Yesterday I listened to the morning “talking heads” programs on network television as usual. Something that struck me was that it was clear that the various representatives of the major media outlets had no idea how much credibility they had lost or why.

Example: on CBS Sunday Morning Tracy Smith conducted a highly reverential interview of Bill Clinton (presumably to promote his new book). 20 minutes later on Face the Nation Margaret Brennan went after Republican members of Congress hammer and tongs on whether, given the sexual crimes and improprieties of which he has been accused, they would support Attorney General nominee Matt Gaetz. As I see it there are three alternatives:

• An accusation or an investigation is not the same as a conviction and that is equally true for Bill Clinton and Matt Gaetz
• Accusations are enough. Bill Clinton should have been taken to task for his sexual history
• The attacks on Matt Gaetz in the media are simply partisan politics as usual

IMO it is clear that the media have been successful in convincing a lot of Americans that the last was the case and everything they say should be taken with more than a grain of salt. We’ve come a long way since Walter Cronkite. “That’s the way it is” and “in seeking truth you have to get both sides of he story”.

Friday was my mom’s birthday but I neglected to post. My reason may have been strangely appropriate—I was having a tooth extract and the preparation for a new implant done. Appropriate because by the time she was far younger than I am now my mom had had all of her teeth extracted. The experience was probably one of the most excruciatingly painful of my life and that includes nearly losing my arm in an auto accident. For the last two days I’ve been pretty out of it. Now for good or ill I’m pretty much back to normal.

We’re not sure which birthday this birthday of my mom’s was since, as I’ve mentioned before, my mom had three birth certificates: one for 1921, one for 1922, and one for 1923. We don’t know which if any was correct.

I continue to miss my mom. She was one of my best friends, the only friend other than my wife on whom I could rely without reservation. She was a woman of extraordinary courage, wisdom, and prudence. She began life with nothing other than the love of her parents whose love did not extend to providing stability of security for. With that background she was determined to provide that security and stability for her own children and with my father, a man who also longed for the stability and security he had never had as a child, she succeeded in creating a loving, stable, and secure home for her children.

I have no opinion of the individuals that President-Elect Donald Trump has nominated for his cabinet. In general I believe that, barring some severe impediment, presidents deserve to have their cabinet appointments confirmed for good or ill. There’s plenty of room for criticism but to my eye the criticism of those he’s picked reflects chagrin the Mr. Trump was elected at all more than it does on the individuals nominated (with the possible exception of Matt Gaetz). Recognizing that Trump’s cabinet only reflects those who have been nominated rather than the final list, I wanted to point out some things.

Much of the comment has centered around how Mr. Trump’s nominees are loyalists. Like it or not there is nothing unusual in that. It has been true of nearly every president, especially in the last 30 years. What leaps out at me are:

1. There are no members of the Silent Generation among Mr. Trump’s nominees. I believe that is the first time that has been the case (Wilbur Ross/Commerce was Silent Generation in Trump’s first cabinet) since Reagan’s first term.
2. How many people over 70 there are in Joe Biden’s cabinet. There’s a big difference between a Baby Boomer born in 1946 (Yellen) and one born in 1964 (Harris).
3. There are Millennials among the nominees for the first time.

If Trump’s nominees are confirmed, this cabinet will mark a real changing of the guard from Silent Generation and Baby Boomers to Generation X and Millennials.

Who’s the leader of the Democratic Party at this point? The Silent Generation leadership that have guided them for the last decade or so are really too old. Barack Obama?

I genuninely wish that those who, like the editors of the Wall Street Journal:

Ukraine isn’t losing the war, but thanks in part to Mr. Biden’s limits on its defenses Kyiv isn’t winning either. The war has devolved into a bloody stalemate with horrific casualties on both sides. Russia is making slow territorial gains in Ukraine’s east at high cost. Ukraine has held its salient in Russia’s Kursk region, but the Kremlin is massing for an assault to repel the Ukrainians with the help of some 10,000 North Korean troops.

Mr. Biden’s Ukraine policy isn’t the triumph that he and the press advertise. At every stage of the war he has limited the military aid the U.S. would provide and how it was used. Artillery, Patriot air defenses, tanks, F-16s and long-range missiles: the Pentagon has delayed providing advanced weapons for fear that Vladimir Putin might escalate the conflict.

The limits have hurt Ukraine’s ability to go on offense against Kremlin forces, including key nodes of supply, communications and weapons stores inside Russia. Mr. Putin’s forces have until recently had a sanctuary inside Russia to attack Ukraine without fear of being hit. Even now the U.S. restricts Ukraine from long-range missile strikes on Russian territory. The U.S. learned the hard way in Vietnam and Afghanistan that you can’t win a war when your enemy has a safe haven.

seem to think that the only thing standing between Ukraine and victory is the stingy United States, would tell us what they mean. The measures that they support:

If Mr. Putin won’t negotiate a peace that Ukraine can live with, Mr. Trump will have to increase U.S. and Ukrainian military leverage to assist diplomacy.

That would mean supporting another aid package in Congress and removing limits on Ukraine’s use of weapons.

Do they not understand that the technology of those long-range weapons means the direct involvement of the United States in programming and guidance?

My view is basically the same as George Kennan’s was. NATO membership for Ukraine is a red line over which the Russian leadership is willing to go to war. Said another way Russia invasion of Ukraine could have been avoided by ending NATO expansion in 2004 (not to mention not fomenting a revolution in Ukraine ten years later). European Union membership might have been fine but the Germans are smart enough to recognize that admitting Ukraine to the EU would brings costs greater than any benefit they might realize from the admission.

