Monthly Archives: March 2016

Jonathan Bernstein on Substance in GOP Debate

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Jonathan BernsteinThe circus was not in town. No personal insults, no demeaning taunts, no candidate bragging about his… well, you know. Instead, thanks in part to some solid questioning from Jake Tapper and CNN’s other moderators and a strategic recalibration from Marco Rubio after his collapse in recent primaries and caucuses, we had what passes for a serious policy debate on the Republican side.

It was not impressive…

They weren’t all terrible all the time. Rubio and Kasich do know their stuff in several policy areas, and Cruz actually did give a solid defense of international trade. But over and over, there’s just very little substance on the stage. For a major political party’s candidates for president of the US, it’s a sorry show, even if they did stay out of the gutter this time.

—Jonathan Bernstein
Posers on Parade as Republican Debate Veers Toward Substance

Image of Jonathan Bernstein taken from Bloomberg View, licensed under Fair Use.

Both Sides Do It: Paul Krugman Included

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Paul Krugman - Both Sides Do It!A major complaint of liberals about mainstream news coverage is that it falls into a “Both sides do it!” narrative. So we see reporting like, “The Republican Party has stated that they will not consider any Obama replacement for Justice Scalia. But it is also true that Democrats have blocked Supreme Court nominations in the past.” While everything said there is true, it creates an equivalence that is false. In fact, blocking a nominee is categorically different from blocking all nominees. One pundit who has done a great job of calling out this kind of nonsense is Paul Krugman.

But the reason that false equivalence continues on, despite its obvious intellectual dishonesty, is that those who use it actually believe it. And Krugman is aware of this. He’s written about it many times. And it is widely understood. The news industry is filled with people who are committed to the idea that the Democrats and the Republicans are equal and opposite — by definition. These are people for whom it is easy to say, “Both sides do it!” And this is because they don’t see themselves on either side. They see themselves in the “sensible center,” where they are unbiased — just telling the facts.

Both Sides Do It!

So it was interesting to see yesterday that Paul Krugman is having his own “Both sides do it!” moment. He wrote, Trade and Tribulation. In it he argues that freer trade has largely been a good thing and that we would all be richer if only the political landscape were different. Well, I’ve been arguing the same thing for years. That is pretty much what I wrote in my poem and it’s what I’ve said many other times, like last year, No Trade Deals Until Our Economy Is Fixed. My point is that I don’t care what great things trade deals will bring if the great things aren’t shared.

Donate to Sanders!Krugman is making more or less the same argument, but being part of the power elite, it doesn’t have the kind of urgency that it does to, say, Bernie Sanders supporters. But I’m glad to hear Krugman say, “The elite case for ever-freer trade, the one that the public hears, is largely a scam.” But who are the presidential candidates who are saying this? Well: Sanders and Trump. But they also think that things like NAFTA were bad, which Krugman apparently disagrees about. I don’t know why. The same political system that makes trade deals today a bad idea made them a bad idea in the 1990s.

But there were only two people mentioned by name in the piece: Sanders and Trump. Krugman mentioned Trump’s continued use of Chinese currency manipulation. According to Krugman this just isn’t happening, but as Dean Baker pointed out, “China’s stock of reserves is more than $2 trillion above what would be expected if it were just managing its reserves for standard purposes.” But regardless, Krugman thinks Trump is wrong, and he said so.

On the other side of wrong, Krugman points out, “Sanders is demagoguing the issue.” How did he do this? By making an overly broad attack on “Hillary Clinton’s free-trade policies.” Wait for it: on Twitter. So Krugman is involved in his own false equivalence. (Well, he actually spends a whole paragraph on Sanders and a single sentence on Trump; if it comes down to Trump vs Sanders, will Krugman make a protest vote?!) But I’m sure that Krugman doesn’t think he is involved in this “Both sides do it!” business. Because in this case, he is the one in the “sensible center.” It’s just that his sensible center seems to include the entirety of the Democratic and Republican establishments.

“Clinton Is Losing!” Hysteria

This is what happens to people when their hysteria gets the better of them. I wrote about this yesterday regarding Hillary Clinton herself. But does Krugman really disagree with Sanders? I don’t think so. If Krugman and Sanders sat down together, they would largely agree. I don’t think that Sanders is against freer trade when it benefits everyone. But trade agreements without strong unions who are intimately involved in the negotiations is madness.

