The View from Right Field

Accepting Mistakes. Focusing on the Future. The Way to Solve Covid-19.

As we try to get through this crisis, we need to keep two things in mind:

1. Mistakes will be made.  We have to accept that, and we have to not blame the people who make them. 
2. We need to focus on the future.  We need to help each other to do the best we can today and tomorrow.  The past can wait until it’s over.

An example of the first: Bill Gates’ foundation is spending billions of dollars to help construct factories to produce seven of the most promising coronavirus vaccines.  Mr. Gates knows that billions will be wasted on factories for vaccines that don’t work, but he also knows that when we figure out which of the vaccines does work, factories will be ready to produce them right away, instead of having to waiting to build the factories once we know which vaccines work.

The President Does It Again. Sigh.

At a time when we need leaders in Washington who can reassure us and inspire confidence, we have a president who seems to think that one of the more urgent uses of his time is to fire the inspector general of the intelligence community who determined, last year, that the whistleblower’s complaint about President Trump’s phone call with the president of Ukraine should be forwarded to Congress.  I don’t know whether the inspector general’s determination was right or wrong.  That's not the point.  The point is that now is not the time to fire him.

Joe Biden’s Big Problem: “Why Is Joe Biden’s Son Working For a Ukrainian Energy Company?”

Actually, former Vice President Biden has a number of problems in his campaign, but then so does Donald Trump.  I have made my thoughts about President Trump pretty clear over the last several years, so I won’t go over them again.  Other than to say: Would you trust President Trump if he said he had your back in a fight?

But back to former Vice President Biden.  One of the big brouhahas regarding the former Vice President’s campaign is the job and money that his son, Hunter, got from a Ukrainian gas company while Vice President Biden was in office.  Some people may think this is a manufactured controversy, dug up only now to embarrass former Vice President Biden and hurt his campaign.

Well, it’s not.  It was a problem when it happened.  See this post, “Why Is Joe Biden’s Son Working For a Ukrainian Energy Company?”, from May 14, 2014.  It should have been dealt then, but neither former Vice President Biden nor the Obama administration did anything about it.  And now, former Vice President Biden has to deal with it today – or lose to President Trump in November.
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UPDATE (3/10/20 9:20 am): Cleaned up the wording in the last sentence. 

With Impeachment All Over the News, Why Am I Blogging About Baseball?

You may have noticed that, while the impeachment trial is blanketing the news in Washington (and probably TV/cable news¹), I have had two posts directly on baseball and another that mentions baseball tangentially in the past week.  The reason, I suppose, in addition to the fact I always post on the Cubs Convention, is that the impeachment trial is so predictable – and dispiriting.  I understand the impeachment question is critical and important to many people, on both sides of the issue.  It’s just I’m not one of them. 

As I have said before, I don’t like Donald Trump.²  I do not think he is a good president, especially on foreign policy (and many domestic policies).  But it’s hard to take the Democrats seriously, either.  I understand they think President Trump is a terrible president.  But too many of them have wanted to kick him out since he took office.  If it wasn’t one thing, it was another.  You wonder if the charges they have come up with in the articles of impeachment are so bad that they would want to get rid of a Democratic president for doing them or if it is just the best they have been able to come up with to get rid of President Trump.

Might It Have Been Possible to Oppose Donald Trump Without the Fury?

As we enter the last year of either Donald Trump’s presidency or President Trump’s first term, it seems like an appropriate time to look back on the last three years.  First, in looking at my posts about President Trump, I see I started out complaining a lot about what he did and his style of doing it.  Just look at some of the titles of my posts in his first nine months:

• “Donald Trump at Seven Weeks. This Is Not Working.”
• “Donald Trump Meets Angela Merkel. Things Keep Getting Worse.”
• “Donald Trump: Will the Embarrassment Ever End?”
• “@realDonaldTrump: Such a Small, Small Man”¹

But eventually, I got tired.  It wasn’t making a difference (obviously), and I was saying the same thing over and over again.  I got bored writing it.  I can only imagine how bored people got reading it.

