Category Archives: Politics

Darkness in America

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I suppose it’s possible there were some “very fine people” who chose to march with the Nazis and Klan in Charlottesville, chanting “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us”. Perhaps they were seriously misinformed about the nature of the event. But as Chris Rock said today: “If 10 guys thinks it’s ok to hang with 1 Nazi then they just became 11 Nazis”.

The good news is that the president* sunk so low today that more of our fellow citizens will turn against him, finally seeing him for what he is. His angry defense of white supremacy even generated disgusted reactions from a few of the right-wingers on Fox (order has probably been restored by now).

Congresswoman Gwen Moore, a Democratic Congresswoman who represents Milwaukee, called for his impeachment:

“As we once again hear [the president*] defend those responsible for the deadly riot in Charlottesville and receive praise by hate groups like the KKK and neo-Nazis, the time has come for Republicans and Democrats to put aside our political differences and philosophical debates for a higher cause. For the sake of the soul of our country, we must come together to restore our national dignity that has been robbed by [his] presence in the White House. My Republican friends, I implore you to work with us within our capacity as elected officials to remove this man as our commander-in-chief and help us move forward from this dark period in our nation’s history.”

Of course, impeachment is unlikely, given the Republican majority in the House, but perhaps the House and Senate will vote to censure him. I could see our not-as-terrible-as-some Republican Congressman voting for that. 

Perhaps being censured would finally give our president* the heart attack or stroke he so richly deserves (after his new chief of staff told him what “censure” means). 

Meanwhile, the sun, earth and moon are speeding toward the locations in space that will give America a solar eclipse on Monday. The “totality – the area where the sun is completely blocked by the moon – will be 70 miles wide and will travel from Oregon in the morning to South Carolina in the afternoon. The rest of the country will see a partial eclipse. 

Vox has a cool eclipse tracker that allows you to see when the eclipse will occur in your zip code and how much of the sun will be hidden. At its peak here in New Jersey, 72% of the sun will be hidden at 2:44 p.m. I don’t plan to use the special glass or glasses you need in order to avoid permanent eye damage, but I’ll certainly take a quick look. Coincidentally, I have an appointment with our optometrist at 3 p.m. I can experience the eclipse from his parking lot and then he can tell me if I’m blind.

I’m just brainstorming here, but I wonder if someone could convince our president* that the eclipse will be a Message telling him his presidency is over. Eclipses have often made a big impression on the ignorant and/or simple-minded. Assuming he’s in Washington, however, the moon will only block 81% of the sun. That might not be enough. But the Secret Service could tell him he’s got a rally to attend in South Carolina (they like him down there) and arrange him to be outside at just the right time. It’s a long shot, but one can dream.

PS: Another Democratic Congresswoman, Jackie Speier, who represents the area south of San Francisco, has called for the president* to be removed because he is mentally unfit: “[He] is showing signs of erratic behavior and mental instability that place the country in grave danger. Time to invoke the 25th Amendment”.

“I’m Not Saying We Wouldn’t Get Our Hair Mussed”

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In March 2016, candidate Trump said he wouldn’t rule out using nuclear weapons in the Middle East or Europe.

In August 2016, Joe Scarborough of MSNBC claimed that “several months ago, a foreign policy expert went to advise Mr. Trump. … Trump asked three times, in an hour briefing, ‘why can’t we use nuclear weapons?'”

In January, after North Korean leader Kim Jong-un announced imminent plans to test an intercontinental ballistic missile, President-elect Trump tweeted “It won’t happen!”

Last month, the U.S. government announced that North Korea had indeed tested an ICBM. The Trump administration responded by saying America would use “the full range of capabilities at our disposal against the growing threat”. 

On Tuesday, sources in the administration leaked an analysis of North Korea’s nuclear capabilities:

North Korea has successfully produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit inside its missiles, crossing a key threshold on the path to becoming a full-fledged nuclear power, U.S. intelligence officials have concluded in a confidential assessment.

