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OK, I Blew It…

Dave Broder, the late, great Washington Post reporter and columnist, was quite possibly the last nearly uniformly respected political journalist in America. Born in Illinois, Broder brought a middle western non-ideological sensibility to his reporting and commentary. Before his death in 2011, Broder was regularly named as the “most trusted,” the “fairest,” the hardest working scribbler in Washington. 

Late is his long career, Broder was insightful – he was insightful about many things – as to the problems facing our politics and those who cover our politics. Trust was the problem he concluded. 

Dave Broder, the Washington Post journalist and icon

“But this is now just sort of endemic,” Broder said in an interview in 1996. “I mean, if you are in politics, you are, by virtue of that fact, a subject of distrust. And if you are part of the press, they also figure that you’re playing some angle of your own. Or that you’re in bed with that sort of closed group–the insiders. And this is a country that is very suspicious of insiders.” 

In his own low-key way, Dave Broder tried every December to address the trust gap. He published a column on the things he got wrong during the previous year. I’m no Dave Broder, but his example is a good one for anyone who pops off about politics and tries to make sense of politicians. 

So here goes: some of what I got wrong in 2020. 

Most mistakes I make, and I certainly make my share, are in the category of hope triumphing over experience. A lifetime of participating in politics and therefore thinking that experience makes you infallible is the ultimate hubris. My hubris was on full display when I suggested – more than once in 2020 – that American voters would broadly reject the politics of division and discord exemplified over the last four years by the man about to leave the White House. 

Donald Trump was broadly rejected – a decisive loss in the Electoral College and crushing margin of the popular vote – but Republicans generally did very well in the November election. Far from repudiation the GOP came darn close to winning control of the House of Representatives, an outcome I could not bring myself to envision before November 3. 

The GOP may still hang on to Senate control pending two runoff elections in Georgia. The “blue wave” that might have swept Democrats into a Senate majority seemed plausible to me until it wasn’t. I didn’t see Montana voters rejecting a popular governor running for the Senate against a Republican non-entity. I genuinely thought strong Democratic women in places like Iowa and Maine had a good chance. They didn’t. I was simply wrong about the breadth and depth of any rejection of Trump’s GOP.

I badly miscalculated the impact of the Republican campaign against “socialism” and “defunding the police.” Americans, I should have known, always reject socialism even as they embrace Medicare, Social Security, government built and operated hydroelectric dams and every sort of agricultural and tax subsidy. Socialism, as the arm waving Bernie Sanders has helped prove all over again, is the third rail of American politics. Most Americans couldn’t define the term, but they know socialism is bad.

The Defund the Police narrative was a big, big loser for Democrats

And the left-wing sloganeering about defunding police was simply political malpractice by too many so called progressives who handed conservatives a huge and winning issue. The issue of redirecting law enforcement funding to substance abuse interventions and better community policing got hijacked by stupid, arrogant use of inflammatory language. I thought Democrats would be smart enough to reject the stupidity of a national message that dissed cops. I flat out underestimated the impact. I’m now convinced the issue nearly cost Democrats the House of Representatives. 

I genuinely thought more Republicans beyond Mitt Romney, particularly after the election, would come to speak truth about what has happened to their party under Trump, how he has debased the very idea of truth and now continues a charade about a stolen election. I thought Idaho Congressman Mike Simpson, for example, who in his pre-Trump life was often a model of civility and bipartisanship, would do what he did in 2016 and pledge to carry out his Constitutional responsibilities and work cooperatively with a new president elect. I was wrong. 

Simpson not only hasn’t done that, but he joined a ridiculous lawsuit seeking to overturn the presidential election. I was wrong in thinking politicians like Simpson would actually welcome a breaking of the Trump fever. 

History will judge the administration of the last four years harshly for its incompetence, corruption and efforts to undermine democracy, but I genuinely thought even the most bungling administration in modern American history would figure out a plan to roll out a coronavirus vaccine. I mean, it’s complicated, but you have at your disposal the world’s best military. Many of the best scientists. The logistics and shipping capabilities of Amazon and FedEx. The administration promised that 20 million Americans would be vaccinated by now. They were wrong and I was wrong in thinking even this crowd couldn’t screw this up

Back in October I wrote: “A fundamental principle of democracy is that people in power act in ways that preserve and protect the integrity of the institutions entrusted to their care. Having the power to act sometimes demand not acting. In our lifetimes there has never been a better moment to pause, consider and practice restrain.” 

The moment was a Supreme Court vacancy being filled days before a presidential election. I thought, wrongly as it turned out, that the precedent Republicans established in 2016 when they refused for months to consider Barack Obama’s nominee would hold. I thought that GOP senators who had vowed to never fill a court seat in an election year would honor that commitment, or at least be shamed into doing so. I was wrong. 

In order to understand the level of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell’s cynicism you have to recalibrate your own cynicism. I thought it possible, before proven wrong, that he might have a moment of pause. I was wrong. 

