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.]

The Grand Old Delusion

The latest polls show that former Vice President Joe Biden is leading President Donald Trump by a five-point margin nationwide, according to CNN and the research firm SSRS, while Trump has a seven-point lead in battleground states. As we know, battleground states have historically been significant in ultimately choosing the winner in our electoral college system.

The 2020 election, which takes place Nov. 3, could be shaping up as another situation in which the Democratic Party candidate wins the popular vote but fails to garner enough electoral votes. In other words, we could be gearing up for another tight race.

MOBILE, AL- AUGUST 21: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump greets supporters after his rally at Ladd-Peebles Stadium on August 21, 2015 in Mobile, Alabama. The Trump campaign moved tonight’s rally to a larger stadium to accommodate demand. (Photo by Mark Wallheiser/Getty Images)

This is stunning to me because Trump has spent four straight years brazenly lying to the public, issuing embellishments and half-truths and just generally talking out of his ass — almost all of it documented and written about repeatedly in the press — as well as insulting nearly every voting demographic in the country and being openly hostile to our democratic institutions. Yet, he seems to have carte blanche free reign to do as he pleases inside the Republican Party, which is full of cowards who refuse to stand up to him, and his supporters in the public sphere either don’t care about his unethical behavior or give him a pass because they like his politics.

Trump bullies and insults anyone who dares disagree or question him. He has shown many instances of narcissistic tendencies and crude behavior toward women. He’s flirted with open racists. He and/or his inner cycle most certainly colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election. He has shown little to no empathy during the coronavirus pandemic. He unabashedly refuses to wear a mask and set an example for the rest of the country. In one of the many talking-out-of-his-ass episodes, he raised the question about whether people could potentially inject disinfectant as a potential cure for the virus. And lo and behold, some small percentage of the population took him seriously. Of course, as he has done in the past, Trump covers his tracks on this idiotic idea by claiming that he was being “sarcastic.” I watched the press conference, and it sounded as if it was a fairly serious suggestion.

In any case, one can only imagine why millions still support him, but something close to half of the people who have been polled are still on the Trump train despite everything that I have mentioned.

Do they support him because he has made good on his campaign promises? A quick check at politifact.com will reveal that, of Trump’s five major campaign promises, two were broken promises — repeal Obamacare and build a wall and force Mexico to fund it — two were compromises and only partly completed and one promise — the travel ban — was actually kept. The following is a breakdown of all of his promises from Trump-O-Meter:

Remember that the election is six months away, so the likelihood that many, or any, of these will get done in that short timeframe, especially given the national pandemic crisis and Trump’s ceaseless obsession with “fake news” and how he’s being portrayed in the media, instead of, you know, being a leader and actually governing.

So, what is behind the continued support Trump receives, and no doubt, will continue to receive from conservatives heading into the election? In part, blue collar America sees the president as standing up for policies that will help them, although the Republican Party’s platforms the last several decades have been anything but concerned with the working class. And since at least 2008, the rise of the Tea Party and continued influence of Fox News, members of the populist right have lived in a vacuum, an echo chamber of whatever they want to hear. Obama was the reincarnation of the “antichrist.” The Democrats, liberals, progressives, homosexuals, feminists and atheists are all immoral, ill-begotten people who want to ruin the country, or worse and even more ridiculous, are themselves tools of the “antichrist.” Were these folks to read a book, they might learn that, historically, it has been the liberals, progressives and freethinkers who have largely moved society forward and generally cared for the interests of everyday, working Americans.

Trump’s other main voting bloc out in the public, besides wealthy Wall Street banker types who are willing to support any policy that puts the health of our financial institutions and corporations above the health and well-being of people, are white evangelicals, many of whom, according to Pew, still believe that Trump is fighting for their beliefs, even if some of them question his personal behavior. One of the more telling polls by Pew is the percentage of evangelicals who think Trump is either very religious or somewhat religious (12 percent and 52 percent, respectively) compared with the general public (7 percent and 28 percent, respectively). Sixty-three percent of the general public believes that Trump is not religious. But make no mistake about it, white, born-again Christian evangelicals in 2016, despite already having plenty of documented cases of Trump’s racism, sexism and dishonesty, overwhelmingly voted for him by an 80 percent margin, according to Pew. He was their consecrated leader. Remember this photo?

