Narcissism

Posted on April 19, 2017 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 19, 2017

According to the Mayo Clinic (http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/narcissistic-personality-disorder/basics/definition/con-20025568):

“Narcissistic personality disorder is a mental disorder in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for admiration and a lack of empathy for others. But behind this mask of ultraconfidence lies a fragile self-esteem that’s vulnerable to the slightest criticism.”

More specifically, the American Psychiatric Association uses the following criteria to diagnose this disorder (http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/narcissistic-personality-disorder/basics/symptoms/con-20025568):

  • Having an exaggerated sense of self-importance
  • Expecting to be recognized as superior even without achievements that warrant it
  • Exaggerating your achievements and talents
  • Being preoccupied with fantasies about success, power, brilliance, beauty or the perfect mate
  • Believing that you are superior and can only be understood by or associate with equally special people
  • Requiring constant admiration
  • Having a sense of entitlement
  • Expecting special favors and unquestioning compliance with your expectations
  • Taking advantage of others to get what you want
  • Having an inability or unwillingness to recognize the needs and feelings of others
  • Being envious of others and believing others envy you
  • Behaving in an arrogant or haughty manner

It must be clear to everyone except Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters that he could be the poster child for this disorder. Most of us have encountered people like this, perhaps a family member, an employer, a subordinate, a rival, or a competitor. Whatever the relationship, we probably wished we could sever it as soon as possible, though often that could only be done at a steep cost. Can you imagine being married to such a person or have to depend on him or her for sound judgment in a crisis? Every American, in fact every citizen of planet Earth is now in exactly that position.

When I encounter such people I see self-loathing that can only be compensated for by demeaning everyone else. When that need is extreme, it affects every decision they make, every action they take, often unaware and uncaring of how they are received by the people they affect. I’ve said in the past that Trump had no moral center. He may actually have one, but if he does it is so deeply submerged in his narcissism, it is virtually invisible.

He spent a year-and-a-half demeaning everyone but the sycophants who jumped aboard his bandwagon. All fifteen of his Republican rivals were incompetent losers. Women were objects to be used for his pleasure, the handicapped were objects of derision, and immigrants, especially Muslims, wanted only to steal jobs from deserving Americans and destroy our democracy. Presidents Obama and Bush (43) were stupid and weak. Congress was inept and corrupt, our economy was a disaster, and our military a shambles. NATO was useless, and China and Mexico were evil incarnate. Only Donald Trump had the answers. Oddly, the only prominent world figure who Trump praised was Vladimir Putin, who is probably our most dangerous adversary after the lunatic who rules North Korea.

During his first two months in office he allowed himself to be led (astray) by extremists like Steve Bannon and the ultra-right wing Freedom Caucus, and Kelly-Anne Conway made him look bad once too often. When, as a result, he discovered that people were liking him less every week, they dropped out of favor quickly. Now Trump’s two most senior advisors are registered Democrats, but according to the president, everything in the west wing is running smoothly. Chaos? Not in Trump’s White House.

Throughout his life, Trump was respected only for his ability to make money, usually at someone else’s expense. He barged through life as an insensitive buffoon, leaving a trail of smoking debris and shaking heads in his wake. I can’t recall any of the people history reveres as memorable leaders behaving that way.  Most of the people we remember as great statesman rose above the petty and the mundane once they reached the top. But Trump continues to be thin-skinned, reactionary, mean-spirited and venal, secretive about his business and personal affairs, flaunting every tradition of visibility and transparency that he campaigned on. Rather than rising above, he has been sinking, with record low approval ratings.

He has some real challenges ahead. Our adversaries surely see through his façade, and understand that beneath it lies insecurity and inexperience. Will he even be able to tread water swimming with those sharks?

For all our sakes, I hope so, but I’m scared.

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Words Matter

Posted on April 13, 2017 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 13, 2017

Words matter, they really do. Sometimes they matter more than actions.

Last year’s political campaign proved that with sixteen months of populist, nationalistic bombast from one side and a peculiar directionless rhetoric from the other (not counting Bernie Sanders who sat out the last few months). Clearly, ranting and appealing to fear and racism won, despite the fact there was never any real substance behind the words. This week the media are expressing complete surprise at Donald Trump’s changes of mind on most of what he said during the campaign.

