His Greatest Con

August 2, 2023 at 3:38 pm (Political Commentary)

Donald Trump is many things: Former president, father, wealthy businessman, draft dodger, convicted sexual abuser, bully, cult leader, tax cheat, self-proclaimed “chosen one,” and, as Maggie Haberman has titled her biography of him, con man. The term is short for confidence man, in which the con man seeks to gain the confidence of his “mark,” typically someone who is sufficiently credulous as to fall victim to the con man’s self-benefiting schemes. I wrote my master’s thesis fifty years ago on a fictional con man—also known as a picaro—and the genre has been explored by Melville, Twain, Faulkner, and other authors, usually humorously (except in Melville), where the reader is in on the con and enjoys the naïve credulity of the marks.

But there are also real con men, as Haberman demonstrates, and the results are not so funny. Donald Trump is exhibit A, and he is supremely gifted at it. At a recent rally he offered the following, both conning and cunning:

“I am the only one that [sic] can save this nation because you know they’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you. And I just happened to be standing in their way. And I will never be moving.” 

This is perfect Trump (though those two words should probably never be used together, being a species of grammatical offense). First, of course, is “the chosen one” theme, the messiah theme: “I am the only one that can save this nation.” It is hubris on a Himalayan scale. No one can compare to him; no one else alive is capable of the great and necessary salvation that he alone can deliver. He bathes in the glory of God’s anointment of him as American savior. Well, he would, if he actually believed in such a God. In fact, he really doesn’t; he himself is his god. Religion is merely a useful tool to keep all of those evangelicals in his column—those who normally would think only Jesus could save the nation. Trump’s capacity for solipsism, self-delusion, and narcissism is so titanic that “trumpism” is destined to enter the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a brand new psychopathology deserving its own category. Already diagnosed with several disorders, soon he will have his very own.

The second way in which those three sentences are perfect Trump lies in his almost uncanny capacity for frightening his followers into thinking that his claimed victimization and persecution are theirs. When applied to him—but only when applied to him—prosecution is persecution. Seeing himself as the Messiah, the deep state wishes to crucify him; but really, he says, through him “they” are maniacally “coming after you.” I am, he says, simply the means by which they are persecuting you. I am you. At some reptilian level of consciousness, he understands that if only he needs to worry about the criminal prosecutions against him, and if only he is the object of so much national revulsion, then his needy and aggrieved masses—no longer terrified for their own well-being—will fall away like autumn leaves. So he must convince them that his fate is theirs, and all their fears and grievances are justified. He and they are bound together in a grotesque co-dependent embrace.

Finally, the sentences’ astounding vanity ends with his self-portrayal as the invincible knight, standing alone against the dark forces of some imagined satanic army in a Manichean struggle of good vs. evil. If he fails—that is, if they don’t vote for him in droves—his martyrdom will also be theirs. But no; he will crush the evil; he is the immovable rock upon which that evil will founder. Retribution will follow. A great cleansing will take place. Paradise will ensue.

This is Trump’s central illusion, his greatest con, that he is the chosen one, a new and much greater Moses to lead the re-invented Israelites out of Egypt to the Trump promised land. It is his greatest conjuring trick, tricking not only his adorers, but himself as well.

Meanwhile, impeachment. Impeachment? Seriously? Of course. When your own twice impeached candidate swims in a fetid sewer of corruption and lies whenever his lips move, what else can you do? Well, you pretend that the president’s son isn’t being punished enough by a Trump-appointed prosecutor for lying on a gun application and should thus do jail time.  So let’s stoke this tiny flame into the imaginary conflagration of “the Biden crime family.” That tag may resonate with the credulous 40% of the country who will follow him to hell, but for those who are not conned, and for those who can still remember just about any day during (especially January 6th) or after Trump’s administration, well, that dog won’t hunt. 

3 Comments

Ukraine Knows the Difference Between Peace and Surrender

July 6, 2023 at 11:17 pm (Political Commentary)

So Brazil, the Vatican, China, a presidential candidate from Indonesia, and a collection of African nations have all offered “peace plans” for Ukraine to consider, not to mention Putin’s helpful suggestion that if the West would simply stop supplying Ukraine with weapons, peace could easily and quickly be achieved. This is likely also Donald Trump’s “peace plan,” i.e., his plan to end the war within 24 hours by selling out the country he could not browbeat in that infamous call to Zelensky that resulted in Trump’s first impeachment. What these alleged peace plans seem to have in common is very much akin to Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 deal with Hitler: OK, you get to keep the Sudetenland in exchange for your promise not to take any more land in Europe—“peace for our time,” proclaimed Mr. Chamberlain. As Brazil et al. would have it, Zelensky should just say, “President Putin, you can keep Crimea and eastern Ukraine if you will just please promise not to hurt us anymore or steal any more of our land. And don’t worry about the tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians you have targeted and killed and the billions of dollars in towns you have destroyed and buildings and infrastructure you have levelled. And certainly don’t worry about anyone trying to hold you accountable for war crimes.”

Would the Vatican sacrifice a third of its art and other treasures to an invader in exchange for promises of peace? Would Indonesia give away a third of its islands to an invading Japan for those same promises? Would China give Inner Mongolia to an invading Russia? Would Brazil surrender a third of its territory to an invading Portugal hell-bent on reclaiming it as a colony? And what are those promises worth?

