In (sort of) defense of Donald Trump's comments about vets and suicide

This Donald Trump comment is making a lot of people mad today — the insinuation that vets who commit suicide are "weak."

ABC:

"When people come back from war and combat and they see things that maybe a lot of the folks in this room have seen many times over and you're strong and you can handle it, but a lot of people can't handle it," Trump said, speaking Monday morning at a panel for the Retired American Warriors PAC in Virginia.

Sounds pretty bad, right? Well, ABC at least includes the rest of the quote — which is omitted from a lot of media accounts.

"We need mental health and medical, and it's one of the things that is least addressed and one of the things — one of the things that I hear most about when I go around and talk to the veterans," he said. "So we are going to have a very robust, very, very robust level of performance having to do with mental health."

Now: I'm not one to defend Donald Trump.

But in this case he's not dismissing a rival politician, a la his comments about John McCain's captivity. He's not insulting parents who took a stand against him at a rival party's convention.

By God, I think ... he's trying to be sympathetic. He's trying to be sensitive, in his clumsy ham-fisted way. He's trying to provide a policy answer to help veterans who need it!

Now. If you want to criticize him for a worldview that separates everybody into winners and losers, strong and weak, I get it. And if you want to get after him for having an understanding of PTSD that, I'm willing to bet, comes from action movies and old episodes of "24" instead of any firsthand encounters with soldiers, be my guest. (At one point, he references how the experiences of such vets are worse than what you'd ever see in movies.)

But I don't think Trump was trying to bash suicidal vets here. I think he was trying to offer help. There are plenty of reasons to think he's an awful person. This isn't quite the reason everybody seems to think it is. 

What's so bad about Obama?

Reading the pro-Trump website American Greatness, I come across this comment from Seth Leibsohn:

"There is all the justification in the world for conservatives, Republicans, Independents, and disaffected Democrats to support their one and last chance to stop an experiment in leftism that will rival in power and duration the New Deal and the Great Society."

Which made me wonder: What's been so awful about the last eight years?

Or, to put it another way: Are you better off than you were four years ago?

I'm not a fool: Obama's presidency began in the middle of the Great Recession and America has been somewhat slow to claw its way out of what once looked like a civilization-ending financial disaster. So your life might not be as grand as before the housing bubble burst, but then again — that happened before his watch. Me? It's an iffy question, but I work in a journalism industry that's undergoing generational changes that would be happening no matter who is president.

So. Is your life, personally, worse than it was eight years ago? Poorer in ways that don't measure on a financial statement? And if so, how do you attribute that worsening to President Obama?

My Trumpist Conservative friends seem to think everything's gone to hell. I don't think life is easy for many folks, certainly, but I don't know if most people have that same experience of feeling like we're on the precipice. Maybe I'm wrong. Anybody have answers?

What liberals can learn from conservatives, revisited

A few years ago, I wrote a short column for the Philly Mag website trying to distill what I'd learned from years of close interaction with conservative friends like Ben Boychuk, William Voegeli, and Steve Hayward — three strong ideas of conservatism that, perhaps, liberalism doesn't always get well.

Do the lessons hold up in the age of Trumpism? Let's revisit.

• They’re often better at recognizing the law of unintended consequences: Simply put, the attempt to fix a problem can sometimes end up creating new, unanticipated problems that also need solving. You can, for example, make the case that the federal government’s decision to seriously start fighting wildfires in the last century actually ended up making wildfires … worse. In Boulder, Colo., attempts to rein in that city’s runaway growth have driven housing prices skyward—ruining some of the grassroots charm activists there were trying to preserve.
Conservatives aren’t perfect at applying this principle—see the invasion of Iraq—and sometimes it becomes their excuse to do nothing, but liberals would probably benefit from applying this insight a little more consistently.

Some of this caution, I think, reaches back to the Declaration of Independence — a document whose signers declared revolution, and which also declares that you might not want to do this kind of thing that often. The Declaration says: "Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

Does the candidacy of Donald Trump qualify as a revolutionary act? Let's agree, at least, that it's one in which many previous norms — observed by both politicians and the press — have been tossed aside. Whether it amounts to "revolutionary" probably depends on whether he wins.

Here's "Decius," writing at American Greatness, offering his rationale for a Trumpist presidency. "A Trump victory could pave the way to a restoration of proper constitutional government. Note to speed-readers: I said “could.” Hillary surely won’t. Trump might. He at least offers us a chance to begin the process of achieving a restoration for ourselves."

Decius' best rationale for Trump is a "maybe, but maybe not." He sweeps aside talk of the consequences of a Trump administration all too lightly. Do Trump's advocates take the law of unintended consequences seriously here? It appears not.

• They’re often better at recognizing that big bureaucracies can become oppressive: Anybody who has dealt with L&I or the city’s revenue department in Philadelphia can probably offer an amen here, as can anybody who has tried to clean up a trashed city-owned lot. It’s why conservatives are against “big government” instead of better government—they believe, not without reason, that bigger government can create problems and badly affect individuals just because of the insidious ways bureaucracies tend to try to claim more power without offering ore accountability.

I don't think even Trump knows his own vision well enough to know if the bureaucracy will grow or shrink during his presidency, so let's move on.

