The Black Swan has been Black Swanned

There is no recovering from this gaffe for The Donald. Not even Jesus Christ or Mahatma Gandhi would be forgiven for:

In the three-minute recording, which was obtained by The Washington Post, Mr. Trump recounts to the television personality Billy Bush of “Access Hollywood” how he once pursued a married woman and “moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there,” expressing regret that they did not have sex. But he brags of a special status with women: Because he was “a star,” he says, he could “grab them by the pussy” whenever he wanted.

The American electorate, H.L. Mencken's "Boobeoisie," knows one thing for sure, and that is smut. This broke yesterday afternoon, the Bermuda Triangle -- Friday after lunch -- of news coverage. It will seep into the collective consciousness over the weekend.

The party is over. Trump's gender gap is now officially unbridgeable. Welcome to Clintontime, part two.

It is hard to imagine how Trump will appear on the debate stage with Hillary tomorrow. His only hope is to make the problem even bigger and go low and blame Slick Willie for saying even worse on the golf course. What could that be? A salacious blow-by-blow of how Bill sodomized a Clinton Foundation staffer?

If Trump goes this route he will be disavowed by the GOP. Conversations are underway right now to force Trump to stand down in favor of Pence. That of course is the smart move for the Republicans down-ballot.

Hillary's Plan to Beat Trump

The big frontpager this morning in "the newspaper of record" is "Inside the Clinton Team’s Plan to Defeat Donald Trump" by Amy Chozick and Patrick Healy. Bernie Sanders tossed aside like a candy wrapper before a single vote has been counted on Super Tuesday, Team Clinton now spins its fantasy of a general election victory against the avatar of the unwashed. The plan is to go negative 24-7, "an all-out assault," against Trump. David Brock is already working up a video montage of bloopers and blunders that The Donald delivered from the stump (which will probably end up drawing more alienated voters to the polls to vote for the reality TV star than indignant soccer moms for Hillary).

There are several problems with this "plan." Using Bill Clinton and Obama as surrogates to harsh on Trump will draw more voters to the real estate tycoon's ranks. Obama and Slick Willie personify to old, white America everything that is wrong with establishment politics. Both, by the way, are stalwart backers of huge free trade agreements. The average voter, despite a uniform mainstream media message about the amazing bounty produced by free trade, has concluded that the U.S. has been de-industrialized because of it. Trump will pounce on Obama and Bill with a viciousness and glee that will fill television and smartphone screens until election day, drawing the Oxycontin and Budweiser denizens into the political process like never before.

Conventional wisdom is that negative campaigning suppresses turnout. In this case  Hillary's scorched earth attack on Trump will actually boost his numbers. The last status quo election in the United Status was the 2014 midterm, which had the lowest turnout since World War Two. In one state, such as Ohio, turnout was as low as the early nineteenth century -- before there was universal male suffrage. There is no more faith in elections.

Enter Trump.

The Super Tuesday bar for Marco Rubio has been set at his winning a single state. Nate Cohn highlights the chances of "Little Marco" in "Where Marco Rubio Has the Best Chance to Win." The answer is nowhere. If Cruz doesn't squeak through in his home Lone Star state, then the primary will be all over except for the crying of GOP apparatchiks. It might be better for Trump in the long run if didn't come away with a clean sweep because then the Republican establishment can persist in its magical thinking a bit longer.

Campbell Robertson has a so-so story about the lost cause of the Democrats in the South. A lot of the commentators to the first story in The New York Times announcing Hillary's big win in South Carolina noted the fatal flaw in Team Clinton having to rely on a Deep South firewall to protect her path to the nomination. How can a candidate expect to win a general election when she won a primary based on states she can't carry in November?

New Hampshire

What we are witnessing now in the Clinton campaign, in the media monopoly that backs her, and among her campaign surrogates is mounting panic. We saw it with Bill Clinton rambling on about Sanders' deceit and misogyny to a less-than-overflowing crowd at a New Hampshire junior high school. It was also on display when Gloria Steinem, feminist museum piece, dismissed as cock chasing the large advantage Bernie Sanders enjoys among young women.

It is pathetic. But it is not arbitrary or capricious. It is a centralized decision by Team Hillary to go negative in the run up to the primary today in an attempt to keep Sanders from a double-digit win.

Here is the CNN New Hampshire polling snapshot from yesterday:

On the eve of New Hampshire's presidential primaries, a new CNN Poll of Polls finds both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are holding on to substantial leads in their respective races, but each faces an opponent whose support is on the rise.