The answer to the last question is Nothing, and the answer to the preceding questions of course is No, provided that the invaded country had some means of resistance (the Vatican being a special case). Nor should Ukraine suffer the ignominy of Chamberlain’s “peace for our time,” and calls for Ukraine to do so are shameful. Here’s my peace plan: Russia withdraws all of its forces from Ukrainian territory; Russia pays Ukraine one trillion dollars in reparations, most of which is to be exacted from Russian oligarchs and Putin himself; Russia returns all of the Ukrainian children it has kidnaped; Russia loses its membership on the Security Council of the United Nations, and Security Council votes henceforth will be valid by majority rather than unanimous vote; Russia turns over all of its accused war criminals, from Putin down to rank and file soldiers, to the United Nations upon that body’s agreement to send them to the Hague for war crimes; Ukraine becomes a member of NATO; Russia acknowledges that it was the unprovoked aggressor in the war.

But in fact, so-called peacemakers should butt out. Ukraine will determine Ukraine’s future. Ukraine will decide what its peace should look like.

3 Comments

Unsafe at Any Speed

May 10, 2023 at 3:17 pm (Political Commentary)

The Conservative Political Action Coalition (CPAC) held its annual babblefest in early March, and an innocent American citizen might be forgiven for pondering how magically Trump-world has turned truth on its head, and how frequently it does so. Matt Schlapp, the grand panjandrum of the CPAC faithful, bemoaned what he considered the bitter irony of terms like truth and justice (the latter of which he put in quotation marks) when applied to his beloved leader. The wonder of his comments was that there is truth in them, and yet that truth as offered by him is coming from a kind of anti-reality zone, where actual reality is the reverse of what is proclaimed to be reality. In the anti-reality zone, the statement may be true but the reason for it is exactly the opposite of what the speaker intended. For example, Schlapp is quite right in saying that “Americans have lost confidence in institutions and government experts because truth has become a casualty to raw political power.” Well, yes. But it’s Donald Trump who, far more than any other American, has created that loss of confidence through over 30,000 false and misleading statements during his presidency as documented by The Washington Post. Trump has ridden his lifelong untruthfulness—or at least from “bone spurs” forward—to the pinnacle of American government. When lying becomes one of a president’s primary political weapons, truth is going to “become a casualty to raw political power.”

 Mr. Schlapp further mourns “The renewed prosecutorial pursuit and indictment of President Trump [as] an outrageous breach of constitutional norms.”  We have indeed seen an outrageous breach of constitutional norms—but not for that reason, with its implication that Trump’s legal woes are merely the result of judicial overreach. Let’s take only the most egregious example, Trump’s January 6th incitement of sedition (“if you don’t fight like hell, you won’t have a country anymore”) and his attempted overthrow of a legitimate election, which was nothing less than an attempted coup d’etat. This would  presumably qualify as an outrageous breach of constitutional norms, though that day apparently does not occur to Schlapp or his CPAC flock.

Mr. Schlapp also claims to be concerned about authoritarianism and corruption: “We believe that the authoritarian punishment of political opponents [i.e., various legal proceedings against Trump] is deeply un-American and is more akin to the proceedings of a Kangaroo court in a corrupt Third World Banana Republic.” Those in the anti-reality zone don’t seem to have noticed Trump’s corruption or his authoritarianism, as when, for just one example, he called on his ironically named Truth Social for “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution”—so that he could continue as president, despite losing both the popular vote and the Electoral College. If a president’s plan is to throw out the Constitution to get his way, most folks would consider that to be pretty authoritarian.

Schlapp drones on: “For too long now our justice system has been at the disposal of unhinged bureaucrats, overzealous activist judges, and radicalized individuals who have transformed the institutions of our nation into political weapons.” Would he name an unhinged bureaucrat? Among unnamed others, he was considering Alvin Bragg, now prosecuting Trump in Manhattan. But Bragg is elected and thus by definition not a bureaucrat, and supporters of Trump should be very careful when using the word unhinged about those of us back on earth, when their guy was throwing a dinner plate with ketchup against the wall, or grabbing the wheel of his limo from a Secret Service agent and informing him that he was “the fucking president.” (The truth does occasionally accidentally emerge.) And when Schlapp in high dudgeon rants about “the Left . . . wield[ing] our judicial system against its opponents and further de-legitimiz[ing] our democracy” [emphasis added], that innocent American citizen who with her own eyes witnessed January 6 is left aghast, stunned that a Trump supporter could possibly claim to be concerned about de-legitimizing our democracy. The very thing they claim to have lost and they fight to regain–their “freedom” (consider the Q-Anon Shaman’s howl of “Freedom” on January 6)–is in fact the precise thing their beliefs and actions seek to overthrow. Yet that is the nature of life in the extreme right’s anti-reality zone: falsity is truth, wrong is right, bad is good, authoritarianism is democracy, the perpetrator is the victim, embracing the herd instinct is freedom.

