YOU AIN'T NOTHIN' BUT A HOUND DOG

On July 2, 1956, Elvis Presley recorded “Hound Dog,” a song which had been a number one R&B hit for Big Mama Thornton in 1953, and a minor hit for Freddie Bell and the Bell Boys, a Las Vegas lounge act, in 1955.  Some people (who must not have heard any of those records) have claimed cultural appropriation, asserting that Elvis copied Big Mama’s version note for note.  That’s nonsense, as even a cursory comparison of the two (or three) versions proves.  And besides, the song was written by two Jewish teenagers, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.

Elvis knew his version would be a hit, and the day before he actually recorded the song, he sang it on the Steve Allen Show.  Allen thought it would be funny to have Elvis sing the song to an actual hound dog, so he recruited a (probably sedated) basset hound to share the stage with the hottest recording artist on the planet.  Elvis wasn’t amused, but he was a good sport, and did as he was asked. But I digress.

I was reminded of “Hound Dog” by Donald Trump – you knew I’d get around to him sooner or later, right? – and his attempt to insult Omarosa Manigault Newman by calling her “that dog.”  Apparently, Trump hates dogs.  I have nothing against cats, horses, and other domestic companion animals, but I’m definitely a dog person, so screw Trump for his cynophobia as well as for everything else.

Trump called Omarosa a dog because she said he used the N-word.  Seriously, is it hard to believe that Donald Trump is a racist?  Look at his policy initiatives.  Read his tweets.  It’s obvious that the man doesn’t like people of color, especially if their color happens to be Black. 

But the mainstream press always resists drawing logical conclusions about Republicans.  They demand a smoking gun.  Omarosa may be able to supply it.  In addition to laying down a barrage of vituperation, Trump also attempted to defend himself against her charge.  But instead of simply denying that he used the N-word, he settled for claiming that there was no EVIDENCE that he used the word (at least not on his TV show).

His actual tweet was “@MarkBurnettTV called to say that there are NO TAPES of the Apprentice where I used such a terrible and disgusting word as attributed by Wacky and Deranged Omarosa.” 

Burnett was the show’s producer.  Trump wants us to believe that as a favor to his buddy in the White House, Mark Burnett sat down and reviewed every minute of every outtake from all 192 episodes and then phoned Trump with an all-clear.  Maybe.  Or maybe Trump made the call up.  So far, Burnett himself has been conspicuously silent, which seems odd under the circumstances. 

Or maybe there are “NO TAPES” because some potentially incriminating outtakes from the Apprentice have been destroyed.  Or maybe Omarosa did some secret taping on her own when the Apprentice cameras weren’t rolling.  Or maybe she taped the N-word in a conversation unrelated to the TV show. 

Or maybe Omarosa is lying.  We can’t rule that out, because she’s a con artist just like her former boss.  She flattered him, so he gave her a do-nothing White House job that paid $179,700/year.  Taxpayer money, of course.

Meanwhile, there’s an interesting secondary debate going on about what would happen if a genuine recording of Trump using the N-word actually surfaced. 

The first theory is that nothing would change.  It would simply confirm what we already know about Trump, in the same way that each new revelation of one of his extra-marital affairs becomes less surprising.  Of course he’s an adulterer.  What else is new?

The second theory is that it would make the Deplorables even more deplorable.  They’d feel empowered by Trump’s example and start using the N-word openly.  Once that particular taboo is broken, public discourse on race would revert to 1950s levels.

Theories one and two are not mutually exclusive.

The third theory is offered by a few optimistic souls who believe that proof of Trump’s use of the N-word would be the straw that broke the camel’s back.  They argue that some non-trivial percentage of Republicans – maybe 10% on the high side – have had it with Trump’s incompetence, and would use evidence of his racism to break ranks. 

Much as I’d love it to be true, theory three just doesn’t ring true.  Trump’s vices are already visible to everyone with open eyes.  Republicans know who Trump is, and he’s helping reveal who they are.   As Weekly Standard writer Jonathan V. Last points out, the grab-‘em-by-the-pussy Access Hollywood tape “didn’t break Donald Trump.  It broke the Republican party’s willingness to insist that character matters.”  

If there turns out to be an N-word tape, rank and file Republicans will either shrug (theory one) or cheer (theory two).  As for congressional Republicans and other party professionals, as long as placating the Base remains the GOP’s top priority, they’ll settle for issuing muted statements of disappointment and concern, and the next Trump distraction arrives quickly.  The bottom line is, we can’t rely on Republicans to do the right thing.  We need to replace as many of them as possible with Democrats.

Still, there’s been at least one silver lining in the Omarosa affair, at least for me personally.  Now that I know Trump hates dogs, I get to count walking my dogs twice a day as protest marches against Donald Trump.  Venceremos! 

I PITY THE POOR IMMIGRANT

Are we, as I was told in school long ago, a nation of immigrants?  Or is there a separate “we” – people like me, whose ancestors came from western Europe – who get to call themselves the real Americans, and reserve the “immigrant” label for people who come from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, or Latin America?      

Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in 1872, that “We Americans are all cuckoos. We make our homes in the nests of other birds.”

On the other hand, earlier this week, Fox News’s Laura Ingraham said, "The America we know and love doesn't exist anymore. Massive demographic changes have been foisted on the American people, and they are changes that none of us ever voted for, and most of us don't like ... this is related to both illegal and legal immigration."

History would seem to be on the side of Oliver Wendell Holmes.  Laura Ingraham’s opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, the most massive demographic change in the history of North America took place when successive waves of Europeans just showed up a few hundred years ago and made themselves at home on this continent.

To use Ingraham’s terminology, those early European immigrants foisted themselves upon the indigenous population – and killed any of them who had the temerity to object to the Europeanization of their territory.  This process went on for nearly four centuries, until there was no more land to steal, and hardly any Native Americans left to kill.  There is nothing in the historical record that suggests that the original inhabitants of North America voted to permit this genocidal land grab.

After 90% of the original inhabitants of the area that became known as the United States of America had been exterminated, and after most of the survivors had been herded onto reservations in the middle of nowhere, it became possible for Ingraham’s predecessors to assert that they were the real Americans, and complain about demographic changes they disapproved of. 

Today, they’re even unhappy about one demographic change they themselves perpetrated.  As they were exterminating the continent’s indigenous population back in the 18th and 19th centuries, people like Ingraham instituted yet another massive demographic change in America.  In order to turn a profit, the Southern agrarian economy needed people who would do backbreaking labor for long hours with minimal compensation.  Sadly, they discovered that very few of their fellow white folks found those kinds of jobs appealing.  Who could have guessed?

Thus it came to pass that white plantation owners looked to Africa for a solution to their labor shortage.  Over the years, they kidnapped just under 400,000 slaves from west Africa.  There is nothing in the historical record to suggest that any of those particular undocumented immigrants voted to become slaves.  Nevertheless, Africans who survived the Middle Passage became African Americans, like it or not.  They maintained the plantation economy for decades, and began having children. 

By 1860, there were over 4 million people of African descent in North America.  Today, that number stands at 40 million.  It’s safe to assume that none of them are part of the America Laura Ingraham and her viewers know and love.  The Fox demographic is made up of people who believe that slavery wasn’t all that bad, and wish that the ungrateful descendants of those slaves would just go back to Africa.  

From where I sit, the demographic history of America confirms Oliver Wendell Holmes’ analysis.  Some of us may have ancestors who came over on the Mayflower.  Others may have ancestors who arrived on a slave ship like the Greyhound, manned by the sailor who later composed “Amazing Grace.”  Some of us have ancestors who fled the Irish potato famine, or religious persecution in Eastern Europe in the 19th century.  Some of us have ancestors who fled political persecution in Asia or Latin America in the 20th or 21st century.  But wherever they came from, if your ancestors arrived after 1492, they were immigrants.

The irony of Laura Ingraham’s anti-immigration stance is that she’s a classic beneficiary of chain migration.  Her maternal grandparents were Polish immigrants who came to America in 1910 to live with a relative.  They didn’t speak English, and they had no special skills.  Her grandfather was a laborer.

Similarly, Donald Trump’s grandfather immigrated from Germany to avoid compulsory military service (foreshadowing Trump’s own Vietnam-era bone spurs).  Trump’s mother was also an immigrant, as were two of his wives.  There is considerable doubt that the current FLOTUS immigrated legally.  But she was a model, which apparently confers upon her a legitimacy that a fruit picker or a construction worker simply doesn’t have.

Why, then, would Ingraham take such an anti-immigrant position?  It’s hard to attribute it to the economic insecurity of the white working class.  Ingraham reportedly makes $15 million a year, which seems pretty secure to me. 

The most obvious explanation is that her remarks were straight up white nationalism.  They aren’t that far from the infamous “14 Words” that white supremacists live by:  "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”  Ingraham’s remarks even earned an endorsement from David Duke.  That was a little too much for Ingraham, since Duke is, for the moment at least, persona non grata in the GOP. 