I’ll leave 2020 with another thought about Dave Broder and the long sweep of American politics. In 1971 – wow, nearly 50 years ago – Broder wrote a little book entitled The Party’s Over in which he worried about the state of the country. “It is going to cost us time and energy and thought, diverted from our private concerns,” Broder wrote, “to make government workable and politics responsible again in America.” 

He was appealing for precisely the cure our diseased system needed then – and needs now. I hope I don’t have to admit next year that he – and we – were wrong. 

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Additional Reading:

Some stories from around the Internet that you may have missed…

A New Southern Manifesto

Nicolaus Mills, a professor of American literature at Sarah Lawrence College and author of Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower, has an interesting piece in The Dispatch.

He links GOP allegations of voter fraud to efforts in the 1950’s – mostly from Democrats – to keep African Americans from voting.

“The targets of the Southern Manifesto were the nation’s black public school children, isolated in segregated schools. The unnamed targets of the Texas lawsuit and most other election suits filed by Trump supporters are mostly black voters in urban areas.  

“What is more, just as the signers of the Southern Manifesto couched their language in neutral terms, saying separate but equal allowed for ‘amicable relations between the white and Negro races,’ the Trump supporters have followed a similar pattern. Rather than directly speak of race, they talk of “voter fraud.'”

The full piece is here.


Where Did America Go Wrong?

Celebrations in New York after Joe Biden’s victory

The German magazine Der Spiegel asks that question.

“America knows it is sick. It is showing all the symptoms. There are doubts about the legitimacy of elections, and confidence in political institutions has crumbled. The media have abandoned or lost their role as impartial observers. The country’s predominantly white police force continues to deploy misguided violence against a disillusioned and outraged Black population. There are armed militias on the streets and it’s become almost impossible to voice an opinion without getting overwhelmed by hateful comments on social media. To top it all off is a president who refuses to concede defeat, a society that has been battered by a pandemic that can only be contained by way of solidarity.”

Harsh, but fair. Read it here.


The State of America

Three more year end political pieces worth your time.

Bruce Gyory is a Democratic political strategist and an adjunct professor of political science at SUNY-Albany. He has a great piece in The Bulwark with a deep dive into the data about how Joe Biden won.

One of my favorite political journalist McKay Coppins in The Atlantic on the media and Biden. The White House spent four years vilifying journalists. What comes next? Read it here:

And a well-deserved piece in The Times about Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson, a breakout star with her daily newsletter putting by-the-facts daily reporting in the context of American history. If you don’t get her newsletter, you should sign up. Here a link.

The World That Made Lincoln

Ol’ Abe

“No one,” writes historian Allen C. Guelzo, “has been a better chronicler of 19th-century American culture than David Reynolds, a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.”

Guelzo reviews Reynold’s sprawling new Lincoln bio in The Washington Monthly.

“His 1008-page re-imagining begins with the bluntness of the title – Abe – since no one, once Lincoln had achieved adulthood, ever dared to address him as ‘Abe.’ To his closest friends, he was always Lincoln; even to his wife, he was Mr. Lincoln. His correspondence was invariably signed A. Lincoln, as though he found even Abraham overly familiar. Only on his most important state papers did he write out his name in full. But to the country at large, he was indeed Abe – Uncle Abe, Old Abe, Honest Abe, Abe Lincoln of Illinois. Good god you goin to shake with me Uncle Abe, was the cry of an astonished soldier to whom Lincoln stuck out his hand at a review. ‘Hey! Uncle Abe are you joking yet,’ was the satirical title of a political song in 1864.”

Well, I know what I should have asked Santa to deliver for Christmas. Read the review.


Thanks friends. It’s been quite a year. I really appreciate you following along. To a better 2021. Stay safe.

Christmas

Season of Hope…

After spending the first 40 years of his life in the wind-swept northwestern corner of Nebraska, my dad developed a few good lines about what winter was like in those parts. 

He joked that an out of state visitor once asked, “What do you people do around here in the summertime?” Dad’s response: “Well, last year it came on a Sunday and we had a picnic and a ballgame.” One of his favorite lines became a favorite of mine: “You get used to the change of seasons – ten months of winter and two months of damn poor sledding.” 

Northwest Nebraska in winter.

In her writings about the rough sandhill country along the upper Niobrara River, my dad’s home ground, Nebraska native Mari Sandoz equated winter with the end of things, that time “when dry snow fell like dandruff from a gray sky.” The long, dark days and nights before the green shoots of spring break ground led Sandoz’s homesteading father to drink too much and tolerate too little. Mari titled the last chapter of her memoir of her father – “winter.” 

It is a damn good thing winter arrives in near proximity to Christmas. Without the opportunity to experience the season of hope and reflect on the prospects for a better future, facing the bleakest months might just make all of us as grumpy as old Mr. Potter was before George Bailey helped straighten him out. 

What is there to say of the end of this awful, deadly, confounding year? How about good riddance? 

