John Rachal's Blog

It’s a fact that Chris Christie is one of the two best-known Trump supporters and advisers (Rudy Giuliani being the other). It is also a fact that eleven days before the election FBI director James Comey sent a letter to Congress stating that in an unrelated investigation of Anthony Wiener, the estranged husband of Clinton adviser Huma Abedin, new emails that “appear to be pertinent” to the Clinton email investigation had been found. Comey approved “steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails,” indicating that no such review had yet taken place. Comey acknowledged that based on these unexamined emails he “cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant.” So as of the receipt of the letter by Congress, there was no evidence of any wrongdoing by anyone, much less Clinton. Nevertheless, Comey saw fit to defy all FBI precedent by dropping this bombshell of a letter, with all of its accompanying innuendo, a mere eleven days prior to a presidential election.

So, let’s imagine a scenario. Let’s imagine that in its investigation of New Jersey governor and Trump adviser Chris Christie’s possible involvement in the “Bridgegate” scandal (in which traffic was intentionally impeded in order to punish a Democratic mayor who declined to support Governor Christie), the investigating agency came across a large group of Christie emails that may or may not have included some to or from Christie that might have suggested that Donald Trump might have been involved in a mob hit in 1993. Then let’s imagine that the head of the investigating agency, contrary to normal procedures concerning an ongoing investigation and with no evidence at all of Trump’s involvement, sent a letter to Congress stating that there might now be pertinent information, not concerning the Bridgegate investigation, but rather concerning the possible connection between Mr. Trump, now running for president, and the murder of an organized crime boss.

How fair would that imagined scenario be to Donald Trump, candidate for president, eleven days before the election?

Not fair at all. And, on the part of the investigating agency, ethically indefensible.

Vote for Trump IF . . .