So what’s a good metaphor for CPAC 2023? We can go with the anti-reality zone, or, a little more down to earth, we can go with this (both work):

I’m looking to buy a good used car. The salesman says, here’s a nice Ford, pretty high mileage, but most of the bells and whistles, excellent dependability and a long history of good performance. Well maintained. Now over here we have a Corvair. It’s also sorta high mileage. We’re pretty certain it’s unsafe at any speed. Its engine leaks oil, tires are showing some nylon, and its dials are frequently giving you info that isn’t true. It’ll tell you it’s doing 95 and you’re really doing 38. It keeps getting tickets for blowing smoke. We think we fixed the carbon monoxide coming through the heater, but you might want to keep the windows down. We tried to get the atomic explosive device out of the trunk, but it’s stuck, and we can’t be sure when it’ll go off. So what’s your pleasure?

The CPAC folks and the MAGA crowd are going with the Corvair.

Leave a Comment

We Are Ukraine

January 25, 2023 at 1:10 am (Ethics, Political Commentary)

Support for Ukraine in its just war with Russia is the twenty-first century’s moral imperative just as abolitionism was the moral imperative of the nineteenth century. If you would have been opposed to slavery then, you must be supportive of Ukraine now. That is, you must be willing to provide Ukraine with the weaponry it needs to defend itself and not be grudging and tightfisted about it. Had you been a Southerner in 1850, a word or act against slavery would have been courageous because it could be dangerous. Today, the only danger Americans face in giving Ukraine weapons is a small dent in the nation’s bank account. (By contrast to the less than $100 billion we have given Ukraine, an estimated $600 billion is lost to that bank account each year due to uncollected but legally due federal taxes.*) But there are other dangers if we and other democracies don’t help Ukraine. I have always hated a bully (see “Was the Third Kid Wrong?”), and Putin’s bullying is a huge part of this war. But there are other bullies and authoritarians and totalitarians looking on, and so the stakes are truly higher. Not being able to improve on Tom Nichols’ wise assessment, I quote him:

If Russia finally captures Ukraine by mass murder, torture, and nuclear threats, then everything the world has gained since the defeat of the Axis in 1945 and the end of the Cold War in 1991 will be in mortal peril. Putin will prove to himself and to every dictator on the planet that nothing has changed since Hitler, that lawless nations can achieve their aims by using force at will, by killing and raping innocent people and then literally grinding their ashes into the dirt. This is no longer about Russia’s neo-imperial dreams or Ukraine’s borders: This is a fight for the future of the international system and the safety of us all.

Like Nichols, I normally consider South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham to be little more than a Trumpian lickspittle. Well, Nichols didn’t call him that, but he was being nice. But Nichols notes approvingly that Graham stood with two Democrats to complain about American and German reluctance to send Abrams and Leopard tanks, respectively, to Ukraine. Many months ago, I saw that Graham said the same thing that was on my mind then and now: Russia needs a successful Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the German patriot who attempted but failed to assassinate Hitler in 1944. No other politician was, or is, saying that. By contrast, Speaker of the House McCarthy, likely to be the weakest Speaker in memory after caving to far-right demands from fellow House Republicans, has already said that Ukraine should not get a “blank check,” and a recent poll showed that almost half of Republicans say we are already giving too much to Ukraine. This is the same amoral stand—indifference—taken by too many pre-Civil War Northerners toward slavery. Lincoln could not even use slavery as the moral impetus for the North going to war, knowing how unpersuasive it would be to so many. He had to argue that the casus belli was to preserve the Union.

It was not too many decades ago that the GOP considered Democrats soft on communism—primarily the USSR. Those tables have now turned. Trump practically embraced Putin, and Trump still has influence. We cannot return to the isolationism of 1914 or 1940. For those getting wobbly on support for Ukraine for fiscal reasons, and for others unmoved by Russia’s scorched-earth policy and the grim deaths of old women and children due to Putin’s indisputable war crimes, they should consider that if Putin wins, we and other democratic nations lose, and we might even find ourselves in a wider war. Robust, full-throated military and humanitarian support for Ukraine is the first international moral test of this century.

*The figure for total tax evasion, also known as the tax gap, varies. Several years ago it was calculated at $496 billion per year and estimated, on that basis, to be $667 billion c. 2018. As recently as 2021, the Department of the Treasury said that the wealthiest one percent of taxpayers accounted, all by themselves, for $163 billion in unpaid but legally due taxes, or 28% of the unpaid amount owed by all taxpayers, which would be $582 billion.

Leave a Comment

Friends, Relatives, Countrymen

October 2, 2022 at 8:51 pm (Ethics, Political Commentary)

(This piece was written prior to the Republican National Convention to be held in 2024, but after Trump declared himself a candidate for the 2024 election, I decided that his entry into the race, and the danger he represents to our country, were sufficient justifications to post now and not to wait and see if he became the nominee.)

I once before noted on Facebook that I reserve my political commentary for an unvisited blog, being unwilling to annoy any of my Facebook friends with my ruminations in the form of original posts mired in politics. Facebook should be for fun, right? I do, I confess, sometimes reply to others’ political posts. On that one occasion when I broke my rule with an original post, I excoriated then-President Trump for his appalling comments and views of the American military. Anyone who supports American military veterans and active-duty personnel and still votes for this person for Commander-in-Chief—well, I’ll simply say that that is very, very hard to understand. (If you wish to see what he said and did or did not do, see “’Have You No Sense of Decency Sir?’” on my blog at https://johnrachalblog.wordpress.com/ Just put the title in the search box. Same for titles below in parentheses.)