Ingraham’s problem is that she broke the dog whistle rule.  She forgot that she was supposed to use code words that the Base would understand but which she could deny indignantly if the mainstream media objected. 

For the time being, Republicans aren't supposed to say what they really believe.  Only Donald Trump gets to do that.  But Trump has loosened the Republican id, and more of them are beginning to say the secret things out loud.  He's brought out the latent bully in some of our friends, neighbors, and family members, and it's been painful to watch.  As Rick Wilson says, everything that Trump touches dies.    

DON'T SPEAK TOO SOON, FOR THE WHEEL'S STILL IN SPIN

I spent some time recently reviewing the political posts I’ve written over the past two years in an attempt to figure out, on a macro level, the sorts of things I got right versus what I got wrong, so as to learn from my mistakes and improve the quality of my posts.  Like Gaul, my analysis is divided into three parts – before the election, between the election and the inauguration, and finally the 19 months of Trump’s presidency. 

GOT WRONG (During the campaign)

1.      My biggest mistake before the election was that I thought Hillary Clinton would win, possibly by a landslide.  She did win the popular vote by c. 3 million, but sadly the Electoral College is what counts, and Trump won that. 

2.      I had plenty of company on this issue, but I was completely unaware of Trump’s close cooperation with Russia before and during the campaign.

GOT RIGHT (During the campaign)

1.      I said that Donald Trump was both corrupt and totally ignorant of virtually everything that a president needs to know; and that a Trump presidency would be a threat to American democracy.  Nothing that happened since then has changed my mind on those two points. 

2.      I also insisted that any vote for the Greens and Libertarians would help elect Donald Trump, which turned out to be true.  The cumulative vote totals of those two “third parties” did indeed exceed the margin of Trump’s win in key battleground states.  If those “independent” voters continue to indulge their fantasies in 2018 and 2020, they’ll help perpetuate the Trump oligarchy.

GOT WRONG (During the interval between the election and the inauguration)

1.      On the Democratic side, I mistakenly assumed that Democrats would find a central figure they could rally around, and I thought Elizabeth Warren was the logical choice.  Warren has done her part, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the efforts of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer in leading their congressional minorities, but there’s obviously no single leader of the Democratic Party.  And that’s OK.  In the fullness of time – i.e. after the midterm elections – prominent (and maybe not so prominent) Democrats will begin to sort out the party leadership question.

2.      On the Republican side, I imagined that Donald Trump was reasonably sane, and at least a little bit savvy.  He’s shown himself to be neither.  If he were maybe 25% smarter and not suffering from obvious cognitive decline, his popularity might actually exceed 50%.  But then he wouldn’t be Donald Trump.

3.      Also on the Republican side, I expected that at least a few congressional Republicans would actively work to curb Trump’s excesses, either out of principle or (in the case of people he insulted during the campaign, like Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and John McCain) out of desire for revenge.  Boy, did I badly underestimate the rot at the heart of the GOP.  Apart from McCain, who’s dying and has nothing to lose, congressional Republicans care only about pleasing their billionaire donor class and not offending the Base so as to avoid being primaried when they’re up for re-election.  

GOT RIGHT (During the interval between the election and the inauguration)

1.      I was right about some relatively minor things, like the impossibility of altering the outcome of the election via Jill Stein’s recount lawsuit or hoping for “faithless electors” in the Electoral College. 

GOT WRONG (During the Trump presidency)

1.      I underestimated Trump’s hatred of Barack Obama.  The main thrust of Trump’s presidency (over and above, or maybe under and beneath the congressional Republicans’ lust for tax cuts to benefit their billionaire overlords) has been to undo as much of Obama’s legacy as possible.

GOT RIGHT (During the Trump presidency)

1.      I discovered, and quickly embraced, what was initially regarded as a wild-eyed conspiracy theory about Trump’s collusion with Russia – not only during the campaign, but before and after.  We were right and the skeptics were wrong.  The Trump camp has gone from “no collusion” to “collusion isn’t illegal.”  Soon their position will be “collusion is good,” and then “let’s abandon our traditional friends and alliances and let Vladimir Putin direct our foreign policy.”  Oh, wait.  We’ve already arrived at that last point.  Pretty soon they’ll advocate for mandatory Russian language classes in public schools.

2.      I noticed and wrote about Trump’s cognitive decline when the topic was taboo in mainstream media.  MSM hasn’t exactly embraced that label, but they’re at least willing to talk about it, even if there’s still a certain scolding tone when they write about people who are willing to state the obvious.

3.      Speaking of the mainstream media, I called them out over their unwarranted deference to Trump just because he was president.  I’m pleased that MSM – not because of anything I wrote, of course – has gradually moved away from simply printing Trump’s lies.  At first they called them “unverified” and then “false.”  At this point, fact-checking Trump is useless.  If he says anything truthful, it’s only by accident.  Come on, MSM.  Start calling them what they are – lies.

4.      I pointed out early on that while most presidents early in their first term try to build consensus, Trump’s basic strategy was to whip up the anger of his base – by launching his re-election campaign tour immediately, and by calling all criticism “fake news.”  I identified the growing cultural “reality gap” as likely to be the most serious obstacle to domestic tranquility this country has seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. 

The last issue I’ll highlight is a more a matter of opinion than something that can be proven right or wrong.  But ever since Election Day, I’ve insisted that Trump’s Deplorables (or “the white working class,” or whatever you want to call the infamous Base) are not the “real America,” as so many media outlets portrayed them in election post-mortems.  They’re real enough, but they’re no more real than Clinton voters in Manhattan, San Francisco, or Tucson. 

And as a practical matter, even as mainstream media continues to imagine that Democratic success hinges on winning the votes of Trump’s Base, I’ve maintained that there is no point in trying to reason with them.  Recognize our shared humanity, sure.  Pray for them if you’re so inclined.  But don’t expend time and energy trying to change their minds.

Andrew Sullivan, writing in New York magazine, recently offered a perfect description of the bond between Trump and his Base: “In the last few weeks, Trump’s outright lies seem to be more frequent and he repeats them ever more shamelessly. They are now pure expressions of power, open demonstrations that his followers will accept anything he says, obey anything he commands, abandon any belief that he opposes. This is not representative democracy; it’s submission to a king. It’s not just an attack on the bedrock American principle of self-government; it’s a determination to extinguish it.”

Strong stuff, but I can’t find anything to disagree with. 

And above all, the rest of us need to understand that these Deplorables will show up at the polls this November, and every November.  Jim Wright, in his Stonekettle Station blog, amplifies that point: “Your angry racist white uncle, the one who believes everything Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh tell him. The Tea Party. The religious nuts. The NRA. They show up. Every. Single. Time.”

“The Republic doesn’t run on moonbeams and magic…. The work of maintaining the republic is tedious and boring, if you’re doing it right. Duty very often isn’t glamorous or popular or even particularly inspiring, but that is what holds civilization together. Sometimes, most times, it’s just about showing up and doing what has to be done to hold back the fall of night and for no other reason than because the alternative is disaster and ruin.”

“There are no shortcuts. If you want a better nation, you have to be better citizens.”

When I woke up on the morning after Trump's election, I knew I had to be a better citizen.  These Facebook/blog posts don't amount to much, but they help keep me focused on citizenship.  If they also help a few other folks, it's worth the effort.

KING MIDAS IN REVERSE

Right now, the two top spots on the New York Times Hardcover Non-Fiction Best Seller List are held down by Fox News shills.  The number one slot is occupied by THE RUSSIA HOAX, by Gregg Jarrett, arguing, essentially “No collusion!  No collusion!  Investigate Hillary!  She colluded!”  In second place is “Judge” Jeanine Pirro, whom Trump will put on the Supreme Court sooner or later.  Her book is called LIARS, LEAKERS AND LIBERALS.  Pirro, too, leaves no stone unturned as she responds to liberal critics of Donald Trump with persuasive arguments like “I know you are, but what am I?” 

The Usual Suspects – billionaire GOP sugar daddies like the Koch brothers – set aside money to buy multiple copies of books by their pet authors.  This is known.  So there’s less than meets the eye to the plethora of bestselling right wing propaganda.  But the Fox stranglehold on the NYT bestseller list is still repugnant.

The good news is, now we can do something about it.  Today – Tuesday, August 7 – is the publication date of Rick Wilson’s EVERYTHING TRUMP TOUCHES DIES.  It should be available at your favorite brick-and-mortar bookstore, your public library, as well as from online retailers like Amazon.  It’s available as an e-book and an audible book, read by Wilson himself.  My Kindle copy just downloaded.

I mention Rick Wilson a lot in these posts.  He’s the Republican (probably former Republican now) media consultant who has become a leader of the #NeverTrump resistance wing of the GOP.  He acknowledges and regrets that he helped build Frankenstein’s laboratory, and now that a real monster is on the loose, he has a responsibility to help stop it.  He’s got a sharp tongue and a salty wit.  In other words, he cusses a lot.  Desperate times require desperate measures.

