I would make an exhaustive list of everyone who’s been dirtied by the Trump-Russia-collusion investigation but I have limited time and space. James Comey. Robert Mueller. The FBI. The Clintons. The Podesta brothers. The DNC. Just about every, indeed, who’s touched it except Trump. Oh, well. Maybe later.

A reader reminded me recently of the old wisecrack about mud ‘rasslin’ with a pig. Apt.

Arizona Sen. John McCain’s view of the world, as expressed in his New York Times op-ed, is quite straightforward. We have enemies, e.g. Iran. We have allies. He only mentions one ally by name: the Kurds, a people who have never had a country of their own and who are likely never to have one:

A web of Iranian proxies and allies is spreading from the Levant to the Arabian Peninsula, threatening stability, freedom of navigation and the territory of our partners and allies, including with advanced conventional weapons. Iran itself continues to test ballistic missiles, menace its neighbors and use its sanctions relief windfall to harmful ends.

Our Arab allies are absorbed in a diplomatic dispute with Qatar in the face of far more pressing threats. And behind all this is the shadow of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which is re-establishing itself as a regional power broker actively hostile to American interests — and wholly unconcerned about human rights or civilian life.

This must be a very comforting view but it’s one I cannot support.

Let’s start with “threatening stability”. What country has created more instability in the Middle East and North Africa than any other? That would be the United States. We have overthrown or assisted in the overthrow of at least two governments there: Iraq and Libya. We have connived at the overthrow of Syria, giving support and training to groups antithetical to our interests. We connived at the overthrow of the Mubarak government in Egypt. We have assisted and supported Saudi Arabia in its illegal, aggressive, and genocidal war against Yemen. We continue to wage war in another half dozen countries in the region. We have interfered with elections.

Let’s move on to “allies”. I think he’s overselling the Kurds for reasons I’ve explained elsewhere but he mentions Arab allies. Who are they? I would offer a contrasting view. We have no allies in the Middle East and North Africa, only clients. We have precious few allies anywhere. And the very best thing we could do to increase the stability of MENA would be to stop fomenting instability.

I don’t honestly know how Steve Rattner came to be thought of as a Democratic Party pundit. I know he’s a strong fundraiser and general party apparatchik. Other than that I see few if any qualifications for the role.

This morning in an op-ed in the New York Times it’s clear that Mr. Rattner has two complaints about the party’s adopting support for “Medicare for All” (M4A) as a litmus for the party going forward:

As a centrist Democrat, I’m scared to see my party pulled into positions that are both bad politics and dubious policy. And I’m disappointed that few of our party’s moderates are willing to resist the freight train coming at us from the left.

I think he makes a pretty fair case that it’s bad politics. The closest he comes to making a case that it’s bad policy is it costs too much:

Spellbound Democrats should also consider the fate of past single payer proposals. In Sanders’s home state of Vermont, a single payer plan was abandoned after an analysis found that it would require a near doubling of the state budget (and increasing taxes similarly).

In Colorado last November, a whopping 80 percent of voters rejected a universal plan, again over taxes and costs. And for similar reasons, California recently shelved a single-payer proposal.

Amid the many complications of Medicare for All, the question of what would happen to the 157 million Americans who get their insurance from their employers and the 19 million who are enrolled in Medicare Advantage loom large.

That Vermont and Colorado demurred from adopting state level single player plans is actually a political argument masquerading as a policy argument. The last paragraph is about as close as he comes and it’s pretty weak tea, amounting to an observation that there are lots of details that would need to be worked out. That didn’t stop the Affordable Care Act.

I’m skeptical of M4A as policy but I have some clear reasons for it, namely cost, time inconsistency, the impossibility of limiting coverage, and bleak prospects for cost savings through streamlined administration.

Cost is obviously a problem. Health care costs in the United States are an order of magnitude (at least) higher than they were when any OECD country adopted its present health care system, whether single payer, national health service, or related. When the U. S. adopted the Medicare system utilization went up and we should expect the same with M4A. Simply put health care in the U. S. is just too expensive for M4A to be affordable. At the very least even its supporters should find the cost issue daunting.

To believe that the U. S. will impose cost controls after adopting M4A is to believe that the federal government will behave differently this time than it has in the past. All of the political signals point in the direction of no cost controls and I see little prospect for a sudden change of heart now. If the Congress had had the stomach to control health care costs in Medicare, we wouldn’t have seen “doc fixes” enacted year after year until the Congress abandoned the charade.

The United States also faces an issue which no other OECD country has: it has a 1,500 mile land border with a country with a median income a quarter of its own and in which the national interest favors an open border. Unless we’re going to limit M4A to citizens, something that I think will be politically impossible, we will be inviting the entire world here for health care.