The analysis, completed last month by the Defense Intelligence Agency, comes on the heels of another intelligence assessment that sharply raises the official estimate for the total number of bombs in the communist country’s atomic arsenal. The United States calculated last month that up to 60 nuclear weapons are now controlled by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

The President immediately issued “an extraordinary ultimatum”:

“North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen… [Kim Jong Un] has been very threatening beyond a normal state. They will be met with fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before”…

The President received encouragement from one of his most prominent evangelical supporters, pastor Robert Jeffress of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas:

“When it comes to how we should deal with evil doers, the Bible, in the book of Romans, is very clear: God has endowed rulers full power to use whatever means necessary — including war — to stop evil. In the case of North Korea, God has given Trump authority to take out Kim Jong-Un. I’m heartened to see that our president … will not tolerate any threat against the American people. 

Yesterday, Secretary of Defense James Mattis (the former general whose appointment as Secretary of Defense required special dispensation from Congress) issued a statement:

The United States and our allies have the demonstrated capabilities and unquestionable commitment to defend ourselves from an attack… The DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] must choose to stop isolating itself and stand down its pursuit of nuclear weapons.  The DPRK should cease any consideration of actions that would lead to the end of its regime and the destruction of its people.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican who occasionally shows some sense, indicated that the President is ready to launch a preemptive strike: 

“I do believe Donald Trump will not allow Kim Jong-un to get a missile to hit America with a nuclear weapon on top, and it’s a matter of time until that capability exists….So, I hope we can do this [with] diplomacy and sanctions [and] war would be terrible, but if there’s going to be a war, it’s going to be in the region, not here in America….Isn’t your primary purpose as President of the United States to protect the American homeland from a nuclear weapon attack by a guy like Kim Jong-un?… He’s gonna pick homeland defense over regional stability and he has to.”

Note for Sen. Graham: Please read the Vox article “North Korea Is More Rational Than You Think”. It’s very hard to see why North Korea would want to start a war.

After Secretary of State Rex Tillerson downplayed the situation, saying there is no “imminent threat” and “Americans should sleep well at night”, Sebastian Gorka, a top presidential adviser (and neo-Nazi), declared: “The idea that Secretary Tillerson is going to discuss military matters is simply nonsensical”, apparently suggesting that the issue of war and peace is a purely military matter. 

Finally, the President today expressed the opinion that his previous ultimatum “maybe wasn’t tough enough”. He told reporters that North Korea “better get their act together or they’re going to be in trouble like few nations ever have been in trouble in this world”.

Well. I hope the North Korean leadership understands that you can’t believe a word that comes out of Trump’s mouth. When it comes to making threats or promises, he might as well be what the Chinese call a “paper tiger”. A normal response to his bombast would be “yeah, right, Donald, why don’t you go play golf or watch TV?”

But our President is also stupid, ignorant and lacking in normal human emotions, so nobody knows what he might decide to do. He does have the ability to launch a nuclear strike without anyone else’s approval (a problem that needs to be fixed). I don’t think he’d do that, however. I think it’s more likely he would authorize a non-nuclear attack on North Korea designed to eliminate the country’s leadership or slow down it’s nuclear program. The likely outcome of that would be a major war that wouldn’t be limited to the Korean peninsula.

The Atlantic has a long article on “How to Deal With North Korea”. Its subtitle is “There are no good options. But some are worse than others.” Its conclusion is “every option the United States has for dealing with North Korea is bad. But accepting it as a nuclear power may be the least bad”:

Although in late April Trump called Kim “a madman with nuclear weapons,” perhaps the most reassuring thing about pursuing the acceptance option is that Kim appears to be neither suicidal nor crazy. In the five and a half years since assuming power at age 27, he has acted with brutal efficiency to consolidate that power; the assassination of his half brother is only the most recent example. As tyrants go, he’s shown appalling natural ability. For a man who occupies a position both powerful and perilous, his moves have been nothing if not deliberate and even cruelly rational.

And as the latest head of a family that has ruled for three generations, one whose primary purpose has been to survive, as a young man with a lifetime of wealth and power before him, how likely is he to wake up one morning and set fire to his world?

