Politics: National

This is the time of year when writers are making their predictions. The Archdruid Report foresees the election of Donald Trump as president. Gail Tverberg has a thoughtful post about oil. The usually delightful, politically incorrect, and trenchant James Howard Kunstler is worth quoting at length:

Given where we are in human history — the moment of techno-industrial over-reach — this crackup will not be easy to recover from; not like, say, the rapid recoveries of Japan and Germany after the brutal fiasco of World War Two. Things have gone too far in too many ways. The coming crackup will re-set the terms of civilized life to levels largely pre-techno-industrial. How far backward remains to be seen.

Those terms might be somewhat negotiable if we could accept the reality of this re-set and prepare for it. But, alas, most of the people capable of thought these days prefer wishful techno-narcissistic woolgathering to a reality-based assessment of where things stand — passively awaiting technological rescue remedies (“they” will “come up with something”) that will enable all the current rackets to continue. Thus, electric cars will allow suburban sprawl to function as the preferred everyday environment; molecular medicine will eliminate the role of death in human affairs; as-yet-undiscovered energy modalities will keep all the familiar comforts and conveniences running; and financial legerdemain will marshal the capital to make it all happen.

Oh, by the way, here’s a second element of the story to stay alert to: that most of the activities on-going in the USA today have taken on the qualities of rackets, that is, dishonest schemes for money-grubbing. This is most vividly and nauseatingly on display lately in the fields of medicine and education — two realms of action that formerly embodied in their basic operating systems the most sacred virtues developed in the fairly short history of civilized human endeavor: duty, diligence, etc.

I don't make predictions in my Seattle Times column. "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future" as Yogi Berra said. Instead, I have laid down markers, written about the perilous prospects ahead for workers, and the chance of a recession.

I thought President Obama gave a decent speech: measured, mature, mostly realistic. I also thought: Many of us are going to miss "No Drama Obama." The number of minds changed: probably zero. So it goes in our Cold Civil War.

The elephant in the Oval Office was Saudi Arabia. Its funding of Wahhabi ideology across the world — and whose practice as a nation with stoning, beheading, etc. resembles an ISIL* (ISIS, Daesh) gone legit — is a huge factor in the rise of radical, militant Islamist terror. Remember 9/11?

This is not the only disconnect in our ongoing strange days, where the cavalcade of domestic massacres was interrupted by the San Bernardino shooting. That one was committed by Muslims at least one of whom had pledged allegiance to ISIL.

Whatever that means.

Sorry for the insensitive headline but my father was a combat infantry officer in Europe in World War II. While the British used the genteel "Jerry" for the Germans and the average Soviet foot soldier employed the surprisingly comradely "Fritz," the Yanks whose youth was interrupted to destroy the Nazis employed the all-American bluntness above.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Pentagon is preparing to rotate more forces to Europe to "deter" Russia. Why is this our problem? The European Union has the largest economy in the world yet most NATO members spend a diminishing amount on defense. German Chancellor Angela Merkel appears serene in the face of Russia's new assertiveness. Indeed, Germany's armed forces continue to shrink.

If there's a problem from Russia, it should belong to the prosperous, democratic Europe, and especially Germany, that was created by American blood and, in the Cold War, steadfastness.

Meanwhile, British Prime Minister David Cameron has announced he will triple down on austerity, which will mean shrinking the Royal Navy lower than its already historic diminished size. In other words, Britain and the entire EU are more than ever free riders on the American taxpayers who fund the U.S. Navy to keep the global sea lanes safe and open.

For the past year, I have been "feeling the Bern," celebrating gay marriage and transgender acceptance, being schooled that Black Lives Matter, knowing that everything I write is from "privilege"…and worrying.

Worrying that this is the self-selecting world of my friends and "friends" on Facebook, Twitter and the progressive Web sites. Meanwhile, the majority of the electorate that is white and votes was keeping quiet. Ominously quiet.

They spoke in this week's election and the result was another disaster for progressives.

People were surprised that the Tea Party nobody Matt Bevin won the governorship in Kentucky over a highly qualified Democrat. Why? He had the one indispensable quality needed to succeed in New Confederacy politics: an R after his name.

