2024 Election, Churchill, Democracy

Don’t Break It, Fix It …

A sizeable number of Americans have given up on democracy. And in their surrender they have remade the Republican Party – and the country.

Many have tried to explain the motivation of fellow Americans who continue to support a man facing 91 indictments, including a case centering on whether he stole classified documents as he left the White House and after he incited an insurrection. Many wonder why so many Americans profess loyalty to a candidate who has been found liable in a civil action for committing sexual assault and then twice more convicted and fined $88 million for repeatedly defaming the woman he assaulted?

It is impossible not to conclude that the vast evidence of criminality, confirmed by separate prosecutors and judges and juries in numerous jurisdictions just doesn’t matter to the MAGA crowd. What’s a little crime when you have a country to plunge further in chaos?

“Our system needs to be broken,” a Donald Trump voter in New Hampshire recently told Politico’s Michael Kruse in an insightful look into the mind of an angry, hurting, confused American, “and he is the man to do it.”

Can’t argue with that logic. Except you must.

Because “our system” doesn’t need to be broken. It needs to be repaired; urgently and carefully.

To believe that Donald Trump possesses the magic elixir to “Make America Great Again” is to descend to a tooth fairy level of gullibility. There is no fix to “our system” short of Americans voting to support democracy over the chaos and the personal villainy of a man convicted of sexual assault who also happens to be a Constitution shredding charlatan.

You can fret and worry about America and not believe it needs to be broken. Let’s review – briefly – what ails the America most of us continue to love in spite of its obvious flaws.

No, she is not a Pentagon double agent …

Disinformation on a grand scale is causing some Americans – and not an insignificant number apparently – to believe conspiracies lurking in dark corners of the Internet. One of the latest and most laughable holds that popular singer Taylor Swift, as the New York Times put it, is some kind of “a secret agent of the Pentagon; that she is bolstering her fan base in preparation for her endorsement of President Biden’s re-election; or that she and [Kansas City Chiefs boyfriend Travis] Kelce are a contrived couple, assembled to boost the N.F.L. or Covid vaccines or Democrats or whatever.”

Falling for such blatant garbage when there is so much else worth concentrating on is what’s wrong with “our system.” Being hoodwinked by elected con men and Fox News is what’s wrong with America.

Bad faith actors in political positions are what’s wrong with America. There is a reasonable, bipartisan deal to be had to put in place much needed immigration reforms, but the very people who have long insisted on changes are on the verge of killing any deal. The leader of the GOP is hoping to use American concerns about immigration to his advantage, so a legislative deal becomes out of the question. That is what is wrong with “our system.”

A political culture of distraction and deflection is what’s wrong with “our system.”

Vast income inequality is what’s wrong with “our system.” When an Elon Musk can demand a $56 billion pay day (a Delaware judge just voided that obscenity) to run an electric car company that is what is wrong with “our system.” As Reuter’s reported, an executive pay research firm “estimated in 2022 that Musk’s [compensation] package was around six times larger than the combined pay of the 200 highest-paid executives in 2021.”

What is also wrong is that women still make on average 85% of what men make. It’s wrong that American health care costs so much more than any other “developed” country. It’s wrong that many younger Americans simply can’t afford to buy a home of their own. It’s wrong we have so much gun violence. It’s wrong that were are not really dealing with the impacts of a changing climate. It’s wrong that there are too many drugs and too much homelessness. It’s wrong that some radical conservatives want to abandon a democratic Ukraine and embrace authoritarians in Hungry and Russia.

None of these wrongs will be righted by breaking our democratic system. They just won’t.

The way to get after our shortcomings is to double down on a politics of decency, compromise, common sense and good faith. You double down on real, hard to accomplish solutions advanced by serious people working to make the country genuinely better. You double down on democracy. You do not strengthen democracy by breaking it. You just don’t.

To say you must destroy what remains of the American system in order to save it is nonsense. Dangerous nonsense.

Democracy requires work. It requires commitment. It requires patience, as difficult as that can be. In this big, complicated and very diverse country there are no quick fixes. There just aren’t. And the millions of Americans who think another go round with Trump is going to fix “our system” are more delusional than the man himself.

If he had real answers to our real problems he’d be sharing them. He’s got nothing beyond the instincts of an orange bull in a very small shop filled with the fragile elements of democracy. He’s running to stay out of jail and keep his dwindling fortune. He’s running in order to pardon himself and others who committed crimes at his behest. He could care less about democracy, the little guy or anyone’s future beyond his own.

Fifty-nine years ago this week the world said goodbye to Winston Churchill, arguably the 20th Century’s indispensable man, who had died at 90. Churchill, warts and all, was a democrat. He believed in democracy with all its messy and difficult processes, the two steps forward and one back. During the darkest days of World War II he never gave up on democracy.

As Sir Winston famously said he was a creature of the House of Commons … in other words: democracy

One of the great ironies of Churchill’s story is that he courageously and correctly led Great Britain – and the freedom loving world – through that awful war and once the Nazis were beaten to surrender he lost re-election. Still, Churchill never gave up on democracy. It would not have occurred to him to say we have the break “our system.”

What he did say was profound and powerful and worth remembering as too many around us embrace the politics of chaos and division.

“Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe,” Churchill said in 1947. “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time …”

Forget the fearmongers and those giving up on democracy. They are the ultimate losers. We can and must do better than to think we can fix the country by breaking it.  