But the upcoming election is so important that I feel obligated to break my rule once again. I really had hoped that the Republican Party would not have nominated this man or one of his clones. Had they done so, you would not be reading this. Though a Democrat myself, I was hoping the GOP would nominate someone who fell somewhere within the broad middle of the American political scene—right of center, naturally, but a person who was not a narcissist, not someone who was “utterly amoral” and a “pathological liar” (as Ted Cruz once said), not an authoritarian, not a friend to other authoritarians, not a person devoid of moral or spiritual values (see “Who Would Jesus Vote For?” on my blog), not a person far too incompetent and too ignorant to hold the office once held by Lincoln.

This election is ultimately about three central themes: character, truth, and democracy—not individual policies. Except for those who are irreparably fervid in their devotion to Mr. Trump, few arguments are needed to illustrate the “character” or the “truth” problems. He lied for years about then-President Obama’s citizenship, finally acknowledging that Obama was an American citizen, but notably never apologizing for the lie. After avoiding the draft during the Vietnam War by having a doctor report that he had bone spurs in his feet, he attacked American military hero John McCain out of sheer Iago-like jealousy of the high regard in which most Americans held him for his refusal to take early release from the North Vietnamese when they discovered who he was (see “When Amorality Meets Character”). In a late 1990s interview with Howard Stern, he said that during that war fear of venereal disease was his “personal Vietnam” and vaginas were “potential landmines.” He has used the Bible as a political prop in front of a church. When asked what his favorite Bible verse was, he claimed, since he didn’t know one, that he “wouldn’t want to get into it because to me that’s very personal,” and he was too slow to even think of The Lord’s Prayer. Mr. Trump appears to be so insecure that he lied about things as silly as the crowd size at his inauguration compared to Obama’s (photos clearly revealing the lie). He lied about his affairs and groping women, even though the latter is on audio tape. Most dangerously, he has continued to lie about the 2020 election.

Most of this you probably know, but please stick with me a little longer.

There is a Mafia-like quality to him, as I am not the first to note. He is certainly a bully, and like a lot of bullies, he is a sycophant in dealing with other bullies. He bullied Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, all but demanding that he “find another 11,000 votes” (see “’That Way Madness Lies’”). He admires, among a few other authoritarians, Vladimir Putin, taking Putin’s word in Helsinki that he had not interfered in our 2016 election despite our intelligence community’s conclusion that he had (see “Vlad’s New Puppy”). The Russians have a name for someone who can easily be manipulated to serve the purposes of others: a useful fool. Putin worked for Trump’s election because he knew that in Trump he had a useful fool. Even Trump’s infamous call to President Zelenskyy served Putin’s purposes: After congress had authorized military aid to Ukraine in the election season of 2020, the then-president tried to extort Zelenskyy into announcing an investigation into Hunter Biden by suggesting—“I would like you to do us a favor though”—that the aid was contingent on Zelenskyy’s announcement. No need to even carry an investigation out, just announce one. Zelenskyy didn’t. (See “Two Mobsters Walk into a Bar….”)

That didn’t go so well, and led to Mr. Trump’s first impeachment. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Trump called Putin “savvy,” and he has said nothing negative about Russia or supportive of Ukraine. Anyone supporting Ukraine’s struggle and opposed to Russia’s invasion, as I certainly am, would necessarily be appalled at the re-election of this man. Imagining anyone as reckless and undisciplined as Mr. Trump being in charge if Putin decides to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine is extremely disturbing:  Trump’s bromance with Putin could lead him to call Putin’s choice of a tactical nuclear strike “savvy” and do nothing, or he could go to the other extreme, lashing out wildly and embroiling us in a world war.

My suspicion, however, is that Trump would do little for Ukraine, strengthening Putin’s hand. That too would be a tragedy for our country and for the world—not to mention gutsy Ukraine. It would be a tragedy for democracy globally. Not only would that failed phone call to Zelenskyy stick in Trump’s craw, but his submissiveness to Putin would disincline him from supporting Ukraine through weapons shipments and providing intelligence. Since the end of World War II the United States—and especially the GOP—has regarded the Soviet Union and then Russia as an adversary (despite a brief intermission in the Gorbachev years). Now, Russia is, in fact if not in official stated policy, the enemy. And now, more than at any previous time since the Cuban missile crisis, is hardly the time for America, under a re-elected President Trump, to roll over and hand Putin and Russia an unparalleled victory signaling American submission and an ignominious tolerance of Russian war crimes and expansionism. Indeed, it is never the right time to do the wrong thing.

