The Dark Machiavellian More Hated Than Feared: Kissinger at 100

If you want to know why Henry Kissinger is the most demonized motherfucker on the planet, read the quick historical rehash by Slate's Fred Kaplan of Kissinger's body counts while handling the United States' foreign policy efforts at the height of the Cold War between the 1960s through 1970s (with a dark realization his policy ideas lived on well into the modern-day War On Terror). 

Kissinger had his moments of triumph in his years of power, from 1969–76: U.S.–Soviet détente, the opening of China, and his shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East (though it was President Jimmy Carter who, a few years later, forged an enduring peace between Israel and Egypt).

Still, the dark side of Kissinger’s tradecraft left a deeper stain on vast quarters of the globe—and on America’s own reputation.

Chile is the darkest blotch on Kissinger’s legacy. He was the chief architect of the U.S. policy to destabilize the regime of Chile’s democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende...

This was not a case of Kissinger merely doing Nixon’s dirty work. In fact, Nixon was considering a proposal by a senior State Department official—one of Kissinger’s aides—to reach a modus vivendi with Allende. Kissinger postponed a White House meeting with the aide and convinced Nixon to crush the new government instead...

He did the same thing three years later, after the Argentine coup, whose military leaders were even more brutal and murderous. In fact, he berated an aide who suggested issuing a démarche to the Buenos Aires government. Instead, Kissinger turned a blind eye to Operation Condor, an assassination operation against left-wingers throughout much of Latin America. In that context, he told Argentina’s foreign minister, “Look, our basic attitude is that we would like you to succeed.” And he urged him to succeed—that is, to put down dissidents and critics—as quickly as possible. State Department officials and ambassadors started issuing protests to the dictators in charge of Condor. Kissinger put the kibosh on their efforts, demanding that “no further actions be taken on the matter.”

Kissinger also gave a green light to Indonesia’s 1975 invasion of East Timor, which resulted in the killing of more than 100,000 civilians. He told Gen. Suharto, Indonesia’s leader, that his use of U.S. weapons “could create problems”—that is, legal problems for Nixon and Kissinger—but added, “It depends on how we construe it: whether it is in self-defense or is a foreign operation.” An East Timor Truth Commission later concluded that U.S. political and military support for Suharto was “fundamental to the Indonesian invasion and occupation.”

This was all of a piece with Kissinger’s actions, back in the spring of 1971, after the East Pakistan coup led by Gen. Agha Muhammad Yahya, which led to the deaths of millions of civilians. “To all hands,” Kissinger supported the coup, writing in a cable to diplomatic personnel, “don’t squeeze Yahya at this time.”

And, of course, dominating Kissinger’s entire time in power, there were the massive bombings of North Vietnam, which did nothing to turn or stop the war, and the secret bombings of Cambodia. The latter—a ferocious stream of aerial attacks that began in March 1969 and roared on for more than a year under the code names “Breakfast Plan” and “Operation Menu”—killed as many as 150,000 civilians. It also so destabilized the entire country of Cambodia that the Khmer Rouge moved into the vacuum and murdered at least 2 million more, roughly a quarter of the country’s population.

There's a reason why whenever a beloved celebrity like Tina Turner passes away, the immediate social media reaction is "Why the fuck is Kissinger still alive?"

Kissinger still lives because he converted political connections into personal power, and because the United States refuses to hand him over for war crimes or any other crimes against humanity he clearly caused across his career (and the bloody legacy he left in his wake).

Kissinger defends himself to this day by arguing the global struggle against Communism required a "realpolitik" response: That is, to be as brutal and undermining as the Stalin-backed insurgencies had been in the 1950s across Eastern Europe and then the Third World. In this, Kissinger describes himself as a Machiavellian, in that "the ends justified the means" in ensuring American economic and political influence on the world stage.

If Kissinger truly is a Machiavellian, he overlooked one of the key teachings: In Machiavelli's question "whether it is better to be Loved or Feared," Machiavelli answered his own question by pointing out "It is more important to avoid being Hated" because in that moment you lose the Respect a Prince - or any leader - needs to keep himself in power.

In Kissinger's wake were dozens of nations broken, bloodied, left to suffer under dictatorial regimes backed by American muscle. The citizenry of those nations did not, will not forget that the United States - selling ourselves as a beacon of liberty and justice - became hypocritical monsters turning a blind eye to the suffering of those who begged for liberty and justice for their own.

In this, the United States remains a target of hate across the Third World nations that we need to deal with in our ongoing efforts to maintain global political stability (which we've learned is a better way to maintain our interests through strong economies built on trade and cooperation).

Because of that legacy, Henry Kissinger remains a Prince more Hated than Feared, and clearly never Loved. I don't care what Jill St. John saw in him.

Putin As Failed Machiavellian

I know I take Machiavelli a little too serious when it comes to history and leadership evaluations.

I know this because his reputation post-Prince is a mixed bag at best. Bouncing between criticisms of immorality and glamorizing criminal behavior in politics, to either being a wry satire of other political polemics of its day and thus should not be taken literally, to being a bad influence on 20th Century dictators, and more recently a dated, unrealistic how-to manual to manage political high office.

However, I'm kind of with Erica Bremmer at The Guardian when it comes to understanding The Prince: a neutral reading of the work showed me how Machiavelli was trying to warn leaders about avoiding despotism that tends to leave their empires in ruins. As Bremmer notes:

Yet the more I read, the more I questioned this story. I started noticing that Machiavelli’s writings speak in different voices at different times. At one moment he seems to applaud men who break their oaths at will, caring little for just dealings. But he also says – in a passage most scholars pass over – that “victories are never secure without some respect, especially for justice”. For every cynical Machiavellian precept, I found two or three others that clashed with it...

Where suggestions in The Prince would justify some underhanded tactic like bribery, or use of force, Machiavelli would then also offer warnings, reminders that the powers-that-be need to temper their actions lest they cross a line with their citizenry that can't be undone.

One of the Prince's most famous philosophical debates is the question: Is it better to be Loved or Feared? Machiavelli noted that being both Loved and Feared is the best possible state, but difficult to achieve. Being Loved is good but relies too much on mercy and leniency, and vulnerable to others who would abuse that Love for their own greed. 

The argument falls on Being Feared as the more manageable, but even then Machiavelli gives a great warning that leaders must avoid letting that Fear become Hate:

For a man may very well be Feared and yet not Hated, and this will be the case so long as he does not meddle with the property or with the women of his citizens and subjects. And if constrained to put any to death, he should do so only when there is manifest cause or reasonable justification... a wise Prince should build on what is his own, and not on what rests with others. Only, as I have said, he must do his utmost to escape hatred...

A later chapter goes into a little more detail:

A Prince, as I have said before, sooner becomes hated by being rapacious and by interfering with the property and with the women of his subjects, than in any other way. From these, therefore, he should abstain. For so long as neither their property nor their honour is touched, the mass of mankind live contentedly, and the Prince has only to cope with the ambition of a few, which can in many ways and easily be kept within bounds...

Or as Guido the Killer Pimp once said (paraphrasing), Never ever fuck with another man's livelihood. In short, do not fuck with a person's employment or personal life. As long as you don't piss off too many people, you'll stay a Prince:

To be brief, a Prince has little to fear from conspiracies when his subjects are well disposed towards him; but when they are hostile and hold him in detestation, he has then reason to fear everything and every one. And well ordered States and wise Princes have provided with extreme care that the nobility shall not be driven to desperation, and that the commons shall be kept satisfied and contented; for this is one of the most important matters that a Prince has to look to...

It's not said directly in his work, but later political observers and philosophers interpreted from Machiavelli's warnings that the real answer is that the leader must seek Respect above all else. You can be Loved and Respected for your integrity, valor, courage, what have you, and stay in power: You can be Feared and Respected for your cunning, decisiveness, judicious application of force, what have you, and stay in power. As long as your soldiers/office workers/voters Respect you for getting the job done, you're solid and cool.

