The Grand Old Party of Sedition

News outlets are now reporting that about 140 Republicans in the House of Representatives and at least 12 GOP senators, who were voted in by a democratic form of government and who swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States, plan to defy the will of the people and object to the 2020 election results on Jan. 6. Without evidence, and parroting one of the most dishonest presidents in the history of the nation, they claim that Joe Biden’s victory was fraudulent.

The election results have been affirmed by election officials, state governors, lower court judges and the Supreme Court. No significant malfeasance has taken place. Yet, in a desperate and undemocratic attempt to apparently stage a coup and reseat Trump, Sen. Josh Hawley will raise a complaint and force both houses of Congress to take a vote on the election. To their credit, Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, with whom I agree on almost nothing, and Sen. Ben Sasse voiced their strong dissent in going through with the measure.

According to Sasse:

The president and his allies are playing with fire. They have been asking — first the courts, then state legislatures, now the Congress — to overturn the results of a presidential election. They have unsuccessfully called on judges and are now calling on federal officeholders to invalidate millions and millions of votes. If you make big claims, you had better have the evidence. But the president doesn’t and neither do the institutional arsonist members of Congress who will object to the Electoral College vote.

Likewise, Sen. Mitt Romney called the efforts of his Republican colleagues “madness.”

The other word for it, of course, is sedition. Here is how the Constitution defines it:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress … who … having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same (.)

As this article from The Week outlines, the voting process, which has remained unchanged election after election, confirmed, after holding the line against all sorts of nefarious lawsuits and unfounded claims of fraud, that Biden won the presidency in a fair election both by the popular vote and in the Electoral College. Few people on the left or right disagree that Trump and Republicans did not have the right to question the results. They certainly did. But the results have been vetted over and over, and Trump lost handily.

To now float a bunch of conspiracy theories in the face of no substantive proof that any of them carry any weight whatsoever is a disgrace to Congress, our government, our nation and the people who went out of their way, in the throes of a pandemic, no less, to have their voices mean something, to participate in their greatest right as an American citizen. To have all of that put into question because Trump and his lackeys in Congress are sore losers and can’t bear to cede power to a competent administration, represents failure failure as human beings and failure to be keepers of the democracy for which they pledged allegiance.

Once the fiasco is done next week, the remaining members of Congress who still believe in the process actually have the right, as The Week has said, to “convene a traitor-free Congress” and to prevent these seditious men and women from taking their seats. I don’t believe that will actually happen, but make no mistake, they don’t deserve to hold the seats for which they were elected, and they don’t deserve to stand as representatives of this democracy.

Whatever happens, their names should be plastered all over the Internet so that in two or four years when their names are on the ballots again, voters can remember that when they had a chance to stand up for democracy, they stood against it, and they stood against the clear and unequivocal will of the American people.

Here are all the names that have been released thus far, etched and cached online for all to see:

U.S. Senate

U.S. House of Representatives

  • Rep. Mo Brooks (Alabama)
  • Rep. Jeff Van Drew (New Jersey)
  • Rep. Joe Wilson (South Carolina)
  • Rep.-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene (Georgia)
  • Rep.-elect Madison Cawthorn (North Carolina)
  • Rep.-elect Lauren Boebert (Colorado)
  • Rep.-elect Diana Harshbarger (Tennessee)
  • Rep. Brian Babin (Texas)
  • Rep. Andy Biggs (Arizona)
  • Rep. Ted Budd (North Carolina)
  • Rep.-elect Jerry Carl (Alabama)
  • Rep.-elect Andrew Clyde (Georgia)
  • Rep.-elect Byron Donalds (Florida)
  • Rep. Jeff Duncan (South Carolina)
  • Rep. Matt Gaetz (Florida)
  • Rep. Louie Gohmert (Texas)
  • Rep.-elect Bob Good (Virginia)
  • Rep. Lance Gooden (Texas)
  • Rep. Paul Gosar (Arizona)
  • Rep. Mark Green (Tennessee)
  • Rep.-elect Yvette Herrell (New Mexico)
  • Rep. Jody Hice (Georgia)
  • Rep. Clay Higgins (Louisiana)
  • Rep.-elect Ronny Jackson (Texas)
  • Rep. John Joyce (Pennsylvania)
  • Rep. Fred Keller (Pennsylvania)
  • Rep. Mike Kelly (Pennsylvania)
  • Rep. Dan Meuser (Pennsylvania)
  • Rep.-elect Barry Moore (Alabama)
  • Rep. Ralph Norman (South Carolina)
  • Rep.-elect Burgess Owens (Utah)
  • Rep. Scott Perry (Pennsylvania)
  • Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (Pennsylvania)
  • Rep. Lloyd Smucker (Pennsylvania)

Conservatism and the History of Voter Suppression in America

“State of Distress” by DeviantArt user cskelm.

President Donald Trump’s audacity apparently knows no bounds.

In a recent tweet, he threatened to withhold federal funding, amid a global pandemic no less, if Michigan did not cease its call to send out mail-in ballots to all of its 7.7 million residents so that, in the words of Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, “no Michigander has to choose between their health and their right to vote.”

The first thing that needs to be said is that, even if Trump doesn’t like the decision — it was issued from a Democrat, so, of course, it would raise his ire — there is nothing illegal about a state mailing out absentee ballots to its own residents. That is lie No. 1. In 2018, Michigan voters approved a “no excuse” constitutional amendment to allow any resident to apply for an absentee ballot for any reason.

Trump’s tweet, which has been liked by more than 120,000 people at present, includes two other falsehoods.

Lie No. 2 is that Michigan’s move has anything at all to do with an attempt at voter fraud. Trump has pushed this dishonest claim repeatedly, but it’s well-documented at this point that, while voting in person is obviously more secure than mail-in ballots, cases of absentee fraud have been few and far between. Michigan’s decision is about ensuring that people stay safe during the virus outbreak while being allowed to participate in one of this nation’s most cherished, and important, democratic processes.

Trump also suggested that he has the power to withhold state funding. He almost certainly does not. That might have been true if this was an authoritative regime, and I’m sure some of the people in power would like to quietly move us in that direction and give Trump all manner of unconstitutional privileges, but here in this democracy, the executive can’t simply invent powers. As The New York Times notes, the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, issued under President Richard Nixon, requires the chief executive to get approval from Congress before any money is withheld. In any case, a lot of the recently approved funding to states has already been released.

Trump also threatened, in a similar fashion, to withhold money from Nevada.

Cutting a state’s funding because they don’t do your bidding would be illegal. By threatening to do so, as Greg Sargent, with The Washington Post said, the president is “abusing his office and betraying the national interest.” Not only would Trump’s threat be illegal if put into action, it’s also undemocratic. Not that either of these bother the president.

Trump knows that in the upcoming election, he might be in trouble in Michigan. Attempts to prevent more people from voting is a tried and true part of the GOP toolkit. Current conservative strategies for limiting votes or asserting more influence in elections, including new restrictive laws and gerrymandering, are certainly more subtle in the 21st century than they were in the 19th and 20th centuries, but they are designed to achieve the same result. Republicans, and conservatives throughout American history, have long known that if they can somehow suppress votes, they have a better chance of winning. And why is that? Because conservatives have historically protected the interests of the few — the privileged and the well-connected (and usually white) — to the detriment of the many, including blue collar workers, immigrants, low-income families and those in the inner city.

Trump and his Republican cohorts know very well that the more they can suppress certain voters, the better chance they have of remaining in power. The president even admitted it. During an episode of “Fox and Friends” on Fox News, Trump was talking about measures that were proposed by Democrats to increase the number of people who could vote during the pandemic:

“The things they had in there were crazy. They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

And in November 2019, Justin Clark, one of Trump’s 2020 election advisors, had this to say in leaked audio captured by a liberal advocacy group:

Traditionally, it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes in places. …

Let’s start protecting our voters (regarding Election Day monitoring of polling places). We know where they are … Let’s start playing offense a little bit. That’s what you’re going to see in 2020. It’s going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program.

Clark claims this was taken out of context and that he was talking about historic, false allegations that the Republican Party suppresses votes — although the line, “let’s start playing offense” belies this argument — but when you actually do look at the historical record of how the conservative party in America actually is incontrovertibly guilty of widespread corruption at the ballot box, it becomes difficult to believe the president or anyone else in the Republican Party that their intentions are benevolent and on the up and up.

Slow Progress

Before the 15th Amendment became law, of course, the right to vote was more or less limited to white people who owned a certain amount of property. In the early 19th century, this began to change as restrictions were loosened in certain states. The constitutional amendment, ratified in February 1870, only allowed black men to vote. Black folks almost exclusively voted for the Republican Party, which was, crucially, the more liberal party in American politics at the time, while the conservatives mainly inhabited the Democratic Party. These dynamics didn’t begin to shift until around the year 1900 when “The Great Commoner” William Jennings Bryant, a Democrat, began to champion increased economic equality and railed against the robber baron class. Although he would later take an anti-Darwin, anti-intellectual stance and is known to many atheists and secular humanists mainly as a fundamentalist Christian, he set in motion the populist left movement en route to Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” platform, which was a kind precursor to Lyndon Baines Johnson’s “Great Society” programs of the 1960s.

