Trump’s “Behavioral Incontinence”

Wall Street Journal Editorial 12.22.2018

Cabinet officers come and go in Washington with little lasting political impact, but the resignation of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on Thursday strikes us as a major political event that is likely to reverberate for the rest of Donald Trump’s term and damage him in ways the President doesn’t seem to appreciate.

It should be said that the former Marine General resigned in honorable fashion. If a cabinet officer or White House aide can no longer in good conscience serve a President on a matter fundamental to his duties, then resignation is the correct choice. The disreputable course is to write a newspaper op-ed under the byline Anonymous, or remain on the job and sabotage policies like a bureaucratic mole.

The resignation damage isn’t that Mr. Mattis is indispensable or is the last “grown-up” chaperone for Mr. Trump, as the Washington cliche has it. The President will find someone to run the Pentagon, whether out of patriotism as Mr. Mattis did or ambition.

The more lasting damage will derive from the shoddy, humiliating way Mr. Trump treated the secretary and his generals on such a core military issue as deployments in Syria. Jim Mattis is not some neoconservative bent on staying in Syria for years. He is less hawkish on Syria and Iran than national security adviser John Bolton or Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Yet in deciding to withdraw all U.S. troops from Syria, Mr. Trump acted on his own impulses with little more than cursory consultation with his military advisers. Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has let it be known he wasn’t consulted at all. A month ago Gen. Dunford told Congress that Islamic State wasn’t defeated, but on Thursday Mr. Trump declared victory.

It’s one thing to advise a President and be overruled. But it undercuts the Pentagon’s authority to learn after the fact that the Commander in Chief has acted without so much as fare thee well. As Gen. Dunford’s immediate supervisor in the chain of command, Mr. Mattis must have been embarrassed as well.

This is about more than two egos, though both the general and Mr. Mattis are modest men. This is about the message Mr. Trump is sending to the men and women under their command. He is telling soldiers that he will act on uninformed impulse, after a phone conversation from a Turkish dictator, without deliberation or due respect. Mr. Trump should know that tens of thousands of his “deplorables” are in uniform or are veterans. He has stuck a finger in their eye.

Then there is the disdain his Syrian withdrawal shows for allies, especially the Kurds and Arabs in the Syrian Democratic Forces. These have been our ground forces in clearing out the Islamic State caliphate. They took the casualties. Yet now, and without any warning, the U.S. President is telling these comrades-in-arms to fend for themselves. If they are slaughtered by Turkish tanks or Iranian barrel bombs, Mr. Trump will share responsibility.

As Mr. Mattis wrote in his resignation letter, “My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues.”

If Mr. Trump were wise, he would ruminate on these words from an adviser who has worked hard and long to reassure allies around the world that Mr. Trump’s word is good. The alarm many of Mr. Trump’s voters feel—men and women who have stuck with him so far—is that the President will instead interpret this only through the lens of his own ego.

Journalist Robert Merry, who is sympathetic to Mr. Trump’s overseas restraint, wrote recently with regret that Mr. Trump is likely to lose re-election through “behavioral incontinence” and that the “biggest losers” will be his voters. Mr. Trump should ruminate on that too.

German lawmakers meet Julian Assange in London

Why is Julian Assange still under House Arrest? It’s the American Hegemon* harassing the Custodian of the Empire’s Secrets.

 *Hegemony derives from a Greek term that translates simply as “dominance over” and that was used to describe relations between city-states.

Excerpted from Deutsche Welle 12.20.2018

Two members of the German parliament, the Bundestag, visited Julian Assange in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London on Thursday to pass on their “greetings of solidarity from the [opposition] Left party and his many supporters from Germany,” and to discuss the possibility of a “humanitarian solution” to the WikiLeaks founder’s legal situation.

Sevim Dagdelen and Heike Hänsel, who also sit on the Bundestag’s foreign affairs committee, traveled to London as Ecuador increases the pressure to end Assange’s six-year stay in the embassy. 