One reason why I keep referring back to Machiavelli: When I read my histories and witness the evils of war, bloodshed, and strife - and sometimes when I reviewed the Characters of our American Presidents using Professor Barber as a guide - I keep spotting where the political leaders responsible for a lot of the suffering tended to be the Machiavellian types seeking to rule by Fear but failing to retain - or even failing to gain in the first place - the Respect of those they sought to rule.

Good Presidents - at least the ones we admire and respect even decades after their deaths - are the ones who performed competently even in matters of, well, moral uncertainty. As long as most of your citizenry prosper and are left untouched by some of your questionable decisions, you should do well as a leader.

So how does all of this talk about Machiavelli involve Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin? The Prince of Russia, leader of one of the major global powers, backed by a massive mechanized army and a nuclear arsenal, overseeing a financial kleptocratic empire that has inspired fear and dread among other nations and his political enemies for over 20 years?

Because Putin, with regards to his invasion of Ukraine this past month, screwed up royally.

The entire endeavor - spurred on by Putin's gaslighting over Ukraine's very existence and by his desire to rebuild a greater Russian empire - exposed both Russia and Putin for levels of incompetence and brutality that eliminated any respect that outside observers had of them. The political leadership under Putin failed to properly plan for the early days of the invasion, relying on a military force that proved to be under-trained, under-supplied, and way under any level of morale. As a result of those miscues, Putin appears to be doubling down on committing enough atrocities towards Ukrainian civilians in order to weaken their defiance into enough fear to make them surrender.

But that's not going to happen because Ukrainians already hated Putin - and they hated the Russian arrogance that treated them as second-class citizens under Tsarist and then Communist rule - to where they will never surrender to him.

In this, Putin had already failed as a Machiavellian figure. Despite all these years of him committing enough crimes - the blatant fraud, the wars against Chechnya and Georgia, the undisguised assassinations and attempts on his exiled critics, the success of manipulating the rise of populist Far Right governments across the western democracies, seizing Crimea and Eastern Ukraine in a border clash when Ukrainians overthrew a corrupt pro-Putin regime - to generate fear of him as a Prince, in just two weeks of stiff Ukrainian resistance he has been exposed as an arrogant bully. More clueless and desperate for violent victory than the rest of the world had realized.

It's gotten to where Putin is no longer feared, but openly hated. And not just among Ukrainians (who have obvious reasons right now). 

Hatred for Putin is something getting suppressed in homeland Russia, but the resentments among Russians are building up now that the overt corruption is exposing the once-hidden incompetence. And in spite of martial law and stiff penalties issued against protesting, a lot of Russians are risking all of that out of hatred for Putin (via Rachel Treisman at NPR):

Thousands of people turned out in cities across Russia this weekend to protest the war in Ukraine, risking arrest in a country where such demonstrations are illegal. Many of them were detained and some subjected torture as a result, according to an independent Russian human rights group.

Police detained more than 4,640 protesters in 65 Russian cities on Sunday, according to the monitoring group OVD-Info. It says more than 13,000 Russians in 147 cities have been detained at anti-war rallies since Russia first invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24...

Those may not sound like big numbers in a Russia with around 130 million souls, but each of these protestors are representative of hundreds of others who dare not risk the arrests. For now.

Based on a lot of the military assessments getting leaked to the press, the analysts experienced in these matters are suggesting that the Russian invasion is due to fail soon to both catastrophic loss of supplies and collapse of troop morale. It's not 100 percent a given, but all signs do point to at worst a prolonged struggle that Putin's ongoing propaganda efforts back home can't cover up.

Francis Fukuyama once wrote at the end of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War a little thing called The End of History, which made him a media darling when it came to talking about Russia vs. The West. So when he pens an online essay about "Preparing For Defeat," there's a reason to pay attention:

Russia is heading for an outright defeat in Ukraine. Russian planning was incompetent, based on a flawed assumption that Ukrainians were favorable to Russia and that their military would collapse immediately following an invasion. Russian soldiers were evidently carrying dress uniforms for their victory parade in Kyiv rather than extra ammo and rations. Putin at this point has committed the bulk of his entire military to this operation—there are no vast reserves of forces he can call up to add to the battle. Russian troops are stuck outside various Ukrainian cities where they face huge supply problems and constant Ukrainian attacks...

The collapse of their position could be sudden and catastrophic, rather than happening slowly through a war of attrition. The army in the field will reach a point where it can neither be supplied nor withdrawn, and morale will vaporize. This is at least true in the north...

Putin will not survive the defeat of his army. He gets support because he is perceived to be a strongman; what does he have to offer once he demonstrates incompetence and is stripped of his coercive power?...

The lies selling this war are going to pile up to where even Putin's hardest supporters will doubt his word, and the setbacks can well get bloody to where enough Russian families are horrified by the loss of their loved ones to set blame on leader Putin who led them to such a fate. Any respect Putin relied on to rule - that reputation as a strongman - is already out the window (metaphor intended) across the world, and that will eventually reach the eyes and ears of most Russians.

It's not that Putin could have ever ruled through Love. It is that Putin did a decent enough job early on to rule through Fear by burnishing his power to be the biggest kleptocrat, and by silencing a number of critics and rivals through assassination and brutality to enforce his strongman image at home.

But Putin isn't a strongman anymore. He's just another struggling dictator starting unjust wars just like all the other failed monsters of history.

It's terrifying that Putin's failure is going to cost so many innocent lives.

Anniversary: End of the Soviet Union

It's an event from 30 years ago that signaled a major tidal shift in the long river of history. On this Christmas Day back in 1991, the leader of the Soviet Union - ye olde USSR, the stronghold of Communism since World War I, the scourge of Capitalist Western Values, shaky ally against the Nazis in World War II, the superpower rival to the United States since 1945 - Mikhail Gorbachev resigned from his office as President and ended the Soviet Union once and for all.

Via Vladimir Isachenkov at AP News:

People strolling across Moscow’s snowy Red Square on the evening of Dec. 25, 1991 were surprised to witness one of the 20th century’s most pivotal moments — the Soviet red flag over the Kremlin pulled down and replaced with the Russian Federation’s tricolor.

Just minutes earlier, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev announced his resignation in a live televised address to the nation, concluding 74 years of Soviet history.

In his memoirs, Gorbachev, now 90, bitterly lamented his failure to prevent the USSR’s demise, an event that upset the world’s balance of power and sowed the seeds of an ongoing tug-of-war between Russia and neighboring Ukraine.

“I still regret that I failed to bring the ship under my command to calm waters, failed to complete reforming the country,” Gorbachev wrote.

Political experts argue to this day whether he could have held onto his position and saved the USSR. Some charge that Gorbachev, who came to power in 1985, could have prevented the Soviet breakup if he had moved more resolutely to modernize the anemic state-controlled economy while keeping tighter controls on the political system...

Thing was, Gorbachev really couldn't: No one outside of a full-on autocrat could have forced through the economic reforms because the political corruption and economic corruption were too intertwined. Just look at today: Putin has the political power but does so through economic corruption which is sapping at modern Russia's strength. An autocrat in Gorbachev's situation wouldn't have made any attempts at reform in the first place, he'd have kept the stagnant system chugging along.

It would take a book - no, a library full of books - to go into how the Communist Utopian ideals of the 19th Century gave way to the revolutionary violence of Lenin's overthrow of Tsarist Russia, and the steps towards corruption - the rise of Party elites, the rise of Stalin to place all power into autocratic rule, the buildup of party bureaucracy that calcified Soviet society, the Greed of elites that always threatens every economic system we know, and everyday state-sanctioned brutality that dulled the Russian population into despair - that created by the 1980s a Soviet empire incapable of maintaining itself without serious reforms.

With respect to Gorbachev, it was that need for reform that led to his rise to high office in the first place. Problem was, the reforms that were needed most - honesty from leadership, cracking down on party corruption, curtailing the high costs of maintaining a war footing in a 40-year-long Cold War that included policing their own Eastern European "allies" (occupied territories, really) - were reforms that Gorbachev's own party couldn't abide.