But back in the 1870s with the passage of the 15th Amendment, the issue of voting rights for black people was far from settled. Politicians and former slaveholders in the South, who were reeling economically from the devastating effects of war and attempting to set up a form of slavery by a different name, Reconstruction began to take shape. Some black folks did get to vote, and some members of the black community even got elected to state and federal offices, but in many cases in the South, literacy tests and poll taxes were introduced as an attempt to control the numbers of African Americans who could vote. Groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camellia were formed to assert white influence in the nation and intimidate blacks and their supporters from participation in democracy and public life. [efn_note]”The Volume Library,” Volume II, Page 2239.[/efn_note]

Interestingly, three prominent Southern statesmen, Lucius Lamar in Mississippi, Wade Hampton in South Carolina and Alexander Stephens, the former vice president of the Confederacy, said in a public statement that denying black people the right to vote was “not only impossible but undesired,” according to “Origins of the New South” by C. Vann Woodward. Whether it is actually true or not, Hampton claimed to be the “first man at (sic) the South” to support enfranchisement for black folks, and went so far as to say that the black man, “naturally allies himself with the more conservative of the whites.” Lamar defended black voting rights and supported a plan to provide federal dollars to local schools “emphasizing the benefits for former slaves,” according to The Mississippi Encyclopedia. [efn_note]”Origins of the New South,” C. Vann Woodward, 1951, Page 321.[/efn_note] [efn_note]”The Mississippi Encyclopedia,” 2017, Page 704.[/efn_note] [efn_note]”Black Reconstruction in America,” W.E.B. Dubois, 1935, Page 443.[/efn_note]

But as Woodward notes, “The century had scarcely ended, however, before the prophecies of these statesmen were overturned throughout the South” as state after state rolled out disenfranchisement provisions through poll taxes and “other devices.”

That would largely remain the situation on voting rights until passage of the 19th amendment to the Constitution when women got the vote.

Full Access?

Probably seeing the writing on the wall and how the arc of history was progressing up to that point, and that they were, in fact, losing, white leaders in the South became even more committed to restricting access to the voting booth for black people, and thus, we have the marches, sit-ins and the battle for rights that ensued in towns like Selma, Miss., where civil rights supporters were hosed and beaten with clubs for daring to challenge the status quo. The crucial moment, 100 years after ratification of the 15th amendment, came with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, presumably giving black folks full access to the ballot box in practice, not just in theory. According to the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the bill was important to prevent some of the more egregious voter suppression offenses.

(The act) included provisions that required states and local jurisdictions with a historical pattern of suppressing voting rights based on race to submit changes in their election laws to the U.S. Justice Department for approval (or “preclearance”). In the ensuing decades, the preclearance provisions proved to be a remarkably effective means of discouraging state and local officials from erecting new barriers to voting, stopping the most egregious policies from going forward, and providing communities and civil rights advocates with advance notice of proposed changes that might suppress the vote.

In the ensuing years, young people were able to vote and new protections were put into place for foreign-language speakers and disabled people.

Undermining Democracy

Although both the Democratic and Republican parties have used the tool of redistricting to their political advantage at various times, it has consistently been the conservatives who have sought to strike a blow for voting rights and make it restrictive for more people to make their voices heard.

The blow came with blunt force in 2013 when the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision and with a conservative majority, removed the “preclearance” provision of the Voting Rights Act, to which liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg remarked, “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” The Atlantic said this decision “set the stage for a new era of white hegemony.”

The Voting Rights Act was only a starting point that was, itself, shamefully, more than 100 years in the making. As Trump is currently predicted to lose the popular vote once again, according to NBC News, we should probably expect more crowing from Trump and Co. about election fraud and additional methods, subtle as they may be, to try to prevent access to the ballot box.

The president may be called a “populist,” but little about the conservative platform or policies suggest that the party cares one whit about the will or interests of the people. They care about obtaining and retaining power. They can more effectively do that by undermining enfranchisement, which in turn, undermines democracy.

[Artwork credit: “State of Distress” by DeviantArt user cskelm.]

Why I’m not celebrating July Fourth

Not to rain on all the parades and fireworks, but I honestly don’t know what it is we’re supposed to be celebrating.

We are being led by the most incompetent, cruelest administration since Andrew Jackson and Co. shipped out the Native Americans. We elected Donald Trump into office via a democratic process after he got finished insulting nearly every voting bloc in the nation, including blacks, Hispanics, women and the disabled.

We are now a nation that treats Hispanics at the border — innocent people who are seeking opportunity and a better life for their families and away from gang violence, drugs and poverty — like common thugs and criminals, although illegal immigration itself is just a misdemeanor.

We are now a nation that castigates grown men for exercising their right to protest police violence against unarmed black people, leading to an asinine decree from the NFL that received gleeful support from the dear leader.

We have, indirectly or otherwise, handed the regressive party, the GOP, the reins to all three branches of government, the same party that illegally refused to consider Barack Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court — Merrick Garland was a centrist by the way — and now that Mitch McConnell is most likely going to go against his own rule and rush through Donald Trump’s pick, the party is threatening to rollback decades of hard-won progress on equal rights before the next election.

The same party that spent eight whole years, not legislating or leading, of course, but cock-blocking everything Obama tried to do purely out of bitterness and spite. The same party that left thousands of people, mostly black folks, high and dry in New Orleans. The same party that led us to war against Iraq under false pretenses. The same party that married itself to the Moral Majority, corrupt corporations, Big Pharma, the coal industry and the gun lobby.

The same party that is currently doing little to improve life for Americans, and in fact, is making it worse in most sectors, amid ongoing concerns in health care, immigration, the environment, the national debt — the highest its ever been under leadership of the self-proclaimed “fiscally conservative” party or under any other administration — and the general contempt Trump has fostered for us the world over, except, of course, in Russia and North Korea.

Our GOP-led Congress is largely bought and paid for by the NRA. We are a nation that, despite how many children die from loons with guns year after year, does absolutely nothing about the problem, as people cry about their precious Second Amendment rights — no matter that the amendment was written in the fucking 18th century when the founders could not have anticipated the widespread proliferation of machine guns and weapons of war in civil society.

Once claiming to be a man of principle, our House Speaker, Paul Ryan, has suddenly gone silent, as his party runs roughshod over people’s rights, wages war on the media and refuses to criticize Trump for his hundreds of lies, half-truths and bullying tactics.

Trump’s rise to power and charged rhetoric has stirred the base into a frenzy of outright bigotry and nationalism. No longer relegated to some corner of their mother’s basement and shamed into the darkness by the march of progress, these people are now out and proud about their insufferable intolerance. They need to crawl back into the cellar.

As a general statement, the Democrats are weak-kneed, aren’t that much better than the GOP and have their own problems kowtowing to corporations and special interests. The party shamelessly and purposefully derailed Bernie Sanders’ campaign in favor of Hillary, who was too contentious a figure to win anyway, and caused its own rift between mainstream liberals and the progressives, thus paving the way for someone like Trump to pick up the far-right populist mantel of the old Tea Party, although his followers were too duped to realize they were voting against their own vested interests.

The more Trump screws up, the more reasons we have to be optimistic that a new guard will be voted into Congress, but like most things, it will probably get worse before it gets better. This is serious business, and we have little cause for celebration.

I wonder at what point — after we cede more of our rights; dismantle health care; continue the war against the media and free speech; refuse to heed the warnings of scientists about climate change and deny the truth of global warming; erode the wall between church and state; make life harder for blacks, women, Hispanics, and low-income Americans; and keep flirting with nationalism and fascism — will we simply get fed up with the clown running the circus and the know-nothings who enable him?

We have lost the plot, brothers and sisters, and I think we should put down the hot dogs and beer for a few minutes today and take a long, sobering look inward.

[Image credit: “You’re Doing It Wrong” by DeviantArt user pagit.]

Pruitt as microcosm of the GOP

This post can be read as a follow-up to “Heil to the Drumpf.”

***

Scott Pruitt, like so many other recent nominees to President Donald Trump’s cabinet — easily the most unqualified set of selections in American history — simply isn’t fit to govern in the capacity he has been chosen. Not only is he unfit, he holds views that are antithetical to the EPA’s mission of protecting human well-being by being good stewards of our environmental resources and guarding against pollution and unregulated, potentially hazardous real estate and commercial development.

