WAY TO GO, DONNIE BOY

WAY TO GO, DONNIE BOY

The number of pejoratives that accurately describe Donald Trump has always been large.

Racist, sexist, narcissist, egotist.  Con-man, cheat, megalomaniac, bully. Unprepared, temperamental, lazy, rude.  Nasty, mean, foul-mouthed, conceited. And of course . . .

Pathologically dishonest.

One would think so large a list more or less exhausts the possibilities.

One, however, would be wrong. 

Because this past week we learned that Donald Trump is also . . .

Preternaturally stupid.

Until a week ago Monday, there were about a thousand American soldiers bivouacked in a portion of northern Syria then under Kurdish control.  The Kurds are an ethnic group spread over at least four countries -- Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.  They played a central role in freeing northern Syria  from ISIS, an al-Qaeda terrorist spin off and wannabe caliphate, losing 11,000 of their own troops in a five year war. 

Throughout that period, the United States led a coalition of thirty countries that supported first the Kurdish People's Protection Units (PPUs) and then the more heterogeneous Syrian Defense Force (SDF). At American insistence, 40% of the latter is comprised of indigenous non-Kurdish Arab fighters.  The coalition supplied SDF with training, special forces operations, artillery and spotting, and over 45,000 air strikes. 

As ISIS was defeated, SDF took over governance of the area.

The border of northern Syria is with Turkey and for years Turkey has viewed the PPU as an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (KWP). For its part, as the The New York Times  has reported,  the KWP is considered a terrorist organization by both Turkey and the United States and "has waged a decades long insurgency inside Turkey." 

Turkey has long considered Kurdish control of the northern Syrian border to be a national security threat, albeit a somewhat inchoate one.  As the Turks saw it, the success of the PPU in Syria emboldened the KWP in Turkey . . .

 Even though the former never attacked it.

When intelligence resided in the White House, America squared this circle of conflict between its NATO ally (Turkey) and its only effective ISIS-fighting ally (the Kurds) with astute diplomacy. It forced the PPU to enlist non-Kurds and become the SDF, and it made the Kurds withdraw from the border.  Under these arrangements, there were no border incidents and no PPU sponsored incursions into Turkey. 

On October 6, Trump and Turkey's president, Recep Erdogan, spoke on the phone.

In that call, Erdogan asked Trump to withdraw American troops from the Turkish-Syrian border.

Trump agreed.  

None of this was planned in advance.  Nor was acceding to (or even discussing) withdrawal  part of the talking points given to Trump in advance of the call.  

The Pentagon opposed any withdrawal, as it has for months, and so did Congress (on a bi-partisan basis).  The fear in both was that withdrawal would give the Turks a green light to invade northern Syria, that millions of Kurds would either be killed or made homeless in the process, that ISIS prisoners held in northern Syria would escape and re-constitute, and that the Kurds would have nowhere to look for help other than Bashar al Assad and Vladimir Putin.  

The fear was also that America would thereafter be viewed as a dishonest broker and worthless ally.

All these fears have now come to pass.

On Wednesday, the Turks invaded northern Syria and by the weekend they controlled 75 square miles of previously held Kurdish territory.  Along the way, they executed Kurdish POWs and bombed civilians, creating 160,000  refugees.  

On Sunday, the Kurds cut a deal with Assad to allow Syrian government troops (backed by Russia) to return to the northern territory. These are the same government troops that last year, along with their Russian mercenaries, had stopped attacking the Kurds once American bombers let loose.  They are also the same government troops that petrify locals in northern Syria, many of whom opposed Assad. "If the regime returns," said one, it will be a "bloodbath".

As predicted, ISIS detainees are escaping.  The US reported that it could not transfer 60 "high-value" ISIS detainees out of the country before we left, and ISIS has already claimed responsibility for two attacks.  Meanwhile, former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said the pull out made ISIS's return "absolutely a given".

The Kurds themselves . . .

Now hate us. 

And with good reason.

An American Army officer who fought with the Kurds said "They trusted us and we broke that trust. It's a stain on the American conscience." Another said he was "ashamed."  A Kurdish official was more exact. "The worst thing in military logic and comrades in the tenches," he said, "is betrayal."

None of this was necessary. 

In the immediate aftermath, as Congress exploded with anger and even his usual political allies eviscerated him, Trump and his seconds careened from one idiotic excuse to another.  

On Wednesday,  the President justified abandoning  the Kurds by tweeting that they "didn't help" at Normandy.  On Sunday, his Treasury Secretary implied that Turkey was going to invade northern Syria regardless of our presence; if so, of course, there had been no need for Erdogan to ask Trump to step aside. 