During all of Gorbachev's early steps to fix a broken empire, the Soviet Union was hit hard by the reality of their own corruption causing for example the meltdown of the Chernobyl reactor, exposing not only their engineering failures but their political failures to respond effectively to crises. The empire itself came to an end when Gorbachev freed the Eastern European nations to decide their own policies to enact local reforms: Instead, nearly every nation from Poland to Bulgaria to Czechoslovakia to Hungary to East Germany broke off from Soviet influence as their Communist regimes collapsed with mass uprisings and protests overthrowing them (Only Romania fell through mass violence and bloodshed, alas). By November 1989 the Berlin Wall fell and Communism as an economic utopian ideal fell with it.

Whatever ideology Gorbachev was trying to use to keep the Soviet Union itself intact wasn't sticking. The push for Glasnost - open transparency of the political bureaucracy - and Perestroika - economic reforms to shift away from Communism to a more Socialist model - met with pushback by lower rungs of the system that preferred the corrupt status quo. Any economic reforms implemented failed with supply shortages and mismanagement.

By 1991, resistance to reform led to rebellion by a faction of Community Party leaders who wanted to go back to the way things were under Stalin Khrushchev Brezhnev. In August - responding to Gorbachev's plan to decentralize power to the 15 Soviet states that made up the USSR - that faction staged a coup attempt by "arresting Gorbachev" and passing power to Gorbachev's VP Gennady Yanayev, with the faction becoming a "Committee" overseeing the "state of emergency" they themselves were staging.

In the bleak style of Russian humor, they failed. Nothing they did went right. It was like the coup plotters believed that all they had to do was capture Gorbachev, go on state television to announce a calm transfer of power, and the majority of the population would just roll over like always.

Except too much had changed by then. In the Machiavellian measurement of "being Loved or Feared," the old Soviet hacks thought they were still Feared. But decades of party corruption had turned much of that fear into Hatred, and the Russian population - along with the other ethnicities that made up the USSR - had seen enough out of the Soviets to rise up in protests against the coup.

Helped by the fact that Gorbachev's decentralization plan would have empowered them, the regional leadership - especially Boris Yeltsin, a political rival of Gorbachev - called for the protests and avoided arrest. Attempts by the coup to shut down radio stations failed. When they called in troops to establish control of Moscow, the brief skirmish left three protestors dead and only enraged the mobs more. There was this quiet realization that the plotters hadn't thought this through, and hadn't counted on escalating any crackdowns.

Whereas Stalin wouldn't have hesitated to send in tanks and let his secret police round up everyone for executions, Yanayev and his bunch couldn't work up the nerve. Which was a good thing for the protestors and for history in general. Without that threat of violence to back them, the plotters turned on each other (several committed suicide) and were arrested themselves.

It was Soviet Communism's last dying gasp.

From then on, Yeltsin held the upper hand over Gorbachev, who no longer had a Soviet state or Communist party he could control. The decentralization plan went through, creating a Commonwealth of Independent States by early December with Russia itself a federation. By then, Gorbachev's departure wasn't a matter of If it was a matter of When, and Christmas seemed like the best time to do it.

Thirty years later, we're still dealing with the ramifications.

Russia as its own state is still a major global player: A permanent stock of nuclear weapons will do that for a nation. In terms of economic power, it's actually slid out of the top bracket - nations like Brazil and India generate more GNP - and they're still struggling to regain any foothold there. 

The corruption that led to the end of the Soviet Union never went away. The kleptocracy that defined the Communist Party re-emerged with the oligarchy - and organized crime - that controls Russia today. Putin's authoritarian power flows from the greed of the national elites, each side feeding off the other to keep Russia broke, stagnant, and hungry to steal from every other nation around them.

In some respects, the threat was never Communism, nor was it Capitalism. It's Greed. A universally recognized human sin that caused the collapse of one empire (USSR), consumed its remnants (Russia), and threatens our American empire here.

I'd wish that was the lesson from history the rest of us could have learned.

Anniversary: Thirty Years Later, Tiananmen Remains a Unfulfilled Promise

Back in 1989, by this date June 4, the democracy protests in China had been going on for a month or so.

A combination of college-age, labor groups, and retired Chinese had gathered in key spots - eventually joining up in the major center of Beijing called Tiananmen Square - demanding political reforms to coincide with the economic reforms the post-Maoist government was trying to implement during the 1980s.

It went along with a growing protest movement in Eastern Europe, where Soviet Russian control was slipping away as Gorbachev's government could no longer afford the massive military and political buildup of the Soviet Bloc.

For a month, the Chinese leadership tried their best to keep a lid on it all, but international media coverage made that impossible, and the Communist regime itself had fissures between reformists and statists vying for control of the whole government.

By June 4, someone along the official chain of command decided "Fuck it," and unleashed the Army into Tiananmen Square.

The official accounts minimized the casualties. The unofficial accounts put the death toll in the thousands.

It led to the China we know today: An economic powerhouse that's also a massive prison for its own citizenry. The facts of that massacre are constantly whitewashed and censored (I bet this minor little blog has been blocked. My librarian blog, however, gets a lot of Chinese spam so who knows...). The few places in China that know the truth - Hong Kong, which was under British rule in 1989 for example - are forced to keep a lid on their outrage.

This is the world that China sees anymore (via AP News):

Dissidents silenced. Security tightened. References scrubbed from the internet.

China went into customary lockdown Tuesday for the 30th anniversary of the bloody military crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, a telling reminder of the ruling Communist Party’s emphasis in the ensuing three decades since on stability above all.

Extra checkpoints and street closures greeted tourists who showed up before 5 a.m. to watch the daily flag-raising ceremony at Tiananmen Square, the main gathering point for the 1989 protests. People overseas found themselves blocked from posting anything to a popular Chinese social media site.

The seven-week-long Tiananmen Square protests and their bloody end — hundreds if not thousands of people are believed to have died — snuffed out a tentative shift toward political liberalization. Thirty years later, social restrictions such as family size and where people can live have been loosened, but political freedom remains for the most part strictly controlled with little prospect for change...

There is a terrible conflict at play here. China's international role is growing - unavoidable due to being the largest populated nation on the planet, its military strength, its economic engines - but its accountability to the world hampered by its own paranoia and sadism.

China's failures at openness makes it difficult to be trusted as an economic partner, even as other Pacific Rim and Asian countries - Japan, Australia, Canada, South American nations, India - are forced to deal with them to keep their own trade deals and economies running well. (I'd include the United States in this argument but trump's tariffs make that a joke)

The leadership fears the truth of Tiananmen, and fears its own citizenry as part of that. But they can't imprison everyone... so they imprison just enough to keep the rest terrified and in line. That leads to the problems of Fear and Hate: Machiavelli's warning to not rely too much on Fear because that drives victims into Hating you, and once that happens you lose control.

This paranoia forces China into massive human rights abuses against entire groups like the Uighurs in western China, a Muslim population forced into "reeducation camps" and forced to renounce their religion through humiliating acts of torture. The authoritarian leadership won't stop there, a nation as big and diverse as China has tens of ethnic and religious minorities that the bosses can't trust, have to correct, need to put down...

The sad thing, there's little the international community can do. Our own protests and government sanctions can only go so far. The best we can do on the sidelines is cheer on the protesters and hope they don't get killed again. Any change in China is going to have to come from within (the very thing the Chinese Communist Party fears the most).

In the meantime, it's been thirty years since we've seen this man, and once again we need a reminder that this brave soul stood up for freedom at a terrible personal price:

Tank Man is my brother. I hope he's still alive even after thirty years. I hope I can meet him some day. So I can ask him what it was like. So I can buy him a cup of tea and drink it in Tiananmen Square.

The Desolation of Daenerys: How Game of Thrones End Tonight

As we await the series finale of a program that concluded before the book series it's based on did, we need to talk about how we got here.

Game of Thrones was pretty much exactly what the label says: A show about a squabbling group of fantasy-world noble houses fighting Musical Chairs over an Iron Throne made up of melted swords and really uncomfortable to sit on (it was uncomfortable to look at).

You had the banished Targaryens, a power-mad (emphasis on mad) dynasty that rose to kinghood literally on the backs of dragons. You had the Lannisters, prideful lions who deemed themselves masters of all. You had schemers like the Tyrells, vengeance-seekers like the Martells. You had sea pirate Greyjoys, essentially the Internet Trolls of Westeros politics. You had the stubborn, unhappy Baratheons. You had the honorable Starks and the mindful Tullys, who didn't want to play the game but whose honor (or political value) made them players.