Lowered expectations

trumps-cabinet

Consider some of his vastly more experienced predecessors likewise nominated by Republican presidents (“acting” administrators not included):

  • Russell Train (1973-77): Train was founder of the Wildlife Leadership Foundation, first vice president of the World Wildlife Fund and president of The Conservation Foundation. Before being named as EPA director under President Richard Nixon’s, and later serving under Gerald Ford when Nixon resigned, he was under secretary of the Department of Interior, and between 1970-73, he headed up the Council on Environmental Quality. According to The New York Times, “Mr. Train developed the idea of establishing the Council on Environmental Quality, a policy office within the White House. He also helped persuade the Nixon administration to create the Environmental Protection Agency, empowered to execute and regulate the nation’s new program of safeguarding natural resources and protecting public health.”
  • William K. Reilly (1989-93): Working on urban beautification earlier in his career, Reilly followed Train as president of The Conservation Foundation, and he was a senior staff member of the Council on Environmental Quality. He was also president of the World Wildlife Fund before assuming his EPA cabinet post under George H.W. Bush.
  • Stephen L. Johnson (2005-09): The first scientist to lead the EPA, Johnson has a bachelor’s degree in biology and a master’s in pathology. Before becoming head of the agency, he worked there for 26 years.

Of course, GOP presidents have also named a handful of people who either had limited or no experience in conservation upon accepting the administration position but still made modest gains or paid lip service to the ultimate goal of protecting the environment. They include:

  • Anne Burford (1981-83), who had a background in law, seems to have mainly been nominated into the agency to work on deregulation and clean up government waste under Ronald Reagan. From an EPA standpoint after taking the post, her greatest claim to fame was passage of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. She resigned in 1983 over the alleged mismanagement of a $1.6 billion hazardous waste dumping program.
  • William Ruckelshaus (1983-85): Serving under Nixon as the EPA’s first administrator, Ruckelshaus is perhaps best known for his ban on DDT.
  • Christine Todd Whitman (2001-03) didn’t seem to have much experience in the environment or conservation before 2000, but in that year as governor of New Jersey, the state’s standard for air quality went from 45 in 1988 to 4, and New Jersey was honored as having rolled out the most exhaustive beach monitoring program in the nation.
  • Under his leadership in the George W. Bush administration, EPA head Mike Leavitt (2003-05) raised emission standards, and he instituted a plan to address environmental concerns along the Great Lakes.
  • Lee Thomas (1985-89) had a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s in education, of all things. He served as assistant administrator of the EPA’s solid waste and emergency division for a little more than a year, and he was assistant director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency from 1981-83. As head of the EPA, he is most notable for overseeing passage of the Montreal Protocol, a plan to scale back production of ozone-depleting chemicals in the air. Thomas went on to become president and chief operating officer of Georgia Pacific Corporation, a subsidiary of Koch Industries. Starting in 2007, he was chairman and chief executive officer of Rayonier, which buys up land to make paper and timberland-based materials and also uses the land, of course, for commercial and real estate development.

Credit: Stephen Crowley/The New York Times/Scott Pruitt, former Oklahoma attorney general, is President Donald J. Trump’s nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.

Credit: Stephen Crowley/The New York Times/Scott Pruitt, former Oklahoma attorney general, is President Donald J. Trump’s nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.

The difference with most of these people and Pruitt, is that our current administrator not only lacks experience to head the EPA, he does not believe in the imperishable and urgent nature of its mission, and before taking office, he actively fought against environmental protections and regulations as attorney general of Oklahoma.

Dubbed a “lifetime adversary” of the EPA by The Washington Post, Pruitt had assumed an adversarial role against the EPA nearly since the beginning of his election as Oklahoma’s top law enforcement officer in 2010.

The anti-green AG

According to The New York Times and state media sources, Oklahoma had been embroiled in a legal fight against the poultry industry since 2006 stemming from alleged pollution of chicken manure into the Illinois River, but when Pruitt took office, instead of stiffening regulations or pushing for corrective mandates against Tyson, he merely initiated a study to look at the issue, which, in effect, kicked the can down the road, even as he had received $40,000 from the defendants in the case as part of his 2010 campaign.

This, of course, is largely indicative of Pruitt’s track record across the four campaigns of his public career. According to FollowTheMoney.org, he has raised more than $3 million from various industry sectors. The energy and natural resources industry was Pruitt’s third largest contributor. Here’s the breakdown of how much money Pruitt has received from each industry:

Credit: FollowTheMoney.org

Credit: FollowTheMoney.org

Clearly, conflicts of interests abound, but if Pruitt was able to own up to his past transgressions and apologize for failing to hold Tyson accountable for potentially damaging the environment at the expense of his own constituents and at the expense of the environment, perhaps the nation could accept him as halfway sincere and competent, but this isn’t even the worse of it.

As Eric Schaeffer, Environmental Integrity Project executive director, said in a recent op-ed piece, Pruitt essentially made his bones standing as firmly as anyone can against the EPA as attorney general, suing the agency no less than 14 times while in Oklahoma.

Here is how Schaeffer assessed Pruitt’s environmental record before his cabinet confirmation:

(Pruitt) has built his career suing the agency he would oversee to roll back its protection of the nation’s air and water, and challenging the very idea of federal action to control pollution.

At the same time, while Mr. Pruitt preaches the gospel of states’ rights, his record suggests he has been far from aggressive in enforcing environmental laws in his own state. Given his anti-regulatory mind-set, skepticism about global warming and support from the industries he would regulate, the Senate, which is set to begin to consider his nomination on Wednesday, should reject him (It didn’t. My note).

His tenure in Oklahoma is instructive. Mr. Pruitt disbanded the environmental protection unit in the attorney general’s office and created a “federalism unit” to litigate against “overreach by the federal government.” Much of that overreach, in Mr. Pruitt’s view, was by the E.P.A.

Much like new U.S. Housing and Urban Development head Ben Carson, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Mr. Let’s Close the — Department of … Hmm what’s the third one there? I think it starts with an “E” … Department of Entertainment … No. … Ahh, shucks. I can’t (name) the third one. Sorry. Oops. — Rick Perry, Pruitt doesn’t believe in the mission of the agency he has been charged to run. He says it right there on his LinkedIn page:

Scott filed the first lawsuit challenging the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, is a leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda, and is leading a multistate lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Dodd-Frank financial law. Before being elected AG, he served eight years in the Oklahoma State Senate where he was a leading voice for fiscal responsibility, religious freedom and pro-life issues.

See anything in there about a concern for the environment or conservation issues? Me either. Here’s more information on Pruitt’s illustrious body of work in Oklahoma.

Ken Cook, head of the Environmental Working Group, said that in assessing Pruitt’s potential acumen as an EPA director:

It’s a safe assumption that Pruitt could be the most hostile E.P.A. administrator toward clean air and safe drinking water in history.

No debate

Even more stunning than Pruitt’s persistent fights against the EPA in Oklahoma are his views on climate change. They are well-documented by now. The following quote comes from an interview on MSNBC after Pruitt’s nomination:

I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. … But we don’t know that yet. We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.

In one fell swoop, Pruitt, despite the fact that Exxon, to its own chagrin, discovered the realities of climate change four decades ago (!), continues to perpetuate the myth that human activity might not be responsible for lower carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, rising seas, melting icecaps and increased temperatures globally. Much like the evidence for evolution, the evidence for global warming and human-induced climate change is overwhelming (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and so on …) such that there is no debate, and there hasn’t been for a very long time.

Pruitt and his other equally unqualified, motley crew of cabinet members may be capable of shuffling some papers around and telling subordinates what to do, but within the fields they are charged to oversee, with few exceptions, they are ill-informed, conceited and flippant about the important work with which they have been charged.

Indeed, that these people could be directly in the ear of the most powerful person in the world is disconcerting, especially since we are only a couple months into the administration, and that they so easily passed GOP muster via the nominations, despite their own incompetency being laid bare in multiple hearings, represents a deeply reckless, unadulterated clutching at power for power’s sake with no thought about the future of the nation.

Surely only the most cynical view of our republic is keeping these people from crawling into a cave and never being heard from again.

But here they are. I don’t peddle fear-mongering here, as the Republicans do, so just as they have a freedom to say and believe any nonsense they choose, we also have the right to call them out — again and again, for as long as it takes — for their blatant anti-intellectualism and disregard for scientific facts and Enlightenment principles, principles that always have, and always will, move our civil society forward and toward a more perfect union.

[Cover image credit: “Elephant Parade” by DeviantArt user Eredel.]

Heil to the Drumpf

Trump was not elected on a platform of decency, fairness, moderation, compromise, and the rule of law; he was elected, in the main, on a platform of resentment. Fascism is not our future—it cannot be; we cannot allow it to be so— but this is surely the way fascism can begin. — David Remnick, The New Yorker

***

Although some personal travails have kept me away from this site for awhile, call it a lack of inspiration or sheer stunned silence, but the rise of real estate mogul Donald J. Trump (Make Donald Drumpf again) to be leader of the free world was a stultifying and surreal spectacle to witness, such that my own drive to offer any additional insight, outside of some microblogging on Twitter and Facebook has been on the wane the last few months. It all seemed so disappointing. And futile. And worst of all, regressive.

