Top blogging in May

Here's a look at some of my most popular posts with readers the past month — whether they were written last month or not.

Topping the list?

My old deceased frenemy of sorts, Actual Flatticus, and my massive overview of Flatty's political life history on Twitter and elsewhere.

Second, my blogging about the Dallas Morning Snooze / Belo taking a bath on the sale of the Belo building, below what Belo said it would expect to get a year ago, and far below what it got on an initial spec bid based on anticipating Amazon's second HQ coming to Big D. Always fun to kick the Snooze in the nads. There's more Snooze-kicking throughout my blog; just click the labels on that piece.

Third, Texas Greens getting an apparent ballot access win from the Lege, as we await Gov. Strangeabbott's hoped-for signature.

Fourth was Rod Rosenstein blasting James Comey into bits.

Fifth was me blasting Ted Rall into bits, which is getting closer and closer to Snooze-blasting levels of fun.

Getting D-Day right, and much after it wrong, plus a dose of alternative history

War and Peace: FDR's Final Odyssey: D-Day to Yalta, 1943–1945 by Nigel Hamilton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Basically, up to Yalta, this was a 4-star book. The chapters about Yalta are about 3.25 stars. The post-Yalta stuff is 2 stars. If that. I may have been generous.

This is an edited version of my Goodreads review.

As we mark the 75th anniversary of D-Day, many people may not know that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was leery of Operation Overlord. And, even those who know that in general may not realize this went beyond being just leery.

In a generally great first two-thirds of this, the third volume of a trilogy about FDR as Commander in Chief, Nigel Hamilton shows just how much Churchill dug in his heels against the invasion.

Unfortunately, there are spotty problems even in the first two-thirds, which increase exponentially the closer and closer one gets to the end of this volume, sadly marring it.

In a generally chronological look at the book, and the military history behind that, we'll see Hamilton's excellence, then his excellence thrown away on hagiography to the point of outright error.

Hamilton rightly eviscerates Churchill’s attempted blocking of Overlord. He does this in context of Churchill’s senseless pinpricks in the eastern Mediterranean, while noting that more of the same plus Italy to the mythical Ljubljana Gap would have had almost as many casualties. He then puts this in context of Churchill at Gallipoli in WWI and Dieppe in WW11.

He also shows how Churchill rushed Shingle into place with no beach trials, no real preparation (while not acknowledging that with both more prep and more daring, it could have worked).

Also explains how Churchill’s insistence on Anzio helped delay Overlord by a month.

And he — and rightly so — does all this more thoroughly and vigorously than the typical WWII history or even WWII military history.

That said, while not over the top, his Churchill-bashing was a bit strained at times. Dieppe was not intended to be an invasion, and it was seen as being in part a learning experience. After all, no major contested amphibious operation had been attempted up to that time in the history of mechanized warfare. Before that, the British at both the Crimea and before that at New Orleans were not opposed at the time of landings.

Even within its parameters, it was arguably more a failure than a success tactically.

That then said, Hamilton also nowhere mentioned that Churchill pushed for Dieppe in part due to Uncle Joe pushing for a second front already then. Nor does he mention that some lessons were learned from Dieppe in time for Torch.

Beyond THAT, which Hamilton (I presume deliberately) doesn't tell the reader is that in the last few weeks before Dieppe was launched, German counterintelligence in France had rolled up British SOE agents and uncovered all the main points of the Dieppe plan.

But, there was plenty of bad outside of this.

First, he has NO look at FDR’s military options on Hungary after Nazi takeover and no asking why he didn’t. Briefly brings up Hungary again in the second half of the book, but still doesn't address these issues. Many military historians today believe that rail line bombing could have at least slowed the transport of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz and that it was even feasible, even without Russian help, to take a shot at bombing Auschwitz itself. BIG failure for Hamilton to not discuss this issue.

Even people who give FDR a pass on pre-US entry into the war tightfistedness on Jewish refugees, but who are thoughtful historians, struggle with the Hungarian Jews issue.

But Hamilton doesn’t “struggle” at all.

Second, he repeats that FDR had polio even though this is being more and more questioned, with many forensic medical historians believing Guillain-Barré syndrome felled him instead.

That’s why the pre-Yalta stuff is 4.25 star, no more.

The Yalta chapters themselves aren’t horrendous. I’ve never thought we really “lost” a lot at Yalta. But, FDR could have tried to have been firmer. And, contra the UN, the spheres of influence that Churchill and Stalin had agreed to DID keep Greece non-communist.

