Today's Must-Read: The G7 Debacle

There's a lot of commentary on how Trump's behavior at the G7 summit shows his ignorance of the mechanisms of international trade. Take this, via Digby:

From the Economist:

On trade, at one point it seemed as though Mr Trump was in search of some sort of grand bargain, as he called for the end of all subsidies, tariffs and non-tariff barriers to trade. But this was more an indication of how poorly Mr Trump understands the global trading system than a serious summons to the negotiating table. Even so, combing through the joint communiqué, signs of genuine co-operation were to be found, including a commitment to agree on new rules regarding “market-distorting subsidies” and state-owned enterprises.

Of course, Trump repudiated the communiqué, but then, he'd never intended to support it anyway -- it smacks too much of cooperation with other countries. o (I'm not the only one who thinks so -- Rachel Maddow has the same take.) He's not stupid. He's not as smart as he claims, by any stretch. I wouldn't call him intelligent -- that implies the ability to learn from new evidence, and in that regard he displays the same characteristics as his more ardent worshippers: he, and they, reject anything that doesn't support what they "know" to be true. (It's no coincidence that he has such strong support among evangelicals.)

It is perhaps more surprising that Mr Trump still faces people who think he can be persuaded by facts. The Cirque du Soleil performers who entertained the G7 leaders on Friday evening were not the only ones tying themselves in knots. At the meeting, Mr Trump’s counterparts brought binders of figures to the session devoted to trade in an attempt to persuade him that his belief that the rest of the world was unfair to America was mistaken. Tellingly, the desk in front of Mr Trump was bare. He later told reporters the others had been smiling at him as if they could not believe they had got away with using America as a “piggy bank” for so long. “The gig is up,” he said.

Read the whole thing -- it's a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at what was going on.

Digby has another piece that ties into this directly, in which she underscores what I just said about Trump's lack of good faith going in:

If you wanted a president who would tell his friends to go pound sand, then Donald Trump fulfilled your every wish. He went to Quebec for the G7 summit meeting with the intention of putting American allies in their place. They were to understand who was in charge and who makes the rules: The Trump States of America. On the White House lawn prior to taking off in Marine One for the Canadian summit he made it clear:

We’re going to deal with the unfair trade practices. If you look at what Canada, Mexico, the European Union, all of them have been doing to us for many, many decades, we have to change it. And they understand it’s going to happen . . . European Union treats us very unfairly. Canada, very unfairly. Mexico, very unfairly.

(If you don't understand why this is nonsense, read this from Paul Krugman, who won his Nobel Prize for his work on international trade.)

Then this got published, and Trump lost it:

I've already mentioned the attacks on Trudeau by Kudlow and Navarro. Digby offers more on Kudlow's performance:

Kudlow, who should know better but seemed somewhat "under the weather," didn't recognize the total absurdity of such pearl-clutching in light of the thuggish threats his boss has been issuing for months. But somewhere in the middle of his bleary tantrum he opened a new front, indicating to Jake Tapper that the G7 countries had been expected to kowtow to Trump and allow him to dominate their industry and trade, as a way to impress North Korean leader Kim Jong Un with Trump's manly superiority. He portrayed their unwillingness to sacrifice their own voters to make Trump look like a Real Man as a betrayal of world peace.

Kim may have led a cloistered life, but he's not that dumb. He has already shown that he largely has Trump's number, and what he didn't know before, Chinese President Xi Jinping has surely shared with him in their meetings leading up to this summit. All Trump has done is degrade the alliances between the U.S. and its closest allies for reasons that only he knows.

The reason is that the whole G7 performance was meant to show Kim Jong-Un that Trump is the alpha male, so he'd better watch his step and give Trump what he wants.

We've already seen that Kim can play Trump like a fiddle. I'm half expecting the Singapore summit to end up with a declaration of war.

Read both pieces -- the details are fascinating.

