Travis

Pres. Trump says he's "ready to meet" with Iran "anytime they want to" and says there would be "no preconditions."

"I would certainly meet with Iran if they wanted to meet. I don't know that they're ready yet, they're having a hard time right now." https://t.co/5LhyfYAB1q pic.twitter.com/gAo4edtWNR

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) July 30, 2018

I'm seeing lots of reactions like this:

Trump, asked whether he'll meet with the president of Iran, says he'll meet with any leader without preconditions.

Republicans, at one point, attacked President Obama for saying he would meet with the president of Iran without preconditions.

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) July 30, 2018

But I'd just like to say:

1. Trump is like Obama in many ways. Not in all ways, obviously, but click my "Trump is like Obama" tag for more examples of this phenomenon.

2. I remember when Obama made his statement that he'd meet "without preconditions" with Iran (and  Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea). It wasn't when Obama was vying with the GOP candidate. It was in July 2007, when he was fighting to distinguish himself in the field of Democratic candidates in this debate:



It wasn't Republicans that got on his case! It was Hillary Clinton and her supporters. Here's what I wrote at the time which makes it crushingly clear the opposition to Obama was about Hillary:

I think in these last two days it's become clear that Hillary Clinton is the Democrats' best candidate. In the most significant moment of the debate, the candidates were asked "[W]ould you be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea, in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries?"

Obama immediately says "I would," not really noticing the detail to the question. He'd meet "without preconditions"? He goes on to plug in some material, which he will use in the after-debate period about how wrong Bush has been to think that "not talking to countries is punishment to them."

Clinton gets a lucky break when the questioner, who's in the audience, is given a chance at a follow up and throws the question to Clinton. I think Clinton had seen her opportunity the instant Obama said "I would," and here, with the chance to speak next, she deftly takes full advantage:

Well...

A disarming "well," as if this isn't going to be word-for-word perfect...

I will not promise to meet with the leaders of these countries during my first year. I will promise a very vigorous diplomatic effort because I think it is not that you promise a meeting at that high a level before you know what the intentions are.

I don't want to be used for propaganda purposes. I don't want to make a situation even worse. But I certainly agree that we need to get back to diplomacy, which has been turned into a bad word by this administration.

And I will pursue very vigorous diplomacy.

And I will use a lot of high-level presidential envoys to test the waters, to feel the way. But certainly, we're not going to just have our president meet with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez and, you know, the president of North Korea, Iran and Syria until we know better what the way forward would be.

Live-blogging, I say "this is the precise point in the debate where I conclude... that Clinton is the superior candidate." But as impressive as this is, her campaign also deserves credit for forefronting this interchange the day after the debate, and Obama must take a second downgrade for the way he handled the after-debate.

Listen to him struggle through this interview with Iowa's Quad-City Times. Now, let's look at the coverage in today's newspapers.

The Boston Globe:

Yesterday, Obama's campaign tried to clarify his remarks by saying that he wouldn't agree to meet with such leaders before lower-level diplomatic work was done. But Clinton's campaign seized on their divergent answers, arguing that it exposes both her command of world affairs and Obama's greenness. "Senator Clinton is committed to vigorous diplomacy but understands that it is a mistake to commit the power and prestige of America's presidency years ahead of time by making such a blanket commitment," her campaign wrote in a memo.

Obama's campaign put out its own memo yesterday saying his is the approach that would keep America safe.

"Obama's tough but smart approach to America's diplomacy is exactly the kind of change and new thinking that excites voters about an Obama presidency," the memo said. His campaign also pointed to a remark Clinton made this spring in which she said, "I think it is a terrible mistake for our president to say he will not talk with bad people."

Clinton's campaign yesterday also employed former secretary of state Madeleine Albright to speak to reporters about Clinton's knowledge of diplomacy and the appropriate use of American power. "When all is said and done she knows that being president is about protecting the country and advancing national security interests," Albright said, adding that Clinton shows "a very sophisticated understanding of the whole process."

So Obama falls back on his mantra "change," showing his dreadful tendency to rely on abstractions and generic hope messages. He's gotten on a long way with such material, when speaking to admiring crowds of people who are just getting to know him. But it's horribly inadequate to fight off a formidable opponent on a specific issue.

And his attempt to catch Clinton in a contradiction could only work if we lacked the most basic powers of discernment. So Clinton said it's "a terrible mistake for our president to say he will not talk with bad people"? It can be wrong both to say "I won't talk" and to say "I will talk." The position Clinton took at the debate was that talks had to be planned and developed through a diplomatic process. She's rejecting both hardcore positions: promises to talk "without preconditions" and intransigent refusals to talk.