Truth is critical to democracy. Where it thrives, democracy flourishes. Where it is suppressed or attacked, democracy fades—or dies.  Authoritarians and dictators the world over inevitably need to suppress truth, both burying their own misdeeds and substituting not only individual lies but an entire alternative “truth” since the road to autocracy is by definition a matter of controlling the narrative in favor of the would-be autocrat. This was nowhere more evident—and nowhere a more serious threat to American democracy—than on January 6th, 2021, when Mr. Trump said to his rapt, even adoring listeners, “if you don’t fight like hell, you won’t have a country anymore” (see “1776 This Was Not”). He has repeatedly used the term “enemies of the people” in reference to a free press, echoing Stalin. Dictators and would-be dictators abhor a free press, and always, always move to supplant it with their own propaganda. The United States now has two competing truths, one which is real and where serious journalism and many of Mr. Trump’s former staff continue to reveal his moral, psychological, and legal unfitness for office; and one which is not real and where Fox News, Newsmax, 4chan, and Q-Anon flood the airwaves and internet with creepy fantasy and bizarre conspiracy tales.

I know that, if anyone has read this far, some might say, “Well, OK, he lies sometimes and behaves like a child sometimes, but he’s still better than the Democrats and their dangerous agenda.” No. He is not. He is a false Messiah. I use this phrase quite intentionally, hoping that my Christian friends and relatives will recall the Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus warns of “false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves.” Liz Cheney, as principled a conservative as they come, knows a ravening wolf when she sees one. So do many who worked for the former president. Mr. Trump has promoted himself from prophet to, in his own mind, the Messiah, having said “Only I can fix it” and referring to himself as “the chosen one.” For those who even one decade ago saw and still see themselves as pro-business, family values, law and order, anti-Russian, conservative Republicans, they are entitled to wonder what has happened to their now-cultish party.

Yet too many have drifted away from that long-gone GOP to the current radical, extreme right-wing, cult-like GOP where Mr. Trump and the poison he inspires in others threaten our democracy. Those “others” include far too many GOP politicians who once spoke harshly of Trump (I’m looking at you McConnell, McCarthy, Graham, Cruz, Rubio, DeSantis) and who know he is potentially a mortal danger to our country, but now fear saying so and ride the wave of his demagoguery. Even stealing classified documents gets a pass from Fox and its elected collaborators. Marco Rubio wriggled like a worm on a hook and called it a “storage problem”; one wonders what he and Fox and company might have said had Obama carted top secret documents off to Chicago. Storage problem. Sure.

So I am not talking about mere policies; conservatives and liberals will always debate policy. I am talking about character, truth, and democracy. We have a choice: in favor of those three themes, or opposition to them. The choice really is that stark.

Leave a Comment

“ALL THEY HAD TO DO WAS ASK”: Well, They Did, in the Form of a Subpoena You Ignored

August 13, 2022 at 4:08 pm (Political Commentary)

After the former president of the United States ignored a subpoena, a few days ago the FBI obtained a warrant to search Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home for more classified documents and other materials he illegally removed from the White House at the end of his disastrous presidency. Predictably, all the right-wing talking heads, politicians, and their credulous followers are apoplectic, accusing the Justice Department and the FBI of having been “weaponized” against Trump and all his forces of good, and threatening biblical retribution on the Democratic forces of evil trying to shatter American democracy. As Adam Serwer of The Atlantic quotes various Republicans, they are all about law and order when Black Lives Matter protesters are in the streets or Democratic office-holders need investigating, but if law and order is applied to them, the FBI becomes “the gestapo.”

It used to be that bald-faced hypocrisy was disqualifying for government service; now, along with undermining democracy, it is one of the two defining characteristics of the GOP, even at its highest levels: witness Trump continuously claiming the Fifth at his recent deposition in Manhattan, after years of deriding anyone claiming the Fifth as obviously guilty; or former and possible future House Speaker Kevin McCarthy blaming Trump for January 6th immediately after the insurrection but a mere eight days later groveling at Mar-a-Lago and kissing the ring of the former president; or former and possibly future Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell also angrily blaming Trump for the assault on the Capitol and the Constitution that day and not long after stating that he would “absolutely” vote for Trump if he is the 2024 nominee.

Or there’s the amazing gymnast cum contortionist Lindsey Graham, calling Trump (1) an “idiot” and “unfit for office” in 2016 (cited by Mark Leibovich in a brilliant takedown of Graham and McCarthy), then (2) squeezing himself back into the Dear Leader’s oozy embrace during Trump’s presidency, then (3) flipping again by declaiming to loud huzzahs on the senate floor the night of January 6th that “Today all I can say is count me out. Enough is enough,” and shortly after (4) flipping back to MAGA orthodoxy, having tested the wind yet again. In the wide, wide world of political gymnastics, Graham smiles in the warm glow of the spectators’ applause. He has just scored a perfect 10 on the (Senate) Floor Exercise event, performing what may be called a Lindsey Quadruple, or a Lindsey Quad as his friends might say. Apparently, in the Republican party of Trump, McCarthy, McConnell, and Graham, there is no longer any shame to be attached to hypocrisy—staying true to some moral standard, or even just to what you said last week, is a game for fools.