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Additional Reading:

‘Into the arms of strangers’: child refugees of Nazi Germany remember

Worth reading in light of our battles over immigration and the often desperate people who look to the United States for a better, safer life.

“Hella Pick, a former Guardian foreign correspondent and diplomatic editor, and Lord Alf Dubs, the Labour peer and former MP, visited Berlin this week to mark the 85th anniversary of the Kindertransport, which rescued them as child refugees.

“About 10,000 children, mostly Jewish and the majority from Germany, Austria and Czechslovakia, were brought to live with foster families in the UK to save them from the Nazis.”

From The Guardian.


Precipice of fear: the freerider who took skiing to its limits

Also from The Guardian.

“Like big-wave surfing, extreme skiing has always carried an existential charge: its dangers are not incidental or extraneous, and death is not a rare accident that only occurs when things go terribly wrong. Doug Coombs, an American whose style was once compared to “a droplet of water trickling down a rough plaster wall”, plunged to his death in the French resort of La Grave in 2006. Shane McConkey, a Canadian who was pivotal to the development of wider skis in the 1990s, lost his life in 2009 in an attempt to combine skiing with Base jumping in Italy. Swedish pro skier Matilda Rapaport died in Chile in 2016 while filming for an extreme sports video game, the title of which was, simply, Steep.”

The imbedded video is, well, pretty scary. Read the full story.


Mansfield and Dirksen and the US Capitol Historical Society

I had a wonderful time this week thanks to the US Capitol Historical Society that hosted my talk about the Senate’s leadership in the 1960s.

The full program is now available on YouTube. I hope you’ll check it out.


Thanks for following. Do all you can to defend democracy. It is fragile and needs our help. All the best.

2024 Election, Democracy, GOP, Trump

Trump’s Mafia …

It was news in South Dakota this week, a state that has become as red as Donald Trump’s neckties, that the state’s two Republican United States senators won’t be attending an upcoming Trump rally scheduled in the Black Hills.

Among those RSVPing regrets is John Thune, the number two Republican leader in the Senate. Thune and South Dakota’s other GOP senator, Mike Rounds, have done what few other high profile Republicans have done – think Idaho’s Senators Mike Crapo and Jim Risch or Wyoming’s John Barasso, for example – and finally put distance between themselves and the party’s cult leader.

The South Dakota senators, about as conservative as they come, have endorsed South Carolina Senator Tim Scott for president. Hardly worth a profile in courage award, but better than the vast majority of Republican officeholders who act like backing the party’s leading presidential candidate – or carefully avoiding any comment on his many indictments and proven criminality – is totally normal.

It is not totally normal. Nothing about American politics at the moment is remotely normal. Nothing about the Republican Party’s embrace of a much indicted sociopathic serial liar is normal. Nothing is normal, as the Morning Consult poll found this week, in the fact that three of five Republican voters say they’d vote for a convicted sexual abuser even if he’s behind bars on Election Day next year.

Nothing. Normal. About. Any. Of. This.

As The Bulwark’s Jonathan Lash wrote recently:

Pretend we could go back in time, to January 2017, and tell people that in six years:

  • Trump will have been impeached twice.
  • He will have been found guilty of rape by a jury of his peers.
  • He will have been soundly defeated for re-election, but refused to concede the loss.
  • In an effort to remain in power he will put in motion a vast conspiracy to overturn the result through extralegal methods.
  • When this conspiracy fails he will incite a violent insurrection in which he directs his armed supporters to invade the Capitol and prevent the certification of Electoral College votes.
  • He will be indicted in four separate criminal cases.
  • He will seek a return to the White House explicitly for the stated purpose of ‘retribution.’
  • And he will be leading the Republican field by >30 points.

The party of Lincoln, and TR and Eisenhower is now a stewing cesspool of grievance and denial willingly embracing neo-Nazis and a wide array of conspiracists. The party leader’s legal team – many of them indicted in Atlanta this week – are a mockery of Republican appeals to law and order.

The degradation and destruction of the once Grand Old Party is both stunning and frightening, but mostly frightening.

Frightening in that Trump’s mesmerized supporters believe in him, and his avalanche of demonstrable lies more than they believe their own friends, family and religious leaders. As the CBS News-YouGov poll recently discovered these folks cling to the lies and rabid misinformation more than ever in the face of Trump’s grand jury indictment for attempting to overturn the presidential election in Georgia. Making off with the nation’s secrets for whatever reason and defying not only the law but common sense in refusing to return them deepens their regard for this shallow, foul man.

Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him continues to metastasize in the conservative body politic. The devotion to that enormous lie is the single biggest reason more Republican officeholders refuse to do what the senators from South Dakota have done, namely move on from the fabulist-in-chief. The Crapo’s and Risch’s of American politics know it’s all bull, but they won’t really confront it because they are afraid … of their own voters.

There have been so many turning points in this American melodrama – the Access Hollywood tape, Trump’s persistent praise of the murderous Russian thug, the grifting of the presidency through a gaudy Washington hotel, the Unite the Right neo-Nazi spectacle in Charlottesville, the serial departures of Cabinet secretaries who thought they could contain the fabulist and discovered they couldn’t, the name calling, the threats, the incitement of insurrection.

And It will only get worse, while the GOP elected elite works to delist grizzly bears or neuter the IRS.

Amid all this crazy, outrageous and full on dangerous behavior, history is likely to record as one of the most egregious acts in presidential history, Trump’s mafia-inspired efforts to shakedown Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in order to manufacture dirt on his political opponent.