When Bill Clinton did it, they called it waffling. When George W. Bush failed to bend to reality and alter his views people called him dumb. Today Trump is being given credit for being flexible in the face of new information by some, while others consider his about faces proof that the words that got him elected were empty.

How many times did he scream that China was robbing us blind and manipulating its currency to undersell American made goods here, and make it impossible for our exports to compete there? A ten minute conversation with Chinese president Xi, which has been characterized as a history lesson, changed Trump’s mind.

He called NATO obsolete at every campaign rally, scaring the hell out of our allies, and very likely emboldening Russia, which has been fighting NATO’s eastward expansion. That’s what the battles in Ukraine and the annexation of the Crimea were all about. But today, Trump actually said NATO isn’t obsolete any more. He’d accused it of not doing its part in the war against terrorism and other member nations of not paying their fair share. He must have received another history lesson from the NATO Secretary General, because he now thinks they’re wonderful partners, despite there being no evidence that anything has changed.

He screamed about crooked Hillary and lying Ted Cruz and sleepy Ben Carson and incompetent Marco Rubio. He accused the Federal Reserve Board, and Janet Yellin in particular, of being incompetent, promising to replace her immediately, yet today he’s open to keeping her around. What changed?

He promised an end to Obamacare and wonderful health care for every American. Then he said he hadn’t realized how complicated health care was and threw his support behind a bill that catered to the Freedom Caucus, which would have left millions without coverage. He didn’t realize how complicated it was? I’ve always supported on the job training, but not to this extent.

Perhaps the most significant of his turnarounds was Syria. In 2013, when Assad gassed his own people, Trump urged President Obama to stay out of it. He said we had no business interfering in their civil war. It’s interesting how different things look when the responsibility is his. Now it’s clear that the civil war is inextricably tied to terrorist jihad and the national interests of Russia, which desperately needs its naval base on the Mediterranean. What part of that was news?

So except for the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, which was basically a slam dunk, every promise Trump made was empty rhetoric. All of the constituencies that voted for him, including our international allies, must be scratching their heads. The Congressional town halls suggest that a lot of people are angry, too.

In light of current events, it’s worth asking, was Trump deliberately lying during the campaign, pandering to the voting blocks that put him in office? Is it possible that he really had no idea that his promises were empty? You might respond that the election is over, and none of that matters any more, but you’d be wrong. It’s still very relevant.

Assad claims that the recent gas attack was a complete fabrication by the United States and the Syrian rebels who want to overthrow him. He and his Russian counterparts say everyone else is lying. Even the videos of children choking to death were faked. Our news media are astounded at his defiance in the face of hundreds of eye-witness accounts. How can he possibly expect anyone to believe him?

Umm…remember when we saw and heard Trump brag about groping women in a video recorded as part of a television show? Remember when eleven different women came forward to claim that he’d forced himself on them? Remember when he said everyone was lying and none of it ever happened?

I believe the sound journalists who observed the aftermath of the gas attack. But Trump’s own behavior leaves him no credibility when he claims we should dismiss either Assad’s or Putin’s denials, notwithstanding the fact that sexual predation is a far cry from the kind of war crimes Assad is guilty of. And that’s a serious matter, considering what’s at stake.

I said in an earlier post (https://wordpress.com/post/americathebeautiful.blog/294) that a president who has no moral center cannot be an effective leader. This is exactly what I was referring to. Assad and Putin are playing the same game he played. You know what happens when the pot calls the kettle black.

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Russia

Posted on April 12, 2017 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 11, 2017

Stephen F. Cohen is a Professor Emeritus in Russian Studies from Princeton and New York Universities. Over the last few months he’s often been interviewed on cable and network news programs concerning the charges that Russia was responsible for hacking the DNC and attempting to influence the 2016 election. Depending on your point of view, Cohen has been either the calm voice of reason in a chaotic debate or a salmon swimming against the stream of public opinion.

He consistently argued that there is no evidence that Russia is guilty of these charges, for which some characterize him as Putin’s apologist. But as Putin himself pointed out over the past weekend, we’ve been fooled by intelligence reports before. Remember the WMDs in Iraq? The Gulf of Tonkin?