I urge you to buy this book and help knock Fox News off the top of the the NYT Hardcover Non-Fiction Bestsellers. 

This has been a public service announcement.  We return you now to your regular programming.

THEY SAY BELIEVE HALF OF WHAT YOU SEE, SON, AND NONE OF WHAT YOU HEAR

“The American mind simply has not come to a realization of the evil which has been introduced into our midst.”  That sounds like something that Donald Trump could have said at one of his rallies last week, but it comes from an article published in 1956 by J. Edgar Hoover, FBI Director for life.    

Back in the 50s, when Hoover wrote about evil in our midst, it was socially acceptable to believe in a Russian/communist conspiracy to infiltrate and undermine key institutions in American society.  There was a kernel of truth in the claim, but Hoover wildly exaggerated the capacity of Boris-and-Natasha style agitprop to influence American public opinion.  Russia posed a legitimate external threat, but it didn’t become an internal threat until it stopped trying to sell us communism. 

When the Soviet Union broke up, and Russia no longer felt obligated to promote its ideology, they began to think more clearly about how to sabotage their chief geopolitical rival.  Sabotage was much easier than conversion, and as the events of 2016 proved, it wasn’t difficult to introduce confusion and discord into the American political system.      

We were sitting ducks for Russia in part because of that pesky karma thing.  The good old USA had been intervening in the affairs of other countries for decades, as if we were immune from the principle that what goes around comes around.  But it’s also true that important public and private institutions in America did a lot to undermine their own credibility in the years after World War II.

This country has been awash in conspiracies – not just conspiracy theories, but genuine conspiracies – for all of my adult life.  By “conspiracy,” I mean deliberate attempts to deceive the public, either by telling outright lies about, or by withholding important information on, matters critical to the public interest. 

If that assertion seems cryptic or even paranoid, let me offer some examples.  The federal government covered up embarrassing details related to the Kennedy assassination.  It lied to us about the Vietnam War, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the Iraq War.  In the private sector, corruption has been pervasive in most of our major financial sectors in recent decades (e.g. Enron, WorldCom, Lehman Brothers); in our college and professional sports; and even in our churches (e.g the pedophilia scandal that continues to plague Catholicism). 

If you’re not cynical, it’s because you haven’t been paying attention.  All Russia had to do was exploit divisions that were already present.  Social media gave them the perfect tool for the job, and used it just well enough.

And in doing so, they’ve made all those earlier conspiracies seem quaint and old fashioned.  Since 2016, we’ve been living in Donald Trump’s world, where truth is infinitely elastic, and all bad news is fake news.  Trump himself made that explicit last week at one of his endless series of rallies.  He declared “What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening."

Trump benefits from a massive media infrastructure devoted to ignoring bad news, or spinning it into good news.  But even an obvious propaganda outlet like Fox is basically limited to putting a pro-Trump spin on the same stories that CNN and MSNBC cover.  They are still tethered, however tenuously, to reality.  That’s not good enough for a lot of Deplorables.

Enter QAnon, the new king of pro-Trump conspiracy theorists.  QAnon writes fan fiction for the MAGA set.  In his tall tales, Donald Trump is a knight in shining armor who has secretly broken up pedophile rings, saving thousands of children.  His criticism of Robert Mueller is just a smokescreen.  Trump and Mueller are actually working together to bring down Hillary Clinton, who’s going to jail soon.  Trump is just biding his time, waiting to spring the trap that will destroy the Deep State once and for all.  So much winning you’re going to get tired of winning!

The QAnon phenomenon unintentionally demonstrates the insecurity of Trump fanatics.  They claim to believe that Trump is a genius, playing eight-dimensional chess, outfoxing his enemies at every turn.  But underneath the bluster, they’re just scared.  They’re unconsciously re-enacting the postwar Red Scare, when people like J. Edgar Hoover saw Russians lurking in every shadow.   Which is ironic, because nowadays Russians are indeed everywhere.  But they don’t have to lurk in shadows anymore.  Russians have been hobnobbing with Trump and his people quite openly.  Of course, QAnon’s fans get defensive when you point that out.

In 2015, science fiction writer William Gibson wrote: “People find conspiracy theories fantastically comforting not because they’re more frightening than reality, but because they’re less frightening than reality.” 

There’s a lot of truth in Gibson’s observation.  Since election night 2016, my own reality (politically speaking) has been pretty frightening.  I was an early adopter of the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory, at least in part because I wanted it to be true.  Luckily, give or take a pee tape or two, nearly every seemingly implausible rumor connecting Trump and Putin has turned out to be valid.  And I haven’t given up on the pee tape just yet, although we don’t need it to prove Trump’s unfitness for office.

On the anti-Trump side of the internet, there’s a guy known on Twitter as CounterChekist.  He uses his own cryptic terminology to announce the existence of sealed indictments against members of the Trump Crime Family.  He says, for instance, that Mueller has obtained eight grand jury indictments that the public has yet to learn about.  Big deal, you might say – a left wing fantasy is still a fantasy.  Anyone could make up a number like that.

But unlike QAnon, whose gathering storm is always coming real soon now, CounterCheckist has correctly called a lot of Mueller’s indictments.  For what it’s worth, he says that there’s an indictment for Ivana waiting to be unsealed. 

Conventional wisdom scoffs at all conspiracy theories, but that’s just as wrongheaded as embracing every conspiracy theory.  Still, healthy skepticism is a good habit to cultivate.  On this, if nothing else, Ronald Reagan had the right idea – trust but verify. 

My advice – to myself and to my readers – is to be patient.  We’ll find out soon enough whether QAnon and CounterChekist have inside information or are just blowing smoke.  While we’re waiting, I’ll leave you with a quotation from George Orwell’s 1984:

“I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.”

I SAY A LITTLE PRAYER FOR YOU

My wife and I bought season tickets to University of Arizona basketball in 1983, which happened to be Steve Kerr’s freshman year.  We watched him for four years as he became a local hero, and then – against all odds – found a niche in the National Basketball Association.  As a player, he was good enough to contribute, mostly from the bench, to five NBA champions.  As the coach of the Golden State Warriors, he’s added three more championships in the past four years.

I’m proud of Steve Kerr for his success as a player and a coach (not that I did anything to help him achieve it), but I’m proudest because he doesn’t duck political controversy.  He’s outspoken in favor of sensible gun control, against racism, and against the attempts by the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to politicize sports. 

I bring this up on the occasion of his latest comment about the National Rifle Association.   Upon learning that the NRA claims to be going broke, Kerr tweeted: “Don’t send money……thoughts and prayers should suffice.”

Live long and prosper, Steve!

ON ONE SIDE THE GOVERNMENT, THE OTHER THE MOB

Donald Trump has always been willing to say out loud the things that most Republicans believe but don’t want to admit publicly.  His base calls this honesty, and loves him for it, even though the vast majority of his public statements fall into the category of fantasies, fibs, untruths, falsehoods, and damn lies. 

Trump is the Republican id, out in the open for all to see.  And most Republicans apparently liked what they saw.  Who’d have guessed that all those pious family-values conservatives really wanted to be libertines?  Who’d have guessed that all those free trade, balanced budget fiscal conservatives espoused those positions not as a matter of principle, but because they thought it was the fastest way to build their personal fortunes?  Now Donald Trump has shown them a faster way – just ignore the law and grab the loot.

On Wednesday, Trump compared Paul Manafort to Al Capone – not as bad guys, but as victims of government persecution.  Trump even referred respectfully to Capone as “Alfonse.”  Of course, Capone spelled it “Alphonse,” but it’s the thought that counts, right? 

The connection between Capone and Paul Manafort may not be immediately obvious, but – minus Trump’s fake outrage – the comparison is apt.  Capone and Manafort are both mobsters.  Capone was a big fish and Manafort is a minnow, comparatively speaking, but both men made their fortunes through organized crime.

And guess what.  So did Donald Trump.  He managed to squander his inheritance, and was, in effect, a bankrupt real estate mogul and failed casino owner – until he mobbed up.  The Russian Mafiya saved Trump’s business career by loaning him money when no American bank would give him the time of day.  In return, when Russian oligarchs decided that their billions would be safer if invested in America, Trump used his real estate properties and casinos to help them launder money. 

Trump is more like Manafort than Capone.  He was a functionary, not a boss.  He probably admires and envies Al Capone, who was the tough guy that Trump has always wanted to be.  And the fact that Capone died in prison on a charge of income tax evasion probably resonates with Trump as well. 

I wonder if Donald Trump watched The Untouchables when he was a kid.  Maybe he sees Robert Mueller as a latter-day Eliot Ness.  No wonder he’s scared.

