Strange Things Happening Every Day
Center-Left Democrat writes about politics, music, books, movies, and life.
If you have relatives or friends who claim to be Christian but also admire Paul Ryan, and/or hate Obamacare, try to get them to read this editorial by Nicholas Kristof in today’s New York Times. I wish I’d written it.
Here’s a miscellaneous compilation of shorter takes on various aspects of the continuing crisis.
THIS LAND WAS MADE FOR YOU AND ME. Over the weekend, Iowa Congressman Steve King (Republican, naturally) tweeted a complaint about American civilization being threatened by “somebody else’s babies.” CNN offered him a chance to “clarify” his remarks, so that he could look a little less like a racist dick. Instead, King doubled down, telling CNN, "I'd like to see an America that's just so homogenous that we look a lot the same." Former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke and the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer gave him a standing ovation. The largest town in King’s congressional district is Sioux City, which must bug the hell out of him. They should change its name to Aryanburg or Angloville.
I COME FROM DOWN IN THE VALLEY, WHERE MISTER WHEN YOU’RE YOUNG, THEY BRING YOU UP TO DO LIKE YOUR DADDY DONE. I listened to an interesting podcast conversation (link below) with Rick Wilson, a Republican ad man who loathes Donald Trump. He mentioned a focus group in one of the Rust Belt states, where a man was literally in tears because the factory where he, his father and grandfather once worked had closed, and he couldn’t imagine a future apart from that factory.
Donald Trump knows one way to get the support of the displaced white working class – he lies to them. Maybe that’s what they want. Do folks in Appalachia and the Rust Belt really believe that Trump will bring back mining and factory jobs? When it doesn’t happen, will they get mad? Will they blame Trump for lying? Or will they look for a minority group to scapegoat? I’d really love to hear Wilson’s ideas about how to have an honest conversation with the economic casualties of the 21st century.
Things change, Kundun. You can demand that the federal government keep your factory or mine open by taxing other Americans to subsidize your job. But you can’t do that and then turn around and complain about taxes and welfare queens and similar Republican talking points.
HOW CAN WE HELP YOU, UTAH? HOW CAN WE MAKE YOU GREAT? Paul Ryan is the reigning heavyweight champion of congressional hypocrisy, but a new challenger is moving up fast. Utah Congressman Jason Chaffetz (Republican, of course) is the chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The word “oversight” has two rather opposite meanings: monitoring and ignoring. Historically, the committee’s job was monitoring, but Chaffetz prefers ignoring. He aggressively ignores Trump’s malfeasance, although he is eager to investigate Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
Chaffetz is now dodging his own constitutents by refusing to schedule more town halls. He’s resurrected a phrase used by southern racists back in the civil rights era, calling his town hall critics “outside agitators.” paid by George Soros to come to Utah and be mean to him. History has not been kind to those who have relied on that phrase.
His latest headlines came when he scolded low-income Americans for complaining about having to pay more for less coverage under Ryan’s health care plan. “Maybe rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and they want to go spend hundreds of dollars on that, maybe they should invest in their own health care,” said the compassionate Utahan.
Let’s crunch some numbers. A top of the line iPhone (7 Plus, 256GB) lists for $969. In 2013, the most recent year for which I could find data, a day in the hospital would have cost you between $1791 (in a for-profit facility) and $2289 (in a private hospital). If you were in the habit of buying two iPhones every day, you could save enough to pay your hospital bills. Otherwise, you’re pretty much screwed.
The truth is, poor people don’t choose between health care and iPhones. When disaster strikes, their choice is often between health care and food or rent.
FREEDOM’S JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that Paul Ryan’s Trumpcare proposal would deprive 24 million people of health insurance in the next decade, while increasing the cost of premiums significantly for the next few years. Ryan calls that freedom. The good news, if you’re Paul Ryan, is that by about 2020, the cost of the premiums will begin to come down– because old geezers like me won’t be able to afford Trumpcare and will drop out of the risk pool, thus lowering coverage costs for the young and healthy.
I have always relied on the kindness of strangers, so if you see someone who looks like me panhandling at a busy intersection in 2020, please give generously.
Here’s the link to the podcast I mentioned earlier: https://play.google.com/music/listen#/ps/Iv27632tkzhgs67kjvtmvtdtwbu
Way back in the 20th century, two famous men made these observations about the past. George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” William Faulkner upped the ante by writing, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Like many others, I’ve spent some time trying to game out Donald Trump’s future by looking for past precedents. But the past covers a lot of territory, and everyone sees it differently. None of the historical precedents that I can think of are exact fits, so rather than ignoring inconvenient facts in order to build a case, I’ll offer several possibilities that suggest different but plausible directions that American history could take in the Age of Trump. I’m going to concentrate on events in my country in my lifetime, so if there’s a Chinese emperor from the Ming Dynasty that matches Trump perfectly, you won’t read about it here.
Possibility 1: Donald Trump is the second coming of Evan Mecham. For fifteen months in 1987 and early 1988, Ev Mecham was Arizona’s governor. He an ultra-conservative Republican who wore a tinfoil hat before tinfoil hats were cool. He’d become kind of a joke, having run unsuccessfully for a variety of state offices over the years. But he beat out a weak field in the Republican gubernatorial primary in 1986, and then got lucky. For some reason, a Democrat who’d dropped out of his party’s nomination process jumped back in the race as an independent candidate.
Mecham won the three way race for governor with 40% of the vote, and proceeded to make a fool of himself – and of Arizona. He earned immediate notoriety by cancelling Arizona’s Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. Boycotts ensued, including the Super Bowl, and they hurt the state’s economy. Meanwhile, Mecham appointed crooks, cranks, and cronies to state offices; he behaved arrogantly and erratically, alienating potential allies; he was obsessed with negative media coverage; and he was convinced that his political enemies were spying on him. New incidents and scandals came along almost every week.
As public opinion began to turn in favor of impeachment, Mecham’s opponents (who by now included many prominent Republicans) began to worry that he might tone down his behavior just enough to hang on to his job for a full term. A few of them commissioned a psychological profile. The study’s authors told them not to worry. Mecham wasn’t going to change; he couldn’t help himself. They were right. Defiant to the end (he claimed he wasn’t accountable to the legislature), Mecham was impeached and removed from office. Arizona moved on.
Mecham and Trump share a lot of personality traits, although Mecham wasn’t a womanizer as far as I know. He had a “base,” but it wasn’t nearly as extensive as Trump’s is now. The big difference is that in 1987, there were prominent Arizona Republicans (including John McCain) who were willing to admit that one of their own was a bad apple, and help get rid of him. Right now, there’s no sign that national Republicans give a damn one way or the other.
Evan Mecham was basically a fluke. He made no lasting impact on Arizona politics. We woke up from our bad dream and simply reverted to the status quo ante. We got MLK Day back, the boycotts ended, and the whole.
Possibility 2: Donald Trump is the second coming of Jimmy Carter. Ross Douthat, writing in the New York Times, suggested this comparison – not in personal terms, because Trump is a bad hombre and Carter is a genuinely good man; but rather in terms of the eras they represent.
He posited that Carter was a disjunctive president – someone who came along as the old order was crumbling and hastened its downfall. The old order in Carter’s case was the Democratic Party. Carter’s outsider status (Governor of Georgia rather than a Washington insider) coupled with the arrogance of the Democratic majorities in Congress led to bickering over who spoke for the party rather than to progressive legislation. The fall of the Shah of Iran and the ensuing hostage crisis sealed Carter’s fate, derailing a golden opportunity for a progressive era in American politics.
Disjunction can go either way, of course. If a disjunctive president solves the problems he exposes, his party is transformed and he’s remembered as a hero. If he merely reflects, or even amplifies, the rot at the core of his party, he’ll hasten the collapse of the old order.