Finally, some have pointed to Medicare’s low administrative costs as a reason it should be a model for the entire U. S. I think that’s far-fetched. IMO it’s likely that Medicare’s true administrative costs are buried. The reality is that administrative costs in the U. S. are higher. Look at our educational system.

There’s a thought-provoking post by Joshua Mitchell at City Journal on identity politics, class, and religion I’d like to commend to your attention. Here’s a snippet:

Sustained legalized slavery in America, over more than two centuries, sets African-Americans apart from all others who are now here in our country. African-Americans are not one “identity” among others. My father’s family, one example among millions in America today, came from Lebanon in the 1890s. His immigrant family was not treated particularly well, nor was he. (He nevertheless lied about his age, joined the Marines after graduating high school, and served in the Pacific theater during World War II.) Toleration and acceptance are hard-won and do not happen in a generation. In the identity-politics world, my father’s immigrant family would have been granted the fault-and-guilt debt points to which his immigrant identity entitled him. To which every immigrant family with a long history in America should say, “Nonsense.”

I’ve written about class here in the United States in the past. Mr. Mitchell is correct in that here in the United States class is different than elsewhere, determined by money. But we actually have more classes than he lists and which I’d delineate by source of income. If you punch a clock and are paid by the piece or by the hour, in general you’re working class—blue collar. If you receive a salary, in general you’re middle class. The rich are divided into two subclasses. One subclass is wealthy by virtue of owning assets; the other is wealthy by virtue of government subsidy.

Members of the Watcher’s Council including yours truly have shared who their favorite filmmakers are. As should be a surprise to just about nobody my favorites are all filmmakers whose major output took place between 1930 and 1970: Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, and Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger.

One of the aspects of my favorites that I didn’t mention in my offering to the Council Forum is that the influence of each of those cinema greats resonates right down to the present day. Hitchcock not only perfected the thriller but pretty much invented the modern slasher movie. John Ford invented the modern Western. And Michael Powell gave one of today’s most respected actresses her first major role. That would be Helen Mirren.

Add George Pal to that list and you’ve pretty much got the foundations of modern cinema.

Is it my imagination or are those who argued back in 2010 and 2011 that the Republicans had no right to complain about the form that health care reform had taken because they had put forward no reform plan of their own not putting forward their own tax reform plans? Shouldn’t they be doing that?

As I’ve been saying for the last ten years we’re overdue for tax reform. The tax code is like a ship. Over time it acquires barnacles which need to be scraped away in drydock. I’ve already expressed my opinion that the very least we should do is bring the corporate income tax within OECD norms and add a bracket above the current top bracket so that abolishing the corporate income tax is at the very least not regressive. It would be better to abolish corporate and personal income taxes in favor of a VAT with a prebate so it’s not regressive but that’s clearly a bridge too far.

While we’re on the subject, what’s the Democrats’ plan for more robust economic growth? Shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic isn’t much of a plan but that seems to be about it.

The New York Times and the Washington Post, impelled, no doubt, by Cass Sunstein’s recent book, are back on the “Impeach Trump” bandwagon. There are op-eds on both of their opinion pages supporting such a course of action. For example, in the NYT Michelle Goldberg writes:

Some members of Congress are awaiting the results of the investigation being conducted by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, and the case for impeachment may become stronger when his inquiry is complete. Yet whatever Mueller discovers, we have credible reasons for impeachment right now. The Constitution dictates that presidents be impeached for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

But as the Harvard Law scholar Cass Sunstein, author of the recent book “Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide,” told me, that doesn’t mean Congress can impeach only a president who is caught breaking the law. “Crime is neither necessary nor sufficient,” said Sunstein, who emphasizes that his book is not about Trump. “If the president went on vacation in Madagascar for six months, that’s not a crime, but that’s impeachable.”

while Barbara Radnofsky adds from the WP:

Again and again, they anticipated attributes and behaviors that President Trump exhibits on an all-too-regular basis. By describing “High Crimes and Misdemeanors,” the grounds for impeachment, as any act that poses a significant threat to society — either through incompetence or other misdeeds — the framers made it clear that an official does not have to commit a crime to be subject to impeachment. Instead, they made impeachment a political process, understanding that the true threat to the republic was not criminality but unfitness, that a president who violated the country’s norms and values was as much a threat as one who broke its laws.

Their arguments fill me with questions. First, doesn’t Ms. Radnofsky’s argument undercut claims that the Republican House acted wrongly in impeaching Bill Clinton? That’s precisely the argument advanced by Ms. Goldberg. If violating “the country’s norms and values” is sufficient, isn’t that what Mr. Clinton did?