THE PATRIOT GAME

In his first inaugural address in 1861, Abraham Lincoln said: “The mystic cords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the angels of our nature.”  Lincoln was talking about the Revolutionary War and our Founding Fathers, who understood that, in the phrase “United States of America,” the key word was “United.”

They were willing to risk their lives for a particular ideal.  Thomas Jefferson wrote of the exhilaration – he called it “public happiness” – of joining his comrades in a public declaration that the United States of America was not like Old World countries, where small tribes evolved by conquest into larger tribes and finally into nation-states, even as they continued to share (or impose) a common ethnic and religious identity.

Our Founding Fathers explicitly rejected the idea of America as a homogeneous “Volk.”  They built this nation on a philosophy rather than on membership in a tribe.  And the core of that philosophy was: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Inevitably, we’ve failed to live up to that philosophy, but it’s important to have it in writing as our national aspiration.

It’s possible that Donald Trump has heard of the Declaration of Independence, but he surely has no idea what it says.  And if someone on Fox News happened to quote the line about all men being created equal, Trump would claim that he could have written a better Declaration of Independence than Jefferson did.  For that matter, if someone told him about the Louisiana Purchase, he’d complain that Jefferson was a lousy negotiator, and threaten to renege on the deal unless France threw in an additional colony or two. 

Donald Trump isn’t the first demagogue to say, in effect, screw the better angels of our nature and screw the notion that all men are created equal.  But he’s the first one with the backing of a major foreign power and the acquiescence of a major political party.  Trump’s not a deep thinker, but he understands instinctively the concept of divide and conquer.  It worked for him in the Republican primaries, and with a lot of help from Vladimir Putin, it worked for him in the 2016 presidential election.  He’s betting everything that it will work for him against Robert Mueller.  The sad and scary thing is, he could be right.

Here’s another quote.  “Come all ye young rebels, and list while I sing. / For the love of one’s country is a terrible thing. / It banishes fear with the speed of a flame, / and it makes us all part of the patriot game.”

That’s the first verse of a song written by Dominic Behan, about the Irish Republican Army and its fight against British rule in the mid-1950s.  Behan despised the English, but he saw firsthand how easy it was to manipulate people caught up in patriotic fervor.

I’ve never thought of myself as patriotic.  “Last refuge of a scoundrel,” and all that.  I came of age in the Vietnam era, when Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon used patriotism to deflect criticism away from their strategic blunders.  I hit middle age at about the time George W. Bush used the same tactic in Iraq.  Just salute the flag and don’t ask questions. 

I just got back from a two-week silent (i.e., no talking) meditation retreat in a forest on an island in British Columbia, Canada.  It was, among other things, two weeks of total abstinence from the news of the world.  I didn’t do (much) talking, but I did do some reading, mostly about music. 

One thing I read was a long interview with music critic Greil Marcus, in which he said: “Patriotism in America, as I understand it, is a matter of suffering.  When the country fails to live up to its promises, or even actively betrays them.” 

Wait – patriotism doesn’t require chest thumping, testosterone-driven xenophobia?  It’s possible to be patriotic and also be outraged at the choices your country has made?  Well, now.  That changes everything.  Maybe it’s possible to play the patriot game rationally and constructively.

Every once in a while, I find myself wondering why I feel the urge to keep cranking out these essays two or three times every week.  The Marcus interview (which was published in 2012, long before Donald Trump was anything more than tabloid fodder) convinced me that the dismay and sense of impending doom I’ve felt since election night 2016 is actually patriotism.  How about that! 

Abraham Lincoln didn’t mention Trump by name, but in 1855, he wrote this prophetic statement: "Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid...I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty--to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."

The 2018 election is a crossroads for American democracy.  It’s time for progressives to reclaim patriotism and use it to reclaim our country.  If we don’t do it now, it’ll be an uphill climb in 2020.  And if we don’t do it in 2020, it’ll be too late.  

HOW CAN I MISS YOU IF YOU WON'T GO AWAY?

Right after I signed off, Robert Mueller dropped another bombshell, so I thought I’d offer one last comment before I head out of town.

At the end of September, 2016, Donald Trump – yes, the same Donald Trump who in July had explicitly asked Russia for help in finding Hillary Clinton’s emails – tried to muddy the waters about the DNC hack.  “I mean, it could be Russia, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, OK? You don’t know who broke in to DNC.”

Now we know.  China and the 400-pound guy are off the hook.  Robert Mueller’s team just indicted 12 Russians for the crime.  Team Trump is scrambling, and Rudy Giuliani was quick to claim that since no Americans were named in this indictment, Mueller should pack up and go home.

Not so fast, Rudy.  Mueller’s team doesn’t leak, but they are absolute masters at using indictments to drop hints that they have an ace or two in the hole.  Today’s indictment mentions an “organization” (read: Wikileaks), “a person who was in regular contact with senior members of the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump” (read: Roger Stone), and a candidate for Congress, who requested stolen documents from Guccifer 2.0. 

Word on the street is that the congressional candidate was Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican.  Gaetz is a real piece of work.  He’s only 36, but he’s racked up 16 speeding tickets and at least 7 DUIs.  Not only that, but his college roommate died under ‘suspicious circumstances.”  Matt’s daddy, Don Gaetz, is a political power in the panhandle, so Matt skated on all charges. 

Robert Mueller has given us a direct connection between Russian hackers and the Trump campaign.  We’d already learned that on June 9, 2016, Don Jr. met with a bunch of Russians seeking dirt on Hillary Clinton.  We’d already seen Donald Trump himself, on July 27, ask Russia to find Clinton’s emails.  Now we know that later that very evening, the hackers struck.  Either the Russians were waiting for Trump’s signal, or (more likely, in my view) Trump had advance knowledge of the impending hack and couldn’t resist teasing it in a public speech.

Collusion much?

Keep the faith, and I'll be back at the end of the month.

WE INTERRUPT OUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED PROGRAM

My wife and I will be out of town and largely off the grid from most of the remainder of July.  We’ll be spending two weeks on Salt Spring Island, in British Columbia.  This will be our third year there, but it’s our first trip to Canada since Donald Trump initiated overt hostilities between the two countries. 

I’m sure our neighbors to the north understand that not everyone from south of the 49th parallel is a Deplorable, but I still feel embarrassed to be traveling on an American passport.   

We’ll be attending a silent meditation retreat.  When I tell people that, responses vary from “you must be crazy” to “I sure wish I could do that.”  The latter response comes mostly from mothers of young children.

We did this retreat last July, and at the time I was seriously worried that Donald Trump would fire Robert Mueller while I was incommunicado.  I was wrong about that, obviously, which got me thinking about other things I’ve been wrong about in two years of blogging about Donald Trump. 

I decided to look over what I’ve written about politics over the past two years and create a scorecard of hits and misses.  I’ll share some of the highlights and lowlights when I get back, and we’ll see how much credibility I have left.

Everybody take care, and please see to it that the Republic is still standing at the end of the month.

THE THINGS THAT YOU'RE LIABLE TO READ IN THE BIBLE

Sometimes I wonder if white Evangelical leaders have even bothered to read the Bible.  If they have, they must assume that their followers have not. 

Here’s Donald Trump’s “spiritual advisor,” Paula White, defending his kids-in-cages policy:  Jesus, she said, “did live in Egypt for three-and-a-half years. But it was not illegal. If He had broken the law then He would have been sinful and He would not have been our Messiah."

The “flight into Egypt” story appears only in the Gospel of Matthew.  Matthew’s focus throughout his gospel is on demonstrating, via correlations between Jesus’ life and Old Testament prophecies, that Jesus is the Messiah promised to the Jews.   In Matthew’s account of events, Joseph took his wife and baby son to Egypt in order to avoid persecution by King Herod of Judea.  Herod lived only until c. 4 AD/CE, at which point Joseph, Mary, and Jesus returned to Judea – fulfilling the prophecy of Hosea, who quoted the Lord as saying “out of Egypt I call my son.

Inasmuch as Judea and Egypt were both part of the Roman Empire, and inasmuch as the notion of illegal immigrant would have to wait a couple of millennia to be born, White is technically correct that Jesus’s presence in Egypt didn’t break any laws. 

On the other hand, as an adult, Jesus got in plenty of trouble with the law.  As White would know if she read any of the four gospels all the way to the end, thirty years after the flight into Egypt, Jesus was arrested and executed by the Roman authorities. 

And seriously, the crucifixion was how Jesus’ earthly mission had to end.  You don’t take on the sins of all mankind by dying of old age or getting run over by a drunk driver in a chariot.  In order for his death to be redemptive, Jesus had to die a martyr.  And in order to die a martyr, Jesus pretty much had to be viewed as an outlaw by the rich and powerful.