Donald Trump has certainly revealed the depth of the dysfunction at the core of the Republican Party. And he’s leading them deeper into the swamp. Will he be able to convince a majority of the electorate that the swamp is actually a pristine mountain meadow? Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but I doubt it.
I don’t believe that Trumpism will have become a majority movement by 2020, but there are two ways that Trump could retain the presidency. If Republicans are successful in their vote suppression efforts, they could eke out another win in the Electoral College. If Democrats nominate a weak candidate, it could prompt another cycle of low turnout and third party support, resulting in another Republican win in the Electoral College.
The best case scenario is that the Democrats nominate someone who can keep the electorate’s focus on Republican corruption and malfeasance. Voters will throw the rascals out, and it will be morning in America for progressives.
Possibility 3: Donald Trump is the second coming of Joe McCarthy. Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy’s reign of terror lasted nearly a decade, from 1947-1956, when rode the wave of post-war anti-communist hysteria to national prominence. In 1951, he said “How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.” (Doesn’t that sound a lot like Steve Bannon’s fantasies about President Obama seeding the Executive Branch with deep state saboteurs?)
When Democrats were in control of the government, Republicans didn’t mind this sort of talk. But McCarthy refused to tone it down once Dwight Eisenhower became president. It took way too long, but finally people began to stand up to McCarthy – Edward R. Murrow in the mainstream press, as well as politicians (including prominent Republicans like Senator Margaret Chase Smith) who noticed that he consistently failed to produce evidence of the treason that he claimed was rampant. Once his bluff was called, McCarthy faded away quickly, and the paranoid anti-communism he represented was left to fringe groups like the John Birch Society.
The nativist movement never went away, though. After the fall of communism, America Firsters simply switched bogeymen from communists to Muslims and Mexicans.
But wait – there’s more! McCarthy’s protégé and attorney was a sleazy guy named Roy Cohn. You’ll never guess who represented Donald Trump in the 1970s when Trump got in trouble for discriminating against minorities in his rental properties. Yep, it was Roy Cohn. Cohn also worked closely with Trump insider Roger Stone on political campaigns in New York.
Today, Joe McCarthy’s legacy is the word “McCarthyism,” a pejorative term for an unethical political attack designed to suppress dissent. Trump is McCarthy’s most successful spiritual heir. How long he can sustain that success depends on how long the Republican bubble lasts. The mainstream press was slow to realize the threat that Trump posed, but (after their fecklessness helped elect him) are now calling him out with regularity. The question is whether that matters.
In the mid-50s, Edward R. Murrow arguably had as much credibility as any politician except the President. There’s no one like him in the era of “fake news.” In the mid-50s, the average American was savvy enough to get suspicious when none of the dire consequences McCarthy insisted upon ever came to pass. Nowadays, Republicans are still crying wolf about President Obama, and a non-trivial segment of their base seems willing to believe them no matter what.
It is clear that none of our current crop of Republicans have the inclination, much less the courage, to call Trump to account. The only way to stop him is through the electoral process.
Possibility 4: Donald Trump is the second coming of George W. Bush. Like Trump, Bush was lazy and incurious, a “born on third base and thinks he hit a triple” guy who failed upwards all the way to the White House. Bush was content to bask in the cheers while more cynical men made the decisions. Alas for America and the world, the decisions they made were catastrophic. They wrecked the economy and launched two foolish wars which led directly to the rise of ISIS as well as to the flood of refugees from the Middle East that has been the source of so much divisiveness in Europe and America.
Neither W. nor Trump would have amounted to anything without their fathers’ money and influence. Like Bush, Trump has surrounded himself with advisors who aren’t nearly as smart as they think they are. And like the architects of the failed Iraq War, Steve Bannon is spoiling for a fight, particularly if it’s against Muslims.
That’s where the Bush parallel turns dark. Left to their own devices, I’m confident that Trump and the Republicans would self-destruct. The one thing that could bail them out, at least temporarily, would be a war.
As the Republican wars in the Middle East proved, Americans will rally ‘round the flag, at least for a while. Americans are willing to support a war against an aggressor, as long as it’s clear we’re the good guys, and as long as we get a quick win. Americans are good at conquest, but we’re terrible at occupation. We won every battle in Vietnam and Iraq, but lost both of those wars because we couldn’t tolerate sustained casualties inflicted by a determined guerilla resistance.
The special danger of a war with Trump as commander in chief is that he could easily become impatient at the first sign of difficulty and go nuclear. Bomb them back into the Stone Age and take their oil, that’s the ticket. Or he might encourage one of our allies, like Israel or Russia, to use their nukes against a foe that refuses to go down easily. Trump and Bannon are cruel men who love bold gestures. What gesture would be bolder than a nuclear war?
Possibility 5: Donald Trump is the second coming of Richard Nixon. Unlike Trump, Nixon was an overachiever who (like his contemporary Joe McCarthy) became famous by leading anti-communist witch hunts. That’s what got him elected to Congress, and then onto the Republican ticket as Eisenhower’s Vice President. And after a couple of bumps in the road (losing the presidency in 1960 and the governorship of California in 1962) he finally made it into the White House for six years, until the majority of his own party turned against him as the Watergate scandal unraveled and he resigned in disgrace. By the end of his public career, Nixon was clearly in bad shape mentally with a strong streak of paranoia exacerbated by a drinking problem. The majority of his own party turned against him. He was 61 when he resigned, nine years younger than Donald Trump is now.
Unlike Trump, Nixon was a hard worker, and he was a pragmatist rather than an ideologue. He knew how the federal government worked, and – much as it pains me to acknowledge it – he did some good things as President. He created the EPA, and opened diplomatic relations with China. He ended the military draft, gave Native Americans the right to tribal self-determination, and signed Title IX, a landmark in the fight against gender bias in higher education. Those things don’t outweigh the evil that he did, but compared to Donald Trump, Nixon looks pretty good.
Both Nixon and Trump share a paranoid streak and a desire for revenge against their perceived enemies. They both counted the press among their enemies, and they both acquiesced (at the very least) in election rigging. Whether Trump’s Russian connections will wreck his presidency remains to be seen.
And that concludes my “second coming of” scenarios. Although there are a few similarities between Trump and Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, George Wallace, and Ross Perot, I don’t think those comparisons are as apt as the ones I’ve already made.
So which scenario seems the most plausible? Much as I’d love to see a quick Evan Mecham-style “OMG, what were we thinking?” Trump exit, I think some variation on the George W. Bush scenario is a more likely. Why? One more 20th century quote: L.P. Hartley wrote, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
You may have noticed a recurring theme in most of my scenarios: in the 20th century, there were Republicans who had some integrity. They were willing to put principle over party – reluctantly sometimes, but when push came to shove, they did the right thing.
Republican integrity began to dry up and blow away during the Reagan years, and it was long gone by the time George W. Bush moved into the White House. Major Republican initiatives – from the Reagan’s Laffer Curve to Bush’s Iraq War – were built on a foundation of lies and nonsense.
It must have felt incredibly liberating when Republicans discovered that they could just make shit up. But they found themselves on a slippery slope. First they abandoned moderation in favor of conservatism, and then abandoned conservatism for oligarchy. Now they’re in the process of abandoning oligarchy for nihilism. Even their longtime propaganda outlets like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh increasingly find themselves following the lead of Breitbart and Infowars. Nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about.
The past is a foreign country, and the future’s not ours to see. Since we can’t count on Republican help, we’re going to have to get the job done ourselves. That will require hard work, and persistence in the face of inevitable setbacks. As Jesus said (Matthew 24:6) “See that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.”
My friend Gina directs my attention to the article linked below, which posits that Republicans actually want their health care plan to fail. Here are my thoughts, pro and con.
Republicans intended their Obamacare replacement to fail because:
1. It’s a terrible bill. But since when did that deter Republicans?
2. They were desperate to prove that they weren’t bluffing all these years, even if the plan they conjured out of smoke, mirrors, and Ayn Rand-inspired fantasies of revenge against the undeserving poor didn’t pass either the laugh test or the smell test. Certainly elements of truth here, but this smacks of an ex post facto excuse, rather than a real strategy.