Rage in the machine

Perhaps I did not want to admit the thing that I feared the most: That the Republican Party would fail to eschew the fringe right from its ranks and take a more moderate bent going forward; that the party of Lincoln, whose endgame Civil War policy ultimately broke the back of the South and freed millions of slaves before the conservatives devised new forms of subjugation known as Reconstruction and the Black Codes, would turn in on itself and embolden new legions of racist and bigoted voters to come out from their mother’s basements and their camouflage duck huts and their white-bred, self-loathing lives of grinding discontent to offer up a candidate who made hostility to immigrants, MexicansMuslims and other outgroups; pathological dishonesty (here and here and here and here and here and here and here); childishness; sexismbullying; and unbridled narcissism as American as hot dogs and apple pie.

I have written in newspaper columns the last five or six years about the Republican Party’s flirtation with the precipice and essentially made the case that the centrists or establishment politicians on the right needed to reclaim the center before it was too late for their party and too late for America. The right’s supreme and utter failure after the emergence of the Tea Party to hew the rotting arm to save the rest of the body may have detrimental outcomes for the nation at large, for inner city and low-income Americans and ironically, for many of the GOP’s supporters, who routinely vote against their own vested interests.

As it stands at the moment, the GOP can revel in its victory, having secured both houses of Congress and probably an eventual majority on the Supreme Court, but if Trump proves to be as much of a disaster in the White House as he has been in his multiple abortive business dealings and personal relationships, we should expect the Democratic Party, assuming it takes the advice of Bernie Sanders and presents a platform that is more appealing to working class Americans and gets tough on Wall Street and the health insurance industry, to see a resurgence in the future as Trump’s voters learn the hard way that he is dangerously uninformed, brash and impulsive.

But that’s perhaps two or four years hence. For now, we have to consider the 6-foot-3, 236 pound soon-to-be elephant in the Situation Room and his track record so far.

On the homefront, Trump, and to some degree running mate Mike Pence, coerced Carrier to keep a paltry 1,000 jobs in the U.S., which amounts to 0.01 percent of all manufacturing positions in the nation, at the expense of the government having to shell out $7 million in tax breaks to the company. Far more than 1,000 Americans will be on the hook when that bill comes due.

Credit: FiveThirtyEight, Source: Federal Reserve, Bureau of Labor Statistics

Credit: FiveThirtyEight, Source: Federal Reserve, Bureau of Labor Statistics

In any case, Trump has deluded himself and deluded his followers if he thinks he can do anything to ignite a manufacturing boon in the year 2017. Economic experts agree that the manufacturing sector is not due for a resurgence at all. On the contrary, it’s on the decline, so Trump’s grand showboating after his supposedly grand deal with Carrier amounts to little more than that: a show.

On health care, Trump has vowed to help end Obamacare, which paved the way for an estimated 11.3 million people to get health insurance. The Affordable Care Act also banned insurance companies, which have operated with near impunity for decades, from denying patients coverage for having preexisting conditions. Even more relevant for many of the people who voted for Trump, the president-elect’s plan could have disastrous consequences for Medicare, according to Forbes.

Red scare?

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about Trump’s early actions are his cabinet nominations, some of whom have direct or indirect ties with Russian oligarchs or the Russian government itself, including former Lieutenant General Mike Flynn, ExxonMobile CEO Rex Tillerson and billionaire Wilbur Ross

Trump, when given opportunity after opportunity, has refused to say anything negative about Vladimir Putin, an egomaniacal bully in his own right, and even praised the Russian president for his “great move” in deciding against allowing U.S. diplomats to leave Russia after the U.S. found that Putin’s government was behind a hacking attempt at the Democratic National Committee. The hack was believed to have been carried out in order to sway the presidential election in Trump’s favor.

One could even go so far as to say, as Sam Harris and Garry Kasparov pointed out on a recent podcast, that Trump has roundly insulted nearly every group imaginable inside and outside the United States, yet the one person he will not say a single bad thing about is Putin. This is unprecedented in American politics in the last 60 years, and it’s especially unprecedented for a Republican president-elect.

Compound these issues with the fact that we know little about Trump’s actual assets, since he skirted convention and would not release his most recent tax records. For all we know, Trump could have business ties with the Russian government or those close to Putin, not to mention other foreign powers. Yet, the Republicans have been slow to launch an investigation into Russia’s cyber attack, and few, if any, inside the party seem concerned that Trump has such a seemingly cozy relationship with the Russian dictator. Where is the outrage? Republican idol Ronald Reagan, who fretted over potential Russian trespasses for decades, is no doubt turning cartwheels in his grave.

Never forget, Rick Perry

Trump’s other cabinet picks include an assortment of firebrands, know-nothings, incompetents, jingoists and outsiders, many of whom know little, if anything, about the positions in which they have been selected to serve.

[pullquote]I will tell you, it is three agencies of government when I get there that are gone. Commerce, Education, and – what’s the third one there? Let’s see. (After prodding) … I can’t. The third one, I can’t. Sorry. Oops.”[/pullquote]

Rick Perry, who was chosen to head up the Department of Energy, represents the epitome, not only of incompetent decision-making on Trump’s part, but incompetence outright. For starters, Perry denies climate change and evolution despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that attests to their reality (climate change and evolution), once charging that scientists have “manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects.” He has also called climate change a “contrived phony mess” and a “secular carbon cult.”

On evolution, Perry, as governor of Texas, said he wanted to incorporate bunk intelligent design pseudoscience alongside actual science in textbooks. According to an article in Science magazine:

Perry has earned the opprobrium of science educators for his comments on the importance of balancing evolution with creationist theory in Texas schools. And he’s appointed a series of chairs of the state board of education who embrace that view and also criticized science textbooks that discuss the negative impact of fossil fuels on the environment. Yet science education is a tiny $20 million slice of the department’s $30 billion budget.

Of course, among scientists or those with enough intellectual honesty to look at the world with eyes wide open, the debate about evolution and climate change has been over for a long time. Indeed, there is no debate at all, and anyone who does not accept climate change and evolution and who, in other words, still has a grade school understanding of basic science, is unfit for office.

All of this, of course, is notwithstanding the fact that Perry floated a plan in 2012 to eradicate the Department of Energy, along with two others, and then couldn’t recall the name of the department he has now been picked to lead. I wonder how he would do recalling the three laws of thermodynamics or articulating anything coherent whatsoever about energy as a scientific principle.

Motley crew

I can’t possibly cover all of Trump’s cabinet nominations without spilling tons of virtual ink, but let’s briefly run down a few more.

  • Betsy DeVos, who was tabbed to lead the Department of Education, is a strong charter school advocate and a member of the Family Research Council, an anti-gay — and by extension, anti-science — Christian lobbying group. But other than being a Republican donor and supporter of private schools at the expense of public education, and possibly at the expense of the separation of church and state, she has no qualifications in the classroom and seems to be among the the least qualified candidates ever selected to any cabinet position.
  • Ben Carson is an affluent neuroscientist who knows next to nothing about the Department of Housing and Urban Development nor the experiences of low-income residents who actually live in HUD communities.
  • Twice failed Connecticut Senate candidate Linda McMahon, who was picked to head the Small Business Administration, is the wife of Vince McMahon, chairman and CEO of the WWE, and a former on-screen character as played out in an intrafamily saga with the corporate villain character, Mr. McMahon. Trump, of course, has a close relationship with the McMahons and has himself appeared on WWE programming multiple times. It is true that Linda, who was directly involved with WWE from 1980 to 2009, helped grow the company from a regional outfit in the Northeast to the global entertainment empire that it is today, but outside of her involvement in WWE and Titan Sports, Vince’s company before purchasing Capitol Wrestling (the World Wide Wrestling Federation) in the early 1980s, she has scant “small business” experience. Of course, potential conflicts of interest abound between the Trumps’ and McMahons’ various business ventures and their mutual support over the years, such that the appointment feels more like a favor to the McMahons than anything else. According to this article from the Connecticut Post:

In 2007, WWE paid Trump $1 million to appear with Vince McMahon, during WrestleMania 23, with Trump putting McMahon in a chokehold and shaving McMahon’s head in the “Battle of the Billionaires.” The alliance was further cultivated by Vince McMahon’s $5 million contribution to Trump’s foundation, making the wrestling impresario its top donor. Linda McMahon gave $7.5 million to a pro-Trump super PAC during the presidential campaign.

Some of the couple’s detractors wondered whether Linda McMahon’s newfound clout in Trump’s administration could insulate the WWE from congressional prying over a myriad of issues such as concussions, steroid use and net neutrality, the free access of products and content by all online users.

“I think we can just assume it’s another example of the fox guarding the hen house,” said Irvin Muchnick, who has written several books on the culture of pro wrestling and maintains a blog on the topic.