I’m not siding with Putin, but I resent the lynch mob approach to decision making. A majority of Americans seem to want to believe Russia hacked its way through our election. I say “want to believe” because it’s not clear whether anyone, even the president is sure of the truth. The people investigating these charges all say, “We’re sure Russia did it.” But when asked how they know, everyone up to FBI Director James Comey tells us they can’t discuss details of the investigation, and in any event they’re classified.

Again, depending on your point of view, that’s either sound national security policy or a convenient diversion. It reminds me of the early days of the O. J. Simpson investigation. Everyone was sure he was guilty the moment the killings were reported, long before there was a shred of evidence, but that didn’t stop people from believing it.

Why do Americans want to believe Russia is guilty? Clinton supporters need someone to blame for her defeat; right wing hawks love the idea because it supports their contention that Russia can never be trusted. Americans have a need to believe we’re always the good guys, but even Trump recently asked a reporter, “Are we so innocent?” when discussing Russia’s atrocities. No doubt people will be dancing in the streets if it’s finally proven that Russia did what they’re accused of. But stop and think. If that happens, it will wreck relations between the two most powerful nuclear nations in the world. Is that something to be happy about?

Now we have the Syrian gas attack on innocent civilians. Putin claims Assad wasn’t responsible, that the whole thing might be a setup to weaken his support. Yet everyone in the Trump administration assures us that Syria is guilty of a serious war crime. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis issued a statement today saying there was “no doubt” that Syria was responsible for last week’s chemical weapons strike (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/04/11/defense_secretary_jim_mattis_press_conference_on_syria_north_korea_russia.html). But no one, from Mattis to Sean Spicer to Donald Trump has presented any evidence.

This morning, Professor Cohen appeared on CNN’s morning show and said the same thing. We really haven’t proved that Assad was behind the gas attack or that Russia is covering for him. I understand that releasing detailed evidence might compromise our intelligence, but that doesn’t change the fact that the administration expects us all to take their word on faith, despite the fact that the president has sent inconsistent signals about Russia. He seems to not comprehend that his vaunted love of unpredictability is the worst possible way to conduct diplomacy with a powerful adversary.

After Trump continually praised Putin during the campaign, his administration now says he will do anything to assure Russian dominance, and he will say anything to advance his agenda with no regard for the truth. He lies by design. The problem is that Donald Trump has behaved that way since the beginning of the campaign, and a majority of Americans believe he lies whenever it suits him.

But all this obfuscates the fact that we may be on an irrevocable path to a military confrontation with Russia that cannot end well for anyone, and that mustn’t be allowed to continue based on unproved allegations. In this morning’s interview, Professor Cohen chastised the media for focusing entirely on the gas attack and America’s airstrike on the Syrian airfield. He said the real story, which the media have ignored, was what Russian Primer Minister Dmitry Medvedev said yesterday. Medvedev is viewed as the most powerful person in Russia after Putin, and the only one in the Russian leadership who favors good relations with the United States. When he said, yesterday, that Russia was on the brink of war with the U. S., Cohen thought that was the main story.

So do I. I grew up during the “duck-and-cover” days of the anti-Soviet hysteria in the 1950s. Whenever I was awakened in the middle of the night by a fire engine racing through the streets of Brooklyn, I thought the sirens were telling me we were about to be nuked. I don’t want my grandchildren growing up with those terrors.

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To Impeach or Not to Impeach

Posted on April 7, 2017 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 6, 2017

Impeachment is not a subject to be taken lightly. It has raised its ugly head twice in my lifetime, once against Richard Nixon and once against Bill Clinton.

In the case of Nixon, the Watergate burglary and the subsequent attempt to cover up his involvement, very likely including perjury, (we can’t presume that without a trial,) caused him to lose the confidence of both political parties. The relentless beating from the press and his political enemies rendered him dysfunctional, and ultimately, the impending specter of impeachment caused Nixon to resign the presidency. In the wake of the tragedy of Viet Nam, we were fortunate to have a man of Gerald Ford’s stature and calm demeanor take up the reins of government.

