Last Friday, David Brooks wrote another in his series of insight-less articles, Hillary Clinton’s Opportunist Solution! In it, he said that Clinton’s reversal on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is all done just to compete against Bernie Sanders. Breaking news: politician panders to voters! I wish I were a big name pundit at The New York Times so that I could write articles based on trivial and useless observations. And there’s a bonus: Brooks gets to frame the issues so that the Republicans he still somehow favors look good.

Check out how he started the article, “To win their party’s nomination in an age of growing polarization [presidential candidates] have to adopt base-pleasing, pseudo-extreme policy positions.” Oh, that’s right! Being against the TPP is “pseudo-extreme”! And Brooks knows that because… Well, he doesn’t say. It is just an unstated assumption. If a big city newspaper reporter is against something, it’s got to be “pseudo-extreme.” He would just say “extreme,” but either he or his editor understands that people actually know what “extreme” means and haven’t a clue what “pseudo-extreme” is. So writing the latter gives him the opportunity to imply extremism without the editors’ insistence on truthfulness.

But let’s look at the other side of this. Thus far, there are three Republican presidential candidates who have released budget proposals. And they’ve all done the same thing: given huge amounts away to the rich while busting huge holes in the budget. But these aren’t done to please the base. Indeed, I would say that Trump lost a lot of excitement from his base by putting out a budget that was the same as Jeb Bush’s except more extreme. What the Republican base seems to care about is red meat rhetoric, not specific policies. So is Brooks claiming that opposition to the TPP is equivalent to calling Mexicans rapists?

Books’ clever trick in this article is to say that Hillary Clinton has figured out how to appeal to the base and to the supposed centrist general election voters: she just says things she doesn’t believe! This is clever only in the conservative affirmative action case where it doesn’t require even the smallest amount of wit. Does Brooks not remember Mitt Romney’s campaign, and Eric Fehrnstrom’s “Etch A Sketch” comment? If so, he certainly doesn’t mention it. And rightly so! If he had, it would have undermined his entire premise. I’ve looked back and can only find once that the incident came up in my writing, and it was in a quote. That’s because I’m slightly more sophisticated than David Brooks, and I realize that politicians don’t always tell the truth.

In a broader sense, Brooks’ article is just another of thousands about Hillary Clinton’s lack of “authenticity.” And in this regard, he summarizes work done at the leftist Institute for Public Accuracy. Now, I really like them — they do good work. But Brooks would never accept all of their equally accurate work on Republican candidates. But the question really isn’t whether Clinton has changed her position, or as Brooks put it, “We all get to change our mind in response to the facts, but each of these intellectual inquiries happens to have led her in a politically convenient direction.” Well, it also just so happens that she has moved in the direction that is natural when one follows the evidence.

For example, Clinton would now like to see prison and sentencing reform. This is a reversal from where she was twenty years ago. But should we complain about that?! She was wrong before and right now. And there actually is more information today, even if it should have been clear then. Meanwhile, with a couple of notable exceptions, the Republican candidates are still locked into the same failed “tough on crime” policies from decades past.

I don’t mind people attacking Hillary Clinton if they have something real to attack her on. Brooks has nothing. And there is a way to exonerate Clinton from his charge anyway. All of the changes that Clinton has made in her positions are the same ones that Democratic voters — and to a large extent all voters — have made. So are all these voters inauthentic? If it weren’t that Brooks were pushing a tired narrative, his article would seem bizarre. As it is, it is just another trivial and useless column by a man who would be unemployed in a just society.

Afterword

The last part of Brooks’ column is about the “downsides” of the political opportunism that he’s assumed. A big part of that is about what a great humanitarian thing the TPP is for the poor people of Malaysia and Vietnam. Dean Baker rips him apart on this, David Brooks, Hillary Clinton, and the TPP. I highly recommend reading it. It explains some really important issues about the TPP, as well as calling Brooks on some of his nonsense.

One of my favorite concepts is the “fundamental attribution error.” This is where we tend to attribute internal causes for the actions of others but external causes for our own actions. Consider my favorite example: driving. I like it because everyone I know complains about other drivers to one extent or another. Ask someone if they’ve ever been cut off in traffic, and they will almost always jump at it like a dog on red meat, “Just the other day! I was driving…” But what’s more important is the reason that they were cut off: the guy’s just a jerk.

On the other hand, if you are driving with someone who cuts someone else off, they will tell you they had reasons. They are in a super big rush because their boss will kill them if they are late or the traffic was so bad that they had no choice or — and this is the most common — they just screwed up. And they are right! I’ve never known someone who drives around just looking for opportunities to piss off other people. But if you point this out to someone who has been cutoff, they will usually reject the notion violently.

I ran into this with a Christopher Hitchens fan who was mad at Richard Seymour. There was an admittedly vague sentence in Seymour’s book Unhiched. The reader understood the sentence to mean something that was clearly not true. I noted that he was misunderstanding what Seymour had written. And the reader’s response was, “Garbage.” Because it just had to be that Seymour was an evil man who wrote something he knew was wrong just to slander Hitchens. The much more reasonable explanation that Seymour had written a vague sentence that could be misinterpreted was not possible. Obviously, the reader would have had a different opinion if we were talking about his own writing.