All of Trump’s venality and disdain for American – and European – democracy was on clear display in his telephone call to the man who now tries to save the independence of his country against the brutal aggression of The Donald’s pal, Vlad. Simply put, Trump was eager to intimidate another democracy to help destroy one at home. Meanwhile, the GOP edges closer to Putin, while most of the rest of the world shuns him as never before.

There is a perverse symmetry that on the same day Rudy Giuliani was indicted in Georgia the leader of the Russian militia that provided Putin’s only effective fighting force against Ukraine died, likely on orders from Donald’s pal. Rudy with the light brown hair dye was, of course, Trump’s Ukrainian bagman charged with assembling dirt on Joe Biden. Meanwhile, the fabulist says he could end the brutal aggression against Ukraine with one phone call. Right.

This farce become tragedy is as if the script for The Godfather or GoodFellas had been substituted for the shredded ruminants of the rule of law, or any sense of decency in the GOP. Trump is the Vito Corleone of our politics, keeping it all in the family, fronted by corrupt lawyers and evil politicians willing to do anything to protect his own skin and the family business. Just don’t get caught.

Forget the pundits who tell you there is future salvation for the Republican crime family and all of its enablers. There isn’t. Won’t happen. The only way to banish this level of corruption is to take them to trial, convict them in front of a jury of their peers and vote the enablers into the inglorious history they so richly deserve.

Imagine your political legacy being that you couldn’t bring yourself to call bull on this BS.

Michael Corleone, to play out the mafia analogy, eventually tried to go legit, but the stink of the family crimes never left him.

There is simply no washing or wishing away these crimes.

—–O—–

Additional Reading:

A few other items worthy of your time …

No OB-GYNs left in town: what came after Idaho’s assault on abortion

Montana journalist Kathleen McLaughlin writes about how Idaho’s anti-abortion laws have impacted the state’s medical care, including doctors like Amelia Huntsberger, an OB-GYN in northern Idaho who has had enough.

“The raft of extreme abortion laws left doctors like Huntsberger unsure if they could continue to practice any kind of family medicine in Idaho, where untrained political figures now have greater say over medical decisions than physicians. Across Idaho, doctors are leaving, looking to practice in safer states. After months of weighing their options, including many sleepless nights, the Huntsbergers finally decided the risks and anxiety were too much. It was time to leave.”

Read the entire story from The Guardian.


How the PAC-12 scramble will impact WSU’s athletics

I confess to having less and less interest in college football. The massive realignment chasing massive money has ruined conferences and will almost certainly destroy rivalries. The PAC-12 – the Conference of Champions – is no more with several schools including Washington State and Oregon State left as orphans.

Here’s Nicholas K. Geranios on the impact on WSU.

“College sports isn’t cheap. Washington State, one of the thriftier programs amid the so-called power-conference teams, will spend more than $84 million on athletics in fiscal 2024. Other schools spend far more.”

Read the full piece:

And here’s an idea from Joe Matthews – an all California conference. It makes too much sense, so will never happen.


Shameless Self Promotion

As you likely know, I have a new book out – Mansfield and Dirksen: Bipartisan Giants of the Senate – and I’m about to go into full book tour mode with events early next in Boise and then across Montana, Mike Mansfield’s home. In October, I’ll be in Illinois for a few days to visit Ev Dirksen country.

And … some nice coverage of the book already.

A really enjoyable visit with Oregon legislator and excellent interviewer Ben Bowman on his Oregon Bridge podcast. Here’s that link.

A very generous review here from Jim Heffernan, an Oregonian who gives the book a very close read. Jim says: “I do not often order a book before publication. But the subject and the author compelled me to take the risk. I am very glad I did. Marc Johnson is a very good writer and historian, and he did not disappoint me.” Here’s that link.

Thanks Jim.

And a nice piece with reporter Tim Shelley with the Peoria, Illinois NPR station. Tim said: “The politicians of today’s U.S. Senate could stand to learn a thing or two from Everett Dirksen and Mike Mansfield.”

He’s not wrong. And here’s that link.


More soon. Thanks for reading. Hope to see you …

Democracy, Trump

The True Believer …

Maybe the best guide to understanding what has become of the modern conservative movement is a modest little book first published in 1951.

The enduring truths contained in Eric Hoffer’s book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements simply could not be more relevant to America in the 21st Century.

Dwight Eisenhower thought enough of Hoffer’s book to recommend it to a wounded World War II veteran. Ronald Reagan presented Hoffer with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983.

Eric Hoffer, a San Francisco longshoreman by trade and a self-taught philosopher by avocation, might never have predicted that the United States, a country built on at least the language of fidelity to the rule of law, would one day find itself in a situation where one political party would fundamentally reject the authority and seriousness of the American legal system in service to a demagogue.

In fairness, Hoffer likely couldn’t imagine a Donald Trump, at least not 70 years ago amid fresh memories of what authoritarians are capable of. Yet here we are in a nation dominated by the blind idolization of the “base” of the Republican Party for a former president who is about to become the subject of serial indictments ranging from hush money payments to a porn actress to illegally secreting away classified documents to inciting a deadly insurrection.

Long before Trump, Hoffer was able to understand the characteristics of mass movements that propelled charismatic, manipulative, law ignoring charlatans to power in the Europe of the 1920s and 1930s.

