Im-Politic: Media Bias Even in Impeachment Trial Basics

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House managers, Im-Politic, impeachment, impeachment trial, Trump, Washington Post

Charges of media bias are so common nowadays that their simple volume can undercut their credibility. But at least from time to time some such instances are so flagrant that they should generate condemnation across the political or ideological spectra, and the latest came yesterday on the Washington Post website’s home page.

It’s no longer on-line (and didn’t appear in print), but it consisted of capsule descriptions of the House’s impeachment managers and Trump legal team, and I was so offended that I made sure to copy them as soon as I saw them. Here they are, starting with the managers (and they are indeed worth presenting in full):

Rep. Adam B. Schiff: “The California Democrat is known for distilling complicated subjects clearly and having a willingness to go after Trump’s soft spots.”

Rep. Jerry Nadler: “The New York Democrat leads the committee traditionally in charge of impeachment and shepherded the articles through Congress.”

Rep. Zoe Lofgren: “The California Democrat, who is serving her 13th term, is one of the most experienced members of Congress on impeachment.”

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries: “House Speaker Pelosi described the New York Democrat as ‘an accomplished litigator in private practice’ before seeking office.”

Rep. Val Demings: “The Florida Democrat was the first female police chief in Orlando, and Pelosi cited her law enforcement background as a strength.”

Rep. Jason Crow: “The Democrat from Colorado served as an Army Ranger and was partner in a law firm in Colorado.”

Rep. Sylvia Garcia: “The first-term Texas Democrat was a municipal judge in Houston and was one of the first Latinas elected to Congress from Texas.”

And here are the descriptions of the Trump team:

Pat Cipollone: “Republican lawmakers have described Cipollone as the ‘quarterback’ for Trump’s: legal strategy.”

Jay Sekulow: “Sekulow is the leader of the president’s personal legal team and he represented Trump during special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation.”

Ken Starr: “Starr is the independent counsel who investigated President Bill Clinton.”

Alan Dershowitz: “Dershowitz is the Harvard Law emeritus professor who advised the defense team in football star O.J. Simpson’s murder trial.”

Pam Bondi: “Bondi was the attorney general in Florida for eight years and has a number of ties to Trump.”

Robert Ray: “Ray is the former independent counsel, replacing Starr in October 1999, who oversaw the agreement with Clinton that averted a possible criminal trial.”

Pat Philbin: “Philbin is Cipollone’s right-hand man, his most senior deputy in the White House’s legal office.”

Michael Purpora: “Purpura took the lead on battling to prevent White House grand jury testimony from the Mueller investigation from being made public.”

You see the pattern here? Of the Post‘s seven House manager blurbs, four (those for Schiff, Lofgren, Jeffries, and Crow) contained flattering value judgments. And the favorable Crow description included experience that’s of course impressive militarily, but completely irrelevant to the impeachment trial, or any legal matters.

Of the seven Trump lawyer blurbs, none contained a flattering value judgment and three contained references arguably aimed at sliming their subjects (the link drawn between Dershowitz and O.J. Simpson; the observation of Bondi’s (unspecified) “ties to Trump”; and Purpura’s role in what’s all but dismissed as a cover-up.

As for Cipollone and Purpora and Philbin, it would be easy for Post readers to conclude from these otherwise straight factual portrayals that their careers have included no positions of consequence other than their Trump White House jobs – even though the first served as a senior aide to then Attorney General William P. Barr during the administration of George H.W. Bush (no fan of Mr. Trump’s); the second worked as a senior Justice Department official during the administration of George W. Bush (no Trump enthusiast, either), as well as a federal prosecutor in New York; and the third held jobs in Justice’s chain of command under Bush 43.

Everyone should be free to believe that the House managers are mainly legal eagles and/or paragons of virtue and even heroism, and that the Trump legal team is dominated by mere Trump flunkies. But such views don’t bear the slightest resemblance to facts, and if a newspaper fails to  keep this distinction straight for what should be a relatively uncontroversial informational feature, why should anyone trust it on anything less cut and dried?

Making News: A Washington Post Cite on Manufacturing, China Trade Deal Interviews…& More!