The Daily News:

Political observers said they expected Clinton to waste no time using Obama's comment to shore up her standing among key voter blocs, such as Cuban-Americans in bellwether Florida and Jewish voters who may find the idea of a sitdown with the Holocaust-denying president of Iran disturbing.

Team Clinton plans "to use these issues in outreach in the states [and nationally] with Jewish leadership and Jewish grass-roots voters," a Democratic operative familiar with the Clinton campaign told the Daily News.

Obama's camp said that approach wouldn't impress anybody. "There is a smallness to such misleading attacks that voters reject," said Obama spokesman Bill Burton....

In a race where Obama has presented himself as the fresher face, the exchange handed Clinton the perfect opening to "prove she's more experienced and would provide a steadier hand at the helm of the ship of state," said Democratic consultant Hank Sheinkopf.

To push that message, the Clinton campaign swiftly arranged a morning press call with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who didn't attack Obama directly but called the New York senator "a person who understands how the American presidency works."

The Obama campaign quickly trotted out its own stable of surrogates, including former Clinton administration national security adviser Anthony Lake, who argued, "A great nation and its President should never fear negotiating with anyone and Sen. Obama rightly said he would be willing to do so."

So, Lake pretends Obama said what he should have said -- that is, what Clinton said.

Lynn Sweet in the Chicago-Sun Times:

During the day Tuesday, the Clinton and Obama campaigns issued dueling critical memos while advisers sparred over who appeared more presidential. The candidates each gave interviews to the Quad City Times in Iowa, the state with the crucial lead-off presidential vote, where they escalated the rhetoric.

"I thought that was irresponsible and frankly naive," Clinton told the paper. Obama, she said, gave an answer "I think he is regretting today."

Obama told the paper that Clinton's camp was trying to score "political points."

Yes, she's not just demonstrating that she's right on the issue, she's demonstrating how to be a strong candidate, which is actually more important as the Democrats decide who they want to be the candidate.

He stood by his response and that Clinton's position was not that different from the Bush administration policy, so she "can't claim the mantle of change."

"The mantle of change." I wonder what people picture when they hear the word "mantle." Really, think about it for a while: The Mantle of Change, The Mantle of Change, The Mantle of Change. Doesn't it sound like something you win at a stage of a video game?

The Obama rhetoric is getting stale and repetitious -- just as Hillary is trouncing him in the after-debate!

Obama's campaign was trying to regain its footing after walking into a potential political minefield. The debate story in the Miami Herald, another early primary state where Cuban Americans make up a voting bloc, said Obama and Edwards "suggested Monday that they would meet with two leaders who top South Florida's most-hated list: Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez."

If he met with Chavez, Obama told the Iowa paper, it would be to tell him "what I don't like" while finding areas to "potentially work together."

"I didn't say these guys were going to come over for a cup of coffee some afternoon," Obama said.

That coffee line tries to brush off the controversy as lightweight and meaningless, but it is his biggest showdown with Clinton thus far.

He barely shows up for the showdown.

But it's not too late! The selection committee approved this thing...



I don't know what could possibly have convinced them that this thing belongs in the heart of the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus — as opposed to some soulless glass-and-steel corporate plaza in a city — but the City Council must still vote for the thing. Please help keep this horror out of sacred space.

It's by RDG Dahlquist Art Studio of Des Moines, Iowa — art studio of Des Moines, Iowa! —  and they've titled it "Both/And – Tolerance/Innovation." And just that title makes me mad. Some design studio in Des Moines, Iowa is trying to use language to influence a bunch of politicians in Madison, Wisconsin. And they've decided there are 2 things to jerk them around over that embody what the university is hot to express right now: diversity and technology. And diversity gets to be a misshapen/unformed stone and technology is a row of sharp-edged metal plates.

If that thing gets erected — and it is phallic (and therefore disinclusive of women (or are we the lumpy stone?)) — the only question will be how to employ it in political theater and protest. Lots of places to hang signs and symbols. You know that's what we do in Madison. Here's a scene from the 2011 Wisconsin protests when somebody hung a "solidarity" t-shirt on the public sculpture that is the statue of Civil War hero Hans Christian Heg:



You see the State Capitol in the background. In Madison, Wisconsin, you're not allowed to build a building taller than the State Capitol. And yet this sculpture the Des Moines studio presents to us looks like the skyline of a city filled with skyscrapers.