Sanders' 54% to 40% advantage over Hillary Clinton is down slightly from a 55% to 37% lead in the previous Poll of Polls. No public polling has found Clinton in the lead in New Hampshire since November.

Trump tops the GOP field with 31%, well ahead of Marco Rubio's 15%. Rubio has picked up four points since the previous New Hampshire Poll of Polls, the biggest change in the averages in the last week. Ted Cruz follows with 13%, John Kasich at 11% and Jeb Bush at 10%. This pack of four -- Rubio, Cruz, Kasich and Bush -- has been jockeying for second place in the state for some time. The fifth candidate often included in the group, Chris Christie, has generally seen his support dwindle, and now stands well behind, dropping two points in this week's Poll of Polls to an average of 5%. Carly Fiorina ties Christie at 5% and Ben Carson rounds out the group with 3%.

Politics is not rocket science. Certain things are known to work, one of them is negative campaigning. It doesn't drive support to your candidate; it drives down the support for your opponent, particularly if your opponent is buoyed by idealistic, young, first-time voters who still believe a better world is possible. Going on the attack, accusing your opponent (and, by association, his supporters) of dishonesty and base intentions, is the equivalent of a blow to the face. Most people can't take being hit in the face. So these voters stop participating. I saw it up close in the heady days post-Nader 2000. Once idealistic young Greens figured out that people despised them and that the foundation of politics was conflict and quid pro quo they melted away, back to their lives as spectators.

The goal for Hillary is to keep Sanders' margin of victory in the single digits and then claim victory based on that result. The template here is what Slick Willie did in New Hampshire in 1992 against Paul Tsongas. Clinton came in second, losing by eight points; but he did better than expected and dubbed himself "The Comeback Kid," which the media monopoly dutifully gobbled up.

Signs are that Hillary's negativism is paying off. But it looks like it's too late to keep Bernie from a double-digit win. Nate Cohn has a good New Hampshire rundown this morning in "New Hampshire Should Answer a Lot of Key Questions":

The race may have tightened since the last debate. The five polls released after the debate last week showed Hillary Clinton faring seven points better, on average, than a prior batch of polls. On the other hand, those prior polls showed her behind by an average of 15 points, so there may be some “reversion to the mean” at play — it might be that the five previous polls were unrealistically good for Mr. Sanders, not that Mrs. Clinton actually gained. 

It would be tough to dismiss a huge Mr. Sanders victory simply by saying he’s well known in Vermont. That’s certainly true compared with the rest of the country, but it seems like a stretch to argue that the average New Hampshire voter should be extremely predisposed toward Mr. Sanders. 

Ninety percent of the New Hampshire Democratic electorate isn’t in the Burlington, Vt., media market, and the state’s most populous area — the southeastern section — is also the area farthest from Vermont. It was also Mrs. Clinton’s strongest area in 2008. Whether Mr. Sanders can beat here there, or at least do better than Barack Obama did in 2008, could offer real insight into the extent of Mr. Sanders’s appeal.

Bernie wins New Hampshire. The only way the narrative gets difficult is if he beats Hillary by only a few points. But whether it is nine points or 13, I don't think it makes much difference going into Nevada and South Carolina. The race really begins in Nevada. We will know how much mojo Bernie has based on how he does there. Hillary beat Obama in Nevada in 2008.

The same metric applies to Trump in New Hampshire. He has led there for a long time by a wide margin. If he wins in a squeaker, following his disappointing performance in the Potemkin village of American democracy, the Iowa caucuses, then his path to the Republican nomination becomes a trail of tears. But the New Hampshire narrative for the last week has been all about Marco Rubio. Chris Christie bitch-slapped him repeatedly Saturday night during the Republican debate hosted by ABC, and Rubio didn't look good handling it.

I watched the debate; it's the first GOP performance I have seen. What struck me is how threadbare the whole affair appeared. It reminded me of employees who have worked together for decades trapped in the company break room sniping at each other; that, or hungover fraternity brothers arguing in the filth of the kitchen the morning after a big house party. Trump looked tired. Ben Carson came off as an imbecile. Chris Christie, a bully. Marco Rubio, a hot young stupid ambitious chick in "come-fuck-me" pumps. Jeb Bush, a manikin. Ted Cruz, the second coming of Tricky Dick Nixon. John Kasich, probably the best of the bunch, but no one you would ever want to vote for anyway. ABC framed the debate like a sporting event with shots of the candidates walking through halls like boxers with their entourages on the way to the ring or footballers coming out the tunnel. Marco Rubio even had earbuds draped over his Oxford, reminiscent of so many athletes you see dismounting the team bus with their Beats headphones.