The biggest black mark is that Hamilton is already trying to whitewash Stalin here. And it gets worse in the post-Yalta chapters, to which I now head.

First, 480ff claims, or seems to, that Hitler was behind Operation Sunrise. This is not true, nor is the claim that Hitler was behind Himmler’s late attempts to negotiate a separate piece. And, there simple IS NOT an “Operation Wool” that was a grand plan for this, despite his claim on 481. I have NO idea where this came from. I did a Google because I had NEVER heard of such a thing, and I’ve read Hastings, Kershaw and many other modern WWII historians.

But, the ultimate goal of Hamilton’s inaccurate slant here seems to be what it had been at Yalta — throw Churchill further under the bus, wrongly as well as rightly, and then türd-polish Stalin, mostly wrongly.

On 485, appears to blame Truman, of all things, for FDR not meeting with him privately to inform him more on serious issues, starting with the bomb. Hamilton knows FDR held one-on-ones with few people even when he was in good health. And, this totally tries to otherwise whitewash FDR. If his musings about resigning in just months were truly meant, then he should have truly sat down with Truman.

I directly quote:

Why, then, in the circumstances, did he not summon Harry Truman, his chosen vice president, to come and discuss, in private, the challenges the former senator would soon enough have to face. This was something no biographer or historian would ever be able to comprehend ...  

"Yet in the subsequent four weeks before he left the capital he met with Truman only once, for ninety minutes, and that was in the company again of Speaker Rayburn [and others]. ...  

Truman had NOT [emphasis added) complained. Highly intelligent, a quick study and a bon viveur when it came to whiskey and cards, Truman had not thought to request a private meeting.

Other than throwing Truman under the bus, this is a failure as an argument from silence. How do we KNOW Truman never requested a private meeting? There's no footnote here citing a Truman diary entry that says something like "Asked Pres. 3 days ago for private meeting. Still no response."

There was one just plain weird thing, from FDR’s last State of the Union.

Halifax wasn’t one-armed; he was missing his left hand, and the arm higher up was at least somewhat atrophied; also, calling him such out of the blue on 467 came off as irrelevant to the narrative and jarring.

Had other parts of the book not been so well, the last 60 pages were enough I might have two-starred it. The book is simply marred at the end. As though Nigel Hamilton had hit his own medical wall or something.

Or else he hit the print job rush wall, to have the book in print before the 75th anniversary of D-Day. I saw that a few years back, when the Civil War sesquicentennial was winding down. Ditto in spades on Joel Brinkley's Teddy Roosevelt book. It happens. But, while being a possible explainer, it's not an excuse. Not a valid one.

I had read the second volume in the trilogy and Goodreads shot me an alert when this came out. That second volume may have been moderately hagiographic (a commenter to my review said he thought it was highly so), but it didn't have outright errors like this.


View all my reviews

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If Churchill had somehow persuaded FDR to his strategy, what would have gone differently in WWII?

Well, the ETO would have lasted longer. Hitler probably would not have been defeated until late summer of 1945.

More importantly for the future, Russian troops would have been on the Rhine and Allied trust would have been lower. Stalin would have dared Churchill (if he could have delayed British elections and kept a coalition, if not Atlee) and Truman to try to claim occupation zones in Germany. Neither would have risked WW3, and probably would have settled for a Rhineland area after stiff negotiations. This affects the whole Cold War.

At the same time, Russia doesn't enter Asia until after Truman bombs Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With bitterness in Europe, Truman might scramble troops to occupy all of Korea, which obviously changes the war there. Kim Il Sung probably then becomes a Ho Chi Minh, trying to inflict a Vietnam on America.

With all of that, no D-Day and no true Second Front also means no United Nations, which is far from perfect, but still better indeed than nothing.

That said, moving back from Hamilton's hagiography to the reality-based world, the always insightful and hard-hitting Robert Fisk notes that the UN, and the "international community" in general, has done little to uphold promises made to and about the Middle East at Cairo, Teheran and Yalta.

TX Progressives look harder at the Lege while wondering what Strangeabbott will still veto

Gov. Greg Abbott has until June 16 to sign bills, veto them, or let them become law without his signature. Among the things he can do nothing about, short of a special session is the non-law that did not address sunset issues and keep state plumbers' regs in place.

So, the Lege doesn't give a shit about shit, even as a protest of licensed plumbers is reportedly headed to Austin. And with that, here's the Roundup.

The Lege

Justin Miller at the Observer reports that Dennis Bonnen pulled some short-term punches as first-term speaker with an eye on longer-termGOP power, starting with 2020 Census redistricting.  At the same time, Vicky Camarillo notes the Lege refused to spend money to help the Census in its counting, which could cost the state big time. 