But it doesn’t matter what the substance is. We all know that Donald Trump is a demagogue, so Krugman doesn’t even have to mention that. When Sanders’ rhetoric gets a touch wild, Krugman is there to point out that he too is a demagogue — never forget that Sanders supporters! Meanwhile, pay no attention Clinton demagoguing the Sandinistas on national television. Both sides do it! It’s just that Clinton isn’t on a “side.” And remarkably, Krugman finds himself on the same non-side!

Image of Krugman altered from NYT official image, licensed under Fair Use.

Morning Music: Fenêtîks (Phonetics)

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Fenêtîks (Phonetics)I am sad to report that the second Jules and the Polar Bears album, Fenêtîks (Phonetics) is not as good as its predecessor. It’s not Jules Shear. The songs are as great as ever. I’m sure the record company went to the band and said, “The first album didn’t sell well, so let’s add a bunch of synthesizers!” Not that they needed the push. A very young Stephen Hague was just waiting to do that. And clearly, Shear himself was kind of clueless about production. But he did learn that less is more, and it isn’t surprising that he went on to be one of the main people behind MTV Unplugged.

Another problem is throughout Fenêtîks (Phonetics), there just seems to be too much production. And that is just a problem when you the core of band is one of the greatest living songwriters. So I’m going to offer up a song that actually sounds more typical of Got No Breeding, “Fate.” There are some others that are strong — or at least that’s how I remember them. But not much off this album is available on the internet. So we are stuck with “Fate.” And that isn’t bad, because the song really does work.

The melody is attractive, if perhaps too forceful. And the lyrics are typically clever, with things like, “You cut off your nerves just to spite your love.” Check it out.

Phonetics album cover taken from Amazon and licensed under Fair Use.

Anniversary Post: Girl Scouts of the USA

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Juliette Gordon Low With Early Girl ScoutsOn this day in 1912, the Girl Scouts of the USA were formed — although they were then called Girl Guides. Let me just start by saying how much I love that. They should have been called, “Girls Taking Charge.” We could use a lot more of that. Not to mention cookies, but I digress.

For a long time, I thought that the Girl Scouts were just the female equivalents of the Boy Scouts. But then I learned otherwise. Since 2011, they have been open to transgender girls. Meanwhile, the Boy Scouts will fight tooth and nail to avoid entering even the 20th century. You can find out some of my thoughts on the Nazi Youth Boy Scouts in, Why Boy Scouts Have Always Bothered Me. But I have a different opinion of the Girl Scouts.

The thing is, I wish it weren’t done in terms of gender. When I was a boy, I heard about what the Boy Scouts were doing and what the Girl Scouts were doing. And not surprisingly, what the Girl Scouts were doing sounded like more fun. (I’m probably remembering the Cub Scouts and the Camp Fire Girls — I’m not that clear about all the distinctions.)

Of course, I’ve always preferred to hang out with the girls. I don’t wish to hammer this to death (and after all these years, if it isn’t dead, it never will be), but so much of male culture is based on the idea of proving that you aren’t gay that I’m not interested. Would it be asking so much for male culture to accept that there are different kinds of men — far removed from sexual orientation. If other men have hangups and secretly think that they are gay, they really should get some help with that. But barring that: just stop acting like idiots!

Here’s a funny thing: the two most clearly healthy heterosexual men I’ve ever known — men who love women and are loved in return — are both kind of, well, effeminate. I’m not saying that typically masculine men are latent homosexuals; I’m just saying that they are boring. Really boring. Deadly boring. Like: I’m in fear of life boring.

Women don’t tend to have this problem. This isn’t to say that women are perfect. But it isn’t surprising that the Boy Scouts are a dysfunctional organization that teachers noxious lessons to boys and the Girl Scouts is mostly a force for good — generally a group that doesn’t look back on itself a generation and cringe. There’s a lot to be said for that.

Afterword: Girl Scouts and Women in General

Let me note that it is always a bad idea to leave men alone. We really need women around to humanize us. Otherwise, we don’t behave well. As Donald Trump would say, “Really! It’s true!”