That Republicans have claimed their party holds the moral high ground in America the last half century, couching it in Christian language when their policies have little, if anything, to do with the teachings of Jesus — care for the sick, the downtrodden and the least among us and meet the needs of the poor — is contemptible. The Republican calling card, since the rise of the Moral Majority in the late 70s and even before, has, in fact, been to address the interests of corporations, financial institutions and, of course, privileged white people. The platform goes like this: leverage power from the pulpit and through The Family, leverage power from Wall Street, leverage power and influence from the halls of Congress and demonize those who actually do care about the underdogs of our society: the sick, the disabled, the blue collar workers, the immigrants and inner city families. “Somewhere I read,” as Martin Luther King Jr. would say, that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Yet, while the Democratic Party certainly contains many Christians, it is the Republican Party that has draped itself in the flag and the cross all the while eschewing the very teachings espoused in the Bible.

The populist right, then, has been duped into believing that Trump and the Republican Party has their best interests at heart. They do not. But despite the reality, and decades of evidence as support and four years of outright lies and unethical behavior from the Child-In-Chief, one of the pettiest human beings I have ever encountered, and certainly one of the most ill-fit to ever hold office, conservatives will, once again, lacking a basic understanding of context or history, foolishly vote against their own vested interests and make this a close race.

Evangelicals and white workers in small-town America believe that the Republican Party cares about them. They believe Trump, or whoever the Republican nominee is in any given year, cares about them. All are demonstrably false. This is the great delusion of the last 30 years.

Democracy under assault

Few thinkers, past or present, could match the intellectual and rhetorical power Christopher Hitchens harnessed when he sat down to put pen to paper, excoriating what he saw were the misdeeds of leaders across the cultural and political spectrum, from Joseph Ratzinger, Bill Clinton, Mother Teresa to God himself.

“One of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority,” he once said. “It’s indispensable.”

No one is above scrutiny, I believe he would say.

Sadly, we lost this imperishable writer in 2011, but one wonders what he would say today if he could witness the widespread regression taking place in politics and society, at a time when free speech is being threatened on college campuses across the nation, when journalists are demonized as “enemies of the people” and when the nation is being led by one of the most dishonest, borderline autocratic and nationalistic administrations in United States history.

The Washington Post’s motto reads, “Democracy dies in darkness.” While the battle for free speech on college campuses and elsewhere may not appear to be related to President Donald Trump’s administration, the two are actually working in tandem to dim the light of our democracy.

In recent years, dozens of speakers, including evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, libertarian Ben Shapiro, classical liberal and psychologist Jordan Peterson, conservative commentator Ann Coulter, feminist Christina Hoff Sommers and former CIA director John Brennan, of all people, have been either deplatformed or forced to end their talks early amid protests at public events in traditionally progressive centers.

To take one case, Dawkins was blacklisted by Berkeley progressive radio station, KPFA, for what the station described as “abusive speech” against Islam. Readers of Dawkins well know that while he is an unapologetic atheist, he, along with other members of the New Atheist movement, which includes Hitchens, have been careful to criticize the ideas of Islam, not the people who practice it.

Thus, officials at Berkeley and many other liberals toeing the social justice line have confused, and continue to confuse, this distinction, such that many rational liberals and progressives have been compelled to defend conservatives in the interest of free speech and the latter’s inalienable right to speak openly. College campuses and liberal towns are supposed to be bastions of free speech and expression. That is where students go to be intellectually challenged, not to be coddled.

“How have the mighty fallen,” Dawkins said in 2017. “Berkeley, the home of free speech. Now, the home of suppression of free speech.”

Trump’s ongoing attacks on the media — exempting, of course, his friend Sean Hannity and other supporters at Fox News — stick the dagger in even deeper.

To its credit, Fox News scolded Hannity for appearing on stage with Trump during an event in late 2018, but that was too little too late. With even a cursory look at the cable news channel, one must conclude that it stopped pretending to be “fair and balanced” long ago. For Trump’s part, dismissing stories as ”fake news” — fake, not because they aren’t true, but because the president just doesn’t like the reporting — and lambasting journalists who have an important job to do, maybe the most important job to do in this era of misinformation, undermines one of the pillars of our democracy.

For a sitting president to sneer at reporters and childishly complain that he is being treated unfairly, as he has done repeatedly since before the election, is beyond the pale, and even many of his fellow Republicans have found this behavior indefensible.