. . . you believe that Barack Obama is literally “the founder of ISIS.”
. . . you believe that “thousands” of Muslims were seen on a video celebrating in New Jersey after the attacks on 9/11.
. . . you think it’s OK for a presidential candidate to physically mock a journalist’s disability.
. . . you think it’s OK for a presidential candidate, in a highly publicized primary debate, reply to a vulgar innuendo from Marco Rubio that “there’s no problem” with the size of his genitalia.
. . . if you think it’s OK for you to pay federal income taxes but that billionaire Trump doesn’t for as many as eighteen years.
. . . if you believe that the real reason Trump won’t release his tax returns, contrary to precedent from all Republican and Democratic candidates for president for the last several decades, is that he’s being audited.
. . . if you believe that he will release his tax returns when the audit is over.
. . . if you believe that John McCain is not a war hero—not because he was captured and tortured over several years, but because he refused to be released when the North Vietnamese discovered he was the son of an important navy admiral if his fellow POWs would be left behind.
. . . if you don’t think there’s just a little bit of a sleazy parallel between Donald Trump trying to play down his admitted gropings of women he did not even know by calling it “locker room talk” and Jerry Sandusky trying to play down his sodomizing young boys in the shower by calling it “just horsin’ around.”
. . . if you don’t think there is something profoundly grandiose and arrogant about a man thinking that his importance is such that his gropings and kissing of women he didn’t know was a kind of entitlement because he is rich and famous.
. . . if you don’t think that a presidential candidate should know what the American nuclear triad is.
. . . if you agree with Trump that despot Vladimir Putin is a great leader.
. . . if you think Vladimir Putin is not playing Trump, just a little like Hitler played Neville Chamberlain in 1938, leading Chamberlain to declare that he and the Fuhrer had achieved “peace in our time.”
. . . if you don’t believe that Vladimir Putin would love to see Trump elected, knowing that Clinton would be a more significant adversary.
. . . if you believe that the guy who said “I love war, in a certain way” is the best guy to have his finger on the nuclear button.
. . . if you would be just fine with your daughter working for Trump in the same office.
. . . if you think Trump will, as he has claimed, erase the $18 trillion national debt in eight years.
. . . if you agree, as Trump charged in a primary debate, that Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the assassination of JFK.
. . . if you believe that Mexico is going to pay for even a picket fence at the border, much less a massive wall.
. . . if you think that any tax plan coming out of a Trump White House would not be designed to benefit millionaires and billionaires, for example by eliminating the estate tax.
. . . if you think that just saying that everything will be great under his administration is a reasonable substitute for actual policy, whether on the economy, fighting ISIS, or social issues.
. . . if you believe that bombastic braggadocio and being woefully uninformed would be good substitutes for a cool head and wide knowledge of the problems we face nationally and internationally.
. . . if you believe, as Trump has speculated, that the reason he is audited every year is that he is “a strong Christian.”
. . . if you believe, as Trump has claimed, that the Bible is his favorite book, when he doesn’t even know that the second book of Corinthians is referred to as Second Corinthians, not “Two Corinthians.”
. . . if you are comfortable with the fact that he has stiffed numerous employees and small business owners, agreeing to a contract price, then, when the work is done, paying far less than the agreed-upon price, encouraging the business owner to sue, and then tying the dispute up in court for years, sometimes bankrupting the business owner.
. . . if you are not suspicious of someone who has been involved in over 4,000 lawsuits.
. . . if the fact that several Republican-leaning newspapers have endorsed a Democrat, especially the generally loathed Clinton, doesn’t give you pause.
. . . if you think that a fellow who avoided actual military service has any right to criticize the Muslim parents of a son who, as an American captain, was killed in Iraq.
. . . if you’re not worried that a thin-skinned President Trump would spend way too much of the presidential day tweeting about and otherwise seeking revenge on his critics.
. . . if you are absolutely sure that none of the animus toward Hillary Clinton, particularly among white males, is due to the fact that she is a woman.
. . . if you think it’s OK for a man who has groped women (though denying it to Anderson Cooper in the second debate), bragged about it, and committed adultery to attack the non-candidate husband of his opponent, who herself has groped no one and never committed adultery, by saying that she enabled her husband’s affairs.
. . . if you think it is logical and truthful to brag on audio tape about groping women and getting away with it because you’re famous, then to deny in the debate that you’ve groped anyone, and then to vilify as liars and conspirators the several women who say that you did indeed do to them what you said you did in the audio tape.
. . . if you don’t believe there is something just a wee bit hypocritical about Trump’s current excoriation of Bill Clinton’s long ago infidelities while inviting both Clintons to his most recent wedding.
. . . if you think that the students at the now defunct Trump University got a good business education.
. . . if you have never wondered why Trump doesn’t restrict his lies to things that cannot be clearly disproven by video or audio tape, such as his professed early opposition to the Iraq war, or his claim in the second debate that he has never groped women he did not know.
. . . if you believe that “no one respects women more than” him.
. . . if you believed him when he claimed that Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
. . . if you didn’t wonder why he suddenly claimed that Obama was born in the United States after all, declining to give an apology for his four years of lying about it and, perhaps even worse, refusing to give the slightest explanation for the total reversal—meaning that he knew it was a lie from the beginning.
. . . if you think that megalomania and an unprecedented public coarseness are desirable qualities in the president of the United States.
. . . if you have never wondered why he once said that he thought Hillary Clinton would make a great president.
. . . if you have not noticed the irony of his little refrain “believe me” at the end of a sentence, given his difficulty refraining from any remark that glorifies him, advances his self-interest, or slanders a rival.
. . . if you believe, as Trump has claimed, that eighty percent of white murders are committed by blacks.
. . . if it doesn’t bother you that the last two Republican candidates for president, as well as the last two Republican presidents, do not support his candidacy.
. . . if someone who claims “I alone can fix it” doesn’t sound like a demagogic despot to you.
. . . if you think that Trump’s claiming that it could have been China that hacked Democratic emails, contrary to the intelligence community’s conclusion that it was Russia, was not an attempt to protect Vladimir Putin, or to curry favor with him.
. . . if you think that routinely committing five or six of the seven deadly sins—wrath, avarice, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony—is a good foundation for being an American president.
. . . if you think, as Trump has claimed, that man-made climate change is a “Chinese hoax.”
. . . if you believe that character no longer matters.

So if most of these apply to you—heck, if, say, just two or three of these apply to you—go for it. Trump’s your man.

Donnie Boy says the darnedest things, but of course you would expect that of someone with the maturity of a ten-year-old. One of his latest whoppers is that President “Obama is the most ignorant president in American history,” afterwards Trumped, as it were, by accusing the President of being “the founder of ISIS,” not even figuratively, but literally. Conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt tried to give him an out by suggesting that surely he meant that Obama effectively allowed ISIS to come into being, but Donnie refused the exit and said that he meant it literally. Apparently he was imagining the President and Hillary in the Situation Room conspiring with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to let Baghdadi be the Operations Chief as long as Obama’s name was at the top of ISIS letterhead. And if Donnie imagined it, it must be true, like the non-existent videos of all those Muslims celebrating in New Jersey after 9/11.

But the “most ignorant president” comment was astonishing in revealing Trump’s horizonless ignorance of American history. Not only do James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson (said to have been taught to read by his wife), and Warren G. Harding pop to mind, but the reputations of all three would skyrocket by comparison if Trump joined their ranks as president. But further, the statement begs for a new word. “Ironic” would be the closest word, but even raised to the third or fourth power it seems pathetically inadequate to describe an abysmally uninformed philistine like Trump calling a former professor of Constitutional law and a man as articulate, reflective, and knowledgeable about world affairs as Obama “ignorant.” Love him or hate him, or something in between, Obama is hardly ignorant. What would be the word to use if, say, a pathological mass murderer called Gandhi or Pope Francis a threat to peace? What word captures that level of titanic irony? So beside all the accurate commentary about Trump’s temperament, his micro-thin skin, his demagoguery, his insecurity, his bullying, his offensiveness, his ostentatiousness, and his total disregard for truth as disqualifiers for the presidency, what about the simple fact that the GOP candidate who considers himself a “genius” and challenged the Muslim mayor of London to an IQ contest is in fact a know-nothing ignoramus?