My preference for the #2 slot in the GOP New Hampshire primary, ahead of Kasich or Bush at #3, is Chris Christie. The guy is a toxic force, a lethal debater, extremely unappealing, a blowhard. Christie at #2 would shake things up.

Iowa Post-Mortem: GOP's Boy Wonder Appears, Trump Actually Does Quite Well and Signs of Clinton Meltdown

The tendency will be to say the big takeaway from the Iowa caucuses is that Donald Trump shit the bed, coming in second as he did to the vile Ted Cruz, and not necessarily by a minute margin either with the Texan champion of the GOP Tea Party makeover beating the Manhattan real estate mogul 27.7% to 24.4%.

But that is not my takeaway. My takeaway is that the Iowa caucuses offered a smorgasbord for Republicans, giving every significant segment of the fractured party a reason to crow. For starters, evangelicals proved once again that victory for a GOP candidate in Iowa is dependent on their faith-based network. Cruz joins Mike Huckabee (2008) and Rick Santorum (2012) as winner of the caucuses thanks to the Christian vote. And as Huckabee and Santorum managed to linger on after Iowa without ever dominating the race again, so too will be the fate of Ted Cruz.

For the party establishment, Iowa delivered the joyful verdict that Marco Rubio is indeed a player. Rubio came in third, just a little more than a point behind Trump. For months Rubio has been puffed as the future of the party, the bright, new face of the GOP, and he came through after really only spending January in the Hawkeye State. Reince Priebus must be tickled pink this morning. If Rubio performs well again next Tuesday in the New Hampshire primary, while Bush, Kasich and Christie underperform, the pressure from on high will be for the also-rans to get out of the race and fall in behind Norman Braman's page-boy.

For Donald Trump, all is not lost. In fact, I would say, if not "mission accomplished," then "one helluva job." An all-time record was established for participation in a Republican Iowa caucus, with 46% showing up to his/her first caucus (roughly equal to Bernie's draw in the Dem caucuses, though not up to the 57% Obama drew in 2008). And Trump had basically no ground game to speak of. This is from the frontpager in today's New York Times, Jonathan Martin's "Ted Cruz Wins Republican Caucuses in Iowa":

Turnout was about 185,000, a record, according to Edison Research, which conducted entrance polls at precincts across the state. Mr. Trump’s success had been expected to hinge on whether he could mobilize his supporters. But the turnout was not enough to deliver him a win, even though 46 percent of those who turned out were participating in a Republican caucus for the first time. 

Instead, Mr. Trump paid the price for building only a rudimentary political organization in the state: The brew of energy and anger powering his candidacy did not fully translate into votes.

This lack of ground game will not be a problem in the upcoming primary states. Trump is unsinkable; his loss to Cruz is of very little importance. What should be very troubling to Trump is the emergence of Rubio as a candidate with comparable heft. As long as Rubio remains in the frame, come convention time the party will do everything in its power to deliver the nomination to him.

When it comes to the Democratic results in Iowa, the tie between Hillary and Bernie is almost as good as a victory for the Sanders camp. Clearly the Clintons were anticipating a victory and the spate of "Go home, Bernie; you're a fringe candidate after all" stories to follow. Now the opposite is happening. Take the opening to this morning's frontpager by Patrick Healy, "Little Separates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton in Tight Race in Iowa":

The close results were deeply unnerving to Mrs. Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, as well as her advisers, some of whom had expressed growing confidence in recent days that they had recaptured political momentum after weeks when Mr. Sanders was drawing huge crowds and rising in the polls. The Clintons had appeared optimistic at rallies over the weekend, thanking Iowans for their support as much as urging them to turn out to vote.

The close vote means that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders are likely to split Iowa’s share of delegates to the Democratic convention, and Mr. Sanders will be able to argue that the Iowa result was a virtual tie.

The Clinton team was counting on its huge, well-trained army of volunteers, covering all of Iowa’s 1,681 voting precincts, to counter the enormous enthusiasm of voters who jammed into events to hear Mr. Sanders. But his well-financed Iowa organization was able to convert the energy of his crowds into voters on Monday night, as he drew huge numbers of first-time caucusgoers, young people and liberals who responded to his rallying cry against the nation’s “rigged economy.”