  • And then there is South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley who, to her credit called for the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the courthouse lawn in Columbia after the tragic church shooting in June 2015 in Charleston. She was nominated as ambassador to the United Nations, and other than her favorable opinion about Israel, she has no foreign policy or diplomatic experience.
  • Trump selected James “Mad Dog” Mattis, a celebrated commander and a student of military engagement and strategy, for the Secretary of Defense position, which was actually one of Trump’s better picks, if not for Mattis’ hostility to President Obama’s nuclear weapons program in Iran, a plan that has the support of the European Union, Germany, France, Great Britain, China and Russia. The program seems to be working, at least in the interim, as Iran had placed 19,000 centrifuges in storage as of this past summer, unloaded 98 percent of its uranium and opened up its facilities to nuclear inspectors.
  • Steve Bannon, who was nominated as Trump’s chief strategist, is perhaps the most troubling pick of the lot. An alt-right firebrand and former chairman of the shrill website Breitbart, Bannon has been criticized for his “nationalist, conspiracy-minded message,” and content at Breitbart has been dubbed “misogynist, xenophobic and racist” by people on both sides of the political aisle. According to The New York Times:

The site refers to “migrant rape gangs” in Europe, and was among the first news outlets to disseminate unsubstantiated rumors that Mrs. Clinton was in ill health. Its writers often vilify the Black Lives Matter movement, emphasizing what they call a scourge of “black-on-black crime,” and described “young Muslims in the West” as the world’s “ticking time bomb.”

During this past election, the site was essentially a mouthpiece for Trump, as it has disseminated some of the same anti-intellectual, anti-immigrant, borderline fascist and bigoted rhetoric that has served to further divide the nation.

Bannon, then, fits right in with a candidate who has quite literally been able to spew any number of personal insults, lies and half-truths in person and on Twitter and has virtually gotten away with every single one of them with a smile on his face. This glorified Internet troll roused the base, roused the riffraff and in doing so, roused the worse angels of our nature.

Of course, numerous factors led to Trump’s victory. Hillary Clinton got too comfortable and didn’t campaign hard enough in key battleground states. Too many of Sanders’ supporters stayed at home. The Electoral Collect failed us yet again.

But the most disappointing demographic in the whole election, perhaps even worse than Trump himself, was the stubbornness and rigid partisanship on display by traditional Republican voters — GOP lifers, if you will — who punch the red card regardless of who gets foisted to the front of the line. Some among the Republican faithful even agreed with the rest of us that Trump was obviously, laughably unqualified to take charge of the White House, yet voted for him anyway because of GOP loyalty or because of their contempt for Clinton.

In any case, rather than showing some modicum of courage and switching allegiances this one time for good of the nation, these hard-line Republicans, like the musicians frozen on the bow of the Titanic as the great ship gives up its ghost to the sea, steadfastly toed the party line and agreed to leave the fate of the nation with a man who has repeatedly exposed himself as a half-cocked, blatantly dishonest buffoon and one who may, when all is said and done, bend the arc of American history more than a few inches toward fascism in his four in office — assuming he lasts that long. An inch in that direction is obviously an inch too far, but this is the peril we now face thanks to a reckless candidate and even more reckless electorate.

I, for one, hope the situation is not as bad as I think it might be and am willing to give Trump a chance because if he fails, the whole nation suffers. But as machinations are already underway to repeal Obamacare, that hope may fall away quickly when dawn sheds new light over the Potomac come Jan. 20.

[Cover photo credit: “The Trump World Tower” by DeviantArt user toko.]

The gathering storm

Anyone trying to figure out how Donald Trump became the presumptive presidential nominee of one of the two most powerful parties in the United States, itself the most powerful nation in the world, would have had to either be a) asleep or b) lobotomized at some point in the last four eight years to not at least have some clue as where the political trajectory of the Republican Party was headed. And only someone completely deluded by their own red-hued ideological blinders would have the gall to cast blame across the aisle.

Credit: Getty

Credit: Getty

Sure, even the most wonky of political junkies like Nate Silver failed to see Trump coming and predict that so many people would, apparently, be galvanized around a message that has practically dripped, at nearly every phrase, with some combination of bigotry, xenophobia, sexism and in-group, out-group hostility.

But the proverbial writing has been on the wall for a long time, and for someone like Jeb Bush to lay Trump at the feet of President Barack Obama and the Democrats is the height of absurdity.

But he did exactly that in this op-ed piece for The Washington Post. Here is part of it:

Call it a tipping point, a time of choosing or testing. Whatever you call it, it is clear that this election will have far-reaching consequences for both the Republican Party and our exceptional country.

While he has no doubt tapped into the anxiety so prevalent in the United States today, I do not believe Donald Trump reflects the principles or inclusive legacy of the Republican Party. And I sincerely hope he doesn’t represent its future.

As much as I reject Donald Trump as our party leader, he did not create the political culture of the United States on his own.

Eight years of the divisive tactics of President Obama and his allies have undermined Americans’ faith in politics and government to accomplish anything constructive. The president has wielded his power — while often exceeding his authority — to punish his opponents, legislate from the White House and turn agency rulemaking into a weapon for liberal dogma.

In turn, a few in the Republican Party responded by trying to out-polarize the president, making us seem anti-immigrant, anti-women, anti-science, anti-gay, anti-worker and anti-common-sense.

The result has been the vanishing of any semblance of compromise or bipartisanship in our nation’s capital. Simple problems don’t get solved. Speeches happen; the important stuff doesn’t. The failure of elected leaders to break the gridlock in Washington has led to an increasingly divided electorate, which in turn has led to a breakdown in our political system.

He goes on to lay out his plan for returning the Republican Party to respectable status in American politics by advocating for the following:

  • Continuing to control Congress and hold on to seats in state government;
  • Establishing a program that supports “greater economic growth, revitalized leadership on the global stage and a strengthened democracy”;
  • Bolstering what he called the “true pillars of America,” which he said include two-person families, communities and the business sector;
  • And returning to civil political discourse that has been all but lost this election cycle.

First, let me get it out of the way at the start: I think Jeb Bush would have been far and away a better option for president than Trump. While I don’t think Jeb and George W. Bush are miles apart intellectually, I would have actually preferred to have Jeb in George’s footsteps between 2001-2009. I think Jeb, for all his faults, largely because of the influence of his wife and his experience with the Hispanic community in Florida is a little more worldly and more attuned to the larger planet and the complexities of living in a multicultural society. While he definitely would not be my first, second or third pick for the presidency, I could have at least imagined waking up to a Jeb Bush White House and the world not burning to the ground on day one. With Trump, we don’t have the luxury of that thought experiment; it is actually a potential and disturbing reality, and a reality that’s polling at about 50 percent if recent data is to be trusted.

So, for all that I’m about to say about Bush’s piece on how far the GOP has fallen with Trump as its best offering, I will say that I agree with his final point. Trump’s over-the-top style has pushed the political discourse beyond the realm of civility, such that people like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, who have normally displayed at least a certain level of decorum when engaging with the opposition, were drawn into the fray and resorted to name-calling and petty insults during the primary debates.

In any case, let’s consider a few of Bush’s statements about the rise of Trump inside the GOP. Bush claimed Trump does not represent the “principles or inclusive legacy” of the party and did not make the country’s “political culture on his own,” while he said Obama’s “divisive tactics” have damaged Americans’ trust in government.

Obviously, much of the framework that led to Trump getting so much support among grassroots voters, closeted bigots and the rest of the riffraff, didn’t happen overnight or over the course of a year. It has been brewing under the surface for a long time, possibly since the race riots near the end of George H.W. Bush’s tenure when Rodney King was beaten by police officers, who were subsequently acquitted, and when Reginald Denny, a white semi-truck driver, was pulled from his vehicle and likewise beaten by a group of black residents, such that it seems race relations in this country were actually better through parts of the 1970s and ’80s until tensions boiled to the surface in the early 1990s. We experienced a relative cooling off period through the rest of the 1990s into the early 2000s and then a period of solidarity after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack. That’s not to say isolated incidents didn’t occur during this period. They did, but in my lifetime, the greatest periods of racial tension in the nation have occurred in the early 1990s and in the last couple years before Trump got a national platform to spew his incendiary rhetoric.

Although I don’t know how far back in history Jeb Bush was intending to go by arguing that Trump doesn’t represent the party’s “inclusive legacy,” he would certainly be in error if he was thinking about Abraham’s Lincoln’s legacy on race because Lincoln’s Republican Party was simply not the same as the modern iteration of the Republican Party. In the mid-19th century, the GOP was the liberal party in the United States, while the Democratic Party included all the not-so-closeted bigots and know-nothings (distinguished from the actual Know Nothing party). Not until the 1960s did the Republican Party come the represent the conservative wing of American politics when de facto racist and old-guard Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond from South Carolina, displeased that certain members of his party at the time were supporting the Civil Rights Movement (those bastards), he decided to switch, thus essentially turning the GOP over to the white supremacists, evangelical Christians and small government types for the next 50 years and counting.