“He was really happy to see us, he hugged us tightly when we left,” Dagdelen told DW after the hourlong meeting, which she said was his first visit from parliamentarians in at least eight months. “It was obvious that he was happy about our visit.”

Trump Withdraws U.S. Forces From Syria, Declaring ‘We Have Won Against ISIS’

Even the “liberal” New York Times excoriates American withdrawal from Syria.

My perspective, being of the Vietnam generation, is the following.

The last sentence of Barbara Tuchman’s 1971 book “Stilwell and the American Experience in China,” reads “In the end China went her own way as if the Americans had never come.”  Substitute Syria for China.  When will Americans get over this Pax Americana complex, embedded since 1945, and admit this country is not the world’s policeman?

Lamest Lame Duck. Trump’s shutdown folly cost the GOP any last-ditch victories.

Wall Street Journal Editorial 12.19.2018

For a flavor of politics in Washington next year, take a look at this final week of the lame-duck Congress. Republicans on Wednesday essentially agreed to sign letters of safe passage out of town, kicking spending and immigration issues into 2019 with a short-term continuing resolution to fund the government for two months.

The GOP rout was probably inevitable after President Trump volunteered last week to take credit for a government shutdown that would begin on the weekend before Christmas. He dared Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi not to give him the $5 billion he demanded for border security, and they were only too happy to oblige.

The price of retreat, alas, appears to be worthy legislation that Republicans had hoped to pass, including a Jobs 3.0 package of reforms for capital markets that passed the House in July with huge bipartisan majorities. Mr. Schumer is killing it. Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell had hoped to confirm a batch of judicial and executive-branch nominees in the usual end-of-term rush, but Mr. Schumer is blocking that too.

Welcome to 2019. Democrats are arming to rout Mr. Trump from first day to last, and they are hoping the President will help them with similarly self-harming public gestures like his shutdown boast. If Mr. Trump has any hope of winning even small victories he is going to have to unite Republicans behind him and make the public case with discipline and consistency. We know that’s all but impossible for Mr. Trump, but it’s the truth. His failed border wall funding strategy is the exact opposite of the way he will have to maneuver.

The Childhood of a Leader stunning. Story of a privileged, petulant 10-year-old fated to become a fascist dictator exerts a lethal grip

This is the first film by Brady Corbet whose newly released film Vox Lux, appearing earlier in this Blog, has been well received.

Excerpted from The Guardian of London – Peter Bradshaw,  8.16.2016

This steely, sinister and utterly gripping movie is the feature debut of 28-year-old actor-turned-director Brady Corbet. It’s an inspired provocation, jabbing its audience with a fictional variant on history, and loosely based on Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1939 short story of the same name.

The film imagines the wealthy, dysfunctional and unhappy childhood of someone fated to become a fascist leader: the action, disturbing enough in any case, is retroactively charged with this poisonous destiny. Newcomer Tom Sweet plays Prescott, the unhappy 10-year-old son of an American career diplomat (Liam Cunningham), who is in France in 1919 as part of US president Woodrow Wilson’s retinue, there to establish postwar settlement terms to be imposed at Versailles on the defeated Germans.

The Childhood of a Leader is structured around Prescott’s tantrums: a conceit that might bring to mind Hitler’s creepy diplomatic practice of pretending to be very angry, while not really being angry at all. This young leader is growing up in a world where all of the adults are telling him about the importance of rejecting anger, embracing forgiveness. The local priest gives sermons on this theme, and Prescott’s tutor makes a deep impression on him with the Aesop fable about the virtues of gentleness in power; the lion who befriends a humble mouse. Yet Prescott can see that power is actually working in quite another direction.

Could an Amy Klobuchar Solve Democrats’ Dilemma?

 

The Democrats Will Capture the White House if they’re smart enough to nominate Senator Klobuchar

Excerpted from Gerald Seib – Wall Street Journal 12.17.2018

When asked recently who Republicans should fear most in the 2020 presidential campaign, two prominent GOP figures, both women speaking independently of each other, gave the same response: Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.

A third Republican, a male, asked which kind of candidate Democrats should want, replied: “They need a boring white guy from the Midwest.”