And among them you had schemers and plotters: Varys and Littlefinger, debating over order and chaos; and the slavers of Essos and the masters of the Braavos Iron Bank. Above all of that you had the massive elemental force of a White Walker zombie apocalypse, a storm of ice and death that our heroes had to defeat first before they could resolve the more minor matter of the Iron Throne itself.

That was all pretty much resolved in last week's episode when Daenerys Targaryen, the sole official Targaryen riding the last known dragon, decided to play the Game of Thrones far rougher than the fanbase wanted her to do:

There's been a ton of outrage about how this final Season Eight has played out, mostly due to the rushed nature of the storylines and the sudden, maddening shifts of character loyalties and behavior that the casual audiences didn't get. It's bad enough that an online petition grew to have all of Season Eight "redone by competent writers" as though that would likely improve things.

That wouldn't matter, people. The show is following the rough outlines of George RR Martin's master plot, which means this ending is what Martin is expecting from his work and how his fantasy world is destined to end whether YOU like it or not.

AND THAT'S THE POINT. As Ramsay Snow famously said early on "If you think this has a happy ending, you haven't been paying attention."

Martin's overall narrative on Game of Thrones is a grand play on leadership and power. To quote Varys' early riddle to Tyrion: Power resides where men believe it resides. The power of the Iron Throne is based mostly on how someone can back up their claim for it, based on either two sources of Love or Fear to do so.

For all of Jon Snow's foolishness - yes, he does know nothing, his leadership and actions all based on bravado and chronic desire to do Good instead of doing Right - Snow has ended up as the Machiavellian model of a beloved leader. He becomes a respected member of the Night's Watch at the Wall and even gets voted in as its Lord Commander (against the ire and envy of more veteran, but more brutal, figures like Alliser Thorne). Through betrayal and bad decisions, Snow still survives due to sheer luck and rescuing by other figures, and yet retains a charisma that makes the show's heroes and fighters gravitate towards him as a "natural" leader, eventually making him King of the North when all other viable figures - Robb and Bran and Rickon - are killed or removed from power (the sisters due to male primogeniture are reduced to minor players even though Sansa has grown into arguably the true Queen of the North behind Jon's back).

Along all this is how Jon doesn't *want* power - he is driven more by Duty and Honor to wield it - even though it's revealed especially in-show this eighth season that he's the direct true heir to the Iron Throne as a secret Targaryen love child between Rhaegar and Lyanna Stark. Once it's gone public, Jon claims he doesn't want the throne and willingly passes it to Daenerys... but that aversion to power just makes him more popular among the power-brokers of Westeros.

Which brings us to Daenerys.

When people registered shock at how she destroyed King's Landing in Episode Five, they seemed to have forgotten that Daenerys has been a stone-cold killer throughout the series. Driven both by a divine sense of righteousness - taught since her youth that the Iron Throne is hers by birthright - and a brutal sense of justice - to avenge even the slightest wrong committed on her - this daughter of the Mad King Aerys has left a swath of destruction in her wake.

Think back to all the acts of vengeance she takes: Against the witch that sterilized her and left her first beloved Dothraki Horse-Lord Drogo a mindless half-dead wretch, against the cruel masters of Qarth and the wizard who dared steal her dragons, against the Astapor slavers who tried to buy her dragons in exchange for the Unsullied army Daenerys would need to conquer Westeros Essos. When she approaches Meereen, the city masters crucify 163 children to mock her... and crucifies 163 masters in return (even the ones who had nothing to do with torturing/killing those children). She uses her dragons - either with fire or teeth - to enforce her position when stealthy terrorists known as the Sons of the Harpy undermine her rule. She gets captured by Dothraki lords who abandoned her after Drogo's death, and when they threaten to abuse and rape her she uses her family-based immunity from fire to trap them in a burning house to kill them all, leaving her in command of a suitably cowed Dothraki army.

Daenerys could be a vicious Mother (of Dragons) when she needed to be.

It was easy for fans to accept - and even forgive - Daenerys' actions because each time her opponents were evil and deserving of justice (even as the fairness or wisdom of her acts still made them horrifying). For all of Khaleesi's desire and belief that she was a beloved Breaker of Chains, her rule was no better than the despots she overthrew.

And all of this hits her hard when she finally arrives to her destiny in Westeros. Expecting a warm welcome in the face of Cersei Lannister's sadistic and violent claiming of the Iron Throne, instead she receives doubt and scorn by the remaining great Houses... and quickly loses allies like the surviving Tyrells and Martells. Forced to confront the Lannisters with her Dothraki army and her dragons, she regains control of the battlefield but is forced to publicly execute the head (and favored son) of a respected Tarly House, establishing her more of a tyrant than a chain-breaker. She tries to find love with fellow hero figure and survivor Jon Snow... but the revelation of Jon being her nephew by blood (falling back on the mad Targaryen habit of incest) and having a stronger claim to the Iron Throne disrupts any happiness she could find there. Dealing with Sansa - who reflected the hard reality of the North and of the Starks' view of power - turned uncomfortable and cold every time Daenerys tried to bond with her, isolating the Targaryen from her last strongest ally. Watching Jon get celebrated at the banquet following the Army of the Living's victory over the Night King while she sat there only isolated her even more. Even her Starbucks coffee could not comfort her, for the show editors whisked it away from future viewings. Losing her closest friend Missandei and losing her most devoted defender Jorah had to break her heart and spirit.

It's not that Daenerys went mad when the bells rang at King's Landing. It's that she'd always been like this: Ruthless, because it was the only way she could survive against a world that hated and betrayed her.

She openly decided to rule not by Love but by Fear.

Machiavelli opined that ruling by Fear is the optimal choice for a Prince... only so long as there was Respect for what the Prince did under his (or her) rule. In some ways, Daenerys had remained a favorite character - even a hero, the beloved Khaleesi - to the GoT fanbase because the audience respected how she got to where she was, why she had to do what she needed to do just to survive.

But her massacre of King's Landing becomes a troubling moment. Daenerys may have acted like this to impose a rule based on Fear, but she runs the great risk of becoming Hated, the thing Machiavelli warns against. By killing so many, by doing so in the most brutal way Westeros knows - in the fires spewed from a monstrous dragon - our Khaleesi becomes the Mad Queen, a bloody figure of her mad father's revenge against the Seven Kingdoms.

This final episode has a lot to resolve. The three major characters - Jon, Daenerys, Tyrion - have to face their destinies tonight. Tyrion - who wanted to play the game to defend his family (even as said family hated him) in order to gain a modicum of respect from a world that literally underestimated him - has to deal as a Hand (advisor) to a Queen who is no longer a forgiving sort (and now has no reason to keep him alive). Jon has to cope with his love (once sexual, now familial) for a Queen he can no longer bend his knee to. And Daenerys has to deal with the repercussions of all this death, sitting on an Iron Throne surrounded by damning ash instead of redemptive snow.

A lot could happen. Arya, who had fled the destruction of King's Landing scarred and broken, could return to her assassin's ways and kill the Queen, leaving the throne to Jon... who would abandon it as there was nothing in his mind or soul forcing him to stay. Jon could physically confront Daenerys, trying to gain control of Drogon the last dragon, break her rule and will somehow, possibly killing her or at least dying in her presence to shatter her resolve.

The ending I want to see tonight is Daenerys keeping her word to "Break the Wheel," to end a cycle of madness and powerlust for a throne no one (save Cersei) really wanted to sit in. To have Drogon blast that piece of metal into a thousand melted blades. For her to send the Unsullied home, freed from even her rule. The happiest ending would be Daenerys returning to her childhood home, described in the books as a comforting abode with a red door, and end her days there as the other characters end theirs in peace.

What am I doing?

This is Game of Thrones. No happy endings. Everybody you love fooking dies.

Valar Morghulis.

That Bubbly Sensation of Hope

I've commented on polling before. I've especially commented on how polling on trump's approval/popularity should be taken with a grain of salt because of how the Far Right adoration of him creates a false impression. For example, the fact that trump rarely if ever slid below the 40 percent approval threshold because the only number that mattered was the too-high 85-90 percent approval from just Republican voters skewing the averages.