Meanwhile, as for the fifteen percent of Bernie-istas who said in a recent poll that they would either vote for Trump, a two percent party, or no one at all, what are they smoking? Columnist Joe Klein calls them the dead-enders, comic and former Bernie supporter Sarah Silverman calls them the “ridiculous” Bernie-or-bust people, and I call them the left-wing equivalent of the right-wing Tea Party. They could also be called utopians, and not in a good way. In the same sense that Thomas More’s Utopia literally meant “nowhere,” Bernie himself spoke of “the real world” as a counterpoint to his most avid supporters who feel that they cannot dirty their hands or foul their souls by voting for Hillary, flawed as she may be. They seem to say that Hillary and the real world are imperfect, and thus depraved, and nothing short of utopia—nowhere—will do. But if they choose to sit out the election, or throw away their vote on the two-percenters and zero electoral vote-getters Jill Stein or Gary Johnson, they might consider the consequences of their moral superiority. And a claim of neutrality, the pox-on-both-your-houses defense, won’t wash—they are helping Trump. The catchphrase from my college years, “if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” calls out the utopians. The pox-on-both-your-houses stand means you’re part of the problem.

So, to the utopians, the dead-enders, the Bernie-or-busters, if you don’t vote and Trump is elected, don’t complain. If a Thomas- or Scalia-like hard-right conservative gets on the Supreme Court, don’t complain. If that court hands down decisions you don’t like on abortion, guns, gay rights, voting rights, Obamacare, or a multitude of other issues, don’t complain. If Trump embarrasses the country through his bombast and ignorance, don’t complain. If Trump becomes the arrogant, authoritarian ruler he has already shown signs of being (“I alone can fix it”), don’t complain. If a Republican congress passes objectionable laws that Hillary would have vetoed, don’t complain. If your hourly wages don’t go up, if women’s equality does not advance, if the Trump tax plan favoring people like himself is enacted, if a de-regulated Wall Street leads to another crash, if corporate welfare continues apace, if we get into military conflicts that diplomacy would have prevented, don’t complain. If a hyper-sensitive President Trump uses the bully pulpit to denigrate or otherwise punish private citizens such as journalists who offend him, don’t complain. And, just one more, if a President Trump continues to view man-made climate change as a Chinese “hoax,” don’t complain.

It has become a political cliché to state that any particular election is critical to the history of the country, and it’s true, they all are. But this one really is unique. This is not merely a choice between two contending political persuasions, two visions of America’s future, two individuals of differing ideology but both within the elastic bounds of political competence. Trump, unlike any of his Republican predecessors running for president, is an amoral self-seeker of fundamentally despotic temperament, a crude misogynist, a liar exceeding anything we have seen in decades, a demagogue oblivious to and dismissive of inconvenient facts, a purveyor of conspiratorial innuendo, and a mercurial bully far too uninformed and narcissistic to wield the power of the presidency. I have compared him to Kim Jong-Un, ruler of North Korea, except that as president Trump would have a Constitution, a congress, and a free press to at least partially clip his wings. And so, Bernie-or-busters, you cannot congratulate yourselves for your high principles by sitting this one out. If you have to hold your nose while voting for Hillary, fine, do it. And then—but only if you vote for her—if she does something you don’t like, complain at will.

Justice Antonin Scalia’s passing has led to the President doing his constitutional job of nominating a replacement and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell not doing his. McConnell refuses to even meet with the nominee, Merrick Garland, a centrist respected by both sides. Holding hearings and voting on him, the senate’s constitutional job, are out of the question. In the time-honored and almost magical way that politicians have of making their base, self-serving interests sound like high principle, McConnell very prettily says that deferring the decision until the next president is in office so that “the people have a voice” is the right thing to do. Of course, the people actually did have a voice and they elected Barack Obama to a second four-year term, not a three year term. Naturally McConnell’s pretended principled stand is really raw politics, as he hopes for a Republican to be elected president allowing the next justice to be a Republican nominee. But if a Democrat is elected, all the Republican principle of letting “the people have a voice” will dissolve, and the centrist Garland will likely get a lame duck hearing after all, just before the newly elected Democrat takes office and has the opportunity to nominate someone less satisfactory to Republican sensibilities. Would McConnell be talking about letting the people have a voice if a Republican had almost a year left in office? Of course not.

