My Review of H.W. Brands' "America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War"

 The First America First

With Donald Trump’s victory America First as foreign policy is yet again being thrust into the limelight. Thus, it is important to understand its origins making University of Texas historian H.W. Brands new history of the first America First movement is especially timely. Brands views America First through the lens of the shadow war between Franklin Roosevelt and Charles Lindbergh with the latter being the most prominent proponent of America First.

There is not much new in the Roosevelt side of the equation, but Brands, at least for me plows new ground on Lindbergh by carefully researching his diaries and speeches from the late 1930’s to America’s entry into the war in December 1941. What I learned was that Lindbergh was a foreign policy realist in understanding the decadence of 1930’s Britain and the weakness of France. In his view Germany was the rising power in Europe, so much so that it would overwhelm both Britain and France. 

He believed that with adequate military preparedness the United States would be able to fend off any cross Atlantic attack from a Europe under the auspices of Nazi Germany. Roosevelt, on the other hand was far more clear-eyed in understanding what a Nazi dominated Europe would mean for the security of the United States. From 1939 his globalist vision pushed the United States for war with Germany. Indeed. within the space of a few weeks between late December 1940 and early January 1941 Roosevelt called on America to become the arsenal of democracy and then articulated his Four Freedoms.

Although losing the public relations battle Lindbergh plowed ahead in attacking Roosevelt and his interventionist policies. He reached a dead-end with his infamous Des Moines speech in September 1941 when he, echoing Nazi propaganda, called out the Roosevelt, the British and the Jews for leading America into war. There was near universal condemnation of his speech and for both Lindbergh and America First it was downhill from there.

Beneath his realpolitik there was his underlying racism against Jews and the non-white races. He viewed the war as dividing the white world, when instead it should have been focusing on the dangers coming from the non-white world, no matter that Germany was allied with Japan.

Unfortunately, there are too many similarities to the world of Trump and the world of Lindbergh. America can’t stand aside today in a very dangerous world, but as Brands noted in 1941 the U.S. was the dominant economic power in the world; this is no longer the case. This makes the case that the most important task before us is to strengthen our economy.

A Strong Holiday Shopping Season

 I have a theory that the coming holiday shopping season will be strong. The recent consumer confidence surveys highlighted the fact that Republicans, with Trump's victory, feel much better about the economy and conversely the Democrats have become more pessimistic. My sense is that the Republicans will shop till they drop out of joy and the Democrats will be engaged in the time tested cure of retail therapy. Net. Net. We have the makings for a strong shopping season.

MSNBC is in a World of Hurt

After lying to its viewers about inflation, the border and the mental acuity of President Biden and going gaga for Kamala Harris it now faces a collapse in viewership, and more importantly a significant change in its corporate structure.  Today MSNBC's parent Comcast announced that it will spin off most of its cable networks into a new entity. Significantly that new entity will exclude NBC and its news division which means that MSNBC will no longer have access to NBC's worldwide network of reporters.

Thus the new MSNBC will consist of commentators and news readers that won't have the imprimatur of NBC news. Thus it won't be able to cover breaking news about weather events, wars, campaign events and domestic disturbances. Simply put the network does not have the reportorial  staff, unlike its sister company CNBC which has reporters covering business verticals and an international presence.

Indeed, without NBC News, MSNBC, won't hold a candle to Fox News, CNN and Bloomberg News, all of whom are global news organizations. Thus in order to be competitive it will have to staff up at huge cost. Some of that cost will be borne by the overpaid on-the-air talent, something that is long overdue. 

For my previous commentary on MSNBC see: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2012/11/my-letter-to-comcast-ceo-brian-roberts.html and https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-comcast-whores-of-msnbc.html

My Review of Bob Woodward's "War"

Biden’s Wars

Washington Post writer Bob Woodward has chronicled every president since Bill Clinton. In this book he focuses on Biden’s three wars, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Gaza. Unfortunately, he fails to discuss the most electorally significant war that was a result of Biden’s open border policy. Although not characterized as a war, the invasion/arrival of 10 million illegal/undocumented immigrants at our southern border seemed like a war to those Americans living in the Southwest and later to those living in the cities where they were bussed to. 

Woodward glances over the debacle in Afghanistan where Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from that country permanently reduced his poll standing. I have yet to see who was fired for allowing this to happen.

Biden initially does much better with Ukraine. Here we witness the actions of Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin seamlessly performing as a team. Of course, it is my guess that those three were Woodward’s sources for what happened. Benefitting from excellent intelligence the team warns Putin and notifies Ukrainian President Zelensky that Russia was about to invade. The public release of the intelligence was unprecedented, and it helped prepare Ukraine and the American people for what was to lie ahead.

Contrary to expectations in the West, Ukraine survived the initial Russian assault and then began a counter offensive aided by U.S. weaponry. It is here where the Biden team fails. Instead of going all-in with all kinds of offensive weapons, the team dilly-dallies preventing Ukraine from pressing its advantage. As a result, the stalemate we have now ensues. The Biden rationale for going slowly was the fear that Russia might introduce nuclear weapons into the conflict. Although plausible, we don’t have any Russian sources to back this conjecture up.

After the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas, Biden goes all-in in support of Israel, and he visits the country a few weeks after. However, after the casualties start rising in Gaza the administration starts going soft. This is highlighted in the July 1924 meeting between Vice President Kamala Harris, now a presidential candidate, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. While being supportive and diplomatic with Netanyahu in private, she stuns the Israelis with a very strong public statement critical about how Israel is fighting the war and the casualties in Gaza it is causing. That along with a slowdown in certain arms deliveries to Israel, highlighted the growing breach between the Biden White House and Netanyahu.

