The only thinking The Donald does is wishful

During last night's Republican debate, the wannabe fascist frontrunner said:

“We should be able to penetrate the Internet and find out exactly where ISIS is and everything about ISIS. We can do that if we use our good people. ... Now, you could close [the Internet]. What I like even better than that is getting our smartest and getting our best to infiltrate their Internet so that we know exactly where they're going. Exactly where they're going to be. I like that better.”

I could explain why this is complete nonsense but if you're a Trump supporter you won't believe me (he's the self-proclaimed smartest guy around, after all, and I only spent seven years writing network-aware software), while if you're not a supporter you likely already know he's spouting horseshit. So I'm not going to waste my time.

I mention this gibbering from The Donald only because it's a perfect example of his standard modus operandi. He conjures up an ideal result, the one everybody wants, and then brazenly, and always without offering any proof whatsoever, claims we could achieve this result — if only he were in charge.

This is the kind of stupidity practiced by executives who don't know squat about their industry but won't take "no" for an answer. The business press never asks whether their forceful actions are correct, so the idiots never are confronted with their wrongness and they start believing they're savants.

It's the kind of stupidity Scott Adams has been lampooning for years with Dilbert's "pointy-haired boss". A pointy-haired boss' subordinates don't have the authority to tell him he's wrong, not that he'd listen if they tried. He starts thinking he can make things happen merely by issuing orders, just like waving a magic wand.

The Donald is the ultimate wishful thinker.

Actually, his supporters are the ultimate wishful thinkers. They think he knows what he's talking about. They think he can deliver on his absurd claims.

For all our sakes, I hope he never gets the chance to disappoint them.

A study in contrasts on late night

Monday night saw a couple of late-night pairings that warmed the heart of any Jon Stewart fan. Only one of them worked out in everyone's favor, though.

Jon Stewart himself guested on The Daily Show to talk about Congress' shameful failure to extend or to make permanent a compensation fund for first responders to the 11 September 2001 attacks.

Stewart graciously and correctly never tried to upstage Noah. The trouble was, he couldn't help doing so. Noah's bemused outsider never seemed more genuinely outside, less relevant to the show that now bears his name. The appearance did Stewart and the worthy cause he espouses good (I hope), but it had the deeply unfortunate effect of rendering Noah a nonentity. I can't see how Stewart can appear on the show again until or unless Noah has acquired the presence to stand alongside his predecessor without seeming lost.

Steve Carell's appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was a much happier experience all around. The two old friends swapped stories and praised each other to the skies, but never let too much time elapse between jokes. If it wasn't quite the comedic gem that Carell's triumphant return to The Daily Show was in 2005, it still made for thoroughly entertaining TV. (I'll even forgive Carell his totally believable but completely fake reluctance to sing with Colbert.)

A plea to Donald Trump's supporters

In case you somehow missed it, Donald Trump called for keeping Muslims from entering the U.S. He wouldn't make an exception for anybody, including U.S. citizens.

To Trump supporters everywhere: I'm asking you — no, I'm begging you — to stop for a moment.

I'm not asking you to put yourself in the shoes of a Muslim, because you might not have any idea what that's like. I certainly don't.

I'm asking you to put yourself in the shoes of your grandparents. Or your great-grandparents. Or your friend's father or mother.

You don't have to be Japanese to see that what we did to Japanese-American civilians (and to a lesser extent, to German-American and Italian-American civilians) at the outset of World War II was a cruel and unjustified punishment of innocent people.

You don't have to be Irish or Italian or Chinese to appreciate how badly these groups were treated at various times in our nation's history.

You don't have to be Catholic or Jewish to see how irrational bigotry harmed innocent adherents to these religions.

I guarantee you that if you aren't a first- or second-generation American yourself, your ancestors who were experienced bigotry and calumny at the hands of suspicious "already-heres" who didn't take kindly to the new people arriving on these shores.

The vast majority of Muslims live peaceful lives in the U.S. They're as horrified by terrorist attacks as the rest of us are.

"But they espouse hate!" Some of them do. But then, so do some Christians. There are Christian leaders who call for killing gays. The latter aren't just fringe figures, either: they're politically significant enough that three Republican presidential candidates paid them a visit.

Should we vent our frustration and anger at these hateful people by visiting vengeance on all Christians?