The same logic applies to Iran and its nuclear program. There is no easy way to stop technologically-advanced countries from obtaining nuclear weapons, especially when unfriendly nations already have them. Fortunately, however, there is no reason to think any country on Earth would use them, unless it was to retaliate against an invasion or an earlier nuclear attack. If that happened, we could only hope the damage would be limited, as it was in Japan seventy-two years ago this week. As long as some countries have nuclear weapons, other countries will acquire them. Unless the nations of the world agree to eliminate them, and, if necessary, join together to force recalcitrant nations to give them up (and keep them out of the hands of terrorists), nuclear weapons will pose a continuing threat.

In case you didn’t catch it, “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed” is from Dr. Strangelove. General “Buck” Turgidson is vigorously arguing for a preemptive attack on the Soviet Union: “Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops.”

Presumably, the real-life President will receive better advice than the fictional President Merkin Muffley (if only that nice egghead President Muffley was Commander-in-Chief right now). 

A National Moratorium to End This Presidency

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Will Bunch writes a column for Philly.com, the website for what’s left of Philadelphia’s daily newspapers. This week he called for a Moratorium to End the Trump Presidency:

“Do you remember your first political protest? I remember mine, even if it comes with a big asterisk. It happened on Oct. 15, 1969, and it was called the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam. The asterisk is that I really didn’t do much — not even march in the streets or carry a peace flag. All I did, actually, was ride in the backseat of our family’s Ford Country Squire station wagon with our headlights on during broad daylight — a sign that you were against the war. For those who cruised America’s highways that Wednesday, the sight of so many other headlights was a close encounter of the first kind, meaning you were not alone … in wanting the troops to come home from Southeast Asia.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about the 1969 moratorium — especially since about noon or so on  Friday, Jan. 20, 2017. Of course, it was just the next day that America saw the Women’s March, a 4-million-participant warning shot across the bow of the Trump presidency, and that has been followed by other protests, including targeted efforts that have played a role in so far blocking any efforts to repeal Obamacare. And yet the broader protest fervor seems to have waned even as the threat that Trump and his team pose to America’s democratic norms has grown in recent weeks. Is there a lesson for today’s Trump Resistance in a wildly successful protest that took place nearly 48 years ago?

I think so. The strategy of the Vietnam moratorium … was brilliant. Some activists thought the next step in antiwar protest should be a general strike, but [others] had a better idea. Plan the kind of inclusive event where every American who opposed the war — not just crazy campus radicals with their Viet Cong flags, but churchgoing suburbanites and baseball moms and your next-door neighbor — could find some way, big or small, to take part.

Hold up a candle at a vigil. Attend a rally or a “teach-in” at your town square or in your church. Call in sick from work or stay out of school to march in a protest. Or, failing that, at least take two seconds to flip on your headlights. Anything that would prove that opposition to the Vietnam War was not only nonviolent, but moral and middle-class. And, most important, mainstream. The first round of coast-to-coast protests that October drummed up support for a mass march on Washington exactly one month later that drew an eye-popping 500,000 people….

It’s easy to dismiss the moratorium because — as history showed us — the Vietnam War didn’t end right away in 1969. The final U.S. combat troops didn’t come home until the winter of early 1973. But in other ways, the protest effort was a stunning success. October 1969 marked the first time the Gallup Poll showed a majority of Americans believed the war was a mistake. President Richard M. Nixon felt that heat inside the White House, where that fall, he addressed the public to insist that a so-called silent majority supported his policies. But Nixon also speeded up the pace of troop withdrawals, and Congress eventually moved to pass the War Powers Act, seeking to restrict presidents’ ability to launch another Vietnam. It didn’t last, but U.S. foreign policy was arguably more restrained and wiser over the next decade or two — all because everyday citizens had taken action.

What happened in 1969 is more proof that citizen action — or inaction — is the tipping point between democracy and authoritarianism. The largest wrench in the would-be despot’s toolbox is apathy — a dazed and confused populace that sits on its hands when a self-proclaimed strongman moves to restrict the freedom of the press or curb the power of the judiciary or independent prosecutors or strip people of voting rights. The flip side is that it’s remarkable what a truly engaged citizenry can accomplish.

