The View from Right Field

While Trump Stews, Mike Pompeo Has Been Busy

It’s unclear what Donald Trump has been doing with his time now that he is off Twitter, Facebook, etc., but Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been working hard.  Karen DeYoung has a list of what he has been doing.  It’s a lot – and it’s wrong.  Instead of working on a transition, Secretary Pompeo has been throwing up roadblocks for the Biden administration.

As Ms. DeYoung notes, what Secretary Pompeo can be reversed, but in most cases, it will take time.  Also, the process of reversing those decisions could hurt the very people and policies Secretary Pompeo is trying to protect. 

President Trump Is “Bringing the Troops Home” from Somalia

Well, he’s not actually bringing the troops home from Somalia.  What he’s doing is moving almost all of the 700 troops currently in Somalia to Kenya and Djibouti, where they will do pretty much the same thing they are doing now, i.e., counterterrorism missions against al-Shabaah and Islamic State militants in Somalia.  Except they won’t be able to do them as well from Kenya and Djibouti.  But President Trump will be able to claim he got our troops out of Somalia.

While the Trump administration will claim we can still do the same counterterrorism missions, even if we aren’t in Somalia, it’s not true.  First, how is the Somalian government going to feel about us pulling out and then coming back, whenever we want to, to conduct counterterrorism raids in their country?  We need their consent and cooperation to do this.  Will they agree?  Will they cooperate with us as much?

@realDonaldTrump’s Legacy - Afghanistan and Iraq

For those who thought Donald Trump’s legacy, at least since November 3, would be most tarnished by his refusal to concede to President-Elect Joe Biden, I give you this:

“BREAKING: US Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller announces that the number of US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq will be reduced to 2,500 by January 15th, 2021.”

Acting Secretary Miller apparently refused to take questions after announcing the decision.  I have talked about this before (here and here, among others); there is no need to talk about it again.  It is a terrible decision, as so many of President Trump’s decisions have been.  The United States, Afghanistan, and the world will regret it.

Do Uighur Lives Matter? – Part Two: Do We Care?

In an earlier post I talked about why I thought saying “Uighur Lives Matter” could be problematic.  But beyond that, I don’t think “Uighurs Lives Matter” would carry the day in the United States, even if saying it wasn’t problematic.  Let me mention a couple of reasons.  First, a number of Americans just don’t care about what is going on elsewhere in the world.  It is part of their America First approach.  They feel we need to make economic deals with China.  We have to take care of ourselves; we can’t worry about the Uighurs.  This is certainly what former National Security Adviser John Bolton says that President Trump told President Xi Jinping. 

Second, lots of individual Americans and American companies are intimidated by China.  They see over a billion Chinese and decide sales and profits are more important than principles and doing what is right.

Hunter Biden and Ukraine: Old News – And Still Wrong

There is a big brouhaha about Twitter and Facebook not allowing the re-tweeting or posting (or whatever the proper verb is) of reports in the New York Post about what Hunter Biden allegedly did for the Ukrainian energy company he got a job with when his father was Vice President under Barack Obama.  Apparently, Twitter and Facebook did this because there wasn’t proper sourcing for the reports in the Post, it was based on hacked materials, etc.  (See here and here.)  If Twitter and Facebook really start enforcing a policy requiring stories to be properly sourced, there’s going to be a lot less traffic on those sites.

But back to the Bidens and Ukraine.  If Twitter and Facebook wanted to cut down on posts, etc., about Hunter Biden and Ukraine and his father, a better explanation than a lack of proper sourcing would have been “It’s old news.”  I wrote about this in May of 2014 when reports first came out about Hunter Biden taking the job.  Hunter Biden getting paid by a Ukrainian energy company when his father was Vice President didn’t become wrong because he made an introduction to his father or something else.  It was wrong from the beginning, and it was whether he made the introduction or not.

So, Hunter Biden, Ukraine, Vice President Biden.  Old news.  And still not enough of a reason to vote for Donald Trump.

Do Uighur Lives Matter?

Black Lives Matter has swept the United States.  It is on tee shirts and signs outside churches.  It is painted on city streets and basketball floors.  Along with the pandemic, it is the thing most associated with 2020. 

My question is: What about “Uighur Lives Matter”?  The Chinese have been cracking down on the Uighurs for years.  The repression has gotten worse since President Xi Jinping took office.  Uighurs are labeled terrorists, and police are everywhere.  Reports are that over a million Uighurs are in forced labor camps, which the Chinese call re-education or training centers.¹

Trump vs. Biden: A Question of the Lesser of Two Evils – On Steroids

What do you do when you don’t like either candidate for President?  When, in fact, you think both candidates will leave the country worse off by the time they leave office? 

Well, the first thing you do is hope you are wrong.  I have supported candidates because l thought their policies would make the country better off.  Sometimes that has happened and sometimes it hasn’t.  Sometimes the policies didn’t work like I thought they would.  Other times the candidates didn’t do what they said they were going to do.  You can never be sure.  But you have to decide what to do in an election on some basis, and the only thing you can do is to look at what each candidate is likely to do and go from there.

When Your Party Leaves You and You Have No Place to Go

Ronald Reagan famously said that he didn’t leave the Democratic Party, it left him.  With what is happening in the Republican Party these days, I think I am beginning to know how he felt.  The only difference is that, when the Democratic Party left President Reagan, he had some place else to go.  I don’t.  

During the GOP’s virtual convention, The Wall Street Journal¹ wrote about Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party:

“President Trump is accepting the nomination for a second term before a party that has largely united behind him, embracing his America-first foreign and economic policies and unorthodox, sometimes chaotic style.

Traveling Can Make Current Events More Current

One of the great joys of travel is going to places where history has happened.  The Pyramids, Machu Pichu, Abraham Lincoln’s home in Springfield, Illinois, the Capitol building in Washington, etc.  Seeing places like these can help you better understand history, as well as giving you a personal connection to events in the past.

But if you are lucky, travel can also take you to places where things are happening now or may happen in the future.  Seeing such places can make current events more interesting and personal and maybe even more understandable.  We were lucky enough to be in West Berlin and East Germany in 1979 and 1982, so when the protests arose and the Wall came down in 1989, we had an appreciation of what was happening that we might not have otherwise had. 

Character Defines the Choice in November

The Wall Street Journal summed up the case for and against Donald Trump’s re-election in an editorial today.  Here are a few excerpts, with my comments added in italics:

“Four years [after President Trump’s election] our verdict is that he has been better on policy than we feared but worse on personal behavior than we hoped.  Whether Americans re-elect him depends on how they assess that political balance sheet. …

The President contracted out tax reform to Congress, especially Paul Ryan in the House and Pat Toomey in the Senate, and they delivered.  Mr. Trump also hired a cast of deregulators who liberated the economy from burdens on energy and more. …