In Clinton’s case the crime that led to impeachment was far less serious – a sexual indiscretion with a young woman of legal age compounded by very questionable judgment. Here too, attempts to cover it up and the possibility that the president had committed perjury raised the ante. The impeachment of Bill Clinton did not produce enough evidence of wrongdoing to remove him from office, but it undermined his effectiveness during the last three years of his administration. The once dynamic, charismatic leader was reduced to a shell of his former self.  Many senior intelligence people believe Clinton’s lack of attention to the threat of Osama Bin Laden was an aftereffect of his impeachment which set us on the path to nine-eleven.

This suggests that before discussing the potential impeachment of President Trump, we should take a few deep breaths. Remember the Law of Unintended Consequences, which bows to no master but serendipity. If Trump were forced from office, would the country be better off with President Pence? Would the resulting chaos, likely lasting several months, have serious international implications, both in terms of emboldening adversaries and disheartening allies? Would impeachment heal the already deep divides within our country?

If we still want to proceed, we need to understand what conditions could result in an impeachment of President Trump. We can’t unseat a president just because his popularity plummets, no matter how many people demonstrate in the streets. The Constitution provides that a president may be impeached only for suspicion of committing “Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors”, which include perjury, abuse of authority, bribery, intimidation, misuse of assets, failure to supervise, dereliction of duty, conduct unbecoming, and refusal to obey a lawful order. Sounds like a pretty broad net.

The first step, which is analogous to a grand jury indictment, requires a majority vote of the House of Representatives. If the House really wants to impeach someone, all they have to do is find enough evidence to indict for anything in that list. If they do, there will be a trial in the Senate presided over by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court with Senators acting as jurors.

Impeachment is a political process, not a criminal proceeding. Any of the three bodies currently investigating whether the Trump campaign or Trump himself was guilty of aiding Russia’s attempt to subvert our election process, could gather the evidence needed to impeach. Some of Trump’s accusers suggest that there might even be evidence of treason, which leads to an interesting contrast. Nixon’s enemies viewed the Watergate break-in as a deliberate attempt to subvert the 1972 presidential election, and the word “treason” was heard then too. The main difference was that there was no indication that a foreign power was involved. That element stokes our emotions, but it’s merely a red herring in terms of whether the things Trump is accused of are impeachable. The situations are quite comparable.

FBI Director Comey says he will pursue his investigation “wherever it leads”. I believe Comey is a responsible officer of the law, whether or not we approve of his past actions. If his investigation concludes that there is sufficient evidence to indict Trump for actions he committed prior to the election, the proper procedure will be for him to follow the chain of command and report his finding to his boss, Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General.

I don’t claim to know what goes on in Mr. Sessions’ mind, but I imagine he’d have a few moments of serious reflection. Would his loyalty to Trump trump his duty as Attorney General? (I apologize for that; I just couldn’t resist.) Perhaps the more important consideration for Sessions would be whether he could withhold Comey’s findings and prevent them from being leaked to the press. It’s likely that the equation will become whether his loyalty to Trump is worth the future of his own career, and it’s not difficult to predict what that decision will be.

The point is that if Trump did in fact collude with the Russians to influence the election, impeachment is a real possibility. We’ll just have to wait and see.

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Is This Any Way to Govern?

Posted on April 4, 2017 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 3, 2017

This evening, on her prime time news broadcast, Erin Burnett asked why Jared Kushner who has no experience in either government or diplomacy is doing the job of the Secretary of State in Iraq. It sounds like a fair question. Burnett has been accused of bias by both sides, a sure sign that she’s a journalist with integrity. While her resume looks like that of a prototypical Republican, she doesn’t wear her politics on her sleeve, and I’ve always found her hardnosed interviewing style fair and objective.

Jared Kushner is a pretty bright guy, no question about that. But I know of lot of very bright people who I wouldn’t trust to do jobs they’re not trained for. I’m a pretty bright guy too, but that doesn’t qualify me to lead a diplomatic mission to the Middle East, land an airliner in distress, or remove someone’s appendix.

Burnett’s question deserves a real answer. I don’t mean to put words in her mouth, but I think what she meant was, “Is this any way to govern?” It’s not just Kushner. Who are the people who seem to have the greatest access to Trump’s ear? There’s his daughter Ivanka, who’s also pretty bright and happens to be married to Kushner. Not to be unkind, but something about that seems terribly inbred. At the very least it suggests a lack of open communication in an environment in which we need our terribly inexperienced president to be exposed to as many points of view as possible.