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Breitbart.com, China, Heather Long, i24News, John Carney, Making News, manufacturing, Market Wrap with Moe Ansari, Phase One, tariffs, trade deal, Trump, Washington Post

I’m pleased to report that I got quoted in this morning’s Washington Post on the new Federal Reserve industrial production figures (released yesterday).  Reporter Heather Long mentioned my observation that U.S. domestic manufacturing’s recent recession seems to be over.  She could have also noted the evidence I’d presented indicating that this slump never even happened, but what the heck.

Also yesterday, I was interviewed on “Market Wrap with Moe Ansari” on the new trade deal President Trump has signed with China.  You can listen to the podcast at this link;  my segment begins just after the 27-minute mark.

That same day, Breitbart.com‘s John Carney gave me a very nice shout-out in his very important piece noting new research showing that he (and I) have been right all along about the Trump trade wars having minimal-at-best effects on prices for consumer goods.  Incidentally, Post reporter Heather Long also deserves much credit for first reporting these academic findings.  Read the piece here.

On Thursday night, the U.S.-Israeli TV network i24News also interviewed me on that “Phase One” China trade deal.  To watch the interview, click here and download the file.  As usual with i24News, be sure to download the link within a week, because after that, your freebie access will be gond.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

 

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: China’s Leadership Touted in (Wait for It)…Safe Products Manufacturing

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China, Consumer Products Safety Commission, CPSC, Delta Childrens, Phase One, product safety, Rachel Siegel, trade deal, Washington Post, {What's Left of) Our Economy

I was tempted to describe as screamingly funny the latest Mainstream Media report describing the supposedly indescribable pain that U.S. imports from China in critical industries will keep facing following the new “Phase One” trade deal with the People’s Republic – and from the increases or new levies that could result if Beijing violates the terms.

Except any article dealing with the safety of products imported from China isn’t at all funny, especially considering that they can be killers, and that their victims have included children.

The piece in question: a report from Washington Post correspondent Rachel Siegel. Along with her editors, she evidently thinks that the U.S. economy will struggle to withstand the blow dealt by the ongoing tariff uncertainty confronting the classic toys sector. But on top of obsessing over the challenges facing producers (in China) of Lincoln Logs and My Little Pony, the Post crew responsible for the piece also delivered a world class jaw dropper by quoting the owner of a children’s furniture company who insists that “he can’t just relocate production to another country because he relies on China’s infrastructure to guarantee his products are safe.”

This depiction of China as the global capital of safe consumer goods production is literally gobsmacking.  After all, children’s and other consumer products from China generally are still considered so potentially dangerous that the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission maintains a special website page listing product recalls from China. This past October’s entries alone (the latest figures available) numbered seven.

Nor has the company Siegel singled out – Delta Children, a New York City-based manufacturer of baby and kids furniture – escaped these problems. In 2008, some 1.6 million cribs it made in China, Indonesia, and Taiwan were pulled from stores because one of their features posed an entrapment and suffocation hazard for infants – and because two babies had been killed by this defect.

The recall didn’t solve the problem, either, for in 2010, Delta voluntarily recalled more than 747,000 additional cribs (including products made in China) after dozens of reports had been received of malfunctions and injuries (fortunately none of them serious).

And just two years ago, the company issued a smaller scale recall – for 28,000 strollers capable of breaking and injuring children.

Delta is hardly the only business that’s manufactured dangerous products in China, and there’s no evidence I’ve seen that it’s among the worst perpetrators. But the claim that producing in China is essential for producing safe goods for American consumers has to be a new low in self-serving bunkum – and indeed in dangerously self-serving bunkum. Or does that distinction goes to the journalist and her editors who parroted it?

Im-Politic: Another Possible Impeachable Offense: The Globalists’ Afghanistan War

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Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Craig Whitlock, George W. Bush, globalism, House Judiciary Committee, Im-Politic, impeachment, jihadism, Matt Gaetz, nation-building, Presidents, terrorism, Washington Post

It almost looks providential that within 48 hours, all these events transpired:

>The House Judiciary Committee continued its hearing on impeaching President Trump;

>Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, a Republican Judiciary Committee member suggested that former Presidents can be impeached; and

>The Washington Post began publishing a lengthy series documenting literally decades of official U.S. government deceit – including by former Presidents – surrounding the 18-year long war in Afghanistan.

