Dennis Hartley sent along some footage of Trump’s return from the G20 that I hadn’t seen before:
He hasn’t made his horse a consul (yet) but he did have his inexperienced, unqualified, mannequin daughter fill in for him at meetings of the heads of state of the top 20 governments on planet earth. Seriously.
When President Donald Trump decided on Saturday to skip part of a discussion about what the leaders of the world’s 20 largest economies could do to help Africans improve their lives at home — rather than risk them by migrating to Europe — there was no shortage of cabinet members who could have taken his seat between China’s President, Xi Jinping, and the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Theresa May.
The American delegation to the Group of 20 conference in Hamburg, Germany includes Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who is fourth in line for the presidency, as well as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster.
That Trump chose, instead, to seat his daughter, Ivanka, alongside the other 19 heads of state, was perhaps the most stunning illustration to date that he sees a complete lack of experience in affairs of state as no barrier at all to treating her as his de facto vice president.
I understand Ivanka Trump is sitting at the #G20 leaders table this morning instead of US President Donald Trump.
Source: “Incredible!!!”
— Alberto Nardelli (@AlbertoNardelli) July 8, 2017
Then the Russian government punked Trump again, and published a picture of it:
Lukash is Putin’s rep at the G20. She later deleted the pic.
Remember the Russians also published the pics of trump yukking it up with Lavrov and Kislyak. They love to fuck with him.
Here’s Trump praising the fruit of his loins and explaining that she’s had it very tough:
Trump praises his daughter Ivanka, who sat in for him at a G20 meeting: “If she weren’t my daughter it’d be so much easier for her.” pic.twitter.com/BSzvoHHsKv
I’ll take ancient losing battles for a thousand Alex by digby
So, once again we seem to be on the verge of opening up the Big Tent to anti-abortion politics, thus giving the 100% unified Republicans an ability to make bipartisan deals with Democrats to deny women’s rights. It was ever thus. Whenever Democrats lose they go right to abortion rights as the first place to start compromising. It certainly works to keep the feminists in their place which is always good. They tend to get uppity and the next thing you know they’ll be demanding all sort of things.
Republicans in Kansas say Josh Svaty is the Democrat they most fear in a general election for governor next year. But because of Planned Parenthood, his candidacy could be doomed.
He’s an “extremist,” the group says of the charismatic, 37-year-old farmer from Ellsworth, Kansas with an anti-abortion voting record. Laura McQuade, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, has vowed to stop Svaty “from gaining even the slightest political foothold in Kansas.”
Svaty’s predicament is a case study of the dilemma facing Democrats: Should the party make issues such as abortion a litmus test for candidates, even if insisting on ideological purity could cost it at the polls?
Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez waded into the heated debate earlier this year when he said all Democratic candidates must support a woman’s right to make choices about her own health.
“That is not negotiable,” Perez told the Huffington Post. The DNC later said it doesn’t believe in litmus tests. Anti-abortion Democrats say the damage was done.
Svaty warns the party risks losing voters in rural communities if it applies a one-size-fits-all approach on social issues.
“It is important to have healthy diversity of opinions,” he told the Kansas City Star in an interview. “A Democrat in Baileyville, Kansas is not the same as a Democrat in Brooklyn, New York. They just aren’t … the worlds from which they come are wildly different.”
That’s true. They are different. A lot of those folks don’t believe in climate change and hate public schools and support right to work and tort reform too. Big tax cuts are a huge winner with them. I’m guessing that repealing environmental regulations and affirming “religious liberty” and all that implies are also popular in Kansas. Latino immigration is a big problem for many of them and some undoubtedly think that affirmative action has “gone too far” and they’d be happy to see a Democratic politician condemn Black Lives Matter as an extremist organization. The NRA agenda is super popular too.
There are many issues which divide us. So why is abortion the go-to compromise over and over again?
I happen to think all of those things are defining issues for the Democratic Party and that Democratic politicians need to do a better job of convincing swing voters why it’s in their interest to support the party that believes in social justice and economic fairness instead of “every man for himself.” I also think that human rights are fundamental and as some awful old biddy once said, women’s rights are human rights. Or, at least, I thought they were. They seem to be expendable when the need arises.
