Impeachment and philosophy: addenda

Following up the earlier post.

[Addendum 2/2: NOTE that my treatment both of the facts of Trump's case and of the Dershowitz Argument is provisional - I am fallible af especially on matters such as legal theory that are outside my area of expertise - and I'm still taking in the for-and-against arguments [e.g.] as they keep emerging.   I will likely have more to say on this in coming posts.  I'm wary about exactly how much leeway, short of the "committing a crime like Nixon did" standard, the Dershowitz Argument gives to a president who - of course? - believes his political interests are aligned with the nation's.  So this Argument and other facets of this case don't altogether sit well with me.  (Note that the just-linked argument links to this pro-impeachment letter signed by over 800 legal scholars.  Now, this passage doesn't sit well with me: "[Trump acted] for his personal and political benefit, at the direct expense of national security interests as determined by Congress."  Except that there's a separation of powers in which Congress and the President can differ about what is in the national security interests.  My (fallible) ring-of-truth detector tells me that this passage isn't worthy of politically impartial legal scholars and I'm pretty sure a Dershowitz would also pick right up on this point immediately.)  I'd like to add that one of my favorite moments of the Senate proceedings was when John Rawls was mentioned in connection with Dershowitz's "shoe on the other foot" test.  Would that there were a lot more such moments in politics.  (Why only Rawls, and not also Plato, Aristotle, et al?  In a Fox interview in the last day or so, Sen. Cruz mentions one of his classes at Harvard taught by Dershowitz, someone else [not Michael Sandel, though (surprisingly?)], and "world famous philosopher" Robert Nozick.  I liked that moment, as well.)  The Rawls & shoe-test point was about (justice-as-)fairness, and the complaints from both sides about the unfair processes in the houses the other party controlled, speaks volumes.  Let's say that the House Democrats were to say to the House Republicans, "Okay, put your fairness demands on a list, we'll make every effort to meet them, and when we do, you sign your names to the list so that you have no complaints about process going forward."  And then imagine the same scenario with the opposing Senate parties.  The thing is, the demands of "fairness" would mean - in both cases - a more long, drawn-out process that in this political context both parties seem to want to avoid.  (Elections are fast approaching, see.  An avowed socialist candidate leading in the nomination betting markets, whom the DNC would rather not see nominated and (conversely) the GOP would probably prefer to see nominated, has had to sit through these proceedings in D.C. as the Iowa caucus approaches, see.  [Don't think for a second that Nancy Peloser's motivations for the month-long delay in sending the impeachment articles to the Senate, or the Senate 'rats demands for prolonged process notwithstanding a very predictable outcome, have nothing to do with this.  BTW, Peloser & Co. showed their unserious hand when she used and gave out many souvenir pens at the signing ceremony.])  Hence the "rushed" process in both instances.  Applying a fairness test, do they really have a basis for complaint for what the other side was doing in the respective houses they controlled?  Will they come clean that maybe the proclaimed fairness considerations and the political considerations can't be reconciled here?]

[Addendum 2/12: Note that the second impeachment article - "obstruction of Congress" - is so obviously bullshit that even Mitt Romney dismissed it while voting to convict on the first one (which is what anyone really cares about).]

[Addendum #2, 2/12: Good discussion going on here, in the linked argument signed by legal scholars, and in the comments section, coming from both Trump's opponents and defenders.  One thing I think is for sure: the vast majority of the American people just aren't in an epistemic position to understand with full and clear finality that Trump should be removed from office for his Ukraine-related actions.  I still don't know how Dershowitz's example of Lincoln is answered, by the signed letter or elsewhere.  I still don't see how his actions are in a fundamentally different category than a number of other things other presidents have done without raising an impeachment stink.  I do know that the Demo-rats spent 3 years squandering all credibility and good will, for which they arguably deserved, as a political matter, to lose the impeachment case.  I'm still not clear on whether just any verifiable abuse of power is impeachable, or if it is best left for the most obvious and severe abuses and that this should be left up to the (obviously partisan, obviously politically-motivated) discretion of the members of Congress.  Anyway, the lesson Demo-rats should but won't learn from all this is that their best shot at beating Trump is not to be so loathsome, dishonest, etc. themselves; their sense of desperation and panic in the current primary nominating process is palpable, but they and their allies/enablers/ilk in academia, media, and elsewhere brought this on themselves through years upon years of dishonesty and hubris.  Had they ever shown the remotest amount of decency and good will in their attacks on Rand, I might feel the least bit sorry for them.  Their complaints related to lack of justice, fairness, honesty, etc. of Trump and his defenders ring all too hollow and hypocritical.  BTW, this year's census should help to highlight further that the Demo-rats' efforts to benefit politically from illegal immigration need not happen through the ballot box directly such as by getting these immigrants registered and voting, but through population-based apportionment of House seats.  (They also hope to capitalize on illegal immigration, not just by refusing to create much if anything in the way of disincentives against it - if anything, it's just the opposite - but by smearing people who oppose it, like Trump, as racists. That includes Peloser crying that the border wall - which would only prevent illegal border crossings, mind you - is "an immorality" and is "about making America white again."  You might get a sense from this alone about what I mean by 'rats spending years squandering credibility and good will.)  Not that this House-seat-stealing scheme - also an electoral-vote-stealing scheme - helps them with the Senate, thank goodness.]

Impeachment and philosophy

I'll begin this post with a timeless quote from Plato's Republic, Book V:

Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils,-- nor the human race, as I believe,--and then only will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day. Such was the thought, my dear Glaucon, which I would fain have uttered if it had not seemed too extravagant; for to be convinced that in no other State can there be happiness private or public is indeed a hard thing.

(In other words, why can't political rulers be more like this guy?)

The reason that the nation is in this mess is because the advice contained in the above has been flouted so thoroughly.  As I've pointed out many times already, all the major American framers were philosophical-enough people to be founders and/or members of the American Philosophical Society.  We don't have anything like that in the politician class right now.  As few as four years ago, Sen. Rubio declared in a presidential candidate debate that "we need more welders and less (sic) philosophers," apparently to the approval of the audience (while philosophy-major Carly Fiorina, also on the stage, didn't even rebut).  (To Rubio's credit, he later acknowledged value in philosophy.)

I think the American people are well aware that partisan hypocrisy is front and center - perhaps the issue - of this whole impeachment thing.  What the American people aren't agreed upon, is which of the two sides is the worse offender in the partisan-hypocrisy department.  (It's the other side, of course.)  But I think they're all quite aware that were the party roles reversed, the parties would be singing quite a different tune.

All the Senators signed an oath of impartiality.  This oath is belied what I believe to be a statistically impossible scenario: that 100 seriously impartial people would somehow almost all vote along party lines.  So let's dispense with any notion that impartiality is a serious factor in all this.  [Edit: an alternative explanation is that the political Left and Right have differing information-processing protocols, a different can of worms....]