On Monday, Trump went all 18th century on the issue, saying  "anyone who wants to assist Syria in protecting the Kurds is good with me, whether it is Russia, China or Napoleon Bonaparte.  I hope they all do great, we are 7,000 miles away."

The Twin Towers were 7,000 miles away too.

But that didn't stop 9/11.

Earlier in the week, Trump justified the pull out as consistent with his campaign pledge to get us out of "endless wars".  This, however,  wasn't one of them.  It was the Kurds' war.  At minimal cost, and with enormous gain, we were just helping them out.

All that has now been lost.

In 2014, six years into his presidency,  an angry Barack Obama walked to the back of Air Force One and had it out with critics of his foreign policy.  They thought his policy disjointed, ineffective and a large come down from his soaring rhetoric about human rights and democratic possibilities.  He thought their criticism unfair.  In the wake of Bush II's Iraqui debacle, non-existent weapons of mass destruction, and the humbling of his own "red line" crossed without consequence, he told reporters that his foreign policy was simple . . .

"Don't do  stupid shit."

So that year, we allied with the Kurds, formed an international coalition, and began the process of eliminating ISIS and its self-proclaimed caliphate with locals doing the work on the ground as the coalition provided intelligence and air cover. 

By this year, that policy had succeeded.  

Last week, for no good reason, without any thought, and on the whim of a man who neither reads nor listens, that success was reversed.

Or . . .

To make it simple . . .

Trump just stepped in it.

WHO THE HELL WAS WILLIAM LOEB . . . AND WHY DOES HE MATTER TODAY

WHO THE HELL WAS WILLIAM LOEB . . .
AND WHY DOES HE MATTER TODAY

It was 1976, a Presidential year.

Indeed, it was the first Presidential year since Watergate and Richard Nixon's resignation of the Presidency in 1974.

I was a sophomore at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

All the candidates -- Carter, Udall, Harris, Shriver, Church, Bayh, Sanford, Benson, Reagan and Ford -- traipsed through the snows of New Hampshire,  knockin' on doors and drinking coffee in more living rooms than they could count, each in search of votes in that state's  first-in-the-nation presidential primary.

All of them also had to deal with William Loeb.

And his front page editorials.

In 1976, William Loeb was the publisher of the Manchester Union Leader.  Unlike most newspaper publishers at that time, he told his readers what he thought above the fold and just below the front-page headlines, pretty much the sweet spot in any newspaper.  

He was also mean. 

In 1972, he published a forged letter claiming presidential candidate Edmund Muskie had referred to French-Canadians as "Canucks".  This was bad for Muskie, principally because  there were many French-Canadians in New Hampshire at that time.  It became worse for him, however, a little later, when falling snow created the appearance of tears on Muskie's face as he stood outside the  Leader's offices angrily denouncing Loeb as a liar.

Long story short, Muskie's campaign cratered as anger and tears were falsely turned into emotional instability.

Emotional instability was something we did not  tolerate in our Presidents back then.

In 1976, the Manchester Union Leader was the only statewide newspaper in New Hampshire.  In fact, given the mountains, which limited over the air radio and TV signals, and Boston's sense of itself, which limited its curiosity to Massachusetts, the Leader was pretty much the only statewide source of news at that time.

Loeb never apologized for the "Canuck" letter, not even after its genesis as part of Nixon's "dirty tricks" operation became known.  Instead, he continued to use the Leader to pursue his vendettas and libel his detractors.  

He once wrote that President Eisenhower, the architect of D-Day and victory in World War II,  had "done more to destroy the respect, honor and power of the United States than any President in his history." Later, in the '70s, he attacked the teenage daughter of a Governor for allegedly advocating the use of marijuana. The girl suffered a nervous breakdown.

Loeb also routinely lied about his past . 

He claimed to have been a reporter for eight years at the old New York World.  The paper's publisher denied the claim, and in any case the paper did not even exist during the years Loeb said he worked for it.  After his own mother disinherited him, Loeb sued her estate on her death for a 75% share, claiming they had reconciled,  and then settled for a small percentage of very little, his scorched earth litigation tactics having exhausted the estate (and, not coincidentally,  his siblings' shares).

Many of his journalistic ventures either died . . .

Or became exhibits to his transparent nastiness.

His Haverhill Journal went belly up in eight years, the Connecticut Sunday Herald in five (though incomplete records make its date of death uncertain). In 1949, he purchased a group of Vermont papers and founded the Vermont Sunday News.  That same year, he fired the printers of those papers when they tried to unionize.

Loeb was also a hypocrite.