The leader of a mass movement, Hoffer wrote, need not be particularly smart or a person of character. In fact, those attributes matter hardly at all. The “main requirements,” for the mass leader, Hoffer concluded, involve “audacity and a joy in defiance, an iron will, a fanatical conviction that he is in possession of the one and only truth.” The successful leader of a mass movement has “a capacity for passionate hatred; contempt for the present; a cunning estimate of human nature; a delight in symbols (spectacles and ceremonials); (and) unbounded brazenness which finds expression in a disregard of consistency and fairness.”

Most of all the leader depends on – this should conjure up an image of a Kevin McCarthy, a Steve Bannon or any number of other alleged modern conservatives who have sold their souls and backbones to a twice impeached serial liar – “a capacity for winning and holding the upmost loyalty of the group of able lieutenants.”

These true believing enablers typically display a certain level of competence – McCarthy found a way to get elected Speaker of the House, after all – and are certainly aware of what they have bought into, but awareness matters little compared to a willingness, as Hoffer put it, to “submit wholly to the will of the leader.”

And what does submitting “wholly” to the leader look like as we gaze on America’s mass movement?

Republican after Republican this week, members of the party that once considered nothing more important than “law and order,” attacked the prosecutor who appears poise to indict the movement’s leader on the advice of a grand jury comprised of American citizens. Meanwhile, the man at the center of this unprecedented situation did what all leaders of mass movements do, he called forth his followers, urging them to protest – for him.

The man from Mar-a-Lago and the porn actress he paid to stay quiet … nothing to see here

McCarthy, who long ago wholly submitted, called the pending Trump indictment “pure politics” and attacked the elected prosecutor for being soft on crime, a curious position for one defending a person alleged to have committed a crime. Other former “law and order” conservatives attacked Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Black man, calling him a “George Soros-backed” prosecutor, a nifty twofer insult that involves both race and anti-Semitism.

A credible reaction from any elected official to the potential indictment of a prominent political figure would be to say that “the justice system needs to be allowed to work.” They could have said the burden of proof is with the prosecution and we need to wait and see what a judge and jury make of the allegations. They could have said “no comment.” Instead, they submitted wholly to the will of the leader who has devoted most of his adult life to skirting the kind of legal and ethical accountability the rest of us take for granted.

There is nothing – nothing – normal about this Republican reaction to alleged criminal conduct by a former officeholder. To normalize attacks on prosecutors is to expand dangerously Trump’s own assaults on judges, law enforcement officials and courts, the bedrock American institutions that still remain, thankfully, as a shaky bulwark against his life-long penchant for criminality.

I find myself in agreement with The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols, a Never Trump conservative, who wrote this week that the porn star hush money case is certainly not the strongest case Trump will confront, but if Al Capone, a man like the former president guilty of many crimes, could be brought down by a tax evasion conviction, why not pursue the illegality of Trump’s payoffs to Stormy Daniels?

Yet the bigger issue, as Nichols noted, is that Trump again summoned the mob to do his bidding. 

Trump “is warning all of us, point-blank,” Nichols wrote, “that he will violate the law if he wants to, and if you don’t like it, you can take it up with the mob that he can summon at will. This is pure authoritarianism, the flex of a would-be American caudillo who is betting that our fear of his goons is greater than our commitment to the rule of law. Once someone like Trump issues that kind of challenge, it doesn’t matter if the indictment is for murder, campaign-finance violations, or mopery with intent to gawk: The issue is whether our legal institutions can be bullied into paralysis.”

That’s what is happening here, the wholesale submission of a class of political leaders to the leader of a mass movement who, at his whim, can call on his followers to help him break the law.

How pervasive is the threat? How deep does this rot go? Look no farther than at the conduct of the senior most Republican on the once prestigious Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the junior senator from Idaho, James E. Risch.

When the Trump mob attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 at the call of the president of the United States, an event utterly unprecedented in all of American history, and resulting – so far – in charges against more than a thousand rioters and the convictions of more than 400, Risch’s very private hideaway office in the Capitol was trashed by the mob.

January 6 rioters trash the office of Idaho’s junior senator

The video of the ransacking, as broadcast by NBC, “shows a rioter – who has pleaded guilty to driving a stun gun into a police officer’s neck, nearly killing him – smashing out Risch’s window overlooking the Washington Monument and the national mall in an attempt to let more rioters into the building. Additional video … shows Risch’s trashed desk, including what looks like a framed campaign image bearing his last name.”

NBC noted that the leader of our mass movement is very popular in Risch’s home state, making it therefore necessary for the senator to wholly submit to the will of the leader. Risch, of course, said nothing at the time about the rioters in his office. He said nothing when confronted with the video evidence.

The true believing senator did what followers do, even when they themselves are the victims of evil. He stayed loyal. He submitted.

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Additional Reads:

‘Gone With the Wind’: The Explosive Lost Scenes

A fascinating deep dive into the making of the iconic film.

Undeniably, the movie represented historic achievements in storytelling, color cinematography, production design, acting, orchestration, multidimensional portrayals of female characters, costuming, and efforts to fight the censorship of the Hays Code. But it is equally true that the film had a destructive global influence on the entire world’s understanding of race relations. A French critic once hailed Gone With the Wind as ‘the Sistine Chapel of Movies,’ while director John Ridley more recently summarized it as ‘a film that, when it is not ignoring the horrors of slavery, pauses only to perpetuate some of the most painful stereotypes of people of color.'”

Read the full piece:

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Partygate: Johnson should reject any finding that he broke rules, say allies

Former British PM Boris Johnson – no relation – is in a pickle, again, for allegedly misleading Parliament during Covid lockdown. And Bois acting a lot like someone you probably remember.