The virtual tie between the two candidates instantly raised the stakes for their next face-off, the primary next Tuesday in New Hampshire. Mr. Sanders holds a solid lead in polls there and has the advantage of being from Vermont; candidates from neighboring states have won the state’s primary in recent decades, and Mr. Sanders is admired in the state.

Clinton advisers said late Monday night that Mr. and Mrs. Clinton were discussing bringing on additional staff members to strengthen her campaign operation now that a pitched battle may lie ahead against Mr. Sanders. The advisers said they did not know if a significant staff shakeup was at hand, but they said that the Clintons were disappointed with Monday night’s result and wanted to ensure that her organization, political messaging and communications strategy were in better shape for the contests to come.

Even more damning is Clinton beat reporter Amy Chozick's "Tight Democratic Race in Iowa Unnerves Clinton Campaign." Campaign manager Robby Mook appears to be headed for the chopping block:

Even before Mrs. Clinton finished her brief remarks to her supporters late Monday night, discussions were underway among her outside advisers and donors about the need to bring in longtime Clinton aides and diminish the role of Robby Mook, her young data-driven campaign manager. Asked about such discussions, Nick Merrill, a spokesman for the campaign, grew irritated. “Are you serious?” he said tersely to a reporter. 

Next to a commanding five-point win, Bernie could not have asked for anything more. Mook is the guy who was saying from the outset Hillary could return the Obama coalition to the polls. I'm sure at this point Slick Willie has put his foot down and told John Podesta to get serious.

British Election Results Spell Doom for Democrats in the U.S.

I'm surprised it wasn't on the front page of the print edition of The New York Times this morning. But I suppose there was some concern that the exit polling predicting a big win for the Tories wasn't to be trusted entirely. Well, that is all changed now, as Steven Erlanger and Stephen Castle trumpet in "David Cameron and Conservatives Get Majority in British Election" from the top spot on the Gray Lady's homepage:

LONDON — Prime Minister David Cameron and his Conservatives won a resounding victory in the British general election, with nearly complete results on Friday showing that the party had secured an overall majority in Parliament. 

The vote was a stunning disappointment for the opposition Labour Party and its leader, Ed Miliband, who had shifted the party away from the more centrist strategy it pursued in the late 1990s and early 2000s under Tony Blair. Mr. Miliband stepped down on Friday, opening up a new debate over the party’s direction. 

The result defied pre-election opinion polls that suggested a tight race between the Conservatives and Labour. It returns Mr. Cameron to 10 Downing Street for a second term, with enough seats in the House of Commons to act on his agenda without having to rely on support from smaller parties. 

He went to Buckingham Palace on Friday to be invited by the queen to form a new government.

Labour was nearly wiped out in Scotland by the surging Scottish National Party and did more poorly than pre-election opinion polls had suggested it would in the rest of Britain. Several of Mr. Miliband’s top lieutenants lost their seats.

The predicted final tally is 331 seats for the Tories out of 650, a stunning gain of 24 seats from the last election in 2010; stunning because the Conservatives have governed so diffidently, implementing unpopular neoliberal austerity that is au courant on the German-dominated Continent.

The "dead-on-arrival" Liberal Democrats were replaced as Britain's third party by the surging Scottish National Party (SNP). SNP ended up with 56 out of 59 seats in Scotland.

But nothing is more noteworthy than the complete collapse of Labour under Ed Miliband. Labour is predicted to end up with 232 seats, a loss of 26 seats from 2010. What makes this collapse so noteworthy is that it clearly augurs ill for the Democrats going into the 2016 presidential elections.

Labour and the Democrats are largely the same, led to the weakened, listing place they are today by the corporate-friendly leadership of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.

Miliband made all the right noises during the campaign. He attacked austerity, promised to raise wages and restore funding to National Health, much the same way that Hillary is mouthing the appropriate progressive words on income inequality and racial justice. But here is the thing: No one, only the most deeply-committed partisan, believes anything that Labour/Democrats say anymore. Everyone knows that once Labour/Dems take office and begin to govern the "people" they answer to are the corporations.

Is there any other way to interpret the election results in Britain?

Democrat bosses in New York City and Washington D.C. should take note and quickly implement a Plan B. SNP kicked ass because the party has no baggage and it stands for something that people want: independence from empire, broad equality and social spending.

Democrats should take a page from the GOP playbook post-2008 and do a "Tea Party makeover," except in this case the Dems need to swing sharply to the left. It is the only way to avoid disaster. Instead the Democrats are doubling down on the New Democrat corporate-friendly leadership of Hillary Clinton, a strategy that has placed the party at the edge of doom.