When it comes to 2020, I’m reminded of the famous speech by the British politician Leo Amery in 1940. Amery delivered his remarks in an entirely different context, but the sentiment is spot on: “Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.” 

The tired cynic in me has had enough of the crazy conspiracy politics of division of these interminable twelve months. My optimistic, hopeful self longs for reason, calm, caring and competence. My emphasis is on hope. 

As the Reverend Henry Brougham – played by the elegant David Niven – reminds us every Christmas at the end of the wonderful 1947 film “The Bishop’s Wife,” we have this season of hope, after all, because “It’s his birthday we are celebrating.” And, as Henry says in his Christmas eve sermon, “Let us ask ourselves what he would wish for most … and then let each put in his share. Loving kindness, warm hearts and the stretched-out hand of tolerance. All the shining gifts that make peace on earth.” 

David Niven and Cary Grant in “The Bishop’s Wife”

The American fabric is badly frayed as the awful 2020 comes to close. The fabric is in urgent need of repair. All the shining gifts are within our power to bestow. If any of us thinks the stitching up of our national fabric will happen without diligent work by each and every one of us, we’d be wrong. 

All things, it is said, are political, but the best of things – the hopes for the future we each hold dear – are surely about more than politics. And it all begins with hope: “a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen.” 

There are certain things to wish for Peter Wehner wrote recently. “Honor, decency, courage, beauty, and truth. Tenderness, human empathy, and a sense of duty. A good society. And a commitment to human dignity. We need to teach others—in our individual relationships, in our classrooms and communities, in our book clubs and Bible studies, and in innumerable other settings—why those things are worthy of their attention, their loyalty, their love.” 

Such things are also worthy of hope, our “expectation and desire” that a new year cannot provide the luxury of forgetting the awful year passing away but can renew our purpose and restore our faith that the future can be better than what we have had to endure. The heartbreak and despair of 2020 cannot and should not disappear, but with just enough determination we can make the new year a better year than the one we gladly leave behind. 

“The year 2020 gave the world perspective,” Len DiSesa wrote in his letter to the editor of the New York Times this week. “We took so much for granted before the pandemic entered our lives: dining out whenever we wanted to; dropping in to see friends; hugging our relatives; traveling at will. It is part of the human condition to not appreciate something until it is taken away . . . We have all been stung by this disease, and many have suffered much more than others. But when it is eventually eradicated from the planet I hope we all remember how truly awful 2020 was, and acknowledge the perspective it gave us to appreciate what 2021 can bring.”

Indeed. 

After the awfulness of 2020, America needs to unplug and restart, focusing on what really matters – our kids, grandkids, parents, grandparents, our friends, community, the basic decency and fairness that exists in your service club, at your local library, in the nurse who lives down the block and the kid who shovels snow. 

“It has always seemed strange to me,” John Steinbeck wrote in his enduring classic Cannery Row. “The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding, and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism, and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.” 

So, the heck with selfish meanness. Enough with self-interest that divides. Let us celebrate the better things we can hope for in a new year, and accept the wisdom of Winston Churchill who said at Christmas 1941 – the end of another awful year – that Americans and their British cousins should embrace “the peace of the spirit in each cottage home and in every generous heart.”

Suspend the hum bugs. Winter is really just a prelude to spring. Look ahead to the picnic and the ball game. This season of hope is the dawn of better days. Extend the out-stretched hand of tolerance and seek the healing balm of hopefulness.

And, yes, God bless us, everyone. 

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Additional Reading:

Some additional reading suggestions you may find of interest…

Notre Dame 

“Notre-Dame embodies France’s noble, tragic history, from St Louis trudging on bare feet, holding aloft the crown of thorns, to Napoleon’s vainglorious coronation and General de Gaulle dodging sniper fire to praise God for the liberation of Paris.

“When fire ravaged her on April 15th, 2019, the world, too, discovered how much it loved Notre-Dame. French officials were amazed by the sympathy and money that poured in. ‘She is not Notre-Dame de Paris but Notre-Dame of the World,’ says Olivier Latry, the cathedral’s organist.”

Notre-Dame of the World

A great story from The Irish Times.


Science and the Humanities

Long time readers know that I have a passion for “the humanities,” the academic disciplines that encompass history, literature, language, philosophy – in other words the study and understanding of the human condition. 

I really enjoyed this piece, in part, because I learned that the celebrated Dr. Anthony Fauci studied not only science, but the humanities. 

“Although perhaps only recently a household name, Fauci is no Tony-come-lately. Over the past four decades he’s played prominent roles as a scientist, physician, administrator and spokesman. You know what he’s been up to over the past several months. But what of his previous nearly 80 years? And what made him the figure he has become?” 

Read the whole thing from The Conversation


Trump’s Pardons Make the Unimaginable Real

President Donald Trump issued more pardons yesterday. What next?