Hillary Clinton Is Reactive In a Very Bad Way

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Hillary ClintonI would say that overall, Jonathan Bernstein has been very supportive of Hillary Clinton. But he’s also a political scientist, and he tries to be honest. He was very honest after Wednesday, The Test Clinton Failed in the Florida Debate. He’s not saying that she did badly in the debate. I think we can all agree that Hillary Clinton is rather good at this debating business — which isn’t to say perfect, as her answers about her ties to Wall Street always strike me as hollow and tone deaf. But the question of the night was: why did Clinton come in with guns blazing?

I keep coming back to this: Hillary Clinton is way ahead. I would be far beyond shocked if my man Bernie Sanders were able to catch her — even with confirmed delegates. Now how can this be that I know this but somehow Clinton doesn’t? I mean, regardless of Sanders doing astonishingly well in Michigan, Clinton still won the day — increasing her lead in the only area that matters: delegates. And I very much fear that Bernstein is right that instead of looking at the facts, she looked at the Very Serious Idiots, “It’s not to her credit that she allowed the pundits’ agenda to distract her from her own goals.”

The big question is: will she be so bad at this stuff once president? Is she just going to listen to what they are saying in The Washington Post are react to that?

One month ago, I wrote about this, Could Sanders Win? Why Is Clinton Whining?! People want to pass this off as the result of 2008 when Obama came out of nowhere to beat her. But this is the same way that Clinton behaved in 2008. Again, Bernstein noted, “One of Barack Obama’s strengths in the 2008 campaign was his willingness to sacrifice a news cycle in favor of larger objectives.” It has never been a strength of anyone in the Clinton firmament. And in some cases, it’s the correct way to be as we have seen with the Clintons on a number of occasions.

But it isn’t here! I think Sanders has given Clinton a pass on a lot of issues. (It’s telling that the vast majority of criticisms of Sanders are actually criticisms of Sanders supporters on Twitter.) Hillary Clinton now attacks Sanders for supporting the Sandinistas, as if — What?! — he was supposed to support the Contras? Give me a break. I’ve backed away from this campaign, but it’s this kind of nonsense that makes me want to run over and give some more money to Sanders (which I will do as soon as this article is in the can).

Hillary Clinton Is Starting to Sound Conservative

And speaking of stupid, Hillary Clinton made the standard conservative argument about TARP, “It was all paid back! It didn’t cost the people anything!” There is this thing called an opportunity cost. The government loaned a bunch of money to the banks at below prevailing interest rates. They could have loaned that money to normal people at normal interest rates and made more. So it did indeed cost the people money.

What’s more, it gave that money at exactly the time that no one else would have given it. As Dean Baker wrote back in 2010, “Without TARP and the other government bailout programs, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Bank of America, and many other large banks would have gone bankrupt.” Bankrupt. This canned response makes me think that I’ve been wrong to think that Hillary does actually get it and is just a pragmatist. She seems truly not to get it.

Clinton’s Listening to the Wrong People

But it is even more concerning that she felt she had to come in and hammer away on Sanders, when objectively, she doesn’t. And then she was distinctly disingenuous at times (for example, this nonsense about the second bailout that Sanders voted against). And then she’s making silly arguments against Sanders about Latin American politics few people even remember and even sillier arguments for Goldman Sachs and other banks that she should know do not play to her strengths.

The big question is: will she be so bad at this stuff once president? Is she just going to listen to what they are saying in The Washington Post and react to that? If there’s something like the Gulf of Tonkin incident, I can now see clearly another unnecessary war because she couldn’t possibly wait two days or she wouldn’t “win the week” on The McLaughlin Group. It’s very concerning. And should be especially so for Hillary Clinton supporters.

Opera and the Habanera From Carmen

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Opera Star Anna Caterina Antonacci as CarmenSince our hacker friend Dzz screwed up both our morning posts yesterday, I thought we would take a very quick break from Jules Shear and talk briefly about opera. I understand: pretty much no one I know likes opera. I used to be the same way. But when I was still in high school, I had a piano teacher. He was also a singer, and he taught singing to some of the talented young people in the area. He was not a very pleasant man — he terrified me. But one day he told me that a student of his was going be giving a recital at the local college. So I went.