Sexual harassment fared poorly in the Lege even as it addressed sexual assault. Details here. 

The Lege joined 18 other states in the newest War on Drugs stupidity, thinking “robotripping” is a threat to our way of life as we know it and banning minors from buying NyQuil.

It also made pipeline protesting a felony.

Better Texas Blog has three Top Fives from the legislative session.

Stephen Young has his own Best and Worst list from the session.

Texana

Rural East Texas has pockets with some of the higher suicide rates in the nation. The Observer has details. Although it’s not part of the West, it mirrors in some degree the West’s sociological profile — and that area leads the nation in suicides, especially of older white men. 

Trump’s new tariffs on Mexico could seriously ding the Texas economy.

SocraticGadfly looked at a key period of early Anglo-Texas history to discuss how much of northern Mexico President Polk wanted, when and why, and connected this to the Compromise of 1850.

Off the Kuff was all over the reports of Republican Census rigging that emerged from the computer files of a deceased redistricting guru.

Benjamin Collinger warns that exposure to lead-based paint is still a big health risk for children.

Sunland Park, New Mexico, sadly caved to Kris Kobach et al on a privately built strip of border wall.

Royce West continues to "do his due diligence" about running in the Dem primary to face John Cornyn. Royce is taking about as long to shit or get off the pot on this decision as Joaquin Castro, and having lived in his state senate district most the previous decade, say he'll probably get off the pot. He's got too much of a black eye potential from old Dallas Inland Port shenanigans, as both I and Jim Schutze know. He also was MIA on some south Dallas development issues next to his beloved UNT-Dallas. Beyond that, he and former Houston black state senate peer Rodney Ellis both have taken powders in the past on statewide runs. Read everything with my Royce West tag for more.

Houston

David Bruce Collins documents the newest implosion of the Harris County Green Party. 

Dallas area

Stephen Young documents that the old Dallas business coalition still considers itself in the business of mayor-picking. D Magazine also got the secret recording, and also blasts the Dallas old guard for untruthfulness.  In a related matter, Jim Schutze tells Dallasites to vote for Scott Griggs because that's a vote against the Morning Snooze; Schutze shows how its op-eds have actually gone backwards under its current op-ed head.

(Please, activist investors, force Belo to privatize this POS, and put up a higher paywall for the online version so that few people other than that Dallas Old Guard read it.)

Young also gets emails about his piece about the city of Dallas' old Confederate statues. Great laughs.

Jim Schutze takes the Catholic Diocese of Dallas to the woodshed over its response to a Dallas PD raid for material related to allegedly child-abusing priests and kicks it hard in the ass. 

National

Iowans have more opportunities than ever to get sick of Robert Francis O’Rourke.

Rick Perry's back pain meds must be acting up, as the Department of Energy talks about "molecules of freedom." Juanita weighs in, getting high on Freedom Gas.

Brains has a Dems 2020 update, with a climate change scorecard.

Mean Green Cougar Red touts the virtues of less-visited countries.

Sarah Martinez reports on a fake Buc-ee's spotted in the country of Jordan.

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Sneak peek at next week's Roundup: We'll have an update on what Strangeabbott has sined and what he has made die on bills the Lege passed, a look at not-so-progressive librul Supreme Court justices and more. Last week's issue is here.

Stephen Breyer — part of Supreme Court librulz who hate the First Amendment and Fourth

I have written before about how Democrats' "Oh, the SCOTUS" cry every four years does little to nothing to entice me to jump back into voting for the centrist half of the duopoly. And, librul justices' stance on various portions of the First Amendment is a primary reason why I say this.

Democrats usually appeal to abortion as the big reason why voting for Jill Stein, or Cynthia McKinney, or David Cobb, or Ralph Nader, actually is the "greater evil" or whatever, just as Kuff did last week. I respond, as I have before, that abortion, and LGBTQ issues, are a narrow portion of the spectrum of civil liberties, and that beyond that portion of the spectrum, current librulz on the court have a less than spotless record by several degrees.

I had a big-ticket roundup on this issue just a year ago, when Tony Kennedy retired.

I then counter with noting someone like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the "notorious RBG," doesn't really like the First Amendment that much all the time, or how other Justices have been selective in their support of the Fourth Amendment and criminal rights in general, with examples in that "big ticket" link.

Well, now we have librul Stephen Breyer willing to sacrifice part of the Fourth Amendment, and tying this to that other part of my plaint? He is willing to sacrifice part of the Fourth Amendment that applies to criminals, and more specifically, to policing, so he can "back the blue."

What bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit.

And, it's not even the first time Breyer has voted to undercut the Fourth Amendment. He did so three years ago cuz War on Drugs, an issue where both the courts and librul preznits (remember Bill's crime bill? Hillary's "superpredators" related to that? Joe Biden halfway standing by that bill still?) have repeatedly been willing to junk protections for alleged criminals. Elena Kagan, when in the executive branch, has a history of hating the Fourth Amendment applying equally to minorities cuz War on Drugs.

Sonia Sotomayor, when still an appellate judge, didn't think minors deserved full First Amendment protections. She also wrongly thought the First Amendment meant churches were free from some labor law prescriptions.

And one or more librulz — in most cases maybe more than one — have for 25 years consistently hated third parties (like Kuff and fellow travelers like Manny).

And, all nine justices at the time — including librulz Breyer, Sotomayor, Ginsburg and Elena Kagan, along with libertarianish Kennedy, and pseudo-originalist Scalia — hated the First Amendment's freedom of assembly clause.

The real problem is librulz fetishing the Supreme Court over two issues.

Actually, that is probably No. 2.

The real problem is Democrats thinking they "own" the actual or potential votes of anybody to the left of diehard Republicans.

Dream on.

And, the more you think that, the further from reality it becomes.

==

Update, June 17: Turns out that Breyer kind o hates democracy in general at times, voting in the minority to approve Virginia House Rethuglicans' appeal of a lower court ruling on redistricting and gerrymandering. Now, I know the case was more about the issue of standing, but still.

Update, July 1: Breyer and Kagan think a cross is perfectly OK on public land as long as its connected to a war. Part of it with Breyer, per this analysis, is that he was upholding his own previous ruling in Van Orton v Perry, and even if not upholding precedents in general, justices will uphold their own previous rulings through any and every convolution.

For the unfamiliar, Van Orton v Perry was one of the most godawful "civic religion" rulings the court has made in at least 20 years. It's the one where the court said that the state of Texas could keep the Ten Commandments on state Capitol grounds.

Any unbiased idiot could see that the Eagles chose the Ten Commandments because of all the other God vs Godless communism stuff of the Cold War, and that it was NOT promoting "religion" in the abstract, but Judeo-Christian (usual Judeo fig leaf) ideas in the concrete.

And, he says 40 years passage of time means there was no "intimidation." He ignores the idea that, rather, it meant the intimidation was strong enough nobody publicly protested.

This would be like telling post-World War I original civil rights advocates, "Well, nobody protested for 40 years ..."

The Resistance and tariffs fake news

About two weeks ago, the Donut Twitter corner of The Resistance was lamenting Dress Barn going out of business, and following on the footsteps of Payless Shoes — and some were blaming Trump's tariffs on China.

This is fake news, of course. China is the leading importer of apparel to the US, but with a plurality of less than 30 percent.

It's also callous, and finally, it's blame shifting. Let's tackle all three, as they're interrelated, especially the first two.

Yes, a fair amount of imported clothes and shoes are made in China. But, in most cases, even more is made outside China, in places like Vietnam, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Honduras, Cambodia etc. Specifically, countries 2-7 combined top China. So, Trump's tariffs wars have not driven either store out of business. And, let's take women's, or men's, walking shoes. (Hold on to that order.)

Would you pay $54.99 instead of $49.99 at Payless, rather than $64.99 for American made? Many of you would.

Plus, the first Donut Twitterer I saw claimed this was a war specifically on women. Really? Last time I checked, men wore shoes, too, even if we're not overwhelmed by capitalist fashion brainwashing to buy 15 pairs. That's on you. Men also wear clothing (we hope) last I checked.

Second, all of those countries I listed have poor labor rights. (Not that Trump cares about that. He just hates free or even fair trade. Goods could be made in Canada and especially if they were old-time manufactured objects, he'd still hate them.)

But, Donut Twitter, especially those of you who are political insiders? You haven't cared about labor rights, or pollution safeguards for the 25 years since the Slickster got you to sign off on NAFTA. So, put your hands down again.

Finally, are you really buying stuff at Dress Barn? And I mean you individually.

Maybe you went to the Big Yellow A.

So, blame Jeff Bezos.

Then blame yourself.

==

Sadly, without neoliberals of the Resistance doing an ounce of introspection, Trump has given real tariff new stupidity news with his 5 percent until you stop the migration threat. That's just after he cut some Mexican, and Canadian, tariffs to try to get the Senate to pass NAFTA 2.0, aka USMCA.