Just about the only person prominently involved in this process who has an air of credibility and impartiality is Prof. Dershowitz, who has made arguments that certainly raise some serious questions and concerns, and are of historic import.  Dershowitz has said (on Cuomo Primetime, twitter, and elsewhere) that his argument has been twisted by critics into one he didn't make, and when he says something like that, it should tell the critics that they need to be more careful - or, as I like to put it, to bend over backwards in the name of fairness and context-keeping.  (As in: Dennett/Rapoport Rules.  For instance: Rand-bashers invariably encounter pushback from Rand-fans that the bashers are misrepresenting Rand's position.  That should be a red flag for any fair-minded person that the bashers need to get more careful and (even better) backwards-bending, but the bashers invariably don't do this - they disregard the pushback - a further and more serious red flag about their intellectual character.)

With that background, let's consider numerous facts:

By all appearances - and no one seems to contest this in good faith - Trump conditioned Congressionally-appropriated military aid to Ukraine on Ukraine's president announcing investigations, notably into '20 Dem aspirant Joe Biden and his relation to the energy company on the board of which his son sat.

It also appears that Trump got various ideas about Biden's apparent conflict of interests - something his son was warned about by people connected to Secretary of State Kerry among others who wanted no such involvement, BTW,  - from Sean Hannity's show.  Hannity's show is a cauldron of (partisan) theories about Democratic corruption (in addition to endless Trumpian talking points).  As the previous hyperlink indicates, Trump/Hannity's enemies regard these theories as kooky conspiracy theories, but Hannity was essentially proven right about the Obama/Comey FBI's partisan FISA abuse (about which Hannity/Trump's enemies were most incurious until it became too obvious to ignore any longer).  And given the partisan nature of all this, it's not like Trump/Hannity's enemies weren't involved in conspiracy-theorizing themselves about Trump/Putin collusion, debunked by the Mueller Report.  (See Greenwald for how bad this makes these conspiracy theorists/allies/enablers look.)

So it's not like Hannity doesn't have some credibility and that his/Trump's enemies don't lack a good deal of credibility themselves.  And by appearances Trump accorded Hannity's (crucial-context-omitting) claims about Biden/Burisma more credibility than it deserved.  It speaks (poorly) to Trump's flaky political-belief-formation processes which rear their ugly head elsewhere.  According to Trump's July 25 phone call with President Zelensky, the Biden/Burisma situation sounded "terrible" to him.  Now, unless there is good evidence that Trump had good evidence available to him that the Biden/Burisma situation was probably not as corrupt as he expressed in the July 25 call that it could be, then he has some legitimate pretext (in his mind, supposedly or presumably) on national security and corruption grounds for wanting investigations initiated.  The House's impeachment managers have presented a case to the contrary, i.e., that Trump did or should have known better.  And a faulty-belief-formation-process "out" here doesn't exactly work in his favor, fitness-for-office-wise.

But even granting this "out," the manner and method by which Trump conditioned this aid on investigations is the most disturbing aspect of all this.  He apparently kept it as much under wraps and related to as few people as possible, and he involved his private attorney Rudy Guiliani in it.  Rudy's involvement in this appears not to have been along policy or national-security-related lines, but along personal and partisan-political lines.  Legitimate interests in Ukraine-related corruption could have involved more fully and transparently people in his agencies and in Congress.  But it appears that he tried to hide this aid-conditioning as much as he could, which points to a culpable knowledge that this quid pro quo (and that's what it is) is dirty and accordingly wouldn't pass policy muster.  Bolton referred to it as a "drug deal" to suggest how sleazy and corrupt it is.  From plausible and fair-minded arguments I've seen, it constitutes (to this or that extent) an abuse of power.

That's where the Dershowitz Argument comes in: does an abuse of power as such constitute an impeachable/removable offense?  Here's where non-partisans should balk, as Dershowitz has vigorously been suggesting.  Dershowitz holds that there needs to be something more to the action, namely the committing of crimes (hence his support for Nixon's impeachment), else the abuse-of-power criterion is too vague and malleable, and too exploitable (i.e., abuse-able in its own right) by partisans of the opposing party.  (Note: he seems to leave open the possibility - which would be consistent with the 'consensus' of other legal scholars - that purely self-dealing motives in a non-criminal but abusive act is enough to impeach/remove.)  Dershowitz raises historical examples - notably President Lincoln's partisan-election-related actions releasing Union soldiers from the battlefield to vote for his party in an Indiana election.  (Is there any serious doubt that had Trump done likewise, today's Demo-rats would call for his impeachment?  I recommend carefully chewing over this question.  Further, given the tenacity with which Dershowitz argues his case, it's pretty much inevitable, given the opportunity, that he will bring the Lincoln example up for consideration by the legal scholars ganging up on him.  (He brings it up here on CNN [shorter youtube version here] and it's not addressed.  How friggin' hard can it be to address, I wonder?))  Republicans like to point to Obama's hot-mic moment where he offers a quid-pro-quo to Russia about missile defense - "I'll have more flexibility after the election."  (Having heard about this back then, I found it cynical and typical of the D.C. Swamp, and a cause for political embarrassment, but I don't recall the prospect of impeachment entering my mind.  As I said, it seemed all too typical.  [Edit: And what's more, Trump was supposed to be an antidote to the Swamp; so much for that hope.])

I don't know whether this warrants Trump's removal from office.  At the moment I assign it about a 50/50 probability.  For me to think that measure is warranted, the probability should be at least 2/3.  I do think it shows that Trump is ethically and/or epistemically unfit to be president.  Up until this Ukraine episode, I was almost enthusiastic about his beating the obviously-bad Demo-rats/leftists in 2020.  (Indeed, I even boldly predicted his '20 victory given the alternative which the American mainstream would have ample reason to find odious and ridiculous.)  My hope is that they nominate a candidate who is not so loathsome and idiotic that we're left with Trump as the default option.

And Demo-rats have to be on the hook for so much of the intellectual bankruptcy and corruption in all this.  Relevant points:

(1) This is the same party that bent over backwards to be unfair to, i.e., to blatantly dishonestly smear, Brett Kavanaugh.  You want to talk abuse of power, extreme bad faith?  What business did Demo-rats have agitating and demanding that his accuser be given a nationally televised Senate judiciary committee platform, once they had in hand and knew about Leland Keyser's debunking testimony?  ("Believe women" doesn't extend to Keyser, a woman....)  Or their extensive efforts to gaslight the public with their "we believe Ford" or question-begging "believe survivors [i.e., accusers]" stuff both before and after the assault-allegation hearing?  Appropriate retribution for this effort at personal and career destruction is loss of another SCOTUS seat, if not a presidential acquittal.

(2) This is the party that bent over backwards not to know what was wrong with Crooked Hillary's unauthorized server setup and the consequent mishandling of 110 classified documents.  The legal authorities have declined to bring charges, but no one that I know of has contested the point that anyone who engages in such behavior should not have a security clearance - something that should be a major consideration in whether she is objectively disqualified from holding the office of the presidency.