In all three cases it seems to me that Biden’s strategy was to “end wars” not to win them. (See:  https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2024/05/joe-no-win-biden.html) This strategy ended in disaster in Afghanistan, and it is certainly not helping in Ukraine and Gaza.

There were two widely reported scoops coming out of Woodward’s book. The first being that Trump supplied Putin with Covid testing kits when they were scarce in the U.S. and second Army Chief of Staff Milley calling Trump a fascist. There was third one, not so widely reported where Biden demonstrated significant mental decline at a Silicon Valley fundraiser in June 2023, a year before his disastrous debate performance. The country would have been saved a lot of anguish if this were reported earlier.

Woodward’s book is a helpful guide to understanding the Biden years, but it is far from definitive. We learn more as his staffers write their own memoirs in the years to come.

My Review of David McCloskey's "The Seventh Floor"

 Mole Hunters

Retired CIA officer David McCloskey has written another pager turner. In this novel he captures the bureaucratic back-stabbing culture of the CIA as only an insider can do. His protagonist is the gutsy curly headed five foot tall, Artemis Aphrodite Proctor.  She is a veteran of tours in Afghanistan and Syria and was the architect of a botched operation in Singapore where CIA officer John Joseph is kidnapped by the Russians and his Russian asset is killed. This failure forces her out of the CIA.

Simultaneously two other operations go awry with a key CIA asset in Russia assassinated.  She rightly believes that there is a mole in the house and when Joseph is released in a spy swap, they join forces to hunt down the mole. Joseph is also exiled from the CIA, so they are acting as private citizens, albeit highly skilled citizens in the dark arts of the CIA. I learned that the official mole hunters in the CIA are known as the dermatology department. 

On the other side we see an aging SVR officer, Rem Zomov, working as hard as he can to protect is asset operating at the highest levels of the CIA. The title refers to the executive floor at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

Zomov orders a hit on Proctor and Joseph using an illegal couple on Dallas to do the dirty work. In shades of the hit TV series “The Americans” we find them to be a mild-mannered suburban couple blending into the north Dallas milieu.

McCloskey takes his adventure from northern Virginia, to Orlando, where Proctor is now improbably working at her cousin’s alligator park, to Las Vegas and ultimately on to France. There is much more to the story, but I ended up troubled by the bureaucratic infighting and petty jealousies that plague an organization dedicated to protecting us.

After Action Report on the 2024 Election

Shulmaven did not cover itself with glory this year. We thought Harris would win because she would be successful in casting Trump as the incumbent. (See: Shulmaven: The Turning Point in the Election and Shulmaven: A Realigning Anti-Incumbent Election)       She obviously failed in that task. We also thought that the Democrats would retake the House, which is still possible, but unlikely. Our Senate call had the Republicans ending up with 52 seats: they ended up with 53.   

What we did get right was that the election would signal a major realignment in American politics. We wrote “Simply put, the Republican Party, by eating into the Democrats hold on Black and Latino voters, has put together a broad multi-racial working-class party with a strong populist bent. This is a far cry from the business and country club-oriented party of two decades ago. Lurking behind all of this is an ever-widening gender gap.” 

 

We also wrote: “At least to me, if Harris loses Pennsylvania, her biggest mistake would be not picking Governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate (See: Shulmaven: Kamala Harris Fails Her First Test with VP Pick)  and her failure to counter Trump’s attack on her position supporting federally paid for gender reassignment surgeries.” Both of these points were spot on. Finally, we noted: “I also have a hunch that the election might not be as close as the polls suggest. It is equally likely that either candidate will receive more than 300 electoral votes.”

Harris lost because her one-billion-dollar campaign and the near full support of the propaganda arms of the state, were insufficient to overcome the underlying fundamentals of the race which were:

1. Inflation is the graveyard of administrations.

2. 70% of voters thought we were on the wrong track.

3. The Biden-Harris Administration had a 40% approval ranting.

4. She failed to counter Trumps ads attacking her support for federal funding for gender assignment surgery for prisoners and immigrants held in custody.

5. Her much-vaunted ground game was over-rated.

Further she made two unforced errors. She failed to appear at the Al Smith Dinner and didn’t accept Joe Rogan’s invitation to appear on his podcast.

Perhaps most interesting the election, contrary to earlier thinking, where women fearful of losing their reproductive rights would drive turnout, instead turnout was driven by a wave of noncollege educated men of all races. It is this group that is driving the realignment towards the Republican Party. Also, of note in the deep blue states of New York, New Jersey and Virginia, Trump’s share of the vote surged. The blue governing philosophy is failing. Net Net. The Democratic Party is in a world of hurt relegating itself to be the voice of a cloistered college educated elite led around by its nose by the mainstream media and the boorish snobs of the faculty lounge.

 

The Turning Point in the Election

History will likely record that October 27th, the date of Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, was the turning point in the 2024 presidential election. The vitriol he spilled that night sent the message, “enough is enough.”

Something similar happened on September 11, 1941 when America First leader Charles Lindbergh made a viscous antisemitic speech in Des Moines, Iowa. It was widely criticized and signaled the end of his organization.

Put very bluntly, Trump lost the election with his Madison Square Garden ego trip.