As the leading voice for the judicial philosophy of deciding cases based on the “original intent” of the Constitution, Justice Antonin Scalia would have to be appalled at McConnell’s “let the people have a voice” hypocrisy concerning the Justice’s replacement. The founders unquestionably intended “advise and consent” to mean precisely that, and doing nothing is not “advising” the President, much less “consenting.” If McConnell and company want to show respect to Justice Scalia, then abide by his oft expressed judicial philosophy and proceed with what the original intent of the Constitution’s framers clearly was: consider the nominee and have the senate give its advice in the form of an actual vote. Senator McConnell, why do you so disrespect the Justice whom you so profess to revere?

Iowa Republican caucus-goers have not even yet donned their sealskin parkas and mukluks and begun their trek across the windswept tundra to vote in their quadrennial confab, but Donald J. Trump has had them all aflutter for months. An innocent civilian cannot suffer through a single news cycle without scurrying for the foxhole under a cannonade of alleged news about the coiffure-challenged candidate, invariably including some choice apercus from  The Donald himself. We have learned, for example, by his own testimony that if he is elected, his presidency will be HUGE, and it will be GREAT, and Mexico will pay for a huge WALL, and EIGHTY PERCENT of killings of whites are committed by blacks, and he will bomb the SHIT out of ISIS, and all you need to know about how everything will be fixed and America will be made great again is that he will use MANAGEMENT, unlike all the STUPID leaders we have today who have been a DISASTER, one in particular. Some have claimed that DJT is really a sub-literate, misogynistic, deranged, xenophobic, bloviating, demagoguing, know-nothing blowhard. But I have to admit that he also has some bad traits, though it would be ungentlemanly of me to enumerate them.

I estimate that around thirty percent of the American population would actually like to see him as president. However, if he somehow were to be the GOP nominee, he would get at least forty-five percent of the vote on the principle of “my Republican, right or wrong.” But of those thirty percent who swoon for him, rejecting all others, a very significant number are closet fascists, the card-carrying Ku Kluxers and John Birchers of an earlier era. (Aside: I was getting a haircut yesterday, with Fox alleged News spewing in the background, and one of the waiting customers, maybe my age, observed that he was waiting for Obama’s State of the Union Address. The barber, whom I’ve long known to be of far right wing and racist persuasion, asked why. The customer replied that he was hoping somebody would “shoot him.” The barber said, “Nobody has the balls to do it.” Yes, I should have changed barbers a long time ago, and had another option availed itself, I would have, but that was it, I’m done. Actually, I did change barbers a long time ago, from the one whose Confederate flag filled a wall. So anyway let’s not pretend they’re not out there, and they’re sure not voting for any Democrat. The customer and the barber’s assumption of white, male, right wing solidarity in front of two other customers is itself telling. Now I guess I’ll be getting my hair “styled.”)

Many of the thirty percent are high school educated (or less) white males who consider themselves victimized by Obama-the-born-in-Africa-Muslim, the press, the government in general, and now Hillary and her adorers. And in their often self-pitying and angry world view, they are surrounded on all sides by a liberal or merely moderate cultural onslaught, and Trump is the blond Galahad come to slay their oppressors. Even more so than most politicians, DJT offers his admirers pabulum of intellectually digestible simplicity instead of nuance and complexity, a binary world of strong vs. weak, good vs. evil, smart vs. stupid, and especially us vs. them. The essential qualities of a president for the swooners are bombast, overweening vanity, political inexperience, a delight in offending, and a willingness to utter whoppers that they consider to be inconvenient truths—e.g., Mexicans are rapists, our leaders are stupid, Muslims were celebrating 9/11 in Jersey City—statements which would be anathema to ordinary politicians even if they were true.

In particular all his supporters love his unwillingness to apologize or admit error about anything, even things on which they know him to be wrong. Were he to apologize or admit he might have been wrong about something—say, for example, mocking McCain’s legitimate war hero status—it would deflate his “brand” and expose a weakness that they cannot countenance. After all, strength means never having to say you’re sorry, and one should never let an annoying fact or a truth get in the way of a good storyline. Feeling the love, DJT has become an even greater bully than he was on The Apprentice, a show which thrived to the extent that it did because of his bullying, tough-guy tactics. His vast but terribly fragile ego cannot abide criticism, so mockery—the McCain charge, the blood coming out of Megan Kelly’s “wherever,” his spastic shaking to mock a journalist with a disability—becomes his weapon of choice, one that enraptures his worshipping fans though it may discomfit the few not quite yet fully in the fold. In all, it is more than a little possible to see comparisons to National Socialism in his candidacy: his venomous and theatrical screeds are offered as speeches; his stoking of fears of Muslims and Mexicans is reminiscent of Hitler’s scapegoating Jews; and his observation after a heckler was beaten and kicked at one of his rallies that “maybe he should have been roughed up” recalls the Brownshirts in sentiment if not in scale.