The singer was a soprano — perhaps 19 years old. And she was accompanied by my teacher on the piano. And I was blown away. It was only then that I heard the human voice as a musical instrument and not just something for communicating with. So I enjoyed the performance the same way I would have enjoyed a violin recital. And ever since then, I’ve taken it for granted that opera is beautiful and worthy. And it still shocks me to hear someone say, “I don’t like opera.” To me, that sounds like, “I don’t like music.”

But in addition, opera is theater. I remember reading something that Mozart had written about a performance of Hamlet. And he nailed everything that was wrong in the play. The greatest opera composers were also great theater technicians. I thought about this because this morning, I was listening to Carmen. I came upon the following clip from the Royal Opera House production of it. It is, arguably, the most famous song from Carmen, the “Habanera” or “Love Is a Rebellious Bird.” (It’s hard to say, because the music from Carmen is incredibly well known, and you probably could sing at least five of its main melodies.)

This production is everything that opera can be — and indeed very often is these days. Broadway musicals try to do this kind of stuff and almost always fail miserably by comparison. You can well imagine that a man would desert the army and his bride for Anna Caterina Antonacci in this short scene. I remember a line from Amadeus, “Only opera can do this!” I quite agree.

Opera Afterword

Think about this: every one in that chorus is an incredibly good — even great — singer. That kind of thing always amazes me. The talent of humanity is amazing.

Image of Anna Caterina Antonacci cropped from one at ROH. Licensed under Fair Use.

Anniversary Post: Battle of Castagnaro

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War Made Easy - Battle of CastagnaroBecause of our good friend 13-year-old porch pisser Dzz, we had no anniversary post yesterday, so let me double up. Yesterday in 241 BC, the Roman Republic defeated Carthage at the Battle of the Aegates Islands — thus ending the First Punic War (thus named because it wasn’t the last — there were three of them). And then, on this day in 1387, Padua defeated Verona at the Battle of Castagnaro. None of it really matters to me in any personal way. I could do military battles every day for ten years without repeating myself. There’s always a war, always a battle.

What stuns me is that roughly 10,000 years ago, humans settled down and invented agriculture. In many ways, since that time, we have become far more civilized. Yet the wars just keep on coming. The United States is now on a constant military campaign. It’s absurd to talk about Congress declaring war because we don’t start wars; we just have a single war, it is global, and it will never end — at least until the American empire falls (which is coming).

But all this time! Thousands of years and we keep thinking that war is the way to solve our problems. And it always turns out the same. People think wars are a good idea to start with and then afterward, it is never clear what everyone was in such a big rush for? I’m very fond of Norman Soloman’s documentary, War Made Easy. The subtitle of it is, “How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” That really is what it’s all about. In general, I am convinced that people just want to go to their jobs, raise their kids, have the occasional barbecue, and that’s about it. But there are always powerful people around who have “bigger” ideas.

The following table from War Made Easy is sobering:

Civilian Casualties

If you want to put it in the most basic of terms: it seems that war is becoming more dangerous for children. You would think after all these thousands of years, we would have figured out how not to fight wars. But maybe it is just too basic. I do think of humans as just machines. What are we to do but what we are programmed for? So the Battle of Castagnaro or the Battle of the Aegates Islands. It doesn’t matter. Humans just like to kill each other.

Image from Amazon, licensed under Fair Use.

Work Replaced by Universal Basic Income: Probably Not

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Erik LoomisYou know, this is fine so far as it goes — maybe UBI could be some sort of solution. But it’s pretty ridiculous to me as well. What is far more likely to happen is what is already happening — massive income inequality, permanent poverty for many, a downwardly mobile middle class, and the rise of candidates like Donald Trump able to tap into the deep discontent and anger this all causes, channeling that anger away from capitalism and toward black and brown people. The only possible thing UBI as going for it as a realistic policy is that since it is truly universal in theory, even white people might use it. But since that’s not really the intent — it’s a baseline, to a topline, what it really means almost certainly is that it will be seen by the public as another welfare program disconnected from work where the taxpaying white people are subsidizing people of color. Never mind the reality of this where millions of whites would also benefit.