I bang my little toy drum on this page. The Democrats should beat a retreat from Clinton right now to avoid disaster -- unified government under a radically conservative Republican Party. That no change will be made, no Plan B implemented to avoid this onrushing calamity is amazing to me. Yet it is a sign of the times.

****

Look for Hippies vs. Punks tomorrow morning -- Black Flag's My War.

Collapse of the Democratic Party + Obama Embraces Egyptian Police State + Blue Lives Matter Vs. Black Lives Matter

Yesterday in the Gray Lady's Sunday edition Jonathan Martin had a story, "Role for Warren: To Push, if Not Supplant, Clinton," that had the effect of tossing a bucket of cold water on the effort by MoveOn.org to draft Senator Elizabeth Warren (Dem.-Mass.) to run for president. After reading the piece one comes away feeling fairly certain that Warren will not lock horns with Hillary Clinton for the nomination of the Democratic Party; in fact, Martin's article reads as if it had been written by a Hillary press handler, as one can tell from the first few paragraphs:

DES MOINES — Eight years ago this month, then-Senator Barack Obama began his evolution from political phenom to presidential contender with his first-ever trip to New Hampshire, a visit that attracted 2,500 voters, 150 journalists and a comparison by the state’s governor of Mr. Obama to the Rolling Stones. 

Last week, in the side room of Java Joe’s coffee shop here, the liberal group MoveOn.org took the first step to propel Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, on a similar path, holding a rally to encourage her to get into the 2016 race. 

Yet there were only about 75 people present, some of them local political professionals engaging in a bit of reconnaissance and recreation, and just a handful of reporters. The highest-ranking official there was the Iowa Senate president, who carefully avoided stating her support for a Warren candidacy. 

Not that there is such a thing: Ms. Warren herself was not here, and she has repeatedly stated in public that she is not running for president. In private, according to several Democrats who have talked with her, Ms. Warren, 65, has also indicated that she would not challenge Hillary Rodham Clinton.

 Martin goes on to depict the potent force, juggernaut-like, of Hillary's candidacy:

A Des Moines Register-Bloomberg poll in October showed Mrs. Clinton leading Ms. Warren by 43 percentage points. In New Hampshire, where Mrs. Clinton led Mr. Obama in a Granite State Poll at the outset of the 2008 race by 14 points, she was beating Ms. Warren by 49 points last month in a Bloomberg-Saint Anselm College survey. 

“There is only a very small segment of the party this time around that’s looking for an alternative,” said Jim Demers, a New Hampshire Democrat who backed Mr. Obama in 2008 and is now supporting Mrs. Clinton.

The bold red quote above by Jim Demers is absurd. It is not a "very small segment of the party" that does not want Hillary; it is the activist base, the ones who volunteer to knock on doors and who pay attention to current events. As I see it, Elizabeth Warren is the only politician who has enough legitimacy on issues of Main Street vs, Wall Street to keep enough of the Obama coalition -- Latinos, blacks, youth, women -- engaged and on the reservation to secure a presidential victory for the Dems in 2016. Democrat strategists have said they plan to win by having Hillary turn out the Obama coalition.

It is possible that Hillary Clinton could muddle through if the GOP nominates Scott Walker, Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio. But at this point I think Jeb Bush, if he can weather the storm of the Republican primaries, beats Hillary in a general election. At this point I won't even rule out the possibility that Mitt Romney could triumph over Hillary.

To get a sense of just how bad things are -- for both parties -- a must-read article is "Americans Are Sick to Death of Both Parties: Why Our Politics Is in Worse Shape Than We Thought" by academics Walter Dean Burnham and Thomas Ferguson. Burnham and Ferguson describe a Democratic Party in denial of how historic -- historically poor -- its performance was in the 2014 midterms:

[O]ur cautious guess is that turnout in this year’s Congressional races will finally weigh in at around 36 percent of the potential electorate that had legal rights to cast a ballot. 

That’s a shocking statistic. Put aside for a moment all talk of 1942 and absolute levels of turnout. Instead focus on changes in turnout between presidential elections and the next off-year election. Across the whole sweep of American history, the momentous dimensions of what has just happened stand out in bold relief. The drop off in voting turnout from the presidential election of 2012 to 2014 is the second largest of all time – 24 percentage points. Only 1942’s decline from 1940 was bigger – 29 percentage points. But then there was an excuse. Millions of Americans were hurriedly fanning out across the globe to wage total war. (World War I showed a similar pattern – turnout in the off year elections of 1918 fell 22 points from 1916’s presidential race, marking the fourth largest decline ever. Which leads naturally to the question of the third largest. Read on.)