Tim Naftali write in The Atlantic:

“Will Trump be the first to test the constitutionality of a self-pardon, just as he has tested the limits of so many other constraints on presidential power? Precedent has never mattered to him. He has reportedly been asking aides about the possibility of a self-pardon since 2017. Unlike Nixon, he can’t even hope for a pardon from his immediate successor. But neither can he count on the Supreme Court to uphold a self-pardon; in summarily dismissing Trump’s effort to overturn the election, the justices reminded him that a president should not count on the support of his appointees.”

Who knows what a president without principles, shame or boundaries will do? We’re about to find out.

Read the full story and you’ll be ready if the outrage comes. I’m betting it will.


Be safe and I send to you and yours the best for the Christmas season and a better 2021.

Thanks as always for reading.

Idaho Politics, Pandemic

A Pandemic and Political Failure…

During his successful 2018 campaign to become Idaho’s governor, Brad Little pulled off one of the great stealth attacks on a political rival in recent memory. You may remember the story that only became public after Little’s election. 

As a conservative who was still more moderate than his Republican primary opponents, Little needed to navigate the choppy waters of a party taken over by Donald Trump, and he found a way to do it. 

Little’s task: prevent then-Congressman Raul Labrador from securing Trump’s endorsement thereby signaling to the Trump loving base of the party that Labrador was the anointed one. Little – or at least his political operatives – settled on a very Trump-like strategy. They would disqualify Labrador in Trump’s eyes. They produced a mashup tape of Labrador’s not infrequent criticism of Trump and got the tape to the White House. Almost best of all they did so without leaving fingerprints. 

Labrador is heard on the tape belittling Trump in 2016 for being “a big whiner,” for not being a “gracious” loser and for threatening to sue anyone who crossed him, which Labrador called “just a ridiculous and a preposterous way to run a campaign.” Trump was reportedly ready to support Raul, but the tape nixed a Twitter endorsement and Trump ultimately stayed out of the Idaho race. Little won the primary and then easily dispatched Democrat Paulette Jordan in the general election. 

The Idaho Press’s Betsy Russell wrote about the incident and what it seemed to say about Little the politician. Russell quoted College of Idaho political scientist Jasper LiCalzi saying, “It shows that Little understands politics — he’s not some naive person.” Little’s campaign operatives, LiCalzi added, “didn’t just fall off the potato truck.”

So how to explain the governor’s unilateral political surrender in the battle against the worst pandemic in a hundred years? Why has Little allowed a collection of his biggest political adversaries, and I don’t mean Democrats, to define the terms of the debate around sensible, science-based public health measures

Idaho’s governor thinks he’s battling one enemy – COVID-19 – but he’s really in a fight with his most committed political enemies, as well.

There is an old rule in politics about picking your enemies carefully. Little needs to start naming his enemies. He’s fighting – not very effectively – COVID-19, but he is also at war with science deniers, militia backing armed thugs and people who want him to be a one-term governor. Why isn’t Little fighting back with all the tools of a tough politician who “didn’t just fall off the potato truck?”

For starters, why doesn’t Little take on the dangerous, clownish militia agitator Ammon Bundy? Bundy and his followers are apparently some of the people who have repeatedly disrupted Idaho health district and school board meetings and even shut down school events. They intimidate and threaten public officials outside their own homes. 

The Kansas City Star reported on Bundy and his multi-state network – “Ammon’s Army” – in October. This network, the paper said, “includes militia members, anti-maskers, conspiracy theorists, preppers and anti-vaccination activists. Its rapid growth has been boosted by the joining of Bundy’s far-right paramilitary supporters cultivated from armed standoffs over the years with a large base of new activists radicalized through protests over COVID-19 health directives.”

By refusing to name Bundy and his violence-threatening followers as real enemies of Idaho, Little is giving the radicals a pass. He should be defining them as the dangerous outliers they are, standing in the way of sensible public health measures. He should be asking: “Are you on Bundy’s side or are you on the side of an overworked, overwhelmed ICU nurse?” 

The same goes with the odious Wayne Hoffman, the mouthpiece of the increasingly radical Idaho Freedom Foundation, a group that has opposed Little at every turn on virtually every issue and is now stoking the ludicrous fiction that wearing a mask to protect yourself and your fellow citizens is somehow a violation of your Constitutional right to make someone else sick. 

“It’s become a familiar pattern,” the Idaho Falls Post Register said in a recent editorial. “Hoffman and those of his ilk spread lies about the pandemic. The protestors take up those falsehoods and lead campaigns of intimidation to hobble any effective response to the pandemic at the local level. And so they are deeply culpable for the wave of death that is bearing down on us.” 

Ignoring public health enemies isn’t the way to beat them

Yet, Little’s response to these self-important Neanderthals is so lame as to be laughable: “We’re marshaling all our forces. And yet, the enemy, this plague, continues to advance.” The governor actually said that during a news conference last week, while pleading ineffectively for “compliance” with public health measures that his real enemies attack hourly in every corner of the state. He’s not marshalling anything, he’s abdicating. 

By not naming, shaming and holding responsible the public health deniers who have crippled Idaho’s response to the virus, Little has discarded a major and valuable weapon in the fight. The “enemy” is indeed the virus, but the enemy is also a gang of deplorables hampering a more effective response. 