Until now.

Referring to Martin Longman at Washington Monthly:

Until today, Trump’s approval numbers had been declining slowly but still holding at around 40 percent. A handful of recent surveys had him falling into the thirties, but they looked like outliers. But now the new AP/NORC survey has him at 34 percent and he’s fallen below the 40 percent threshold in the FiveThirtyEight aggregate of polls. Even Rasmussen and Hill-HarrisX have Trump at his lowest mark despite being consistent outliers in his favor...

It's not so much the decline in Republican support trump has - it's still pretty high - it's from the collapse of the Non-Party/Independent voters no longer viewing trump as either/or "effective" / "harmless". In this month of trump running into the brick wall of Pelosi's Democratic House, people are starting to see how bad of a dealer - how inept of a leader - he is.

Looking at the aggregate polling of the last two years actually shows a lower point in trump's polling numbers in late 2017, but he did crawl back out of that into the low-40s where he's usually treading water.

But the likelihood his numbers went up due to the Midterms - when the voting base was invested in turnout for his Congressional allies - is probably an explanation for that rise. Now that trump is on his own again, his numbers are sliding down due to his own bad moves.

It's interesting to note how this compares to previous Presidents. Obama in particular had an oscillating polling chart of approval. But where Obama bounced between 55 percent to 45 percent approval on average, trump is bouncing between 44 to 34 percent, vastly more unpopular than any other person sitting in the White House (even Dubya had months over 50 percent approval).

That's what happens when you're the President Loser of the Popular Vote.

It's that consistency of low polling that has me feeling a bit better about the numbers. The polling for non-Republican voters have sunk to near-record lows for an incumbent Republican candidate. For all the odds that favor incumbency in re-elections, there are election cycles when incumbency can't overcome bad optics. An incumbent who never breaks over the 50 percent water margin in polling even after years in office to prove his (in)abilities isn't going to find enough voters to win again (and trump never even won a majority in the first place).

And trump can't overcome the political axiom from Machiavelli I keep referring to: Always avoid being Hated rather than Feared or Loved, because when you lose people to Hate they will never look at you otherwise and they will do everything they can to throw you out of power.

It's not the low approval numbers, it's the opposite end of the scale, the DISAPPROVAL numbers, and as long as those are at 60 percent or so, trump ain't winning anything other than the 2020 primaries (if any Republican tries to primary him, that is).

There's one other polling number to keep an eye on. Voter turnout. The reason why Dems did so well winning the U.S. House of Representatives against hard odds - Republicans pushing every voter suppression trick in the book - was because voter turnout was the highest for a Midterms (Non-Presidential) Election cycle in over 100 years:

See that sharp spike on the brown line?

Granted, it's not a guarantee the Presidential election turnout (the gray line) will go up, but there is a trend there, you should notice the charts of the two different election cycles tend to match at peaks and valleys.

If there was that sharp a swing UP in voter turnout for the Midterms, we should expect - we should work towards - a similar spike UP in the Presidential Election in 2020.

And that's not a good sign for Republicans or trump: More voters will tend to come not from the extremist voter blocs that show up no matter what, the expanded voter turnout comes from the moderate/Independent voters who are rarely encouraged to vote on their own.

If THAT moderate, Indy leaning bloc shows up to vote in higher numbers, it's usually because of one thing: THEY'RE PISSED. Let's be honest: People don't vote when they're content, they tend to vote angry. And they vote angry against the SOBs mismanaging everything (hint: name rhymes with DUMP).

The 2016 Election cycle wasn't a good indicator of that, sad to note: there was a split among Indy voters 46-42 favoring trump over Hillary. For all my hope during that election cycle, Hillary was hated enough to lose voters. But Hillary's not running this 2020. For all the Far Right will try to do painting the Democratic candidates in as bad a light as Hillary, none of them share Hillary's unfavorable numbers. trump is going to be the most hated candidate on the ticket in 2020, and as Machiavelli warns, never be that hated...

So looking at several factors - trump's unpopularity gap reaching Dubya-esque levels, trump's losing support among non-partisan voters, higher voter turnout - there is a bit of hope this morning. There is a feeling that the nation as a whole is recognizing the nightmare we're in and doing something to stop it.

I did write before that the only number that mattered was the insanely artificially high approval numbers trump got from his Far Right Republican base. Granted, that's still in effect. But all it's doing now is keeping trump out of the mid-20s approval where he deserves to be. As trump starts to hover in the mid-30s at least for longer periods of time, fellow Republicans facing their own re-election concerns are going to view trump as the millstone he is.

The only thing from that point on will be the Far Right Media's control of the Republican Party to keep everyone in line. But even that is going to break sooner or later when their own Narrative can't support a deeply unpopular bastard like trump. Already unelected overlords Coulter and Rush are looking for the lifeboats.

So, today in 2019, there is a reason to know hope.

Problem is, 2020 is still too far away on the calendar to end this nightmare fast enough.

C'MON MUELLER INDICT EVERYBODY BETWEEN trump AND PUTIN ALREADY.

/sigh

Two Minutes to trumpocalypse

There's been a little too much noise this weekend that we may be - finally - facing the end of all things. Not the chatter about Iran and North Korea: I'm talking about the inevitable attempt by Loser of the Popular Vote and Russian Puppet donald trump to try and stop the ongoing investigation into Russia's attempts to compromise the 2016 Elections.

It seems that trump and ilk have seized on a - faulty - argument that Mueller is doing something illegal in the pursuit of emails managed by the GSA handling trump's campaign and transition efforts (via Balloon Juice):

FOX NEWS tweet: BREAKING NEWS: Trump transition team sends letter to lawmakers; claims Mueller team inappropriately obtained private documents.

WEALTHY ELITIST URBAN DWELLER re-tweet: Translation: they obtained embarrassing emails appropriately. 

Here's the Reality: Mueller's investigations went through the proper channels to request those emails, and it was up to GSA to respond or not which they did, and this IS standard prosecutorial procedure to go after such emails.

What trump and co. are trying to do is scrounge up a plausible-sounding excuse to shut down the investigation once and for all. Any excuse will do, really. Because like any mob-boss wannabe, trump doesn't like the law and doesn't feel like he should answer to the law.

Thing is, trump can't directly fire Mueller. There are layers to the bureaucracy that any President had to respect lest the whole thing collapses.

trump would have to fire the Deputy Attorney General responsible for the Special Counsel and then fire every Associate AG until one fired Mueller, or trump would have to rescind something called the Good Clause Regulation and fire Muller himself.

So what will happen if trump takes Option A, and fires everybody he can within the Department of Justice (or he gets a loyalist who'll do the job) in order to fire Mueller?

The likeliest response would be an entire Department of Justice - and the nineteen Intelligence Agencies investigating the Russian hacking of our election - turning in revolt against the White House. These intel agencies already have a good idea what Russia did, and what we know is just the stuff they can leak without compromising our own national security so the nasty stuff they can't release is likely way more criminal. If trump makes this move, all it will take is one of those agencies saying "fuck it" and reveal every nasty detail trump has hiding in his closet (including the already infamous Pee tape).

One thing we know is Mueller has tied much of his investigation into state efforts - especially New York - investigating trump's financial dealings. The likely response to Mueller getting canned is the New York state attorneys filing charges on EVERYONE in trump's circle - as they're ALL tied into his shady business practices - including trump himself. Presidents can't pardon state charges or convictions: if trump tries to burn that bridge down to save himself it would destroy the federal-state balance of government forever and spark a civil war between the states opposing his move - which could include Red States lead by governors who know better - and trump's White House. Congress may well blow up in response, with the Democrats clearly opposed and with enough Republicans terrified of the consequences of trump's actions versus the hardliners still trying to keep the GOP in power no matter what.

Option B - revoking a clause and firing Mueller outright - would be such a blatant move of Obstruction that trump will STILL face open rebellion by the DOJ, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the NCIS, and any other agency using alphabet soup to label themselves. Mueller will still hand over what he's got to the New York State Attorney and have New York arrest everyone from trump down to trump's golf caddy. The separation of powers between federal and state would still be imperiled and we'd still see open revolt among Republican elected officials.