It looks providential because if Gaetz is right (and, at least according to this analysis, there’s no legal consensus yet on the matter), it’s tough to think of more important abuses of power than the flood of dishonestly upbeat statements issuing from the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama about encouraging progress on the military and nation-building fronts in that protracted and ongoing conflict.

After all, the consequences of such abuses weren’t simply a short delay in providing military aid to a country (Ukraine) whose security and independence weren’t seen as remotely vital U.S. concerns even during the Cold War. Instead, according to Pentagon and other figures the Post cites, the war’s toll so far has included:

>2,300 dead American servicemen

>20,589 wounded in action

>Nearly one trillion taxpayer dollars – an inflation-adjusted figure that doesn’t include expenditures by the intelligence community and the costs of caring for wounded veterans.

It’s true that some of these casualties and spending date from the early years of the war – when no serious person can doubt the need to intervene militarily in Afghanistan to destroy its potential to serve as a terrorist base for planning and launching September 11-style terrorist attacks. But the vast majority date from the long years after the ouster from power of the Taliban and the destruction of Al Qaeda.

At that point, it should have been clear that the best American strategy for preventing the reemergence of jihadist organizations with global reach was maintaining small-scale special forces operations in the country that would focus on harassing extremists effectively enough to keep them off balance and incapable of organizing large-scale inter-continental violence. Stronger border security measures could also help keep them away from the U.S. homeland.  Instead, U.S. leaders embarked on campaign to nation-build in a region that historically has been so divided that no true nation had ever existed. 

(Actually, I first publicly critiqued the focus on nation-building in Afghanistan and touted the need for better border controls at a 2002 Washington, D.C. policy conference summarized here.  It wasn’t till 2014, however, when ISIS had replaced Al Qaeda as the main Middle East terrorist threat to the United States, that I first wrote about the need for harassment forces.)   

But the Bush and Obama administrations ignored this advice because they had drunk the globalist Kool-aid insisting that overseas threats can be dealt with adequately only by literally turning troubled parts of the world into the political, economic, and social successes that they have never been. These Afghanistan policies per se weren’t high crimes or misdemeanors – unless you favor criminalizing stubbornness persistent and extreme enough to qualify as stupidity.

What was arguably criminal? As documented by Post reporter Craig Whitlock, even though the documents (which exist because of a federal research project undertaken to analyze failure in Afghanistan) make clear widespread official recognition of the debacle on the ground, they “contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting.”

And more to the point: “Several of those interviewed [by the project’s researchers] described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.”

I’ve only read Whitlock’s summary articles about the documents, not the documents themselves, but undoubtedly if he’d found evidence that Bush and Obama personally knew about the distortion efforts or, worse, ordered them, he’d have reported it. At the same time, determining Presidential guilt wasn’t the government research project’s mission. In fact, although the Post is still suing the government for release of the names of the more than 400 “insider” interview subjects whose statements represent most of the raw material gathered by the researchers, it’s not clear whether the two former Presidents were among them. Moreover, it appears that not all the documentary evidence produced by the project has been released, either with names attached or not.

So the question made famous by the late Tennessee Senator Howard Baker during 1973 Watergate hearings – “What did the President know, and when did he know it?” – can legitimately be asked about Bush and Obama. Any answers eventually shaken loose in impeachment or similar investigations will be too late to undo the enormous damage of the Afghanistan war to date. But they might hasten a decision by Mr. Trump finally to act on his instincts and cut the nation’s losses. More important, the prospect of sitting at a witness table might persuade future Presidents to be far less reckless when they spend America’s blood and treasure.

Im-Politic: The Washington Post Goes All Fake News on Trump, Biden, and the UN

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Anne Gearan, Ashley Parker, Biden, election 2020, General Assembly, Im-Politic, Joe Biden, Mainstream Media, Philip Rucker, Trump, Ukraine, UN, United Nations, Washington Post

On Sunday, I wrote about an Associated Press article dealing extensively with manufacturing that I said might not have been Fake News, but sure came close. Today, the Washington Post published an article about President Trump’s activities at the UN General Assembly meeting in New York City that unquestionably deserves that label.

