Month: November 2024

2024 Election, Trump

America’s Great Mistake …

Posted on by mjohnson

“Robert F. Kennedy’s formal merger with Trumpism will have the effect of making his view of vaccines a de rigueur tenet of MAGA politics. People who pledge fealty to Trumpism will discover that in addition to being required to believe that Trump won the 2020 election they are also required to oppose vaccinations of all types.

“That’s coming. There’s no avoiding it.

“And as sure as day follows night we will see the large-scale reappearance of preventable diseases such as measles and polio. Children will die.”

Jonathan V. Last

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America has made a great mistake.

One Trump presidency was an historic aberration, an absurdist romp with a conman TV huckster that was the result of half the country hating Hillary Clinton.

But a second Trump presidency is something else – a great mistake. The millions who voted to return this tragically narcissistic, hopelessly ignorant and blatantly corrupt man to control of the nuclear codes don’t know it yet – and many will never figure it out – but they have imperiled the future of their country, and the world.

The same kind of thinking – magical thinking – that treats Trump like some kind of normal political personality is ignoring the enormous consequences of November 5. Logic attempts to explain his election logically. There is no logic.

The election was about the price of bacon, some will say. Or Joe Biden’s obvious need to earlier disavow a second term. Social media elected Trump. Or the Mexican border did. The traditional media blew it. Democrats lost the plot with white, working-class voters. That explains it.

But all these “explanations” avoid the reality of Trump and Trumpism. We made this decision with eyes wide open. We didn’t elect an adjudicated rapist because Safeway’s bacon is overpriced. We didn’t elect a man who sent a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol and hoped to hang his own vice president because desperate migrants still see our America as the last best hope on earth.

Nope, we wanted more of the distracting non-stop Trump reality show with its Hannibal Lecter rants and shark stories. We chose to believe his lies. Blame the Democrats, blame the press, blame social media, blame the elites, but in the end none of it matters. We chose a leader of vile temperament and odious corruption. We chose our American fascist.

“Elites” didn’t make us want more of the vulgar rhetoric and the obvious lies. Many of us enjoy how he summons up hatred with the absurd claim that the gender of school children is being changed during homeroom. We found comfort in the putdowns of an accomplished Black woman, and we laughed along when he joked about Nancy Pelosi’s husband being nearly killed by a hammer wielding nutjob. We chanted “lock them up” because it felt good to hate and demean and threaten. We saw it and we accepted it.

We embraced – for the second time – what journalist Susan Glasser has correctly termed “the most vicious campaign of lies, misogyny, racism, and xenophobia ever waged.”

We liked the promises of revenge and retribution. It feels good, after all, to go after “those” people, because our side is right, and what harm could a little revenge do?

When the deportation round ups begin how will we feel about the “illegal” people who roof the houses, milk the cows, landscape the lawns, work in our restaurants and pay their taxes? Will we notice when families are separated, and children discarded as collateral damage? Will we laugh at the concentration camps?

One Trump term was an aberration. This Trump term was a choice.

In authoritarian and fascist systems there is a daily need to justify the unjustifiable. They must make the absurd and dangerous normal, so we blame it on the price of bacon, or Joe Biden. We console ourselves that it is just vile talk. It can’t possibly hurt me. My side won. The “other” has it coming.

From the beginning there has been one great failure regarding Trump. We have lacked from his first day the imagination to see where his villainy has taken us and will now take us even farther. Or perhaps we really do see and elect not to care. What’s worse?

Before January 6, 2021 the vast majority of Americans could not have believed the seat of American government might be attacked by a violent mob willing to harm and kill police officers in order to halt the peaceful transfer of power. We couldn’t image it, so now many rationalize it and all the lies he’s told about it.

It wasn’t that bad. Trump really didn’t incite the riot. Maybe you believe that.

But it was bad, and he did incite a riot. And now he will pardon those who committed those outrages. He told us repeatedly that he would do so, and he will. And we elected him again.