So, there you have it: The dream ticket of Amy Klobuchar and Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio. Case closed, cancel the primaries, on to the general election.

The winning lottery ticket, of course, goes to somebody who can appeal to both. And that’s why Ms. Klobuchar’s name—and profile—attract attention. She’s a woman, obviously, which is important at a time when newly energized women are a growing force within the party. She pleased her party base in the hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh when she challenged him about his use of alcohol, but did so in a sufficiently calm and understated manner that she won an apology from Mr. Kavanaugh after he initially responded angrily.

She also won re-election this year with more than 60% of the vote in the one state Trump forces lost in 2016 but think they have a legitimate chance to flip their way in 2020.

Children who fled Nazis to get compensation from Germany

Excerpted from Deutsche Welle 12.17.2018

Thousands of children were placed on trains to escape Nazi Germany by relatives they never saw again. In recognition of the emotional trauma, the German government has agreed to compensate them.

Germany has agreed to pay compensation to survivors who were evacuated from the country as children during the Nazi regime, the organization negotiating the deal announced on Monday.

The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany revealed the German government would pay €2,500 ($2,800) to the people still alive who fled from the Nazis as part of the so-called “Kinderstransport.”

The compensation is a “symbolic recognition of their suffering,” Claims Conference negotiator Greg Schneider said, after most of the children never saw their parents or other family members again.

About 1,000 survivors are believed to be alive today, with an estimated 500 living in Britain, meaning the compensation payments could total €2.5 million ($2.8 million).

They will be able to make a claim from January 1, 2019.

 

Trump Has Blood on His Hands

Excerpted from The Guardian of London 12.16.2018

Anger grows after death of Guatemalan migrant girl held in US

Family of girl disputes the American government’s claim that she had not had food or water for days beforehand.

The family of the young Guatemalan girl who died in the custody of US border officials after crossing the border is disputing the American government’s claim that she had not had food or water for days beforehand.

Anger is growing over the death of Jakelin Caal Maquin, seven, which emerged last week and immediately sparked uproar about harsh immigration and border policies being pursued by the Trump administration.

On Saturday, lawyers for the family released a statement insisting that the girl had been fed and hydrated and appeared to be in good health as she traveled through Mexico to the US southern border with her father, intending to seek asylum.

She had not been traveling through the desert for days, the family asserted, before being taken into custody by US officials along with many other migrants on 6 December. Jakeline died less than two days later, according to immigration officials.

“Vox Lux” Bends to the Temper of the Times

The New Yorker-Anthony Lane 12.10.2018

Born thirty years ago in Scottsdale, Arizona, Brady Corbet made his name as an actor. He was in the fifth season of “24” (2006), as the son of Jack Bauer’s girlfriend, and in Michael Haneke’s squirmy American reboot of “Funny Games” (2008). Make of that combination what you will. Latterly, Corbet has switched to directing. His début feature, “The Childhood of a Leader” (2015), set in the funereal wake of the First World War, was about a boy who looks like Christopher Robin but whose behavior would get him expelled from the Hundred Acre Wood. In a short epilogue, we glimpse him as an adult, girt with the trappings of fascism and worshipped by the mob. Some people found the film absurd and irritating, but I was too freaked out to be annoyed. It wasn’t “The Omen,” but it was ominous enough, and I waited, not without trepidation, to see what Corbet would do next.

The answer is “Vox Lux,” which appears to represent a change of tack. The setting is modern America, with a brief excursion to Stockholm, and the subject (the aural subject, at any rate) is pop music. There is even a joke about abba. We start with a narrator (Willem Dafoe), who introduces us to a child named Celeste (Raffey Cassidy). “In the beginning, she was kind and full of grace,” he says, as if telling a fairy tale. Cut to 1999, when Celeste, a schoolgirl in Staten Island, “thirteen going on fourteen,” is caught in a violent calamity. The less you know of it in advance the better, but Celeste is lucky to survive. On the other hand, her response—a keening lament, which she writes with her sister Ellie (Stacy Martin) and sings live on national TV—earns her a flicker of celebrity, which, far from guttering, becomes a blaze.