(3) Certain arguments made by the House impeachment managers can be thrown right back at them - namely, about pulling levers of power where so much as even a scintilla of corrupt partisan political intent is involved.  (That was their pushback against Dershowitz's argument about mixed motives, i.e., in between pure national-interest motives on one end and pure self-dealing motives on the other.)  In making the House case on the Senate floor, Schiff claimed that Trump is "scared to death" of facing Biden in 2020.  Well, Demo-rats are scared to death of having to face Trump in 2020.  Using selective presentations of evidence, Schiff peddled the Trump/Russia collusion narrative ever since early 2017.  (BTW, his many references to the June '16 Trump Tower meeting, between Trump aides and the Russian lawyer promising dirt on HRC, don't establish collusion claims but they do establish the extent to which Trump and his son are willing to deceptively/dishonestly spin.)

As for manager Nadler, he's been caught dead-to-rights on video from back during the Clinton impeachment saying on the House floor that impeachment should be bipartisan; this is obvious prima facie evidence that Nadler's motivations this time around are partisan-political and not purely in the nation's interests.

As for manager Jeffries, he's referred to Trump as the "Grand Wizard of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue," itself a claim beyond the pale of honest discourse and clearly indicating an animus and prejudice that would distort his motives for impeachment.

And let's face it, if the Demo-rats are too fucking lazy or dishonest to mount a clear non-strawman counter-argument against the eminently non-partisan Dershowitz, enough to get his recalcitrant mind to relent rather than be coerced into agreement (through dubious 'consensus'-mongering or whatever), then have they really cleared the hurdle that they ought to clear in order to convince 2/3 of the American people of their case?

And that's another thing - both parties but Demo-rats in particular (there isn't much of a case for a moral equivalence here, however odious the Republicans get at times) have so squandered trust and credibility that I can't treat the House managers' case as having been presented in full good faith ("with all due respect..." etc.).  They've cried wolf too many times about how bad Trump and his supporters are, their treatment of Kavanaugh belies any professions to concern for justice and fairness, they look the other way when Crooked Hillary mishandled classified info, etc.  If Trump were to be removed, consider that this empowers these intellectually and morally corrupt people, and that is the wider context in which impeachment- and removal-related arguments should be considered.  (As for those sometimes-odious Republicans, are they even going to censure Trump for his underhanded and dirty aid-withholding?  Do they deserve to lose control of the Senate where the 2-per-state format heavily benefits them already?)  The notion that he would need to be removed from office in order to restore some sense of honor and decency to our politics . . . I think that ship had already sailed some time ago.  The American people are getting the politics they deserve, commensurate with an intellectually bankrupt culture.  Plato is right.  (See the "philosophy ffs," "philosophy for children," and "p4e" tags, and this blog's masthead hyperlink, for leads to the solution.)

[Addendum 2/2: NOTE that my treatment both of the facts of Trump's case and of the Dershowitz Argument is provisional - I am fallible af especially on matters such as legal theory that are outside my area of expertise - and I'm still taking in the for-and-against arguments [e.g.] as they keep emerging.   I will likely have more to say on this in coming posts.  I'm wary about exactly how much leeway, short of the "committing a crime like Nixon did" standard, the Dershowitz Argument gives to a president who - of course? - believes his political interests are aligned with the nation's.  So this Argument and other facets of this case don't altogether sit well with me.  (Note that the just-linked argument links to this pro-impeachment letter signed by over 800 legal scholars.  Now, this passage doesn't sit well with me: "[Trump acted] for his personal and political benefit, at the direct expense of national security interests as determined by Congress."  Except that there's a separation of powers in which Congress and the President can differ about what is in the national security interests.  My (fallible) ring-of-truth detector tells me that this passage isn't worthy of politically impartial legal scholars and I'm pretty sure a Dershowitz would also pick right up on this point immediately.)  I'd like to add that one of my favorite moments of the Senate proceedings was when John Rawls was mentioned in connection with Dershowitz's "shoe on the other foot" test.  Would that there were a lot more such moments in politics.  (Why only Rawls, and not also Plato, Aristotle, et al?  In a Fox interview in the last day or so, Sen. Cruz mentions one of his classes at Harvard taught by Dershowitz, someone else [not Michael Sandel, though (surprisingly?)], and "world famous philosopher" Robert Nozick.  I liked that moment, as well.)  The Rawls & shoe-test point was about (justice-as-)fairness, and the complaints from both sides about the unfair processes in the houses the other party controlled, speaks volumes.  Let's say that the House Democrats were to say to the House Republicans, "Okay, put your fairness demands on a list, we'll make every effort to meet them, and when we do, you sign your names to the list so that you have no complaints about process going forward."  And then imagine the same scenario with the opposing Senate parties.  The thing is, the demands of "fairness" would mean - in both cases - a more long, drawn-out process that in this political context both parties seem to want to avoid.  (Elections are fast approaching, see.  An avowed socialist candidate leading in the nomination betting markets, whom the DNC would rather not see nominated and (conversely) the GOP would probably prefer to see nominated, has had to sit through these proceedings in D.C. as the Iowa caucus approaches, see.  [Don't think for a second that Nancy Peloser's motivations for the month-long delay in sending the impeachment articles to the Senate, or the Senate 'rats demands for prolonged process notwithstanding a very predictable outcome, have nothing to do with this.  BTW, Peloser & Co. showed their unserious hand when she used and gave out many souvenir pens at the signing ceremony.])  Hence the "rushed" process in both instances.  Applying a fairness test, do they really have a basis for complaint for what the other side was doing in the respective houses they controlled?  Will they come clean that maybe the proclaimed fairness considerations and the political considerations can't be reconciled here?]

[Addendum 2/12: Note that the second impeachment article - "obstruction of Congress" - is so obviously bullshit that even Mitt Romney dismissed it while voting to convict on the first one (which is what anyone really cares about).]

[Addendum #2, 2/12: Good discussion going on here, in the linked argument signed by legal scholars, and in the comments section, coming from both Trump's opponents and defenders.  One thing I think is for sure: the vast majority of the American people just aren't in an epistemic position to understand with full and clear finality that Trump should be removed from office for his Ukraine-related actions.  I still don't know how Dershowitz's example of Lincoln is answered, by the signed letter or elsewhere.  I still don't see how his actions are in a fundamentally different category than a number of other things other presidents have done without raising an impeachment stink.  I do know that the Demo-rats spent 3 years squandering all credibility and good will, for which they arguably deserved, as a political matter, to lose the impeachment case.  I'm still not clear on whether just any verifiable abuse of power is impeachable, or if it is best left for the most obvious and severe abuses and that this should be left up to the (obviously partisan, obviously politically-motivated) discretion of the members of Congress.  Anyway, the lesson Demo-rats should but won't learn from all this is that their best shot at beating Trump is not to be so loathsome, dishonest, etc. themselves; their sense of desperation and panic in the current primary nominating process is palpable, but they and their allies/enablers/ilk in academia, media, and elsewhere brought this on themselves through years upon years of dishonesty and hubris.  Had they ever shown the remotest amount of decency and good will in their attacks on Rand, I might feel the least bit sorry for them.  Their complaints related to lack of justice, fairness, honesty, etc. of Trump and his defenders ring all too hollow and hypocritical.  BTW, this year's census should help to highlight further that the Demo-rats' efforts to benefit politically from illegal immigration need not happen through the ballot box directly such as by getting these immigrants registered and voting, but through population-based apportionment of House seats.  (They also hope to capitalize on illegal immigration, not just by refusing to create much if anything in the way of disincentives against it - if anything, it's just the opposite - but by smearing people who oppose it, like Trump, as racists. That includes Peloser crying that the border wall - which would only prevent illegal border crossings, mind you - is "an immorality" and is "about making America white again."  You might get a sense from this alone about what I mean by 'rats spending years squandering credibility and good will.)  Not that this House-seat-stealing scheme - also an electoral-vote-stealing scheme - helps them with the Senate, thank goodness.]

