Peashooter versus straw man

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, politics, governance, polemics

A relative who dearly wishes to turn me against President Trump sent me a book. He included a note that he hoped I would not find it "fake news." I promised to read it, and over a couple of weeks, alongside reading other books that are easier to stomach, I did read it, all of it. Luckily it is rather short.

Afterwards I recalled something I heard once, "The elephant labored and brought forth a mouse." I've used that line to describe the Mueller Report on the supposed collusion with Russia by Candidate Trump. Let's see if it applies to this book: The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis.

The book has two prevailing themes. Firstly, it presents a dark picture of the "transition" from the Obama administration to the Trump administration in 2017. Secondly, it outlines as praiseworthy the lives of several people in various departments of the Federal bureaucracy. Before long I put this analogy to the pattern: art analysis. Perhaps you had a class in Art Appreciation in high school or junior college. It used to be a common "easy A" class for college freshmen who needed to keep their GPA above 2.0.

There are two ways to analyze a work of art, whether a painting by Renoir, a sculpture by Rodin, or a Shakespeare play or sonnet. One is to examine every bit in great detail, to understand the artist's technique, and the other is to look more broadly at the themes, to discern the artist's aim or goal. Taking the first method to an extreme, one might literally disassemble the work at a nearly atomic level. With this in mind, I liken The Fifth Risk to the result of looking at parts of a line drawing, a caricature, and picking off all the bits of black ink and gathering them into a little bowl; followed by snipping out some of the bits of white paper, untouched by the ink, and gathering them into another bowl. With the two bowls in front of him, the author then described them in "See how black these are!" and "See how white those are!" terms. The original drawing itself has been left a sliced-up mess in which no discernible pattern or image remains.

One reason the book took me extra time to read is that I checked into many of the claims the author makes. The first, that there wasn't much of a transition, and that its leader, Chris Christie of New Jersey, was fired along with several of his team, can be largely substantiated by public statements former Governor Christie made during interviews in 2017 and 2018. However, he clearly missed the point behind the firing. Candidate Trump had promised to "drain the swamp." The initial team was moving towards perpetuating it. President-Elect Trump had no intention to replace outgoing swamp creatures with more swamp creatures, so he left many of the bureaus to run themselves until he could get other matters out of the way. He has a long history of letting people who are doing a job "well enough to avoid jail" continue while he puts out fires elsewhere.

This is an important concept. He seems to agree with a statement attributed to General Norman Schwarzkopf: "People don't go to work every day intending to do a bad job." Let's put that together with one of my proverbs: "Does the Devil know he is evil?" Contrary to the public caricature of Donald Trump, he has great street smarts. He knows that most people do a good job regardless of the administration under which they work, but some people think they are doing a good job, even that they are doing God's will, when they do the Devil's work. James Comey and Robert Mueller are two such.

Let's look a little further. I checked into other claims the author makes. I'll just touch on one to show a principle. Pages 69-77 are devoted to discussing the Hanford nuclear site, where a lot of plutonium was made, and the cleanup that has been carried on for many years since the site was shut down. The author claims that President Trump has proposed cutting the budget for cleaning up the Hanford site. It didn't take me long to find an article at energy.gov by Dan Brouillette (look under Hanford Cleanup Process). Briefly, the Plutonium Finishing Plant building was demolished and a large amount of contaminated soil was moved away from the Columbia River to a safer location. These reduced ongoing costs. Budget cuts the President introduced were based on the projected reductions.

This is a typical case. For all the cases I could check the reason a decision was made was not mentioned by the book's author, or the item was based on hearsay and truly is Fake News. This is not collecting black ink from a line drawing. This is adding black ink where there was none. In the end, I find that most of the black chips in the bowl of black ink are similarly false.

Do I think that Donald Trump is some kind of saint? No, not at all. I was not a fan of his in 2016, but I voted for him because a shuddered at the horrendous thought of a Hilary Clinton presidency. It didn't take long for him to win my approval. The reasons are listed (sadly, with numerous typos) in the web site Promises Made, Promises Kept. A few months ago I downloaded the list and dropped it into a Word document (default settings: 11 pt Calibri). It fills most of seven pages.

The "portrait" with which Michael Lewis began was a caricature, and a poor one at that. How does he do describing the people he admires, the ones who did keep things running in spite of the President's "benign neglect" (my term; I am sure author Lewis would object)? Cutting through the tendency to hagiography, I find a pattern. They are all dedicated, all found themselves practically backing into a job in government service, all doing a good job with little direction, either before or after the "transition".

Let me ask this: Why do they all still have their jobs (those who have stayed)? If they are part of the swamp, why haven't they been targeted and in some way forced out. I think most of us know that you can't fire someone from a Civil Service job unless they commit a felony and are convicted. But it is quite possible to exile someone to a useless position and let boredom have its way with them. To answer: the majority of the Swamp Creatures are the uppermost management … the scum rises to the top.

And while I think of it, was there really some kind of purge of "climate change believers"? It seems there was indeed a list-making exercise, not of all who "believe" in climate change, but of those who cry "Wolf!" about it, when that's outside their bailiwick. I note that there are plenty of folks in place who still do so, and the President hasn't "purged" them.

Here are a few things that would have happened already if President Donald J. Trump were the kind of anti-science tyrant that his enemies claim:

• James Comey, James Clapper, John Brennan and Andrew McCabe would have been not only fired, but taken out and shot, all during the first few weeks after Trump took office.
• Robert Mueller would have been fired within the first month of his "investigation". Anybody objecting would have been jailed.
• Nancy Pelosi, Charles Schumer, Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler would have been jailed or shot, a year or two later.
• Barack Obama, both Clintons and Joseph Biden would be in prison as we speak, charged with treason.
• The Department of Energy (and a few others) would have been summarily disbanded.
• Thermonuclear bombs would have been used against Beijing, Tehran, and Pyongyang.

The fact that none of these things has happened should give Trump haters pause.

I looked into the bio of Michael Lewis and found that his prior books, including a best-seller or two, were about sports. "Cobbler, stick to thy Last." The Fifth Risk is barely 200 pages in length. It has a prologue and three chapters, but no index. As noted above, the research is thorough in a specialized way, but the result is sloppy and grossly misleading. Somehow, author Lewis thinks it hilarious to take a cheap shot at Brian Klippenstein, about his liking for sheep farming; the ugliest cheap shot I've ever seen in print. One would think his mother trained him better. He may be an expert in sports, but in politics and governance he is a dilettante. He isn't an elephant who brought forth a mouse, he is a weasel.