Is this what we want in our city as we enter the era of the sky-scraper-building President, Donald Trump?

ADDED: How about a completely traditional bronze sculpture — like the one of Heg — of one notable graduates or faculty of the University of Wisconsin. Wikipedia has a big list of the possibilities. Just pick one. I'll get the discussion going: Lorraine Hansberry.

You'd get articles in The Daily Beast with titles like "American Tourists Quit Trying to Understand the World/The United States initiated a new golden age of travel. Now terrorism and fear-mongering by demagogues is grounding the project."

"Fear-mongering by demagogues" is propaganda, but so is taunting people about not engaging in tourism — saying they've caved to fear-mongering demagogues — and portraying tourists as engaged in a lofty pursuit of "understanding the world."

There are pro and con arguments for traveling and for not traveling, and people weigh the pros and cons for themselves. I don't see the rationality of declaring that those who decide not to travel are irrational. You could be rational or irrational either way.

The writer of this Daily Beast piece, Clive Irving, is a senior consulting editor at Condé Nast Traveler, so he's interested in promoting travel and boosting the mood of the people who choose to spend the money, make the effort, and take the risks of traveling and looking down on those of us who lean toward thrift, comfort, and safety. The prime argument is that the travelers are genuinely interested in learning about the people of the world and that those who stay at home are not. Here's Irving:

Mass tourism swamped iconic destinations like Venice and the French Riviera. But the real travelers—as opposed to the tourists—were no longer blinkered by a Eurocentric idea of what constituted a civilized culture. To these people the temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia became as important to see as the cathedral at Chartres, or Kyoto, the old imperial capital of Japan, as spellbinding as the ruins of ancient Rome.

Notice what's not there: the people who actually live in these foreign lands. These are lovely old sites. I went to Rome. Upon arrival, I was robbed, but later I saw the ruins of ancient Rome. I can honestly say I was not "spellbound." Yes, this is the place that I've long known about, these stones are the stones... but the value lies in what I know because I've read about ancient Rome, and it is more reading that has a shot at spellbinding me. Do the people who travel have a more wide-ranging mind than the people who read and think about the world? Anyway, as Irving observes, places like the ancient ruins of Rome have tourists walking all over the place. And I'm sure Angkor Wat has tourists walking into your camera shots trying to get you out of their camera shots, even though these shots are unlikely to be as good as a hundred photographs you could see right now by Googling for images of Angkor Wat (or watching the last season of "Survivor").

More from Irving:

By traveling, Americans had found out for themselves that abroad was, in reality, a complex and volatile place where people did not immediately accept American exceptionalism, had a pride in their own differences and values—and were prepared to debate them with open minds.

Who travels to a foreign country and engages the locals in debates about American exceptionalism? Or does Irving really mean that by traveling, an American can absorb some snubs and sneers from people who don't like Americans for reasons that will not be explained on the scene but could be grasped through reading and thinking.

There is a lot of detail in Irving's article about "the indignities and frustrations" of airports and airplanes and quite an effort to tie these problems to what he sees as an overreaction to terrorism. He says that after terrorist attacks Americans are "less resilient" than Europeans:

The San Bernardino slaughter.... produced a completely disproportionate change of mood, turned uglier after being fueled by politicians, building on foundations laid by imbecilic xenophobes like Ann Coulter.

And:

Nothing reinforces ignorance more than isolationism. Fear of “the other” intensifies as people retreat behind barricades in their minds, while the actual physical barricades fail to produce enduring security. Reinforced borders and walls promote friction and conflict, not contact. Personal contact—the kind of contact that breaks barriers of attitude, language, religion, and ideology—comes only through experiencing the change of landscapes, senses, and feel of places that is the essence of travel.

I question this belief in the kind of "personal contact" you can get from foreign travel. You can trek all over the place and still be quite ignorant, and I suspect the locals mostly look at the tourists as ignoramuses. Why wouldn't they? And as for the "retreat[ing] behind barricades in their minds," we're all in our own mind. There's no way out. You have never traveled beyond your own skull and you never will. The promotion of travel — an expensive, time-consuming, arduous activity — as the only way to understand the world is propaganda. There are other ways to develop your mind, notably the thing you are doing right now.

