Trump, Ukraine, and Quid Pro Quo

As anyone who reads this blog knows I like to provide links to examples of objective analysis. (Or at least I think they are objective!) The latest story dominating the news cycle is whether President Trump held back funds from the Ukraine government unless it finds dirt on the dealings of Joe Biden's son for his role in the Ukraine based energy company Burisma Holdings Limited.

The first link takes you to an article written by Alan Dershowitz who can hardly be described as a Trump supporter. Dershowitz, who is a scholar of US constitutional law, answers these questions.

Impeachers Searching for New Crimes

[D]id President Trump commit impeachable offenses when he spoke on the phone to the president of Ukraine and/or when he directed members of the Executive Branch to refuse to cooperate, absent a court order, with congressional Democrats who are seeking his impeachment?

The answers are plainly no and no. There is a constitutionally significant difference between a political "sin," on the one hand, and a crime or impeachable offenses, on the other.

Even taking the worst-case scenario regarding Ukraine -- a quid pro quo exchange of foreign aid for a political favor -- that might be a political sin, but not a crime or impeachable offense.

Sharyl Attkisson provides the thoughts below in her Quid pro quo in Ukraine? No, not yet | The Hill. (Attkisson, a five-time Emmy Award winner, was an investigative correspondent in the Washington bureau for CBS News.)

A quid pro quo has two essential parts. First, a deal must be understood between the parties. In this case, it would be President Trump delivering U.S. aid if, and only if, the president of Ukraine delivers dirt on Trump’s “political rival” and potential 2020 opponent — Joe Biden. 

Second, the goods must actually be delivered. In this case, President Trump would have had to receive the requested packet of “dirt” on Biden, in order to trigger release the U.S. aid to Ukraine. So far, there is not an allegation that Part Two ever occurred. Without delivery of the dirt, there’s no quid pro quo. Just a quid. 

The most that can be reasonably alleged against President Trump at this stage is that he offered a quid pro quo — something both Trump and the other party, the president of Ukraine, deny — but that it was never consummated. New facts could emerge but, right now, there seems to be less than meets the eye.

I've chosen Scott Adams for my final example. Unfortunately this article probably sits behind The Wall Street Journal pay wall so I've provided a couple key quotes below. 

If you’ve followed the Ukraine phone-call news, you might have noticed reality branching into two completely different movies. In one, President Trump was doing his job of protecting the republic by asking an allied country to help out on an important legal investigation. The other movie involves Orange Hitler bullying a foreign country into meddling in our elections by “digging up dirt” on a political opponent.

Which movie is the real one, if such a thing exists? I’d like to offer a rule of thumb for evaluating political news: If a fact is reported the same by both the left-leaning and the right-leaning press, it’s probably a fact. If not, wait and see.

...

One side says the quid pro quo—in the form of Mr. Trump’s asking his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate Crowdstrike and Joe Biden at the risk of losing military funds already approved by Congress—was so obvious it didn’t need to be stated in direct language. The other side says every conversation among world leaders carries some kind of implied quid pro quo, and in this case the request for investigation was entirely appropriate. You might even say it was one of Mr. Trump’s highest priorities, given the risk that a potential future President Biden might be compromised in his dealings with a foreign government.

When Adams talks about the two different movies people see depending on their viewpoint, I have run into this myself. A friend asked if I was upset with what Trump said in the phone call with the new Ukraine president. (He referred to Trump as “your president”, not “our president” because he hates Trump and knows that I don’t.) I said that I read the transcript of the phone call and didn’t see something that would warrant impeachment. My friend claims he read the transcript too and disagreed with me. Both of us read the transcript of the phone call but came to different conclusions. I told my friend that this shows that while both of us think we’re being objective we still reached drastically different conclusions.

By the way, Adam’s rule of thumb about evaluating political news is intriguing. I know it won’t work all the time (or even most of the time) because each news outlet spins the facts to fit the narrative they want us to buy. Maybe both sides will present the core facts the same they will conveniently leave out facts that threaten to spoil their spin. For a good summary of the ploys the news media wield to influence us please see How to Spot 11 Types of Media Bias from AllSides; they illustrate each type of bias with real examples.

I subscribe to a variety of daily email newsletters and Twitter feeds. Since I consider myself to be libertarian about three quarters of my news feeds come from libertarian or conservative sources. But I also receive notices from leftist sources to get different perspectives and to test mine.

Every Single Cognitive Bias in One Infographic

Every Single Cognitive Bias in One Infographic

This infographic shows the 188 (!) cognitive different biases that can affect how we think and the conclusions we reach.

Science has shown that we tend to make all sorts of mental mistakes, called “cognitive biases”, that can affect both our thinking and actions. These biases can lead to us extrapolating information from the wrong sources, seeking to confirm existing beliefs, or failing to remember events the way they actually happened!

Who says being objective is hard?! 😀 

We're in a permanent coup by Matt Taibbi

Matt Taibbi doesn't support Trump yet his articles show objectivity that is sadly lacking in the news media. His latest piece, We're in a permanent coup, provides another example.

Early in the article Taibbi lays out his concerns.