It also totally ignores the centrality of work to American political culture. I know that some disagree with me that work is a fundamental tenet of human existence and that it is something we need, but I maintain that position. While theoretically one could then have their UBI and then go into some hipster logging operation where they look really cool and disheveled in all the right ways while sustainably logging or something like this, a lot of people are going to be lost without some kind of work. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, this is a nation that flatly rejects any kind of economic program that does not include work. That’s a big part of the reason Social Security has always been popular, because you work and pay into it and then get paid back. And that’s a huge reason for the attacks on AFDC that culminated in the Clinton-signed welfare gutting bill, because the lack of work is unacceptable to American political life, especially when the recipients of that welfare are poor and therefore probably black.

—Eric Loomis
UBI and Automation

Image of Eric Loomis cropped from one at LAWCHA. Licensed under Fair Use.

A Primer on Free Trade In Ten Rhyming Verses

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Fairy Tale Castle: the Free Trade DreamThe economists came saying,
“Free trade it is good!”
The world will be rich
If only we would.
And oh did we would
And again and again
‘Til just as they said
We had caught a tailwind.

The economy grew
Look at GDP!
It was right in the numbers
For all seekers to see.
But for all of the gain —
The impressive growth rate,
The people just saw
Their wages stagnate.

The people were angry
They thought they’d be rich
The economist’s notions
Must have had a glitch
But it didn’t seem likely
That this could quite be
Do tent cities trump
Higher GDP?!

The problem was where
Economists live
A fairy tale place
Where no one gets the shiv.
So there was more money
In theory at least
Offsetting mass famine
Were much bigger feasts.

It seems when the money
Began rolling in
The rich didn’t share
Greed was not a sin.
In fact it was only
How we could be free
And if you don’t buy it
Look at GDP!

But when some poor souls
Looked at all the growth
It didn’t live up to
Economists’ boasts.
They stepped back and thought,
At the numbers they stared:
The growth it is higher
When wealth’s better shared!

Workers making coats
Competed worldwide
But doctors and lawyers
They got a free ride.
So as worker wages
Sat stuck in the dirt
The cost of a check-up
Continued to spurt.

Who makes the trade deals
Is it workers like you?
Or lawyers and bankers
And all that rich crew?
It’s free trade for you
But never for them
They may all be evil
But aren’t quite that dim.

Still maybe they aren’t
Quite as smart as they think
They’d likely be richer
If their moral’s didn’t stink
But they wouldn’t be richer
In a relative way
They wouldn’t be able
To point and to bray.

So think of this next time
Economists say,
“We’ll all become rich
One bright shining day!”
It might be in theory
But never for real
The rich spend their time
Finding new things to steal.

Update

I wrote this before I read Krugman’s post, A Protectionist Moment? It’s actually the strongest he’s ever come out against TPP. He actually says that free trade is now mostly a scam. Sadly, the single worst thing I can say about Hillary Clinton is that I feel certain that she will reverse herself on the TPP and decide that acceptable changes have been made and that she can support it. I hope not. But her careful statements about it don’t inspire confidence.

Fairy Tale Castle photo by Dobre Cezar (own work), licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 ro, via Wikipedia.

Hacked Hacked Hacked Went the Website

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Hacked By Owner DzzLast night, if you came by Frankly Curious, you did not see our delightful “Legoland” Don Quixote graphic, but instead a white screen with the ominous words printed on it, “Hacked By Owner Dzz.” All things considered, it was a harmless hack. It didn’t destroy any data. But it did the same thing to all of my websites, which are stored on the same server. I assume it did the same thing to other people’s websites, but I’m not sure.

The hack was not inspired. Apparently what happened was that someone got access to my database and managed to change the character encoding from 8-bit UTF to 7-bit. This then allowed them to hack the widgets you see on the right (the calendar, the search box, and so on). So it put in a text widget that contained the following JavaScript:

document.documentElement.innerHTML =
unescape(‘%48%61%63%6b%65%64%20%42%79%20%4f%77%6e%65%72%20%44%7a%7a’);

All that does is replace the webpage with what’s inside the “unescape” function. And what’s inside there is a hexadecimal listing of, “Hacked By Owner Dzz.” But that wasn’t all. It also renamed the site, “+ADw-/title+AD4-Hacked By Owner Dzz+ADw-DIV style+AD0AIg-DISPLAY: none+ACIAPgA8-xmp+AD4-” But more annoying, instead of leaving all my widgets alone, it deactivated them all, making it a mess to put the site back to where it was. In the end, my hosting provider was nice enough to restore all my sites with the backup made earlier that day.