I was somewhat alarmed at the title of Dan Drezner’s latest piece in Foreign Affairs, “The End of American Exceptionalism”. I was relieved to learn that he didn’t actually mean “American exceptionalism” but something that has come to be associated with like a barnacle on a ship’s hull—Wilsonian foreign policy, i.e. “spreading democracy”:

Trump will navigate world politics with greater confidence this time around. Whether he will have any better luck bending the world to his “America first” brand is another question entirely. What is certain, however, is that the era of American exceptionalism has ended. Under Trump, U.S. foreign policy will cease promoting long-standing American ideals. That, combined with an expected surge of corrupt foreign policy practices, will leave the United States looking like a garden-variety great power.

The emphasis is mine.

Actually, I tend to agree with him in that I don’t believe that Donald Trump is likely to pursue as Wilsonian a foreign policy as did Biden or Obama and I agree that he and his appointees are likely to follow the same pattern as federal government officials in recent administrations. Here’s what he means:

Trump’s reelection augurs two trends in U.S. foreign policy that will be difficult to reverse. The first is the inevitable corruption that will compromise U.S. policies. Former policy principals in prior administrations, from Henry Kissinger to Hillary Clinton, have profited from their public service through book deals, keynote speeches, and geopolitical consulting. Former Trump officials have taken this to a whole new level, however.

I think it would be hard to equal the record of the Clinton Foundation and Bill and Hillary Clinton, generally, although Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner come close. I question such largesse but I suspect it would be hard to crack down on it. I think we should be willing to try.

However, at most it will be a hiatus in our mostly futile attempts to “spread democracy”. The internationalist interventionists are not out they’re just down and will continue their possibly well-intentioned efforts in due course.

At ABC 7 Chicago Barb Markoff, Christine Tressel and Tom Jones and Chuck Goudie report on a valedictory interview of States Attorney Foxx by Chuck Goudie:

In what amounts to her last closing argument, Foxx sat down with the I-Team for a spirited review of her eight years in office as a so-called “progressive prosecutor,” marked by controversial reforms, high profile violence, wrongful convictions and a made-up celebrity crime.

One of the things that struck me about the interview was that in listing her accomplishments, Ms. Foxx could not have made what I’ve been saying all along more clearly. She has been disinterested in prosecuting, more focused on defense. What I have said in the past is that she viewed the Cook County States Attorney job as being “public defender at large”.

Among the things not mentioned in the interview were:

• The Jussie Smollett debacle, blandly referred to as a “made-up celebrity crime”, might not have become the cause célèbre if she had not given it credence
• An unprecedented number of prosecutors resigned on her watch, citing the job’s failure to meet their notions of justice
• The large number of felony cases dropped by the States Attorney’s office during her tenure
• The rate of violent crime increased in Chicago during her term although the reporting problems I have spoken of in the past make it hard to be certain

Hopefully, Eileen Burke O’Neill, Ms. Foxx’s successor, will take more interest in the job.

Every time I hear exchanges on support of working people to which the response is that Joe Biden is the most pro-union president ever I have to laugh. 6% of private sector workers belong to unions. Being pro-union is absolutely not identical to favoring working class people. It means you’re pro-public sector unions and there may be no area so in need of reform as public sector unions. Public sector unions contributing to political campaigns is an inherently corrupt practice. In essence it is recycling tax dollars into political contributions.

I don’t think that public sector unions should be forbidden but I do think they should not be allowed to make political contributions in money or in kind.

BTW the president of the CTU is paid more than $400,000 per year.

In my assessment President-Elect Donald Trump’s promise of a “mass deportation” of illegal migrants was his biggest campaign promise. At Outside the Beltway James Joyner considers the prospects for such an action:

President-Elect Donald Trump placed “the border” at the center of his re-election campaign, pledging “mass deportation.” At least 11 million people are living in the United States in violation of our immigration laws. Many of us have argued that there’s no feasible way to deport all of them and that any attempt to do so would be at a horrific humanitarian cost.

We’re about to find out the administration’s actual policies and how much support he can get for them in a Republican-majority Congress.

He goes on to consider the political and legal prospects for “mass deportation” and what the president-elect’s transition team is doing. James writes:

Here, I haven’t the foggiest what the courts will do. The overwhelming number of those claiming asylum are gaming the system, as they rather clearly don’t qualify for the exceedingly narrow provisions of the applicable law. But there is, in fact, applicable law—including international treaties ratified by the Senate—that would seem to require at least some modicum of due process to ensure that we don’t deport legitimate claimants. That the system is being gamed is extremely frustrating, but I don’t see how we can simply ignore the law.

with which I am in material agreement.

What I favor is rendering people here illegally materially incapable of working legally in the United States. I believe that alone would result in mass self-deportation. Tightening considerably on those here illegally working will require some form of eVerify with severe penalties on employers for non-compliance. Donald Trump has opposed those measures in the past.

I’m completely against the nightmare scenario that I suspect many envision: jackbooted immigration enforcement officers going house-to-house and dragging those here illegally (or whom they believe to be here illegally) out to waiting railway cars. BTW something not unlike that happened in the 1930s under presidents Hoover and Roosevelt. It included many who were here legally and even people born here.

However, there’s something that those opposed to mass deportations should remember. If all of those here illegally who have committed crimes other than immigration crimes here or in their countries of origin were deported, it would still be the largest mass deportation in American history. I think that’s a good place to start.