We’ll see what happens. the Democratic party has an awakened interest group and it’s huge:
Clinton won women on Tuesday by 12 points and lost men by 12 points: a total 24 point gap. The 2012 election previously held this record with a 20-point chasm, when President Obama won women by 12 points and lost men by eight.
The gender gap widened this year for the same reason Trump took the White House: men, especially white men, surged right.
Since white men are the holy grail of politics, we’re going to see if forced childbirth is enough to assure them that all those women in Democratic politics won’t make them feel inadequate and they’ll come back into the fold. But I doubt it. They all voted for Trump because he treats women like shit, which is what they admire about him. I suppose some of them might be lured back by the idea that the Democrats are sticking it to the female majority of their own party but it’s hard to see how many of them will do it. Maybe some anti-choice women will vote for the Democrats instead, who knows?
One thing they can always count on is that the mainstream Democratic women will swallow their concerns and their pride and at least vote against the worst of the two evils. What else are they going to do? Vote for the pussy grabbers? But it’s a hell of a way to treat your most loyal voters. I’m going to guess a lot of people who don’t vote for Democrats (or just don’t vote) see that the Dems don’t have a lot of respect for their base, the vast majority of which is composed of women and people of color. Why would they ever believe that a Democratic politician would care about them?
Notwithstanding Tom’s post below which suggests that it will just turn into politics as usual, this seems like sort of, maybe, possibly-only-temporary, good news:
The liberal resistance to President Donald Trump hasn’t managed to capture any new Congressional seats for Democrats — but it’s having a major effect on politics at a more local level.
In Jackson, Miss., progressives elected a candidate last month who promised to make his Deep South town “the most radical city on the planet.” In Cincinnati, a liberal favorite earned more support than the incumbent mayor in the first round of voting this spring.
And in Philadelphia, a Black Lives Matter advocate won the Democratic primary in May to be the next district attorney — in a city where even Democratic law enforcement officials have traditionally taken a hard line.
“We have a president who any sentient person recognizes is a wannabe dictator,” said Larry Krasner, who won the Democratic Party’s primary for district attorney in Philadelphia. “That’s the kind of thing that can wake you up in the morning, make you lace up your shoes, and go vote. So, yes, I think that had impact.”
Indeed, while Trump’s election has whipped progressives into a frenzy and driven new activists and big dollars into high-profile federal races for the House and Senate, it’s in cities and towns that the vociferous response against the president is transforming politics.
The effect has major implications for the Democratic Party, both in the agenda it pushes and its electoral bench of future candidates for higher office.
There’s more at the link.
I guess they will all inevitably turn into corrupt insiders who will betray everything progressives care about because that’s how the incentives are stacked. Still, if nothing else, maybe they will help do one thing before they turn: stop the onslaught of fascist, white nationalism in America. That, it seems to me, is a worthwhile goal too.
The Cesspool of Sin was approaching peak New Age when I arrived. Every other person in Asheville was on a spiritual journey and looking to monetize it. (Landlords and utility companies weren’t taking payments in crystals or massages.) Every practitioner was “internationally recognized” and writing books, posting flyers, or giving seminars on cosmic neuro-nuclear transmigration or some such. You could take the class at the Airport Ramada. $50 for the weekend workshop got you a laser-printed certificate and professional-seeming letters you could tack onto the end of your name. Then it was time for printing up business cards and hanging out shingles.
The spirituality business was sincere, and yet tawdry and a bit lost. There were spirituality trade shows.
For politicos, this capitalist taint, this petite mort, does not come with the first encounter with lobbyists and PAC money as many suspect. What a lot of new activists don’t understand (and I am just grasping) is that it starts very early and innocently.
A week ago, I waved a campaign manager off pursuing young, connected Democratic professionals for a staff position. For one, aspiring political professionals were not likely to hire on to a campaign they did not see as a sure winner. Secondly, they were not likely to be compatible with this candidate.
Young politicos jump into the game the same way the New Agers did: to pursue a passion. They begin as Young Democrats and interns. They cannot wait to attend political functions and rub elbows with high-profile elected officials. They angle for selfies with the “poohbahs,” as one friend put it, and can’t wait to get the pictures up on Facebook to show family and friends just how connected they are. Perhaps they graduate to a legislative assistant position for some state representative or senator. They transition to employment with another one. Or perhaps, even to a permanent position with a committee in the legislature or Congress.