In August, the GOP-controlled Senate unanimously passed a symbolic resolution declaring that the media is not the “enemy of the people,” and Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., was among those on the right to challenge Trump’s charged rhetoric.

“We can’t go on like this,” Flake said. “We’ve got to reach across the aisle and find common ground. If we don’t, it’s just going to escalate further.”

Compound Trump’s hostility toward the media with overseeing one of the nation’s most secretive, intellectually dishonest administrations potentially one of the most corrupt if special counsel Robert Mueller’s work provides incontrovertible proof of collusion with Russia one could argue, as E.J. Dionne Jr. with The Post did in August, that we as a nation are “slouching toward autocracy.”

While we can laugh, and often do, at Trump’s Twitter meltdowns and the ridiculous speeches — he has the “best words” — what we have here is a prelude to disaster if the nation continues down the road of less transparency and the subversion of free speech and the press.

The First Amendment must be protected at all costs. In the year 2019, this should not be a controversial statement.

[Image credit: “Freedom” by DeviantArt user Bozack.]

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.]

Our anti-environment EPA head, redux

In my last post, which I realize was over a year ago and I have had much on which to catch up and comment, I looked at the track record of newly nominated Environmental Protection Agency Director Scott Pruitt in his home state of Oklahoma. I made the case that, similar to other cabinet picks by Donald Trump at the time, Pruitt was just another in a long series of people who, at best, had limited or no experience or expertise in the areas for which they were nominated to serve, and at worst, were hostile to the objectives of their respective agencies.

For any rational person who actually cared about having qualified and serious cabinet members help guide the ship in Washington, Pruitt would be at or near the bottom of the list for a post at the EPA. But true to form, given the proverbial gaggle of incompetent or unqualified people nominated to Trump’s cabinet and administration — those who have yet to be fired or resign, that is — he simply doesn’t care how well these people know their subjects or how vigorously they stand up for the principles of their offices.

My implication last year that Pruitt was going to be ill-fit for the job and even deleterious to its mission has come to bear. Over the last year, he micromanaged efforts to remove information about climate change work from the EPA’s website (more here), defended Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement signed by 195 nations, including Syria — a striking embarrassment for the United States in its own right — and last October, started a process to repeal the Clean Power Plan, the country’s only major initiative to curb carbon plant emissions.

To anyone who is paying attention, all of this should come as no surprise. As I said previously, Pruitt made his bones railing against the EPA, with more than a dozen lawsuits against the agency to boot, as attorney general in Oklahoma. And he has openly questioned humanity’s role in contributing to climate change, telling CNBC:

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 to debate, continue the review and analysis.

Of course, that’s in direct opposition to data from NASA and every credible scientific exploration of the topic on the planet. I would wager that, next to nuclear war, climate change and its potential for long-term, seismic impacts to the environment is the most pressing issue that we are facing as a species. In a 2014 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change called the environmental trends we are currently seeing “unequivocal”:

Human influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history. Recent climate changes have had widespread impacts on human and natural systems.

and

Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, and sea level has risen.

Most recently, a memo leaked from Pruitt’s office continued to throw shade on the idea that humans are causing climate change and all its disastrous effects. Here is point five:

Human activity impacts our changing climate in some manner. The ability to measure with precision the degree and extent of that impact, and what to do about it, are subject to continuing debate and dialogue.

“In some manner” would be a giant understatement. The memo also said “clear gaps” still existed in our understanding of human’s impact on the climate, even though there was no elaboration. Attempting to argue that there are gaps in our understanding of manmade climate change is a copout, of course, and only serves to delay any significant work in this area with the expressed intent to continue propping up the worst offenders in the carbon and gas industries because Pruitt and his ilk have a financial vested interest in halting or curbing regulations altogether.

Add to that Pruitt’s recent egregious travel expenses and supposedly required security detail in places like Disneyland and the Vatican — I don’t think taking tours to Italy and Disneyland is part of the EPA director’s job description — and you have the top environmental official in the nation clearly not caring about his own carbon footprint, his own excessive use of taxpayer dollars or conflicts of interest related to his job.

But for a president who thinks he can govern from Twitter and insult most everyone on the planet, except for Vladmir Putin, of course, these are the kinds of people we should have expected to lead the charge. And, predictably, they seem to be crashing and burning one by one, much like the administration itself.

Sources:

[Cover image credit: “.:Warming Global:.” by DeviantArt user spotterfire-cat.]

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.]

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]