The argument that breaking the law is the equivalent of sinning is just stupid and ugly.  It’s part and parcel of Jeff Sessions’ invocation of St. Paul's Romans 13 in order to justify ICE brutality.  Back in the 19th century, people from Sessions’ neck of the woods used Romans 13 to justify the Fugitive Slave Act.  It’s designed to help the rich and powerful sustain the status quo.  And as I wrote in an earlier post, Paul himself was eventually arrested by the powers that be and executed as an enemy of the state. 

During World War II, the people who hid Anne Frank from the Nazis did so illegally.  The Nazis who found her and sent her to die in a concentration camp were law enforcement officers.  There’s no question about who was breaking the law.  But who were the sinners in that sequence of events?

https://www.christianpost.com/news/paula-white-theres-difference-between-jesus-as-refugee-those-who-enter-the-us-illegally-225900/

IT WAS TWENTY YEARS AGO TODAY

Once upon a time, and a very good time it was, television and I were both very young.  Even 70 years ago, professional wrestling was less a sport than a theatrical performance.  It was a natural fit for television stations hungry for programming.  In those days, the biggest name in wrestling was Gorgeous George, a man who sported dyed blonde hair and wore flamboyant robes.  Bob Hope saw him perform in Los Angeles in 1945 and began making jokes about him on his radio show.  All that free publicity made Gorgeous George one of the most recognizable stars of early television.  He was a comic villain whose motto was “Win if you can, lose if you must, but always cheat.”  I wonder if young Donald Trump admired Gorgeous George.

You’ve probably heard about Ohio Republican Congressman Jim Jordan, who’s currently under fire for failing to stop, or even report, sexual harassment when he was an assistant wrestling coach at (the) Ohio State University back in the 90s.  OSU wrestlers were groped by the team doctor (who committed suicide in 2005) and apparently their locker room and shower area were open to the public, drawing voyeurs to their practices.  As of this writing, no fewer than seven former OSU wrestlers have come forward to say that Jordan knew of this abuse and did nothing.  

The GOP has a long tradition of looking the other way (or making excuses) when one of their own is caught up in a sex scandal.  They’ve embraced pussy-grabber Donald Trump and endorsed child molester Roy Moore.  They even elected Dennis Hastert as Speaker of the House from 1999-2007.  Hastert, too, was a midwestern wrestling coach.  He was worse than Jordan; a judge described him as a “serial child molester.”

Jordan is a wingnut favorite, and a candidate to replace Paul Ryan as the leader of House Republicans in 2019, so it’s no surprise that Republican spokesmen have rallied to his defense.  My favorite apologia came from a young woman named Bre Payton, a staff writer for The Federalist.  She said, "I think it's also important not to hold people 20 years ago to the standards of today, right?”

Not so fast there, Ms. Payton.  I sympathize with the argument that it’s not fair to apply contemporary standards of wokeness retroactively, particularly over centuries.  Still, I’m pretty sure that in 1998, people knew that sexual abuse was wrong.

Payton is a proud graduate of Patrick Henry College, class of 2015.  PHC's motto is "For Christ and for Liberty."  They boast of a curriculum based on the principle of Biblical inerrancy.  Instead of making up transparently desperate excuses for the GOP - gropers, oglers, and pedophiles - you'd think Patrick Henry grads would hold a professed Christian like Jim Jordan to the moral standards of the Bible that he and they claim to believe in.

THE BITCH IS BACK

The White House has announced that Donald Trump will have his annual performance review with Vladimir Putin on July 16 in Helsinki.  He’s prepping for the meeting by holding pep rallies to boost his spirits.  On Thursday, He was in Great Falls, Montana, where he trotted out some of his usual campaign tropes, veering from topic to topic, often in mid-sentence. 

Perhaps the biggest revelation was that Trump is still obsessed with Elton John.  He played “Tiny Dancer” at his early campaign rallies, and more recently dubbed North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un " Rocket Man."  But based on a Trump rant in Great Falls, the relationship appears to have turned into a rivalry. 

Trump launched into a fairly long riff about having bigger audiences in Montana than Elton John.  "I have broken more Elton John records...and I don't have a musical instrument:  I don't have a guitar or an organ.  No organ. Elton has an organ.  We do without, like, the musical instruments. This is the only musical, the mouth. And hopefully the brain, attached to the mouth, right? The brain more important than the mouth is the brain. The brain is much more important.”  Or would be, if he had one.

As best I can tell, Elton John has performed in Billings, Bozeman, and Missoula over the years, but never in Great Falls.  And of course, Elton charged admission for his concerts – at the 2011 Billings concert, the average ticket price was just under $90.  Trump supporters get in free.  So Trump wasn’t exactly making an apples to apples comparison. Still, I like the juxtaposition of Trump’s mouth and Elton’s organ.

Will press coverage focus on the craziness?  I doubt it.  My guess is that they’ll focus on the enthusiasm of the crowd.  Well of course.  Trump’s fans are as crazy as he is. 

Our national media remains strangely deferential to Donald Trump.  Most of them use circumlocutions to avoid calling him a liar.  Even when they call him out – discreetly, of course – on his dishonesty, they studiously avoid drawing several obvious conclusions:  he’s not very bright, he’s mentally unstable, and he’s an inveterate liar.  Even if you reject the first two points as unverifiable, his lying is a matter of public record.  And yet despite the fact that they know they can’t trust anything Trump says, they headline his outrageous claims and bury the facts several paragraphs below. 

They’re also bending over backwards to avoid drawing logical conclusions from the verifiable fact that he’s been up to his ample posterior in Russians for years.  In less than two weeks, Trump will travel to Finland, where he expects to meet with Vladimir Putin alone.  He’ll kiss Putin’s ring, and probably his ass, and get his marching orders for the next twelve months.  Most of the national press will pretend that this is perfectly normal.

Sir John Harington, a 16th century English courtier, wrote a prescient epigram about how misbehavior gets normalized. 

"Treason doth never prosper.

What's the reason?

Why if it prosper,

None dare call it treason." 

GET YOUR MOTOR RUNNIN', HEAD OUT ON THE HIGHWAY

Alex Jones, the Infowars nimrod, says that Democrats are going to start a new civil war on July 4.  I’d hoped to be issued a musket and bayonet so I could serve on the front lines, but Comandante Soros decided that I was needed in the Ministry of Propaganda.  Venceremos, y’all. 

Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, I want to note that July 4th marks the 71st anniversary of the Hollister riot of 1947.  If you haven’t heard about it, here’s the scoop.  In California, after the end of World War II, some newly demobilized veterans who were lookin’ for adventure and whatever came their way fell in love with motorcycling.  Most of them rode either a Harley or an Indian, the two major American motorcycle manufacturers of the era.  Some rode solo, but lots of them joined one of the many motorcycle clubs that sprang up after the war.

This was long before the advent of the Hell’s Angels and other “outlaw” motorcycle clubs.  In the late ‘40s, some of the clubs were family-oriented Sunday picnic types of folks.  Others, including the 13 Rebels Motorcycle Club, led by Shell Thuet, were into serious racing.  And of course, there were some clubs that liked to get a little rowdy.  The Boozefighters Motorcycle Club from south central Los Angeles were hellraisers.  The Boozefighters were led by Wino Willie Forkner, who’d been kicked out of 13 Rebels. 

On July 4, 1947, the Boozefighters decided to ride to the small town of Hollister and party down.  Other clubs throughout the state had the same idea.  Four thousand bikers descended on the town of 4,500.  Predictably, things got out of hand, although as one witness noted, the bikers did more damage to each other than they did to the town. 

The Hollister riot was memorialized in a 1954 film called THE WILD ONE, starring Marlon Brando and Lee Marvin.  Brando’s character was based loosely on Shell Thuet.  Marvin’s character was modeled on Wino Willie.  THE WILD ONE was largely responsible for creating the iconic image of the biker rebel, with or without a cause.

Fast forward to 2018.  The Indian Motorcycle Manufacturing Company in Springfield MA had gone bankrupt in 1953, although the brand has been resurrected in the past decade.  Harley-Davidson, based in Wisconsin, just kept on keeping on.  They survived the influx of imports from Japan (Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki, Kawasaki) and Europe (Triumph, BMW, Ducati) and became an iconic American company.

Enter Donald Trump, whose ignorance of economic policy is matched only by his desire to dominate.  He needs to dominate anybody and everybody – friends, foes, and people who just want to be left alone.  Everyone must kneel before the mighty Donald. 

And what better way to throw his considerable weight around than starting a series of trade wars?  Trump asserted that trade wars were good, and easy to win.  In fact, they were so good that he decided to start three of them at once – with China, with the European Union, and with our erstwhile NAFTA partners Mexico and Canada.  It didn’t take long for the poop to hit the propeller. 

China has decided to buy soybeans from Brazil until they can grow their own; they’ve cancelled all orders from America.  That’s a $12.4 billion per year hit to midwestern farmers.  But it was Trump’s decision to impose steel tariffs on European manufacturers that generated the most pushback.  The EU responded to those tariffs with tariffs of their own on American products – including motorcycles. 