“Boris Johnson should refuse to accept the outcome of the privileges committee investigation if it concludes that he intentionally misled the Commons over the Partygate scandal, his allies have said.

“Some of the former prime minister’s supporters believe he should reject the cross-party group’s findings if they decide, based on written evidence and a fractious three-and-a-half-hour evidence session on Wednesday, that he broke strict parliamentary rules.

Here’s the story:

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Is Ron DeSantis the Republican Michael Dukakis?

I always try to read Bill Scher.

“Democrats once nominated a governor for president, fresh off a landslide re-election, who claimed he could do for the country what he did for his home state. His name was Michael Dukakis, and he dubbed his state’s 1980s economic turnaround the ‘Massachusetts Miracle.‘ However, in the 1980s, a right-leaning electorate did not embrace liberal Massachusetts values.”

Good piece from The Washington Monthly:

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Have a good week … and keep reading – everything.

 

2022 Election, Andrus, Democracy

The Takeaways …

It wasn’t a “red wave,” more like, as conservative writer Mona Charen put it, “a small toxic spill” where “voters of Pennsylvania, Virginia, New Hampshire, and Michigan, among other places, apparently weighed more than inflation in their calculations, and that gives a fighting chance to those who hope to right this listing ship.”

Democrats have little to crow about, particularly in some of the reddest of the red states – Idaho, Montana, South Dakota among others, but they didn’t get swamped nationally, which typically happens to the party in the White House in a midterm election.

The “red wave” that wasn’t …

Many, but certainly not all, election deniers lost, ensuring that the “big lie” will continue to float at the top of our national political septic tank. Idaho, to cite just one example, hasn’t yet copped, but soon enough will, to having elected a professional agitator (and election denier) as attorney general, a political opportunist who will cause a wholesale exodus from the state’s largest law firm. You heard it here: Raul Labrador, a Tea Partier who left a lot of wreckage in his wake while in Congress, wanted a new job in order to play politics with the law and then use that ruse to run for governor.

Montana voters looked past the scandals and carpetbagging of Ryan Zinke, their former congressman and our ethically challenged former Interior Secretary, to send Zinke back to Congress. He’ll fill a seat once occupied by the likes of Jeannette Rankin, Mike Mansfield, Lee Metcalf and Pat Williams. This is politically trading down on an epic scale, rather like swapping your new Bentley for a rusted out Edsel you can’t get started.

My old South Dakota stomping ground once had a Democratic Party. It doesn’t anymore. There a very Trumpy, made for TV governor, Kristi Noem, used her position of public trust to pressure a state agency to provide preferential treatment for her daughter, and spent most of her term flying around the country to raise her national profile. Noem won with 62% of the vote, proving that many – maybe most – red state conservatives are willing to tolerate a little garden variety corruption as long as their side wins.

There will more than enough time – too much time – for the extended postmortems and the already endless speculation about 2024, but this much seems fairly clear.

The ol’ US of A is profoundly divided, a country riven by one side’s willingness to embrace grievance, demonstrable lies and entertain authoritarianism, while the other side thrashes about to barely compete in a majority of states, often failing to supply a compelling narrative about the economy or the future.

Democrats in places like Idaho and South Dakota must make a choice. Continue the old practice of working from the top down, failing miserably in doing so – the Idaho gubernatorial candidate had the worst Democratic showing since Calvin Coolidge was in the White House – or embrace a bottom up strategy that begins with an all-out appeal to younger voters, many of whom haven’t been alive long enough to see how a two party system once worked.

The party must go both extremely local and determinedly old school, with a relentless focus on engaging voters where they are. It won’t be quick or immediately satisfying, but doing the same old thing isn’t either.

Where abortion was an issue, Democrats – again with the help of younger voters – prevailed. Pro-choice provisions succeeded in nominally Democratic Michigan and solidly Republican Kentucky.

Where abortion rights were on the ballot they prevailed

As University of Montana political scientist Rob Saldin and I observed immediately after May’s stunning Supreme Court decision overturning abortion protections, Idaho’s 1990 experience with the issue offers a big tell. That election, Cecil Andrus’s fourth term, marks the modern high water mark for Idaho Democrats, in no small part because the then-governor framed the anti-choice issue as one of vast Republican overreach.

“If the issue is framed correctly,” Saldin and I wrote for the Washington Post, “the sense of grievance surrounding abortion that has long propelled the right will shift, energizing voters looking to preserve access to abortion and catalyzing their support.” And it is happening.

One outcome of this wild midterm election would have passed without comment before 2020 – there was no rigged outcome. Elections from Pennsylvania to Arizona were run professionally and fairly. To believe otherwise is to live in a Trumpian la la land where a rigged election is the only way to explain why a twice impeached failed real estate developer who only won against the weakest Democratic candidate since Michael Dukakis, lost in 2020.

Both parties are due a reckoning, as should happen after every election. Democrats need to commit to a kitchen table agenda and the kind of blunt language Harry Truman used so effectively. The party needs to compete aggressively in rural America, just as it does on the left coast. Democrats need more of Jon Tester, the blue collar farmer from Montana, and more like new senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a tattooed exponent of no nonsense politics who beat a slick, quack TV doctor like a drum, and Fetterman won after suffering a stroke during the campaign.