3. They’ve decided that it’s better to keep Obamacare and find ways to sabotage it, so that it will be less popular the next time the granny-starvers put their own plan forward. Not out of the question, but as above, it sounds like a salvage operation rather than the original plan.
4. They’re fiendishly clever strategists playing a long game that mere mortals like us can’t hope to understand.
Republicans did not intend their Obamacare replacement to fail because:
1. They – and especially philosopher king Paul Ryan – are going to look pretty foolish if they withdraw the plan after all the subterfuge and parliamentary maneuvering they went through to put it forward.
2. The Ryan plan will fail, if it fails, because of Republican opposition. Democrats don’t have the votes by themselves to stop it. It’s hard to believe that Ryan and McConnell wanted to precipitate a civil war within their own ranks.
3. Ryan and other Congressional backers of the plan have gone to some length to persuade Donald Trump to support the plan, which contains elements directly contrary to his campaign pledges. Trump clearly has no idea what’s in the plan, but he’s using some of his own political capital to persuade skeptical Republicans to support it. Congressional Republicans have bent over backwards to avoid antagonizing Trump so far. Would they really ratfuck him over this?
4. Republicans really are that stupid.
The bar for respectability in the Republican Party is set pretty low, and for years, Paul Ryan enjoyed an undeserved reputation as an intellectual, a serious policy wonk in a party of wild eyed zealots. It appears that his Ryancare plan has effectively exploded that myth.
The irony is delicious. Ryan spent seven years claiming that he had a better health care plan than Obamacare. Given an opportunity to prove it after the election handed Republicans control of the presidency as well as both the House and Senate, it became obvious that he’d been bluffing all that time. There was no plan.
So Ryan spent the next five weeks feverishly crafting something, anything, that might restore his credibility. Alas, credibility is in short supply for Republicans these days. The first clue that the plan might have a few teensy weensy problems was the fact that Republican leadership hid it in a basement somewhere and refused to let anyone see it. The second clue was an admission that they hadn’t a clue what the plan might cost. And a third clue, if one were needed, was that they intended to make the House and Senate vote on the plan before the Congressional Budget Office had a chance to review it and offer comments.
Luckily for the rest of us, the Republican clown car began hemorraging clowns immediately. On the far right, Tea Party types refused to support any plan that retained a single vestige of Obamacare. Among Republicans who remain at least tenuously tethered to reality, there’s a justifiable concern that offering voters less coverage for more money might not be rewarded at the ballot box in 2018 and 2020.
Oh, Ryan has a few defenders. Donald Trump tweeted his support for the “wonderful new Healthcare bill.” And Ryan’s mini-me, Jason Chaffetz, was his usual tone-deaf self, claiming that poor people needed to stop buying so many iPhones and save their money to pay for Ryancare. That argument will probably change some minds, but maybe not in the direction that Chaffetz hoped.
With friends like those, Ryan doesn’t need too many enemies. But he’s making them anyway.
Outside the Republican bubble, experts are still trying to cost out the plan. VOX (link below) estimates that it will cost current Obamacare enrollees $1542 extra now, and $2409 extra in 2020. Unless they’re rich, old people are screwed, and there are a number of other poison pills embedded in the plan. It’s Robin Hoon in reverse, taking money from low income people and giving it to the rich.
Ryan’s plan isn’t about health care, it’s about wealth care. Not that Republicans object to that, but they were hoping for a fig leaf, something they could use to fool some of the people all of the time, etc. Ryancare is not the plan they werelooking for. We’ll see whether they pass it anyway.
Let me draw your attention to a bit of rhetorical sleight of hand that Republicans have begun to use. They are claiming that their Obamacare replacement will give everyone “access to health care.” They’re hoping you don’t notice that having “access to healthcare” isn’t the same as actually having healthcare.
I have “access” to Tom Cruise’s Telluride mansion in the sense that it’s on the market and Tom would be as happy to take $49 million from me as from anyone else. Similarly, I have “access” to a new Ferrari, in the sense that there are dealers who’d sell me one the instant I came up with $250,000 (minus the trade in value of my 2010 Hyundai Sonata, of course).
Here are a few highlights from the Republican plan released earlier today:
· There is a provision cutting taxes on healthcare CEOs who make more than $500,000 per year (which I imagine is most of them). Because really, tax relief for rich people is the most urgent health care crisis in America.
· If you let your coverage lapse for longer than 63 days – maybe you’re between jobs, but the reason doesn’t matter – your insurer can increase your premiums by 30%.
· After the 2020 mid-term elections, they’re going to target Medicaid.
· And they cherry on top is that Republicans admit that they have no idea how much their plan will cost, what people can expect to pay for policies, or how many people stand to lose coverage.
· Bottom line: if you’re rich and healthy, you’ll like this plan. Otherwise, not so much.
Vox has a good first take on the implications of the bill (link below). There’ll be more information tomorrow, after experts have had a chance to analyze the proposed legislation.
Of course, Republicans in the House are allowing plenty of time for study and comment before asking members to vote on the bill. Oh, wait, I’m wrong. They’re pushing for a committee vote as early as Wednesday. Better let your Congressperson know what you think.
http://www.vox.com/2017/3/6/14829526/american-health-care-act-gop-replacement
Well, that deteriorated quickly. Yesterday, Republican Senator Ben Sasse tweeted, "We are in the midst of a civilization-warping crisis of public trust."
The “presidential” phase of Donald Trump’s presidency lasted about three days, from his speech on Tuesday evening when he said “the time for trivial fights is behind us” to Saturday morning, when he re-opened his twitter vendetta against Arnold Schwarzenegger. Stay classy, Donald.
Earlier in the week, mainstream purveyors of conventional wisdom showered Trump with hosannas for managing to read from a teleprompter and refrain from talking about pussy for an hour. They want a normal president so badly that they’re trying to will one into existence. Good luck with that, fellows. The really sad thing is that they’ll do it again the next time Trump makes it through a public appearance without sounding like Captain Queeg ranting about missing strawberries.
Trump’s other Saturday morning tweets were distinctly Queeg-like, claiming that President Obama tapped his phone during the election campaign. But the fact is that no president – not Obama, not Trump, not even Abe Lincoln or Millard Fillmore – can order a wiretap. Wiretaps can only be authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court after receiving a request from the Justice Department. The only way the FISA court would authorize a wiretap on an American citizen would be if the suspect was a foreign agent, or was under criminal investigation.
Kinda makes you wonder which of those categories Donald Trump falls into. Maybe both? Nah, he’s probably an innocent bystander who just happens to have a bunch of Russian agents on speed dial.
Meanwhile, a spokesman for former President Obama stated unequivocally that “neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen.” He didn’t say that Trump wasn’t under surveillance, just that the order never came from Obama or the White House.
I take it that Donald Trump has begun to understand the trouble he’s in, including the fact that the FBI knows about the phone conversations between Russian agents and Trump’s people, perhaps including Trump himself. He’s panicking, which of course is what every innocent person does when they realize that the law is in possession of the facts.
We know that Trump engages in a lot of projection, accusing his enemies of what he’s doing himself. And sure enough, he illuminated his predicament yesterday: “This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”
Remember Trump's history. Everything he touches turns to shit. Now it's about to hit the fan.
A commenter on my “Anastasia Screamed In Vain” Facebook post earlier today suggested that Trump’s Russian contacts were defensible because heads of state naturally talk to their foreign counterparts; and that the whole controversy over Russia has been manufactured by Trump’s political opponents in an attempt to frame him for something he didn’t do.
The first argument doesn’t hold up, since Trump wasn’t a head of state when these contacts – some as early as last summer – occurred. The United States has one president at a time, and Trump’s turn didn’t come until January 20. This isn’t just a quaint custom; it’s a law – the Logan Act.