Oh, wait. There’s Steve Bannon, the extremist fringe journalist whose philosophy has become the official ideology of the Trump administration. And Reince Priebus, whose resume includes various flavors of political hackery but nothing of any substance with respect to governing. I’m thankful that Trump realizes he doesn’t know more than his generals about security. But even the best military strategists and security analysts can do no more than manage a holding action when our diplomacy stumbles along alienating one ally after another. Can sending Kushner to Iraq stop the bleeding?

I remember the uproar when John Kennedy appointed his brother Robert as Attorney General. Even a very young and naïve version of me thought that was gross nepotism, but Bobby turned out to be pretty good at his job, and a lot less scary than Jeff Sessions.

All this would be bad enough if the administration weren’t carrying the burden of ongoing investigations over possible collusion with Russia’s attempts to subvert our election process. I don’t know any more than anyone else about what really happened, but if my neighbors began calling to tell me there was smoke pouring out of my windows I’d take the possibility that my house was on fire very seriously. As one alarm after another sounded, I’d dial 911, and I doubt that I’d be able to concentrate on my job until the issue was resolved.

I’m hearing the word “impeachment” more and more. At first it really irritated me. Promoting the idea that the administration might not survive its first six months can’t possibly be good for the country, no matter how much I disagree with its policies. And the whole idea is absurd, anyway.

If the president knew he’d committed criminal acts serious enough to undermine his administration, he’d realize that the combined investigatory resources of the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the FBI (and who knows what other covert organizations we’re unaware of) would uncover the truth. Surely, he’d understand that lies, denials, cover-ups, and diversionary tweets accusing everyone else of conspiring against him couldn’t possibly save him. And knowing all that, he’d put the good of the country first and simply step aside, wouldn’t he?

WOULDN’T HE?

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The Great Health Care Debate Isn’t Over

Posted on March 26, 2017 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 26, 2017

Donald Trump and Paul Ryan say they’re done with health care for the foreseeable future. That’s an interesting choice of words, because the last few weeks have proved that they’re not very good at foreseeing anything. They’re now on record predicting that Obamacare will implode and die, and that the country will blame the Democrats. What both predictions tell us is that they care more about political bickering than providing health care for people of limited means.

They said it loud and clear with the failed AHCA, and they’re re-affirming it by asserting that they can’t improve the system unless they destroy it first. All the pretense on the campaign trail about their concern for working class Americans is revealed for what it is, a cynical refusal to put their money where their mouths are.

The only argument they have that makes a shred of sense is that the maligned Obamacare mandate forces people to buy insurance at the market price and penalizes them if they don’t. But they never discuss why the mandate exists. They’re counting on two things, that most Americans won’t remember the eighteen-month-long debate that preceded the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2009-10, and few if any really understand the issues.

No one wanted the mandate; it was a terrible idea. But when the issue of single payer coverage, or anything that even smelled like it was overwhelmingly rejected, there was no other way the ACA had chance of succeeding actuarially. So once again, let’s strip away all the obfuscation and focus on reality.  “Single payer” is code for the federal government, and the powerful lobbies representing the wealth of the far right don’t want the government to accept responsibility for providing affordable health care. That would be incredibly costly, and it could only be paid for by increasing taxes and/or cutting defense spending. Don’t let anyone convince you that it’s more complicated than that.

Moreover, the ACA could be fixed and the mandate eliminated but for those Republicans who will only accept a solution that humiliates President Obama by erasing his signature achievement. The principal thing wrong with the ACA is the lack of regulatory control of how much insurance companies can charge for coverage. But that would be a form of price controls, and there’s nothing Republicans hate more, though most public utilities have been tightly regulated for decades without bringing down our republic.

Now that Americans have been tantalized by the prospect of affordable health care, they’re not going to let the issue die. The longer this fight goes on, the more voters will direct their anger at the far right as it becomes apparent that they are the only political entity that is seriously opposed to it. It’s a fight that groups like the Freedom Caucus must ultimately lose.