By the time they decide to run for office themselves, they have an established network of party friends, colleagues, and former employers with endorsements and fundraising lists to kick off their first campaign. Unless a party insider smoother, better looking, or better connected enters the race, they become their party’s default candidate right out of the gate. As a known quantity and trusted, they are already an establishment candidate and haven’t seen the first dollar of PAC or lobbyist money. Although this is not true of everyone, the need to maintain those professional relationships and a team-player image limits the range of policies they can entertain.
It’s not that they are not nice people with progressive leanings. It is just that, as budding political careerists looking to turn their passion for politics into a profession that pays the bills (massage is right out), their political judgments are colored by a desire to pursue their next professional leg up. For that reason alone, it is a good bet that last year young Democratic careerists were almost uniformly Hillary Clinton supporters.
Or perhaps instead of elective office, they hang out a shingle in the consulting world where the same network of friends, colleagues, and former employers ensures that when it’s time to spend campaign donations, the careerists are on speed dial. No matter their skill or track record, they are members of the club. Either way, people in this business learn early on not to violate the one unbreakable rule Elizabeth Warren heard from Larry Summers: Insiders don’t criticize other insiders. It’s not just about money. The business is a fraternity.
That’s why those who are not by nature “joiners” often remain outside critics rather than players and nothing changes.
Writing for Harper’s, Andrew Cockburn dives into the Democrats’ political professional culture and how money drives insiders as much as passion drives the noobs. At the election this February in Atlanta of Democratic National Committee officers, “party heavyweights” worked behind the scenes to stop Rep. Keith Ellison’s election as national party chair. Meanwhile, the party’s relationship to donors was up for debate:
In one of his more progressive acts, Obama had banned his party from soliciting or accepting corporate PAC money. But in 2016, it emerged that D.N.C. chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz had lifted the ban. It was done in secret, but almost certainly with White House approval. “We were never told about it,” said Christine Pelosi, a member of the D.N.C. executive committee (and the daughter of Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader). “We read about it online, months later.”
Pelosi, who describes herself as an “antiestablishment establishment person,” had come to Atlanta with a resolution to reinstate Obama’s ban. She immediately ran into furious opposition. “We lost a thousand seats because we didn’t have corporate money,” one senior party functionary assured her. Pelosi dismissed her argument. “There was plenty of money,” she told me, in spite of Obama’s ban. As for the $18 million in corporate funds that came in after the ban was lifted, that went straight into Clinton’s campaign chest.
The contrary view was most succinctly summarized by Terry Lierman, a longtime friend and supporter of Perez and a former chair of the Maryland Democratic Party. He told me that the party should of course solicit from corporations—“because that’s where the money is.” (He did add a pious reference to the “energy” of small donors.) As it turned out, this perspective was shared by most delegates, no doubt including those who were themselves lobbyists for major corporations such as Goldman Sachs, Lockheed Martin, and Pfizer. When all those opposed to Pelosi’s effort were asked to stand up, a solid majority shot to their feet.
Notice the attribution of the nationwide losses to lack of sufficient funds rather than lack of state-level organization and message. In the spirit of “those who can’t, teach,” functionaries who cannot inspire the flood of small donations a Bernie Sanders or even a Jon Ossoff can see big donors as the default source of operating cash. And once they have it, they prefer it stays in the fraternity to support their friends. Once again, no matter what their skills.
The support of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) or the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) comes with strings. You want their money? You have to spend it with their friends. Jon Ossoff found out in the recent Georgia 6th District runoff. The relentless-and-breathless flood of Ossoff emails and the milquetoast television ads bore all the marks of the DCCC’s pet consultants.
The party’s relationship with its consultant class has to change, Sarah Jones wrote at The New Republic. “Amidst the wreckage of Ossoff’s campaign there emerges only one winner: Mothership Strategies, which reportedly earned $3.9 million for its work. Everyone else—voters, the party, the candidate Mothership promoted—lost.”
It is not just the money. It is a culture. Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas wrote about it a decade ago in “Crashing the Gate.” They begin one chapter with a quote by a Republican operative:
“I don’t get it. When a consultant on the Republican side loses, we take them out and shoot them. You guys — keep hiring them.”