It’s not like any of these people – Bundy, Hoffman, Lt. Governor Janice McGeachin and any number of COVID denying legislators – are friends of Little. All of them, and add Labrador, who was photographed in the big indoor mall in Boise last weekend violating the city’s mask order, would knife Little in heartbeat. Heck, they are already doing so. 

Hoping to show Little that an overwhelming number of Idahoans support a governor willing to lead more aggressively on the pandemic, a new grassroots group – The Idaho 97% – organized, as one of the founders Emily Walton told me this week, “to let him know we need him to run Idaho.” Walton said, “there has been no public voice for the vast majority of Idahoans who want to see the government function.” Little should be leading this majority and calling out the clowns in the minority. 

“Brad Little, I think, comes across a little bit as, oh, he’s just a nice rancher, almost a naive guy, but he’s a tough politician, too,” LiCalzi, the College of Idaho political scientist, said of candidate Little in 2018. He noted that Little didn’t hesitate to attack his Democratic rival with negative TV ads, and he cut Labrador off at the knees. What’s happened to that political fire? 

“I think it’s clear,” LiCalzi said, “he’s not somebody who’s going to just let someone run over him.” But getting run over is exactly what has happened as Little has allowed his most committed political opponents to get away with a campaign of misinformation, intimidation and denial.

These should be the people defined as responsible for so much death and disease, but by his wimpy response to these knuckleheads Little has brought the blame on himself.

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Additional Reading:

A few additional stories you may find of interest…

MLB Is Finally Recognizing the Negro Leagues as the Major Leagues They Always Were

A big victory this week for Larry Lester, co-founder of the Negro League’s museum in Kansas City and a baseball historian, who has been a tireless advocate for Major League Baseball recognition of the Negro Leagues as part of the majors.  

“I’m turning cartwheels and excited about a lot of hard work that I’ve put in over the years to get the leagues recognized as a major entity on par with the American and National League,” Lester says. “I don’t know what to say other than, why did it take them so long?”

Read the entire story in The Ringer:


A closer look at Republicans who didn’t stick with Trump

Josh Kraushaar writes in National Journal:

“To anticipate the Republican Party’s political future, it’s useful to look at the categories of Republicans who have moved on from Trump, or at least stopped indulging the president’s political delusions.”

Good piece.


The Texas Wedding

I read a story like this one from Texas Monthly and wonder: are people really this stupid?

“Photographers’ experiences shooting weddings during the pandemic have run the gamut. Several photographers described couples who were cautious, respectful, and understanding. But many were not. ‘I would say about fifty percent of the weddings I’ve shot, there’s been no masks at all. It’s like we’re living in the pre-COVID parallel universe,’ one photographer told me. ‘I’ve been in hotel ballrooms inside and it’s been packed like sardines and everyone’s having a great time. No one’s wearing masks. I’m there as the photographer documenting the reception and there’s sweat flying, and it’s hot, and the music’s blaring and the fan’s on, and I’m just like, ‘Well, the odds are that one of every ten people here have COVID and don’t realize it.’”

Obviously, the answer is…yes.


Thanks for reading. Stay well and do your best to safely enjoy the Christmas season.

2020 Election, GOP

It May Not Work, But It’s Still a Coup…

A month and a half before the country voted in the November election, Barton Gellman wrote a long piece in The Atlantic predicting with uncanny precision what has happened over the last month. 

“Let us not hedge about one thing,” Gellman wrote. “Donald Trump may win or lose, but he will never concede. Not under any circumstance. Not during the Interregnum and not afterward.” By “Interregnum” Gellman means the period we are in right now, the fragile space between when one candidate for president loses – in this case Trump – and the winner takes office.

We still have 40 days and 40 nights to go. And it’s a chapter right out of the new book Strongmen, a book I highly recommend.

In her book – Strongmen – historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat contends that Donald Trump displays the classic characteristics of authoritarians and dictators like Mussolini and Turkey’s Erdogan

There was a fair amount to scoffing at Gellman’s prediction that a defeated Trump would never concede and might actually attempt to further corrupt American democracy by sowing widespread doubt about the election outcome, or that he would actively try to get fellow Republicans to help him steal an election he lost. 

The esteemed journalist Walter Shapiro, a legendary political observer, was one who mostly dismissed concerns about the seriousness of Trump’s post-election nonsense. Shapiro quoted Sam Feist, CNN’s Washington bureau chief, as basically saying: don’t worry, the election outcome will be obvious when one candidate reaches the required 270 electoral votes. 

Even if Trump prematurely declares his own victory, which is precisely what he did in the early hours of November 4, Feist told Shapiro, “We will all note that the facts do not support this declaration…” 

But in the Trump Era, to most Republicans, facts don’t matter. Losing more than 50 desperate and often comically inept election legal challenges doesn’t matter. Having the Supreme Court dismiss a challenge to Pennsylvania votes with a one-sentence kiss off that must be the most obvious “bugger off” delivered by a court in presidential history doesn’t matter. 