The Republican reckoning will be vastly more unpleasant, as well as more important to the future of the country. Republicans seem sure to have a wafer-thin margin in the House of Representatives and the most radical right wingers in the party seem determined to display immediately why they shouldn’t be anywhere near political power. The crazy caucus already has the knives out for would-be speaker Kevin McCarthy, and like John Boehner and Paul Ryan before him McCarthy will likely be no match for fellow Republicans wielding pitchforks.

And Republicans will eventually have to deal – or not – with the insurrectionist wing of their party, a genuine problem in Idaho where militia leader Ammon Bundy pulled 17 percent of the vote.

And, of course, there is the ghost of Mar a Lago. What to do with the cancer growing on the Grand Old Party, what the Wall Street Journal – yes, that Wall Street Journal – termed “the Republican Party’s biggest loser?”

Sane and sober Republicans surely know Donald Trump would gladly burn the party to the ground if it served his malicious purposes. Better get the fire extinguishers ready.

The recent election wasn’t a diabolic mess for democracy, thank the lord, but rather a choice for more of the same. The party that does some soul-searching and recalibrating to find a new and better path forward for the country is the party to favor the next time we whip ourselves into a frenzy over an election.

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

You may find something here of interest …

“Don’t Join the Book Burners”

In June of 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower delivered the commencement speech at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. That old speech is strangely relevant again. This piece from a student who was there.

“I was not thinking of Sen. Joseph McCarthy as I watched Eisenhower rise to deliver what were expected to be his brief remarks. But Eisenhower decided to add something more substantive.

“‘Don’t join the book burners,” Ike said.'”

Here’s the link:


Is this the end of Britishness?

Ian Jack was a terrific British journalist and editor. Jack died recently and a lot of folks in the Mother Country are remembering his enormous body of work, including this piece written at the time Scotland was considering independence.

The pull of Scottish independence remains strong

The writing is superb. The history lesson valuable. The storytelling marvelous.

“Is it, as VS Naipaul once remarked of British culture, all over?

“During the past dozen years, the Scottish National party has worked an astonishing transformation, turning the tables so that unionism now looks sentimental – the home of exhausted tradition – while independence stands for energetic progress. Over that time, the death of Britishness has been predicted as often as the death of the novel, but it has managed to survive and even to grow.”

It’s a long and lovely read.


When bipartisanship really happened

I wrote a piece recently for a wonderful online publication – The Daily Montanan.

For the essay, I drew on the research I’ve done for a new book – coming in 2023. The book is the story of the political and personal relationship between Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield of Montana and minority leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois.

Everett Dirksen and Mike Mansfield: Giants in the Senate

The two men worked together, in a beautiful bipartisan way, to pass civil rights and voting rights legislation, create Medicare and ratify the first major nuclear arms control treaty, and they supported the president during a tense showdown over missiles in Cuba.

“When President John Kennedy had to confront the Kremlin’s nuclear threat in 1962, he enjoyed, indeed solicited, bipartisan congressional support for his strategy, even to the point of insisting that the Republican leader of the United States Senate suspend his re-election campaign in order to participate in urgent consultations at the White House. In our times of fractured partisanship when Republican and Democratic congressional leaders seem barely able to talk to one another let alone offer words of encouragement and support while reasoning through a crisis together with a president, the domestic political lessons of that long ago nuclear showdown bear remembering – and emulating.”

The book was great fun to work on. Here’s a sneak preview.


For those who are thinking democracy dodged a bullet this week – you’re right. There is much work to do. Be about it, friends. All the best.

2022 Election, Democracy, GOP

America’s Choice …

On Monday night, February 20, 1939, a huge crowd of nearly 30,000 Americans packed into Madison Square Garden in New York City. Another 20,000 milled around outside, The crowd was orderly, at least for a while, but eventually became resistive, particularly after the main speaker began calling them to action.

On the platform uniformed guards stood watch, while “storm troopers” in the crowd “wore overcoats to conceal their uniforms.” Red and black and white flags were displayed everywhere. A large portrait of George Washington was suspended from the ceiling.

Under the guise of “Americanization” American democracy was under attack.

Police – more than 1,500 officers were on hand – expected trouble and had the Garden under tight lock down. One counter demonstrator was beaten and arrested. Event organizers claimed the principle speaker, a uniform wearing rabble rouser named Fritz Kuhn, was the subject of an assassination plot.

Celebrated reporter William S. White described the scene in newspaper accounts that appeared across the country. “In a Nazi demonstration that filled vast Madison Square Garden leaders of the German-American bund stood last night under the sign of the swastika to denounce ‘international Jewry,’ some members of the Roosevelt cabinet, and any American alliance with European democracies.”

Headline from the New York Daily News, February 20, 1939

Reaction was mixed with many defending the rally on free speech grounds even as the pro-Nazi gathering came at a time when Germany had rearmed, annexed Austria, taken over Czechoslovakia and imprisoned thousands of its “undesirable” citizens, particularly Jews. Oregon Republican Senator Rufus C. Holman, stoking class and race division, actually proposed in response to the gathering an end to immigration “until we can assimilate the discordant elements already here.”

Buffalo Evening News, February 21, 1939

Holman, who had been an officer in the Oregon Klu Klux Klan in the 1920s, would later say during a Senate speech: “I have always deplored Hitler’s ambitions as a conqueror. But he broke the control of these internationalists over the common people of Germany. It would be a good idea if the control of the international bankers over the common people of England was broken, and good if it was broken over the wages and savings of the common people of the United States.”