The assertion that Trump is being framed is déjà vu all over again. When you’ve been around as long as I have, you’ve seen a bunch of political scandals play out, and you begin to recognize patterns. Politically motivated hit jobs, like Benghazi, are pretty obvious early on. Either they uncover no new information, or the new information that does come to light weakens the scandal narrative rather than strengthening it. The inquisitors keep investigating and not finding evidence of wrongdoing.
That’s not what’s happening with Russiaghazigate.
At a this stage of the Watergate scandal, Richard Nixon’s supporters were pushing every argument they could think of, including the one that he was being framed by the very Democrats he’d just defeated in the presidential election, in a desperate attempt to block the investigations.
That argument didn’t work then, and it won’t work now, because it failed to address one simple question: if they’re innocent, why are they acting guilty?
Until there’s a persuasive answer to that question, reasonable people have a right to be suspicious.
Ironically, there’s an easy way for Trump and his supporters to refute these accusations. Instead of trying to head off an independent investigation, Trump supporters who sincerely believe that Trump is being framed should say, “bring it on.” They should say to the Republicans who control Congress, “We have total faith in Donald Trump’s innocence, and we demand that Congress empower an unrestricted independent investigation to determine the truth of the matter.”
Why don’t Trump supporters do that?
My guess is that most of them don’t really believe that Trump is innocent. Instead, they believe that he’s guilty, and they don’t care. They want Donald Trump to be above the law.
Donald Trump ran an intentionally polarizing campaign. He has deliberately cultivated enemies rather than allies. He appeals to his supporters through anger and fear. In the process, he has empowered a lot of bad hombres, including literal Nazis and Klansmen, who support him not in spite of his faults, but because of them. They revel in his attempts to humiliate minorities, and some of them are taking matters into their own hands. After all, if Trump is above the law, why aren’t they?
Want an example? When Trump left Jews out of his Holocaust Memorial declaration, the bad hombres noticed. Voila, an explosion of anti-Semitic threats and actions across the country. Want another? Note the enthusiasm with which Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have exceeded their authority in targeting the most vulnerable victims of Trump’s ban. They haven’t caught any terrorists yet, but they’ve made life miserable for a whole lot of sick people and children.
The words of a couple of Old Testament prophets come to mind. Micah 6:8: “What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” That doesn’t sound like Trump or his fans to me. Hosea 8:7 comes closer: “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”
It is clear that Donald Trump, as well as his Attorney General, his former National Security Advisor, his Secretary of State, his Secretary of Commerce, his campaign manager, and a couple of his closest advisors (including his son in law) all have ties to Russian business and/or political interests. This is not in dispute.
It is also not in dispute that Trump et al are sensitive about their Kremlin connections. Trump’s defense is his usual shtick: call it fake news and blame the crooked media for repeating it. The Republican Party’s fallback position is that whatever Russian contacts there may have been were all perfectly innocent. Nothing to see here, move along please.
There’s just one teensy little problem with that argument. If their Russian contacts were innocent, why did those involved work so hard to keep them secret? Why would they construct an elaborate cover-up, even perjure themselves, if they did nothing wrong? Why take big risks for no reason? That doesn’t make sense.
Back in the 14th century, William of Ockham articulated a principle that has come to be known as Occam’s Razor: the simplest explanation that accounts for all the facts is probably the best explanation.
Applying Occam’s Razor to Trump’s Russian cover up, it appears to me that the simplest explanation is that Flynn, Sessions, et al were trying to prevent the disclosure of a scandal of some sort, either a major embarrassment or an actual crime. Here are some possibilities.
• Between the election and the inauguration, Trump’s people (Flynn in particular) told their Russian contacts that they’d reverse the sanctions that President Obama imposed in January. That would have been a violation of the Logan Act. My guess: highly likely, but not enough by itself to account for the entire cover up.
• During the campaign, Trump’s people had direct conversations with their Russian counterparts about the Putin-Assange Wikileaks attacks on Hillary Clinton. My guess: almost certain, and maybe enough to account for the cover up.
• Trump himself is in hock to Russian oligarchs, which is why he won’t release his tax returns. My guess: probable. I think the tax returns are the key to the whole scandal. As Deep Throat said during the Watergate scandal, “Follow the money.”
• Those rumors about compromising pictures of Trump and Russian prostitutes have some basis in fact. My guess: who knows? Would anyone be shocked to learn that Trump had “consorted” with call girls while in Russia on business? Not me.
Republicans just want the whole thing to go away, but that isn’t going to happen. President Obama’s old security team knows what’s going on, at least in broad outline. The FBI and CIA (agencies that Trump has already publicly disrespected) are figuring things out. British and Dutch intelligence agencies are involved. Investigative reporters (whom Trump has repeatedly insulted) are on the case, and they’re sensing blood in the water. They won’t be intimidated. Too many people have too many pieces of the puzzle, and none of the principle actors are committed to protecting Donald Trump.
And of course Russia knows everything about everyone involved. They aren’t committed to protecting Donald Trump either. When he outlives his usefulness, they’ll dump him, either by ghosting him or by releasing whatever kompromat they have.
We’ve seen these scandals unfold before. Information will continue to leak, first in a steady drip-drip-drip, and then in a flood. When the dam finally breaks, it’s not a good idea to be standing nearby.
And that brings us to those legendary statesmen, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. They’ve ignored Trump’s malfeasance for so long that they’ve forfeited any claim to respect. The question now is whether they’ve also lost their instinct for self-preservation.
The longer they wait to cut their losses, the more they risk turning into accomplices. If they were smart, they’d stop making transparently silly excuses for Comrade Trump and launch an immediate bipartisan investigation. Instead of trying to marginalize Democrats who want to participate, they’d make sure that Democrats played a prominent role in the investigation to help deflect the notion that the Republican establishment knifed Trump in the back. Appoint competent, independent investigators and stand back while they conduct their investigation.
Are they that smart? We’ll know soon.
And now comes the news that Attorney General Jeff Sessions committed perjury during his confirmation hearings when he denied that he’d spoken to Russian officials during the campaign. There’s no question about it, since his testimony is readily available on video. It seems that quite a few of Trump’s Cabinet officials and other senior appointees lied to Congress about one thing or another. That’s a crime. Some of them lied to the FBI, which is also illegal. Those particular crimes both carry a penalty of up to five years in prison.
Will Sessions or any of the other perjurers in the Trump Administration serve time? It is to laugh. That would require a functioning legal system, in which the responsible officials are, you know, actually responsible. Those charged with enforcing the law would have to take their job seriously.
Instead, whether the issue is perjury, Russian interference in our elections, Trump’s violation of the emoluments clause, or Kellyanne Conway’s plug for Ivanka’s business, Republicans in Congress have responded with a collective shrug. They’ve looked the other way so often that some of them must have whiplash.
Donald Trump has offered the Republican Party its fondest dream of earthly power, in the form of control of the Supreme Court, tax cuts for billionaires, and hostility to ethnic and religious minorities. Earthly power looks good, no doubt about it. But there’s a catch. Jesus put it this way (Mark 8:36): “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
Members of Congress take an oath of office when they’re sworn in. All those Republicans who are desperately trying to ignore the Trump Administration’s rampant malfeasance? Every one of them put their hands on a Bible and said “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.”
As Paul wrote in his Epistle to the Galatians (6:7), “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” Donald Trump is Mephistopheles, and Republicans are Doctor Faustus – ambitious men and women who’ve made a deal with the devil, giving up their souls in exchange for some temporary earthly powers. Spoiler alert: It won’t end well.
Republicans used to brag about being the party of personal responsibility. Maybe back in the Eisenhower era. But for the entirety of the 21st century, Republicans have been the party of “don’t blame me, it’s someone else’s fault.” After the September 11 terrorists attacks, Condoleezza Rice said, “I don't think that anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center.” Well, except for the CIA, which briefed the Bush administration seven times prior to 9/11 on that very possibility.