Have I mentioned that the country is in decline, albeit, one can only hope, not a permanent and irreversible one? While hypocrisy and authoritarianism define Trump’s party, truth is now its official enemy. There are a few honest (and brave) elected conservative Republicans—Liz Cheney foremost among them—but the party is still Trump’s, and is likely to continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Truth, like the truth about the 2020 election for starters, is anathema to the Trumpanistas. If truth wins, they lose—and they know it. Some, like Greene, Gosar, Boebert, Jordan, and their ilk are so rabid, so intellectually impoverished, that one is tempted to think that they truly believe their idiocies. Jewish space-lasers changing Trump votes to Biden? Secretive Italian operators doing the same? Well, if nothing else, we have established beyond question that jaw-dropping ignorance, head-spinning fantasies, and totalitarian instincts are no bars to being elected to congress—or to the presidency.

During the era of the Vietnam War, there was a saying among conservatives: “My country, right or wrong” (the original 1872 quote from Carl Schurz was “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; if wrong, to be set right”). Now, that dubious half-quote is long gone. Now the unstated standard in the GOP is: My party, my clan, right or wrong—to hell with the country. And we can even see the next and final step: Me, my position, my power; all else—country, honor, courage, truth—is just the posturing I do to get elected and stay in office.

Leave a Comment

Decline

May 16, 2022 at 6:15 pm (Political Commentary)

Ronald Reagan had a wonderful line with a hopeful and optimistic image: “Morning in America.” It was an image of freshness, possibilities, and great expectations—a GOP vision that even skeptical Democrats could like. But that GOP is now in the morgue, displaced by a new generation of the GOP, one disdainful of that optimism and driven more by “American carnage” and violence as “legitimate public discourse.” With some two-thirds of Republicans still believing that the 2020 election was stolen from them, the party has degenerated into grievance, fear, and willing marks for disinformation. It is increasingly clear that one of the two major political parties in the United States has disqualified itself from leading a country purporting to be a democracy. The question is whether or not America’s current decline—despite a two-year window of Democratic control of the presidency, the House, and, ever so barely, the Senate—is permanent or just a massive wave in the ebb and flow of our history.

(It is worth noting that the Senate is virtually in Republican hands since Joe Manchin is a DINO, a Democrat in name only. He was the only Democrat to vote against the Democratic effort to legalize abortion after the Supreme Court has made clear, as everyone knew, that it would revoke the past fifty years of nationwide legal abortion—this after he earlier this year torpedoed Biden’s Build Back Better bill. Meanwhile Republicans Murkowski and Collins also voted against the abortion bill, despite having pointedly accused Trump’s last two Supreme Court nominees of about-faces from their support of “established law” during their interviews preceding their hearings, to their almost certain support of revoking Roe v. Wade this coming fall. So Murkowski and Collins had effectively hinted they would support the Democrats on this but then voted their party line.)

But back to the issue of decline. Democrats are poised to lose the House and Senate this fall, and I would put $1000 on their losing the presidency in 2024, quite possibly to Donald Trump. Fox News and conspiracy-oriented social media are both the harbingers and the cause, along with Trump and the politics of fear and grievance he embodies, of American decline. A woman who refuses to get a covid vaccine despite the covid deaths of family members makes all kinds of claims about the vaccine’s dangers and “government control,” then says that she’s done her “research” and with palpable contempt insists that “I’m NOT an idiot.” By this she means falling for government disinformation when the truth is available to her with some digging on 4chan and other forums for the credulous, now even including some churches. Any honest American history written in, say, 2150 will inevitably dissect the current dumbing down of America instigated by the revenue-generating, fear-driven politics of Fox News, along with the viral capabilities of Facebook, Twitter, and the darker corners of the internet. These forums, that future historian will tell our descendants, were pivotal in stoking Trumpist outrage among uncritical believers where people like Ms. “I’m NOT an idiot” spend hours per day doing their “research” and sharing that so-called research with other gulled inhabitants of Plato’s cave.

Between gerrymandering and the Electoral College—both fixable—American democracy’s structural flaws will continue to make their own contributions to American decline. Gerrymandering allows even a purple state, one with rough parity between the parties that can go either way in a presidential election, to end up with a grossly disproportionate number of its House seats going to one party, typically Republican, due to politically motivated drawing of the districts. As for the Electoral College, as I am informed that I never tire of saying, twice now in just five elections (2000, 2016) it has given us a president who lost the election based on the number of votes received, with the consequence that we had the most ignorant and authoritarian man ever to hold the White House damaging the country and accelerating and feeding the decline. Exhibit One, of course, was January 6, with the Republican National Committee actually defending it by calling it “legitimate political discourse.” Nor do I need add that the Electoral College gave us at least three and possibly five conservative Supreme Court Justices who would have been instead Democratic-appointed moderate to liberal justices had the candidate whom most Americans voted for in those two elections become president. I read yesterday that by some mathematical calculation—presumably a few large blue states electing or re-electing their Democratic senators by wide margins and several small red states electing or re-electing Republicans—it would be possible for senate Democrats to win 51% of the total Senate votes cast in 2022 and still lose eight seats.

There is still a range of Republicanism, from the few remaining moderates and strong conservatives who nevertheless despise Trumpism, to the expanding, increasingly Trumpist neo-fascism of the far-right fringe—a fringe metastasizing throughout the body politic of the GOP. But the day of Reaganism and small-government, business-oriented, conventional-moral-precepts-Republicanism is over. Today’s Republicans are all about big government, but a certain kind of big government—the kind that seeks to airbrush our racial history, peek into bedrooms and medical exam rooms, embrace creeping autocracy, substitute their members’ “research” for reality, demonize liberal democracy, call treason patriotism, invert lies as truth, reject inconvenient election outcomes, and generally re-make society in ways to make authoritarians the world over happy.