Chris Dillow at Stumbling and Mumbling wrote something interesting in regard to this, Demand Deniers. It’s about the Tories in the UK. They believe that people don’t have jobs because they just don’t want them — rather than blaming it on outside forces. So they deny that the problem is the lack of demand that these unemployed and under-employed people experience. This, as Dillow noted, is a classic fundamental attribution error. But it is worse than that, because unlike people driving or even ignorant Christopher Hitchens fans, there is economic information on this subject.

But you can see where this comes from. The people making policy in the UK are all from the same class. They are all educated at the same top tier schools. They know that if they found themselves out of job, there would be plenty of people who would give them a job. So it must be the same for gardeners and auto mechanics and computer programmers, right?! It’s amazing that the moment that the left talks about inequality, we are blamed for class warfare. But these people live in a separate, closed off, society and that is just right and proper.

I’m not sure why we are so prone to the fundamental attribution error. But its result in the modern world is that we assume that the rich must be good, hard working people, and the poor must be bad and lazy. Public policy should be based on science, not such base instincts. We shouldn’t be running our economy based upon the same thinking patterns that bring us road rage.

I just watched a short lecture that Noam Chomsky gave in support of his book Failed States at West Point. The talk is about Just War theory. I’ve never given the concept that much thought. I had always thought of it in the context of Catholic scholars like Augustine and Aquinas. But apparently, it dates back much further than that — at least to the Mahabharata, which was probably written about three thousand years ago, but only written down about 2,500 years ago. It’s not surprising that people have long thought about this. Everyone wants to believe that their wars are just.

Chomsky goes through a lot of discussion about what different scholars have had to say on the subject and he comes to a fairly obvious conclusion: what’s considered a “just” war is a reflection of the mores of the time and place. And it’s worse than that, because the scholars seem to all do the same thing: pick some war and define it as just. There is one point where a scholar picked the Afghanistan War, claiming that only hardcore pacifists and crazy people would think that wasn’t a Just War. But of course, the writer was just showing his own biases; there were huge numbers of people around the world who disagreed.

The main point is that it will always be this way. No one ever looks at the criteria objectively, determines that a war would be just, and then goes to war. Just War theory is a way to justify wars that are going on or ones that some group wants to start. And most of all, it is a way for military leaders to think that they are involved in a noble endeavor, even when they clearly aren’t. So it was interesting to see Chomsky at West Point in April 2006 — when the Iraq War was still fairly popular.

The most interesting part of the talk is the questions and answers. The cadets are very well behaved, but they clearly don’t agree with Chomsky. How could they? He’s telling them exactly the opposite of what they’ve been led to believe: that their cause is not just. But it’s quite clear that most of them didn’t understand what Chomsky’s main talk was about: Just War theory is nothing but rationalization. So we get a couple of questions about whether Chomsky doesn’t think this or that fact justifies this or that war on the basis of Just War theory.

I have no idea how the cadets take to his answers, but they are demolished. This is especially true with the last question. A cadet asks if the Iraq War isn’t justified because of Saddam Hussein’s human rights abuses. Up to that point, Chomsky had stayed on point and focused on Just War theory, saying in effect, “We can argue about whether that ought to be done, but Just War theory gives us no guidance whatsoever.” But I think he’s a little annoyed by the last question because it shows such ignorance about the history of the United States and Iraq. Hussein was put to death for crimes he committed with our support. And now we are using those to justify going to war?!

I’ve always found the efforts of the government and the military to justify their wars as a pathetic exercise. I understand that the cadets really believe all this stuff. But the facts are clear. Every time a US president goes to war, we hear about how reluctant he is to do so. It’s such nonsense! It’s almost never necessary to go to war. It wasn’t necessary in Afghanastan — much less Iraq. But there will always be people around making the argument that war is necessary. I’d rather we were just honest about it. We want some resource or we just can’t help it or whatever. But I’ve been hearing how we go to war to protect democracy and for humanitarian reasons my whole life. And it is never true. It’s nice to think that Chomsky might have opened an eye or two at West Point. But I doubt it.

Brian Beutler wrote a very interesting article, but because of the headline, I let it sit in my RSS queue for a while, Republicans Accept Mass Killings. That’s Why Gun Control Advocates Must Get Graphic. I knew at least part of what he was getting at. Ben Carson recently made a statement that he had treated many gunshot wounds, “I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away.” And I was afraid that Beutler might be calling for the gun control community to do what the anti-choice people do and show graphic, disgusting images. And that is more or less his argument, but it isn’t as bad as it sounds.

Before getting into it, let me counter what Carson said. His framing is wrong — I would say disingenuous, but he’s a seriously clueless guy. On the issue of guns, conservatives have gone far past the idea of a slippery slop and gone to a frictionless cliff. Implicit in what Carson is saying is that if we close the gun show loophole, private ownership of guns will be gone from the United States. It’s not surprising that he thinks this. The NRA has spent the last couple of decades arguing against any restrictions for this reason. If flamethrowers were legal, people would now be against doing anything to regulate them.