I wrote the other day that I just didn’t understand why people continued to vote for Republicans when everyone knows that Republicans don’t care about anything but helping out their rich buddies. But I also don’t understand hackers of this type. I do understand hackers of other types. Looking for vulnerabilities in software is incredibly interesting — and given the way the world is, a noble endeavor if done to detect and fix rather than destroy. I even understand hackers who are angry or simply trying to make a point. But that’s not what’s going on here.

Hacked or Just Pissed On?

This is just malicious mischief. There is nothing new about it. Whoever did it just read about it on some hacker website. They went around looking for a weak password, and found one. Given that Frankly Curious is hosted on a shared website with hundreds of other people, I assume it wasn’t one of my passwords. I’ve been thinking for a while that I need to upgrade my hosting to a virtual private server (VPS), and this incident really highlights this case. But I’m not sure how much help I would get with that.

Last night, Scott at Reliable Webs provided the usual exceptional service. Within two minutes of my alerting them to the problem, I got a personal response. And then they worked on the problem in tandem with me. And when it was all done, they restored my sites. They are also now trying to figure out when and how the hacker got in. But I’m not sure they even offer VPS, and I’m sure not in the market for a dedicated server.

I had hoped that I would be able to get all of yesterday’s comments back, but that did not work out. I did read and respond to them all. And I still have them! But I was unable to get my full XML export of the site to re-import, probably because the site is so large at this point.

Regardless, the whole thing makes me very frustrated. It’s kind of like finding out that a 13-year-old boy was pissing on your doorstep to mark his territory. You see that in the message, “Hacked By Owner Dzz.” Now the site is owned by Dzz? No. Just like the 13-year-old boy, Dzz just stunk up the place and moved on. There’s a lot of that in the world. There are 13-year-olds practicing the violin and then there are ones who are pissing on your porch. On the net, the vast majority of people are trying, in their way, to be constructive. But these kinds of hackers (and the related spammers) add nothing — they just create damage because they apparently have nothing else better to do.

Update

Here is a discussion of the same thing by a hacker named Yz_Byte. That was two years ago.

Update: 16 March 2016 8:00 pm

This is what I received from my hosting company:

On Wednesday, March 9th, some WordPress sites hosted on one of our servers were hacked. The hack changed some database fields, which included the field that is the default used for the site’s title and is displayed by some themes near the top of your pages. It also changed the character set value which caused some characters to appear incorrectly on the page. Additionally, it created a widget which may or may not have appeared in the sidebar of your site, depending on whether your theme was using widgets or not. The hack did not change any of the posts, images, or other content…

The cause of the hack was a vulnerability in shared hosting servers that use the cpanel control panel software. Reliable Webs has additional security software on our servers that prevent that vulnerability from being exploited, but unfortunately on your server it wasn’t configured correctly. A hacker gained access to one of the sites hosted on the server, either by guessing its password or exploiting an outdated WordPress installation, and then from there was able to guess the paths to the configuration files of other WordPress sites hosted on the same server. If they guessed the path correctly (which isn’t hard to do if the cpanel username is similar to the domain name) then they were able to read the configuration file (wp-config.php), which gave them the database password and the ability to change records in the database.

That’s the extent of it. What I know from my day job is that it is critical to keep software updated. I’ve written a lot about hacking, and attacks often occur long after patches have been released to address them. But even with a VPS, getting into one WordPress installation is probably enough to get into them all. I mean a server is a server. A VPS would only protect one VPS from another, not the accounts on any given VPS. It’s scary, because it means just one weak link is all it takes.

Trump’s Penis Is Important to His Supporters

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Not Donald Trump's PenisWill sent me a video, Donald Trump: Show Us Your Penis. People want to know if Trump’s penis is as big as he says it is. The video’s been out for a few days and still has less than a million views. How is that even possible? If a video with that title doesn’t go viral, what has become of the internet? I mean it. Even if the video was terrible, it should have at least ten million views. And the video is not terrible; the video is amazingly good. It gets the tone perfectly right.