And that's just within the halls of power in Washington. What do you think will happen among the population?

There's already 65 million ANGRY Hillary voters who view trump as illegal, that he cheated his way into the White House despite losing the popular vote and with clear evidence that Russia schemed to hack and manipulate votes to get trump to "win" enough states to skew the Electoral College. Not a one of them will accept Mueller's firing as "legal".

Add onto that the millions of Americans disapproving of trump's performance: his approval is hovering in the low 30s and his disapproval close to 60 percent of polled voters. Just imagine 60 percent of Americans angry enough to rebel against trump when he makes a move that pretty much confirms the worst they already think of him.

I keep thinking back to Machiavelli: it doesn't matter if you're loved or feared, it matters if you end up being HATED. Because at that point the ones hating you will do anything in their power to overthrow you and make your life a living hell.

trump is right now the most HATED man in the United States, and the rest of the world - Russia included - doesn't think well of him either. The only thing saving him from public riots storming the gates has been the people's respect for the Rule of Law, and the belief that the legal system will expose the facts and hold those accountable for their sins. If trump displays his contempt for the Rule of Law by firing Mueller - a blatant act of Obstruction - then nothing can save him past that point. trump will get his war.

It's just the war will be in our streets: between the protesters screaming for justice, and the pro-trump neo-Nazis all too eager to spill blood.

trump is reportedly planning to fire Mueller just as Christmas weekend starts - maybe this Friday, maybe Saturday - so he can prevent Mueller from doing any last-minute steps to preserve his evidence, or at least go off to another golf outing with the belief he's saved himself.

So here's where we are at now, America: trump ruining Christmas for the rest of us. That's how fucked up he is, and how much spite is in his heart for everyone else.

Here's hoping Mueller files his charges on everyone deserving of them - Kushner, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, trump junior, trump himself - this Monday. C'mon. You HAVE to have enough proof by now that trump is Putin's bitch. Drop the hammer. Make this a Christmas Americans can celebrate in relief.

Above All, A Machiavellian Master Must Be Competent

As of now, nearly every scandal with this trump Administration have been self-inflicted. That is, none of this would be happening if the people in charge - from trump on down to his handlers to their meager overworked staffs - had 1) general competency to do their jobs, 2) a genuine willingness to learn their jobs, 3) respect for the institutional norms that have done this nation well for 200-plus years, 4) basic goddamn common sense that you shouldn't fucking do things that will blow up in your face.

There is no sign that anybody at that White House can plan ten minutes ahead of themselves much less five days, eight weeks, six months, four years. They are bouncing from incident to incident, from mishandled staged events to botched executive orders to disorganized Congressional outreach to outright acts of corruption and illegality.

To quote Stephen Stromberg over at Washington Post:

At the opening of his presidency, Trump’s unforced errors were embarrassing — but, one could argue, at least the botched rollout of his immigration executive order rendered it vulnerable to legal attack, his poor negotiating skills complicated the passage of his slipshod health-care bill and his inattention to detail enabled his surprisingly capable foreign policy staff to limit the damage he could do...

...Now The Post reports that the day after he fired Comey, Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador. U.S. officials apparently obtained the material, which concerned Islamic State plotting, from a foreign ally and did not have permission to share the information with Russia. Though few specific details could be reported, there are a variety of dangerous potential consequences. Not only could the information’s disclosure imperil an intelligence relationship with a helpful government, but it could also reveal a secret intelligence asset to a foreign adversary working at cross purposes to the U.S. and its allies.

Compounding the insult, the accounts in The Post suggest Trump may have revealed the information in order to boast to his foreign visitors about the quality of the intelligence briefings he receives, as if they would not have known that the president of the United States has access to impressive amounts of secret material. The picture is not so much of conspiracy or malevolence, but of unfathomable carelessness...

I am fond of quoting Machiavelli about "Whether it is better to be loved or feared?" In that question, there is an underlying acceptance that the Prince in this scenario be someone competent. Incompetent leaders quickly lose the respect of others, at which point being loved or feared is useless.

Now to David Frum over at The Atlantic:

The president can never be cut out of the information loop altogether. But consider how little information Trump wants in the first place. He is satisfied with single pagers dotted by colorful bullet points. If that is all he uses, maybe it’s better for everybody to hold back information he could possibly misuse?...

It’s understandable why conscientious professionals would take such measures. Yet consider the troubling consequence of that decision. The security aspects of government would slip away from political control—for reasons that might seem necessary in the short run, but could be hard to reverse in the longer term. Donald Trump promised to shake up Washington. And what is being shaken is the trust of those who must carry out his orders. Someone has to be ultimately in charge of the national-security portions of the U.S. government. After this week, it may become a lot harder to identify precisely who that someone is...

It doesn't help that trump is playing this game as one of the most hated "leaders" in modern history, starting off his administration in an Unpopularity hole NO MODERN PRESIDENT ever had. He's already lost a majority of Americans who simply will never accept him.

The only thing keeping trump and his Republican allies in government - many of whom are showing the strain of supporting this clueless shitgibbon at every downturn - afloat is the epistemic bubble of the Far Right Narrative, where 80 percent of the GOP voting base loves trump precisely for the chaos and emotional turmoil he inflicts on all the non-believers outside that bubble.

But the Real World does not exist in that bubble. The Real World respects competency and effectiveness in governments being able to work together to maintain stability.

The Real World has ways of making those incompetent would-be dictator god-emperors doom themselves.

Unfortunately, everybody else has to pay the bills when that doom comes.

We are so very royally fucked.

Added: An additional note or twelve from Jon Finer at The Atlantic:

...Taking a step back, it is increasingly clear that Trump’s wrecking ball approach to the traditional norms of the presidency, praised as “disruptive” by his supporters, is exposing the limitations of a political system ill-equipped to handle someone operating  so recklessly. There may be few legal restrictions on the president related to, for example, disclosing classified information, or ethical breaches, or interfering with a law enforcement investigation into the campaign that brought him to power, but there has always been a basic presumption that a president would operate within certain bounds of good faith.

With a Republican-led Congress so far unwilling to hold the administration to account and few remedies available, short of nuclear options (impeachment or removal under the 25th Amendment), the system is largely left to discipline itself. That isn't working...

...This incident is among the first, or at least most visible, costs of a person with this president's temperament occupying the Oval Office. Yet again, the administration is fighting a five-alarm fire of its own (and, as is often the case, of its president's) making.

It's been said and written frequently, but it bears repeating, that the day will come, sooner than anyone of us wants, when there will be a major external crisis for this administration to address. Anyone who isn't concerned about how that will play out isn't paying much attention.

...yup. Royally fucked.

Whoa Babe Just a Little Bit R-E-S-P-E-C-T, and Why Trump Ain't Getting Any

If there is any joy to find this dismal winter of discontent, it's the malicious joy of watching Trump fumble his way to the podium. Not the growing and alarming revelations of just how nasty his ties to Russia are turning out to be - that's actually making me turn away in horror - but the fact that Trump is still historically, epically (yes, Stephen King will kill me for the adverb use) unpopular with the universe. Via Matthew Yglesias with Vox.com:

On January 10, Quinnipiac released the first big Donald Trump poll of 2017, and it showed that he retains some strengths as a politician. Most voters think he’s intelligent (gaakkkk) and that he’s a “strong person.” (headdesk) A plurality believe he has “good leadership skills.” (o.o)

But his job approval rating is a dismal 37 percent, with 51 percent saying they disapprove of the job he’s doing. Rather than being an effective political tactic, Trump’s habit of frequently saying untrue things has led Americans to conclude by a 53-39 margin that he is not honest. Fifty-two percent say that Trump “does not care about average Americans,” and 62 percent say that he is “not level-headed.”

Just remember kids: this asshole didn't win the Popular vote, he won a broken-down Electoral College.

Sure, Trump got 62 million voters, but as I pointed out a few posts ago our elections are now so partisan that a dead dog could have gotten 62 million votes for the Republicans. I can guarantee you millions of his own voters hated him (they just hated or mistrusted Hillary more).