I'm asking you, supporters of Donald Trump, to take a few moments to calm down. Think what tarring whole ethnic and religious groups with a broad brush has done in the past, very likely to one or more of your own ancestors.

This country is a marvelous experiment in getting people of a thousand different cultures to live in relative harmony. It has been a rocky road at times. We bump against one another and piss one another off on a regular basis, it seems. But we share a commitment to making it work. Really. We do. One of the more eloquent testaments to the strength of that commitment is the example of the 442nd Infantry Regiment from World War II: even after the racist and vindictive treatment of their parents, these American-born men of Japanese ethnic ancestry believed enough in American ideals to lay their lives on the line for them.

But ours is a fragile experiment. The threat isn't from ISIS or Russia or China or anybody else. It's from a strain of thought that seeks to atomize us, to divide us, to pit us one against another on the basis of race, religion, or some other factor. ISIS can't destroy us — but we can.

And Donald Trump's rhetoric points the way.

So again, I'm asking you supporters of Donald Trump to pause, and put yourself in the shoes of The Other. Your ancestors were The Other at some point.

Trump isn't going to listen to me. He might listen to you, though.

Tell him he's playing right into ISIS' hands. Tell him we need to win the war of ideas as well as the shooting war. Tell him that "shutting down" entry by Muslims would confirm the worst suspicions of people around the world about Americans. It would be a betrayal of our principles from which it would take us generations to recover.

Please. Tell him.

The illusion of discriminating between refugees

Jeffrey Tayler posits in a Salon piece that Donald Trump might be right about one thing (contrary to all the abundant evidence that he is a serial liar): we should be very careful about accepting more refugees from Syria. The facts, he says, favor caution: Islamic fundamentalism is on the rise and has as alarming a rate of infection as Ebola (my simile, not his). Tayler's okay with accepting those refugees who are Christian. But, perhaps as a sop to people who find discriminating on the basis of religion to be not just immoral but exceedingly stupid, he adds, "why not consider seeking out atheist Syrian asylum seekers, few though they may be?"

Tayler is an idiot.

I would guess that people have lied on their applications about their religious affiliation without our catching it. Moreover, Tayler cites the statistic that, of 66 Muslims arrested for plotting terrorist attacks in the U.S. in the last year and a half, "four out of 10 were converts to Islam". Syrian Christians and atheists aren't going to be more immune to conversion than anybody else.

No evaluation for asylum is going to reveal whether somebody is a threat in waiting. No amount of interviewing and fingerprinting and database-searching is going to reveal somebody's heart or peer into his future.

We can't totally foreclose another terrorist attack. We are going to have to learn to live with the risk.

I say, we should honor the promise Obama made and admit 10,000 Syrian refugees after the requisite vetting. It's more than a lot of people want and a lot less than we, a very prosperous nation, probably owe the world, but again, that's the promise we made.

Either that, or just close the border to everybody.

Just stop the hand-wringing already. Don't pretend we can just let in the "good" kind of refugee. That's a fucking illusion, and I'm sick of all the fucking illusions already hobbling us (e.g., "climate change isn't real").

Straight-up domestic terrorism

So — another mass shooting. And this one, you can't blame on mental illness. Robert Dear's only mental defect is an unholy zeal fueled by far-right anti-abortion rhetoric. (Oh, and talk-radio pundits, he's not Muslim, either. He's a white 'Mercun male, the kind of fellow you consider the backbone of the nation.)

Anti-abortion activists, you made him. Take your bows. He cares so much for what you call unborn children that in order to protect them, he's happy to kill full-grown adults, including at least one police officer.

A police officer. A good guy with a gun. Not that he matters more than the other victims, but, well, you pundits who piously weep for aborted embryos also insist on respect for cops. The shooter must have missed that memo.

You anti-abortion activists want to own this massacre? It seems only fair, considering what you accuse Planned Parenthood of doing.

When you incite the kind of outrage anti-abortion activists do, you guarantee that what starts as moral fervor will turn into rage when fervor doesn't lead to satisfactory results. You turn ordinary people into religious crusaders, or rather, Crusaders: guys so inflamed by missionary zeal that any means is justifiable if it furthers their ends. Once, that meant slaughtering Muslims in the Middle East. Today, it means slaughtering M.D.s in the U.S. (Come to think of it, for some folks it has never lost its original meaning.)