Now cast a glance at the actual levels to which turnout in many states sank this year. In the last generation, turnouts in the many formerly industrialized states in the Northeast, the Mid-Atlantic region, and parts of the Midwest have bounced around, with one or another state sometimes touching historic lows in a particular election. But this year the decline is broad and to levels that boggle the mind – rates of voting that recall the earliest days of the 19th century, before the Jacksonian Revolution swept away property suffrage and other devices that held down turnout. Turnout in Ohio, for example, fell to 34 percent — a level the state last touched in 1814, when political parties on a modern model did not exist and it had just recently entered the Union. New York trumped even this: turnout in the Empire State plunged to 30 percent, almost back to where it was in 1798, when property suffrage laws disenfranchised some 40 percent of the citizenry. New Jersey managed a little better: turnout fell to 31 percent, back to levels of the 1820s. Delaware turnout fell to 35 percent, well below some elections of the 1790s. In the west, by contrast, turnout declined to levels almost without precedent: California’s 33 percent turnout appears to be the lowest recorded since the state entered the union in 1850. Nevada also hit a record low (28 percent), as did Utah at 26 percent (for elections to the House).

We are witnessing levels of voter participation that go back two-hundred years to the days when suffrage was synonymous with property ownership. This is a collapse the size of which is truly sublime.

And what is the Democratic Party -- the party nominally committed to the "little guy," to working men and women -- doing about this crisis of legitimacy? They are telling us to line up behind Hillary Clinton, the spouse of the man who brought us NATO expansion and the war against Yugoslavia as well as the repeal of the Glass-Steagall.

This will not end well. People can no longer stomach the lies. Voters made their way to the polls in two consecutive presidential elections, giving Obama huge margins of victory in both 2008 and 2012, and for what? The benefits of the economic recovery, what of it there is, have all gone to the wealthy. Unions and pensions are less secure. We do have a new market-based system of health insurance that can count the expansion of Medicaid as an achievement. But we also have a new iteration of the Cold War and war in Iraq and Syria, both of which are largely due to the U.S. and its allies in the Gulf Cooperation Council.

A recent example of an indigestible lie: USG has cleared the way for the delivery of military helicopters to Egypt, helicopters that have been put on hold since the Egyptian military ousted the elected president Mohamed Morsi in a coup the summer of 2013. Morsi is in prison along with more than 10,000 imprisoned this year alone. Egypt is a massive police state. Yet neither the USG nor Congress will sanction the generals of Egypt and Thailand like it has sanctioned Venezuela and Russia.

And right on cue there is evidence of the U.S. police state kicking back against the Black Lives Matter protest movement by waving the bloody tunics of two police officers murdered in their squad car this past Saturday in Brooklyn. As Liz Robbins and Nikita Stewart report in "At Demonstrations, a Change in Tone After Officers Are Killed": "After the killings on Saturday, the protest motto of 'Black Lives Matter' was joined by a chorus of 'Blue Lives Matter' on social media, in support of officers."

This was all predictable. As soon as police died in the line of duty their deaths would be used as a political cudgel to beat down the Black Lives Matter movement, which has been maintaining its momentum. There are Black Lives Matter actions all over the country all the time. The precedent here is when CIA agent Richard Welch was murdered in Greece at the height of the Church Committee revelations of national security state lawlessness, his death was used to kill off calls for sunlighting the Deep State.

The police are going to be called on in short order to maintain control as the political parties continue to lose the allegiance of the people.

Comparing Syria to Yugoslavia

Putin takes flak at the G-8 summit for his support of Syria, and the rebels, in a story that doesn't sound authentic, purportedly killed 60 government troops in a suicide bombing of a military base near Aleppo.

But what I found noteworthy this morning was an opinion piece, "To Get a Truce, Be Ready to Escalate," by Wesley Clark, former U.S. presidential aspirant and NATO supreme allied military commander for Europe. It is noteworthy because it is an excellent illustration of the weakness and rot in pro-interventionist thinking prevalent in the U.S. foreign policy establishment.

It goes something like this: Inaction is not an option. And though it is likely that a U.S.-enforced no-fly zone would lead to full-scale military engagement and even though it is unclear what Syria would look like after Assad, we should nonetheless escalate the use of force to bring al-Assad to the negotiating table.