The theme of the article was made clear by the headline: “Trump uses U.N. meeting to wage domestic political attack on Biden.” Sounds pretty disgraceful, right? I mean, after all, every September the world’s leaders gather for this event, and address weighty issues ranging from threats to peace to climate change (a big focus this year). And here comes this notoriously egomaniacal and selfish boor of an Oval Office occupant determined to ignore his responsibilities as steward of the national interest and global leader – and the tradition of domestic politics stopping at the water’s edge. Instead, all he cared about was using this solemn conclave to slime former Vice President Joe Biden, a likely opponent during the next presidential election campaign.

As often not the case these days, moreover, the article itself faithfully reflected the header. According to authors Anne Gearan, Philip Rucker, and Ashley Parker, the President “turned” the General Assembly, “where foreign leaders converged to confront climate change and other global pandemics, into the backdrop for an assault on a domestic political opponent.”

They continued: “Trump used his meetings with heads of state to flay Biden, celebrate his personal attorney’s altercations and tend to his media feuds.”

For good measure, they wrote that Mr. Trump “seemed to revel in the opportunity to kick up dust around Biden, who has led Trump in virtually every public poll for several months.”

In other words, could the President be more of a reckless lout?

Readers were also told that participants in the global gathering were “baffled by the sudden interjection of a complex Trump scandal that they found mystifying.” And the authors dutifully quoted (globalist) “experts” to validate their emphasis on the President’s allegedly alarming weirdness:

“‘It puts foreign leaders in a difficult if not impossible position,’ said Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. ‘How do you manage this complicated person who doesn’t play the game by the rules, and how do you somehow protect this important relationship? Everybody’s a bit wary.’

“Victoria Holt, managing director at the Henry L. Stimson Center, said the arcane details of the Ukraine story and its overlap with U.S. politics are largely beside the point for other leaders here. ‘I’m sure they are scratching their heads,” she said. “The United States is supposed to be leading on major issues” such as climate change.’”

Except a glancing reference in its paragraph completely destroyed the alarming premise of the article. As the authors briefly noted, the controversy over Mr. Trump’s own and the Biden family’s dealings with political leaders and oligarchs from Ukraine “hung over Trump’s first day at the annual U.N. meeting, beginning with a volley of shouted questions from journalists….”

Another unintentionally revealing observation: “Trump stayed away from the Ukraine topic in his only major prepared remarks of the day….”

That is, it wasn’t Mr. Trump who injected domestic politics into this year’s General Assembly and its work. It was journalists like the Post reporters. (Unless you attach lots of importance to the fact that the President tweeted about the subject beforehand – which the Post reporters clearly didn’t, since they devoted no other passages to it.) Talk about blaming the victim.

The Washington Post, of course, is the newspaper that throughout the Trump administration has been sanctimoniously warning that “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” As so often the case, though, it’s ignored how shamefully biased reporting by democracy’s supposedly impartial watchdogs represent an equally dangerous threat.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Why Trump’s Not Down on the Farm

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agriculture, Alan Rappeport, American Farm Bureau Federation, election 2020, farmers, Greg Sargent, Mainstream Media, regulation, tariffs, taxes, The New York Times, Trade, trade war, Trump, Washington Post, {What's Left of) Our Economy

For anyone with any sympathy for President Trump’s China and other trade policies (like yours truly), one of the great pleasures of following the news coverage has been reading the bushel of stories that conform to the following pattern: a Mainstream Media reporter jets out to farm country expecting to find the nation’s agricultural community – which voted strongly for Mr. Trump in 2016 – up in arms about lost export sales due to foreign tariffs and other restrictions imposed in retaliation to new U.S. levies. And selfsame reporter winds up grudgingly writing that farmers and ranchers are by and large sticking with the President.  (See this classic example.)

This morning, such coverage took a turn that’s new and especially important given the approach of the next presidential election. In the process, the journalists involved unwittingly demonstrated how ignorant they continue to be about the full relationship between Trump administration policies and American agriculture.

The new turn was made clear by this claim today in a New York Times report: After “remaining resolute” in support of Mr. Trump, the difficulties faced by U.S. Farmers is finally “becoming a political problem” for the President. Indeed, wrote correspondent Alan Rappeport, “as the trade fight gets uglier, farmers are beginning to panic.”

And following a recent, increasingly incestuous trend in which reporters and pundits from one news organization breathlessly (and often instantly) hype the findings of a rival, a Never Trump-er Washington Post columnist based an entire essay today on the Times piece, declaring “There are indications that they are now getting genuinely angry over Trump’s efforts to gaslight them so shamelessly over the impact of his trade war with China.”

