TomDispatch.com

Last month, near the end of the first presidential debate, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton laid a masterful trap for her Republican rival. Reminding viewers of Donald Trump’s frequent crude comments about women, she mentioned “a woman in a beauty contest,” and then unpacked the story of former Miss Universe Alicia Machado.

“And he called this woman ‘Miss Piggy,’” Clinton told around 80 million Americans. “Then he called her ‘Miss Housekeeping,’ because she was Latina.” 

Clinton paused, waited, and revealed her name.

“Where did you find this? Where did you find this?” Trump sputtered, to which Clinton countered with a kicker: “She has become a U.S. citizen, and you can bet she’s going to vote this November.”

A more conventional candidate than The Donald might have spent that night and the next day carefully prying the jaws of the bear trap off his leg and licking his wounds, but Clinton and her coterie knew their opponent well. No doubt stung by his overall poor performance and a wave of withering criticism over his treatment of Machado two decades earlier, Trump figured out a way to squeeze his other leg into the vice grip of that metal maw. As Machado and the Clinton campaign carried out a masterfully orchestrated media blitz, the Republican hopeful went on Fox News to double down. “She gained a massive amount of weight and it was a real problem,” he told the seemingly shell-shocked hosts of Fox and Friends.

Days later, the story was still going strong, garnering media attention, generating headlines, and prompting discussions about everything from Trump’s own weight (five pounds shy of clinical obesity) to his past comments about the size of a pregnant Kim Kardashian culminating in an early morning Twitter storm last Friday. 

This is American politics today: crude, crass, freewheeling, and tending toward the frivolous.  America has had sexist, misogynist presidents, of course. Some have been astonishingly lewd and crude. I’m looking at you, LBJ!

Lyndon Baines Johnson may have been an incorrigible bully and inveterate womanizer -- to say nothing of the copious amounts of Vietnamese blood on his hands -- but his 1964 campaign featured a nuclear war-themed political attack ad that, though only aired once, is still lodged in the American consciousness.

At the end of that so-called Daisy ad, as a mushroom cloud rises onscreen, we hear Johnson’s voice: “These are the stakes.  To make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.”  The implication was clear.  Johnson's Republican opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, was too dangerous to entrust with America’s nuclear arsenal.

Clinton has made a similar point about Trump.  “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons,” she’s said -- a suitable enough line but without a Daisy punch.  Barring a Trump win and a resulting nuclear exchange, don’t expect people to remember it 50 years from now.  Don’t even hold your breath about whether it might affect a single news cycle between now and Election Day or morph into the kind of substantive discussion of nuclear policy that spawns 100 headlines and a million tweets.  There have been many scandals deserving of mention during this long presidential campaign, many controversies demanding attention, many travesties deserving of discussion but as TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, author most recently of America’s War for the Greater Middle East, observes today, the biggest travesty may be that an issue with the potential to end life as we know it on this planet can’t compete with one candidate’s seemingly hysterical obsession with publicly criticizing women’s bodies. Nick Turse

What We Talk About When We Don’t Want to Talk About Nuclear War
Donald and Hillary Take a No-First-Use Pledge on Relevant Information
By Andrew J. Bacevich

You may have missed it. Perhaps you dozed off. Or wandered into the kitchen to grab a snack. Or by that point in the proceedings were checking out Seinfeld reruns. During the latter part of the much hyped but excruciating-to-watch first presidential debate, NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt posed a seemingly straightforward but cunningly devised question. His purpose was to test whether the candidates understood the essentials of nuclear strategy.

A moderator given to plain speaking might have said this: "Explain why the United States keeps such a large arsenal of nuclear weapons and when you might consider using those weapons."

What Holt actually said was: “On nuclear weapons, President Obama reportedly considered changing the nation's longstanding policy on first use.  Do you support the current policy?”

The framing of the question posited no small amount of knowledge on the part of the two candidates. Specifically, it assumed that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton each possess some familiarity with the longstanding policy to which Holt referred and with the modifications that Obama had contemplated making to it.

If you will permit the equivalent of a commercial break as this piece begins, let me explain why I’m about to parse in detail each candidate’s actual answer to Holt’s question. Amid deep dives into, and expansive punditry regarding, issues like how “fat” a former Miss Universe may have been and how high an imagined future wall on our southern border might prove to be, national security issues likely to test the judgment of a commander-in-chief have received remarkably little attention.  So indulge me.  This largely ignored moment in last week’s presidential debate is worth examining.