The loathsome Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz was actually ready to argue the case before the high court before the nine justices, three appointed by Trump, effectively told the president to go pound sand. 

(Now Texas has rounded up 16 other states and more than 100 Republican members of Congress in another appeal to the Supreme Court that most every respected court observer believes is a ridiculous and futile effort to throw out millions of votes in four states Biden won.)

Trump lost the election – it really was not close, either in the popular vote or the Electoral College margin – but he has still salted democracy’s soil with the conspiracy theory that it was all a rigged, stolen election. This is and continues to be an unprecedented assault on free elections and a peaceful transition of power. And virtually every Republican office holder, including the backbone free enemies of democracy who represent Idaho and eastern Washington, have helped him do it. 

The Turkish-born academic Zeynep Tufekci, who has experienced perverted or stolen elections in her home county, understands what is happening: “The U.S. president is trying to steal the election, and, crucially, his party either tacitly approves or is pretending not to see it. This is a particularly dangerous combination, and makes it much more than just typical Trumpian bluster or norm shattering.” 

As Tufekci says, “Act like this is your first coup, if you want to be sure that it’s also your last.”

There is another aspect, equally frightening and anti-democratic, playing out across the country as Trump plots his next lie on Twitter. The political unrest he stokes to further his claim to hanging on to the White House has come, or is coming, to a courthouse or a statehouse near you. 

The Republican majority leader of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, pressured by Trump to do something, anything to reverse his loss there, said she had no choice but to acquiesce to the president’s pressure. “If I would say to you, ‘I don’t want to do it,’” Kim Ward said about signing a letter demanding her state’s congressional delegation work to overturn Biden’s win, “I’d get my house bombed tonight.”

Armed thugs shouting obscenities into bullhorns surrounded the home of Michigan’s secretary of state Jocelyn Benson last weekend, demanding that she “stop the steal,” even after the state certified its results confirming a Biden win in Michigan by 154,000 votes. 

Benson said she supports peaceful protest, but that “there is a line crossed when gatherings are done with the primary purpose of intimidation of public officials who are carrying out the oath of office they solemnly took as elected officials.” 

Similar efforts to intimidate local and state election officials have taken place in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and Wisconsin. And the trickle-down effects of Trump’s effort to further destabilize the political process are felt even in a very Trump friendly place like Idaho. The local health district that serves four counties in southwestern Idaho, meeting to discuss steps to counter the raging pandemic, had to end its discussion when armed protesters showed up at the homes of three board members. The area is overwhelmed by the virus with hospital administrators warning that they will be forced to ration care by Christmas. 

The very Trumpy “anti-mask” protesters, clearly influenced by the president’s politicization of pandemic mitigation measures, were deemed a threat to public safety by Boise police. Ada County Commissioner Diana Lachiondo was forced to leave the health board meeting in tears in order to rush home and check on her 12-year old son. 

Protesters, some of them armed, forced cancellation of a health district meeting in Boise, Idaho. Some protesters showed up at board members homes.

The Associated Press reported that the protesters were organized “at least in part, by a loose multi-state group called People’s Rights. The group was created by Ammon Bundy,” the same dangerous clown who was arrested earlier this year during a violent incident at the Idaho state capitol. 

Almost simultaneously the human rights memorial in downtown Boise – a place that honors both Anne Frank and the late northern Idaho human rights activist Bill Wassmuth – was vandalized when some imbecile placed swastikas on the memorial, one claiming Nazis “are everywhere.”   

To his credit, Idaho Governor Brad Little immediately condemned the intimidation aimed at health district board members, but he remains – as do other Republican leaders – maddingly indifferent to the broader assault on democracy underway. The governor, the congressional delegation and legislative leaders have bully pulpits, but they never muster the guts to speak from them. 

Fearing his fellow conservatives, Little purposely created the environment where local, part-time health officials have had to become the frontline in the virus fight. And he acted this week as if his plans to cut taxes during the next legislative session was an adequate response to the radical rightwing anarchy that now increasingly dominates the state’s politics, and surely will continue to do so in the future. 

By refusing to confront attacks on democracy at the highest level, Republicans now contend with attacks at every level, and the attacks come from their own supporters that they refuse to confront. Republicans have sown this wind; we all will now surely reap the whirlwind. 

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Additional Reading:

A few other items worth your time this week…

How Biden Should Investigate Trump

James Fallows in The Atlantic

“As he prepares to occupy the White House, President-elect Joe Biden faces a decision rare in American history: what to do about the man who has just left office, whose personal corruption, disdain for the Constitution, and destructive mismanagement of the federal government are without precedent.”

Fallows has a few ideas.


How Trump Changed America 

Clare Malone is a fine writer and her recent piece is very fine, indeed.