Today's Must-Read: Horror Story

I've written about the Trump regime's practice of separating children from their parents at the border, no matter the circumstances of their arrival. (A follow-up post is here.) From Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo, the full petty nastiness of this regime in depth:

Buzzfeed reported Friday night:

A Salvadoran mother who applied for asylum as part of a caravan of Central Americans that traversed Mexico for the United States this spring has had her two sons removed from her custody and placed in the care of the federal government in New York.

Officials offered no explanation for removing the children, the latest in what's becoming a growing pattern of separating immigrant parents from their children under the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy for undocumented migrants caught trying to sneak into the US along the southwest border.

Except the woman had arrived at port of entry, applied for asylum, and passed the first step in the process. Immigration and Customs Enforcement gave her 10 minutes to say goodbye to her children.

And they're violating not only American law, but international law as well:

Except under international law, signatories to the Convention and Protocols Relating to the Status of Refugees "shall not impose penalties, on account of their illegal entry or presence, on refugees who, coming directly from a territory where their life or freedom was threatened." The U.S. is a signatory. Donald Trump might call a bad deal, but it is a binding one.

All the worst aspects of Trump and his base in one nasty package, only exacerbated by the actions and attitudes of the knuckle-draggers who are enforcing this policy. (I could make a few comments here about small people with a little bit of power, but you know the type: ICE agents, TSA agents, petty bureaucrats, "bad" cops.)

It's worth reading, if your stomach's up to it. And then consider how quickly Trump and his minions have destroyed our standing in the world. Putin is just beside himself with glee.

Giggle du Jour

I'm surprised Trump hasn't taken credit for ending the Korean War:

The Winter Olympics were “very, very successful,” Donald Trump told a Pennsylvania audience Saturday night.

Thanks, of course, to Donald Trump.

“We did a greta [sic] job with the Olympics,” Trump said. “Might as well say it, nobody else is going to say it.”

Why is Trump responsible? For bringing peace to the Korean Peninsula, of course.

“A little hard to sell tickets when you think you’re going to be nuked,” he said.

“It became a very, very successful Olympics,” Trump assured.

Nobody else is going to say it because it's BS.

America the Beautiful

You know, you can always count on someone to be offended by the commercials run during the Super Bowl. I'm starting to wonder if anyone watches the game any more.

Well, this year's hands-down winner in the controversy department is this one, from Coke:

Nice idea, right? Celebrate the diversity of our country by having Americans singing "America the Beautful" in the language of their heritage. What could be more American?

Apparently not. This is just a sample of the reactions from "real 'Murricans'":

That last one is a real WTF? moment.

Speaking of which, here's a reaction from Breitbart that I think deserves a Through the Looking Glass Award:

Executives at Coca Cola thought it was a good idea to run a 60 second Super Bowl ad featuring children singing America The Beautiful – a deeply Christian patriotic anthem whose theme is unity – in several foreign languages. The ad also prominently features a gay couple. Conservatives instantly lit up social media with objections, with many vowing to boycott the soda company's products. The lyrics of the song, written in 1893 by Wellesley College Professor Katherine Lee Bates, ask God to grant America 'brotherhood / From sea to shining sea.' As far as the executives at Coca Cola are concerned, however, the United States of America is no longer a nation ruled by the Constitution and American traditions in which English is the language of government. It is not a nation governed in the Anglo-American tradition of liberty. It is instead a nation governed by some all inclusive multi-cultural synthesis of the various forms of government in the world, as expressed by the multiple languages used in the Super Bowl ad to sing a uniquely American hymn that celebrates our heritage.

And last but not least, there's Glenn Beck:

“Why? You need that to divide us politically? Cuz that’s all this ad is. That’s all this ad is. This is to divide people. It’s an in-your-face… and if you don’t like it, if you’re offended by it, then you’re a racist. If you do like it, well then you’re for immigration. That’s all this is, is to divide people.”

Well, consider the source.

One thing that has struck me repeatedly about this whole flap: note who are calling this commercial "divisive": people who seem to think that they have an exclusive right to determine what is "American" and what's not, culminating in Beck, whose whole career is built on divisiveness. (I should note, by the way, that the comments at YouTube are overwhelmingly positive.)

Maybe it's something in the water.