He promised to fire thousands of career federal employees who are not “loyal” to him, an unprecedented break with American history, and he will do it.

He will threaten Ukraine just as he did before. He will weaken if not destroy NATO just as he did before. He will politicize the American military just as he tried before and will try again.

Few presidential candidates have been so explicit about their aims. We heard it. We saw it. We embraced it, and not because bacon costs too much.

As the historian Timothy Snyder writes: “It was predictable that Trump would deny the results of the 2020 election. It was predictable that his Big Lie would change American politics. It is predictable, today, that he will give free rein to the oligarchs who, he knows, will continue to generate the social and digital bases of a politics of us and them. It is predictable that, in returning to power, he will seek to change the system so that he can remain in power until death. It is predictable that he will use deportations to divide us, to accustom us to violence, and to make accomplices of us. It is predictable that he will create a cult out of the martyrs of January 6th. It is predictable that he will cooperate with similarly minded rulers abroad.”

We knew all this. Many warned us, especially people – many now in danger – who worked with him at close range. They aren’t traitors or partisans, but military leaders and elected officials and Americans. And yet we chose to ignore and embrace all this.

The ultimate collapse attendant to our enormous mistake will appear to come slowly, but then it will immediately be all around us. It is as predictable as his corruption and his revenge and his hate. And we did it to ourselves.

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Thanks for reading.

If you are a regular follower of this space you know – or must have concluded – that my nearly 50 years in politics tells me this is the big one – a true existential crisis for our country. Prepare yourself for an America that we could not have imagined a few years ago.

I’ll be back soon …

2024 Election, Democracy, Eisenhower, Foreign Policy, GOP, World War II

The Price of Democracy …

Posted on by mjohnson

“All who shall hereafter live in freedom will be here reminded that to these men and their comrades we owe a debt to be paid with grateful remembrance of their sacrifice and with the high resolve that the cause for which they died shall live eternally.”

– Dwight D. Eisenhower at the American Cemetery in Luxembourg

Private First Class Clarke E. Krivanec went missing in action on December 20, 1944, four days into the bloodbath that became the Battle of the Bulge.

Krivanec was 21 years old, an infantryman in 112th Regiment of the 28th Division, part of General George Patton’s Third American Army. Private Krivanec was from Rupert, Idaho, a graduate of Rupert High School.

Clarke Krivanec never came home from Europe. Never married. Never had a chance for a career or a family. He almost certainly never again saw his mother and father after shipping out for the European Front in September 1943.

Private Krivanec is a name lost to time, a statistic, one of the 400,000 American dead in the greatest war the world has known, a war against fascism.

When nine Nazi divisions launched their surprise offensive in the early hours of December 16, 1944, Krivenac’s 28th Division was spread along a 25-mile front in the Ardenne Forest, a dense wood that had four years earlier provided the Nazi invasion route into western Europe.

By December 20, the 28th Division – nicknamed the Keystone Division – “had been pushed back from their initial positions and was scattered across a new defensive line.” The fighting had been as brutal as the winter weather. Battling frozen hands and feet, great coats caked with snow, the division delayed the German offense, but it had been bloody costly.

Photo Credit: After making their way to the crossroads town of Bastogne when their position was overrun by the surprise German attack, Private Adam Davis and T/S Milford A. Sillars of the 110th Regiment, 28th Infantry Division’s appear exhausted. The soldiers of the 28th Division largely held their ground against the German onslaught during the opening hours of the Battle of the Bulge.
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As a unit history recounts the delay, “had allowed reinforcements like the 101st Airborne Division to arrive and secure the critical junction at Bastogne,” a place that lives in World War II history.

I happened upon Krivenac’s grave last weekend during a Sunday visit to the big American cemetery on the outskirts of Luxembourg City, not far from where Adolf Hitler’s Nazi forces staged the Third Reich’s last great offensive of the war. A fascist offensive. Private Krivanec got in the way of that offensive and was apparently seriously wounded in the left leg and then taken prisoner by the Germans.

