Tale in the form of a Hulu original series for TV. One can readily understand why this lame and dated example of dystopian literature has been dredged up at the present moment. The series was announced in April 2016 and now here it is, almost precisely at the one-hundred day mark of the Trump Tyranny. Critics have of course describe it as “timely.” Gail Pennington of the Detroit Free Press opined that “Viewers and readers may understandably see The Handmaid's Tale as cautionary.” Well, of course. Dictatorship! Sexism! Fundamentalist religion! The Bible-thumping far-right barbarians are at the gates of progressivism! It’s time for a wake-up call and The Handmaid’s Tale…The Handmaid’s Tale…

Well, The Handmaid’s Tale is just about the last dystopian vision that anybody with an ounce of discernment would pick to criticize the Age of Trump. Here we have a president trailing two ex-wives and a pride of girlfriends, a product of the New York City celebrity culture, whose references to God and religion seem as casual as “Have a nice day,” whose vulgarity carries the taint of fanny-patting sexism—and he is supposed to be the target of this Atwood revival, a jeremiad against religious fundamentalism? Please!

Nevertheless it may be that The Handmaid’s Tale, the TV series, will succeed after a fashion. Though the novel itself is a tiresome piece of dreck, the 1990 film version did possess a certain entertainment value—providing that one chose to regard it as a parody or farce. So with good production values and a decent cast, this new TV version may actually be worth watching. The Walking Dead isn’t plausible either, and up to now it’s done pretty well. But as a cautionary tale, as an attack on America, religion, conservatives or Trump it’s bound to fall flat, just like its predecessors.

Just the other day the New York Times published an op-ed that more or less directly advocated the revision of the First Amendment so that it no longer covers that nebulous category of expression, “hate speech”—otherwise known as “statements and opinions that liberals, progressives and leftists don’t like.” The op-ed was written by a professor at New York University. And recently Howard Dean—that stupid man who used to be governor of Vermont, DNC chair and a Democratic presidential candidate—has been running around saying more or less the same thing. And they’re not just blowing smoke.Threats, intimidation and actual violence have been employed by academic leftists to prevent conservatives from speaking on campus. Pretty much explicitly, the broad Left has embraced a concept of group rights that has no patience with traditional civil liberties like freedom of speech. In that abandonment, it seems to me, may be discerned the germ cell of totalitarianism in contemporary America. And thereby hangs a tale that will never be told by Hulu.

Posted by tmg110 at 11:07 AM EDT

Updated: Thursday, 27 April 2017 12:06 PM EDT

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There is irony in the anti-Trump Left’s current craze for Nineteen Eighty-four—once again a best seller, albeit for reasons that would, no doubt, make George Orwell roll his eyes. It seems likely that few of the Trump bashers have read it or, if they have, that its message actually has penetrated their skulls. That their own behavior in many ways mimics the dogmas of Ingsoc as Orwell imagined them is a cosmic joke that they just don’t get. 

Today on Twitter I happened across a bit of extraordinary news. It seems that Mitch McConnell, the GOP Senate Majority Leader, and Paul Ryan, the GOP Speaker of the House of Representatives, colluded with V. Putin to funnel Russian cash into the campaign coffers of Donald Trump. Various replies to this tweet were of the “Aha! Now we’ve got them!” variety: expressing absolute confidence that once this story breaks Demon Trump, his minions and his enablers will disappear behind bars. Winston Smith, toiling in his cubicle at the Ministry of Truth, could not have concocted a more audacious political fantasy. So here we are, almost one hundred days into the Trump Dystopia, and the Left has embraced its very own variant of birtherism: the conviction, apparently unshakable despite a total lack of evidence, that Donald Trump & Co. colluded with V. Putin to hack the 2016 presidential election and steal it from the rightful victor, Hillary Clinton. 

It’s amusing to recall the scorn and contempt with which the Left treated the original birtherism: the claims by various fringe figures on the Right that Barack Obama was not really a native-born US citizen and was, therefore, ineligible to serve as president. Conservative dislike of Obama was such that many people who ought to have known better gave credence to this fact-free theory. Most notoriously, it was embraced and promoted by one Donald J. Trump—though one wonders whether he really believed it. Anyhow, the Left was right to revile birtherism, a political fable in the tradition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion that was and remains a blot on conservatism. 

But then a funny thing happened: Donald Trump actually managed to get himself elected president, and the Left lost its collective mind.

The essence of the original birtherism was a stubborn belief in a claim that was obviously not true and was soon refuted by clear documentary evidence. Admittedly this sort of thing is nothing new in political history. I already mentioned The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a product of the Tsarist secret police that is still cited nowadays by dedicated anti-Semites. There was, too, the charge that the Great War, whose centenary we’re currently observing, was engineered by those Merchants of Death, munitions and weapons manufacturers, in a quest for ever-higher profits. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy spawned literally dozens of conspiracy claims, many of which live on today despite repeated debunking. Some seemed more plausible than others, but all, if not at blatant variance with the facts, were unsupported by any real evidence. 

The current birtherism of the Left—let’s call it trumputinism—has this resemblance to the Merchants of Death charge: some basis in reality. It’s certainly true that the prewar arms race played a role in the coming of the Great War, and it’s also true that Russia was meddling in the 2016 US presidential election. But that is all. Just as there is no evidence that munitions manufacturers actively conspired to start the Great War, there’s no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian agents to corrupt the 2016 election. Indeed, there’s no plausible scenario by which either thing could actually have happened. Where trumputinism is concerned, on a small foundation of fact was raised a vast, ramshackle superstructure of speculation, wishful thinking, distortions and plain falsehoods. And the less credible it appears, the more fanatically it’s embraced and promoted by the faithful. 

Supposedly the leaders of the institutional Democratic Party are becoming nervous about trumputinism. It served their purpose for a time, perhaps, but if it doesn’t pay off in terms of gigantic headlines, indictments, perp walks and impeachment, the letdown may be such as to ruin the Democrats’ long-term political prospects. The problem is that many trumputiners are also part of the party base. If nothing happens, these people may turn on the Democrats, accusing them of selling out to Trump. Then too, as journalists pursued the story certain details emerged that look problematical for the late Obama Administration. It just goes to prove that so-true truism: Be careful what you wish for… 

The author of Nineteen Eight-four would certainly have relished the irony of all this: The trumputinist Left has become a mirror image of the birther Right they so despise, clinging to a political fable that makes them appear ridiculous to anyone with a scrap of objectivity. It’s condign punishment for the people who are attempting to hijack Mr. Orwell’s intellectual legacy.

Posted by tmg110 at 11:06 AM EDT

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