Previously, Rubio had made mention of Donald Trump’s hands being small. This supposedly means that he has a small penis. I’d never heard that. I have certainly heard of the foot-penis correlation and assumed that it was an urban legend. And it is. I mean, why would there be a correlation? How about nose or ear size? You might as well be measuring the bumps on a man’s head. But anyway, Rubio made fun of Trump’s hands, because Rubio decided that the way to beat Trump was to sink to his level. And that has worked out as well as you might think, given that Rubio placed third or fourth in every primary yesterday.

Trump Couldn’t Let Go of Trump’s Penis

But Trump couldn’t let the whole thing go. At the last Republican debate, Trump said, “He referred to my hands: if they’re small, something else must be small. I guarantee you, there’s no problem. I guarantee you.” So: Trump’s penis is amazing, like everything else about him. But the whole thing shows that even when the other Republicans sink to Trump’s level, he can sink lower without it having any effect on his campaign. Trump won Michigan easily last night. And in Mississippi, he came close to getting a straight out majority. That was as close to a head-to-head contest as we’ve seen, and Trump got 47.3% — 11 percentage points more than Ted Cruz.

The brilliance of this video is that it is somber. It treats the size of Trump’s penis very seriously. Rubio introduced it to the race. Trump kept the issue alive and has now made a falsifiable claim. Or to be more accurate: he implied a falsifiable claim. Because apparently, 80% of women have difficulty reaching orgasm through vaginal stimulation alone. So maybe that’s all he means; maybe he gives good “face.” And I’m sure if you asked him, Trump would tell you that he gives great face. No one is better at giving face than he is. You wouldn’t believe it. And if you question him, his tongue just got ten inches longer.

But the people in the video want proof. They want to know how big Trump’s penis is — or at least if “there’s no problem”:

But I find the whole thing disturbing in that I suspect that Trump supporters do care about the size of his penis. Being supporters, they just take it for granted that a man that belligerent, with that much swagger, must have a big penis. It’s all about this idea of physical power. Last week, Bobby Jindal argued that it was Obama’s “cool, weak and endlessly nuanced” nature that brought us Trump. But we know that isn’t the case. The Republican base has been begging for Trump ever since Reagan left office.

The truth is, there isn’t much difference in most people’s minds between a “strong man” and a strongman. And when it comes to Trump supporters, its all the same. It’s the cult of personality just as sure as it was for Mussolini. Or Kim Jong-il. Remember when he played golf and got 5 (later 11) holes in one? I’m sure the true believers in North Korea assumed he had a very big penis too. The biggest. You wouldn’t believe it.

“Donald Trump” by Gage Skidmore. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Morning Music: The Soul of Many Places

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Got No Breading - The Soul of Many PlacesToday, I want to highlight a Jules Shear song that makes me kind of weepy — but in a good way. It is “The Soul of Many Places.” It’s a full tilt love song — but a wise one. It has lines like, “I will not invade you like a warrior or a preacher; I will not approve you like a butcher or a teacher.” Ah, that is something that most 26 year olds don’t know about love; that’s something that most people of any age don’t know about love: you have to accept people as they are if you plan to be around them a lot.

Of course, what I most love about “The Soul of Many Places” is one word: starving. The refrain is all leading up to that word. She touches the soul of places in him that he is starving to touch in her. I do remember feeling this way. And even as I felt it, I understood the tragic nature of it: love doesn’t work that way. Yes: you are touched in ways that you cannot explain. Yes: you wish to touch the object of your affection in the same way. But no: it never works out that way.

There is a great strength and joy to “The Soul of Many Places.” One could, I suppose read the song in a positive way, but that isn’t my nature. The singer understands the tragedy but is going to embrace what is ultimately a losing proposition. The funny thing is, the one time that I was ever in this situation, I did exactly the same thing. But the brave embrace of my feelings only lasted for so long. Then I fell apart. For a decade or so. But then, I’m a slow learner — good, but slow.

Album cover licensed under Fair Use.