With Bevin's election, Republicans can claim 32 governors — that's an astounding 64 percent of the governorships in the nation. Those holding hope for a Democratic victory in Louisiana against David Vitter should remember he triumphed in his Senate race despite being ensnared in a sex scandal (his lover/call girl was helpfully named Wendy, same as his wife). Will he survive a new love-child scandal or do a Grover Cleveland? Vitter has the magical R. All is forgiven.

Back in school, when evolution was taught, we had the familiar chart on the wall of the science classroom showing our ancestors walking behind homo sapiens, the tallest and most advanced (homo erectus was always a favorite of we seventh-grade boys).

In their debates, the most recent one Wednesday night in Republican-heavy Planet Boulder, the Republican presidential candidates are moving in exactly the opposite direction. No substance. No serious policy proposals. No attention to the most pressing issues.

Consider: This is the party of the intellectual Theodore Roosevelt, the brilliant autodidact Abraham Lincoln, and the man who organized and prosecuted the liberation of Europe, Dwight Eisenhower, a task that required not only military but political and diplomatic genius. Even Barry Goldwater talked about issues. Nixon, despite his dark side, was a policy wonk. Reagan wrote extensively on political philosophy.

Not one of them could win a GOP school-board primary today. At this rate, especially if the Republicans lose the next election, the candidates for 2020 will resemble life from the primordial soup.

Not one is qualified to be president. None (including John Kasich) has shown the chops to be any office holder of quality outside of Dogpatch mayor, although our democracy offers slots for many mediocre place-holders. And yet it doesn't seem to matter.

Back in the 1960s, the phrase "the sick society" was coined among liberals to assess a collective responsibility for that era's crime, riots, racism, and political assassinations.

It seems quaint now. When a former Marine ascended the 30-story tower at the University of Texas in 1966 and used his sniper skills to shoot 14 people to death, it was a shocking act. There were no SWAT teams then, no militarized police. Such events were almost unheard of. Two Austin police officers and a civilian, armed with revolvers and a rifle, made it out on the roof of the tower and killed the sniper.

Today mass shootings, "rampage killers," are so common they can be mapped. So many have occurred in recent years, they are on spreadsheets. A calendar can be marked up: 274 days, 294 mass shootings.

That's a sick society.

After the latest, at a community college in a small town in Oregon, I struggled to write something beyond my earlier column "Empire of Violence." Vast terrain of the Internet was taken with predictable outrage and horror, but ultimately pretty empty stuff. The most intelligent prescriptive writing came from the New York Times' Nick Kristof, urging us to treat gun violence as a public health issue.

I've been reading books about the last days of the Soviet Union, especially David Remnick's magisterial Lenin's Tomb, but also Serhii Plokhiy's The Last Empire, which is particularly insightful about Ukraine's critical role in the breakup.

The more I learn, the more Boris Yeltsin emerges as a giant in the burial of the totalitarian regime and birth of a democracy for the first time in Russia's thousand-year history. The vast importance of the "saint" Andrei Sakharov and the courageous priest Alexander Men. And the smaller Mikhail Gorbachev becomes: naive, overtaken by the reforms he began, ultimately captured by the reactionaries. Yesterday's man.

Vladimir Putin, former KGB officer, is no doubt a bad guy. But a new Stalin? Hardly. Stalin murdered at least 30 million people. Indeed, Sakharov believed that the KGB contained the seeds of potential reformers because its agents were more educated and had seen more of the world than the communist nomenklatura.

While brings us to Russia bombing in Syria and the proto-hysterical reaction of the American media. For example, the Washington Post's David Ignatius implies that President Obama has lost Syria to the Russians. As if Syria was ours to lose.

The conventional wisdom keeps waiting for Donald Trump's latest outrageous statement to bring him down. So Republicans can nominate someone from the party's "mainstream," say Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

But the latest poll from Fox News has Trump still in the lead, at 26 percent, up a point from last month. Ben Carson has 18 percent. And the rest of the GOP clown car is in single digits.

In the new Quinnipiac poll, Trump leads with 25 percent, down three points from last month. Carson is at 17 percent, followed by Carly Fiorina at 12 percent.

One way of looking at this is that three quarters of those surveyed don't want Trump. But his rivals are cannibalizing each other. Especially on the losing end is Jeb Bush, the supposedly establishment candidate.