Congressman Brad Carson was running for Senate in Oklahoma in 2004 when he ran up against the consultancy. As an underdog, a “business as usual” campaign was not going to cut it. So Carson sought out Steve Eichenbaum, the Milwaukee-based advertising executive whose clever ads helped Russ Feingold win his Senate seats. But before he could seal the deal, the DSCC sat Carson down for a talk and pressured him into hiring Murphy Putnam Media, a politically connected D.C. firm. It was an eye-opening experience for Carson:
“That’s the thing you’ll learn about any consultant at the top level. They’re above you in the food chain,” said Carson. “You have to negotiate about what you do in your commercials. They call up the DSCC and complain if you’re not doing the ‘right thing.’ They’re a source of intelligence to people back in D.C. And these guys are all powerful people, prominent people. They aren’t even working for you. It’s an amazing thing in a lot of ways, really amazing.” Carson lost the election 53 to 41 to Tom Coburn.
Perhaps Carson should have used Eichenbaum:
“Money … can’t buy you a movement,” Jones writes. Nor could the tens of millions raised last year by David Brock, the former right-wing hit man behind Democrat-friendly American Bridge and Media Matters, Cockburn notes. Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party and an Ellison supporter, was banging her head against the wall over Brock’s plans for the future. “David Brock’s organization got seventy-five million dollars last year!” she exclaimed. “What did he do with that money? You could have given a million dollars to each of the state parties.” But it pays the bills for a lot of frat brothers.
A Texas congressman said President Bill Clinton intimidated the government’s lead lawyer into not seeking an indictment of Hillary Clinton by telling her, “We killed Vince Foster.”
Did Clinton, desperate to help his wife, declare as much about killing Foster, the White House deputy counsel at the start of Clinton’s two terms?
That’s what Rep. Pete Olson said in a June 9, 2017, interview on the Houston-based Sam Malone Show.
[…] “I guarantee you,” Olson said, “they had the conversation where he basically said, ‘Mrs. Lynch, call your attack dog off. We’ve killed people. We killed Vince Foster. We destroyed Webb Hubbell. We will destroy you.’ And then what happens to things?,” Olson said. “All of a sudden–well, she did it, yeah, it was all terrible, don’t know who got the information, very classified. But no indictment.”
That lying loon isn’t an internet troll or a Russian bot. He’s a member of of the United States Congress.
By the way, on’t think this is just some one-off comment. Both the House and Senate have launched investigations into Lynch’s “interference” in the election. So, we’ll be hearing a lot more about that, particularly since the Mueller probe is happening behind closed doors and the GOP committee chairman are saying they don’t want to get in his way with the Russia stuff. This, however, will be a sideshow, I predict, with Bill and and Hill and Loretta and maybe James Comey all coming up to the hill for testimony.
I hope I’m wrong about that. But do you think it’s impossible that they wouldn’t do it? I don’t.
This is why Senate Republicans are having so much trouble with the health care bill. The Republican health care effort is the most unpopular legislation in three decades — less popular than the Affordable Care Act when it was passed, the widely hated Troubled Asset Relief Program bank bailout bill in 2008, and even President Bill Clinton’s failed health reform effort in the 1990s. That’s the verdict from MIT’s Chris Warshaw, who compiled polling data from the Roper Center on major legislation Congress has passed since 1990.
Why it matters: It’s rare for Congress to move ahead with legislation when the signs are this clear that the public doesn’t want it. Clinton’s health care plan never got a floor vote in the House or Senate, and neither did President George W. Bush’s plan to partially privatize Social Security. (It’s not included in Warshaw’s data, but the Social Security plan only had 46 percent support in February 2005 and seniors were overwhelmingly opposed, according to the Pew Research Center.)
The big exceptions: Democrats ignored the warnings and passed the ACA, expecting the political fights to fade — but they never did. And Congress passed TARP because the markets were melting down and it had no choice. Even in those cases, the polling averages weren’t as low as the support for the GOP health care plan.
Then vs. now: Support for the Affordable Care Act fell as low as 38 percent right before final passage — but even that isn’t as bad as the 12 percent support for the Senate health care bill in a recent USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll.
As we continue to watch the health care debate unfold in town halls and protests around the country, you can see why Mitch McConnell was so eager to have this vote over with before the July 4 recess. The last thing he wanted was for his senators to have to go home and face constituents who cannot understand why their representatives are so eager to pass a bill with a 12 percent approval rating. As I observed on Thursday, the politics of this are very difficult for Republicans. They shouldn’t be. Their party ran on a very specific platform and won control of the entire federal government and most of the states. Passing their agenda should be a cakewalk.