A Few Thoughts on Impeachment – And Process

It’s hard to come up with things to write about with impeachment sucking all of the oxygen out of the news.  So, let me make a few comments on impeachment and the impeachment process.  Before I start, though, let me note, as readers of this blog know, I did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016 (I actually decided that in 2015), and I will not vote for him in 2020.  To my comments:

1. So far, President Trump has not done anything that has surprised me all that much.  Appalled me, yes.  Surprised me, no.

Donald Trump and Impeachment. When – and How – Is It Going to End?

A few thoughts:

1. It shouldn’t be too big of a problem for the pro-impeachment forces to get the House of Representatives to impeach Donald Trump.  It only takes a majority, and there are 235 Democrats in the House compared to 197 Republicans.  (There are two vacancies and one independent.)  The Democrats can almost certainly pass an impeachment resolution if the House leadership wants to.

2. The Senate is a different story.  Because it takes a 2/3 vote to convict in the Senate, the pro-impeachment forces need to get 20 Republicans senators to vote to convict President Trump (assuming all 47 Democrats vote to convict).  In this regard, I think it is safe to say that President Trump has not built up much personal loyalty among Republican senators.  The key for them, instead, will be (i) the facts and (ii) how their pro-Trump constituents feel about impeachment.  If President Trump loses any significant portion of his base and/or those who  voted for him in 2016 because the alternative was worse, he could be in trouble.

How’s a Person Who Cares About Foreign Policy Supposed to Vote Next November?

As I have written before, foreign policy may be the most important issue for me in November 2020 and it’s hard to know what to do.  Donald Trump is unacceptable.  The list of reasons why would go on for a long time, so I’ll just list one of the most recent: he apparently needed John Bolton to stop him from inviting Taliban leaders to Camp David just before the anniversary of 9/11.  But I had decided I wouldn’t vote for President Trump long before that, so while it is appalling, it doesn’t affect my decision.

The question is whether any of the Democrats are just barely acceptable.  Joe Biden is supposedly the most moderate, but former Defense Secretary¹ Robert Gates, who I respect, said of former Vice President Biden, in 2014: “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”²  In other words, just because you are “moderate” doesn’t mean you can’t still be wrong.³

I Am So Tired of @realDonaldTrump

In the middle of his snit yesterday over trade and tariffs with China, President Trump tweeted, in part:

“Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing your companies HOME and making your products in the USA.” (Here and here)

I just don’t know what to say.  Maybe Xi Jinping and Kim Jung Un, people President Trump calls his friends, can order their companies to do this.  But, President Trump, you can’t do this.  We are a free country, and you can’t order people or companies around like some Communist dictator.  And saying things like this is stupid. 

Foreign Policy: Are Presidents Trump and Obama All That Different?

Wilbur Ross, Donald Trump’s Secretary of Commerce said, last Wednesday, that Hong Kong was an internal matter for Hong Kong and added: “What are we going to do – invade Hong Kong?”  In response, Edward Luce, of the Financial Times, commented: “In a few words, Mr Ross captured the degeneration of US foreign policy.”¹  Which may be true, but it didn’t start January 20, 2017.

Secretary Ross’s choice, invasion or doing nothing, sounds suspiciously like the phony choices Barack Obama used to justify his do-nothing, or at least, do-as-little-as-possible, approach to foreign policy.  For example, when Russia invaded Ukraine, annexed Crimea, and fomented a war in eastern Ukraine in 2014, President Obama asked: “Do people actually think that somehow us sending some additional arms into Ukraine could potentially deter the Russian Army?”  In fact, the Trump administration, even though President Trump is supposedly in the pocket of Vladimir Putin, has sent the kinds of defensive weapons that President Obama refused to send.  And it has seemed to help.