Leave a Comment

Democracy Fading

April 28, 2022 at 10:06 pm (Ethics, Political Commentary)

I wish I could feel more optimistic about 21st century America. It is generally conceded among those who do not have to cheerlead for Democrats that the Republicans will take over both the House and Senate in the 2022 elections, and anything approaching a Biden agenda will ground to an unceremonious, broken-down halt. Indeed, American factionalism is so profound that only three Republican senators could see their way to support the eminently qualified Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by Justice Breyer. Almost everything else is strict party-line, except for Democrats Manchin and Sinema who sabotaged Biden’s already much-compromised Build Back Better program. Republicans do seem willing to join Democrats in supporting Ukraine with weapons, but for about everything else, Republicans especially seem willing to put party (and thus power) above country, morality, fairness, and personal integrity. Romney and perhaps Collins and Murkowski in the Senate and Cheney and Kinzinger in the House seem to be the only exceptions.

The party-and-power-over-all-else doctrine seemed perfectly illustrated by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who after January 6 did the right thing by blaming Trump for the insurrection, and who now says that if Trump is the nominee in 2024, he will “absolutely” support him. So he is saying that the man that he himself said is responsible for the storming of the Capitol and the intended violent overturning of a fair election will be his man if Trump succeeds in winning the nomination two years from now. That turnabout is worthy of our sober reflection. McConnell, who said the right things in the immediate aftermath of the insurrection—including the fact that Joe Biden actually won—is willing to allow his integrity only to go so far. The president who was impeached twice, who lies from the minuscule (his inauguration crowds) to the epic (saying he won in 2020), who publicly admires Vladimir Putin, who more than any other single human being is responsible for turning normal conservatives—your uncle or mine—into deluded right-wing extremists, and who is and for the last five years has been the single most dangerous internal enemy of American democracy is now the man McConnell is “absolutely” willing to return to the White House.

Perhaps McConnell has been sobered by the fact that Trump still commands the collective adoration of the Republican party, given that 71% still believe, amazingly, that Biden is not the legitimate U. S. president. Thus, unwilling to buck that near consensus, McConnell trades his integrity for expediency. He is too smart, unlike some of the lesser fry of the GOP like Gaetz, Jordan, Cawthorn, Greene, et al., to be unaware that Trump is unequivocally the most demagogic, autocratic president in our history. He absolutely knows this, as do those marvelous contortionists Kevin McCarthy and Lindsey Graham. Even if McConnell couldn’t see it for himself, his wife could tell him, having served in Trump’s cabinet. And yet, rather than say that he could not and would not support a second Trump term, he is willing to embrace a proven would-be despot, to put democracy at extreme risk, to invite the return of a sewer of presidential corruption, to subject the country to another corrosive four years of the degrading of truth as a critical democratic value, and to ignore the probability of future catastrophes Trump could beget during another term in the Oval Office.

This symbiosis of congressional cowardice and collusion, fed by half the populace who cannot see or choose not to see the poison Trump has injected into the body politic, depletes the strength of American democracy. As fantasy substitutes for reality and grievance displaces truth, democracy fades. The toxic mix of cowardice and collusion, fantasy and grievance, is enormously abetted by so-called news channels and a social media which daily, hourly, heaves gobbets of lies and disinformation at an addicted public craving new alleged outrages upon which to gorge. This public expects its Republican leaders to slay their imagined dragons. So McConnell and Trumpism Inc. choose to pretend the dragons are real rather than suffer the fates of apostates like Cheney, Romney, or, worst of all, Mike Pence, who would be dead today had he fallen into the hands of the January 6th mob—the same mob engaged in “legitimate political discourse,” says the Republican National Committee. When Trump told his already stoked partisans that day “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore. . . . So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue,” he aimed at the very heart of American democracy, while he himself scooted back to the White House.* Democrats, already reviled by the crazy right as child sex-traffickers, and scorned by the merely deluded right as anti-American, have no standing to convince half our population that Trumpism corrodes democracy. Only Republicans can do that.

*June 28, 2022 testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, to the January 6 House Committee revealed that Trump did indeed want to lead the mob at the Capitol in person, even wanting to go into the House chamber. He even grabbed the steering wheel of the presidential limousine, saying “I’m the fucking president,” when the Secret Service agent driving the car would not take him there and returned him to the White House.

Leave a Comment

Churchills, Not Chamberlains

March 15, 2022 at 11:10 pm (Ethics, Political Commentary)

Three weeks after the February 24 invasion

There is no off ramp for Putin. None. He is far too committed to what he has already done, killing thousands of Ukrainians (2,100 so far in Mariupol alone), targeting residential areas and hospitals in a war of terror. He has turned several Ukrainian cities into wastelands. He knows there is no turning back. He must win, and he must intimidate the West and NATO into a willingness to allow Ukraine to go under. He threatens the use of tactical nuclear weapons, of which he has thousands and the United States has some 230. Lenin had a motto: “You probe with bayonets; if you find mush, you push. If you find steel, you withdraw.” So far, the bayonet has not hit much NATO steel.