We will never know whether Krivanec died of his wounds or was left to die as the course of this awful battle finally turned against the Nazis. That he was there, a young man with a life ahead of him fighting a war against evil thousands of miles from southern Idaho, is what we do know.

The U.S. War Department told Krivenac’s parents in January 1945 that he was classified as missing, and then they heard nothing for months. The brief newspaper story detailing these slim facts reported that Krivanec has been selected to attend a special, nine-month engineering training course at Washington University in St. Louis, but the story then cryptically noted, “when the program was discontinued he was assigned the infantry.”

Finally, the following January – 1946 – the Twin Falls Times-News published another story about Clarke Krivanec. “Missing for a Year, Private Listed Dead.”

The War Department’s straightforward communication simply said, “in view of the fact that 12 months have now expired without the receipt of evidence to support a continuing presumption of survival” the government’s conclusion was that the Idaho soldier had died. Sometime later Krivanec’s remains were identified and interred in the American Cemetery in Luxembourg.

PFC Clarke Krivanic’s cross in the American Cemetery in Luxembourg

It is fitting that one of the major American war cemeteries in Europe, including a simple and beautiful chapel and other monuments is located in the tiny nation in the heart of Europe. Krivanec’s simple white marble cross resting on immaculate green grass marks the final resting  spot of one of the more than 5,000 U.S. soldiers and airmen buried there. The most famous grave is that of Patton who died as the result of an automobile accident after the war ended. Patton’s wife decided it would be appropriate that he be buried where so many of his men rest in this quiet, solemn spot in Luxembourg.

The American Cemetery’s location in Luxembourg is also fitting since that nation both suffered grievously during five years of fascist occupation and emerged from that experience as dedicated as any nation to a free and democratic Europe.

Luxembourg was one of the six original members of NATO and although the pocket-sized nation has a tiny army, the country dutifully contributes two percent of its GDP to national defense, the NATO standard. It was no surprise to see flying next to the Luxembourg and Europe Union flags at city hall the flag of Ukraine.

For decades after World War II, it was an article of bipartisan political faith that American national security interests were inextricably linked to the security interests of a democratic Europe. Collective security, as demonstrated by NATO, the most effective military alliance in history, was not a subject of debate during any presidency from Harry Truman to Barack Obama.

Dwight Eisenhower, who praised the sacrifice of the dead when the American Cemetery in Luxembourg was created, was the first commander of NATO. The Alliance came to America’s aid after the attacks of 9-11. NATO has been the linchpin of collective security against Putin’s Russia, and member nations have supplied billions to Ukraine, a democratic non-member, as it fights off the continuing terror of Putin’s war.

Clarke Krivanec, the 21-year-old Idaho soldier from Minidoka County, died fighting fascism 80 years ago in Europe. By the time he died there was little question that the United States and its allies would prevail over fascist Germany. The only question was how many more Americans would die to insure the victory. Krivanec paid the ultimate price.

Eighty years on, an American political party – once the party of Eisenhower – is running a NATO-bashing fascist, a Putin apologist who has denigrated the sacrifice of American veterans as its candidate for president. Simply remarkable.

Seeing Clarke Krivanec’s white marble cross in Luxembourg is enough to make one weep for such callous disregard for his sacrifice and what it continues to mean for all of us and the world.

Clarke Krivanec was no doubt a young man imbued with many characteristics. No one in their right mind would call him a “sucker” or a “loser.”

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One more before the election …

Inside the Ruthless, Restless Final Days of Trump’s Campaign

A must read from one of the best political reporters of his generation, Tim Alberta.

Read this piece in many ways, including that Trump’s senior advisors can’t stand the guy.

“People are calling this the most disciplined campaign they’ve ever seen,” Trump remarked to friends at a fundraiser this summer, according to someone who heard the conversation. He smirked at the compliment. “What’s discipline got to do with winning?”

Read the article.

Wish the country good luck. Make sure you vote.