Trump impeachment thoughts/questions

I wasn't around for the impeachment inquiry into President Nixon, but from all I've seen/heard about it, there was clear an overwhelming evidence that Nixon displayed what might be called a blatant disregard for the rule of law (and there were some 18 minutes of recordings which put him dead to rights on that), enough so that the effort to remove him from office was bipartisan and Nixon saw no alternative but to resign.  I'm not seeing that in President Trump's case.

A couple thoughts/questions re: "Treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors" and the specifics of Trump's case:

Assume you're not a partisan piece of shit; reverse the party affiliations if necessary and see if you come out with the same answer in either case:

Are treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors sufficient grounds for impeachment, or or only necessary or potential grounds?  Of course, the Framers sought to have some mechanism by which a sitting President could be removed.

In the case of President Clinton, he committed perjury in a deposition and perhaps before a grand jury as well.  He tried to influence the testimony of his assistant Betty Currie.  For such actions this national chief law-enforcement official was deemed by the Arkansas State Bar unfit to practice law.  Is this sufficient to warrant impeachment and/or removal?  Does it make a difference if these actions fall under the heading of "high crimes and misdemeanors"?  Was Clinton displaying a blatant disregard for the rule of law?  (Should blatant disregard for the rule of law suffice as an impeachable/removable offense?  I would think so; if that doesn't suffice, then what does?)

As for the specifics of Trump's case: Some reasoning I've heard for why his payoffs to Stormy Daniels weren't a violation of campaign finance laws is that he could have other, legitimate reasons for such a payoff (e.g., to avoid personal embarrassment).  So we might call this a dual-motivation excuse.  Does such a dual motivation exist in the case of Trump's pressuring Ukraine to announce  investigations of the Bidens?  Supposedly Ukraine announcing/initiating investigations would benefit Trump and hurt Biden politically, but Trump has said that his concern isn't political but is about corruption (particularly if there is probable cause to think corruption might have taken place).

Was there probable cause to suspect corruption by either of the Bidens?  Trump told Zelensky that Biden using monetary pressure against Ukraine to get a prosecutor not to investigate Burisma "sounds terrible to me [Trump]."  What now?

Supposedly, a foreign country (or whomever!...) announcing an investigation of X tends to be politically harmful to X, whether or not anything is ever actually dug up.  Well, gee.  What do you think the Demo-rats & allies/enablers were up to when it came to the Mueller investigation that had been hanging over the Trump presidency some two years?  What was their intent other than to go after something that "sounds terrible to [them]" when there was nothing there?  What the fuck else were the likes of Adam Schiff doing those two years other than casting baseless suspicions on the Trump presidency?

On a matter of broader political interest: how much cynicism does it take to assume - as apparently is assumed inside the Beltway - that so much as an announcement of an investigation of X tends to be politically harmful to X, whether or not anything is ever actually dug up?  Wherever did they get that idea?  How does the Demo-rat complaint about Trump pressuring someone to investigate his political opponent not amount to the ultimate in cynicsm if not blatant hypocrisy?  (Keep in mind that as far as I am concerned, the Demo-rats have squandered all credibility and grounds for good will; a number of their top "leaders" in Congress and on the '20 campaign trail have claimed that there are sufficient grounds to impeach Brett Kavanaugh, for example - not a position an honest and informed person would take.  They've recklessly smeared Trump and his supporters as racists, for another example.  If you're looking for honest and credible arguments for whether Trump should be impeached/removed, the Demo-rats cannot be considered a reliable source.  Any reasonable observer should also note the Demo-rats' years-long effort to run interference and make excuses for Obama/Comey's FISA-abusing FBI.)

As for Trump, if he really thinks he did noting wrong, then I don't see any excuse whatsoever for him to hide behind anyone or anything when it comes to his (presumed) Senate trial.  He should get his fat fucking ass up there to Capitol Hill to testify in person (under oath, etc.) and clear his name.  He should face the adversarial grilling of Senators.  Likewise, Joe Biden should also stop being an evader and explain just what the fuck his unqualified, black-sheep son was doing drawing some $50k a month from a company (for doing what?) that apparently plays a key role in the Ukraine narrative (enough so to draw his intervention as VP and Ukraine point-man...).

For reasons apparent to most any honest and attentive observer, this impeachment process has been and is expected to continue being a blatantly partisan event that probably serves to illustrate Beltway intellectual and moral bankruptcy and cynicism than anything else, with the impeaching party having squandered all credibility/trust on tons of matters.  Trump was elected for, among other things, being as credible a vehicle as anyone - as a take-no-prisoners outsider - to clean up the Beltway swamp.  (If he doesn't do it, who credibly could?  I already know what happened in the case of Obama.  Ironically, his original "clean up Washington" persona was starting to crack when as Senator he voted back in '08 for FISA powers, as the likes of Glenn Greenwald would surely not overlook...)

Well, that's why Trump should testify and clear up just why it was within his constitutional powers to pressure Ukraine as he did, and released the funds when he did (i.e., two days after word of the whistleblower got out).  And since the Demo-rats have no reputation left over to salvage, it's up to the GOP to honorably follow the evidence where it leads, and weigh the input of Dershowitz (e.g.) alongside that of the law professors who testified to the House Judiciary committee.  Such dialectically responsible behavior is a requirement of basic epistemic justice.

The American people (the ones with a clue, that is) are fucking sick and tired of being subjected to much less from their "leaders," and thereby having their intelligence and character routinely insulted.

Charlottesville fake news, 2+ years later

Scumbag CNN

CONTEXT

The notion that Donald Trump referred to neo-Nazis, white supremacists, white nationalists, skinheads, the KKK, or any related groups who might have been in Charlottesville in 2017 as "very fine people" is false, thoroughly and easily debunked, as perfect an example of fake news as any.  (PHILOSOPHER'S QUESTION: if that isn't fake news, then what is?)  Trump's statement about "very fine people on both sides," stripped of context, would appear to be some sort of dog whistle to these racist groups.  The full context includes not just the entirety of the press conference in which he said "very fine people" but also other statements made within days of that in which he explicitly and unambiguously repudiated - by name - neo-Nazis, white supremacists, the KKK, etc.

In other words, there really is no excuse for spreading what is in essence a fucking lie that Trump called Nazis "very fine people."

It's a notion that took hold in the minds of vast swaths of the American left - Democrats, "progressives," academia, and media such as CNN.  And if you have any doubts that this notion went all the way to the top, just see what Obama said: "How hard is it so say Nazis are bad?"  (How the fuck can Obama not know better than this?  How can he not know that Trump explicitly, repeatedly repudiated Nazis?  This makes Obama a fucking liar, plain and simple.)