To an extent, Celeste resembles one of those Disney-cradled child stars, like Britney Spears, who arrive early at fame and never really leave, except that Celeste’s public persona is forged not among cartoon mice but in the residue of horror. Her nightmare, needless to say, is a publicist’s dream, and the arc of her subsequent career, during which she grows into a globally recognized performer, bends to the temper of the times. The sight of terrorists, years later, committing murder while wearing masks copied from one of her music videos may be an affront to her image, but so what? Her brand still gets a boost.

For those of us whose hearts habitually sink at the prospect of a Hollywood bio-pic, Corbet’s films are a tonic. Scorning the grind of steady chronological progress, he jerks us onward and makes us fill in the gaps. Suddenly, we see Celeste walking down a New York street with Ellie and an older man, his expression acidic and grim. They proceed in slow motion, like the worn-down Berliners at the start of Ingmar Bergman’s “The Serpent’s Egg” (1977), another premonitory fable. In fact, the girls’ companion is a manager (Jude Law), who will guide Celeste’s ascent to the stardom that is promised in her name. Already, we notice how much determination, and how little visible pleasure, are involved in that rise; Celeste responds with precocious aplomb to a record-company executive (Jennifer Ehle) and drives herself to master choreographic routines, as if some internal motor had been set spinning and cannot be stopped.

After fifty minutes, the movie takes a fresh leap, to 2017. Celeste is now played by Natalie Portman. And what playing: the accent has broadened into a snarl; the hair is slicked back, piled high, or daubed with a dazzle of silver at the sides when Celeste is due onstage; and the hands are never still, plucking, splaying, pushing up the sleeves of her jacket, or slamming the table in a diner because the manager has the nerve to request a photograph. If the young Celeste was preternaturally mature, this later model is youthfully brattish, like a parody of a spoiled adolescent. Is Portman overdoing it here, hamming the trashiness to the limit? Or is she furthering the brave exploration of mania that she initiated in “Black Swan” (2010)?

Personally, I reckon that Portman tips “Vox Lux” off balance. The simple act of drinking through a straw is turned into an embarrassing megaslurp. Other actors get shouted down. Maybe, however, that’s the point—not that poor Celeste was shoved into the spotlight by a traumatic event but that popular renown, in a saturated age, is itself a prolonged form of trauma, warping the body’s motions and wrecking any chance of equanimity. No wonder her rapport with Ellie, once so trusting, is irreparably frayed. Lady Gaga, in “A Star Is Born,” is far more stirring than Portman but also, strangely, more innocent, alive to the prospect of happiness. Corbet’s film rejects that hope, suggesting that no sooner are you born, as a star, than something within you begins to die.

Hanging over “The Childhood of a Leader” was a dark and thunderous score by Scott Walker, and he returns with new portents for “Vox Lux.” By way of contrast, we also get a string of bright, insistent songs by Sia, composed for the movie, and delivered with conviction by Raffey Cassidy—in one case, from the back of a motorbike—and then by Portman. The heroine’s mantra is as basic as a diktat: “I don’t want people to have to think too hard, I just want them to feel good.” Resistance is useless.

The ending consists of a show. The same goes for “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and Rami Malek, as Freddie Mercury, commands the crowd no less majestically than Portman does, but the crowning glory of Queen is meant to warm us, whereas Celeste, in her pomp, emits a cold robotic zest. Sure, she’s only giving a pop concert, back in her home town, among the faithful, and we see nothing scarier than ranks of young girls, many of their faces radiant with glitter. Yet their Dionysian act of worship feels uncannily close to the political ecstasy that concluded “The Childhood of a Leader,” and, again, we sense a crack—some kind of buried flaw that runs below a prosperous society and drives its inhabitants to extremes. Though nobody talks about the crack, we feel it in the breaking of family dynamics, and we hear it in the deep pulsations of a song. Brady Corbet’s second film is not a departure from his first, still less a renunciation. It’s a sequel.