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Since 9/11, untold sums of money have gone into building up the national security state. That includes new billion-dollar-plus headquarters for some of its agencies, hiring outside contractors by the bushelful, and creating a system of global surveillance the likes of which would once have been inconceivable even for the rulers of totalitarian states.  It includes the National Security Agency constructing in Georgia “the world’s largest listening post” focused only on the Middle East.  James Bamford describes it as a “$286 million, 604,000-square-foot facility [that] has more than 2,500 workstations and 47 conference rooms, and... employs more than 4,000 eavesdroppers and other personnel.”  And don’t forget the facility it constructed in Bluffdale, Utah, a “$2 billion, 1-million-square-foot complex... to function as the centerpiece of the NSA’s global eavesdropping operations” into which "would flow streams of emails, text messages, tweets, Google searches, financial records, Facebook posts, YouTube videos, metadata, and telephone chatter picked up by the constellation of" America's satellites, cable taps, and listening posts.  The national security state now houses 16 major intelligence outfits, not including the office of the director of national intelligence, and boasts an intelligence black budget of close to $70 billion a year.  And that's just to begin what would be an endless list.  

And all of this has essentially been built and expanded on the basis of a single “threat” to the American way of life: terrorism, which means, of course, the terrorism of Islamic extremists, which in the U.S. means the terrorism of unhinged or disturbed individuals who feel deeply aggrieved by and at odds with this society and come, however briefly, to identify with ISIS and its brutal mission, and -- to add yet another element to this mix -- have remarkably easy access to military-style weaponry and ammo galore.   

In other words, without Islamic terrorism, which has been responsible for the deaths of a surprisingly modest number of American civilians in these years, the national security state, now the fourth branch of government, would be a far less impressive, less well-funded structure, and its various experiments in governmental overreach, whether in the realms of torture, detention, kidnapping, assassination, the militarization of the police, or surveillance, would have been far less possible.  Put another way, that state within a state is joined at the hip to terrorism.  And yet here’s the strange thing: given the nature of the terrorist threat, no matter how many people it surveils or what kinds of communications it listens in on, no matter the drones in the air or the cameras on the streets, it remains remarkably helpless when it comes to finding the Syed Rizwan Farooks, Dahir Adans, and Ahmad Khan Rahamis of our world.  It is incapable of picking those unexpected needles out of the vast haystack of us.  In its own strange way, it is, then, remarkably overbuilt, overfunded, and useless in its present muscled-up form.  TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School and author of Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State, illustrates this point vividly today, offering a clear-eyed view of what such a security state is actually capable of -- and what we abandon needlessly when we bow down before it. Tom

Liberty Is Security
The Lesson Not Drawn From Post-9/11 Government Overreach
By Karen J. Greenberg

One vivid image of the historical relationship between government power and individual liberties in America has long been the swing of the pendulum. It catches the nature of the perpetually changing balance between the two. When it comes to terrorism and civil liberties after 9/11, that pendulum swung strongly toward the power side of the equation and it has been slow indeed to swing back.  Still, in several areas in recent years -- torture, detention, and surveillance -- there has been at least some movement in the other direction and from this delayed and modest backswing, there is a distinct lesson to be drawn about liberty and security in twenty-first-century America.  The only problem is that no one has bothered to draw it.

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Think of American politics today as a tale of two Donalds. First, there’s Donald Trump, political provocateur, a man with his eye on the Oval Office who’s ready to say just about anything to get into it.  That includes insisting, in his “America First” campaign, that he -- and he alone -- will bring back millions of manufacturing jobs to this country (that are unlikely ever to return) and that he’ll create boom times for both the coal and natural gas industries (though they are in direct competition with each other).  And then, of course, there’s the other Donald Trump, the one who will do anything for a buck (or a million bucks, for that matter), including offshoring jobs galore for his own product lines and hiring cheaper foreign labor for his hotels and resorts (or building projects).

You might think that, in the heat of this election campaign, he’d decide to take a modest hit by hiring American labor rather than foreign “guest workers,” and by repatriating the making of those Trump shirts (Bangladesh), Trump ties (China and Mexico), and similar products; that, at the moment, he might put his money where his mouth is when it comes to "America First."  As it happens, we have a curious snapshot of The Donald and outsourced products from the latest Trump International Hotel, the one he recently opened just down the street from the White House with full campaign trail publicity and at prices meant only for the super-rich.

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank spent a night there (on Jeff Bezos’s tab) and in his room ($856 plus tax) he found one all-American product: a “small package of milk-chocolate Trump gold bullion ($25).”  Here was his description of what the room otherwise contained: “a Trump logo bathmat and towels from India, bone china from Japan, Italian cutlery and tiles, two telephones from Malaysia, a Swiss refrigerator, German coffee cups, Trump soaps and lotions from Canada and, from China, all four lamps, the coffee machine, the bathroom scale, the valet stand, and the shower cap.”  Milbank adds, “The hotel’s managing director is from France. Most hotel workers I met during my stay had Caribbean or African accents.”