My discomfort in the last few years, first with Russiagate and now with Ukrainegate and impeachment, stems from the belief that the people pushing hardest for Trump’s early removal are more dangerous than Trump. Many Americans don’t see this because they’re not used to waking up in a country where you’re not sure who the president will be by nightfall. They don’t understand that this predicament is worse than having a bad president.

The Trump presidency is the first to reveal a full-blown schism between the intelligence community and the White House. Senior figures in the CIA, NSA, FBI and other agencies made an open break from their would-be boss before Trump’s inauguration, commencing a public war of leaks that has not stopped.

Towards the end of his article Taibbi says, 

I don’t believe most Americans have thought through what a successful campaign to oust Donald Trump would look like. Most casual news consumers can only think of it in terms of Mike Pence becoming president. The real problem would be the precedent of a de facto intelligence community veto over elections, using the lunatic spookworld brand of politics that has dominated the last three years of anti-Trump agitation.

Taibbi labels this tug-of-war between Trump and those who want to remove him from office as the Permanent Power Struggle. This is a common theme of Tucker Carlson: that the Democrats lust for power compels them to dispose of Trump who they feel is an illegitimate president.

While I agree with Carlson's point there is a deeper one. Would we even have this perpetual political WrestleMania if the Federal government didn't wield so much power? Would we still have this to-the-death battle to wrest the levers of power from the incumbent party to the political party that lost the previous election? I doubt it!

Persuasion Mode, Demonization Mode - Arnold Kling - Medium

Persuasion Mode, Demonization Mode - Arnold Kling - Medium


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In the linked article Arnold Kling distinguishes between two modes of political discourse: persuasion mode versus demonization mode.

In persuasion mode, we treat people on the other side with respect, we listen to their logical and factual presentations, and we respond with logical and factual presentations of our own. In demonization mode, we tell anyone who will listen that people on the other side are awful human beings.

Later in the article Kling poses the following reasons why we tend to demonize people who disagree with us politically.

As individuals, we seek to minimize cognitive dissonance. It troubles me to believe that there are good reasons for people to disagree with my views. The dissonance goes away if I can dismiss those who disagree as driven solely by bad motives.

As social creatures, we are motivated to demonstrate loyalty to our tribe. Demonizing people of other tribes is a way of doing this.

Why have we devolved into demonization as our default mode of discussion? (How about that for alliteration?) Kling thinks its tied to how the mainstream news media.

As best I recall, fifty years ago, more of the commentary in newspapers, magazines, television, and radio was in persuasion mode, and less of it was in demonization mode. But in recent decades Rush Limbaugh discovered that demonization could appeal to a mass audience and Paul Krugman discovered that demonization could appeal to the readers of the New York Times.

While I agree with Kling that despite our ability to reason objectively we still harbor deep-seated tribal instincts that can challenge or at times over-ride our objectivity. I would argue that the influence of postmodern philosophy makes it even harder for some people to maintain their objectivity or makes it easier for them to succumb to primitive, tribal forces.

What is postmodernism? For a detailed explanation and analysis please refer to Stephen Hicks Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. Based on his study of postmodern writing he extracts the following summary. Warning: the quoted paragraph is long and uses philosophical terms but I think it’s worth plowing through it to get to Hicks’ main points.

Metaphysically, postmodernism is anti-realist, holding that it is impossible to speak meaningfully about an independently existing reality. Postmodernism substitutes instead a social-linguistic, constructionist account of reality. Epistemologically, having rejected the notion of an independently existing reality, postmodernism denies that reason or any other method is a means of acquiring objective knowledge of that reality. Having substituted social-linguistic constructs for that reality, postmodernism emphasizes the subjectivity, conventionality, and incommensurability of those constructions. Postmodern accounts of human nature are consistently collectivist, holding that individuals’ identities are constructed largely by the social-linguistic groups that they are a part of, those groups varying radically across the dimensions of sex, race, ethnicity, and wealth. Postmodern accounts of human nature also consistently emphasize relations of conflict between those groups; and given the de-emphasized or eliminated role of reason, post-modern accounts hold that those conflicts are resolved primarily by the use of force, whether masked or naked; the use of force in turn leads to relations of dominance, submission, and oppression. Finally, postmodern themes in ethics and politics are characterized by an identification with and sympathy for the groups perceived to be oppressed in the conflicts, and a willingness to enter the fray on their behalf.

Let’s see if I can digest Hick’s ideas a bit further. Before doing that I need to touch on his description of modernism, the philosophical outlook that preceded postmodernism. Modernism reflects the Enlightenment in which thinkers agreed that there is an objective reality and that we have the ability to reason from the facts to sound, objective conclusions that we can defend and explain.

Postmodernism then fundamentally disagrees with the modernist, Enlightenment worldview. If, as postmodernists claim, that we can’t forge objective conclusions about the world then “truth” belongs to the winner of the inevitable resulting power struggle. And unfortunately that means we’re free to treat people who disagree with us as sub-human demons because they threaten our grasp on the reins of power and they’re considered agents of oppression so it’s OK to ignore or even silence those who disagree.