Proof of the success of such a strategy? NATO's 1999 bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. We're hearing this argument made frequently these days. Bill Clinton made it last week in his criticism of Obama for not doing more to aid the rebels.

Some points to keep in mind:

• Kosovo is not a viable state. It is an Albanian rump rife with criminality. It is held together by means of United Nations support. Do we want this in the heart of the Middle East? Do we want Afghanistan in the heart of the Middle East? (Take a look at this analysis, provided by Syria expert Aron Lund, of the Islamist nature of the opposition.)

• The NATO campaign against Yugoslavia could have led to war with Russian (Pristina airport incident) and China (bombing of Chinese embassy in Belgrade). Is there any doubt that the spin-offs of a broad Western intervention in Syria would be much worse?

• It is not the Syrian government that is unwilling to negotiate. It is the opposition and the GCC and the West who insist that al-Assad agree to relinquish power as a precondition of any talks. In other words, victory before any bargaining begins. Absurd. The West is engaged in an absurdity.

Here's Clark's wished for outcome:

The formula for diplomacy is clear: a cease-fire agreement; a United Nations presence; departure of foreign fighters; disarmament of Syrian fighters; international supervision of Syria’s military; a peaceful exit for Mr. Assad, his family and key supporters; a transitional government; and plans for a new Syria.

It's absurd. It's delusional. It's a desire for anarchy in the Middle East. It's a clear prescription for disaster. And this passes for interventionist prevailing wisdom?

Organ Trafficking in Kosovo

I made the work-week commute in the late afternoon yesterday. The occasion was a retirement party for the business manager of the local where I work.

Riding the train out to SeaTac on a Saturday -- the party was held at the local's first-floor meeting hall -- was not something to which I was particularly looking forward. But the weather was perfect and the change of pace turned out to be enjoyable. The train was chock full of weekend shoppers and sightseers. Fathers out with their families and single women carrying bags from the department stores. I used the hour trip to read the lengthy The New Yorker piece by Nicholas Schmidle on Kosovo's criminal organ-harvesting enterprise. It's a sordid tale but one that needs to be learned. Too many supposedly knowledgeable people point to Bill Clinton's NATO war on Yugoslavia as a successful example of Western military intervention. But it must be remembered that during the spring of 1999 when the United States was leading the attack, the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was bombed and Wesley Clark almost fired on Russian forces in Pristina. Both incidents could have led to a much wider and more devastating conflict. Today Kosovo is not a viable state absent United Nations assistance; it is an Albanian criminal enterprise.

Schmidle spends the first half of his story constructing a rigorous brief on the criminal nature of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Then he pisses in his own punch bowl the second half by speculating that Serbs have suborned perjury in their obsession to secure convictions of former KLA leaders at the ICTY. He concludes his essay with a sympathetic account of Hashim Thaci.

In the end, Schmidle can't break out of the official mindset: evil Serbs, innocent "Kosovars." At the time Schmidle's article appeared in April he made the following blog post, "An Organ-Trafficking Conviction in Kosovo":

In this week’s issue of The New Yorker, I investigate allegations that, around the time of the 1999 Kosovo war, the Kosovo Liberation Army trafficked prisoners across the border into Albania, killed them, and harvested their organs. Hashim Thaci, the current Prime Minister of Kosovo, is among those accused of being responsible; a 2010 report, published by the Council of Europe, accused him of being the “boss” of a “network of unlawful activity,” which included prisoner abuse and organ harvesting. Thaci strongly denies the allegations and, despite all of these nasty insinuations, not a single case of suspected organ trafficking has gone before a judge and yielded a verdict.

That changed Monday, when an international panel of judges from the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo issued multiple convictions of human trafficking and organized crime. The charges don’t relate directly to the war years, or include Thaci or his close associates; they are centered on Medicus, a transplant clinic in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital. The prosecution argued that, in 2008, a urologist named Lutfi Dervishi began performing kidney transplants there for money. (The sale of organs is outlawed everywhere in the world except Iran.) In its 2010 report, the Council of Europe cited Dervishi’s clinic as evidence of an organ trade that began during the war and continued afterward, “albeit in other forms.”

The investigation continues. So expect more revelations of the true nature of the state created out of the smoke of Bill Clinton's stunning military-intervention success story.