Unfortunately for the Republicans, however, they lied about their agenda and its devastating consequences for many of their constituents. The Congressional Budget Office score stopped their momentum on health care, and now rigid ideologues, led by Sen. Ted Cruz and like-minded outside groups like the Club for Growth, are pushing for changes that go after people with pre-existing conditions. If there is a sacred cow for both parties, it’s that one, so naturally Cruz wants to gut it. According to this report from The Hill, McConnell is none too pleased.
So the politics are getting more complicated every day for the Republicans and maybe they’ll get so tangled up that they can’t pass any health care bill at all. But I wouldn’t count on it. They’ve been trying to get the tax cuts from slashing Medicaid that are at the center of both the House and Senate versions of their repeal bills for 30 years. They aren’t going to give that up without a fight.
But there is more to it than just money. Republicans have been fighting the Medicaid program since its inception, when it was not only used to help the poorest Americans get access to health care, but also became a tool to force hospitals and other medical facilities to desegregate in the South. (As always, race plays a central role in the right’s antipathy toward government programs.)
Ever since the Reagan era, Republicans have tried to convert the Medicaid program into state block grants, which is really just another way to starve it. They do not believe that the United States needs a safety net for poor people. It’s really that simple.
But Medicaid isn’t just a program that provides vital medical coverage for poor adults who don’t earn enough money to pay for health insurance, or who don’t have jobs which provide it. Over the years there have been important additions to the program.
— Kaiser Family Found (@KaiserFamFound) July 6, 2017
That chart illustrates what a radical change it would be to slash Medicaid spending to levels much lower than before the Affordable Care Act was enacted, as the House and Senate plans would both do. It isn’t just that Republicans don’t think the U.S. needs a safety net for poor people. They also don’t think we need a safety net for people who are unable to work, including children, the elderly and people with disabilities.
There are many stories circulating about the devastation these bills would cause for people who need extensive home care and support in order to live full lives. In many cases, families will be financially ruined. Some will face the possibility of being forced to live in institutions if these funds are cut. It’s a nightmare scenario for many of our fellow citizens.
But just because you are not disabled or don’t have a disabled family member does not mean you won’t be personally affected by these changes, even if you are well covered by insurance yourself. Most of us with older parents and grandparents may not realize that Medicare does not pay for nursing-home care — Medicaid does. Many millions of Americans spend their final days in such facilities so they can have the constant supervision and medical care they need. As the baby boom generation moves into old age, there are going to be many more of them: The population of elderly Americans is expected to double, from roughly 48 million today to 98 million by 2060.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, Medicaid pays for 62 percent of nursing-home care in this country today. About 80 percent of people who live in nursing homes are over 65, which is not surprising. Roughly two-thirds are women and a large majority are white. More than half the people in nursing homes have some form of cognitive impairment, such as Alzheimer’s disease or disorders resulting from stroke. About 60 percent have more than four self-care needs.
These people are not moochers or parasites. Most of them worked for many, many years and have come to the last stage of their lives unable to work and requiring the kind of skilled care that they or their families cannot afford or deliver personally. They will not survive on their own and their families will face financial catastrophe if someone has to quit their job to take care of them.
One of the great conceits of the GOP argument for their repeal-and-replace crusade is that they are bringing “relief” to younger people in the form of lower insurance premiums. But they never mention the fact that if they succeed in stripping this program of needed funds in order to give their wealthy benefactors a massive tax cut they don’t need, many of the parents of those young people will no longer be able to afford to send them to college or help them buy their first home or their first car. Many younger people may find themselves forced to care for parents or grandparents in their own homes.
Unfortunately, even if the Republicans are unable to pass this monstrous bill, there are other ways they plan to inflict misery and pain on people in nursing homes. According to ThinkProgress, the Trump administration plans to roll back Obama-era rules that protect seniors from being abused by nursing homes that force residents and their families to sign arbitration agreements prohibiting them from filing lawsuits against the care provider.
Ironically, the Obama rule would have withheld federal funds from any facility that made such a requirement. The Trump administration, which claims to be overwhelmingly concerned about costs, is more than happy to write a check for such places. You almost wonder if they want these people to suffer.