But what really pisses me and a ton of people off, is the likes of CNN refusing to own up to their de-contextualized misreporting - the spreading of fake news and lies.  CNN refuses to accept accountability and responsibility, indicating they think they can spread lies with impunity.  (And, yes, had CNN done the right thing and issued a full and clear correction, it would be headline news impossible not to have heard about.  All we have so far, it appears, is a half-assed admission from one if its anchors.)

It's one thing to spread lies and fake news; it's another to refuse to own up to it.  There's only one logical consequence of this: CNN deserves no credibility as a news outlet - certainly not when it comes to its coverage of politics.  The only logical question to raise at this point is: What else might CNN be lying to our faces about, this very day?

Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams (for one) has spent lots of time calling CNN to task for its lies, and CNN has chosen to ignore him.  Well, fuck CNN, then.  If they ignore him, who won't they ignore?  Fake-news motherfuckers.

But as I've proven beyond a shadow of a doubt throughout many blog postings, this is a problem going well beyond CNN and applies pretty much to the entirety of today's American Left and what, to them, passes for decent and responsible discussion about political matters.  The American Left has become chock full of dishonest motherfuckers who think they can smear their opponents (not just politicians like Trump but intellectual figures like Rand) with impunity, and cry "racism" all the time with no consequence, and generally act like scum who have no business wielding power over others.  What's more, if they're not in on this scummy act directly, they are complicit in it.  If they don't actively take measures to hold the likes of CNN to account for its lies (while still rooting out every mistruth stated by their opponents, and screaming bloody murder when they pretend to have found something for sure), then they're partisan pieces of shit who also have no business pretending to act in the name of truth and goodness.

I hardly bother watching CNN any longer; it's quite predictable how its commentators will one-sidedly distort things (i.e., lie through context-omission), exaggerate the misdeeds of their opponents and downplay/ignore their own, etc.; whatever value it might have to offer I can get on another network, anyway; they offer no-value-added.

And that is part of a wider picture which I have also suggested before: the best (not merely good, or okay) minds in politics today have ended up being on the Right broadly speaking.  (Think about it: if someone like Daniel Patrick Moynihan dies and isn't succeeded in Democratic politics by anyone of remotely comparable stature, then where do you suppose the potential successor-minds have gone instead?  Suppose that the very best minds coming of age in, say, the 1990s make lots of attentive effort to sift through competing political ideas.  Such a mind would be carefully observant of the state of the debate, a meta-level observation as it were.  And what if such a mind is not only disappointed by what Democrats and the Left have to offer, but becomes increasingly disappointed over time to the point of being appalled at the intellectual bankruptcy a quarter century later?  What if the so-called minds of the Left nowadays consistently and unaccountably caricature and smear their opponents on the Right (and pat each other on the back for doing so) rather than engage in serious dialectic?  And what if those so-called minds, with increasing regularity, accompany their smears with hubris and contempt for their (imagined) opponents?  At what point does the best and most attentive mind stop giving these intellectual slobs the benefit of the doubt; how obviously slovenly and slothful does their behavior have to get?)  I'll add: those with the more reputable moral character have also ended up on the Right.  The Left has deluded itself with the notion of intellectual and moral superiority, which is belied the moment you get leftists pretending to debate the merits of opposing political views.  The likes of CNN are employing lesser intellects and more morally defective people than their competition.

(MSDNC is even more of a fucking joke; I haven't wasted a second of my time on that pitiful excuse for a news/opinion network in well over a month now; its commentators are obviously of a lesser intellectual and moral caliber, and the only point of its "news" is to propagate DNC talking points.  Or maybe it's just that CNN does a better job of disguising itself doing essentially the same thing; in that they would happen to be only more clever, but hardly wise.)

Even if you still wanted or hoped to trust CNN, to give it the benefit of the doubt, how can you?  If what they've done so far isn't enough to have squandered the benefit of the doubt, then what would be?

If "liberal centrist" Jonathan Haidt and his now-4-years-old Heterodox Academy project, with all its commonsense recommendations for how the Academy (and especially the Academic Left) might restore a reputation for honest inquiry, is pretty much ignored by the Academy (and especially the Academic Left), then what more do you need to convict the Academy/Left of peddling the equivalent of fake news and elevating one-sided propaganda over genuine dialogue, and squandering any remaining benefit of the doubt?

One thing the likes of CNN could do to restore at least a shred of credibility is to hire Republican fact-checkers on stories they publish that might so much as remotely suggest President Trump is saying something racist.  (The Academy and Academic Left could take similar measures in relevantly similar contexts, if credibility, contrition and honor are their concern.)  At this point the likes of CNN should want to bend over backwards to remove doubts about their honor and credibility, or else they deserve every negative tweet the president and others direct their way.  At this point, anything less from them suggests ongoing scumminess.

Congress: chock full of partisan scumbags?

It seems as appropriate to begin this posting with the following point as any: Nearly all the leading candidates for the '2020 Democrat presidential nomination called for the impeachment of Brett Kavanaugh on a basis of exactly zero evidentiary merit.  (Those who find Christine Blasey Ford's accusation against Kavanaugh remotely credible are either stupid or dishonest, or both.  You have to ignorantly or willfully disregard the sworn testimony of Ford's friend Leland Keyser, and you have to believe that it's even remotely likely that Ford and Kavanaugh would ever be at a gathering together.  The Democrats insisted that Ford be given a national hearing for her not-believable story.)  These include: Mayor Pete, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren.  Warren is even on record for saying that other, even more ridiculous accusation against Kavanaugh (namely Swetnick's serial-drugged-gang-rape story which crumbled the moment she was interviewed on TV about it), were "credible."  Democrat operatives calling themselves journalists fanned the flames of hysteria surrounding these accusations.

By the very epistemic nature of such things, I simply cannot trust such people to carry out some kind of judicial proceeding in good faith, and so the upcoming(?) Senate trial of Trump is tainted by the participation of the likes of Sanders and Warren (and also Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Mazie Hirono, Chuck Schumer, and I'm sure numerous others who either said Ford should be believed that Kavanaugh should be impeached).  [Edit: such people seem to be either not very bright because of how oblivious they are to how bad this makes them look, or they do know how outrageous their behavior and rhetoric are and yet they still think they can get away with it.  We already know how Demorats behave when one of their own is accused of sexual misconduct and where they stand to lose power if the accusations are pursued with the same zeal they pursued Ford's et al.  The evidence of their having squandered all intellectual and moral credibility just keeps on piling up without end, doesn't it.]

And it's most likely going to be tainted coming from both sides of the aisle, if the House Judiciary hearings are any indication.  Here's basically what happened in that hearing: Democrats and their witnesses presented an abundance of evidence that Trump acted improperly in Ukraine, notwithstanding that Ambassador Sondland says Trump wanted "no quid pro quo" (apparently as it relates to military aid, but not in connection with a White House meeting for the Ukrainian president).  Republicans were mostly reduced to repeating 4 talking points (which a Democrat witness, the majority counsel for the House Intel committee, would rebut repeatedly but which didn't stop Republicans from continuing to raise them), and complaining about process.  (One thing that doesn't look good for Trump is the timing of the release of Ukraine aid funds.  The GOP keeps saying that the aid was released without the "quo" of announced investigations by Ukraine.  They typically don't mention that it was released once the whistleblower complaint (or, shall we say, metadata about that complaint) become known to the President.  If you think the timing of the aid release is irrelevant, your cognition may be poisoned by partisanship.)