Harley-Davidson sells a sixth of its motorcycles in Europe, and H-D’s management can do math.  It didn’t take them long to calculate that they were going to lose money on every American-made motorcycle they sold in Europe.  Instead of just saying, “oh well,” and accepting the loss of 17% of their market, they decided to move that segment of their manufacturing to Europe. 

Some people claim that H-D been had wanting to make that move anyway.  Maybe that’s true and maybe it’s not, but whatever.  Donald Trump handed them a perfectly reasonable excuse to do what they did. 

Trump responded to H-D’s announcement predictably, with a storm of rage-tweets.  First, he threatened to impose retaliatory taxes on them (“they will be taxed like never before”).  Then on July 3, he threated to help Harley’s foreign competitors.  Way to make America great again, big fella.

The cream of the jest is that so far, the worst casualties in Trump’s new trade wars have been in states (e.g. Iowa and Wisconsin) that helped make him president. 

I’m sure that Paul Ryan and the other members of the Republican congressional delegation from Wisconsin will set aside their deep philosophical opposition to tax increases in order to punish one of the major industries in their home state.  That’s certain to end well.

Trump has described his supporters as “the smartest, strongest, most hard working and most loyal that we have seen in our countries history.” 

I’ll grant that some of Trump supporters are hard working.  And possibly strong, whatever that means.  But come on.  No one who is genuinely smart would support Donald Trump.  That’s why his hard-core supporters won’t notice that he wrote “countries” when he should have used “country’s.”  Not that Deplorables would care if they did notice.  Only elitists like me care about grammar and usage.  As for loyalty, we’ll see what happens when members of Trump’s base lose their jobs as a result of his feckless trade wars. 

I just pray that Democratic congressional candidates in affected states are smart enough to make this a campaign issue and keep hammering away at it.  Republicans will try to make the congressional mid-terms about MS-13 and other bogus issues.  C’mon, Democrats.  Fire all of your guns at once and explode into space!

TAKE A LOOK AROUND YOU BOY, IT'S BOUND TO SCARE YOU BOY

CNN’s David P. Gelles has noticed an interesting trend.  He’s counted the references to “witch hunt” in Donald Trump’s tweets for the past year.  Between May 2017 and March 2018, witch hunt references averaged 3 per month, and that included a brief spike (6) last July in the wake of revelations about Don Jr.’s Trump Tower meeting with Russian spies.  Then the number jumped to 9 in April, 20 in May, and 22 this month as of June 23rd.   Something appears to have the mad emperor rattled.

Of course, part of this bluster is simply agitprop, a component of the Trump regime’s last-ditch gamble to delegitimize the Mueller investigation.  But #NeverTrump Republican Rick Wilson offered another perspective via Twitter on Thursday morning.  Since the week’s news has been pretty depressing, I thought I’d share my lightly edited compilation of his tweetstorm as a pick-me-up.  A couple of notes on acronyms.  SIGINT means signals intelligence, which includes intercepted communications between known spies and criminals, as well conversations they may have with civilians. SIGINT on Russia is gathered and shared among the intelligence communities in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere.  IC means intelligence community.

Rick Wilson: “You know what the Trump fluffers are ignoring, yes? They don't want to ask the first causes question, and it's pretty clear why. The origins of so, so, so many counterintelligence operations start with SIGINT.”  

“This wasn't some political hack job. This was a rising wave of information reaching various points in the IC and trickling UP the chain, not some top-down "Get Trump" operation.  When you, your family, your private attorney, your most senior (and junior) campaign staff, business partners, and associates are ass-deep in contacts with people tied to Russian organized crime, Russian intel, and Russian oligarchs (but I repeat myself), it's going to show up.”

“As we've discussed, the FBI, DOC, IC, and FISA court ain't playing beanbag. They don't just say, "WHOA, Trump's a flaming dickbag! Let's subvert our oath and violate the law to screw him!" The Fox crowd uses the asymmetry of what the FBI/DOJ/OSC is forbidden to reveal (yet) to draw this lurid, stupid portrait of an evil Deep State conspiracy for the credulous, the slow, and the willfully mendacious who know better.”

“With all the contacts, associations, meetings, business deals, money, and hard intel that the Russians were attacking our election that *caused* the attention the Trump, if you think the system should have sat quietly and done nothing, allow me to propose a gedankenexperiment.  Substitute "Clinton" and "Muslim" and tell me you wouldn't want the FBI to *do its damn job*”

“I've said this from the very, very start. The IC has a royal flush, or damn near it. The fact that you haven't seen it yet is evidence of discipline, not absence.  All this show, and bluster, and hair-tearing flim-flam from Team Trump is their usual disservice to the rule of law. Steady on.”

HOW MANY EARS MUST ONE MAN HAVE BEFORE HE CAN HEAR PEOPLE CRY?

Legend has it that the Emperor Caligula planned to make his horse, Incitatus, a Roman Consul.  Today, our very own emperor, Donald I, is sifting through a list of potential replacements for retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.  I don’t know who he’ll pick, but I’m sure a horse would do less harm than his eventual nominee.

Yes, I know – don’t mourn, organize.  Progressives have one job between now and November, and I’m afraid we’re going to blow it. 

Back in April, I wrote about Kevin Williamson, the conservative columnist who argued that because abortion is murder, and murder is a capital crime, the 15 million American women who’ve had abortions should be hanged.  In theory, at least. 

Because I’m a fair-and-balanced, I-report-you-decide kind of guy, I decided to write a comparable post about the progressive equivalents of Williamson, people on the self-righteous Left whose theories have helped get us into this mess.

As luck would have it, just as I was finishing up this post, I looked at a website called Forsetti’s Justice, and found out that “Forsetti,” whoever he or she is, had already said what I wanted to say, better than I could say it.  There’s a link at the end of this post.

TL;DR?  Here’s my version.

The progressives I’m talking about are the ones who spend their time sowing dissension among Democrats and/or voting for third party candidates.  Anyone who voted for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson, or who didn’t vote at all, helped elect Donald Trump and helped put Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court.  I repeat:  any eligible voter who didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton is responsible for Gorsuch as well as Trump’s next nominee, and the awful decisions that will continue to be handed down by SCOTUS.

The Republican agenda boils down to “Screw the kids that ICE abducts and deports to places where they’ll probably be killed.  Screw the people who can’t afford health care – let them die.  Screw the victims of school shootings.  Screw the environment.  Even screw elephants, so nimrods like Don Jr. and Eric can pretend to be big game hunters.  Screw everyone but me and mine.”  Please don’t help elect people like that.

I’m a Democrat.  Not because I think the Democratic Party is perfect or close to it.  On their good days, Democrats are maybe a B+ party.  On their bad days, they’re more like C-.    I’m a Democrat because Democrats are the only viable alternative to Republicans, and Republicans are monsters. 

I’m old enough to remember when reasonable politicians – Dwight Eisenhower, Earl Warren, John Lindsay, Nelson Rockefeller, John Anderson – identified as Republicans.  Those days are gone forever, over a long time ago.  Today’s Republicans are devoid of compassion.  They believe in looking out for number one.  Numbers two through infinity might as well not exist.

Any member of the House who voted to make Paul Ryan Speaker is part of the problem.  Any member of the Senate who voted to make Mitch McConnell Majority Leader is part of the problem.  And that, my friends, was virtually every Republican member of Congress in the House and Senate, respectively.  

Anyone who helped elect Republicans to Congress – either directly, by voting Republican, or indirectly, by doing anything except voting for a Democrat – is part of the problem.  Whether they knew it or not, the effect of their vote was to help rich people and hurt poor people. 

And that leads me to the point of this essay.  Whether they know it or not, Greens and Libertarians are on the side of the monsters.  I’m sure if any Green or Libertarian heard that, they’d be offended by my assessment. They probably thought they were voting for a better set of policy proposals.  But anyone who pays attention knows that the Greens and Libertarians will never get to implement those better policies.  Why?  Because they won’t win elections. 

The practical effect of voting Green or Libertarian in 2016 was to throw the presidency to Donald Trump.  The practical effect of voting Green or Libertarian in the 2018 congressional midterms and/or the 2020 presidential election will be to elect Trump-enabling Republican monsters.  Please don’t do that.

My hope is that the Democrats become more progressive as time passes.  Working to make that happen is a good thing to do.  Advocating on behalf of a more progressive Democrat over a less progressive Democrat during the primary season is also a good thing to do.  But keep it civil, and don’t burn any bridges.  Being a sore loser only helps elect Trump-enabling Republican monsters.  Please don’t do that.

It’s worth remembering that Vladimir Putin’s bot army focused its mischief in 2016 mostly on progressives.  Sadly, progressives, with our penchant for circular firing squads, are easy to manipulate.  If you see a thread on Facebook or Twitter trying to re-litigate the Hillary-Bernie fight, there’s a good chance that it came from a bot, or a deluded human sharing a post that originated with a bot.  Ditto for anyone who argues that there’s no difference between the two parties, or who harps on the deficiencies of (admittedly) fallible Democratic candidates running against Trump-enabling Republicans.  Please don’t fall for that shit in 2018 or 2020.