I thought about Rufus Holman, Fritz Kuhn and “the common people of the United States” while reading about the big confab of the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) in Dallas recently. CPAC once was a rather staid, establishment conservative outfit, with its annual meetings offering up servings of standard rightwing red meat for those Americans who still believe Barry Goldwater was a prophet and Gerald Ford a liberal squish.

Once at the fringe of the conservative movement, CPAC is now, as Texas Monthly described it, offering “a violent blueprint for seizing power.” This is now the conservative mainstream, a neo-fascist movement in thrall to violence and in support of coup plotter.

The principle CPAC speaker was, of course, the man who would be president again. “We have to seize this opportunity to deal with the radical left socialist lunatic fascists,” Donald Trump declared to rapturous applause. “We have to hit them very, very hard. It has to be a crippling defeat.” 

With uniformed Proud Boys standing by and Hungarian dictator Viktor Orbán thrilling the radical right multitudes with his anti-Semitic, anti-democratic, pro-Christian nationalist rhetoric, Trump repeated for the ten-thousandth time the Big Lie about his election defeat. He lamented the poor insurrectionists facing jail time for attacking the U.S. Capitol. He pitied his vast legal exposure. The crowd went wild.

Donald Trump and Viktor Orban

“If somebody has doubts whether progressive liberals and communists are the same, just ask us Hungarians,” Orbán earlier told CPAC. “We fought them both, and I can tell you: they are the same.”

Peter Montgomery, a senior fellow at the non-profit group Right Wing Watch told The Guardian: “Rightwing leaders, and especially the religious right leaders in the US, love Viktor Orbán for the same reasons they love Vladimir Putin. This overt embrace of Christian nationalism, willingness to use strongman tactics and the power of the government to enforce so-called traditional values about family and sexuality.”

The cold civil war in America ratcheted up a big notch with the most prominent conservative conference in the country embracing a thug like Orbán and it went into overdrive when the FBI subsequently served a search warrant on Trump’s Florida compound.

To say we have entered uncharted territory is to understate the peril of the moment. The darkest forces on the fringe right are calling for war and the crowd that yesterday slammed Democrats for wanting to “defund the police” today wants to eliminate the FBI.

Perhaps only one thing seems perfectly clear – the GOP elite, every bit as much at the grassroots, is sticking with the party’s would-be Viktor Orbán.

As Dahlia Lithwick wrote in Slate: “Having witnessed the bulk of the party harden its commitment to protecting Trump at any cost after the January 6th attack on the Capitol, nobody should be shocked to learn that ranking Republicans – without any information about what was seized, or why – were willing to stake their political careers on the claim that it was a lawless, partisan ‘raid.’ The darkest versions of these claims called for doing away with federal law enforcement altogether.”

Or as David Frum noted in The Atlantic: “In the hours since the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s freshest resentments have become the election manifesto of his party, whose leaders are one by one lining up to investigate and punish the Department of Justice for enforcing the law against Donald Trump. Usually, August of an election year is when a party shifts its message from red meat for the true believers to softer themes for the general electorate. Trump is trying to stop that pivot, and after the FBI’s visit, he may succeed.”

We can’t imagine what might happen next for the simple reason we have never been here before. Never before have we had a lawless former president, sponsor of an effort to overturn an election and mired in endless scandal, supported by the most radical elements of one of our major political parties and hoping to reclaim power.

After than big New York event in 1939, the vast majority of Americans rejected the forces of fear and division the rally represented and committed themselves to the preservation of a pluralistic, democratic country, eventually sending sons and daughters to defeat the forces of fascism in a great war that continues to define the modern world.

Today the forces of fascism are again on the march, but they do not march as our would-be dictator claims from the ranks of the party of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Biden. The pressing threat to American democracy comes from the opposite direction, those who would shred the rule of law, while dividing us at every turn with appeals to hatred and violence.

We haven’t seen the bottom with these deplorables because there is no bottom. There is only democracy if we care enough to save it.

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Additional Reading:

For your consideration my carefully curated weekly selections …

Seven years of sex abuse: How Mormon officials let it happen

A stunning investigative piece by the Associated Press. The AP obtained thousands of documents related to allegations of child abuse in Arizona and West Virginia, cases where Mormon Church officials had knowledge of the abuse but did nothing.

“Families of survivors who filed the lawsuit said they show it’s part of a system that can easily be misused by church leaders to divert abuse accusations away from law enforcement and instead to church attorneys who may bury the problem, leaving victims in harm’s way.”

It’s difficult to read, but one hopes this kind of story leads to reform.


How the FBI knew what to search for at Mar-a-Lago 

Scene of the crime …

Interesting Q-A with an expert on presidential records.

Q. How do the archivists actually know what’s missing? Isn’t that hard to figure out?

A. The archivists probably have a really keen idea of what is and what isn’t missing, based upon things that they’ve gotten out of other offices, like the vice president’s office and things that got deposited from the secretary of state, for example. There are a lot of papers that are referenced and cross-referenced, multiple copies or multiple things going in and out of offices.

Read the entire interview:


The maddening coverage of the Mar-a-Lago search

I’ve been a fan of the Columbia Journalism Review for years. This piece dissects some of the early news coverage of the big story out of Florida and hits hard at some of the shortcomings.