Those process complaints are also legitimate.  House Intel chair Adam Schiff, for one, is a scumbag who has, among other things to date, released metadata on journalist John Solomon's phone calls, for no good reason and evidently for the sake of punishing a political opponent - the very same kind of abuse of power he's accusing Trump of.  Anyone who thinks Schiff is something other than an obviously partisan scumbag may also be a partisan scumbag.

And now comes the Horowitz IG report about the FBI's clear-cut misconduct in its process for securing a FISA warrant on Trump associate Carter Page.  (This is before the DOJ's John Durham, who has more investigative capability than Horowitz, comes back with whatever additional dirt he finds....)  All of a sudden, it's Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee who appear very incurious about this FISA abuse.  PHILOSOPHER'S QUESTION: If, e.g., ommitting 17 key facts from the FISA application (the inclusion of which probably would have meant denial of the application) doesn't constitute FISA abuse, THEN WHAT WOULD?  The philosopher's job is to differentiate between and integrate among instances, so that unlike instances aren't improperly grouped together and like instances are properly grouped together.  Hence that philosopher's question.  And another PHILOSOPHER'S QUESTION:

Turn the tables, and it's Republican operatives misleading the FISA court about a Democrat presidential campaign, or a Democrat president applying levers of power to get a foreign government to investigate a prominent Republican.  QUESTION: Do we have any reasonable expectations that the two sides would be operating as they do?  Would the Republicans want to drill all the way down to the suspect if not clearly abusive practices of the Republican operatives?  Would Democrats be repeating the same already-rebutted talking points and making every effort to explain away a political motivation for what the Democrat president was doing?

No, there is no such reasonable expectation of such un-partisan honesty.

It appears that the Democrats aren't really curious or concerned about what the Comey FBI was up to.  They don't care that, from the beginning, the FBI operation in question (Crossfire Hurricane) apparently met the lowest threshold they could possibly meet to justify such an operation.  That there are 17 "errors" of omission in their first (successful) FISA application -- all of the errors somehow magically going against Trump -- doesn't appear to cause even suspicion among the Democrats.  (But remember, Ford's accusations against Kavanaugh are to be considered credible enough to hold up his confirmation so that she could be heard, and Leland Keyser is to be disregarded.)

Here's something for both parties to (honestly) consider and/or (dishonestly) evade:  Both Biden and Trump failed to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interests.  Biden's answers (so far) about his son's involvement in a Ukraine energy company (despite apparent lack of any relevant qualifications - a point I haven't seen Biden & allies push back on) are to the effect of: "My son didn't so anything wrong."  Uh, it's about whether Joe Biden did anything wrong with this apparent conflict of interests (Joe being the Obama administration's point man on Ukraine).

Likewise with Trump: He can point to an apparently legitimate motive on his part - to root out corruption in places like Ukraine, including or especially if it involves abuses of power by American officials - but his opposition is pointing plausibly to dual motivations: Fighting corruption and going after a political opponent.  If Trump's corruption-fighting motivation is the guiding one here, then by the same token he should want to avoid the appearance of corruption on his own part since the target of his putative corruption-fighting is a leading political opponent.  Maybe both motivations are involved, but, well, there's the appearance of a conflict of a kind between them.  Maybe both motivations are involved, but it's the Dems who focus on only one of them, and the GOP who focus on only the other of them.  Again, partisan scumbaggery by both sides.

What an intellectually unserious circus, huh?

Here's another loser of an argument, coming from the GOP side: Impeachment and/or removal would be divisive without overwhelming bipartisan support.  The whole point of the impeachment inquiry (which should be an honest one, based on a curiosity to know all the relevant facts and credible explanations) is to find out whether bipartisan support is warranted.  Are they in effect saying they wouldn't be moved by the evidence?

(Is it any wonder that philosophy and philosophers are basically absent from our politics?  The questions they ask are too effective at exposing partisan hypocrisy, selective (in)curiosity, and the all-too-shitty arguments they employ on a whole range of subjects.)

PHILOSOPHER'S QUESTION: Presumably, the GOP would be willing in principle to impeach and/or remove a GOP president if the actions involved were bad enough.  QUESTION: What is their threshold for "bad enough"?  We already have some idea of the Democrats' threshold, in the case of Kavanaugh (which means they are willing to get pretty scummy for the sake of a partisan smear job).  This is a useful question to ask of many a rank-and-file Trump supporter whose belief system in this area may be akin to that of a cult (where Trump is the savior fighting for them against the Swamp - which is indeed part of the truth).

PHILOSOPHER'S QUESTION: This time for the Dems:  What makes Trump's behavior "bad enough" but not President Clinton's, for which he (Clinton) was determined unfit to practice law?

Can any of these folks answer these questions without looking like they're doing bad-faith mental gymnastics?

PHILOSOPHER'S QUESTION: Is there any notable or prominent politician right now who isn't obviously tainted by partisan cognition?  (I.e., does the philosopher have any serious opportunity available to differentiate among today's politicians along these lines?  Or does all the available integration/induction go in the "they're partisan scumbags" direction?)

President Clinton's perjury, 2020 betting odds unchanged, Demorats, etc.

(saganized :) )

1. Watching professors of law testifying that President Trump has committed (at the minimum) obstruction of justice is quite interesting to me, as it should be to the rest of the American people.  But is(n't) there a greater context to all this than just that?  One of the contexts is past behaviors of Presidents in an impeachment and/or removal context.  And so President Clinton's perjury - outright perjury on such questions as whether he had ever been alone in the Oval Office with Lewinsky - becomes rather relevant to this.  A Democrat-run senate at the time let Clinton off the hook for such behavior, impeachment-wise, so doesn't that provide some kind of guidance, intellectual-honor-wise, as to how to Democrats should treat Trump?  Likewise, doesn't a similar obligation of intellectual honor apply equally as strongly to Republicans?  Given the logic they used in Clinton's case in 1998, should they impeach and/or remove Trump?  Clinton's misdeeds were enough to get him stripped of his law license.  One legal analysis I've already linked a few days ago argues that the most significant offense from an impeachment standpoint was Clinton's attempts to influence assistant Bettie Currie's testimony about his Lewinsky-related activities.  How does that compare to / contrast with Trump apparently trying to get White House counsel Don McGhan to issue a false denial?  One legal expert today testified this clearly constitutes obstruction of justice.

The American people rightly expect intellectual honor from their political representatives.  Will they get it here?  On that point, their expectations aren't so high, now are they.  (They would get better political representation through philosophy, btw; a shit-ton of promising leads on that point are throughout this here blog.)

2. betting odds are prima facie evidence that there has to be a greater context to this, than having legal experts testifying that, e.g., Trump obstructed justice.