We’ve seen what Trump-enabling Republicans have been able to do in a year and a half.  If we don’t come to our senses until 2024, it’ll probably be too late. 

I’ll close with three paragraphs from Forsetti’s Justice and then the link to the full article.

“Imagine you are in a room with no windows that has a single ceiling light wired to a single on/off switch.  If you choose to not flick the switch on because your preference is a dimmer switch, you have chosen to be in the dark.  If you choose to jiggle the doorknob in hopes of opening the door to let in light, because you don’t like the binary option of the light switch, you have chosen to be in the dark.  It doesn’t matter how passionate you feel about the type of light switch or the number of options you think should be available.  If you do anything other than actively turn the switch to the on position, you are in the fucking dark and it is completely by your own choice.  You can sit in the dark bitching about how unfair it is you are dark and why the room isn’t wired differently all you want but none of it is going to change the reality that you are in the dark because of your choices.”

“Politics is about power.  It is this fucking simple.  Without it, all of your great, wonderful ideas aren’t worth a damn.  How do you get political power?  By winning elections at the local, state, and federal levels. How do you win elections?  You don’t win them by staying home and not voting.  You don’t win them with “protest votes.”  You don’t win them by voting for third-party candidates who have no chance of winning.  You win elections by voting in every election for the candidate who has the best chance of winning who stands for your values more than the other candidate with the best chance of winning. Period.  Full-fucking-stop.  Any strategy, any thoughts, any opinion about American politics that doesn’t have this as its underlying principle is not only seriously flawed, it is a cancer that needs to be eradicated.”

“Even after pointing all of this out, there are some progressives who are still adamant their strategy is the winning ticket.  They believe that if they allow Republicans to continue to win and fuck the country over enough, at some point, America will reach rock bottom and come on bended knee to them to save it.  Even if this view was true, this would mean the most vulnerable in society will be screwed six ways to Sunday, in order to prove a point.  How many people denied health care is okay?  How much worse can the environment be damaged to where it is justified?  How much wealth is it okay to redistribute upwards in order to justify being a purist?  How many rights is it okay to sacrifice for a mythological outcome?”

http://forsetti.tumblr.com/post/172569094830/on-american-politics-its-all-about-power

USE ALL YOUR WELL LEARNED POLITESSE, OR I'LL LAY YOUR SOUL TO WASTE

Golly.  Sarah Huckabee Sanders got kicked out of a restaurant because the owner didn’t want to serve a notorious liar who supports her boss’s policy of separating children from their parents and putting them in cages.

The Washington Post responded with a thumb-sucker editorial entitled “Let the Trump Team Eat in Peace.”  It was the usual tut-tutting about civility.  Funny how the expectation of civility seems to work in only one direction.  Trump’s rabid base doesn’t get similar lectures. 

David Roberts of Vox Media posted a brilliant tweet storm on Sunday, defending the restaurant owner and explaining why this mindful violation of usual norms was both reasonable and necessary.  I agree with Roberts. 

My belief is that Republicans are rapidly taking us towards oligarchy.  The inside-the-Beltway punditocracy probably believes that it’s uncivil to point that out.  But civility ceases to be a virtue when it’s used to legitimize totalitarianism. As King Solomon wrote (Ecclesiastes 3:1), there’s “a time for every purpose under heaven.”  The Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War were profoundly uncivil.  They were also necessary under the circumstances.

But while there’s nothing virtuous about aiding and abetting cruelty, there’s also nothing virtuous about gratuitous rudeness.  There’s nothing virtuous (or smart) about venting for your own personal satisfaction if doing so winds up harming the cause you’re trying to help.  In other words, I’m not endorsing “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take anymore” responses. 

I prefer “I WAS mad as hell, but I calmed down and considered my options, and this struck me as a reasonable response under the circumstances.”  That said, if defending democracy requires a little incivility, so be it.      

Here’s my edited version of what David Roberts wrote.

“Unsurprisingly, the WaPo editorial board completely misses the significance of this whole episode. In fact, it gets it wrong in exactly the same way Very Serious People have been getting in wrong in DC for decades.  The salient fact about US politics is that the right has been going steadily more crazy for decades -- breaking the law, disregarding norms, sinking into a hermetically sealed media bubble filled with paranoid conspiracy theories, seeking to disenfranchise opponents, etc.”

“At every stage, it gets worse. Norms & values we thought inviolate are crapped on, lawlessness becomes more brazen, ugly prejudices we thought buried, or at least suppressed, roar back to the surface. And with every increment, the question re-presents itself:  What should the rest of us do?”

“The ~25% of Americans who believe & want horrible, illiberal shit ("deplorables," you might call them) have taken over the GOP. They are driving it toward fascism as fast as the system will allow them. What's the right response?”

“The question has always been, where do you draw the line? At what point in the GOP's devolution do we say: OK, that's too far. We're no longer in Normal Politics. We're in a crisis situation, on the verge of losing our democracy. Where is the line?”

“The most insidious thing about the descent into illiberalism is that it is incremental. There's no dramatic moment, no Rubicon. Every step seems bad, but only a little worse than the previous step. Smart autocrats are careful not to provide that moment.  As this slide into illiberalism has continued, the mainstream DC establishment, including the sorts of Very Serious People that write major newspaper editorials, have *helped prevent that moment*. They have normalized, normalized, normalized, greasing the skids.”

“When lefties have tried to draw a line, create a moment, force a reckoning, the establishment has united in a single voice to say: calm down. Let's be civil & work together. Let's not raise our voices or be shrill. Both sides do it. We're still in Normal Politics.”

“Now here we are with a president who very openly pines for tyranny, explicitly disregards laws & norms, is nakedly racist, lies as often as he breathes, and oh yeah, is now JAILING TODDLERS TO DETER LEGAL IMMIGRATION.  By jailing toddlers, Trump has potentially made a mistake. Instead of incremental illiberalism, this seems like a jump, something to shock the conscience. It is yet another opportunity for a Moment, a time for the rest of us to say: no. This is not normal. It's not ok.”

“That’s what the owner of the Red Hen was doing by refusing to serve Sanders: saying, No. This is not just a normal political dispute that can remain confined to the political sphere. You cannot support this & still expect to be treated like a normal, decent person.  This is not normal, not "just politics." We must stop pretending it is.”

“And so, right on cue, the Very Serious People ride to the rescue of the aspiring tyrants, saying, yet again: Calm Down. Let's not get crazy here. Let's not be RUDE. Heavens no. We must retain our decorum at all costs.  WaPo editors say that accepting incivility is a "slippery slope." But that gets it exactly wrong. WE ARE ALREADY ON THE SLIPPERY SLOPE. It's a slope that leads to illiberalism, violence, & collapse. It's a slope greased by accommodation & civility.”

“The Very Serious People who serve as tone police in DC need to decide what they value more: democracy or civility. Because we're just sliding, sliding, sliding down this slope, pretending all the while that things are still Normal. To get off the slide will, almost by definition, require a break with Normal. It will require some sand in the gears, some raised voices, some violations of decorum and precedent.”

“Maybe the agents of this cruelty, the ones lying on its behalf, should feel a little discomfort. There are worse things in the world.”

SPRINGTIME FOR HITLER

Every so often, Trump and his minions do or say something particularly odious, and horrified observers bring up the N-word – Nazi, in this case.  

I’ve written before about Godwin’s law.  In 1990, at the dawn of the online era, a guy named Mike Godwin observed that the longer an internet argument went on, the more likely it was that one side would compare the other to Hitler.  A corollary law said that invoking Hitler meant that you automatically lost the argument.

But then Donald Trump became president, and actual Nazis began to come out of the woodwork.  Most Republican politicians looked the other way, and some (e.g. Iowa Senator Steve King this past week) actually seem to approve of the American neo-Nazi movement.  Nazis and Klansmen marched and rioted in Charlottesville last August, and Trump allowed as how there were some good people in their ranks.

That was too much for Mike Godwin.  He surfaced after all those years to declare that it was fine to call a Nazi a Nazi.  He recently gave his blessing to using the term to describe Trump’s inhumane treatment of refugees and would-be immigrants from Latin America.

Donald Trump – his executive order to the contrary notwithstanding – is doubling down on demonizing Hispanic immigrants.  “My people love it,” he told his advisors.  And now we’re beginning to see comparisons of the tactics Trump uses to demonize Hispanics with those Hitler used to demonize Jews.

Greg Sargent, in the Washington Post on May 25, put it this way: “Dehumanizing rhetoric works in exactly this way: It slaps the dehumanizing slur on the least sympathetic subgroup and then conflates that subgroup with the larger group that is the real target, then piously feigns innocence of any intention to tag the slur on the larger group.”