If The Donald were somehow actually elected, it would be the cognitive equivalent of installing a whiny nine-year-old in the Oval Office, with a few loaded assault rifles lying around on the desk and sofa. Surely nothing could go wrong. America would have its very own Kim Jong-un, with the added benefit of their dueling hairstyles. After a few weeks of President Trump, the reputations of Millard Fillmore, Warren G. Harding, and Herbert Hoover would skyrocket by comparison. He would be shocked by the discovery that the country actually has a constitution, and that his pronunciamentos, whims, and imprecations were subject to congressional scrutiny. Perhaps fortunately for him, his rabid supporters do not appear to have the numbers to elect him, thus saving him the disorienting revelations that he could not be Dictator of the United States and that realities and facts matter. As president, he would be confronted with the impossible drudgery, at least for him, of having to govern, as well as the appalling realization that actually being president is not at all fun like the improvisational joys and glories of campaigning for it. Like Sarah Palin as Alaska governor, he might actually quit. Of course the hurdle of getting elected in the first place is raised even higher by the enigma of DJT’s actual birthplace. Rumors have abounded for months that he was not, in fact, born in Queens, New York in 1946 as he claims, but rather in the small village of Dystopia, Vulgaria, to minor aristocracy in that benighted eastern European nation. If true, as a native Vulgarian, he would not be constitutionally qualified to serve as president. Whether such rumors can withstand media scrutiny remains to be seen, but what is unequivocally true is that so far he has never made public his birth certificate.

None of this is to say that I am a big Hillary fan. I’ll certainly vote for her, but I have no affection for her prevarications and occasional outright lies. Here is a little-known one, reported by now deceased critic-at-large Christopher Hitchens in his book And Yet . . . . He noted that in a trip to Asia some time ago, Ms. Clinton met mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary, and “ever ready to milk the moment,” she told him that her mother had named her after him. How could she be foolish enough to say such a thing? She was born in 1947, and Sir Edmund was an unknown until the Everest climb in 1953. Hillary, do your math homework! Her spokeswoman Jennifer Hanley acknowledged in 2006 that it was not true, but observed that “It was a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter, to great results I might add.” OK, it’s just a tiny obsequious lie, sort of like Paul Ryan’s tiny self-aggrandizing one that he had run a sub-three hour marathon. But then there was also the “running under sniper fire” one in Tuzla, Bosnia in 1996. Still, I’ll take Hillary over any of the Republicans, though Kasich seems almost honest and reasonable. Of course he doesn’t have a chance. Cruz is cagily holding fire on DJT, hoping for something from him that would be so bizarre or offensive as to presage a fall, allowing Cruz to rush into the breech and claim the presumably disillusioned Trump fantasists. Rubio poses as a moderate conservative, a pose which, compared to Cruz, may almost be true. Meanwhile Carson wilts, Christie scratches, Jeb pleads, and Fiorina snarls.

The funniest line of the campaign so far came from now departed and greatly unlamented Bobby Jindal, who, when informed that The Donald claimed the Bible as his favorite book, retorted that that could not possibly be true as Trump himself was not mentioned anywhere in it. But who knows, maybe The Donald got into all the animal sacrifice stuff. As for the Democrats, O’Malley, like the lesser Republicans, can be dismissed as a cipher scrounging for a footnote in the history books or maybe a gig as a talk show host. Meanwhile Sanders nips at Hillary’s sniper-dodging heels by advocating mostly reasonable and fair policies that even Democratic congressmen and senators would scorn to entertain, like raising taxes on the wealthy.

Several months ago it was easy to dismiss Trump as a gasbag mountebank. He’s still that, but the presumed self-destruct button that he was always on the verge of pushing has now been pushed a few dozen times and seems to be out of order. The only possible unpardonable gaffes for him among the true believers at this point would be a sudden embrace of some hint of gun control or a confession of atheism. The fact that his corporations have filed for bankruptcy four times has apparently elevated his economic prowess; his ignorance of what the nuclear triad is enhances his commander-in-chief bona fides; his three marriages confirm his family values; his sweet talk about Vladimir Putin burnishes his foreign policy cred. The lemmings live in a topsy-turvy world, where up is down and black is white. Let’s just hope there are not enough of them to lead us all over the cliff next November.

A seminal moment occurred on June 17 when twenty-one year old Dylann Roof entered a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, sat with a Wednesday Bible study group for about an hour, then pulled out a gun and proceeded to shoot nine of them to death. Roof’s flagrant white supremacist views, as seen in photos of him with a gun and a Confederate flag, as well as his stated desire to start a race war, have brought to new life a vigorous debate about the Confederate flag, and particularly its display by government bodies on public property. South Carolina Republican Governor Nikki Haley bravely declared that it should come down from the Capitol grounds. The legislature, after beating down some foot-dragging amendments, approved, and on July 10 the flag was officially lowered to widespread cheers and moved to a museum. Even the flagpole and fencing were removed. Meanwhile Mississippi legislators seem content to let the fervor cool as time passes, knowing that having the only state flag that contains, in its upper left corner, the entire Confederate flag puts Mississippi’s flag under an unwelcome glare.