How historic a disaster is this?

Gallup created a comparative chart of Trump's beginning numbers compared to his predecessors Obama and Bush II and Bill Clinton:

Each of these Presidents were divisive in some respects: Clinton's win in 1992 came from a contested three-candidate race that the Republicans could not abide; Bush the Lesser lost the Popular vote and only won the Electoral College over a contested vote count in Florida (and a 5-4 SCOTUS vote); Obama won the Popular and Electoral but was hated by a Republican party that viewed him as illegitimate and a threat.

Yet all three still had high approval ratings - at least over 60 percent - going into the White House.

There are two very good reasons for this.

First reason is that a majority of Americans - regardless of party or even if they voted - want to think that the incoming President will do well and they wish him well. After all, if he succeeds the nation succeeds. It's called the Honeymoon period. It can last a few months or almost a year during which voters will give him the benefit of the doubt.

The second reason is that all three President-Elects played the public image of a Uniter, giving speeches and presentations alongside both parties to demonstrate no ill-will and to invoke signs of humility and empathy to the electorate. A perfect example is Dubya: having won a bitter contest on questionable grounds, he made a public victory speech where he spoke in humble tones about working with Democrats, and made pointed efforts towards bipartisanship:

Tonight I chose to speak from the chamber of the Texas House of Representatives because it has been a home to bipartisan cooperation. Here in a place where Democrats have the majority, Republicans and Democrats have worked together to do what is right for the people we represent.

We've had spirited disagreements. And in the end, we found constructive consensus. It is an experience I will always carry with me, an example I will always follow...

Granted, once in office Bush and Cheney pursued their hard-core conservative tax cuts and policy initiatives. But he played the part of Uniter well and got his Honeymoon polling numbers in the mid-60s where his political capital had value.

So why is Trump failing at Reasons One AND Two? He's well below the 50 percent mark, and with the Quin poll at 37 percent he's slinking downward with the general public before he's done anything in office to make him even more unliked (which happens to every President, Reagan included).

Big point: Trump is no Uniter figure. His own personal nature as a bully makes that impossible. His history of vulgar and disruptive behavior is a major reason why he's been so unpopular this entire election process. And the stories about him have only gotten worse.

The final most damning part: Trump shows no respect to those he views his lessers. And that includes everyone among his own Republican ranks and his own damn voters (he's publicly admitted as much).

Machiavelli, I know I keep referring back to him, but his passage in The Prince about whether it's better to be Loved or Feared still makes a ton of sense in an electoral system like ours that runs on emotional and irrational decision-making.

Machiavelli noted it was difficult to be loved and feared at the same time, so it was preferred to be feared. He warned, however, that Fear could lead to Hate if you try to employ fear too often. And being Hated was the worst thing a Prince (leader) could become, because in that state the leader's opposition will have nothing to lose and everything to gain by driving you from power.

And Trump is coming into this role of President so very very HATED. Behaving like he's the greatest winner of all time when he really got Second Place, dismissing entire swaths of our population with insults and disdain... People hate him - myself included - with the fire of a thousand suns.

I honestly never saw - or felt - this level of animosity among my co-workers and friends towards an elected President before. Clinton never had this much hate (even after all the mud slung at him in 1992), Bush the Lesser didn't create massive protests against himself before his own tenure started, and Obama's haters were mostly contained to Rush Limbaugh's radio show and the Fox Not-News squad.

Once they hate you, it is hard to turn that emotion into something else.

The real prize for a Prince was to be Respected, a reputation that can co-exist with both Love and Fear. With Respect, a leader can be Feared as long as his subjects were convinced he knew what he was doing and capable at it. With Respect, a leader can be Loved as long as his subjects understood his Love for them was genuine, and borne of responsibility and care for their mutual well-being.

The thing about Respect, it's not given it is earned. As the saying goes, Respect Goes Both Ways. You have to show it towards others to have them respect you.

And Trump, mentioned above, does not respect you. Unless you happen to be Putin.

It shouldn't be any surprise that Trump doesn't get any respect back from the rest of us.

And without that respect, Trump is hated. And getting hundreds of thousands of protesters marching in the streets against him before Day One of his administration even starts.

It's a damn shame it took all these events and revelations after the election for more Americans to figure this out.

Things would be less dreadful and horrifying if 37 percent was his voting base on Election Night.

And we wouldn't have 62 million Americans to blame for the oncoming train wreck.

When The Best Choice is The Parachute, Dave.

One of those questions I pose for myself from time to time is "How would I behave myself in public when confronted with two loathsome options?"

Let's say I'm booked for a flight on an airplane, and it's packed except for two last seats remaining. One seat is next to Grover Norquist, the second seat is next to Ann Coulter. Which seat would I choose?

And of course the correct answer is "I would choose the parachute, Dave."

(Just don't ask who Dave is)

I'm bringing this up as an opening bon mot to get you in the mood for this latest news bit from ABC News and what not.

The Republicans are not going to like this news one bit, because ABC hosted a poll on Favorable/Unfavorable numbers again on the current Presidential candidates... and both Donald Trump AND Ted Cruz - the two likeliest nominees - are working with some of the highest UNFavorble numbers in recent memory (PDF link here):

Donald Trump ranks as the most unpopular top-tier presidential contender in more than 30 years of ABC News/Washington Post polls, trailing only former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke among presidential candidates in any election year since 1984.

At the same time, the unpopularity of Trump’s main rival, Ted Cruz, has reached its highest level yet this election cycle. John Kasich breaks even in basic popularity, with many – at this late stage of the primary season – still yet to form an opinion of the Ohio governor.

Remember what I keep saying about Machiavelli's warning, kids: it's tough to be loved, better to be feared, BUT ALWAYS AVOID BEING HATED.

(And for those crowing about how Hillary is also hated, please note the hate for her is still less than for Trump and near-even for Cruz... and there's a growing likelihood that the Republican Establishment - along with everyone else - may settle for Hillary as a better option than a man who has alienated that Republican leadership like no other)

Right now the Republicans are looking at their two remaining serious options - Kasich is mathematically eliminated from winning outright, he's merely in this race to keep both Trump and Cruz from winning outright - and realizing that their only real choice is that damn parachute.

They can't lie to themselves that either candidate - Trump or Cruz - will turn into a beautiful swan post-convention and everyone in the party ranks happily smiling as they line up to support whomever the winner will be. The numbers we're talking about involve the general voters, the moderate and independent voters who have no party loyalty that can sway them to like candidates they already loathe.

And we're talking about the type of depth to such loathing that can have a serious effect on down-ballot races. We're talking about the possibility that an anti-Trump or anti-Cruz movement could give Democrats a chance to break the gerrymander advantage the Republicans currently hold on the US House.

The buzz over the Republican Establishment running their own third-party candidate - now swirling around a retired general with little political presence - to try and salvage the Senate and House campaigns will not abate, not after news like this.

An Apostate like myself feels a little warm in the part of my soul that cherishes schadenfreude like this: watching the very real possibility of a Trump-led Republican campaign that barely cracks 30 percent of the popular vote and wins only Wyoming and Alabama. With 68 Senate seats going to the Dems and enough wins in the House to embarrass the Republicans into realizing their obstructionist sh-t no longer impresses anyone.

Ah, a crazy Florida boy like me can dream...

And as always, that dream can become a reality if the Democratic voters remember to GET THE DAMN VOTE OUT.

She's Just Not That Into Trump (w/ Update)

(Update: Hello again, everyone from Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round Up! Thank you for visiting and perusing this article. Please note I've got other articles related to this topic, especially one I wrote last night that follows up my main point on here. Have fun!)

I mentioned a few posts back about polling guru Nate Silver making an almost flippant suggestion on Twitter that if Trump were the nominee and if women refuse to vote for him based on the current polling, the entire Electoral map would turn Blue. Considering this is Nate, and that even when drunk Nate is serious about the numbers, I expected there to be actual data to back this up.

The wait is over - for the nonce.

At his site 538, Silver did a chat session with fellow pollsters and analysts about women voters this election cycle, and the numbers are not in Trump's favor.

micah: So just how poorly is Trump doing among women? Republican women and women overall?

clare.malone: By the way, readers, one person in this chatroom is wearing a “Feminist” T-shirt today. Guess who.