In 2005, George W. Bush tried to excuse his administration’s shoddy performance in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina by claiming that “nobody anticipated the breach of the levees” in New Orleans. Well, except for the experts whose frantic warnings about that very possibility were ignored by Republican bureaucrats.
And now, Donald Trump has joined the choir, claiming that “No one knew health care could be so complicated.” Well, except for every non-Republican who has ever dealt with the issue of health care.
But the truth is that the main health care complication Republicans face is that they don’t want to provide it for Americans. It hasn’t been too complicated for Canada, the UK, France, Australia, Israel, or pick literally any other industrialized nation in the entire world. Every one of them – every single one –as a national health care system. Except the United States.
As I watch Republicans flounder as they try to repeal the Affordable Care Act, I remember the European river cruise my wife and I took in the summer of 2015. There were about 150 passengers on our boat, and 80% of them were Americans. In the evenings after dinner, there were educational programs about the places we were passing through, and one of them featured a German fellow talking about Bavaria. When he mentioned that health care was free, many of the Americans were dumbfounded.
“Wait. If I got sick on German soil, you’d treat me without charge?” one of them asked. Certainly, came the reply. “Even something big, like a heart attack?” Certainly. “Even though I don’t pay taxes in Germany?” Certainly.
Incredulous murmurs rippled throughout the crowd. People were shaking their heads in confusion. It was too much to process. Americans generally accept that national, state, or local governments (with revenue from taxes of various kinds) pay for public safety (military, police, fire), public education, and basic public infrastructure (roads, public utilities like water and electricity). But they can’t wrap their heads around the possibility that a similar model might work for health care.
There are two reasons, I believe, why the so-called greatest nation in the world is an outlier on national health care. The first is greed. Big Medicine and Big Pharma won’t settle for being merely rich. No, they’re driven to be mega-wealthy, and they’d rather let people get sick and die than sacrifice any revenue. The second reason is plain, old-fashioned racism. Before the huge wave of 21st century immigration to Europe and elsewhere, the countries that implemented national health care systems were fairly homogeneous.
In America, there has always been “us” and “them.” The first “thems” were the indigenous peoples we killed off or drove away so that we could appropriate their land. The second group of “thems” were the African slaves we imported to do our work, followed in the 19th and 20th centuries by laborers from other parts of the globe who did the work that regular Americans like “us” didn’t want to do – build railroads, pick crops, wash dishes, whatever. We were willing to let “those people” do our unpleasant jobs, but they weren’t ever going to be one of us.
During that latter period, we also acquired some refugees. Some of them fled famine in Ireland. Others fled religious persecution in Eastern and Central Europe. A lot of “us” back in those days didn’t much like the Irish, the Italians, and the rest, especially the Eastern European Jews. They all talked funny and tended to be clannish. But we found ways to assimilate them. Instead of building a wall to keep them out, we erected a statue in New York Harbor, welcoming them. They were white, after all.
Now we have a new wave of workers and refugees who also talk funny and tend to be clannish. But they’re from brown countries, not white ones. For the diehard “us vs. them” folks in the Republican Party, that’s all the difference in the world.
The internal battle that the Republican Party is waging right now over Obamacare repeal is being fought on those two battlefields. Paul Ryan and Team GOP want to fund huge tax cuts for the rich by gutting health benefits for everyone. Steve Bannon and Team Trump want to establish a racist welfare state, maintaining benefits for white people while cutting those same benefits for minorities.
What's a poor Republican Congressman to do? No one knew it would be this hard. No one could have foreseen. It was impossible to predict. But at least they can take solace in the fact that all of their problems are someone else's fault.
The bestselling record of 1907 was “School Days,” by Byron G. Harlan. I doubt if anyone under 50 has ever heard of it, but the chorus, at least, was familiar enough when I was a kid: “School days, school days, dear old golden rule days. Reading and writing and ‘rithmetic, taught to the tune of the hick’ry stick.” It seems odd to think there was a time when people asked each other, “Hey, have you heard this great new song called ‘School Days?’” There’s a YouTube link at the end of this post, in case you’re interested in what Americans went wild for 110 years ago. Spoiler alert, though. It’s not very good.
And now, here’s the story of something else that happened a long time ago and wasn’t very good – my first day of school. It happened in Wichita, Kansas, in 1952. I was a real mama’s boy back then. The first picture of me doesn’t even have me in it. It was a group photo, taken around 1950, of my mom’s side of the family. There were aunts, uncles, and at least a dozen cousins from the first wave of the post-war baby boom. I was hiding behind my mother’s dress.
If shyness can be inherited, I got it from my father’s side of the family. My father’s father was a man of few words. He died when my dad was four or five, in the then-new state of Oklahoma. My dad was born in 1910. When his older sister, my Aunt Cleo, was born, it was still Indian Territory. Aunt Cleo remembered only two things about my grandfather. He was a Democrat – maybe I inherited that too – who celebrated the election of Woodrow Wilson in 1912 by firing his pistol into the air. And not long after that, he died of tuberculosis. Those two pieces of information represent the sum total of family lore about my Grandfather Mitchell.
My father wasn’t so taciturn, especially around family, but he didn’t have any close friends apart from Aunt Cleo and my mom’s largish family. I’m a pretty quiet guy, but compared to my father and grandfather, I’m practically an extrovert.
There was no such thing as pre-school when I was young. Wichita was a mini-boom town after the war, with a rural mentality that was slowly adjusting to the fact that its population had exceeded 100,000. Three large aircraft factories – Boeing, Beechcraft, Cessna – collectively made up the region’s largest employers. Before the war, it was one of the few places that offered work to Arkies and Okies (including my father) displaced by the Great Dust Bowl.
In the years after World War II, there were kids all over the place – that famous baby boom – and I could always find someone to play with. This was completely unstructured play, always outdoors unless it was raining, with no parental supervision. Mothers on the block were probably looking out the window occasionally, but the assumption was that we’d be OK. And as best I can remember, we were. I broke my collarbone a couple of times, first when I fell off my tricycle and then again when I was wrestling with a neighbor friend. We had our share of bumps and bruises, but crime was non-existent, and our doors were never locked.
Back then, everyone born in the same year started school at the same time. Some of my kindergarten classmates, including me, had already had their fifth birthday. Others were still four when they started school. Kindergarten was held in half-day shifts, and I was assigned to the afternoon shift. My school was Ingalls Elementary, a little less than half a mile from my home. To get there, though, I had to cross a major street, which had traffic lights and a safety patrol.
I can’t remember why I felt so strongly about it, but I dreaded having to go to school. I literally had to be dragged, screaming and crying, into my classroom. I don’t remember anything else about that school day, but I remember panicking when school was out, because I had no idea how to get home.
Somehow, I had the notion that no one would help me unless we were friends, and I didn’t know any of my new classmates. So I kept approaching bewildered kids and saying “Will you be my friend? Great. Can you help me find my way home?” Of course, my mother was standing nearby, chatting with a gaggle of other moms waiting to pick up their kids. For a guy who went on to earn a couple of masters’ degrees and put in a 35 year career in academia, it was a pretty inauspicious start to my formal education.
One thing I particularly disliked about kindergarten was that the afternoon shift had a mandatory nap time. We all had rolled up rag rugs, which stayed in the classroom. A daily nap sounds pretty good these days, but back then I was a total failure at napping. It was awful trying to lie still for what seemed an endless amount of time – probably 15-20 minutes – while most of the other kids slept.
Ingalls was an integrated school, so I encountered black kids for the first time in my life. I made friends with one of them in 1st or 2nd grade. His name was Roscoe, and we’d meet up at recess and play together. I remember one time we were at the far end of the playground and didn’t hear the bell ring, so we were late getting back to class. When we finally noticed that we were the only ones still outside, I was terrified. I thought sure we were in for some terrible punishment. Roscoe was pretty blasé about it, and since I don’t remember what happened when we got back inside, I assume Roscoe was right not to sweat it. We must have gotten off with nothing more than a mild warning. I often wonder what happened to Roscoe.