The question of whether the Stars and Bars should continue to fly on Southern states’ public properties pits Southern ultra-conservative ideologues claiming to defend their “heritage” against progressives, moderate Republicans, and especially black Americans, all of whom know, when all is said and done, that the flag really is about white supremacy. The likelihood that few flag supporters could name a single relative in the Civil War severely undermines the heritagers’ claims of ancestral affection and protestations of racial good will. A realtor friend of mine told me a few years ago that when a house would become available for sale in a white area, some neighbors would put up a Confederate flag to deter possible black buyers. It was unequivocally not about “heritage.” Both the white homeowners and any potential black buyers knew exactly what that flag meant: blacks audacious enough to buy would be entering hostile territory.

The flag’s meanings are multi-layered, but heritage is the least of them. “Heritage” is the benign cover for the many malign realities. Fueling the white supremacist meaning, the flag is a statement of defiance against the great accumulated stockpile of right wing Southern white grievances—a black president, civil rights, black advancement and accomplishment, the daily necessity of interaction with black people on an equal basis, or, worse, in positions of authority, all of which presumably come at the heritagers’ aggrieved expense. So the flag is their proud statement of defiance against all of that.

It is not coincidence that the state of South Carolina did not raise the flag at its capitol until 1962, as the state’s racist senator Strom Thurmond railed against civil rights, and the state legislature gloried in thumbing its collective nose at the civil rights-loving federal government and Yankee interference with the “Southern way of life.” Yankees, claim the heritagers, have been interfering with that way of life since its apogee in the antebellum years, and the war, symbolized by the Confederate battle flag, was the glorious scream of defiance to end that Northern interference. In fact, the heritage actually being defended is the infamy of a treasonous revolt against the United States, a revolt costing over 600,000 souls and innumerable limbs and traumatized lives. The revolt’s sole purpose, without which it would not have happened, was to preserve America’s original and most shameful sin. That is the real heritage represented by the flag—hatred and violent defiance of a government that would end the South’s presumed right to own, exploit, torture, and rape other human beings.

Southern heritage, of which I too am a part, is already well represented at county courthouses across the South. Statues and monuments to the Confederate dead adorn courthouse lawns, and I have no heavy brief against that. The county I live in, Forrest County, Mississippi, is named after the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Unfortunate, but so be it. The flag, though, is another matter. Statues and monuments to war dead really do reflect heritage, and I can respect that in the same way I can respect, say, actual German war dead. But the flag is not about those real humans dying in a morally contemptible cause, but rather about present day grievance and message-sending. I can respect my great, great grandfather and Civil War veteran Larkin Creech without retreating into the suspect sentimentality of “heritage,” without approving the morally bankrupt cause for which he fought, and without waving an inflammatory flag whose current real meaning we all know.

Notes: (1) The new Mississippi flag eliminated the Confederate flag from its upper corner and was made official in January 2021. (2) The above was written almost five years before the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman, and the worldwide multi-racial uprising in defense of the Black Lives Matter movement that followed. Protests for BLM occurred across the world, including here in Hattiesburg–a protest Val and I would have joined, but, given our fairly rigorous safety precautions due to the pandemic so far, we reluctantly decided against. In the above blog, I accepted the presence of memorials to Confederate war dead as a legitimate heritage statement, however contemptible the cause. I also accepted the name of our county, Forrest, named after the founder of the Ku Klux Klan–“unfortunate, but so be it.” But the beating heart of both is a barely camouflaged, morally indefensible apologia for a slavocracy. Attitudes can change. Mine have. I was wrong. June 23, 2020.

The spring of the year preceding a presidential election has arrived, and again we are entertained with the quadrennial parade of professional pifflemongers to the steppes of Iowa, a state inebriated by the hypothesis that it alone has the wit and discernment to distinguish the genuine pretenders from the merely egomaniacal. Iowa takes for granted its sagacity in the matter of judging cows and would-be presidents at state fairs, so other states wishing to wrest control of Iowa’s perpetual first-in-the-nation status would do well to acknowledge the bucolic charms of Iowan prairie life and the political wisdom they invariably confer. And so every four years—but nary a one in between—the lowing herds of nostrum peddlers and gasbags obtrude themselves on proud Iowa, sip coffee with the salt of the earth in Mama’s Café, order up a plate of hotcakes and corn syrup, and nod earnestly as local boy Billy Bob dilates on geopolitical conundrums and especially the need for the ethanol subsidy. Then it’s back on the bus and down the straight, flat road. Collectively they form a claque of traveling grovelers, mountebanks, and dancing bears whose bedrock convictions sway with the prevailing winds and the vagaries of the particular audience. Who doesn’t love a great circus, especially the clowns?