If Jeb Bush was referring to more recent history, I will concede that Ronald Reagan has been one of the most inclusive major Republican figure in the last 30 years, especially in providing amnesty for millions of Hispanics, but he would be conspicuously out of place in today’s Republican Party that has evolved even since George W. Bush took office. Even if we take it as a given that Reagan was the most inclusive of all Republican presidents since the mid-19th century, to say that the party has been generally inclusive and on the forefront of civil rights since the 1980s is just patently false.

Here is a look from The Washington Post on how the GOP party platform shifted from the 1960s and ’70s to the 1980s with a few examples:

The GOP, like its opposition, has responded to ideological, demographic and social changes by hardening some of its positions and adopting entirely new planks, all part of an effort to create a coalition capable of winning national elections. In the Republicans’ case, that meant adapting and appealing to a new base in the South from the 1970s forward, becoming the dominant party of white suburbia, and finding ways to marry its traditional pro-business foundation with less affluent, more socially conservative voters.

Many positions Republicans often tout as traditionally conservative are actually relatively new to GOP ideology. Indeed, although the party’s stance on the issues has shifted rightward over the past 20 years, Republicans have studiously avoided using the word “conservative” in platforms.

In 1972, the platform celebrates Republicans’ use of wage and price controls to curb inflation, a doubling of federal spending on manpower training, and a tripling of help to minorities.

Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, the GOP platform includes vigorous support for an equal-rights amendment to protect women. Then, in 1980, the party stalemates: “We acknowledge the legitimate efforts of those who support or oppose ratification.”

In the 1960s and ’70s, the party positions itself as a strong advocate for D.C. voting rights, in the Senate as well as the House. Then, in 1980, all mention of voting rights vanishes; the subject has not appeared since.

In the past 30 years, then, we find the Republican Party becoming less, not more, inclusive — by implication or otherwise — on issue after issue, supporting policies that undermine minorities, Hispanics, women, low-income families and labor union members, to name a few.

So no, while Trump may not directly reflect the modern Republican Party, he is its manifestation in its most unbecoming state, and his willingness to say what is, apparently, on the minds of millions of angry, white, disaffected Americans has ripped off the scab of tensions that we have, by whatever force, been able to contain to some degree since the early 1990s.

The other part of Jeb’s column that I take issue with is the contention that Obama’s “divisive tactics” created the political climate that we find ourselves in and not Trump. As I have already said, Trump didn’t create it, but decades of ill-conceived policies led to its rise. Trump just lit the torch.

Jeb is also wrong to suggest that Obama and the Democrats solely fostered distrust in lawmakers and the political process. They may have certainly contributed, but I would say that many lawmakers and politicians, including Obama and Hillary Clinton, along with a veritable gaggle of past misfits like George W., Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, all contributed largely to Americans’ hostility toward Washington.

The situation was not helped during Obama’s tenure, when, as he was attempting to move forward on some of his campaign promises, lawmakers like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner led efforts to block him at every level, no matter how beneficial the policies could have been for their own constituents.

Republicans blocked the jobs bill. They blocked the infrastructure bill. They wasted untold taxpayers resources passing symbolic repeals of Obamacare and looking like complete buffoons, took up more than 60 votes to repeal the law, knowing all along they wouldn’t pass. Indeed, GOP leaders in Congress have been so busy trying not to do anything the past eight years in these juvenile games that they have actually been quite busy finding new and creative ways to obstruct and halt the legislative process.

Add to this political malaise people like Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, who have turned anti-intellectualism into a virtue, and the constant drone of the 24-7 news cycle with its borderline sensationalism and paranoid-level headlines, and it’s no wonder the party is in the process of careening off the edge or imploding altogether.

Trump absolutely reflects a certain demographic of people in the Republican Party. Quite literally, the only thing he has brought to the table was that he made it OK to come out into the open about who they are and what they really think about American society and their place in it. He played to their most base concerns and fears, exposed the GOP’s vulnerabilities and in doing so, laid bare its inner demons and now threatens its destruction.

[Credit: DeviantArt user Estruda, “No Peace In Life No Peace In Death“]

Gravity’s pull: Returning to assess a world on fire

… And I’m back.

This may have been the longest stretch I have taken away from this site since I started it eight years ago. Recent national and global events have put me in kind of a general malaise about writing on here lately. I have still kept up with columns for work and have been following current events — obviously, or else I might not have been in this funk in the first place — but even at the office, I honestly haven’t been terribly inspired to sit down and pick apart or analyze much of anything in the form of op-ed work.

As a result, columns that I did manage to produce in the last couple months largely felt forced, although their content and spirit were genuine. Of course, I hope that they didn’t read like they were obligatory, but that’s kind of how I have felt trying to fill a 1,000 word news hole at a time when the muse was a bit lost in exile. Hopefully it will be returning with more regularity.

giant meteor2

With that said, here is a rundown of some of the things that have happened since my last blog and some not-so-brief commentary:

  • Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton became the presumptive nominee and Sen. Bernie Sanders, to the chagrin of many of his supporters, finally embraced Clinton as the nominee. So much for Sanders’ claim that Clinton was “unqualified” to be president and lacked the character and leadership acumen for the job. So much for Sanders’ strategy of winning over all those superdelegates at the convention, although a handful of people are still suggesting that Sanders still has an outside chance of winning. One writer went so far as to say Sanders’ “strategy” of endorsing Clinton could have been a “tactical master stroke” of political maneuvering. I don’t think there’s a chance in hell at this point. In any case, while I always chafe whenever candidates run down each other on the campaign trail and then do a complete about-face when it’s time get down to brass tacks in the general election (See: Chris Christie‘s shameful self), but the sad reality is that hatchet politics has always been part of democracy in America. The difference is that 150 years ago, if two politicians attacked each other, they really meant whatever unflattering things they said about the other. At least that was honest. Politics in the 21st century is just an intellectually dishonest game of smoke and mirrors, in which the most trustworthy, genuine people rarely, and indeed in many cases can’t, win. Sanders is just the latest example. I have more to say on what I think Sanders supporters should do on election day (Hint: Do not stay home and do not vote for Trump), but I will save that for another day.
  • Trump is still the nominee and could still become president, and despite a popular meme floating around that gave us all hope that Earth would be shattered by an oncoming meteor before that nightmarish reality could ensue, members of the GOP appear to be rallying behind him, presumably because they think Trump, who has, at one time or another, uttered opinions that could be described as racist, bigoted, homophobic, xenophobic and ableist, would make a better leader of the free world than Clinton, who would, I think it’s safe to say, never hurl so much hate at so many people.
  • While I was in the process of writing this, I learned that Trump named Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate, apparently silencing speculation that the pick was going to be Newt Gingrich. In addition to turning off black people, women, Hispanics and everyone else with half a brain, Trump, in his brash, off-the-cuff style, has also run afoul of the the evangelical Christian bloc of the GOP, so Pence will probably attempt to woo some of those folks back into the fold. Here is how the Indiana Star assessed Trump’s pick: “In Pence, Trump adds a social conservative whom GOP strategists say will reassure rank-and-file Republicans that Trump can be trusted to pursue their interests. Veteran political observers say Pence, a former U.S. House member and chairman of the House Republican Conference, will provide a disciplined counter to Trump’s improvisational campaign style. Pence also brings fundraising power and credibility on a wide range of policy issues that are important to conservatives.” And here is a decidedly less charitable analysis. Personally, if Trump was going to go with another old, white guy, Gingrich would have been a smarter and more seasoned choice. But I guess Gingrich, in his recent comments about black people in America, was starting to sound a little too sympathetic and a little too, you know, human, for Trump’s tastes.
  • The tragedy in Orlando. Of all the terrible things that have happened the last few months nationwide, this is, perhaps, the one that frustrated and disappointed me the most and largely contributed to me wanting to take some time off from blogging. As per our column schedule at the office, I was supposed to turn in a column on the Tuesday after the shooting — and Orlando certainly would have been the obvious choice on which to provide my thoughts since it was so clearly on everyone’s mind — but I didn’t have the stomach for it just a couple days after it happened. As the deadline loomed, I told my boss that I attempted to sit down and gather my thoughts, but I literally didn’t know what to say. In any case, details were still coming in, and I just had the sense that any words that I possibly could have strewn together would have been so inconsequential to what was happening in the lives of our brothers and sisters and their families that week that radio silence was the only adequate response. The shooting was supremely frustrating because, before that time, uplifted by the Supreme Court ruling last year that denying gay and lesbian people the right to marry was unconstitutional, it really felt like that the nation had turned a corner on accepting the LGBT community. And maybe it has in the population at large, and I certainly hope so. But in that moment, all I could think was that the shooting was at least one of, if not the, deadliest shooting in American history, which took place against a group of people who have been vilified and discriminated against for generations in a country that touts freedom and equality as some of our most cherished principles when, in fact, these have really only applied to certain people. In any case, I eventually opined on Orlando and gun control the following week in this column: “No longer if, but when.”
  • Speaking of gun control, at least two more unarmed black men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, have been killed by the police, meanwhile Eric Garner’s family and many other relatives of shooting victims are still waiting for their long-overdue justice. I wonder how many years the families of Sterling and Castile will now have to wait before they get an answer on whether someone will be held accountable for their deaths?
  • Brexit happened. Other than to say the unfettered wave of populism that began, or at least grew to infamy, in the election of 2008 in America and has seemingly leapt the pond, is a bit concerning — here’s why — I don’t have much of an opinion on England’s decision to leave the European Union. I will simply say that the more modern European nations and America move toward the far-right, the more cherished principles I mentioned above will be put into jeopardy. If we had learned anything from the early 20th century, we would know that the far-right program and the set of ideologies that govern it are, at bottom, antithetical to democracy and liberty. Its terminus is fascism.
  • All of that, and then finally, there’s this horrific shit. Predictably, the jihadist in Nice, France, was said to have screamed “Allahu Akbar” [pullquote]Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time. It is the denial—at once full of hope and full of fear—of the vastitude of human ignorance. — Sam Harris, “The End of Faith”[/pullquote] (God is [the] greatest) before getting killed and swept to away to his non-existent 72-virgin-adorned paradise. I have already said most of what I think about Abrahamic religion and radical brands of Islam elsewhere on this site. Suffice it to say that so long as revealed religion exists in all its forms and so long as people can convince themselves to believe things on bad evidence or on no evidence, faith, whether it is fanatical or more subdued, will continue to smash against modernity and stunt the progress that we could and should be making toward a peaceful and just society. Whereas the far-right endgame is merely fascism, religion terminates in a darkness that threatens to unmake our world. ISIS is only the most recent iteration of violent religious extremism that has caused untold human misery in previous centuries, and we, as a species, had better wake up to these realities sooner than later.