ADDED: I wonder if these people who believe they're understanding the people of the world through travel ever consider spending more time in the poorer neighborhoods of their own city and getting to know the immigrants who live in their town? Why not contribute the money you would have spent on travel to a charity that serves this population and then volunteer for some activities that might involve you in real relationships with some of these immigrants? If that doesn't seem like a viable alternative to you, then why take pride in the imagined superiority of yourself as a traveler?

AND: I would love to see Skara Brae, but I'm seeing other people standing around even in the pictures on the Internet:

I was going to do a real post, but Saturday I had 12 continuous hours in public — readings, panels, signings, the Baen road show — and it turns out I’m tired.

I really, really, really, really TIRED.[/caption]

 

Really tired.

I don’t think you understand how tired I am:

So I’m going to drag self out of bed, put clothes on, because I hear the TSA hates it when you streak and I don’t want them to do this:

Because they’re already annoying enough.
Then I need to get home (tonight) and make sure Schrodinger’s fish is still alive.

Tomorrow is back to my scheduled painting and staining, and hopefully only three days left on that, after which I should have Darkship revenge in a couple of weeks so ya’ll can:

So catch you on the flip side. Going to shower and pack now.
And I’m really, really tired.

 

"In announcing his candidacy, he shared the story of 'a Christmas Eve when my brother and I and our parents exchanged modest gifts — there was no lighted tree as there had been on Christmases past. I remember watching my father open what he thought was a greeting from his employer. We all watched and yes, we were hoping for a bonus check. It was notice that he no longer had a job.... I’ll carry with me always the memory of my father sitting there holding that envelope, unable to look at us. I cannot and will not stand by while inflation and joblessness destroy the dignity of our people.'"

From Scott Walker's "Unintimidated: A Governor's Story and a Nation's Challenge" — a passage found while searching for "Christmas" in my ebooks.

"... according to a new CNN/ORC International poll," says a new Breaking News email from CNN. Here's the article:

Two months ago, Democrats held a 50%-42% advantage among registered voters in a generic ballot, which asked respondents to choose between a Democrat or Republican in their congressional district without identifying the candidates. 

Whoa! 2 months ago the Dems were up by 8 and now they are down by 5? That's a 13-point change in the spread.

That result came after congressional Republicans appeared to overplay their hand in the bitter fight over the federal government shutdown and the debt ceiling.

So the Republicans were unusually low at that point. By the way, it's absurd for journalists to adopt the term "government shutdown," at least not without putting it in quotes. It's an inflammatory propaganda term. Obviously, the government didn't shut down.

The 13-point swing over the past two months follows a political uproar over Obamacare, which included the botched rollout of HealthCare.gov and controversy over the possiblity of insurance policy cancelations due primarily to the new health law.

Why say "botched rollout" and not "collapse" or "utter ruin" or something more dramatic, equivalent to "shutdown"? You know, it's not just the "rollout," which suggests the initial stages of the system as it lumbers into motion. And "botched" suggests some pesky messiness that can be forgiven.

"Virtually all the movement toward the GOP has come among men," CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said. "Fifty-four percent of female voters chose the Democratic candidate in October; 53% pick the Dem now. But among male voters, support for Democratic candidates has gone from 46% in October to just 35% now."

Younger men, I take it. They are ones for whom the reality of Obamacare most diverged from the hope-and-dreams.

According to the poll, only three in 10 registered voters say they are extremely or very enthusiastic about voting for Congress next year.... Democratic voters seem particularly unenthusiastic about voting, and that is likely to benefit the GOP. Thirty-six percent of Republicans say they're extremely or very enthusiastic about voting. That number drops to 22% among Democrats.

Another GOP advantage is the President's standing with the public: 55% of registered voters say that they are more likely to vote for a congressional candidate who opposes the President than one who supports him and four in 10 say they are likely to vote for a candidate who supports Obama.

Get ready for the anti-Obama Democrats. What will they look like? Perhaps they'll grind away at him from the left on issues like the NSA surveillance and drone warfare. They could say Obamacare was devised as a sop to Republicans who outrageously avoided all responsibility for it when it failed, and single-payer was always the only good answer, and it's where we must go now.

JAMES TARANTO ON CIVIL RIGHTS PROGRESS:

Now, why would blacks move out of big cities in the Northeast, the Midwest and California and into the South and the suburbs? In part for the same reasons nonblacks do: in search of better economic opportunities and quality of life. But also because the factor that drove blacks in particular to leave the South no longer exists. Jim Crow is now long dead, but it had been dead a decade at most by the time the New Great Migration began.

But for some people — for reasons of political power or simple self-image — it must always be 1963.