It is such a shame that the Mississippi legislature chooses to invent problems that do not exist, while ignoring so many that do. With the Senate’s unanimous approval of the “religious freedom” bill protecting businesses from having to trade with people they think might be gay, the Senate manages in one stroke to align itself with the state-sponsored racial discrimination of half a century ago, invite economic retribution, violate the equal accommodations component of the Civil Rights Act, and incidentally do nothing to enhance religious freedom—all while very effectively illustrating Mark Twain’s observation that “fleas can be taught nearly anything that a Congressman can.” Where are the plaintiffs complaining that their religious liberty has been compromised? None. Zero. Nada.

If the legislature is truly concerned with religious liberty, it might start with amending the Mississippi Constitution, which, in Article 14, Section 265, states that “No person who denies the existence of a Supreme Being shall hold office in this state.” In effect, while the legislature bucks and brays about what it considers religious freedom, we have in fact an officially theocratic state, where religious belief is virtually a constitutional requirement for elected office. In fairness, there is a rhetorical distinction between a requirement to affirm the existence of a Supreme Being, which the Constitution does not do, and a prohibition of denying the existence of a Supreme Being, which the Constitution does do. But the intent of the actual language (which presumably violates freedom of speech) is so close to saying that candidates for office must be believers that the distinction almost vanishes to a point of merger. There is no freedom to state that one does not believe, or even to state that one has no opinion. To be meaningful, religious freedom cannot just be a matter of having the freedom to choose among theistic offerings; it must also embrace the right not to believe. Thus the current “religious freedom” legislation, rooted in anti-homosexual sentiment, is a farrago of hypocrisy, mean-spiritedness, petulance, ignorance, pandering, and grandstanding—full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Or at least nothing worthy of a legislature supposedly smarter than fleas.

The formula for polemical writing typically advises beginning with acknowledgments of the valid or at least arguable points of the other side. These acknowledgments are typically rather perfunctory, though well meant. But I really mean them: any targeting by the IRS of a group solely on the basis of political ideology, while giving a pass to groups with the opposite ideology, is wrong. Richard Nixon should not have done it when he sought to have the IRS target specific individuals known in his circle as his enemies list. The IRS should not have implied that the NAACP was treading on dangerous ground relative to its tax-exempt status in George W. Bush’s administration, nor should it have attempted to intimidate a church that had a speaker—not a church employee—advocating some political point not friendly to the Bush administration. The Nixon case had nothing to do with tax-exempt, non-profit status, unlike the Bush cases and now the Obama case.

I remember no particular outrage in either of the Bush cases. Now, however, we have a full-blown ersatz scandal, with both Republicans and Democrats preening in high dudgeon. But there are some specifics to this case that I have heard nowhere else other than from Lawrence O’Donnell’s show, The Last Word. These include: (a) the actual law states that organizations should be denied tax-exempt status unless their activities are “exclusively” devoted to “social welfare” and thus not even a little bit political; and (b) as early as 1959 the IRS essentially ignored the law Congress wrote and passed, and substituted the word primarily for Congress’s exclusively. That one change in wording means that organizations which claim that their primary purpose is social welfare, but which allow up to 49% of their purpose to be devoted to political advocacy, would be approved for tax-exempt status. But by the law, as actually written, the IRS could not approve their tax-exempt status since any political activity would bar that status being granted. So, by law, only an organization that is exclusively a social welfare organization—which is to say, an organization without any political action activity at all—can be granted tax-exempt status.

Democrat Carl Levin in 1994 inquired of the IRS about the use of these two mutually exclusive terms, exclusively and primarily. The IRS replied in a letter obtained by O’Donnell that the IRS interpreted the word exclusively to mean primarily. This is the point that should make us mad with the IRS—that somewhere, at least by 1959, it was violating the law by rendering one critical word (exclusively) in the law null and void, and all on its own substituting for that word another word (primarily) that was totally incompatible with the word Congress wrote. The difference between exclusively and primarily is the difference between dog and cat or often and never—they are not exactly opposites, but they do not overlap since they each exclude the other. They are not subject to possible misinterpretation by being roughly synonymous like sometimes and occasionally. They mean very different things, and the IRS had no business changing the meaning of the law by changing those words. The IRS doesn’t tell us that we should “primarily” or generally not cheat on our taxes, but that we should “exclusively” or never cheat on our taxes. They would not be happy if we “primarily” didn’t cheat. God didn’t tell Adam and Eve to try not to eat the apple, or not to eat much of it, or not to eat it unless it looked like it was about to rot. He told them, quite unambiguously, Don’t eat the apple. There was no room for interpretation. When the IRS changed that one word, they committed their original sin.