Role Models

Boy Scout leaders. In Utah:

A group of Boy Scout leaders is potentially facing felony charges for destroying a rock formation nearly 200 million years old.

The trio of men was adventuring in Utah's Goblin Valley State Park when they decided to film themselves knocking over one of the formations, known as "goblins."

One man can be seen leveraging himself against a nearby rock and pushing a formation over.

"We have now modified Goblin Valley," the cameraman crows. "A new Goblin Valley exists with, uh, this boulder down here on the bottom. Muscles here pushed it off."

The three laugh, cheer and high five each other.

"Savin' lives is what we're about"? I think any rational personal would call it "vandalism."

Assholes. I hope the authorities stick them with massive fines.

Small People, Part I

I wonder, sometimes, about the need some people seem to have to denigrate others -- not based on anything they've said or done, mind you, but simply because of who they are, who their parents are, the way they look, things like that. There's a couple of recent stories that kicked that one up to the front of my brain this morning.

First off, the "Mrs. Nice" of the anti-gay movement, Maggie Gallagher. She started off with this, in, of course The National Review, bemoaning the upswing in acceptance for things that she (read "the Catholic Church") finds immoral. Given her history, it's not so surprising that the nut is same-sex marriage:

I personally still cherish the hope that we can as a society eliminate cruel homophobia without jettisoning heteronormativity — which is the need for social norms and institutions to be oriented strongly around the problem and the blessing that sex between men and women makes babies.

This is a statement worthy of her mentor, Robert George. (I dissected one of his essays here.)

Perhaps she just doesn't get it, but the idea that we can eliminate homophobia without "jettisoning" heteronormativity is ludicrous on its face: until you accept that same-sex attraction is part of the normal range of human sexuality, you're keeping gay people in the category of "other."

She apparently got wind of the criticism, because, in true conservative fashion, when you say something ridiculous and offensive, double down.

Marriage equality is going to be used primarily to enforce the moral norm: no differences between straight and gay can matter. Or as Think Progress put it recently “At a basic level, it’s logically impossible to say that heterosexuality is better — or should be the norm — compared to homosexuality without simultaneously stating that homosexuality is worse — or abnormal. Either all people are equal in society or they are not; she cannot have her straights-only wedding cake and eat it stigma-free.”

It is possible to affirm an ideal without stigmatizing the alternatives–to affirm in the positive without pushing the negative. But gay marriage advocates insist that any affirmation of the ideal represents a denigration of them, no matter how expressed.

Let's see -- there are no significant differences between gay and straight, unless, like most of the anti-gay right, you are obsessed with the mechanics of sex. And tying the "moral norm" to heterosexuality is loaded, at the very least, echoing the Catholic propaganda (not that Gallagher does anything else) that gays are "intrinsically morally disordered." Unlike an institution that shields pedophile priests.

As for "affirming the ideal without stigmatizing the alternatives" -- how, exactly, does one do this? Anything that falls short of the ideal is, by definition, not good enough. (Oh, and just in terms of formal argument, an assertion to the contrary does not counter a conclusion by your opponent. And that's all Gallagher can come up: argument by assertion.)

By way of background, Gallagher has her own page at GLAAD's Commentator Accountability Project's website. Gallagher taking the pose that she cherishes the hope that we can do away with "cruel homophobia" (is there another kind?) is so much bullshit.

Back to my original question: why does she feel a need to cast a group of people, in this case gays and lesbians, as less deserving? Given her history and public statements, there are some obvious answers, but I'm not going to assume motivations. I'll just let that history and those statements speak for themselves. It's also worth noting that she shares this characteristic with the right in general -- the need to cast those who are different as "other." Partly this is a basic human characteristic -- we're tribal creatures, when all is said and done. And the influence of Christianity of a certain, Old Testament cast on conservatives in this country only reinforces that tendency: it's founded on a religion that itself was founded on group identity: anyone not of the tribes of Israel was lesser.

Given that America's real ideals are based on inclusion and equality, you have to wonder what country Gallagher is living in.

I'll probably come back to this topic -- there are a lot of small people out there.