3.  Demorat politicians have some nerve appealing to expertise - legal expertise in this case - given their support for things like rent controls and minimum wages and other market distortions that a supermajority of professional economists - experts in their field - say will counteract the supposedly good intentions of the rodent-like politicians inflicting these policies on a supposedly free people.  The phrase "fuck 'em" comes to mind, but let me also add substantively that selective appeal to expertise doesn't turn one-sided/partisan, bad-faith propagandists into truth-seekers.  They clearly refuse to be consistent in their thought/actions about which actions to punish how, and about which experts to consult on which subjects.  We've already established in this blog with exhaustive/overwhelming evidence and state of the art analysis the principle of what the Demorat politicians/their allies and enablers are (culminating more or less in their patently dishonest attempts to destroy Brett Kavanaugh); the only question is the precise measurement of their depravity.  Also, once again: fuck 'em, they've already shit away their credibility.  Perhaps the Republicans can prove that they're significantly less-worse?

Trump vs. fake news, in a nutshell

"That is a lot of fake news back there."

Trump: "Fake news is the enemy of the American people."

Fake news: "Trump says a free press is the enemy of the American people."

Either you get what's going on here, or you might just be clueless/a Democrat.

Why are Trump/GOP assholes re LGBT+ rights?

If there's anything the GOP obviously has a poor track record on, it's LGBT+ rights.  (Another would be too much blindness to real racial injustices, and that includes their hypocritical support for (predictably?) failed big-government "drug-war" policies that have disparate racial impacts.  Not that this vindicates the left all that much; they're the ones hypocritically pointing out the failures of big-government policies in only this one area, immediately crying racism whenever an "unarmed black teenager" is killed by police (e.g.), etc.)

From what reporting I've been seeing, the Trump administration is arguing in front of the Supreme Court against standard Civil Rights protections for LGBT+ people.  Here's something I find revealing in this context: while there's no shortage of Fox News links on any number of Google News topics, there aren't any on this subject, not on the first two pages of results, anyway.  If Fox News isn't reporting on it, chances are good that the activities involved are really too shameful for them to direct its audience's attention that way and to really air the Cultural-Political Right's laundry on this.

The Congress is chock-full of selectively attentive cowards who refuse to do the right thing when it comes to (a) ending federal cannabis prohibition (consider, e.g., the callousness and willful cluelessness involved toward medical cannabis users), and (b) updating the Civil Right act to include the same protections for LGBT+ people.  These are such no-brainer issues that it's not hard to figure out what the "right side of history" position is.  (Although see my tentatively-proposed position as a libertarian below.)  And it's GOP politicians who (on average, of course) are more toxic on these issues than those across the aisle.  (It's just too bad that the Demo rats bring so much credibility-destroying toxicity to just about any issue; see below, for example, on their anti-libertarian attitudes toward Christian bakers.  And good luck getting them to couch their arguments for weed legalization in the language of freedom rather than racial equity or [their perennial addiction] tax revenues.)  While it's believable that a Democrat-controlled Congress would do the right thing on these issues at some point in the not-distant future, I have a hard time believing that a GOP-controlled Congress would ever get around to doing so (unless they faced severe political repercussions for their shameful inaction).  [Edit: on a related note, would states like Texas ever have gotten around to repealing their sodomy laws (which are premised on the patently evil idea that people's lives are the state's and not their own to dispose of) on their own accord, absent SCOTUS intervention?]

If it were merely about the right of a baker to refuse baking a cake for a same-sex wedding, then we have an apparent clash of deep constitutional values.  (I say it's "apparent" because I don't see any warranted presumption that a business "open to the public" must do things that violate the religious convictions of the business-owner.  Also, the libertarian principle involved becomes more clear-cut when "bake my cake, bigot" morphs into "wax my balls, bigot.")  I don't see what clash of deep constitutional values is involved in the right of a business to fire someone on the basis of their sexual preference or gender identity when there are other relevantly-similar protected classes under prevailing law.  (Again as a libertarian, I say the presumption should be in favor of the right of a business to discriminate as long as it openly advertises its bigotry.  But I'm tentatively saying that it's a presumption, and that context matters in reasonably delimiting the scope of property rights.  No doubt some asshole business-owners would abuse this presumption to the maximal extent if given the chance....)

If you don't think anti-intellectualist, anti-liberal strains of religious dogma don't have something to do with this, then I would urge a look into attitudes toward LGBT+ rights in the Bible Belt.  Just because those attitudes aren't as shitty as they were a few decades ago, doesn't mean they still aren't shitty.

Have a look at Trump's shameful, anti-evidence behavior and policies (which go beyond the usual distractions associated with Trumpspeak) in this and some related areas.  Not only isn't he friendly toward LGBT+ rights as advertised, but he's also clearly blanket-Islamophobic. (From what I can tell, you might as well treat his and Pamela Geller's views on Islam as interchangeable).  (And while we might treat his 2016 campaign-season proposal to ban all Muslims entering the country as the usual casual-relationship-to-truth Trumpspeak which had little to zero chance of ever being implemented, along with his quickly-abandoned campaign-season proposals to kill the families of terrorists and bring back torture of terror suspects, the sentiment behind it is unquestionably Islamophobic.)  It isn't just a matter of the usual blustery things he says, but what he has done policy-wise.

And whether or not it affects his policy decision, when Trump contradicts himself from one time period to the next, as he has done most obviously on the cannabis-legalization issue, and doesn't explain himself, then that is evidence of bad faith and/or cynical pandering.  "It's just Trumpspeak" doesn't help when he unaccountably contradicts himself.  (Likewise, "Trump's saving grace is his ridiculous/unhinged/dishonest opposition," while quite arguably true, doesn't transform him into a non-asshole.)  (Likewise, one doesn't have to be one of these toxic-af radical trans activists - too toxic even for many on the "progressive" left - to recognize how transphobic and/or downright ignorant of transgenderism so many on the Cultural Right are; "God created two biological sexes" won't erase the distinction between sex and gender, for example.  How about this: there's plenty of toxicity to go around on this subject, coming from any number of directions.)

I'd just like to know, what these GOP people think is the upside to upholding (whether actively or by omission) the putative right of businesses to fire people for being gay, given their not upholding the right to do so in the case of biological sex, race, or religion.  And the philosopher's question: just how far, exactly, are they willing to go on this, before even they get ashamed and disgusted with themselves?  (My first philosopher's question for leftists would be: just how egregious, exactly, does a distortion or smear of Ayn Rand have to be, before even the leftists start calling foul?  They've been real lowlifes on this subject, as it is....)  Something specific, please.

[Addendum: An extension of the philosopher's questions: for those who aren't outright assholes, just how far, exactly, do their colleagues on their own side of the aisle have to go in being assholes, before the non-assholes start calling the assholes out?  (Or: how far, exactly, does the non-called-out asshole behavior have to go, before those failing to call out the assholes start becoming assholes themselves?  Something specific, goddammit.)]