So since the IRS should all along have been following the law and rejecting applications for non-profit, tax-exempt status for groups engaged in any political activity at all, it was actually right to be questioning or rejecting applications for groups with Tea Party in the name, just as it would have been right had it received applications from groups with Democratic Party, Republican Party, Communist Party or other groups who are obviously engaged in politics, and not just primarily, but exclusively. But even by the lesser standard of the word primarily, they should have been rejected, or at least questioned, since an organization which included in its name a well-known political group could reasonably be assumed to be primarily devoted to political activity rather than social welfare. What we don’t know is how many liberal groups with red flag words in their names were applying and, equally important, being accepted for tax-exempt status. We do know that many conservative groups were applying, but without knowing about the number of liberal groups applying and being approved, the notion of “targeting” is itself misplaced. And if the number applying is small, then the word targeting is simply wrong. You just can’t compare fifty to two. We don’t know the numbers, and we should know them before passing judgment. If, on the other hand, the fictitious Tea Party for American Progress and many similarly named groups were being stalled or rejected, while a roughly equal number of the equally fictitious Radical Leftists for Radical Change and other similarly named groups were not, then we have targeting. Either way, it is reasonable to infer orientation from such names. They tell us their purpose; we know what Tea Party means these days, just as we know what Occupy Wall Street means. When the name itself bespeaks political action, whether left or right, the IRS employees asking for more information before granting tax-exempt status were not stalling but doing their job. And their boss, Ms. Lerner, was apparently doing hers. Nor should we forget that many conservative Republicans would love to see the IRS dismantled, so it seems no huge stretch to conclude that many conservative groups took the opportunity to exploit the IRS misinterpretation of the law that allowed them to conduct political fund-raising and advocacy behind a charade of “primarily” social welfare fronts, all while mooning the very organization they loathe. By contrast, and presuming their applications were comparatively few in number, liberal groups were either too honest or too dumb to exploit that same misinterpretation.

So the IRS is guilty, but not of what it is currently being accused. It is guilty of changing the meaning of the law decades ago, and continuing to ignore the original meaning to this day with impunity. I have not heard a single legislator berate the IRS because of that. Why has no Congressman hurled thunderbolts at the IRS for unilaterally changing the law that Congress itself wrote and passed? That change has led us to this: judgment calls as to what is 49% political and what is 51% political. Returning to the law as written, with that unambiguous word exclusively, would get us away from that by eliminating from tax-exempt status any group doing any politics at all. In so doing, it probably would make most Americans happier knowing that the tax system is not effectively subsidizing numerous political groups whether of the left or the right.

Perennial blowhard Rush Limbaugh bewails the state of American democracy, given its recent re-election of a moderately liberal black man—a deplorable state of affairs due, in Mr. Limbaugh’s view, to the empty-headed hordes of “low information voters.” These poor saps are, by right wing definition, liberal voters, or even those with middle-of-the-road political dispositions. Certainly any Obama voter must ipso facto be low information, and almost any supporter of a Democrat. But Limbaugh is wrong forty-two percent of the time, and he lies fifty-eight percent of the time, which means that his caterwauling should be ignored one hundred percent of the time.

A more accurate definition of a low information voter is the modern descendant of a species discovered by H. L. Mencken: the knuckle-dragging boobus americanus, who, squatting beside the radio, listens raptly to Limbaugh’s mummery and mistakes the sputum dribbling from his mouth as actual reality. This pitiable cretin bears, as Mencken once noted in a slightly different context, “all the stigmata of inferiority—moral certainty, cruelty, suspicion of ideas, fear.” In other words, the true low information voter is the Limbaugh fan, first cousin to Faulkner’s Flem Snopes, but even further debauched. In addition to the stigmata, and since reality is an insufficient explanation for the menacing forces presumed to be surrounding him, Rush’s typical listener leaps to conspiracy theories, filters out any tincture of rationality, and sees himself as the hapless and innocent victim of the vast and bellicose armies of radical leftists seeking to dispossess him of his guns and his lesser constitutional freedoms. Not that he has ever read the Constitution or would actually agree with any of its sentiments, other than the second amendment. In short, he is as ignorant as a housefly. This constellation of unenviable traits makes him the perfect gull for Rush, who has slopped at the trough of public stupidity and paranoia for years and made a fine living at it. Rush’s overriding message is akin to a gigantic, engorged, suppurating boil on the end of his nose waiting for the scalpel, and when its blade pricks, the fetid ejecta splatters over all of those within earshot, anointing them with his imbecilities and lies, and leaving them feeling as if they have been bathed by John the Baptist himself. But in truth, their low information status has just been lowered into negative digits, their fragile hold on reality further loosened, their panic heightened, and their fact-free anger stoked. They rush, so to speak, headlong into the darkness, girded for the Apocalypse, oblivious.