I stayed at Ingalls through 3rd grade, and then we moved across town, from the north-central area to what was then pretty far southeast. We needed more space because my mom was pregnant with my second sister. Race may have played some role in the decision to move, as black families were moving into our neighborhood. I don’t know that for sure, and neither of my parents were overtly racist in any way, but our old neighborhood quickly transitioned from white to black during that period.
We moved to 709 S. Terrace, which was only two blocks from my grandparents’ house (my mother’s parents). Terrace was on the crest of a hill, and we could look out our back door and see my grandparent’s back yard on Belmont. A couple of my mom’s brothers also lived within a few blocks. The Clines were a tight knit family.
That was in the summer of 1956, which I remember for two things. That summer was when I first heard rock & roll, and it was also when my Grandma Mitchell died.
To be continued. Here's the link to Byron G. Harlan's "School Days" from1907 :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1Ekos0ogYs
On Sunday (2/19), the New York Times published another one of those thumb-sucking opinion pieces which argued that since diehard Trump supporters haven’t abandoned ship yet, it proves that Democrats are wrong about everything. It’s another verse in the never-ending song, “Why Can’t Democrats Be More Like Republicans?” It’s a recurring cliché, but it’s also a serious misunderstanding of the current political situation.
Democrats are never going to convert hardcore Republicans. The good news is, they don’t need to. As I never tire of repeating, Clinton got 3 million more popular votes than Trump. The inherent small state bias of the Electoral College (where a vote in Wyoming counts 3.6 times as much as a vote in California) handed the election to Trump. But his margin was razor-thin. A shift of only 100,000 votes in three states would have changed the outcome in the Electoral College. What Democrats need to do is find a way to change those 100,000 votes. Of course, it would be great to get more than that, and in more than three states. Let’s go for a landslide next time.
Fortunately, there are several places where those votes can be found that don’t require deprogramming millions of Trump supporters.
· Category 1: Democratic-leaning voters whose passion for email security kept them from supporting Hillary Clinton. She won’t be on the ballot in 2020.
· Category 2: Voters who bought the third party argument that there was no real difference between Clinton and Trump. They’ve already been provided with ample evidence that they were wrong. Some of those voters sat the 2016 election out, and others voted Green or Libertarian. In at least four key battleground states – Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – third party voters swung those states to Trump. My guess is that there will be a lot fewer third party voters in 2020, and that Democrats stand to pick up the majority of those votes. That, by itself, is reason for optimism.
· Category 3: Last but not least, there are indeed potential Democratic votes among 2016 Trump voters. The challenge will be to ignore the pundits who want Democrats to abandon their own base to chase Republican votes. Instead, Democrats need to distinguish between the Deplorables and the Persuadables – hardcore Trump supporters vs. those who may have voted for him reluctantly and are now experiencing buyer’s remorse.
The most effective tactic against the Deplorables is to highlight their excesses and make them the face of the Republican Party. If Milo Yiannopoulos is the face of Republican Party, a whole lot of people will run the other way. Rhetorically, the best way to drive a wedge between the enthusiastic and reluctant Trump supporters is to avoid blanket statements like (as Tommy Vietor put it on Pod Save America), “If you voted for Trump, you’re an idiot.” That’s not persuasive language. It’s true that some Republicans really are idiots and worse, but it will be more effective to reserve pejorative terms for specific people (e.g. Yiannopoulos, Flynn, Spicer, Conway) and specific behaviors (e.g. racism, or collaboration with Russia to influence American elections).
One specific behavior that qualifies as idiotic is the whole “We suffered for 8 years, now it’s your turn” meme that some Republicans are pushing. Several of my FB friends have reprinted a longish post by someone named Scott Mednick, in which he listed many of President Obama’s accomplishments and asked after each one, “Has this caused your suffering?” Unemployment is down, the stock market way, way up. The budget deficit way down, corporate profits up. Violent crime down, number of abortions also down. Do these things make you suffer?
It’s a long, impressive list. I wish I’d thought of it. But while it might come in handy if you’re trapped in a political conversation at a family reunion, I don’t think it’s a scalable argument.
Oddly enough, I believe that many Republicans really did suffer during the Obama years. It’s just that the source of their suffering wasn’t President Obama. If Republicans suffered for eight years, it was because they were living in their own nightmare fantasy world all that time. They trusted the right wing propaganda machine, which told them that President Obama was going to take their guns, impose Sharia law, and make them get gay married.
Donald Trump was the perfect candidate for voters with that mindset. As David Brooks wrote in the New York Times, “At the heart of Trumpism is the perception that the world is a dark, savage place, and therefore ruthlessness, selfishness and callousness are required to survive in it. It is the utter conviction, as Trump put it, that murder rates are at a 47-year high, even though in fact they are close to a 57-year low.”
And lots of Republicans believe all that stuff. In fact, they can’t get enough of it. Like kids telling ghost stories around the campfire, they aren’t satisfied until they scared themselves out of their wits. Now they’re addicted to the adrenaline rush of fear and anger.
When Donald Trump says he actually won the popular vote because three million people voted for Clinton illegally, they believe it, and they’re pissed off. When Kellyanne Conway concocted a totally bogus Bowling Green Massacre, they bought it. Even after Conway admitted that she “misspoke,” 51% of those supporting Trump’s Muslim ban said that the Bowling Green Massacre was not only real, but that it proved that the Muslim ban was necessary.
There is a non-trivial segment of the Republican base is literally delusional. Those are the people Democrats can safely ignore in 2018 and 2020. As Thomas Paine wrote, “To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason … is like administering medicine to the dead.”
But there are growing numbers of Trump voters who are beginning to realize what the loss of Obamacare would mean to them, or to a loved one. Others fell for Trump’s bullshit about running the country like a business, overlooking the fact that most of his businesses have gone belly up. Now that they’ve seen President Trump in action for a month, they’re appalled at the level of incompetence emanating from the White House. Those are the Persuadables.
Non-voters, third party voters, and Persuadables – there are millions of votes available for the right Democrat. The challenge is to recruit those candidates and support them.
"The tone! The hatred! I'm really not a bad person! The hatred! The venom,” said Donald Trump at his press conference on Thursday.
One of Trump’s first political victims was Jeb Bush. Jeb! was a terrible candidate, but in December, 2015, he said something eerily prescient: "Trump is a chaos candidate and he will be a chaos president."
Yesterday, Donald Trump begged to differ. “I see stories of chaos, chaos, yet it is the exact opposite. This administration is running like a fine-tuned machine.” A fine-tuned machine with the wheels coming off, maybe. The truth is that Trump is floundering.
It turns out that actually being President isn’t nearly as much fun as running for President. So one month into his first term, Trump decided to have fun again by launching his 2020 re-election campaign in Florida. He actually misses Hillary Clinton, and threw a couple of half-hearted barbs her way. But it’s clear that he needs a new scapegoat to demonize when things go wrong. Because a whole lot of things have gone wrong in the past four weeks.
To the surprise of approximately no one, Trump has chosen the press as his new whipping boy. “I mean, I watch CNN, it’s so much anger and hatred and just the hatred,” he said. And then, a few seconds later, “I don’t watch it anymore because it’s very good.”
The whole performance was like that – a string of non sequiturs, contradictory statements, and outright lies, swinging back and forth between praise for himself and anger at his critics.
About his wife, he said, “I’ve actually known her for a long time.” Good to get that cleared up!
One of the highlights of the press conference was Trump’s explanation of uranium. “You know what uranium is, right? It’s this thing called nuclear weapons. And other things. Like lots of things are done with uranium. Including some bad things. Nobody talks about that.” Well, no Republicans anyway.
“I’m not ranting and raving,” said Donald Trump, ranting and raving. “I love this. I’m having a good time.” Vladimir Putin probably got a kick out of it too.