I understand why Americans mistrust the creation of a new federal bureaucracy which would, in effect, expand Medicare to cover everyone. As much as I believe in universal health care, I shudder at the thought of leaving it entirely in government hands. But maybe there’s another way.

Suppose insurance companies had an incentive to provide affordable coverage that limited their risk of financial loss. Suppose we required every health insurer to offer its own version of universal coverage and let it compete for business in the marketplace. The government will always have to provide some form of subsidy for low income people – it already does in the form of Medicaid and dozens of state-only programs.

Suppose, in addition, that Congress created a fund that could be used to reduce the risk for insurers who were willing to gamble on affordable care and realize huge losses as a result. Those companies could apply to an impartial government commission for partial reimbursement of their losses. That may sound radical, but it’s not very different from the way most state insurance commissions operate now when they approve premium increases.

The result would be a system in which everyone shared the risk without taking control of the program away from the private sector. It still wouldn’t be cheap, but the same ultra-conservatives who wish to scuttle the ACA have always touted competition in the marketplace as the best way to reduce costs. Doesn’t it seem reasonable that a Congress that cared about keeping its promise would at least give ideas like this a shot, instead of watching millions of people lose coverage, just so they could blame the opposition party?

No one thought there was sufficient voter antipathy with the system to elect Donald Trump president. Wait until the voters direct their anger where it should be, at Congress.

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The Demise of the AHCA

Posted on March 25, 2017 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 25, 2017

I never say, “I told you so”, and I won’t now, but as my posts have been saying for the last couple of weeks, no other outcome was possible. There was no way Trump could keep his promise of wonderful, affordable health care for everyone and satisfy the right wing of his party, and the “moderate” Republicans couldn’t vote for a Draconian measure like the AHCA and run for re-election in nineteen months. I never believed Obamacare was going away, and having seen the alternatives, the majority of Americans are glad it isn’t.

Was Trump’s promise to repeal and replace Obamacare ever anything more than a campaign slogan to garner votes? His party committed itself to that goal the day Obamacare passed. The possibility that Trump never cared about repeal shouldn’t surprise anyone. For him words are tools to be used in whatever manner suits his purpose, and more often than not, his purpose is misdirection and confusion. He loves the role of the unpredictable gadfly.

I don’t think he cares one way or another about health insurance. His family and friends are all covered, and his business career was that of a man who cared only about himself. Nothing about his entire past life suggests compassion for anyone outside his circle.

Whatever else you may think about him, Donald Trump is pretty smart. If the internet is to be believed his IQ is in excess of 150. It’s not possible that he didn’t understand the truths I laid out in previous posts here (Zero Sum Games, The Truth about Health Care.) If that’s true, why did he support the AHCA knowing it would die?

He never had a health care plan of his own, and until a couple of weeks ago, he had no understanding of how complex health care is. Faced with the reality that he was in over his head, he had no choice but to follow Paul Ryan’s lead. And why not? One of Trump’s basic principles is making sure he always has someone to blame when things go wrong. Don’t believe a word of the speech he made yesterday, thanking the Republican Party for all its hard work and blaming the Democrats. The blue collar workers in the rust belt won’t buy it. And if they turn on him he’ll lose his majority in the House next year.

I think Trump loves that his house majority crashed and burned in full view of the world. He thinks of himself as the only person who knows how to get things done, the White Knight for every voter who believes life has cut him a raw deal. But in Trump’s own words, if you don’t deliver the goods, people eventually catch on. When it becomes clear that the Republican tax plan won’t treat the Reagan Democrat crowd any better than the AHCA would have, he’s going to be dealing with some very angry voters who feel betrayed. And if he continues to be unable to rally his own party to agree on legislation, we may see the spectacle of him abandoning the right wing and having to reach out to Democrats.

That might actually work if he’s serious about an infrastructure bill. The right wing of his party will fight it to the death, but they may be outnumbered by Democrats who want it to pass. Who knows, this could all be part of a grand strategy in which Trump manages to undermine his own party to bring his brilliant deal-making talent into play and save the day. Wouldn’t he look like a hero, then?

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Where Have I Heard This Before?