Harry: From The Huffington Post:

As you can see, Republican women in particular are much more unfavorable towards Trump than to Cruz or John Kasich (or the dearly departed Marco Rubio). Those are horrible numbers.
The same poll has Trump with just a 21 percent positive rating with all women nationwide. His negative rating with women nationally is 70 percent.

clare.malone: This might be a historical level of dislike, no?

harry: No major party nominee has had that bad of a rating, based on the data I look at.

micah: So Trump does really poorly with women — it hasn’t stopped him in the Republican primary, why will it stop him in the general?

natesilver: Because winning 51 percent of 100 percent is way harder than winning 35 percent of 35 percent?

I noted that meself awhile back: Trump doesn't have to win a majority to win the Republican nomination, he just has to win. And he's winning right now on a campaign that has him behaving as a crass, vulgar bully dismissive of people not of his liking... which is pretty much everyone he views beneath himself.

But that very campaign style to win the Party nomination is going to kill his chances in the General. What's going to hurt Trump is obvious in two key ways: his open racism against Hispanics, Blacks, Chinese and Muslims, and his willful ignorance that drives away educated voters. But now the media is picking up on the third thing hurting Trump: Trump is a sexist across the board, intentionally rude when uncalled for and accidentally demeaning all the other times. As Silver notes:

Yeah, a Machiavellian could argue that demonizing blacks or Hispanics or Muslims or gays is a winning, if incredibly cynical, electoral strategy for the GOP. That doesn’t work when you’re talking about 51 percent of the population. Furthermore, the fact that Trump doesn’t realize this suggests either that (i) he’s just making shit up as he goes along instead of being some sort of brilliant tactician; (ii) he’s a sexist down to his core and can’t help himself; or (iii) both.

Here's a nasty little secret about our electoral system (and it's one I've noted earlier!): there are more women voters (76 million) than men (66 million). Pissing off the majority of voters that participate in the general election is not a sound campaign strategy. And if there's any issue that can unite women, it's being treated like dirt by a misogynist bastard.

micah: So that’s my question: How much can Trump’s popularity with women change between now and November?

natesilver: Or to put it just slightly differently: Do the gender splits in Trump’s numbers suggest he’ll have a harder time improving his numbers than if he were equally unpopular with both men and women?

clare.malone: A great mystery … or perhaps not a mystery at all. To Nate’s point above, about the various theories of why Trump says sexist things, I think he kind of can’t help it, and while his sexist comments are being written off by the GOP electorate who’s voting for him, it’s going to be increasingly hard for him to pivot away from that image in the general election. I think he’ll try to do it, though, by deploying his oh-so-poised and career-oriented daughter, Ivanka, and I think he’ll also do it by just being less vituperative in his speech — he’ll pour a little whole milk on the hot-sauce rhetoric and hope for the best.

micah: But, Clare, hasn’t Trump just said too many sexist things? His record on this was long and bad when the campaign started! And it has only gotten worse...

micah: But that is why, to Nate’s question, I think this will be harder for Trump to change than if he were disliked equally by both genders...

clare.malone: Why? Because it’s more entrenched and women will reinforce the dislike more and more, as in an echo chamber of Trumpian disgust?

micah: Yeah. That is, there’s a very clear real-world explanation for Trump’s unpopularity with women — it’s not due to the vagaries of the news cycle or a well-run campaign against him. He’s sexist, and women don’t like him.

natesilver: One other big theme is that Trump had an element of surprise in the Republican race, which is part of why his opponents never really developed an effective strategy against him. That won’t be true for him against Clinton, who has had months to think about a strategy and put together opposition research that the GOP campaigns skimmed over...

There's another thing that Nate overlooked: one reason why Trump's primary opponents didn't want to attack him too harshly was because he was - and remains - a legitimate threat to split the GOP as a Third-Party candidate. They avoided hurting his fee-fees too early, and by the time they realized how much of a hook he had into the hardcore voting base it was too late. Hillary - or Bernie - isn't going to worry about driving Trump out of the GOP, they're going to be worried about stopping him from getting into the White House.

And they're going to have 70 percent of the women voters joining them in that effort. In 2014 there were 76 million women voters (rounded out). If that 70 percent holds up, that's 53 million pissed-off women voters who aren't going to forgive a guy like Trump all that easy. And given how Trump has alienated other core groups - Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, gays, educated people, sane people - that include a lot of male voters, I doubt he's getting enough of that 66 million male voters to cover his ass. I'm at the point where I'm doubting Trump can get 50 million total voters based on how unpopular (38 percent) he is.

Despite the talk Nate Silver and the others at 538 went into how Trump could pivot to a more moderate position to win more General election voters over, I doubt Trump can do that. He's all Id, with little or no control on his personality. What you see 99.44 percent of the time is what you get with Trump: he can't fake empathy or Congeniality. He can't trade in his verbal disgust and patronizing of women for anything: and he's never shown much skill or interest in apologizing for his sins.

Trump can bullsh-t all Trump wants, but he's not going to be able to sell that to people who hate him. And right now, too many women hate him.

Machiavelli wins again.

The Trick Is Never Be More Hated Than Your Opponent

There's some more numbers to crunch, a lot of it tied into the popularity numbers of the two lead candidates this 2016 for the Presidency.

Here's a poll for how the three major voting factions - Republican, Democrat, Independent - would (un)favor either Trump or Hillary (poll by Quinnipiac University, linked to Washington Post):

Additional polling shows - and it's hidden in the numbers - how Trump is getting about 49 percent of the White Male vote. For any Republican to be under 50 55 60 percent White support of any kind in this day and age is woeful for the GOP.

But let's look at that chart. It asks "Which of these candidates would you never vote for?"

Overall, 42 percent say they'll never vote for Hillary and 58 percent will never vote for Trump.

Break it down by party, and you'll get the standard partisan response: there's no way Democrats will vote for Trump (he's over 84-86 percent on that chart) and there's no way Republicans will vote for Hillary (sitting at 80 percent denial).

But the number for them within their own ranks is what will be troubling for Republicans. Hillary has 6 percent haterdom among Democrats (which looks shockingly low given all the Bernie supporters bash her) but Trump is nearly triple that with 17 percent Republicans refusing to vote for him.

Granted, by the time the actual election kicks in, some of those haters will settle down and return to their party folds. Thing is. Hillary will find it easier to do that and Trump won't: if they get half back to their parties, Hillary can lose 3 percent of her base to Trump losing around 9 percent.

Those are the voters most likely to not even show up at all: the partisan nature of being in a party means they won't cross the aisle to vote for the opponent, but they'll be unhappy enough to sit out altogether.

Can the Republicans afford to have around 8 to 10 percent of their party to avoid the general election? No, going by how things went in 2012 they can't, because they lost then and if they have lower turnout in 2016 they'll lose to an even worse percentage.

And when you throw in how in 2012 Mitt Romney won the Independent voter turnout 50 to 45 percent (the missing 5 percent went third-party) AND STILL LOST to Obama, Trump can't afford to be down among Independents 46-to-54.

Still, the troubling factor here for Republicans is the likelihood that the voters who hate Trump that much may not show up for the election at all. While there's little solid evidence of "coat-tails" of a Presidential candidate helping the down-ticket candidates, there is evidence that lower turnout overall by one party is bad news for that party's lesser candidates from the Congressional districts down to state and county offices.

Even with Congressional seats gerrymandered up the wazoo (about 55 percent of Republican seats are compared to 25 percent for Democrats), any downturn in turnout can run the risk of close losses (as long as Democrats run challengers in all of those districts) for those Republicans. The Senate races may not be directly affected by voters discouraged by Trump, but there will be an impact in close-race states like Florida and Kentucky.

It's interesting to note how - despite all the media chatter and despite all the drum-beating by Bernie's supporters - the hatedom for Hillary is not that severe compared for Trump. It's really not as bad as most of the other Democratic front-runners have endured from their own ranks before. Only six percent of Democrats refuse to vote for her? Wow, the party's really warmed up to Hillary...