Last week, several of my Facebook friends posted “Some Wise Advice Circulating,” a set of rules for resisting the Trump Administration. The rules are sometimes attributed to Bernice King, daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., although she hasn’t claimed authorship (see link below).
Although I’m certainly down with the general spirit of the list, there are a couple of the points that don’t make sense to me. Maybe some of my wise FB friends can tell me what I’m missing.
I don’t understand the Lord Voldemort Rule: “Don’t use his name; EVER (45 will do).” He who must not be named is obviously Donald Trump. Oops, I just broke the first rule. I’ve heard people argue that because Trump is such a narcissist, he believes that any publicity as good publicity. According to this theory, if we avoid using his name, we can deprive him of the oxygen of attention that he thrives on.
Except that President XLV clearly does NOT see all publicity as good publicity. He is the most hyper-sensitive politician this country has ever seen. Criticism drives him nuts. Good lord, even insufficient praise drives him nuts. Why not keep the pressure on?
The other reason I don’t like the first rule is that it reminds me of the superstition about saying the devil’s name for fear of invoking him. And speaking of the devil, when the devil tempted Jesus in the wilderness, Jesus didn’t refer to him as Fallen Angel #1. Jesus called him out by name (Luke4:8): “Get thee behind me, Satan.” There’s a similar story, centuries older, in the Buddhist tradition. When the demon Mara tempted the Buddha, the Buddha simply said, “I know you, Mara.” Neither Jesus nor the Buddha were reluctant to say the name of their adversary. Trump’s a bad hombre, but he’s not in the same league as Satan or Mara. Maybe I’m overlooking something, but I can’t think of a good reason not to use Trump’s name.
The third rule – “Do not argue with those who support him--it doesn't work,” makes a certain amount of sense, although I think that formulation oversimplifies the nature of Trump’s support. I’d put it this way: “Distinguish between hardcore Trump supporters and those who may have voted for him reluctantly and are now experiencing buyer’s remorse. Ignore the former and attempt to persuade the latter.” I’ll write more about that soon.
The fourth rule is: “Focus on his policies, not his orange-ness and mental state.” I agree that it’s important to keep the focus on the impact of Trump’s (and his Republican enablers’) policies, and that his skin color and hair are silly distractions. Remember that Hillary Clinton did a pretty good job of pointing out Trump’s character flaws. As a strategy, it didn’t work last November, and it probably won’t work in 2018 or 2020. Nevertheless, I continue to believe that Trump’s mental state is intimately connected to his policies. In my view it’s not only fair, but actually important, to point that out. I would rewrite the fourth rule to say “Don’t waste your time on personal insults aimed at Donald Trump. Instead, focus on the negative impact his policies are having on our citizens.”
To be continued. In the meantime, here’s a link which contains the full list of “Wise Advice”: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/02/08/a-word-of-advice-from-martin-luther-king-jr-s-daughter-resist/?utm_term=.7f441dad6fd6
To be continued. In the meantime, here’s a link which contains the full list of “Wise Advice”: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/02/08/a-word-of-advice-from-martin-luther-king-jr-s-daughter-resist/?utm_term=.7f441dad6fd6
Earlier this month, I posted something on the Republican disconnect from reality. I’m grateful that the press has done a much better job of separating truth from fiction since the inauguration. Their willingness to call out Donald Trump, Kellyanne Conway, and Sean Spicer on their lies has been a pleasant surprise. Credit where credit is due. But there are still a couple of elephants in the room.
So far, Congressional Republicans have been largely exempt from the truth-squadding that the White House has received. Paul Ryan continues to enjoy a reputation of a serious, principled fiscal conservative, when the truth is that he’s a dishonest opportunist, willing to indulge any behavior on the part of the Executive Branch as long as they’ll support his lifelong dream of cutting taxes for billionaires and cutting benefits for everyone else. Mitch McConnell is often portrayed as a procedural genius, cleverly using Senate rules to stymie Democrats and advance the Republican agenda. The fact that that Republican agenda is racist, sexist, and anti-democratic doesn’t seem to matter to the press.
But there’s an even more serious issue that has thus far been ignored or underplayed by the mainstream press. Every politician tries to put the best possible face on things, stretching the truth here and there in the process. That’s not what’s going on in the Trump Administration. Simply separating fact from fiction, while an essential first step, is not enough.
Plainly put, this President is more than just dishonest. He’s mentally ill. His children – primarily Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner – seem to have figured out ways to manage him. Steve Bannon can manipulate him at times. But the rest of his newly hired political appointees are confused and helpless. That’s why people like Conway and Spicer wind up looking like babbling fools. It’s not just that they’re trying to justify obvious lies. They’re trying to pretend that a madman is sane.
Calling the President a liar was a huge breakthrough for the mainstream press. Given their instinctive deference to institutions of power, it can’t have been easy. It will be just as hard, if not harder, for them to come right out and question the President’s sanity. But it has to be done.
The first step may have been taken by Andrew Sullivan in New York Magazine (link below). I’ll wrap up this post by quoting extensively from that article, which helps me understand why Trump’s lies feel so different from, and more disturbing than, the lies that George W. Bush told, or those of Richard Nixon before him.
“I keep asking myself this simple question: If you came across someone in your everyday life who repeatedly said fantastically and demonstrably untrue things, what would you think of him? If you showed up at a neighbor’s, say, and your host showed you his newly painted living room, which was a deep blue, and then insisted repeatedly — manically — that it was a lovely shade of scarlet, what would your reaction be? If he then dragged out a member of his family and insisted she repeat this obvious untruth in front of you, how would you respond? If the next time you dropped by, he was still raving about his gorgeous new red walls, what would you think? Here’s what I’d think: This man is off his rocker. He’s deranged; he’s bizarrely living in an alternative universe; he’s delusional. If he kept this up, at some point you’d excuse yourself and edge slowly out of the room and the house and never return. You’d warn your other neighbors. You’d keep your distance. If you saw him, you’d be polite but keep your distance.”
“I think this is a fundamental reason why so many of us have been so unsettled, anxious, and near panic these past few months. It is not so much this president’s agenda. That always changes from administration to administration. It is that when the lynchpin of an entire country is literally delusional, clinically deceptive, and responds to any attempt to correct the record with rage and vengeance, everyone is always on edge.”
“Somehow, he is never in control of himself and yet he is always in control of you.”
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/02/andrew-sullivan-the-madness-of-king-donald.html
There’s an article in the Observer (link below) carrying the byline of Tim Sommer in small print. It’s called “A Letter of Apology from Bruce Springsteen for Letting Trump Win.” I don’t know how much, if anything, Springsteen had to do with the article, but whoever wrote it made two points that really resonated with me.
The first point is that I share some of the blame for how the election turned out. Of course I voted for Clinton, and beyond that, I put a lot of effort into writing long Facebook posts about why it was important to keep Trump out of the White House. That was more than I’d ever done before, and it wasn’t enough.
I’ve voted in every election since I turned 21 in 1968, but voting was about the extent of my involvement in the electoral process. I never volunteered on behalf of a party or candidate, or did much more than put up yard signs. In other words, I put in the minimum effort at citizenship. I’ve backed more losers (8) than winners (5) in presidential elections, and was pretty disappointed about many of those losses. But I always took for granted that my side would have a meaningful opportunity to try again in four years. Now I’m starting worry.
There were telltale signs last summer, beginning with unapologetic vote suppression in key battleground states, sometimes in defiance of court orders. Then at the Republican National Convention in July, Rudy Giuliani screamed, “There is no next election.” At the time I thought it was just more Republican hysteria. Three weeks into Donald Trump’s presidency, it’s beginning to look like Giuliani blurted out Trump’s post-election strategy.
There is a strong fascist strain in Trumpism, and the Republican Party has already been co-opted into it. Oh, a few of them will express “concerns.” Big whoop. Dangle the prospect of tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires in front of those “concerned” Republicans, and they’ll set fire to the Constitution in a heartbeat.