In South Korea, during the same weeks that Trump was transitioning into the presidency, as many as 1.7 million people at a time flooded the streets of downtown Seoul to protest corruption by their country’s then-president, Park Geun-hye, in demonstrations the Washington Post described as a “democratic, peaceful and even joyous assembly, demanding the president’s ouster.” And ousted Park was. In Poland, democracy seemed to be hanging by a thread last month as the ruling party sat poised to crush that nation’s independent judiciary — until the masses took to the streets of Warsaw.

The bottom line is that government does respond to the people, but only when the people respond to the government. When Trump fires the FBI director who’s probing his campaign or calls the free press “the enemy of the American people,” right now he doesn’t see 1.7 million people outside his bedroom window. He sees only the prattling heads on Fox & Friends — and so it’s only going to get worse, especially with the new report that special prosecutor Robert Mueller is bringing evidence before a grand jury. Now is the time for America to show its inner Seoul.

A long time ago, I chose a keyboard over marching boots. But today, I’m using my keyboard and my platform as an opinion writer to offer this opinion: What America needs right now is a Moratorium to End the Trump Presidency — a mass event that will show the world a not-so-silent majority of Americans does not support an uncouth and irrational wannabe despot in the Oval Office. It’s great that 61 percent of the public can tell a pollster they disapprove of Trump’s presidency. But now we need 61 percent of Americans to tell that to their neighbors, to their local communities, and to the world, in a public display of disaffection.

When? Why not Oct. 15, 2017, the 48th anniversary of the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, when the weather is good and the kids on campus have settled in for the fall semester? What? Whatever it takes to show people that decent Americans want this nightmare to end…. Why? Because it’s going to take more than 140 characters or your most impassioned Facebook rant to change America for good. Then, a month later — say Nov. 18, 2017, a Saturday — converge 1.7 million, give or take a few, of those people in front of Trump’s White House fence. And watch to see who will be the first Republican congressman from a swing district to endorse impeachment.

You know, moratorium, at first blush, seems like an odd thing to call a protest. But the definition of moratorium is “a temporary prohibition” of a regular activity. For the last 28 weeks, America has endured a president who is, in the words of the Twitter hashtag,  #NotNormal. Maybe mixing up our routines for a couple of days this fall is the best way to get our nation back to, you know … normal.

End quote.

Twenty-Four Later, A Few Angry Observations

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Now that the legislative assault on the Affordable Care Act has ended for the time being, I’d like to take a break from thinking about politics. I hope the members of Congress feel the same way. 

I can’t move on, however, without sharing some choice words I read today. First, Paul Waldman of The Washington Post wrote “This Is What You Get When You Vote For Republicans”:

“It goes much further than their repugnant and disastrous effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but all the contemporary GOP’s pathologies could be seen there: their outright malice toward ordinary people, their indifference to the suffering of their fellow citizens, their blazing incompetence, their contempt for democratic norms, their shameless hypocrisy, their gleeful ignorance about policy, their utter dishonesty and bad faith, their pure cynicism, and their complete inability to perform anything that resembles governing. It was the perfect Republican spectacle.

It’s remarkable to consider that there was a time not too long ago when the Grand Old Party was known for being serious, sober, a little boring, but above all, responsible. They were conservative in the traditional sense: wanting to conserve what they thought was good and fearful of rapid change. You might not have agreed with them, but there were limits to the damage they could do.

The devolution from that Republican Party to the one we see today took a couple of decades and had many sources, but its fullest expression was reached with the lifting up of Donald J. Trump to the presidency, this contemptible buffoon who may have been literally the single worst prominent American they could have chosen to be their standard-bearer. I mean that seriously. Can you think of a single person who might have run for president who is more ignorant, more impulsive, more vindictive and more generally dangerous than Donald Trump? And yet they rallied around him with near-unanimity, a worried shake of the head to his endless stream of atrocious statements and actions the strongest dissent most of them could muster.”

Waldman then reviews other recent travesties I won’t bother listing. He concludes:

“I could go on and delve into the president’s plan to blow up the Iran nuclear deal, or the climate-denial initiative at the Environmental Protection Agency, or all the fossil-fuel lobbyists now staffing the Interior Department, or any of a hundred abominable policies and programs. But the point is, we’re getting just what we should have expected. Donald Trump isn’t an aberration, he’s the apotheosis of contemporary Republicanism.