The thugs of MS-13 have become the Republican dog-whistle term for Latinos.  Trump and his supporters bring them up at every opportunity.  And they claim that many of the refugees and immigrants they’ve rounded up – even babies, even people who were literally fleeing MS-13 – belong to the gang.  Or if they’re not members now, they’ll certainly join when they get old enough.

Are there other similarities between Nazi strategies and Trump strategies?  Why yes, there are. 

Hitler and his crew convinced the German people that they were victims of a vast Jewish conspiracy.  If you’re a victim, you have a right to fight back.  Nowadays, Trump and other Republicans, despite being the party in power – holding the presidency, with majorities in both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court – love to portray themselves as victims.  Witch hunt!

Both Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, adopted the Big Lie strategy.  In MEIN KAMPF, Hitler claimed that German Jews used the technique to avoid being blamed for Germany’s defeat in World War I.  Sixteen years later, Goebbels accused Winston Churchill of using the Big Lie strategy: “The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it.”  Fake news!

It’s a tried and true strategy.  Pre-emptively accuse your opponent of doing precisely what you’re doing yourself.  Lying comes naturally to Donald Trump, and it didn’t take long for the entire GOP to embrace the practice as well.

Both of those strategies are working, at least with Trump’s base.  They see bogeymen everywhere, coming to take their guns, to impose Sharia law, and to force them to get gay-married.  Anything that contradicts their beliefs is fake news, promulgated by MSM, the Deep State, Democrats, the Clintons, George Soros, or their latest bogeyman du jour.

Here’s a quote from Timothy Snyder’s review of a book by Benjamin Hett, called THE DEATH OF DEMOCRACY: HITLER’S RISE TO POWER AND THE DOWNFALL OF THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC (link below): “Hett’s book is implicitly addressed to conservatives. Rather than asking how the left could have acted to stop Hitler, he closes his book by considering the German conservatives who aided Hitler’s rise….  The conclusions for conservatives of today emerge clearly: Do not break the rules that hold a republic together, because one day you will need order. And do not destroy the opponents who respect those rules, because one day you will miss them.”

I suppose I’m obliged to say that I don’t believe that Donald Trump is a literal Nazi.  He knows little about history and has no coherent philosophy.  The shrines he keeps shrines are dedicated to himself.  I’m talking about similarities in strategy and tactics.

There’s one important difference between Germany in 1932-33 and America now.  For the moment, at least, we still have free elections.  But the 2018 mid-terms and the 2020 presidential elections are “use it or lose it” situations.  Let’s not blow this.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/06/14/books/review/benjamin-carter-hett-death-of-democracy.html#click=https://t.co/rg4ERecL9N

TAKE GOOD CARE OF MY BABY

On June 12, 2015, Maya Angelou tweeted: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”  The press knew from the get-go that Donald Trump was a liar.  They chose to ignore that obvious fact during the presidential campaign because of the hidebound journalistic tradition that nominees of major political parties must be treated with respect.  If they found a flaw in one candidate, they felt obliged to point out a similar flaw in the other, even if there were enormous differences in scale.

Their steadfast dedication to the principle of bothsidesism poisoned their coverage of the campaign and allowed Donald Trump’s ignorance and bigotry to go largely unchallenged.  Well into the first year of Trump’s presidency, pundits kept expecting him to change.  They expected a “pivot” to conventional behavior, doggedly applied that label to anything he did, no matter how trivial or temporary, that looked like something a normal president would do.  If Trump give a semi-coherent speech, reading woodenly from a script someone else wrote, they declared that this was the day that Trump became president. 

They should have listened to Maya Angelou. 

Melania Trump has been trying to show us who she is at least since inauguration day.  The term that comes to mind is “hostage.” 

Word on the street is that Trump and Melania were planning to divorce shortly after the election.  To her dismay, Trump won, and she was stuck in a sham marriage.  She waited months to move into the White House.  She gave speeches plagiarized from Michelle Obama.  She looked absolutely miserable in public appearances. 

Yesterday, she wore a jacket with “I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?” on the back on a visit to one of her husband’s prison camps for refugee children in McAllen TX on Thursday.  Sometimes she puts on her brave face and assumes the role of First Lady, but for the most part, the past 18 months have been a cry for help.

The Trump administration has chosen to deploy Melania as a crisis actor.  Wingnut conservatives have fallen in love with that term.  Ann Coulter claims that refugee kids in Donald Trump’s gulag of cages were crisis actors.  The NRA claimed that high school students protesting gun violence were crisis actors.

But the real crisis actors in the public sphere are Melania and Ivanka.  Ivanka leaps into the breach, while Melania is probably shoved into the breach, every time one of Donald Trump’s inhumane policies generates too much negative publicity.  A gentle tweet, a brief site visit/photo op, and the conversation shifts away from the atrocity to speculation on how much influence his wife and daughter have on Trump.

I’m not asking anyone to feel sorry for Melania.  No one could have predicted in 2005 that Trump would wind up in the White House, but she knew the kind of man she was marrying.  My position is that we should basically ignore her.  Even the I DON’T REALLY CARE jacket gaffe is a distraction from the real issue. 

The real issue is still kids in cages. 

MOTHERLESS CHILDREN HAVE A HARD TIME

I think there’s a real chance that the Trump Administration policy of taking immigrant children from their parents will turn out to be a wedge issue in the next election. 

Let’s acknowledge that it’s popular with Trump’s base.  The base approves of cruelty, as long as it’s directed at African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims, or Liberals.  Hard core Deplorables are a lost cause.  Pray for them, if you’re so inclined, but don’t waste time trying to show them the error of their ways.  They’ve gone to the Dark Side, where cruelty is a feature, not a bug.

And yet Trump (and a few of his minions) are squirming now that the press is has spotlighted this particular piece of cruelty.  Not that they care about the kids.  But they know that the optics of children in cages hurts them with 70% of the voters.  That’s why they’re trying to lie their way out of responsibility for their actions.  Blame Obama.  Even blame George W. Bush, as Sarah Huckabee Sanders tried to do on Monday.  Trump himself keeps tweeting “Change the law!” 

The Republican defense is so stunningly bogus that it’s hard to know where to start, but let’s begin with something you learn on the first day of class in Trumpism 101.  Donald Trump routinely ignores laws he doesn’t like.  Even if there were such a law that required him to separate children from their families, all he’d have to do is tell ICE to stop enforcing it.  Republican congressional majorities are effectively gelded.  Some of them would be relieved at that particular order, while others would be privately annoyed.  But they’d all roll over, just like they’ve done every time Trump breaks the law.

But the truth is that there is no law that requires Trump to take children away from their parents.  None.  He could enforce immigration laws by deporting entire families intact.  He’s chosen instead to terrorize children.

Taking children from their parents and keeping them in cages is a deliberate strategy, a form of psychological warfare.  Republicans want those pictures to circulate widely in Mexico and Central America.  They think it will discourage potential refugees from crossing the border.   Some of Trump’s lackeys – Sanders, Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller, and John Kelly – have even acknowledged this. 

But Trump himself is a coward, so he claims that Democrats made him do it.  That’s a lie.  And blaming Democrats is weak.

The most important point, though, is that if Trump wanted an unambiguous law forbidding ICE to do what he’s ordered them to do, all he’d have to do is propose one.  Republicans control the White House, both houses of Congress, and they have a Republican-appointed conservative majority on the Supreme Court.  The wind is at their backs.  Just do it, for crying out loud. 

The moral of the story is that the only way for decent Americans to stop this is to elect a Democratic majority in the House and Senate next November. 

In 2016, the Russian-Republican strategy was divide and conquer.  Putin’s bot army kept sowing dissension between the Clinton and Sanders camps, and way too many people fell for it.  Russians call those people “useful idiots.”

In 2018, Trump is all about pandering to his base.  He’s betting the store that they’ll be enough to save him.  ICE’s gratuitous cruelty is popular with the base because it exemplifies the twin pillars of contemporary Republican policy – racism and annoying liberals.  But that strategy provides Democrats with an opportunity to do a little dividing and conquering of their own.

Republicans in swing districts may find that Trump’s “kids in cages” policy is too much for independent voters to stomach.  It may even offend a small percentage of reliable Republicans.  Maybe they won’t vote for a Democrat, but they could decide to sit this election out.

In my view, it will be important for Democratic candidates to attack this area of vulnerability.  Donald Trump will be the issue.  Make Republican candidates own his cruelty.  Make them own his rampant corruption.  And if they refuse to do that, demand that they explain how they intend to curb his excesses.  Whether they reject Trump or embrace him, either choice will alienate potential Republican voters.  In some districts, that will be enough.

As an added bonus, the useful idiots of 2016 will have an opportunity to show that they've learned from their mistake.  Redemption is a good thing.  I'll be writing more about that soon.