The “Springsteen” article also reinforces the point is that the 2018 mid-term elections are going to be critical. And it’s important to remember that state legislative and gubernatorial elections are really important as well. If you’re looking for something new to worry about, try this on for size,
A cabal of ultra-conservatives known as “Convention of States” is in the process of trying to radically revise the U.S. Constitution via a provision in Article V, which allows for a Constitutional Convention if two thirds of the states call for it. Maybe you’re thinking that’s pretty far-fetched. But guess what? They have 28 states already, and they’re making a push in Kentucky right now, trying to bring the number up to 29.
The original impetus behind the Convention of States came from people who wanted to insert a balanced budget amendment into the Constitution. But along the way, they’ve gathered adherents with a grab bag of right wing agendas. If they pick up a half dozen more states, they can rewrite the Constitution in whatever ways they choose. And this time, the framers of the Constitution won’t be Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. They’ll be the screwballs and cranks in your state legislature who introduce those loony bills that smart people make fun of. Except that it won’t be funny anymore.
You can bet that proposals will include gutting the First Amendment to allow, or maybe require, prayer in public schools (assuming there are any public schools left, after Betsy DeVos gets through with them). There is bound to be some sort of anti-LGBT amendment, plus new restrictions on voting rights; an amendment outlawing abortion under any circumstances and limiting access to birth control; an English-only amendment; a flag burning amendment; and the abolition of income tax.
Right now, the courts are the only thing standing between Donald Trump and dictatorship. Turn a bunch of Tea Party types loose on the Constitution and there's no telling what it would look like when they got through with it. That’s why the Convention of States movement is dangerous.
Democrats need to feel a sense of urgency about making inroads at the state legislative and gubernatorial levels in 2018 to build a firewall against this threat. Long story short, I’ve decided it’s time for me to step up. Right now, I don’t know what that will look like, but I’m going to find ways to do more than write long Facebook posts. Not that I plan to stop writing long Facebook posts.
http://observer.com/2017/02/an-apology-from-bruce-springsteen-for-letting-trump-win/
During the debate of the Jeff Sessions nomination for Attorney General yesterday, Senate Majority Leader and major league poop-head Mitch McConnell helped launch Elizabeth Warren’s Senate re-election campaign in 2018 (and maybe her presidential campaign in 2020) by preventing her from reading a 30 year old letter from Coretta Scott King criticizing Sessions’ civil rights record back in the day.
McConnell got a case of the vapors, and invoked a seldom-used rule against accusing another senator of behaving badly, or something like that. (See the link below for a fuller account of the rule.) Then he offered her a potential campaign slogan: “Nevertheless she persisted.”
McConnell’s full explanation was particularly tone deaf: “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless she persisted.” Imagine that. The shameless hussy wouldn’t back down, not even after the menfolk gave her a warning and went to the trouble of mansplaining the rule for her. She had the unmitigated gall to persist.
And here’s the kicker. After Warren was prevented from speaking, four Democratic Senators, all men, were allowed to read the letter on the Senate floor without incident.
My respect for Republicans is already at rock bottom, so I can’t say this incident caused me to lose any. But I am continually amazed at how not ready for prime time these guys are.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/the-ruel-to-silence-elizabeth-warren-has-seldom-been-used-before
First they came for the spellchecker. The new White House list of 78 terrorist attacks that the crooked media refused to cover has quite a few typographical errors. In fact, the word “attacker” alone was misspelled (“attaker”) 22 times, or twice as often as the number of the terrorist attacks on the list that took place on American soil. The sloppy composition of the list is the least problematic thing about it, but the fact that no one bothered to proofread it speaks volumes about the Bannon/Trump regime.
One thing is certain now. We can forget the lessons of Watergate. For the past forty years, it has been an article of faith in the press that it was the cover up, not the original mistake, which got politicians into trouble. Admit your error, apologize, and move on.
But like Pearl Harbor and September 11, the Bowling Green Massacre has changed everything. Team Trump’s response to being caught in a lie is to lie more. Even as twitter was mocking Kellyanne Conway for her imaginary tragedy, Donald Trump doubled down on the claim that many acts of terrorism are “not even being reported” by the very bad, no good, failing American media. Sad!
The next day, the White House released a list of 78 terrorist incidents, mostly overseas, as evidence for Trump’s claim. In addition to its typos, the list was problematic in other ways. For some reason, whoever compiled it threw Kellyanne Conway under the bus by leaving out the Bowling Green Massacre. More importantly, they also left out white Christian terrorism (including school shootings and attacks on abortion clinics), attacks on reporters and the press worldwide, and also attacks on Jewish victims in Israel.
But its omissions aside, many of the incidents on the list were in fact front page news in the American press. That’s when reporters noticed that the White House was trying to move the goal posts – changing Trump’s “not even being reported,” which is demonstrably false, to “under-reported,” which is a totally subjective criterion.
And the fact is, 75 of the 78 incidents were covered at some length by the American press (see the link below for video confirmation). The three remaining incidents include one – an alleged rocket attack on an Egyptian airfield – for which the only references on Google are to its presence on the White House list. Perhaps it has flown under the radar because it coincided with the Bowling Green Massacre. There was another incident in which someone threw a Molotov cocktail at a mosque in Sweden, with no casualties. And finally, in Chad, someone with a BB gun shot at police officers in front of an American embassy, also resulting in no casualties.
And now you know … the rest of the story.
http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/donald-trump-says-u-s-media-ignored-these-78-terror-at-1792074596
Betsy DeVos is just another billionaire Trump donor who got rewarded with an important job she’s unqualified for. She was nominated precisely because she’s not too bright, and because she hates the agency she’s supposed to lead. There’s nothing special about her. There were other, perhaps worse, candidates waiting in the wings, had the vote gone the other way. Donald Trump will no doubt soon be boasting that DeVos was confirmed by a huge margin, one of the largest margins in history. But we know better.
The DeVos confirmation sucks, but it’s important to remember that we made them fight for it. Progressives who called, wrote, and otherwise made their opposition to the DeVos nomination known helped stiffen the spines of some wishy-washy Democrats, and persuaded two Republican Senators to vote No.
Because today’s news sucks, it’s important to remind ourselves that some good things have happened since January 20.
First, we’ve learned that Steve Bannon is not an evil genius. Evil, yes. But he and everyone else involved in managing the Trump White House have been surprisingly sloppy, making unforced errors on an almost daily basis. And once you get past the Bannons, Conways, and Spicers, it’s increasingly clear that Trump’s working staff don’t have much respect for him. They’ve already begun to pass gossip and embarrassing information on to the press. All of this is good news for the opposition.
Second, we’ve learned that, for a new president, Donald Trump is remarkably unpopular nationwide, with the lowest approval ratings of any new president since such things have been measured. And third, we know that this matters a lot to Trump, who is obsessed with being popular. He proves it with every tweet and speech. He’s incapable of speaking on any topic without whining about how unfair his press coverage has been. The bully has revealed his Achilles heel.
Fourth, we’ve learned that protest works. The Women’s March, the airport protests against the Muslim ban, the phone calls and letters, the rallies at Republican town hall meetings – they’ve all had a positive impact. Congressional Republicans are running scared, a few of them quite literally, away from their own constituents at town halls devoted to Obamacare.
Fifth, we know that we’re not alone. There are a lot of good guys out there who are willing to fight for American democracy. We have important allies. The ACLU has stepped up bigly, bless their hearts. Democrats are waking up to the fact that there are millions of voters who will support them, if they’ll just lead. The national press is finally doing its job, pointing out lies and blunders rather than simply repeating the spin with a straight face.
It’s going to be a rough four years. We’ll lose more battles. But two and a half weeks into the fight, we’re in better shape than I thought we’d be. As Jesus said (Matthew 24:6), “See that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.”