According to selected members of the “US intelligence community” (“selected” for their loyalty to, and willingness to promote the line of, the Democratic Party establishment) Vladimir Putin and the Russian government just love them some Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Can’t get enough of ’em. If November is a Trump/Sanders shoot-out, the Kremlin wins either way.

Yes, it’s silly. It might even be funny if so many people didn’t take it so seriously and if it wasn’t so on the nose in aping Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare tactics.

Here’s why it’s silly: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are also much beloved by those meddling kids (yes, I grew up watching Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!).

No, not the Russians. The voters.

Like K-pop and post-Roseanne The Conners, I find the appeal of the two northeastern authoritarian septuagenarians inexplicable, but it’s very real.

Despite Herculean efforts by the Democratic National Committee to put anyone but Bernie over the top for its presidential nomination, by hook or crook, he’s winning primaries and caucuses and leading in the national polls.

In states where anyone’s even allowed to challenge Trump, he’s pulling 85-95% support from Republican voters.

The Republican establishment went through an agonizing process in 2016, eventually coming to terms with having its party taken over and remade. By Trump, yes, but more importantly by Trump’s voters.

The Democratic National Committee’s “success” in 2016 was also a double failure: It managed to rig the presidential primary contest to ensure that its preferred candidate won the nomination, but it couldn’t carry the general election and couldn’t bring itself to accept responsibility for that. It was easier to blame !THEM RUSSIANS! for Hillary Clinton’s failure than to admit that Democratic voters weren’t enthusiastic about her and didn’t turn out for her in the needed numbers.

And the DNC still hasn’t read the memo. Having abjectly failed to make Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, or Elizabeth Warren palatable to pluralities, it’s still trying to whip those meddling voters into line behind Pete Buttigieg or Amy Klobuchar instead of accepting Bernie as their choice. Now, in desperation, it’s playing the “Russian meddling” card again.

Is there foreign meddling in American elections? Presumably so, and by several governments, just like there’s American government meddling in foreign elections. The only countries which don’t experience foreign meddling in their elections are countries which don’t hold real elections.

But in the case of US elections, the Russian meddling doesn’t even rise to the level of background noise, let alone to the level of excuse for the losing candidate’s defeat.

Interested in meddling? OK, let’s talk about meddling.

Over the last 130 years or so, the two “major” parties have conspired to limit voters’ choices with “ballot access” laws, exclusory beauty pageants disguised as “debates,” etc., such that both internal dissidents and “third party” candidates are severely handicapped from the start and seldom win “major” party primaries or break into double digits in November.

That’s meddling for real. But suddenly it isn’t working reliably anymore. Poetic justice, perhaps?

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Back in 2016, presidential candidate Donald Trump promised that Mexico would pay for his proposed border wall. Turns out Mexico wasn’t interested, so Trump eventually resorted to declaring fake emergencies and illegally misappropriating money from the military budget.

He’s spending tens of millions of taxpayer dollars per mile on a barrier that, Samuel Lovett of the Independent reports, migrants are scaling with $5.30 ladders (when the wind isn’t blowing it over for them, making ladders unnecessary).

Yes, based on the price of rebar at a local hardware store on the Mexican side of the wall, $5.30.

What a refreshing lesson! No matter how much money politicians like Trump spend trying to restrain and impoverish the people they stole it from, those seeking freedom and prosperity find ways to win through — and to do so for far less.

The wall was always a dumb and evil idea.

Dumb, because it was never going to “work.” The US has 95,500 miles of border and coastline. If people want to get in, they’re going to get in, even if every member of the armed forces and every sworn law enforcement officer in the country is re-assigned to nothing but “securing the border.” The only reliable way to keep people out is to turn America into such a crappy place that nobody wants to come here. Which, admittedly, is something our politicians are always hard at work on.

Evil, because even if it DID “work” the result would be less freedom, a slower economy, and worse lives for everyone on both sides of it. Capital — including “human capital,” aka labor — naturally flows to where it can be most profitably invested. If that flow is impeded, we’re all worse off.

Well, not all of us, I guess. The corrupt politicians doing the impeding, and their crony corporate welfare queens, make bank at the expense of the other 99% of us. Which is as good an explanation as any, and better than most, for Trump’s wall fetish.

Those $5.30 rebar ladders are, a huge practical benefit to their direct users. But they’re of double benefit — practical and political — to the rest of us.

As a practical matter, the immigrants who come over, under, around, or through the wall make our lives better.

As a political matter, the ease with which they’re exposing Trump’s multi-billion-dollar boondoggle for what it is makes it less likely that future politicians will waste our money on similar idiocy.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

As a political junkie, I get lots of email pleas from politicians and political advocacy groups. Today, I got one from US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Well, not exactly. That’s what the “from” header said, but the message was signed “Team AOC” and delivered via Daily Kos.

What does Team AOC want me to know? That “Donald Trump is robbing the working and middle class to give huge tax breaks to the wealthiest among us.” His latest budget proposal, they say, “is a classic right-wing plan that would gut our most critical social programs.”

I probably dislike Trump’s budget proposal as much as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez does, if not more, and if not for all  the same reasons. It asks Congress for way too much, and way too much of what it asks for is corporate welfare for arms manufacturers in the guise of “defense.”

But Team AOC wants me to do more than dislike it. They want me to take it seriously, so that I donate money to help them “fight” it.

I don’t take it seriously. I dislike it in the same way I like a bad movie or a poorly written novel. It’s fiction, and not particularly entertaining fiction.

As Peter Suderman writes at Reason, “[t]he president’s annual budget proposal has about as much impact on the budget process as the lunch menu in the Rayburn House Office Building cafeteria, possibly less, given that one actually impacts the disposition of sitting members of Congress.”

For nearly a century, under the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, the president has been required by law to submit an annual budget request.

And for nearly a century, Congress has felt free to ignore that budget request.

In theory, Trump can ask for anything and everything he might, in his wildest dreams, want.

As a practical matter, since the Democrats control the US House of Representatives, he gets whatever the Democratic Party decides to let him have.

Yes, he can veto what they offer. Yes, the two sides can dig in, triggering a “government shutdown” that’s more dramatic production than true crisis.

But when the smoke clears, the president gets not one thin dime to spend unless Congress appropriates it. That was true when big-spending Republicans controlled Congress during the Obama years, and it’s true now.

Don’t let Congress con you. They, not the president, are  responsible for government spending, deficits, and debt.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY