Tag Archives: Democracy

We’re at the Brink, So We Need to Get Serious

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If you’re familiar with American politics and mass media, you probably won’t be surprised to hear that, between January 1st and October 24th of this year, the nightly news programs on ABC, CBS and NBC devoted three times as much coverage to Hillary Clinton’s emails than to all issues of government policy combined (from the Tyndall Report):

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It’s safe to say this imbalance has grown even larger since October 28th. That’s when the Republican FBI Director Robert Comey sent Congress his cryptic letter regarding Anthony Weiner’s laptop. As Comey should have realized (and no doubt did), releasing that letter eleven days before the election led to an explosion of speculation and related discussion, none of which has revealed relevant facts about anything at all except that Trump and his supporters will use any excuse to paint Clinton as corrupt.

The incessant email stories on the broadcast networks and cable news and in leading newspapers has had a bizarre result. From the Gallup polling company:

We found that “email” was by far the most frequently used word when we asked Americans what they had read or heard about Clinton back in August 2015.…As [we] put it then: “When Gallup recently asked Americans to say what they recall reading or hearing about her, one word — ’email’ — drowned out everything else.”

Now we are asking Americans every day the same basic question — what they have read, seen or heard about Clinton — and once again, “email” dominates. For interviews conducted Oct. 28-31, “email” drowns out everything else, particularly anything relating to policy or substance. Indeed, the second-, third- and fourth-most-frequently used words associated with Clinton also relate to emails: “FBI,” “investigation” and “scandal.”

Believe it or not, 46% of voters in a recent poll said that Trump, the most obvious con man ever to run for the Presidency, is more trustworthy than Clinton (only 38% gave her higher marks). When people are asked to explain why they don’t trust Clinton, the most frequent response is, of course, “emails”.

As a minuscule corrective to the mountain of email nonsense that the media, Wikileaks (assisted by Russia, of course) and the FBI (officially and via politically-motivated leaks) have disseminated, here are an article and a video worth considering. You might also share them with friends, acquaintances, antagonists and random citizens before the voting ends on Tuesday.

First, Matthew Yglesias of Vox analyzes the Clinton email story with the aptly titled: “The Real Clinton Email Scandal Is That a Bullshit Story Has Dominated the Campaign”. He explains what Clinton did and shows why we shouldn’t care. An excerpt:

Clinton broke no laws according to the FBI itself. Her setup gave her no power to evade federal transparency laws beyond what anyone who has a personal email account of any kind has. Her stated explanation for her conduct is entirely believable, fits the facts perfectly, and is entirely plausible to anyone who doesn’t simply start with the assumption that she’s guilty of something.

Given [Secretary Colin] Powell’s conduct, Clinton wasn’t even breaking with an informal precedent. The very worst you can say is that, faced with an annoying government IT policy, she used her stature to find a personal workaround rather than a systemic fix that would work for everyone. To spend so much time on such a trivial matter would be absurd in a city council race, much less a presidential election. To do so in circumstances when it advances the electoral prospects of a rival who has shattered all precedents in terms of lacking transparency or basic honesty is infinitely more scandalous than anything related to the server itself.

And here is an eight-minute video uploaded today by Humanity for Hillary. It features Daveed Diggs and is called “Clinton vs. Trump on the Issues”:

Finally, a few words from Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine: 

However low my opinion of the Republican Party, it was not low enough….This is not a joke. This is one of the moments in history when the republic is at the brink.

Republican voters chose Trump. Republican donors have supported Trump. Republican politicians, even those who condemned him as a charlatan totally unfit to be President, have endorsed Trump. Others have remained silent. There are no excuses for what they’ve done. But now we have the chance to teach them a lesson. We need to vote for Democrats up and down the ballot. Only an historic, stinging defeat for the Republican Party will protect America and the world from getting this close to the brink the next time someone as dangerously abnormal as Trump wants the ability to launch nuclear missiles.

Obama Reminds Us This Isn’t a Reality Show

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President Obama spoke at a Clinton campaign rally in Philadelphia on Sept. 13. Anyone who might stay home in November or vote for someone else should watch the video. Actually, anyone who enjoys a great speech by a perceptive, honorable man should watch it.

Here he speaks about Clinton and our democracy, starting at 33:45 in the video:

“And, yes, she’s got her share of critics. And she’s been caricatured by the right and sometimes by the left. And she’s been accused of everything you can imagine, and has been subjected to more scrutiny and what I believe is more unfair criticism than anybody out here. And she doesn’t complain about it. And you know what, that’s what happens when you’re under the microscope for 40 years. But what sets Hillary apart is that through it all, she just keeps on going, and she doesn’t stop caring, and she doesn’t stop trying, and she never stops fighting for us — even if we haven’t always appreciated it.”

“And look, I understand we’re a young country, we are a restless country. We always like the new, shiny thing. I benefited from that when I was a candidate. And we take for granted sometimes what is steady and true. And Hillary Clinton is steady, and she is true. And the young people who are here, who — all you’ve been seeing is just the nonsense that’s been on TV. You maybe don’t remember all the work that she has had to do, and all the things she has had to overcome, and all the good that has happened because of her efforts.”

“But you need to remember. You need to understand this. If you’re serious about our democracy, then you’ve got to be with her. She’s in the arena, and you can’t leave her in there by herself. You’ve got to get in there with her. You can’t stay home because, you know, she’s been around for a long time. Well, you know what, this is not reality TV. Democracy is not a spectator sport.”

The full video:

We Should Let Garrison Keillor Pick the Next President

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Mr. Keillor shared his thoughts on Hillary Clinton and her presidential campaign yesterday on Facebook. I don’t think he’d mind me reprinting what he wrote. Or you can click on this link to read it.

[Quote:]

I saw Hillary once working a rope line for more than an hour, a Secret Service man holding her firmly by the hips as she leaned over the rope and reached into the mass of arms and hands reaching out to her. She had learned the art of encountering the crowd and making it look personal. It was not glamorous work, more like picking fruit, and it took the sort of discipline your mother instills in you: those people waited to see you so by gosh you can treat them right.

So it’s no surprise she pushed herself to the point of collapse the other day. What’s odd is the perspective, expressed in several stories, that her determination to keep going reveals a “lack of transparency” —- that she should’ve announced she had pneumonia and gone home and crawled into bed.

I’ve never gone fishing with her, which is how you really get to know someone, but I did sit next to her at dinner once, one of those stiff dinners that is nobody’s idea of a wild good time, the conversation tends to be stilted, everybody’s beat, you worry about spilling soup down your shirtfront. She being First Lady led the way and she being a Wellesley girl, the way led upward. We talked about my infant daughter and schools and about Justice Blackmun, and I said how inspiring it was to sit and watch the Court in session, and she laughed and said, “I don’t think it’d be a good idea for me to show up in a courtroom where a member of my family might be a defendant.” A succinct and witty retort. And she turned and bestowed her attention on Speaker Dennis Hastert, who was sitting to her right. She focused on him and even made him chuckle a few times. I was impressed by her smarts, even more by her discipline.

I don’t have that discipline. Most people don’t. Politics didn’t appeal to me back in my youth, the rhetoric (“Ask not what your country can do for you”) was so wooden compared to “so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past,” so I walked dark rainy streets imagining the great novel I wouldn’t write and was still trying to be cool and indifferent well into my thirties, when other people were making a difference in the world.

Hillary didn’t have a prolonged adolescence and fiction was not her ambition. She doesn’t do dreaminess. What some people see as a relentless quest for power strikes me as the good habits of a serious Methodist. Be steady. Don’t give up. It’s not about you. Work for the night is coming.

The woman who does not conceal her own intelligence is a fine American tradition, going back to Anne Bradstreet and Harriet Beecher Stowe and my ancestor Prudence Crandall, but none has been subjected to the steady hectoring that Mrs. Clinton has. She is the first major-party nominee to be pictured in prison stripes by the opposition. She is the first cabinet officer ever to be held personally responsible for her own email server, something ordinarily delegated to anonymous nerds in I.T. The fact that terrorists attacked an American compound in Libya under cover of darkness when Secretary Clinton presumably got some sleep has been held against her, as if she personally was in command of the defense of the compound, a walkie-talkie in her hand, calling in air strikes.

Extremism has poked its head into the mainstream, aided by the Internet. Back in the day, you occasionally saw cranks on a street corner handing out mimeographed handbills arguing that FDR was responsible for Pearl Harbor, but you saw their bad haircuts, the bitterness in their eyes, and you turned away. Now they’re in your computer, whispering that the economy is on the verge of collapse and for a few bucks they’ll tell you how to protect your savings. But lacking clear evidence, we proceed forward. We don’t operate on the basis of lurid conjecture.

Someday historians will get this right and look back at the steady pitter-pat of scandals that turned out to be nothing, nada, zero and ixnay and will conclude that, almost a century after women’s suffrage, almost 50 years after Richard Nixon signed Title IX into law, a woman was required to run for office wearing concrete shoes. Check back fifty years from now and if I’m wrong, go ahead and dance on my grave.

[Unquote]

Anybody Who Still Admires Trump

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There has been a lot of discussion lately about Trump’s supporters. One of the points frequently made is that we should try to understand their admiration for Trump from their perspective. We shouldn’t assume we know best.

Okay, I’ve tried to do that. This is the conclusion I’ve reached: 

Anybody who still admires Trump at this point is either an idiot, an ignoramus or a dupe.

In fact, I’ll share this further observation:

Anybody who thinks Hillary Clinton is the corrupt, untrustworthy candidate in this race is either an idiot, an ignoramus or a dupe.

Consider, for example, this article from The Washington Post: “Trump’s history of corruption is mind-boggling. So why is Clinton supposedly the corrupt one?”

And this one from Salon that explains why so many people are wrongly convinced that Clinton is corrupt: “Press, lies and Hillary’s campaign: Years of smears have created a fictional version of Clinton. They’re also a disservice to voters”. Its subtitle is “Many Americans think Clinton is a congenital liar — that’s because of the right and the media, not her”.

Finally, here is well-known journalist James Fallows of The Atlantic showing how recent news coverage of the campaign was especially dangerous and misleading. The article’s title is “How the Media Undermine American Democracy”.

Fallows has been writing almost daily about this moment in history under the heading “The Daily Trump: Filling a Time Capsule”. His editors explain why:  

People will look back on this era in our history to see what was known about Donald Trump while Americans were deciding whether to choose him as president. Here’s a running chronicle from James Fallows on the evidence available to voters as they make their choice, and of how Trump has broken the norms that applied to previous major-party candidates.

This is Fallows’s first entry from back in May, in which he shows how Trump jumped to a conclusion about a missing plane. This is his most recent entry, which discusses Trump’s continuing refusal to release his tax returns. 

It’s great to know there are journalists who are doing a good job covering the presidential campaign. Despite the fact that you have to look for them, there’s no excuse at this point for being a political ignoramus or a dupe, whatever your perspective is. 

And one more thought: I should have said that you could still admire Trump at this point if you’re a thug. Obviously, one thug can appreciate another thug who’s getting away with thuggery.

From Under the Cone of Silence

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Four days ago, I lowered the Cone of Silence, thereby tuning out all the news and commentary that keeps me relatively well-informed about current events. I wanted to watch the Democratic National Convention with no help from anybody else, unfiltered and undiscussed by anyone on TV or the internet. That’s meant no New York Times, no New York Magazine, no Guardian, no Daily Kos, no VOX, no Sky News, not even any Yahoo News for four whole days.

Finding gavel-to-gavel coverage of the convention online was easy (the convention has a website). Resisting the urge to read about it has been hard. In fact, despite my best efforts, one piece of news slipped under or through the Cone.

I learned that the Republican candidate for President of the United States said the Russians should try to find a bunch of Hillary Clinton’s emails and share them with the world. (Later, he apparently said he wasn’t joking.) That made me wonder. If the emails were uninteresting, hacking them would merely be a crime and an enormous campaign dirty trick. But if they did indeed contain sensitive national secrets, that would be a crime, a dirty trick and a breach of national security. Maybe Trump should have kept his mouth shut?

Anyway, I have a couple thoughts I want to share.

Remember two weeks ago when Ruth Bader Ginsburg said she was very worried about a Trump presidency? She later apologized for speaking out, since Supreme Court Justices are expected to keep their opinions about politics to themselves (although it’s fine for them to help elect a Republican President, vacate campaign finance laws and rule that the Voting Rights Act is obsolete, all while voting along party lines). 

Then, today, I saw that a retired Marine Corp general, John Allen, who commanded our forces in Afghanistan, will speak at the convention. Presumably, he will explain why he believes Clinton would be a much better Commander-in-Chief than you know who.

In reading a little about Gen. Allen, however, I saw some criticism at the Marine Corps Times site:

One expert on civil-military relations fears that by endorsing Clinton, Allen could give the appearance that he is speaking for current senior military leaders.

“A man of his prominence and his rank can be interpreted to speak for the whole military community, retired and active duty,” said Richard Kohn, who teaches military history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Kohn said he does not believe any retired military officer should ever endorse political candidates.

“They are in effect declaring themselves partisans and leaving the non-partisanship of the military profession and that’s a different thing,” he said.

We should note that a retired Army general spoke in favor of the Republican nominee last week, but putting that aside, it strikes me that anyone criticizing Gen. Allen, and anyone who criticized Justice Ginsburg, in fact even Justice Ginsburg herself, have all missed the point.

Rules help us make our way through life in an orderly fashion. Ethical rules, professional rules, grammatical rules, rules of thumb, the rules we call “the law”, they all help us deal with the situations we confront as we go about our business. Should I take that loaf of bread without paying? If he won’t look you in the eye, he’s probably lying. Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. “Couldn’t” is okay, but “can’t” isn’t.

As we all know, however, extraordinary things do happen. We sometimes face situations where the standard rules aren’t good enough. Can you think of such a situation today? Let me put it this way: Trump is so utterly unqualified to be President, he would be so dangerous if he became Commander-in-Chief, that no rules, laws, standards or common practices should stop anyone at all from saying so. 

Despite the fact that he won a major political party’s nomination, it would be entirely appropriate if the whole Supreme Court (all eight of them) and the senior officers who make up the Joint Chiefs of Staff (all seven of them) went on national television and pointed out the obvious fact: Nobody should vote for this guy! Wake up, you people!

I don’t mean to say that none of the rules apply in this situation. We should still have a presidential election on November 8th. The FBI shouldn’t put Trump in a cell. He shouldn’t be given a one-way ticket to Mars. But, seriously, we all need to do what we can to stop him from becoming President. We need to do it for ourselves as Americans but also for the rest of the world. (There are even rules in our favor: Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures and an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.)

Before I go, there was one other thing I wanted to mention. Maybe you’ve seen a movie called “Seven Days in May”. It was based on a novel about an attempted military coup in the United States. The idea was that the President wanted to sign a treaty with the Russians, but most of our military really hated it. So Burt Lancaster and a bunch of other high-ranking officers tried to take over the government. I won’t tell you how it ended, but we were lucky to have Kirk Douglas on our side.

Now consider if somebody like the general who led the conspiracy in Seven Days in May decided to leave the Army and run for President. As played by Burt Lancaster, Gen. James Mattoon Scott was a very handsome, very intelligent, very experienced, very skilled officer. If anyone was looking for a Man on a White Horse to save America in its darkest hour, he’d be a prime candidate.

So here’s my question: If millions of Americans are willing to elect an unpredictable ignoramus and reality TV con man like Trump, how would our fellow citizens react to a candidate who favored equally misguided policies, but who could speak intelligently and had a distinguished record of service to America?

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather not worry about that question. We have enough trouble already.