“I have no doubt that the effects of Trump’s presidency will ripple through American life for years, if not decades. Trump didn’t create partisanship or the idea that racism is a decent electoral strategy, but he elevated both. He revealed fundamental weaknesses in the way Americans consume politics, and he seemed to make everyone in America care about it. It is difficult to imagine that history will look favorably on Donald John Trump after he leaves office on January 20, but I feel certain that history won’t be able to stop looking.’

From the website FiveThirtyEight:

Maradona: The God of Argentina

MEXICO CITY, MEXICO – JUNE 29: Diego Maradona of Argentina holds the World Cup trophy after defeating West Germany 3-2 during the 1986 FIFA World Cup Final match at the Azteca Stadium on June 29, 1986 in Mexico City, Mexico. (Photo by Archivo El Grafico/Getty Images)

It may not be possible to understand fully how deeply baked into Argentine cultural is the great game – and how the game was personified by the great Maradona – without a visit to Buenos Aires.

I was fortunate to visit a few years ago and came away with a better understanding of just how big soccer is in Argentina.

Diego Maradona’s recent death brought back those memories. This piece from The Ringer – even if you are not a soccer fan – is very good.

“There are geniuses in this world whose fate is not to be recognized at once, whose talents need time before they can be fully appreciated. This was not the case with Diego Maradona. By the time he was 9 years old, there was no mistaking what he was. If you saw him play, you knew. He was puny and odd-looking, a spindly shantytown kid, not yet the plug of compacted muscle he became. He wasn’t fast. He couldn’t jump. But the way he moved with the ball, the control he had with his left foot, left people gasping. Hardened soccer pros, narrow-eyed pragmatists who’d worked with enough youth talent to be cynical about the whole business of early promise, had to sit down and tell themselves to breathe. He’d go barreling at full speed into a swarm of bigger, faster boys, his chin tucked down and his little chest upthrust, and when they’d recovered their balance and turned around, the ball would be in the net.”

Read the whole thing.


Thanks for reading…be safe.

2020 Election, McCarthy, Trump

GOP Fails Its McCarthy Moment…

Sixty-six years ago this week – December 2, 1954 – the United States Senate voted to censure Wisconsin Republican Joseph McCarthy. The vote was 67 in favor, 22 opposed. The very public rebuke effectively marked the end of McCarthy’s lie-infused assault on American democracy. 

During his four-year run, the burly bully from Appleton dominated headlines and ruined careers with his reckless and unproven allegations that Communists had infiltrated the federal government. As his reign of political terror advanced toward censure by his own colleagues, McCarthy became ever more brazen, even attacking the patriotism of members of the United States Army

Joseph McCarthy with Roy Cohn, his counsel, who later became Donald Trump’s lawyer

McCarthy’s followers condemned Dwight Eisenhower, the celebrated supreme allied commander of European victory in World War II, as “a communist.” McCarthy used a Senate speech to attack General George Marshall, one of the great heroes of 20th Century America, for being soft on communism. Marshall’s biographer says McCarthy’s speech was so hysterically over the top, so obviously full of innuendo and bad faith, that few senators remained in their seats to listen to the tirade, but few also condemned it. 

When the roll was called in the Senate on McCarthy’s censure in 1954, Idaho’s two Republican senators – Henry Dworshak and Herman Welker – refused to condemn McCarthy, indeed they defended him, made excuses, embraced his delusions. According to contemporary accounts, Welker prowled the Senate floor during the censure vote muttering threats to those attempting to hold McCarthy to account. Dworshak, handpicked by McCarthy, served on the committee that investigated McCarthy’s wild accusations against the Army but made little contribution. One McCarthy biographer said the Wisconsin senator effectively silenced the “timid” Dworshak and publicly insulted him by wishing he had selected someone else. 

The events surrounding McCarthy during that long-ago December seem both a distance echo of American history and as fresh as today’s front page. As the conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg wrote recently, “McCarthy liked to insist he had evidence of communists in the government, but he couldn’t show you the names right now. The number of communist infiltrators on his secret list changed from speech to speech.” 

In this December we are experiencing a new kind of McCarthyism updated for the Trump Era. 

“Listening to President Donald Trump’s legal team claim over and over again that they have voluminous evidence that the election was stolen,” Goldberg says, “it occurred to me that we’re in a kind of repeat McCarthy era. Only this time, to borrow from that old-school communist Karl Marx, history is repeating itself not as tragedy but as farce.” 

McCarthy was condemned by the Senate 66 years ago this week

It took four long years for the Senate – and many Republicans – to admit that McCarthy’s protean tactics and political treachery were a genuine threat to the stability of American citizens and institutions, everything from the legal system to the Senate itself. McCarthy intimidated and bullied anyone who questioned him. His weapon was not fact, but intimidation; intimidation meaning if you had the backbone to challenge him McCarthy would summon down the wrath of his supporters on those who stepped out of line. 

A handful – Maine’s Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith most notably – had the courage to confront McCarthy, but most held their tongues while his power grew, and his outrages expanded. “The fifties were like that,” historian Ellen Schrecker wrote in her study of the era, “less a world of fear than of silence.” 