I am still hopeful that—short of Western military intervention—once he has destroyed the country and killed tens of thousands, he will be unable to occupy the country for the long term and that a Ukrainian Resistance and sanctions will somehow bring him down. But hope is not a dependable strategy. He has terrified us into thinking that World War III will ensue if NATO takes any military action. Putin has already said that we have committed an act of war merely by supplying Ukraine with weaponry. I am off the fence now: Enact a no-fly-zone as a start. Eliot Cohen, noting both Putin’s military weakness (despite his one advantage in tactical nuclear weapons) and NATO’s strength, has pointed out that American aircraft have fought the Russians in third countries, including Syria, Korea, and probably Vietnam. A NATO military presence over Ukraine is not the same as attacking Russia on its own soil. If Putin thinks he has a right to be on his enemy’s soil wreaking desolation, we have a right to be on our friend’s soil stopping him. We should at least bring a knife to the knife fight—and probably a gun. Our unwillingness to even support Poland’s offer to supply its own Migs to the Ukrainians and “backfill” the Poles’ reduction with our F-16s suggests that we are too afraid to even come to the fight, and are willing to watch the Russian Bear gobble up a country and murder its people, and not just its soldiers. We should be Churchills, not Chamberlains.

Short of that, we have the Hope Strategy—an unsustainable Russian occupation of Ukraine, a strong Ukrainian Resistance, Russian war fatigue, China choosing not to throw Putin a lifeline, and eventually Putin’s fall. And maybe the Hope Strategy will eventually be enough. But there is an alternative possible scenario: The West will tire of their own sacrifices in imposing sanctions, and rather than rising up against Putin, Russians may be duped by Putin’s propaganda and stand with him, while dissidents disappear. Ukraine will be in his pocket, and more countries may be on offer. He will smile at the political and moral weakness—the mush—of the much-vaunted NATO, America in particular. And what is left of Ukraine will glower at America and agree with Putin at least on that.

Leave a Comment

Was the Third Kid Wrong?

March 12, 2022 at 4:56 pm (Political Commentary)

As of yesterday, seventeen days since Russia invaded Ukraine, Putin’s war had moved into western Ukraine, increasingly beginning to threaten the capital. Putin’s military has proved to be less capable than expected, and Ukraine’s more so. But size and weaponry matter, and artillery is now targeting civilian targets—against all conventions and making the Russian decision-makers war criminals. Several hospitals have been attacked, and Putin is attempting to strangle all the larger cities and to block western aid from getting in. Mariupol has no electricity, and food and water are at a point of dire scarcity.

It is clear that NATO will neither put boots on Ukrainian ground or planes in its sky or strike Russian targets inside Ukraine from bases within NATO countries. I understand it—World War III we are told—but I hate it. So many people will have to die because of this man. He will ravage the cities, decimate the infrastructure, and kill tens of thousands, including so many in his own army. Zelenskyy will neither leave nor yield, and I fear he will die in a bunker under artillery fire, or be arrested and sent to the Gulag. But the Ukrainian Resistance will fight on, and Russia’s installation of a puppet regime in Ukraine will not be stable, especially as an extended occupation by Russia increasingly becomes too costly and Russian support for the war ebbs. As the sanctions take hold, as western businesses abandon Russia, as modern conveniences Russians have accustomed themselves to crumble, as the last vestiges of a free press are extinguished, as unemployment and costs for everything rise, as Russian boys come home in body bags, as Russians realize the propaganda they hear is all a lie, as they weary of a war most of them probably never supported in the first place, my hope is that Biden will say, Do you want this to end? Do you want sanctions lifted and your boys brought home? Then let us examine, at a site of our choosing, the body of Vladimir Putin; or, if you prefer, send him to The Hague to stand trial for war crimes. We prefer the latter—but will accept the former.

When I was in the sixth grade, there was an undersized, poorly dressed, somewhat unkempt kid named Robert Alexander. I remember that he looked vaguely Hispanic, with dark eyes and unruly dark hair. He had very large, protruding front teeth; he had not one friend that I knew of. He slept a lot on his crossed arms at his end-of-the-row desk, which, to my surprise, the teacher let him do. It’s possible that Miss Burks, probably in her fifties, had given up on him. Alternatively, her knowledge of him may have been much deeper than ours and she may have felt that decency entitled him to sleep. He was clearly from the other side of the tracks.

One day another kid in the class, Craig Burton—the biggest kid, and a bit of bully—said something mean to Robert, but Robert did not respond. My memory may be faulty here; it may have been that the big kid generally treated Robert with contempt. But in any event, a third kid in the class took Robert’s side, and the third kid and the big kid determined to settle things at recess. I remember that part well: right around the pitcher’s mound (which really was not a mound), after possibly a few moments of mutual staring, the third kid landed a fist to the jaw of the big kid, which sent him crying from the field and ultimately to the principal’s office. For some reason the teacher did not send the third kid to the principal, but made him sit by her on the low wall overlooking the playground in the shade of a large oak.

Nuclear weapons were not even a threat, of course. But was the third kid wrong?

Leave a Comment

« Older entries Newer entries »