• They have an idea and stick to it: Recognizing there are several varieties of conservatism in this country, what most profess to have in common is a belief in the Founders, the Constitution, and limited government.

Trump is unusual for a Republican in that he hearkens back to the Founders with far less frequency than his predecessors. He's show fealty to specific parts of the Constitution — the Second Amendment — and contempt for others (the First) and done little to offer up any explanation of his Constitution vision. Suffice it to say, though, he's given every indication that he doesn't see any limits to the powers he might have as president. "I alone can fix" America's problems, he says, and that's the not the comment of a man who respects limits on the powers of the presidency.

So. Three years ago I offered three lessons liberals could learn from conservatives. Trumpist Conservatives, it seems, are ignoring or whistling their way past two of those lessons. It's bad for conservatism; I suspect it might be bad for the United States as well.

The endless rage of the Donald Trump election

Probably this is too personal, too emo, too revelatory, but here we go:

I'm pissed. All the time.

If you're paying close attention to the election, I suspect you are also pissed all the time. But maybe you're not.

It's clear, though, a lot of people are pissed all the time.

Now: Some of this is almost certainly fair. Donald Trump keeps finding new ways to demonstrate he'd be a very poor president. Possibly disastrous. It's rage-inducing to see smart people make implausible arguments for him, or — worse in my view — pretend his candidacy isn't the vehicle for the new ascendancy of white-nationalist anti-semitism it clearly is.

The problem is this: I don't trust my rage.

I don't trust it to help me make sound judgments. I don't trust it to help me deal with people fairly. I don't trust it to help me preserve friendships that I want to last beyond this stupid, stupid election.

On the other hand, I'm also worried that in my caution to keep rage from clouding my vision, I'll stop short of calling out bad things (like anti-Semitism) for what they are.

I have my biases, no doubt. But within those parameters, I do want to be fair to people who think differently from me.

None of this is paralyzing. But it does slow me down. Perhaps that's for the best. In any case: I'm tired of being pissed all the time. There's got to be a better way.

How to completely destroy Nebraska football in four easy steps.*

1. Be a nearly all-white state.

2. Have a team that relies on African American players to be competitive.

3. Have angry white officials threaten to kick those players off the team for protesting racial injustice. Compound that with "fans" sending lynch threats to those players.

4. Watch the recruiting bonanza come in!

* Yeah, I know. Lots of football today. It's what caught my eye.

George RR Martin predicted the end of football ... back in 1975.

I was trying to remember this afternoon, a story I read in sixth-grade English about how professional sports had declined because people had come to enjoy video simulations of them much more. It struck me as possibly prescient, so I plunged into Google.

Turns out the story, "The Last Superbowl," was written by none other than George RR Martin. *

The story is actually two tales, as he covers the last Superbowl which takes place in January 2016 and interjects the depiction of that Superbowl, between the Green Bay Packers and the Hoboken Jets, and the downfall of real sports. Real sports, in the 2016 of Martin’s fictional world, have been overtaken in popularity by simulated sports. 

Simulated sports are controlled by a computer that can put any team, from any era, against any other for the enjoyment of the spectators. The technology he describes in the computers that control the simulated sports may have been a thing of science fiction in 1974, when I assume he wrote the piece, but here in the real 2015, our computers are powerful enough to create those simulations. Just look at video games like Electronic Arts’ Madden and FIFA series.

The Super Bowl is still pretty popular, and doesn't look to be overtaken by video games this decade, at least. But with growing concerns about what CTE does to the brains of football players — and the dearth of injuries and suicides by digitized players — it's not difficult to see Martin's scenario, or a version of it, coming to pass.

* I thought it had a tremendous amount of gratuitous nudity and sex for a story in a sixth-grade textbook.

Hillary Clinton is the only candidate who can beat Donald Trump.

The conventional wisdom so far is that Hillary Clinton is so personally unpopular that she might be the only Democratic candidate that could lose the presidential race to Donald Trump. I have an alternative theory.

Hillary's the only candidate who can beat Donald Trump, at least this year.

Donald has turned all the subtext of politics into text, and thus — in the primaries, at least — all but turned the campaign into a dick-measuring contest: He beat his GOP opponents mostly by displays of dominance: "Lyin' Ted," "Little Marco," "No Energy Jeb." The TV news coverage looked less like a campaign and more like nature documentary footage of wild predators establishing a clan's alpha male.

Watching Hillary play rope-a-dope tonight — baiting Donald, then watch him bluster and interrupt while she smiled calmly — it occurred to me she's not playing the dick-measuring game. She was content to poke him, then step back and let him reveal his essential nature while she plugged away with a wonk's command of facts, figures, and plans.

The skills she displayed, a million women Tweeted tonight, are the kinds of skills that smart, professional women generally have had to employ in a world full of mansplainers. It's a form of jiujitsu — let the dudes demonstrate their alpha male moves while the women maneuver around the egos and get stuff done.

A traditional male candidate might not be able to beat Donald Trump's dominance displays this year. A woman? One like Hillary who has spent decades maneuvering among alpha male egos at the highest level? She might be the only person who could beat Donald Trump this year.