Posted on March 20, 2017 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 20, 2017

Echoes of déjà vu and familiarity have been bouncing around in my head for almost two years now. Today, I happened across a brochure from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, titled ODD, or Oppositional Defiant Disorder.

(https://www.aacap.org/App_Themes/AACAP/docs/resource_centers/odd/odd_resource_center_odd_guide.pdf)

The brochure states that the most common behaviors associated with ODD are defiance, spitefulness, negativity, hostility, and verbal aggression. I knew I’d seen those things before, along with lack of respect for others, insensitivity to people’s feelings, and a less than casual relationship with the truth. It’s not that my memory was failing; it’s been thirty years since I had adolescents living under my roof.

From the moment Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president, twenty-one months ago, the image that most often popped into my mind after watching one of his rants was that of a petulant five-year-old throwing a tantrum, superimposed on memories of older children who always found someone else to blame for whatever went wrong in their lives.

Do you remember how your teenagers reacted to being caught doing something they knew they shouldn’t? There may have been a dozen eye-witnesses, all reporting exactly the same story and irrefutable physical evidence all pointing in the same direction. Were you shocked to hear, “I didn’t do it” and “They’re all lying”? And honestly, in the face of all that evidence to the contrary when you looked into those earnest, unrepentant eyes pleading for understanding, weren’t you, too looking for every excuse to believe them?

And even when you had no choice but to accept the obvious conclusion, didn’t you fervently believe clichés like “bad actions aren’t the same as bad kids” and “they’ve learned their lessons” and most seductive of all, “have patience, wait and see, they’ll grow out of this phase”. Fortunately, that was most often true when we were dealing with fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds. But as more and more people are coming to realize, seventy-year-old men don’t change. They are who they are.

Imagine a sixteen-year-old boy hauled before a Board of Education review board, sitting in plain sight of everyone texting offensive comments to his friends. Now imagine a sitting president watching his FBI and NSA Directors testify before Congress. He hears them refute every charge he has made against his political enemies, and during their testimony he tweets more delusional nonsense which the news media run on crawl lines at the bottom of the screen showing the hearings. Which image looks worse?

It’s interesting that Trump’s latest tweet storm, while the testimony was in progress, occurred after Gallup announced that his approval rating after almost sixty days in office was only 37%, with 58% disapproving. The fact that only 5% of the people polled couldn’t make up their minds is as damning as the approval numbers. To put that in perspective, no President in the history of approval ratings has ever seen his numbers drop below 50% after sixty days until now. And that was before the hearings. I’ll go out on a limb and wonder what his rating will be tomorrow and the next day.

I started this blog with the intention of being objective. I continually hear people say, “Give him a year and see what he can do.” But they were the same people who said political campaigns are vicious and horrible, and once he’s in office you’ll see a change in his behavior. The reason he hasn’t been given the benefit of a honeymoon period is that his behavior has been so awful. Outside of his core base, the rest of America is becoming more horrified every day. Just like in the campaign, policy and the real issues America faces have been drowning in Trump’s cult of personality. We can’t wait for him to grow up.

We really can’t afford to wait even a year. By the way, Happy Spring.

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A Letter to People Who Voted For Trump

Posted on March 19, 2017 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 19, 2017

Agnes Gyorgyey Summers came to the United States as a young girl from Hungary during the anti-Soviet uprising of 1956. She has spent most of her life as an American working to assure that people in need were cared for by some of the agencies whose budgets would suffer deep cuts in the proposed Trump budget. Yesterday, she posted this open letter to Trump voters. https://www.facebook.com/agnes.g.summers/posts/10211165728413362.

Remember when Donald Trump said he wasn’t going to take a salary? He just accepted his second paycheck.

Remember when he said Mexico was going to pay for the wall? He has asked Congress to appropriate the $25 billion of taxpayer money to cover costs.

Remember when he said he wasn’t going to go on vacation or play golf like Obama? 5 of the last 7 weekends he went on vacation and played golf, costing taxpayers $11.1 million each time.

Remember when he said he was going to use American steel to build these dangerous pipelines? Russian steel arrived last week for the Keystone Pipeline XL.

Remember when he said he wasn’t going to cut social security and Medicare? The Republican bill does just that.