All in God's name.

How about you anti-abortion activists lose some of your missionary zeal? As a matter of law, abortion is legal. As a matter of actual practice, Planned Parenthood's work consists overwhelmingly of family planning, the kind of work that reduces the need for abortions. You guys are sabotaging an organization that, if you'd let it do its work, would make the world far better according to your own lights than your religious hectoring does.

Stop making it a Christian jihad to end abortion.

Stop making homegrown terrorists.

We aren't Trump

Back in August I wrote:

Trump's in it for his ego. He wouldn't know what to do with the Presidency if it dropped into his lap. These two reasons explain why he says something offensive and/or appallingly ignorant every twenty-four hours without fail: it simultaneously keeps him in the spotlight while ensuring he will never, ever gain the GOP nomination.

(To "offensive" and "appallingly ignorant", add "outright false".)

It's early in the primary cycle (which is easy to forget since this godforsaken campaign has been going on for a year already) but I have to walk my earlier statement back. Actually, I have to admit I got it wrong.

Trump, in this benighted age, might just yell his way to the nomination. Worse, he seems to have deluded himself that he's ready to be President.

I'm not so down on my fellow voters as to predict he'll win the Presidency, but I'm nervous about the possibility.

I'm trying not to think hard thoughts about the poll respondents who keep him at the top of the Republican heap. I'm hoping they're signaling their fed-up-edness, and that's all; that, when the time comes to vote, they'll demonstrate they're more serious about the country than their answers to pollsters indicate. And to be fair, if you're being asked which Republican candidate you support, it's not like any of the choices is palatable. But still ... Trump?

I suppose they could be trying to tell Ted Cruz to stop being so diplomatic (yeah, writing that kind of made me choke) and to say what he really thinks, which I admit would be grimly refreshing. For one thing, he might admit that his appearance at a virulently antigay religious conference means he agrees with the "kill the gays: the Bible says so" preacher, Kevin Swanson. (Swanson clarified that he didn't want to kill the gays until attempts have been made to save their souls. What a prince — just like Lucifer.)

Any way you slice it, the embrace of Trump, and the larger embrace by his fellow Republicans of so much of his hateful rhetoric that indiscriminately blames whole ethnic groups for complex problems, is a tragic spectacle.

This is not going to be remembered as a proud era in American history. Our descendants will not be kind, either to Trump, or to the supporters who enabled him to poison our political discourse.

As for the rest of us, we can only hold our noses — and keep fighting the good fight.

We're better than Trump.

Huckabee being sued over song

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is being sued over his campaign's unauthorized playing of "Eye of the Tiger".

I detest Huckabee's fundamentalist, intolerant stance on many issues. Even so, I kind of feel for the guy.

"When the person made a complaint, there was an offer made to pay him and issue an apology," said the presidential candidate, who continues to struggle in the polls and was demoted to the undercard debate in Milwaukee. "We don’t want to run somebody’s music who hates my guts. I get that."

I'll take him at his word on this. It does kind of suck that an apology and restitution wasn't enough. (Caveat: we haven't heard from the plaintiff, one of the song's writers. Maybe the campaign didn't handle the negotiations well and honked him off somehow.)

That said, political campaigns, particularly Republican ones, have a habit of playing songs first and seeking forgiveness later. Reagan's campaign infamously used "Born in the U.S.A." without asking Springsteen (and apparently without understanding the lyrics, which are scathing toward the simpleminded patriotism he espoused); Trump used Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World" and R.E.M.'s "It's the End of the World As We Know It" without asking. Huckabee is neither Reagan nor Trump (though he exhibits some of the least savory aspects of both), but I suspect he's reaping the music world's resentment of the trend.

Musicians have good reason to hit back at politicians' unauthorized use of their music. First, copyright enforcement has to be vigorous or the holder risks losing the copyright. Second, musicians risk being linked to the politicians in people's minds. Artists of any stripe live and die by their reputations: they have to guard those reputations as carefully as any brand.

Maybe if Huckabee weren't so polarizing a figure, or the context of the song's unauthorized use hadn't been a rally for Kim Davis, one of the most polarizing figures in recent memory, he might have been able to settle the matter quietly. We don't know. The bottom line, though, is that a lawsuit was always possible. He and his campaign knew that. So when I say "I kind of feel for the guy", the emphasis is on "kind of".