Nearly a month on from the presidential election that will turn Donald Trump out of the White House, a firehose of lies about voter fraud and rigged elections tumble from the presidential Twitter feed to be amplified by his minions on cable television and across the Internet. The lies have been refuted repeatedly by a bipartisan collection of state election officials, Trump’s own attorney general and the cyber security expert the president fired for truthfully saying the recent election was the most secure in American history. 

In a true McCarthyesque through the looking glass turn, William Barr, the Trump appointed attorney general who has defended the president at every turn, is now dismissed as a traitor and agent of “the deep state” for saying there is no evidence of fraud that would change the election outcome. 

A Republican election official in Georgia, one of many needing police protection now for doing his job in a state where Trump continues to lie about a rigged election, demanded this week that Trump end the deceit, saying “Someone’s gonna get shot. Someone’s gonna get killed…and it’s not right. It’s not right.” The official, Gabriel Sterling, put a fine point on what is happening with his fellow Republicans. “This is elections,” Sterling said, his voice quivering with indignation. “This is the backbone of democracy, and all of you who have not said a damn word are complicit in this. It’s too much.”

Gabriel Sterling, the Republican election official in Georgia, who has condemned Donald Trump’s attacks on election integrity

Yet, all of this – the lying, conspiracy theories, attacks on an election that wasn’t really all that close, the full-on assault on democracy – has engendered a world of silence from most elected Republicans. They are ending the Trump presidency as they began – with eclairs for backbones. And no Republican senators better exemplify this chicken-hearted response than the two from Idaho who now fill the seats once held by McCarthy’s enablers. 

Jim Risch is proving to be a worthy heir to Henry Dworshak. While Dworshak is remembered in Idaho, to the extent that he is remembered, for a big dam on the Clearwater River, the history books (briefly) note him only as a dead ender for Joe McCarthy. Risch has gone all the way up and now all the way down with Trump.

Mike Crapo, twenty years in the Senate, has little more to show for that tenure than Herman Welker, the angry senator and credulous McCarthy defender whose seat he now occupies. 

A month on from the November election, neither man has uttered a word of condemnation, concern or care about Trump’s blatant attack on democracy even as the conservative National Review points out, “Almost nothing that the Trump team has alleged has withstood the slightest scrutiny.”

Crapo and Risch seem to care less, again to quote National Review, that “Flawed and dishonest assertions like this pollute the public discourse and mislead good people who make the mistake of believing things said by the president of the United States.”

Like Idaho’s Welker and Dworshak from an earlier day, Crapo and Risch will be remembered to history, not as they might hope, but rather because they are complicit in the worst attack on American democracy in the history of the presidency.

It’s just not right. 

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Additional Reading:

Iowa is What Happens When the Government Does Nothing

From The Atlantic

“To visit Iowa right now is to travel back in time to the early days of the coronavirus pandemic in places such as New York City and Lombardy and Seattle, when the horror was fresh and the sirens never stopped. Sick people are filling up ICUs across the state. Health-care workers like Klein are being pushed to their physical and emotional limits. On the TV in my parents’ house in Burlington, hospital CEOs are begging Iowans to hunker down and please, for the love of God, wear a mask. This sense of new urgency is strange, though, because the pandemic isn’t in its early days. The virus has been raging for eight months in this country; Iowa just hasn’t been acting like it.”

Read the full piece.


Obituary of Marvin J. Farr

This death notice in a Kansas funeral home went viral with the Kansas City Star newspaper wrote about it. Read it and you’ll see why.

“Dr. Marvin James Farr, 81, of Scott City, Kan., passed away Dec. 1, 2020, in isolation at Park Lane Nursing Home. He was preceded in death by more than 260,000 Americans infected with covid-19. He died in a room not his own, being cared for by people dressed in confusing and frightening ways. He died with covid-19, and his final days were harder, scarier and lonelier than necessary. He was not surrounded by friends and family.”

Here is the obit


And Speaking of Obits

Ding Kuen Tam, also known as Danny Wong, a legendary restaurant owner in Butte

The Montana Standard in Butte, Montana had a wonderful tribute this week to one of the city’s iconic figures, Ding Kuen Tam, owner of reportedly the oldest continuously operated and family-owned Chinese restaurant in the country, the Pekin Noddle Parlor.

One of Mr. Tam’s best customers was a guy named Evil Knievel.

“Knievel was ‘Bobby’ to Wong.   

“Whenever Knievel pulled his Maserati into the Pekin alleyway, Wong would give him a box full of food and a bottle of Jack Daniels, whether he drank it or not.

“Danny, I’m gonna jump Caesars Palace,” Knievel would say.

“Bobby, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Wong would answer.

“I’m gonna jump the Snake River,” Knievel would say.

“Bobby, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Wong would answer again.

“Such was their bond. Knievel even gave Wong his last car, a Lincoln Mark VIII.”

What a story.


Thanks for reading…take care.

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