[Addendum 10/12: Some common sense reasoning requiring little to no mental gymnastics in either (left/right) direction: Sexual orientation and gender identity are in the same category of 'immutable characteristics' that make sex, race, and religion protected classes under the Civil Rights Act.  How much, exactly, ahem does one need to read into the Civil Rights Act to see that it is about protected classes based on immutable characteristics and not only about those classes concretely enumerated in the Act?  Congress refuses to do the right thing here, after all....]

Trump: "My unmatched wisdom"

Apropros this tweet:

1. Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump Oct 7
   

   As I have stated strongly before, and just to reiterate, if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!). They must, with Europe and others, watch over...

   125,411 replies39,816 retweets140,294 likes

   
   

   
   

(1) A sage publicly touting his/her own wisdom is probably a contradiction in terms.

(2) Trumpspeak probably has its roots in WWE-style kayfabe and smack-talk.  If you don't get that, then you miss out on a lot of the dynamic between Trump and his fans.  (If you're an elitist you might tend to look down on both of these entertainment genres and their fans.)  (Incredibly enough, I didn't encounter a dropdown menu option for "trumpspeak" in google search.)  (Are Demo rats and leftists all too easily trolled by Trumpspeak?)  (Last but not least: is it wise for a POTUS to engage in WWE/kayfabe smack-talk regardless of whether some or all people are "in on the act"?  No, I don't think so; I think it indicates a degradation of the political, but a degradation rather commensurate with the intellectual bankruptcy of both our politics generally and of Trump's opposition especially; that is, Trump is more a symptom rather than cause, bringing the intellectual bankruptcy to the fore of everyone's attention in an undiluted, unapologetic fashion.  It's not the kind of shit you'd see Marcus Aurelius, an actual historical ruler-sage, engaging in.  Speaking of Trump's intellectually-bankrupt left-opposition, shouldn't the public-sector "educators" be all over the example of Marcus Aurelius like flies on shit, on the assumption that they want/need historical examples of non-intellectually-bankrupt politics to point to for inspiration/instruction?  If they're not all over that sort of thing - and it appears they're just somehow not interested - then ain't that just fucking ridiculous?  These are the people to whom the nation should be entrusting the next generation's education?  I mean, it's one thing for unionized public-sector employees to face perverse incentives, but just how fucking hard can it be, exactly, to learn and teach about Marcus Aurelius?  Or Plato and Aristotle, for that matter?  A philosopher's question: Just how bad does it have to be in this regard, before the People really begin finding this situation to be most unacceptable?  50% worse than it is now?  100%?  What's the breaking point; that's all I'd like to know.  And how can the "educators" really complain about having a Trump as president when they fail to know and teach about serious counterexamples?  It's not just Marcus Aurelius, either; all the key American Founders were seriously philosophical people, a fact which the "educators" seem to bury underneath such facts as the Founders having been slave-owners, say.)

Trump, Iran, MBS and Khashoggi

I assume that regular readers of this blog have enough of a clue to guess where the headline here is going.  But for those why might need some cluing in:

Say that the U.S. intelligence assessment (currently being awaited by the President) comes to the conclusion that Iran is responsible for the recent attack on Saudi oil facilities.  Can the intelligence assessment be trusted, relied upon?  Well, it seems that our leaders - Trump being among them - have been selective about which intelligence they choose to treat as reliable; further, the only serious accountability that would come with acting upon bad intelligence (read: the Iraq invasion) seems to come at the ballot box.  (Which intelligence officials were held accountable for the bad Iraq intelligence?  Was our intelligence apparatus improved after that debacle?  What assurances would we have of any of this?  [Edit 9/19: Not to mention the Steele/FISA fiasco.])

In October 2018, journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered by members of the Saudi regime, and our national intelligence assessment placed a high degree of probability on the murder being ordered by acting head of state, Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS).  In the face of this intelligence assessment, Trump issued a bizarre statement, including:

Our intelligence agencies continue to assess all information, but it could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event – maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!
That being said, we may never know all of the facts surrounding the murder of Mr. Jamal Khashoggi. In any case, our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. They have been a great ally in our very important fight against Iran. The United States intends to remain a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia to ensure the interests of our country, Israel and all other partners in the region. It is our paramount goal to fully eliminate the threat of terrorism throughout the world!
I understand there are members of Congress who, for political or other reasons, would like to go in a different direction – and they are free to do so. I will consider whatever ideas are presented to me, but only if they are consistent with the absolute security and safety of America. After the United States, Saudi Arabia is the largest oil producing nation in the world. They have worked closely with us and have been very responsive to my requests to keeping oil prices at reasonable levels – so important for the world.

Such skepticism and caution!  So, (here goes the philosopher again...) when the Iran intelligence assesment comes in, can we expect the same skepticism and caution?  Can we expect him to say, "Maybe Iran ordered the attack and maybe it didn't!"  (Exclamation point is apparently necessary here.)

No, we wouldn't reasonably expect this response from Trump.  Not when the culpable party is Iran.  They're an enemy, and Saudi Arabia is an ally (for what reason besides its vast oil reserves I don't have any idea).

This is just one example of why I don't consider Trump all that credible or reliable, more or less forcing the contrast with the even-worse (perhaps even far worse) Demo rats.  It is just one example of how the lack of philosophy and wisdom in our politics corrupts pretty much any discussion in that arena.

Logic, reason, context-keeping, and other such positive epistemic values would say that Trump's previous position in the reliability of our intelligence assessment (in the case of MBS/Khashoggi) constitutes something akin to an estoppel against his accepting the forthcoming one (about Iran) as fully reliable.  (Estoppel is a legal concept but shouldn't there be a quick-and-easy term for the same concept in the realm of logic, reason, philosophy, and morality?  We can say "be consistent ffs" but that just doesn't seem to carry the same sort of cash value and enforceable effects of legal estoppel.  The point in either case is to promote accountability.  The only accountability we might see in this case is at the ballot box, but where Trump will probably face an even-worse opponent.)

And, what's more, there is the very palpable sense that the American citizenry have become cynical (or more so than ever before) about expecting much in the way of decency, integrity, intellectual conscience, or other positive values coming from the elected officials.  If Trump has a blatant double standard about the reliability of intelligent assessments depending on the target of the assessment, well, that's just more of the usual ol' D.C. bullshit we come to expect nowadays.  (Even though he pledged in '16 to Drain the Swamp....)  The only question at that point is about whose bullshit is the most ridiculous, dishonest, etc.

If Trump wanted to be more straightforward, and dispense with the bullshit about MBS's culpability, he could have likened his relationship with the Saudi regime to FDR's alliance with the heinous mofo Stalin (i.e., against that other heinous POS Hitler).  In other words, some kind of 'pragmatic' realpolitik where you make and shift alliances as needed to (e.g.) fight a common enemy.  If Stalin's country were the world's largest oil producer, it would have that much more leverage and provide that much more motivation for American leaders to form an alliance.  (After all, some spike in oil prices that might result from MBS's ouster would likely result in a sizable number of deaths around the world....)

Something tells me, though, that this ever-cynical American citizenry wouldn't be comfortable hearing this line of reasoning.  (After all, do we hear that line of reasoning explicitly from our leaders?)  So perhaps they're getting the corrupt, bullshitty, philosophically-vacuous government they deserve?