[Cover image credit: “world on fire” by DeviantArt user orangebutt]

Trump vs. Kelly: ‘Couples therapy’

After finally getting around to watching Megyn Kelly’s interview with Donald Trump — it’s surprisingly hard to find the full video, and most copies online appear to be edited hack jobs for either supporters or haters of Trump  — I can say that, despite Kelly’s assertion that “it’s not about me” when asking Trump about his nasty retweets in which he called her a “bimbo,” that statement certainly seems like a microcosm of the entire interview: It was absolutely, 100 percent about her.

Kelly obviously has no shortage of talent. She hit the ground running at Fox News in 2004 and her celebrity has been on the rise and growing ever since, arguably reaching or eclipsing that of her long-time associates Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity.

To her credit, she claims to be an independent on a conservative network that doesn’t even pretend to be “fair and balanced” anymore, and she hit Donald Trump as hard as anyone during the August 2015 debate when she questioned his character in making numerous “disparaging” comments about women:

But that Megyn Kelly — detached, steely eyed, uncowed — was far from the person who sat across from Trump earlier this week. This Megyn Kelly was soft, amicable, introspective and almost psychoanalytical in her attempts, mostly unsuccessful, to unearth the inner crust of Donald Trump. She asked him about his alcoholic and now dead brother, his perceived mistakes on the campaign trail, his regrets and his emotional wounds. Watch the interview with closed eyes and you may, for a second, forget this is a conservation between two highly privileged celebrities and imagine a psychiatry patient laying on the couch talking to his shrink.

megyn kelly donald trump

Fox

There is no psychoanalyzing Donald Trump. Donald Trump gets out of bed every morning based on the strength of three simple things: his wealth, his power and his own aura. That’s it. Yet, in this interview, Kelly, in pure Barbara Walters wannabe form and not half as probing, asked few follow-up questions and even minimized moments when Trump, seemingly unapologetic and unrepentant as ever, was at his most obnoxious.

During what was probably the most memorable part of the interview, Kelly alerted Trump to the fact that he had called her a bimbo multiple times on social media, to which Trump just donned a boyish grin, leaned in and issued an almost mocking “excuse me,” as if he had just cut her off at the checkout line. Kelly, failing to use that opportunity to reclaim some of her earlier fire and ask a tough question, just recoiled and smiled. After an awkward pause and a creepy, sustained grin from Trump, he continued, noting that he, using ethical discretion like a true gentleman, did not retweet some of the harsher comments on Twitter.

Indeed, the only time Trump revealed anything interesting about himself was when he commended Kelly for coming to him and seeking reconciliation after the imbroglio last year. “I have great respect for you that you were able to call me and say let’s get together and lets talk,” Trump said. “For me, I would not have done that. I don’t say that as a positive. I think it’s a negative for me.”

Aside from that admission, this was, as Poynter Institute’s James Warren noted, far from Frost-Nixon. Here is Warren:

Why might a cynic have wondered if Megyn Kelly’s primetime Fox network interview with Donald Trump would fall short of David Frost’s evisceration of former President Richard Nixon? Might it have been the afternoon tweet and photo from a beaming Trump himself, his arm around a grinning Kelly, her arm around his back, and the declaration, “I will be live tweeting my interview with ‪@megynkelly on the Fox Network tonight at 8! Enjoy!” (@realDonaldTrump) Or was it the night before, on the Bravo cable channel, when she conceded that she’d once not just touched his hair but “run my fingers through it” to see if he wore a wig.

So no, despite the “big fight feel” implied by advertisements leading up to the interview, this was not Kelly’s breakout moment as a long-form interviewer.

This was simply theater masquerading as a hard-hitting interview. I don’t know if Trump and Kelly went over some of the questions she was going to ask beforehand, but did anyone really think that she was going to walk into Trump Tower, recreate a working relationship with the real estate mogul just to pepper him with a relent barrage of questions a la the August 2015 debate? They both realized that to make the interview seem genuine, Kelly was going to have to ask an uncomfortable question or two, but this was never going to be a whole-cloth take-down of Trump.

It was not even about policy or Trump’s character. It was almost exclusively about Trump and Kelly, and as Trevor Noah brilliantly summarized recently, amounted to little more than high-profile “couples therapy” after a breakup. Frankly, if people Connie Chung, Katie Couric and Barbara Walters are the benchmarks, Kelly’s interview looked rather pedestrian by comparison.

Race-baiters: GOP’s descent to the bottom

The Republican Party, once a relatively progressive outfit by earlier historical standards, having played a key role in passage of the Civil Rights of 1964, was on the right side of history from the mid-1800s with the election of Abraham Lincoln up until the presidential nomination of Barry Goldwater in the 1960s and the defection of Strom Thurmond from the Democratic Party to the GOP.

For about 100 years after 1860, and even before the Civil War, the Democratic Party was the de facto breeding ground for bigotry and segregationalist thought in America, but in ’64, when about 80 percent of Republicans in the U.S. House and Senate voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act, compared to 60 percent of Democrats, the political landscape changed (here’s a detailed look at how the party has changed over the years) — perhaps irreversibly sending the GOP down a path of kowtowing to religion and big business, resisting societal progress, denying LGBT people of their rights and instituting programs designed to line the pockets of the wealthy at the expense of the poor, particularly poor blacks living in inner cities.

Indeed, for more than 30 years now, the Republican Party has operated on platforms and policies that seemed to only carry the hint of racism — implied, but not explicit; by that, I mean most lawmakers have not, by and large, come right out and said that laws related to the war on drugs and criminal justice, for instance, were implemented to lock up a disproportionate number of black people or that statutes on immigration were passed to address the “problem” of Hispanics taking jobs away from white Americans. But conservative lawmakers have, knowingly or otherwise, injected a kind of institutional racism in the post Civil Rights era. For Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow,” the clearest example of this is in the criminal justice system.

She writes:

The Supreme Court has now closed the courthouse doors to claims of racial bias at every stage of the criminal justice process, from stops and searches to plea bargaining and sentencing. The system of mass incarceration is now, for all practical purposes, thoroughly immunized from claims of racial bias.

According to a 2015 study from political scientists Zoltan Hajnal and Jeremy Horowitz, Republican policies since 1948 have served the interests of affluent white Americans more so than any other group. Sean McElwee, with Al Jazeera America, sums up the findings:

Although they (all ethnic groups) still benefit significantly more from a Democratic president, the gap between the two parties is the smallest for whites. Hajnal and Horowitz estimate that black poverty declined by 38.6 percent under Democratic leadership, while it grew by 3 percent under Republicans. From 1948 to 2010, black unemployment fell by 7.9 percentage points under Democrats and increased by 13.7 points during Republican administrations. Black income grew by $23,281 (adjusted for inflation) under Democrats and by only $4,000 under Republicans.

“Put simply: However measured, blacks made consistent gains under Democratic presidents and suffered regular losses under Republicans,” the authors said. While there’s limited data, the findings hold true for Latinos and Asians.

It appears at first glance that Republicans actively transfer income to whites through government. Of course, there could be another explanation for this phenomenon. In a study published last July, Princeton economists Alan Blinder and Mark Watson found that from 1947 to 2013, gross domestic product, employment, corporate profits and productivity grew faster under Democrats than Republicans. The authors also noted that unemployment and deficits shrank and the economy climbed out of recession in less time under Democrats.