Or are they?

The original (long) Times article – in the next to last paragraph – informed readers that

“many farmers continue to support Mr. Trump and express hope that the president knows what he is doing in his dealings with China. A July survey from Farm Journal found that 79 percent of 1,100 farmers still back Mr. Trump despite the lack of progress in negotiations with China.”

Similarly, Post columnist Greg Sargent wrote: “Let’s stipulate up front [actually, this insight didn’t come until the middle of the article] that there is zero chance that farmers — or rural voters — break with Trump in 2020.”

At the same time, there’s no doubt that American farm exports, especially to China, are down this year. So what gives? Two major developments, both of which have been almost completely neglected:

First, the Trump administration has done very well by American farmers and ranchers by way of tax policy. And second, it’s done just as well by them by way of regulatory policy. At least, that’s what the biggest U.S. agricultural lobbying group has said, in reports here and here. P.S. The American Farm Bureau Federation is no fan of the Trump tariffs.

I could add that American farm prices and incomes began falling years before Mr. Trump’s inauguration – and have actually been leveling off recently. And that, when it comes to trade, farmers are strongly in favor of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada-Agreement – the Trump administration’s rewrite of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). But that would be piling on.

It’s not that everyone shouldn’t be heartened by the upsurge in national press corps interest in American agriculture. But that’s only Step One in generating accurate coverage. Step Two is actually learning something.

Making News: Manufacturing Views Quoted in the Washington Post…& More!

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American Greatness, China, Denver Post, Hollywood, Making News, manufacturing, Modern Machine Shop, recession, tariffs, Thaddeus McCotter, Trade, Trump, Washington Post

I’m pleased to announce that three recent news reports – two on the state of American manufacturing, and one on China’s growing influence over the American movie industry – have cited my views and analyses.

On July 25, this Washington Post article included my – cloudy- forecast about industry’s near future due to all the uncertainties created by President Trump’s tariff-centric trade policies.  It was also gratifying to see a Mainstream Media piece mention my observations about technical manufacturing recessions – I believe that’s a first.

For more on recent manufacturing recessions, including the one in which industry is still stuck, see this recent post of mine.

This Washington Post piece was also reprinted in several major dailies around the country, like the Denver Post.

The day before, this post on Modern Machine Shop‘s blog quoted from my recent offering on how U.S.-based companies have dealt with Mr. Trump’s tariffs.

Finally, on July 19, former Michigan Republican Congressman Thaddeus McCotter’s essay for the American Greatness website on Hollywood’s latest kowtow to Chinese investors mentioned a tweet of mine on the subject.  Here’s the link.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming and recent media appearances, and other developments.

Im-Politic: A Century-Old Way Forward on Defining “True Americanism”

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assimilation, Christianity, conservatism, Henry Olsen, Im-Politic, immigrants, Immigration, libertarianism, Louis D. Brandeis, national conservatism, national identity, progressivism, social conservatism, Trump, Washington Post

That sounds like a pretty interesting and important Washington, D.C. conference that took place last week that gathered a bunch of politicians, pundits, intellectuals (how I hate that word!) and activists of all kinds on the political Right. Their aim: Developing a form of “national conservatism.” Think of it as a large-scale attempt to create Trump-ism without the – ah – idiosyncracies of its namesake.

Not that it will be easy to accomplishing this worthy goal – which appears to amount to seeking to replace the economic libertarian- and globalist-dominated views that have predominated on the Right for so long with something much better suited to advance the interests of working-class Americans.

After all, like it or not, the President’s controversial character in general clearly pleases a big chunk of the electorate, and it’s probably a major contributor to the near-universal support he enjoys with avowedly Republican voters. Moreover, Trump-ism as practiced by the President includes a lot of economic libertarian-ism, as indicated by his early and avid support for a business-heavy tax cut plan, for major cuts in the discretionary portion of the federal government, and for substantially easing environmental and other regulations. And for good measure, as I’ve written, his foreign policy honors America-First precepts in the breach at least as often as not. 

So the presidential version of Trump-ism has not surprisingly attracted backers from all over the Right, and the big disagreements that apparently broke out at the conference were just as predictable. One of the thorniest has to do with the intertwined issues of identity politics and immigration, But however emotional such disputes are likely to remain, they seem to me among the easiest to resolve – at least if Trump-ism is to have any viable long-term political future, and more important, to play a constructive role in resolving them.