Though married to three different women himself, he attacked Nelson Rockefeller during the  1964 Presidential primary.  Rockefeller had divorced his first wife in 1962 and married his second in 1963.  In 1964, however, he was running against Loeb's favorite conservative, Barry Goldwater . . .

So,  thrice married Loeb vilified twice married Rockefeller as a "wife swapper".

Even Loeb's patriotism was suspect.

He  avoided the draft in World War II on the ground of ulcers. But he reportedly helped his case by drinking a lot and causing the ulcers to flare up just before his medical examination. 

In 1975, Kevin Cash wrote a book entitled "Who the Hell is William Loeb".  In it, Cash recounted the lies, libels and licentiousness of his subject.  In response, Loeb threatened legal action in an effort  to stop Cash from publishing the book.  As a result, four New Hampshire publishers would not touch it and Cash himself had to set up his own publishing company to get the book printed.  The company was incorporated in Delaware (out of Loeb's reach) and the book was printed in Vermont.

Loeb died in 1981 and in the years that followed no one was able to replicate his unique ability to unite dishonesty, hypocrisy and malice in a suit of shameless promotion.

No one, that is, until Donald Trump.

Earlier this week, we  learned that, in a phone call last July, Trump asked Ukraine's President, Volodymyr Zelensky,  to do him a "favor" and investigate former Vice President Biden and Biden's son, Hunter.  The request violated the law, which prohibits the solicitation of foreign help in our elections, and otherwise had all the trappings of Trump-brand sleaze.  

Shortly before the call, Trump had frozen $391 million in aid to Ukraine, and during it, he reminded Zelensky of all the United States had done for his country as he asked for dirt on the Bidens.  Afterward, Trump ordered the electronic transcript of the call deep-sixed in a super-classified computer file meant to protect the nation's most important secrets (but not the President's mob-like shakedowns).

Later in the week, more shoes dropped.  

On Thursday, America's former special envoy to Ukraine, Kurt Volker, handed over text messages confirming that Trump was in fact holding up aid until Zelensky played ball.  Among the texts was one from our Ambassador to the Ukraine, William B. Taylor.  He wrote:  "I think it's crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign." 

This is . . .

Game Over.

Trump will be impeached.

Though he claims the call was "perfect", the administration's own rough transcript of it renders that claim ludicrous . . .  

As will  the actual electronic transcript of the call, once freed from the super-classified imprisonment to which it was sent to die.

Trump is in full meltdown.

Yesterday,  he decided to violate the law in plain sight, asking China and Australia to investigate the Bidens as well.  This morning,  he repeated that Ukraine should do so.  

Earlier in the week, he was wildly tweeting to his base, imploring them -- with a word salad of lies -- that he was being "harassed"; that the whistle blower and listeners who outed him are "spies"; that Congressman Schiff, the Chair of the House Committee investigating the matter, should be "arrested" for "treason"; and that those following Constitutional processes were nevertheless staging a "coup". Meanwhile, his seconds -- who include a deranged former Mayor named Giuliani -- were reduced to screaming (in Rudy's case) or just plain ducking (in the case of most everyone else).

Expect our Commander in Chief to become more unhinged . . .

And our politics to become more fetid.

Trump is not Nixon.  

The latter respected our institutions.  

Trump is trolling them.  

He vilifies  any reporters, whistle blowers, legislators, judges or civil servants who oppose him. He lives in the gutter, his word repository and the reputed source of an authenticity that supposedly confuses none who take him seriously but all who take him literally.  In 1974, senior Republican Senators went to Nixon and told him the gig was up.  Nixon respected them and quit.  Trump, however, respects no one (and in any case fears prosecution once he leave the Oval  Office).  He will not go quietly into the night.

Trump is also not Clinton, our other most recently impeached chief executive.  

Clinton compartmentalized, walling off his official duties and policy-making from the continuing storm of subpoenas, media reports, and the drama inherent in an on-going impeachment saga.  Put simply, he got the work of the Presidency done.  

Trump is paralyzed.  

He cannot hold a press conference with a foreign leader, or walk by a gaggle of reporters on the south lawn, without it turning into a profanity-laced tirade against his enemies, real and imagined. 

He is all tweets, all the time.

And nothing else.

With Nixon and Clinton, impeachment was serious, sad and tragic.

With Trump, it will be all that . . .

And something more.

During the 1976 Presidential campaign,  Kevin Cash visited  Dartmouth College to talk about Willian Loeb.  I met him outside the studios of Dartmouth's radio station, WDCR.  I asked him how he felt in the wake all the fights to get his book published and the attacks from Loeb.  In response, he repeated what he had posted in his book's epigraph . . .

Something his father had told him years ago.

"When you fight with a skunk, you wind up stinking even if you win."