U.S. Says al-Assad Used Chemical Weapons

Based on a reading of this morning's story by Mark Mazzetti, Michael R. Gordon and Mark Landler, "U.S. Is Said to Plan to Send Weapons to Syrian Rebels," which is definitely worth checking out, yesterday's announcement that U.S. analysts have concluded that the Assad government has used poison gas and that military support for the Syrian opposition will now commence is not as dire as first imagined. It appears that Obama has only signed off on small arms and ammunition with the possibility of antitank weapons. No antiaircraft weapons will be supplied; a no-fly zone is all but ruled out.

This will please neither the Arab monarchies, nor the war pigs in the State Department and the U.S. Senate. To be charitable to Obama, a weakness to which I am susceptible, he appears to be trying to deftly defuse a lot of unseemly war lust. Reading the statement by Benjamin Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser wunderkind, one finds that it is pretty tepid. Here's the part that deals with the allegation that chemical weapons were used by the Syrian government:

Following a deliberative review, our intelligence community assesses that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons, including the nerve agent sarin, on a small scale against the opposition multiple times in the last year. Our intelligence community has high confidence in that assessment given multiple, independent streams of information. The intelligence community estimates that 100 to 150 people have died from detected chemical weapons attacks in Syria to date; however, casualty data is likely incomplete. While the lethality of these attacks make up only a small portion of the catastrophic loss of life in Syria, which now stands at more than 90,000 deaths, the use of chemical weapons violates international norms and crosses clear red lines that have existed within the international community for decades. We believe that the Assad regime maintains control of these weapons. We have no reliable, corroborated reporting to indicate that the opposition in Syria has acquired or used chemical weapons. 

The body of information used to make this intelligence assessment includes reporting regarding Syrian officials planning and executing regime chemical weapons attacks; reporting that includes descriptions of the time, location, and means of attack; and descriptions of physiological symptoms that are consistent with exposure to a chemical weapons agent. Some open source reports from social media outlets from Syrian opposition groups and other media sources are consistent with the information we have obtained regarding chemical weapons use and exposure. The assessment is further supported by laboratory analysis of physiological samples obtained from a number of individuals, which revealed exposure to sarin. Each positive result indicates that an individual was exposed to sarin, but it does not tell us how or where the individuals were exposed or who was responsible for the dissemination.

There was a prompt push back from Syria and Russia. And it is important to keep in mind that the UN fact finding mission does have evidence of rebel use of chemical weapons. We know this from Carla Del Ponte's statement in May. The portion of Rhodes' statement that deals with this is ridiculously weak. "We believe that the Assad regime maintains control of these weapons. We have no reliable, corroborated reporting to indicate that the opposition in Syria has acquired or used chemical weapons." One can easily imagine a situation where a deserter grabs a cache of canisters on his way out the door.

No, it appears that this is all just status quo. And the status quo favors the Syrian government. The opposition has no answer for the more highly motivated fighting forces of the government and its Hezbollah allies. Antitank guns will not change this; a no-fly zone would, but this does not appear to be in the offing.

An interesting portion of the Mazzetti et al. story is the growing impatience of the rancid Arab monarchies with Obama:

But the president’s caution has frayed relations with important American allies in the Middle East that have privately described the White House strategy as feckless. Saudi Arabia and Jordan recently cut the United States out of a new rebel training program, a decision that American officials said came from the belief in Riyadh and Amman that the United States has only a tepid commitment to supporting rebel groups. 

Moreover, the United Arab Emirates declined to host a meeting of allied defense officials to discuss Syria, concerned that in the absence of strong American leadership the conference might degenerate into bickering and finger-pointing among various gulf nations with different views on the best ways to support the rebellion.

It's safe to assume that Obama's approval of small arms will be followed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar moving to provide the jihadi heavier weapons.

On top of this there is the filthy spectacle of the flaccid Bill Clinton doing his Gulf paymasters' bidding and shilling for more rebel weapons. (See also Colum Lynch's Turtle Bay blog.)

Adding to those voices was former President Bill Clinton, who earlier this week endorsed a more robust American intervention in Syria to help the rebels, aligning himself with hawks like Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who fault Mr. Obama for his reluctance to get entangled in the war. 

Speaking on Tuesday at a private session in New York with Mr. McCain, Mr. Clinton said, “Sometimes it’s best to get caught trying, as long as you don’t overcommit.”

Clinton has a knack for fomenting war. Think about Yugoslavia in 1999. Clinton took his high approval ratings following the GOP impeachment and went to war against a country trying to put down an internal uprising that was stoked by foreign intelligence agencies. Today Kosovo is a failed state held together by UN assistance; it is known for exports of harvested organs and prostitutes.