According to one sympathetic conservative writer, Henry Olsen, too many of the conservatives at the conference, and too many Trump supporters generally, seem insistent on emphasizing “the country’s past as a British Protestant nation, one where the vast supermajority of citizens took their moral cues from the Bible as the guide to its future.”

The author, a Washington Post columnist who is supportive in particular of much of the “nationalist” part of national conservatism (especially on the crucial trade and immigration fronts), argues correctly that “Since the 1890s, the country has successfully defined what it means to be American without recourse to denominational persuasion or British heritage.”

And in my view, he’s equally correct in contending that claims (mainly from the social conservative wing of conservatism) like “Christianity was the force that created America” simplistically overlook the more inclusive beliefs of the Founding Fathers, ignore centuries of massive demographic change, and “argue for modern America’s de facto dissolution.”

So what does hold us together – and just as important, has held us together for so long? Olsen’s pinpointing of 1890 brings the answer very close. Because its precise chronological location is the year 1915. That’s when soon-to-be-appointed Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis gave a speech in Boston titled, “True Americanism.”

If you think the title means that Brandeis was a jingoistic xenophobe, think again. He was the son of immigrants from Prague, the first Jew to sit on the high court, and a genuine titan of that era’s progressive movement. And in this address, he presented probably the strongest, most eloquent descriptions of what is unquestionably the most admirable, and effective, unifying forces a work throughout American history – what most of us would call the “American way of life.”

Indeed, Brandeis’ theme that day was why the country should welcome the immigrants arriving during that era in record numbers, and how it could maintain the consensus on bedrock national values and governing practices that’s vital to any society’s coherence – and therefore success.

I’ve quoted from this speech before, but it’s worth revisiting at some length. In Brandeis’ words, since its founding, America had

“admitted to our country and to citizenship immigrants from the diverse lands of Europe. We had faith that thereby we could best serve ourselves and mankind. This faith has been justified. The United States has grown great. The immigrants and their immediate descendants have proved themselves as loyal as any citizens of the country. Liberty has knit us closely together as Americans. Note the common devotion to our Country’s emblem expressed at the recent Flag Day celebration in New York by boys and girls representing more than twenty different nationalities warring abroad.”

He also implored his audience, “let us not forget that many a poor immigrant comes to us from distant lands, ignorant of our language, strange in tattered clothes and with jarring manners, who is already truly American in this most important sense; who has long shared our ideals and who, oppressed and persecuted abroad, has yearned for our land of liberty and for the opportunity of abiding in the realization of its aims.”

But crucially, he added, simple admission was not enough. Nor was the adoption by immigrants of “the clothes, the manners and the customs generally prevailing here” or even substituting “for his mother tongue, the English language as the common medium of speech.”

“To become Americanized,” Brandeis argued, “the change wrought must be fundamental. However great his outward conformity, the immigrant is not Americanized unless his interests and affections have become deeply rooted here. And we properly demand of the immigrant even more than this. He must be brought into complete harmony with our ideals and aspirations and cooperate with us for their attainment. Only when this has been done, will he possess the national consciousness of an American.”

I won’t describe Brandeis’ specific definition of that consciousness (you really should read it), but I can’t imagine that any American of good faith would quarrel significantly with it (although Brandeis’ view that this system of beliefs was distinctive and distinctively virtuous wouldn’t sit too well with many on the Left).

What plainly has been even more controversial in recent decades, however, is the equally Brandeis-ian idea that these beliefs need to be actively propagated, and his emphasis on lifelong education makes clear that this mission needed to be carried out not just by the schools, but by many of society’s most important institutions: “the public platform [i.e., by political leaders]…discussion in the lodges and the trade unions….”

So if national conservatism wants to be truly national, and therefore, successful, it will have no choice but to rally round the view that anyone from any part of the world can become an American – if Americanizing them becomes a national priority again. Of course, that’s the key to success for liberalism, too – which unlike too much of conservatism, is fine with the “anyone” part of the above conviction, but seems convinced that diversity should be sought uber alles, and perhaps exclusively.