That hotel room fits a pattern, and don’t think of it as a case of Trumpian hypocrisy either.  That doesn’t begin to catch the flavor of what’s going on.  No, when it comes to The Donald’s businesses, political positions be damned.  He’s happy to rouse Rust Belt and other communities with talk about the nightmare of outsourced jobs for American workers and to slam companies like Ford and Nabisco for sending their factories abroad.  There’s one thing he’s not prepared to do, however: give up what’s best for Donald Trump.  And if that’s true now, imagine how essential it is to the man and how likely it is, as Nomi Prins, TomDispatch regular and author of All the President’s Bankers, indicates today, that it’s one trait -- even obsession -- that would enter the Oval Office with him and change the nature of the American presidency big time. Tom

Madoff in the White House? 
How Trump’s Conflicts of Interest Could Become Ours 
By Nomi Prins

Imagine for a moment that it’s January 2009. Bernie Madoff, America’s poster-child fraudster, has yet to be caught. The 2007-2008 financial crisis never happened. The markets didn’t tank to reveal the emptiness beneath his schemes. We still don’t know what’s lurking in his tax returns because he’s never released them, but we know that he’s a billionaire, at least on paper. We also know, of course, that he just won the presidency by featuring the slogan -- on hats, t-shirts, everywhere -- “Make America Rich Again!” On a frosty morning in late January, before his colleagues, his country, God, and the world, Madoff takes the oath of office. He swears on a Bible to uphold the constitution.

The next day, everything comes crashing down. The banks. The markets. His fortune.

Madoff is a businessman, not a politician. He’s run and won as an anti-establishment maverick. Now, he’s faced with a choice: save the United States or his own posterior.  During the campaign, he promised that he could separate the two, that his kids could run his empire, while he did the people’s business.  But no one wants to talk to his progeny. They want him. They want the man in the suit who owes them money.

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It’s the timing that should amaze us (were anyone to think about it for 30 seconds). Let’s start with the conflict in Afghanistan, now regularly described as the longest war in American history.  It began on October 7, 2001, and will soon reach its 15th “anniversary.” Think of it as the stepchild of America’s first Afghan War (against the Soviets), a largely CIA affair which lasted from 1979 to 1989.  Considered a major victory, leading as it did to the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, it also devastated Afghanistan and created close to the full cast of characters for America’s second Afghan War.  In reality, you could say that Washington has conducted a quarter-century-plus of warfare there (with a decade off).  And in the Pentagon, they’re already talking about that war's possible extension well into the 2020s.

And then, of course, there’s Iraq.  Where even to begin to count?  You could start perhaps with the military aid and assistance that Washington gave Saddam Hussein in the eight-year war that followed his invasion of Iran in 1980, including crucial information that the Iraqis could use to target Iranian troops with their chemical weapons.  Or you could start with that victory of all victories, the first Gulf War of 1991, in which the U.S. military crushed Saddam’s troops in Kuwait, showed off the snazzy techno-abilities of the mightiest force on the planet... and er, um... somehow didn’t unseat the Iraqi ruler, leading to years of no-fly-zone air war until that second, ultimate victory, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which led to... er, um... a disastrous occupation, various insurgencies, and finally the withdrawal of American forces in 2011 before... er, um... the Islamic State emerged triumphantly to smash the American-trained Iraqi army, taking over major cities, and establishing its “caliphate.”  That, of course, led to America’s third Iraq War (or is it the fourth?), still ongoing.  In other words, at least a quarter-century of conflict and possibly more with no end in sight.

And don’t get me started on Somalia.  Who, after all, doesn’t recall the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu (known here as the “Black Hawk down” incident)?  Twenty-three years later, the U.S. is still bombing, missiling, and raiding that country which is, by now, a terror disaster zone.  Or Yemen, where the U.S. began its drone strikes back in 2002 and has never stopped as that country went over a cliff into civil war followed by a disastrous Saudi-led invasion that the U.S. has backed in a major way, including supplying cluster bombs and white phosphorous to its forces.  And Libya?  From the moment in 1986 when the Reagan administration sent in the U.S. air power to take out “terrorist training” sites in Tripoli and Benghazi, as well as the residence of the country’s autocratic ruler, Muammar Gaddafi, on and off hostilities continued until the NATO/U.S. air intervention of 2011.  That, in turn, brought on not just the end of Gaddafi’s rule, but a failed state filled with actual terrorists.