Republicans don’t care about making an honest case for their priorities; Trump lies nearly every time he opens his mouth. They’re unconcerned about the details of policy; he knows less about how government works than your average sixth-grader. They’re indifferent to human suffering; he literally advocates destroying the individual health-care market so he can blame Barack Obama for the lives that wind up ruined. They advocate a mindless anti-government philosophy; he has so much contempt for governing that he puts his son-in-law in charge of everything from solving the opioid crisis to achieving Middle East peace. They whine endlessly about the liberal media; he spends hours every day watching “Fox & Friends” and takes advice from Sean Hannity. Trump is the essence of the GOP, distilled down to its depraved and odious core.

America was given a reprieve last night, saved from the Republicans’ cruelest plans by a Democratic Party that stood strong, thousands of activists and ordinary citizens who organized in opposition and the GOP’s own incompetence. But this what you get when you give today’s Republican Party complete control of the government.”

Second, Eric Levitz of New York Magazine points out a big story that isn’t getting much attention today: 

“On Friday morning, the big story is that three Republicans voted no, and spared the individual insurance market from the threat of imminent collapse. But in the long run, the more significant development may be that 49 voted yes — and kicked out another chunk of concrete from the crumbling foundation of our (sorry excuse for a) representative democracy….

[The] threat to our republic has not been quarantined in the White House.

The congressional GOP has spent most of the past six months trying to cut nearly $800 billion out of a half-century-old program that 70 million Americans rely on for basic health care. They have also worked to erode protections for people with preexisting conditions; increase the average deductible on insurance plans sold over the individual market; and drastically raise premiums for a large swath of their own base, all for the sake of maximizing the amount of tax cuts they can deliver to multi-millionaires.

They have done all this while explicitly promising their own voters that they were trying to do the opposite…. Republican lawmakers knew that their policy goals lacked the support of their own voters. But [that] merely led them to try and obscure [their goals]…. They lied and hid, and hid and lied, until, finally, their mendacious cowardice reached its tragicomic apotheosis, and three U.S. senators publicly announced that they would vote for a “disaster” bill — but disavowed all responsibility for the effects it would have if passed into law, because they officially opposed it.

Trumpcare may be dead. But the libertarian plutocrats who bankroll the Republican Party are not. The Kochs, Mercers, and their ilk are not going to stop fighting for their agenda. And so long as an overwhelming majority of Americans do not want to live in Ayn Rand’s utopia, advancing their aims will require undermining responsive government in the United States. Earlier this month, House Republicans released a “budget blueprint,” which functioned as a formal declaration of the party’s long-term fiscal goals. Those included $500 billion worth of cuts to Medicare, $1.5 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, and the utter decimation of food aid and tax credits for the working poor. Few, if any, Republicans won election by publicly touting such plans. The party’s standard-bearer won the White House by promising to protect — and expand — the welfare state. They know they aren’t going to realize their vision through the power of persuasion.

But if they can pass enough voter-suppression laws to fine-tune the electorate; sow enough fatalistic cynicism about our political system to get ordinary Americans to tune out; buy up enough local television stations to deliver conservative propaganda to 70 percent of U.S. households; supply enough campaign contributions to insulate GOP incumbents from democratic rebuke; and eliminate enough transparency from the legislative process to leave the public incapable of comprehending what their representatives do and don’t support, maybe, just maybe, they can substitute their will for the majority’s.

Last night, they came one vote short. That’s a relief. But it’s also a crisis.”

Hooray!

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Sometimes the good guys win!

The fight won’t be over until the Democrats regain the presidency or at least one house of Congress, but maybe the reactionaries will finally accept that America won’t go backward.  

And then one day we’ll finally get to universal medical coverage.

In the short term, however, what we need is for the hosts of Fox and Friends to accurately explain to their most devoted viewer what the Affordable Care Act does and how it could be made better (by expanding Medicaid to every state, for example). That could make a big difference to the health and welfare of the American people. 

Sometimes it’s okay to dream, because sometimes the good guys win.