Which portion of the political spectrum will be the first to recognize the synthesis – which will be a win not only for its own fortunes but, as history has taught, for the nation as a whole? So far, I’d bet on the conservatives. But not heavily.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: The Latest Trump Tariff Debunkers Debunked

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Benjamin Della Rocca, Benn Steil, China, Council on Foreign Relations, goods imports, imports, merchandise imports, n, Peter Navarro, tariffs, Trade, tradewar, Trump, Washington Post, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Only in the free trade-worshiping American Mainstream Media could an op-ed piece titled “Debunking Trump’s Tariff Claims” be published that’s chock full of easily debunk-able claims itself.  

The first such allegation in the article, which came out on the Washington Post’s website yesterday, holds that the administration’s view that China “bears most of the burden of the tariffs” imposed by the President over the last year is based solely on adviser Peter Navarro’s explanation that China is lowering the prices of its goods in order to offset them. Authors Benn Steil and Benjamin Della Rocca of the Council on Foreign Relations note, correctly, that U.S. government data show that prices of Chinese imports haven’t fallen by nearly as much as they’ve been increased by Trump tariffs.

What Steil and Della Rocca have left out, though, could fill a book. For instance, the tariffs still only cover $250 billion worth of America’s total goods purchases of China – which last year totaled just under $540 billion. So that’s well under half. In addition, the vast majority of these levies have been in place for considerably less than a year.

Moreover, the prices of imports from China – which stem from numerous influences aside from tariffs (U.S. and other foreign market conditions for the various products involved, levels of Chinese subsidies – including value-added tax rebates that were increased last September) – have definitely shifted gears. During the pre-tariff period May, 2017-May, 2018, they rose 0.40 percent. During the largely post-tariff period May, 2018-2019 (encompassing the latest available data), they fell by 1.4 percent.

Equally interesting: Those May China import prices hit their lowest absolute level since September, 2007, nearly 12 years ago. Coincidence? Overall non-fuel import prices are down, too – but stand only at a post-September, 2017 low.

Perhaps more important, though, Navarro has in fact not staked his stance only on import prices. As he told Fox Business on June 21 (before the Steil-Della Rocca article), “China producers pay for these tariffs in the language of economics, they bear the burden of the tariffs through lower prices, lower exports, lower profits.” And there’s abundant evidence to back him up.

Notably, since July, 2018 (when the first, $50 billion, tranche of Trump tariffs were imposed), America’s goods purchases from China fell on a monthly basis by 16.66 percent. The comparable results for the previous year – an increase of 0.92 percent. Over that span, U.S. non-oil goods imports (the best global control group for goods imports from China) weakened, too, but kept growing. The slowdown was from 6.65 percent to 1.82 percent.

Another way to look at these changes is to compare U.S. goods imports from China from January-May of this year with those purchases from the same five-month stretch in years past. During the first such Trump period (covering 2016-2017), before any tariffs were imposed, these merchandise imports from China increased by 8.10 percent. The purchases went up during the following five-month stretch –  to 9.54 percent.

The growth rate during the first five-month period featuring tariffs, in 2019? There was no growth. In fact, they sank by 12.34 percent. And interestingly, the overall U.S. economic growth rate during these spans was almost unchanged. 

Since the federal government doesn’t keep monthly figures on the gross domestic product (GDP), I’ve used the next best measure — the quarterly data kept by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. On a pre-inflation basis (the same gauge as used by the trade figures), during the first between the first two quarters of 2018, the economy grew by 2.93 percent. During the first two quarters of 2019, the pace quickened only to 2.95 percent. (Because the first results for second quarter GDP aren’t in yet, I’ve used the average of these widely followed “tracking figures” as a substitute.) 

An even clearer idea of Chinese losses can be gleaned from considering what U.S. merchandise imports from China might have been without any tariffs. These kinds of exercises are anything but precise, of course. But had they increased at the same 9.54 percent rate as between January-May, 2017 and 2018 rather than shrinking by 12.34 percent, they’d have totaled $224.97 billion during the first five months of this year – a swing of nearly $45 billion.

Steil and Della Rocca didn’t bother to look at the impact on China’s global exports, either – even though it looks sizable. Between July, 2018 and May, 2019 (from that first full month of U.S. tariffs through the latest data month), China’s global overseas merchandise sales fell by 0.80 percent on a monthly basis. From July, 2017 to May, 2018 (pre-any tariffs), they expanded by 8.94 percent. 