Most of us don’t think about this issue until faced with making a decision about whether it’s time for our parents to go into some kind of assisted living. It’s a wrenching process for all concerned, one that impacts our freedom of movement and financial independence and comes with a renewed awareness of our own mortality. It is a difficult time for almost every family.
Now the Republican Party and President Trump want to make it a hundred times worse for millions of people. Indeed, they want to make it worse for all of us. What’s the saying? Getting old is no fun, but it’s better than the alternative? These heartless people are challenging that truism.
Thankfully, the NYT has finally revealed that it was Trump, not Putin, who chose to limit attendees.
Only six people attended the meeting itself: Mr. Trump and his secretary of state, Rex W. Tillerson; Mr. Putin and his foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov; and two interpreters.
The Russians had agitated to include several more staff members in the meeting, but Mr. Trump’s team had insisted that the meeting be kept small to avoid leaks and competing accounts later, according to an administration official with direct knowledge of the carefully choreographed meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity around the matter.
And he did so specifically to avoid leaks about what would transpire.
It is therefore, not possible to totally believe the read-out of this meeting. Unless you think Trump and Tillerson and Putin and Lavrov would never lie.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Friday told press that President Trump opened his 140-minute meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin by discussing Kremlin interference in the 2016 election. Additionally Tillerson—who was in the room for the conversation—relayed that the meeting was “rightly focused on how do we move forward from something that may be an intractable disagreement at this point.” Additionally, Tillerson said, “There was a very clear positive chemistry between the two… There was not a lot of re-litigating things from the past.” According to The New York Times’ Moscow bureau chief, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov claimed President Trump accepted statements from Putin that the Kremlin did not hack the 2016 election.
Of course he did. They need to move on now to important things like how Trump can reward his new friend for all his help.
This is really creepy. Not that I expected anything better. But still. You are witnessing something historic here and not in a good way. The president of the United States was helped in his election campaign by a foreign government and it appears that he’s just telling the American people to go fuck themselves if they don’t like it. There’s not a damned thing they can do about it.
Let’s not forget who dropped the ball on North Korea
by digby
“I thought it was important that we went outside. I thought it was important that people on the other side of the DMZ see our resolve in my face.”
I was going to write up something about the Bush administration being the ones who screwed the pooch on this problem back in the early aughts, but Josh Marshall did a terrific historical survey of the last two and a half decades of right wing bullshit on the subject and how it’s led up to this terrifying moment with an orange cretin at the helm. He entitled it “Trump’s policy is a fast-forward stupider version of Bush’s” which should give you a flavor of what it’s about. Please read the whole thing. I’ll just pick it up in the middle here:
The past three presidents have tried to negotiate, only to learn that Pyongyang can never be trusted. Reflecting the hubris of someone who believes he alone can fix things, Trump’s “it will not happen” tweet came two months after Barack Obama warned him privately that North Korea would likely be the single most urgent problem he confronted as president. Several aides from the last administration also told their incoming counterparts that the missile program should be their top national security priority.
The first sentence is a major distortion of the the last two-decades-plus of history. The last three administrations are Clinton, Bush and Obama. The current situation dates back to the 1993-94 North Korean nuclear crisis under President Clinton which eventually led to something called the ‘Agreed Framework‘. I am glossing over a vast amount of detail but that agreement and its elaborations over the 1990s amounted to the US and its allies providing technology and various forms of aid to North Korea in exchange for freezing its nuclear programs. The American right viewed the deal as “appeasement” and an example of perceived American weakness abroad. North Korea was neither a normal state or a very trustworthy one (true enough). The US, most Republicans argued, shouldn’t be in the business of essentially paying the North Koreans protection money as a reward for their aggressive behavior.
This was the essence of the debate through much of the late 1990s. President Bush ran on ending the deal and bringing the North Koreans to heel. Then in late 2002, a US delegation went to Pyongyang to confront the North Koreans with what the US claimed was evidence of cheating on the deal by creating a uranium enrichment program. (The original deal had dealt with the North Koreans’ plutonium cycle.) The quality of that intelligence has always been controversial. But that doesn’t mean it was wrong. One Clinton era State Department official later said that the Clinton administration had had at least suspicions about a uranium program as far back as 1998.