What Beutler pointed out is that there is another hidden assumption in Carson’s claims or the less obviously nutty claims of Jeb Bush. They look at the roughly 10,000 gun homicides and roughly 20,000 gun suicides each year. And they think that they are nothing. They are a minor issue that we should do absolutely nothing about because any measure to strengthen gun regulations is a much greater threat to us. It’s a curious argument, because pretty much every other peer country has far greater firearm regulation and they haven’t lost their liberty.

So Beutler thinks that we need to make this argument plain. He’s not suggesting that we march around with gruesome images of gun fatalities like the anti-choice groups do with large fake photos of abortion. But he is suggesting that we not hide the results of gun violence in reporting on it. When the results are not shown, just like in our wars since Vietnam, it has a propagandistic effect. It sanitizes it and makes it all about statistics. Note that in Ben Carson’s case, he was not treating people who had their heads exploded by a bullet; in the vast majority of cases, he was working on people who were wounded and not killed by bullets.

I’m not sure that I agree with Beutler that this would make any difference, however. The truth is that gun rights advocates will say the same thing that abortion rights advocates say: we all know the reality. Of course, look how different this is. In the case of abortion rights, we are talking about real people being negatively affected — in the case of late term abortions, we are talking about a matter of life and death. In the case of gun rights, we are talking about the idea that we can’t place any limits on gun ownership because (big assumption number one) it will lead to gun confiscation, which will lead to (big assumption number two) the end of liberty in America.

But maybe Americans do need to be reminded of the terror of a mass shooting. Beutler provided the following image from New York Daily News from the murder of television reporter Alison Parker. It isn’t graphic in the sense of showing blood and intestines. But I think it is quite graphic in the sense of showing the terror and pain caused by these shootings. Maybe such images would cause people who would normally stay at home to trudge down to the polling place and vote for reasonable gun control. It’s worth a try.

Image of Alison Parker’s murder used under Fair Use.

I was strangely concerned yesterday morning when I read that Kevin McCarthy had removed himself from consideration as Speaker of the House. It’s not like he would have been great, but he didn’t seem to be totally insane. And all we are really asking of the Republicans in the House is that they not destroy the world economy for the sake of making a “statement.” So who’s it gonna be now? Currently, we only know of Daniel Webster and Jason Chaffetz — two freaks. Is this what we have to look forward to?

The conventional wisdom — which I have generally followed along with — is that with power goes responsibility. Boehner acted the way he did because he — like all the Republicans — knows (or thinks) that blowing up the economy would be bad for them. Therefore, anyone in the job would be responsible. But that’s a questionable assumption, not a compelling conclusion. This really hit home to me when I heard Ben Carson interviewed on Marketplace. It was clear that Carson didn’t understand what the debt ceiling was all about. And I suspect that this is also true of many, if not most, of the Republicans in the House.

I’m starting to have these visions of Donald Trump in the White House with a General trying to explain to him that bombing Moscow would be a bad idea. Such a large part of the Republican Party has been completely cut off from the real world for such a long time. Their delusions now dictate their policies. And we’ve most definitely seen this with regard to the debt ceiling, where many Republicans have tried to make the case that breaching it would be no big deal. So what happens if such a person becomes Speaker of the House? Or are we going to get what the freaks always claim with a government shutdown: if only they just hung on another day, week, month that they would have “won”? It’s madness, but sadly all too possible.

According to Think Progress, Kevin McCarthy Suggests House Republicans Are Ungovernable, May Need To “Hit Rock Bottom.” It is hard to construe that in any way that isn’t terrifying. When drunks “hit rock bottom” they destroy their lives. The GOP hitting rock bottom could well destroy the world economy.

Steve M at No More Mister Nice Blog wrote a really angry, and I think accurate, article yesterday, First They Came for the GOP Moderates… It isn’t even directly about the crazies in the Republican Party; it’s about the likes of Colin Powell, Christie Todd Whitman, and William Weld. He noted, “The party in recent years has made its right-centrists… increasingly unwelcome. And they did nothing to fight back, except occasionally stamp an ineffectual foot…”

I’m angry too. The Republican Party didn’t just wake up this way one morning. And it isn’t just the Republican “moderates,” either. (It’s really kind of a joke. Whitman withheld clean syringes from drug users because facts don’t matter to her any more than they do Louie Gohmert.) It’s also the fault of the Democratic Party — most especially the New Democrats. And it is the fault of the American people for not caring enough to distinguish because a moderate party and proto-fascist radicals.

But perhaps McCarthy is right: sometimes you need to hit rock bottom. But that’s not a statement about the GOP, but the world. Maybe this is what it will take for us all to realize that we can’t allow any country to have the kind of power that the US has. All it takes is a handful of talk radio created lunatics and a disinterested electorate and the economy is destroyed. It’s truly amazing.