China’s overall economic growth took a big hit, too. On an annual basis, in the third quarter of 2018, (when those initial American tariffs were slapped on), Chinese GDP expanded by 6.5 percent. (And yes, I realize these numbers can be very dodgy.) By the first quarter of this year, it had dipped to 6.4 percent. From the pre-tariff third quarter of 2017 to the first quarter of 2018, China’s growth rate remained the same – a considerably higher 6.8 percent.

President Trump and his aides certainly can and should be much more precise when they talk about the trade war’s costs. But examining these claims using partial quotes and isolated figures is surely a much greater sin. In other words, the bigger the picture examined, the better the Trump administration’s contention that the Chinese economy is suffering a much greater burden from U.S. tariffs than America’s

Im-Politic: The Mueller Letter Coverage Shows the Need for a Journalism Hall of Shame

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Attorney General, Im-Politic, journalism, Mainstream Media, media bias, obstruction of justice, Pulitzer Prize, Robert S. Mueller III, Special Counsel, The New York Times, Trump, Trump-Russia, Washington Post, William P. Barr

Here are two suggestions for the folks at Columbia University’s journalism school who each year award the Pulitzer Prizes for that so-called profession: First, in addition to citing reporters and editors whose work supposedly embodies journalistic excellence, they should identify news people whose performance is a complete disgrace. Second, they could easily kick off this practice next year by shaming the Washington Post and New York Times articles this morning revealing that Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III has complained to Attorney General William P. Barr about Barr’s descriptions of his report on Russia’s interference with the 2016 presidential election and President Trump’s reactions to the Mueller probe.

Both pieces – and the reporters and editors responsible – completely mis-characterized the Mueller concerns that they eventually went on to portray accurately. And they committed the unforgivable journalistic (and broader ethical) sin of accentuating the negative when the case for focusing on the positive was at least equally strong.

Specifically, the thrust of the two pieces was that Mueller in a letter to Barr expressed objections to Barr’s March 24 letter to Congressional judiciary committee leaders summarizing the “principal conclusions reached by the Special Counsel and the results of his investigation,” and informing them of the status of Barr’s “initial review” of the report.

But any reader who finished the articles would discover that, contrary to the headlines and the opening paragraphs, Mueller was most irked not by any of Barr’s actions or writings, but by the press coverage. According to the Post reporters (who claim to have seen the Mueller letter), the Special Counsel did write to the Attorney General (his Justice Department superior) that the March 24 Barr communique to Congress

“did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions. There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”

(The letter has since been released.)

But farther into the story, readers are told that the following day, when the two spoke by phone, “Mueller said he was concerned that media coverage of the obstruction investigation was misguided and creating public misunderstandings about the office’s work, according to Justice Department officials.”

Moreover – and this is crucial – “When Barr pressed Mueller on whether he thought Barr’s memo to Congress was inaccurate, Mueller said he did not but felt that the media coverage of it was misinterpreting the investigation, officials said.”

So the question needs to be asked: Why wasn’t the emphasis in the Post story Mueller’s statement that Barr had accurately summarized his report, and that he thought the press coverage was awful? And by extension, why wasn’t the headline something on the order of “Mueller praises Barr summary as accurate; slams media interpretations”?

The Times story followed the same pattern and therefore embodied the same fatal flaws. In particular, it wasn’t until the seventh paragraph that readers learn that

“‘The special counsel emphasized that nothing in the attorney general’s March 24 letter was inaccurate or misleading,’ a Justice Department spokeswoman, Kerri Kupec, said in response to a request for comment made on Tuesday afternoon. A spokesman for the special counsel’s office declined to comment.”

As a result, it, too, could have been – and indeed should have been – structured along lines favorable to Barr, not critical of him. Indeed, here the argument for such an approach is even stronger than for the Post piece, since the evidence of Barr’s accuracy comes from a named official spokesperson, not from anonymous sources.

Last week, a major national poll found that American voters’ distrust of “political news” had hit an all-time high of 54 percent. The Post and Times coverage of Mueller’s words all but guarantees that new records on this score will soon be set – and is sending a message to the Pulitzer folks that something like a Hall of Shame is needed to start getting journalism off its current irresponsible track.