This gets us back into the highly complicated and messy history of the Agreed Framework. By the late 1990s, the North Koreans complained the US had not followed through on a promised normalization of relations between the two countries. They also claimed the US hadn’t delivered all the promised aid. At least some of this was the case since the Republican Congress worked to scuttle the deal via its control of the appropriations process. Basically, they wouldn’t make the money available.
For more details than this, you have to read up on the history and make your own judgments. It was messy. There was plenty of evidence to suggest North Korean bad faith or at least failure to live up to agreements. There was also a good bit of evidence that the US didn’t live up to its agreements, in part because the US government was divided. It also quite possible, even likely that the North Koreans did start a uranium enrichment program. In my mind, looking back on it, it’s not like retrospective arguments about whether Israel or the Palestinians killed the ‘peace process’. Both sides have at least plausible narratives arguing that the other side operated in bad faith and/or did not live up to their side of the bargain.
But the key is this. As of 2002, the North Koreans had no active nuclear weapons program. The Bush administration used the intelligence about a uranium enrichment program as a confirmation of its doubts about the Agreed Framework and proceeded to scuttle the deal over the course of 2003. In 2006, North Korea detonated its first nuclear weapon.
My take on this history is that the Bush administration, not without some reason, said you don’t reward aggressive behavior. We’re going to get tough with North Korea and stop paying protection money. And they did get tough – to the extent that getting tough means saying mean things and showing resolve. But the Bush folks eventually came to grips with the reality the Clinton team had confronted which was that the US had no military options it deemed viable. Could the US invade and overthrow the North Korean government? Sure. But only at the cost of probably hundreds of thousands of lives, the risk of a conflict with China and a lot else. So the Clinton administration had a messy and unlovely ‘deal’ with the North Koreans that kept North Korea non-nuclear through the 1990s. The Bush team “got tough” and the outcome was a North Korea with substantial nuclear arsenal and a expanding missile program. Beyond the ego gratification of ‘being tough’ and ‘showing resolve’ it is difficult to imagine any policy producing worse results than what the Bush policy produced. One can debate how much better the Clinton administration results were. But you simply can’t argue with the fact that they were better than what happened under Bush. Again, North Korea not having nuclear weapons versus having them. There’s just no getting around that.
The US options were quite a bit more limited during the Obama era. North Korea was already a nuclear weapons power, with all the obvious deterrence that goes along with it. But as I said at the top, Trump policy is really just a fast forward and much clumsier and stupider version of the Bush policy. To be clear, our options were already quite poor at the end of President Obama’s tenure. But President Trump reverted to the same approach. I’ll get tough and make North Korea behave. The Trump administration’s rhetoric of strength and resolve was comical even by Bush era standards. Back in April Vice President Pence made the traditional presidential and vice presidential visit to the demilitarized zone. According to the Post, Pence actually was not scheduled to walk outside at ‘Freedom House’ on the South Korean side of the border. But he made an impromptu decision to go outside because he thought it was important that the North Koreans see US ‘resolve’ in his face. I’m not kidding. He really said this. “I thought it was important that we went outside. I thought it was important that people on the other side of the DMZ see our resolve in my face.”
That’s just …inane. As Marshall points out, it’s unclear what the answer is. But it’s definitely not that:
What is clear to me and I think seems demonstrably the case is that if you say you’re going to “get tough” or that the “era of strategic patience is over,” you need to have some plan for what you’re actually going to do. It is quite clear the Trump team had zero idea what to do. When they realized that, they happened upon the idea of outsourcing the job to China, what all three past administrations tried with very limited success. The President now says that didn’t work either. In fact he’s almost comically blase about the collapse of his entire policy.
Seriously:
Trump is a bully who thinks if he threatens people they will back down. That’s clearly not working. But he’s also supposed to be a master negotiator who can get anyone to the bargaining table and make a great deal that everyone is happy with. You’d think he’d want to at least try that. But he’s just blustering about nonsense because he’s a fool who couldn’t negotiate his way out of a paper bag.
So, here we are, with North Korea making it very clear that they are prepared to launch a missile at someone if they feel provoked and an imbecile for president who has no clue what he’s gotten himself into and could easily fall for some Buck Turgidson type who wants to swing America’s manhood around. It’s a bad situation.