Didn’t President Obama’s signing into law the Affordable Care Act also violate an important norm? IIRC it was the first time major social legislation had ever been enacted on a strictly partisan basis. Should the incoming Republican House have impeached President Obama?

Finally, breaking the law is one thing but violating “norms and values” is something else again. Every president of my memory which goes back to the Truman Administration has violated “norms and values” at one time or another in his presidency. Should they all have been impeached? Doesn’t impeachment for violation of “norms and values” render the standard even more vague than the constitutional formula “high crimes and misdemeanors”? Doesn’t a “decent respect for the opinions of mankind” call for a more rigorous definition?

“High crimes and misdemeanors” are whatever the House says they are. If the House decides that Trump is just too awful and he is impeached because he’s an arrogant, loud-mouthed obnoxious boor, they will be acting within their powers but don’t expect his supporters to take it lightly. You’ll even raise some hackles among people who don’t support him.

I can’t decide whether Adm. James Stravidis’s op-ed at Bloomberg is accurate analysis, closing the stable door after the horse has bolted, wishful thinking, or some combination of all three. His thesis is that Turkey is just too strategically important to eject from NATO:

There is no understating how important it is that the U.S. and other NATO allies quickly mend fences with Turkey and help it through its regional crisis.

The Turks are under great strain from the fight against terrorists in Syria and Iraq, a rare instance of sustained warfare along NATO’s southern flank. Russia is moving ever closer to Turkey, coordinating military operations in the Middle East and agreeing to sell the Turks a top-of-the-line S-400 air-defense system, over protests from the U.S. and other NATO countries.

Domestically, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a highly polarizing figure who continues to fume over the failed coup against him last summer. More than 50,000 Turks have been jailed and 150,000 have lost their jobs, actions that will reverberate in Turkish politics for a generation. Crackdowns against “unruly journalists” and “suspect jurists” are common. And the independence movement among the Kurds of Iraq and Syria has put an end to hopes for progress on relations with Turkey’s own restive Kurdish minority.

Meanhwile, U.S.-Turkish relations have cratered following a string of confrontations that run from the profound to the petty. Erdogan continues to be obsessed with extraditing Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish cleric now living in Pennsylvania, whom he believes to have been at the heart of the coup. His security detail is under indictment in the U.S. after they beat a group of protesters in Washington. This month, a Turkish citizen working for the U.S. State Department was jailed, triggering visa retaliations back and forth between Ankara and Washington and dealing a staggering blow to the Turkish lira. And the U.S. is understandably concerned about Turkish moves in Syria, which seem to be more aligned with the interests of Russia and Iran than the U.S.

Let’s turn our minds back to the 1970s. We had strong relationships with the two major non-Arab Middle Eastern powers with Muslims majorities—Turkey and Iran. Iran was strategically important, too, until it became our implacable enemy and then it wasn’t. That’s the nature of strategy, a subject about which Annapolis grad Adm. Stavridis surely knows more than I. When a strategy becomes untenable, you change strategies.

There’s a basic question which I do not see Adm. Stravidis addressing let alone grappling with. That Turkey under Erdogan is no longer the secularist Kemalist country it was for its first 90 years. Under Erdogan it is an increasingly authoritarian Islamist state and as such has a lot more in common with Iran than it does with us. I don’t think he’s taking Turkey’s religious turn seriously. Like most secularist Westerners he assumes, incorrectly in my view, that Islamism is just a ploy.

Let’s talk about that question. NATO has accepted military dictatorships since its inception (PortugaL, Greece, Turkey). Can it tolerate an Islamist member? I don’t believe so but I’m willing to listen to arguments.

New York’s Le Cirque is closing. It can’t make ends meet.

Before I continue let me establish my bona fides. I am probably the best cook you know. I am an excellent cook, I cook fundamentally in the classical French style but I can also produce credible dishes in most of the world’s cuisines, particularly cuisines paysannes (which I tend to prefer). I like to eat; I like and understand food. And, as fate would have it, I know a little about the restaurant business as well.

Just about every restaurant, whether Alinea or a McDonald’s store, has the same critical success factors: location, rent, payroll, the cost of food. Of those three location and rent are by far the most important. The cost of food is almost an after-thought, particularly for a better restaurant in which it wouldn’t be surprising for it to spend ten times as much for rent as for food, as is the case for Le Cirque. That’s the reason that so many restaurants serve such large portions. It’s a relatively cheap way to offer value.

The linked article omits two significant factors without which I can’t really tell you what Le Cirque’s problem was: revenue per customer and number of customers per operating day. To my eye and based on its online menu, its prices appear to be too low for a restaurant in its location and of its class but let’s assume that its prices are what would be expected and it can’t raise prices without losing business.

The only conclusion I could draw is that Le Cirque can’t afford to operate in New York City. San Francisco, take note.