The following graph shows how ethnic groups have fared economically under Democratic administrations versus Republican presidents through 2010:

income equality

In further support of these points, Robert Smith, political science professor with San Francisco State University, argued in his 2010 book, “Conservatism and Racism, and Why in America They Are the Same,” that while modern conservatives may not be racists outright or in general, the policies they support and enact produce “the same effect as racism”:

Racism in the United States … is systemic – a complex, interdependent, interactive series of behavioral and ideational components. This “systemic racism” is reflected in the unjustly gained economic resources and political power of whites; empirically in a complex array of anti-black practices; and in the ideology of white supremacy and the attitudes of whites that developed in order to rationalize the system.

This complex systemic phenomenon is what African American thought challenges and African American movements have sought to overthrow. Conservatives, however, have sought to maintain it, or, at best, to change it gradually, always prioritizing stability over justice. This then, historically and situationally, is what in the first instance makes conservatism and racism in America the same.

Now, this shows the effects of GOP policies and ideologies when Republican lawmakers, politicians and conservative talking heads are at their most well-behaved. Enter Donald Trump, Ann Coulter and the legion of followers who, with the bigoted winds at their sails, aren’t afraid (anymore) to tell us what they really think.

What is new with the 2016 election, then, is a return of blatant, out-in-the-open racism and bigotry reminiscent of the old Dixiecrats of the mid-20th century. What is new is that racist and xenophobic sentiments are coming, not from some obscure third party candidate, but from the GOP frontrunner in an election to determine the leader of the free world. What is new is that Trump is on pace to get more primary votes than any candidate in American history.

Where to begin with Trump? He generalized that a whole wave of Hispanic immigrants contained untold numbers of rapists and drug dealers and flippantly conceded that “some” might be good people. He declared that he was going to force a sovereign nation to pay for a wall along the border, erroneously assuming that Mexicans, presumed to be cowering in fear, were just going to bow to the will of a power white guy in America.

He said he would turn away Syrian refugees seeking asylum in the United States, has called for a “total and complete ban” of Muslims entering the United States and used his followers’ irrational fears about Muslims to support a kind of isolationism even inside our borders. Here’s what he had to say about the refugees in April:

We don’t know where they’re from, we don’t know where they’re from, they have no documentation. We all have hearts and we can build safe zones in Syria – and we’ll get the Gulf states to put up the money, we’re not putting up the money – but I’ll get that done.

Lock your doors folks, okay, lock your doors. There’s no documentation. We have our incompetent government people letting them in by the thousands, and who knows, maybe it’s ISIS. You see what happens with two people that became radicalized in California, where they shot and killed all their coworkers. Not with me, folks, it’s not happening with me.

I’m not one to cry “Islamophobia” over criticisms of Islam as a religion or set of bad ideas. I have been as critical of Islam as just about any other religion except Christianity, but here Trump is obviously not running down Islamic thought or doctrines but implying that not only could ISIS members be “embedded” in groups of refugees, but the refugees themselves are so weak intellectually and spiritually that they might, at the turn of a switch, fall under the spell of ISIS and become radicalized, rather than recognizing that the couple in California was an extremely isolated case and hundreds of thousands of American Muslims worship peacefully every day in this country. In fact, Trump’s odious remarks on Muslims may have actually backfired, as significant numbers of the 3.3 million Muslims in America have been energized to get out and vote against Trump in the election.

Then, of course, there’s this and this.

Screenshot 2016-05-13 at 11.32.42 PM

Donald Trump’s retweet of a wildly inaccurate meme.

But perhaps most damning of all was Trump’s not so inconspicuous flirtation with modern white supremacy by failing to disavow the support of former KKK grand wizard David Duke and other racist groups that pledged fealty to him. Ludicrously, he initially claimed that he needed to do “more research” before commenting on David Duke and the KKK – more research? – and only when pressed did he rebuff these hate groups, although the rebuffing seemed more obligatory than heartfelt, signaling to the rest of us that Trump will apparently take votes anywhere he can get them and from literally anyone.

To add fuel to the fire, an avowed white supremacist named William Daniel Johnson was originally signed up as a delegate for Trump’s campaign from California, but later resigned, telling reporters that Trump campaign officers “don’t need the baggage.” Moreover, Trump’s rallies have included a virtual horde of white nationalists, apparently finally feeling newly empowered to crawl out of whatever sad and bitter life they have in the hinterlands of America in order to gin up some fresh hate against black folks and other ethnic groups.

For his part, Trump has said he is not a racist and doesn’t want the support of white supremacists, but given the numerous lies and half truths emitting from his mouth nearly on a daily basis, it’s hard to say whether he is being genuine or not on that point, or frankly, on anything else, especially so, since his campaign has admitted that he has just been “playing a part” in his “brash, bigoted, bullying” persona, as described by The Washington Post.

What we know for sure, however, is that his rhetoric is acutely responsible for stoking the flames of racism and bigotry in this country and continuing the work began by the Tea Party in the late 2000s, as the GOP’s failure to neuter the intractable strain of populism in its own ranks now threatens its existence.

[Cover photo credit: John Cole, Scranton Times-Tribune]

Election of unelectables

If anything has become certain this election, it must be that, unless both presidential primaries end up being decided at the conventions and more likable and less divisive candidates are foisted to the surface, Americans are going to wind up electing an unpopular candidate, which seems counterintuitive to how democracy is supposed to work, but chalk that up to another of the head-scratching anomalies of 2016.

Clearly, Donald Trump is at the top of the unpopular list. In states where he has won, Trump has commanded up to 40 percent of the vote, and in at least one recent poll, 49 percent of the GOP electorate said they supported him, compared with 15 percent for Sen. Ted Cruz and 6 percent for Gov. John Kasich. But outside of Trump’s core audience, which includes mostly uneducated, angry or frustrated white people in rural America, Trump has long ago lost the plot with conservative-minded women, Hispanics and educated Republicans, which is why he not only could turn out to be a disastrous GOP nominee, but he may be virtually unelectable in a general contest.

The GOP inteligencia, we can only assume, includes all of the “establishment” Republicans in Washington and their supporters in districts across the nation who are beseeching the party to #StopTrump at all costs, which has become a viral hashtag on Twitter the last several weeks, along with #DumpTrump, #CrushTrump and of course, #AnyoneButTrump. Rather than let the democratic process work like it was intended, which occasionally means electing candidates who are neither qualified or worthy of the office — Trump happens to fit both bills — some leaders inside the GOP have been plotting and scheming in an attempt to “derail” the real estate mogul’s path to victory and offer up an independent candidate to face former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or Sen. Bernie Sanders in the general election.

So, it’s no wonder, then, that 37 percent of Republicans surveyed said they would cast their ballots for a third party candidate rather than giving their votes to Trump. Meanwhile on a national scale, more than 60 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump, and 53 percent have a negative view of Clinton.

In short, although Trump and Clinton are the frontrunners in the next presidential election, a majority of Americans, amazingly, don’t like them. Trump’s problems are glaring enough — hostility to immigrants, xenophobia, bigotry and woeful foreign policy — but Clinton, at one time the darling of the left, has lost much of her luster amid a general mistrust and a perception that she lacks sincerity at all, much less sincerity on the level of Sanders.

Here is what Michael Barbaro had to say about this year’s unlikely primary election in a recent New York Times article:

Should they clinch the nomination, it would represent the first time in at least a quarter-century that majorities of Americans held negative views of both the Democratic and Republican candidates at the same time.

Cruz, who currently holds second place in the GOP primary with 424 delegates, is no better, and he may even be more disliked than Trump and Clinton. Numerous polls show Cruz hovering around 50 percent approval, and inside Washington, the perception seems to be that the only thing of substance he has done on The Hill thus far is to oversee — some might say “force” — the GOP-led government shutdown of 2013.

That leaves Sanders and Kasich, two candidates who happen to be the most liked, but consequently, the least likely to actually win the nomination in their respective parties. As unusual as the 2016 election cycle has been thus far, it’s almost a given that we are bound, in spite of ourselves, to elect a deeply unpopular candidate this year, and will then, as democracy goes, be forced to live with the consequences.

Below are favorability charts for the remaining candidates in the GOP and Democrat primaries (courtesy Huffington Post) with my brief notes:

Trump: Has the most momentum so far in the election and is the most disliked.

Cruz: Has few friends in Washington and widespread disapproval in the body politic:

Kasich: Objectively the most qualified candidate in the GOP field, with favorables outweighing negatives. Yet, still in a distant third.

Clinton: Has a strong base of supporters who would walk with her through fire and back, but everyone else is decidedly mistrustful and sees through the hollow politicking veneer. Will mostly likely win the nomination because — well — she’s Hillary Clinton, and apparently for the Democratic National Convention and her loyal supporters, that’s all that matters.

Sanders: Has almost as high a favorability rating as Clinton has unfavorable, but is and will likely continue to be in a distant second because — well — Hillary.