Syria is, of course, a Johnny-come-lately to American war, since Washington has been bombing there for a mere two years, and Special Forces operatives only entered the country relatively recently.  And Pakistan barely counts: just 424 drone strikes over 12 years.  A mere nothing when it comes to American warfare in this era.  And as if to make the point about all this, just a few weekends ago, the U.S. launched bombing or missile strikes in six of those seven countries (skipping only Pakistan), all six now being either failed states or close to that.  It’s quite a record of unending warfare, largely against -- with the exception of Saddam Hussein’s military -- lightly armed insurgents and terror groups of various sorts in countries that are generally now verging on collapse or nonexistent.

If you’ve ever wondered how those inside the planet’s self-proclaimed mightiest military force assess their handiwork over these last 15 (or for that matter 50) years, it’s fortunately no longer necessary to guess. Thanks to TomDispatch’s Nick Turse, we now have a document from within that military which will answer your every question on war, American-style, even if those answers beg questions all their own. Tom

Win, Lose, or Draw 
U.S. Special Operations Command Details Dismal U.S. Military Record 
By Nick Turse

Winning: it’s written into the DNA of the U.S.A.  After all, what’s more American than football legend Vince Lombardi’s famous (if purloined) maxim: “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing”? 

Americans expect to be number one.  First Lady Michelle Obama recently called the United States the “greatest country on Earth.” (Take that, world public opinion, and your choice of Germany!) Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton went even further, touting America as “the greatest country that has ever been created.”  Her rival, Donald Trump, who for political gain badmouths the country that made him rich and famous, does so in the hope of returning America to supposedly halcyon days of unparalleled greatness.  He’s predicted that his presidency might lead to an actual winning overload.  “We're going to win so much,” he told supporters.  “You're going to get tired of winning. You’re going to say, ‘Please, Mr. President... don't win so much’… And I'm going to say, ‘No, we have to make America great again... We're gonna keep winning.’” 

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The figures boggle the mind.  Approximately 11 million Americans cycle through our jails and prisons each year (including a vast “pre-trial population” of those arrested and not convicted and those who simply can’t make bail).  At any moment, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, there are more than 2.3 million people in our “1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 942 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,283 local jails, and 79 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, and prisons in the U.S. territories.”  In some parts of the country, there are more people in jail than at college.

If you want a partial explanation for this, keep in mind that there are cities in this country that register more arrests for minor infractions each year than inhabitants. Take Ferguson, Missouri, now mainly known as the home of Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager shot and killed in 2014 by a town policeman.  The Harvard Law Review reported that, in 2013, Ferguson had a population of 22,000.  That same year “its municipal court issued 32,975 arrest warrants for nonviolent offenses,” or almost one-and-a-half arrests per inhabitant.

And then there are the conditions in which all those record-breaking numbers of people live in our jails and prisons. At any given time, 80,000 to 100,000 inmates in state and federal prisons are held in “restrictive housing” (aka solitary confinement).  And those numbers don’t even include county jails, deportation centers, and juvenile justice institutions.  Rikers Island, New York City’s infamous jail complex in its East River, has 990 solitary cells. And keep in mind that solitary confinement -- being stuck in a six-by-nine or eight-by-10-foot cell for 23 or 24 hours a day -- is widely recognized as a form of psychosis-inducing torture.

And that, of course, is just to begin to explore America’s vast and ever-expanding prison universe.  The fact is that it’s hard to fathom even the basics of the American urge to lock people away in vast numbers, which is why today TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon focuses instead on what it might mean for justice in this country if we started to consider alternatives to prison. Tom

There Oughta Be a Law...
Should Prison Really Be the American Way?
By Rebecca Gordon

You’ve heard of distracted driving? It causes quite a few auto accidents and it’s illegal in a majority of states.

Well, this year, a brave New Jersey state senator, a Democrat, took on the pernicious problem of distracted walking. Faced with the fact that some people can’t tear themselves away from their smartphones long enough to get across a street in safety, Pamela Lampitt of Camden, New Jersey, proposed a law making it a crime to cross a street while texting. Violators would face a fine, and repeat violators up to 15 days in jail. Similar measures, says the Washington Post, have been proposed (though not passed) in Arkansas, Nevada, and New York. This May, a bill on the subject made it out of committee in Hawaii.

That’s right. In several states around the country, one response to people being struck by cars in intersections is to consider preemptively sending some of those prospective accident victims to jail. This would be funny, if it weren’t emblematic of something larger. We are living in a country where the solution to just about any social problem is to create a law against it, and then punish those who break it.

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