Remember when he said that nobody on his campaign had any communications with the Russian government? Seven (7) of his people have now admitted they spoke and/or met with Russian officials…but only after they lied and got caught.

Remember when he said he was going to divest from his businesses? Changed his mind.

Remember when he said he was going to release his tax returns? Changed his mind.

Remember when he said he was going to drain the swamp of Washington insiders? His cabinet is filled with lobbyists, billionaires, as well as Big Oil and Wall Street executives, many from Goldman-Sachs. Yes, THAT Goldman-Sachs.

Remember when he said would defeat ISIS in 30 days? He doesn’t even have a plan.

Remember when he said that the Obamacare replacement would cover more people at lower cost? The GOP and 45 admit that the AHCA they are pushing will cover fewer people at a higher cost, but only after being called out by the CBO and the OMB.

If you voted for him, please hold him accountable to what he promised you – for all of our sakes.

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Zero Sum Games

Posted on March 16, 2017 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 16, 2017

Game theory defines a zero-sum game as any situation in which all gains and losses must balance each other exactly. When all the inputs and outflows are added up there can be no net gain or loss. The concept of insurance is based on that principle.

If we apply it to Congress’ attempt to re-write national health care policy, it’s obvious that there is no way they can craft a bill that delivers what President Trump promised. I know I’ve said this before, but to get a clear picture of what’s happening, you essentially need to ignore everything you read and hear, and just think. If more people are covered it’s going to cost more. If fewer people are covered it will cost less.

Republicans in Congress are being torn in opposite directions by those who believe Trumpcare is too generous and those who think it’s not generous enough, and that’s based on a starting point, according to the CBO, of ultimately covering 24,000,000 fewer people than Obamacare. Even if the warring forces cancel each other out, we’re still left with a health care system that has glaring holes in it.

Like a lot of people who’ve spent the last few months shaking their heads, I looked to Paul Ryan to steady the ship. But yesterday, he defended the new bill in terms of not forcing people to buy what they don’t want. The idea was that it’s a good thing that Trumpcare doesn’t cover as many people, because some of them don’t want to buy coverage at present costs, anyway. Am I the only one who sees the absurdity of that argument? Several years ago, when gasoline prices were exploding, some oil industry advocates said, “So what if gas goes to six or seven dollars a gallon? People who can’t afford it simply won’t buy it and the problem will solve itself.” No, it won’t.

A key provision of Trumpcare is turning Medicaid over to the states, something conservatives have been arguing for decades. In effect, what they’re trying to do is set the clock back sixty years. Following World War II, with the Great Depression finally over, states had complete discretion in determining who could request government assistance in health care, housing, and putting food on the family table. Some states, notably the northeast, the rust belt, and the west coast took a progressive approach, while the rest did everything possible to reduce public assistance. When the Supreme Court ruled that states could not impose prior residency requirements on people asking for assistance, there was a mass migration of people in poverty to the more generous states. Welfare and medical assistance rolls skyrocketed in most large American cities, while the more affluent taxpayers fled to the suburbs.

To stem those tides, the social legislation of the sixties required that all states adhere to minimum standards of care. No longer could some states turn a blind eye to people in legitimate need and ship them off to someone else’s rapidly growing urban slum. If Congress throws in the towel and returns public assistance to the states with no federal oversight, we’ll be back where we were in the fifties. When I hear people ask why their taxes should pay for other people’s health care, my first reaction is that they’re selfish. Worse than that, they’re shortsighted about their own future.

Treating health care as a zero sum game must, in the end, result in what I described above. The problem is that it’s not a zero sum game – it’s worse. This administration wants to significantly increase the military while cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans. That will drain even more resources from the programs nearly half our population depends on. They’re already stripping the EPA and the Department of Education bare, but those agencies’ budgets were never large to begin with. The real money the right wing salivates over is in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. And while we’re fighting to save those programs there are other things we can’t lose sight of.

Where will women turn when Planned Parenthood has been decimated? How are we going to make it possible for average kids to get an education beyond high school without going into debt for the next twenty years? And what about our veterans? Remember all those promises during the campaign? Have you heard a word about caring for them?

We’ve lived through this cycle before. Are we going to let it happen again to satisfy the greed of the far right?

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