“After facing criticism yesterday, the Post changed its initial headline – ‘Garland vowed to depoliticize Justice. Then the FBI raided Trump’s safe’ – at least once. It now reads: ‘FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago lands Merrick Garland in a political firestorm’; on Google, it displays as: ‘For Garland, FBI search of Trump property makes it hard to avoid political fray.’ The updates constitute an improvement in that they don’t implicitly accuse Garland of politicizing the rule of law. But they’re far from perfect, resting on DC clichés—’political firestorm’; ‘political fray’—that are worn and passive, offering no insight into who might have started the fire or frayed democracy. This might seem pedantic, but headlines, and language more broadly, matter.”

Good reading to understand some of why the “media” is constantly under fire in the Age of Trump.


A sage for all seasons

From The Guardian archives a John Updike appreciation for Henry David Thoreau and Walden.

Henry David Thoreau

“Thoreau was 27 when he took up residence in the cabin by Walden Pond; he had graduated from Harvard 19th in his class, tried teaching, helped his father in the family pencil business, did local odd jobs for a dollar a day, lived with the Emersons for two years as handyman and gardener, left Long Island after a brief spell of tutoring and testing the literary market, and, despite Emerson’s sponsorship and a few poems and essays in the Transcendentalist quarterly The Dial, had made no mark. He emerged from the cabin in 1847 as essentially the Thoreau known to literary history.”

You’ll learn something and may be inspired to read the classic again. Here is the link.


Thanks for reading. Be well.

Democracy, Insurrection

Heed the Signs …

How can an American know that democracy at home is under assault, and may even collapse?

Listen.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, February 3, 2021:

“There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.

“The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president and having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories and reckless hyperbole which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth.

“He did not do his job. He didn’t take steps so federal law could be faithfully executed and order restored.”

(AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Idaho Republican Senator James E. Risch, February 10, 2021:

“[Trump] said I need you to get out there and fight for me, well you know, what politician hasn’t said that to his supporters? You know, I need you to get out there and fight for me. Now it’s a really slippery slope to say that you hold a political rally and you give fiery speeches and then somebody goes out and does something you didn’t intend and then they hold you responsible for it. That’s not right.”

Wyoming Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney, February 10, 2021:

“Republicans used to advocate fidelity to the rule of law and the plain text of the Constitution. In 2020, Mr. Trump convinced many to abandon those principles. He falsely claimed that the election was stolen from him because of widespread fraud. While some degree of fraud occurs in every election, there was no evidence of fraud on a scale that could have changed this one. As the Select Committee will demonstrate in hearings later this year, no foreign power corrupted America’s voting machines, and no massive secret fraud changed the election outcome.

“Almost all members of Congress know this – although many lack the courage to say it out loud. Mr. Trump knew it too, from his own campaign officials, from his own appointees at the Justice Department, and from the dozens of lawsuits he lost. Yet, Mr. Trump ignored the rulings of the courts and launched a massive campaign to mislead the public.

“Donald Trump not only sought to destroy the electoral system through false claims of voter fraud and unprecedented public intimidation of state election officials, but he also then attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to his duly elected successor, for the first time in American history.”

January 6, 2021

Journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters who investigated Richard Nixon’s crimes that came to be known as Watergate:

“In a deception that exceeded even Nixon’s imagination, Trump and a group of lawyers, loyalists and White House aides devised a strategy to bombard the country with false assertions that the 2020 election was rigged and that Trump had really won. They zeroed in on the Jan. 6 session as the opportunity to overturn the election’s result. Leading up to that crucial date, Trump’s lawyers circulated memos with manufactured claims of voter fraud that had counted the dead, underage citizens, prisoners and out-of-state residents.

“On that day, driven by Trump’s rhetoric and his obvious approval, a mob descended on the Capitol and, in a stunning act of collective violence, broke through doors and windows and ransacked the House chamber, where the electoral votes were to be counted. The mob then went in search of Pence – all to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Trump did nothing to restrain them.

“By legal definition this is clearly sedition – conduct, speech or organizing that incites people to rebel against the governing authority of the state. Thus, Trump became the first seditious president in our history.”

Capitol Police Staff Sergeant Aquilino Gonell, June 7, 2022. Gonell was permanently injured in the attack on the Capitol that claimed seven lives.

“To be honest, I just want the truth. I mean, like I said on my testimony back in last year, I had a feeling at the moment when I was fighting those people that this was well-coordinated. And from revelations that we have seen coming out from the investigations and through the court system, it has – and it was coordinated from the top down, from the president down. This was no coincidence of what happened. I believe that since the election, everybody who supported the president – most of them – they had a handle on it in terms of coordinating it, planning it, orchestrating it, including downplaying it after the fact, even though on January 6 they were running for their lives.”

Maryland Republican Governor Larry Hogan reacting to reports on June 8 that a heavily armed 22-year-old man who had threatened members of the Supreme Court was arrested near Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Maryland home and charged with attempted murder:

“I call on leaders in both parties in Washington to strongly condemn these actions in no uncertain terms. It is vital to our constitutional system that the justices be able to carry out their duties without fear of violence against them and their families.”

Garnell Whitfield Jr. speaking before a congressional committee, June 7, 2022. Whitfield’s 86-year-old mother died in a mass shooting carried out by a white supremacist in Buffalo, New York:

“My mom’s life mattered. Your actions here will tell us if and how much it mattered to you.  

“On that fateful day in Buffalo we realized the danger of allowing hatred in, any form, in our country to fester. It tears at the overall fabric of our democracy. Will we be better at being a multicultural nation?”

Historian Heather Cox Richardson, June 7, 2022:

“The Department of Homeland Security today issued a new bulletin in the National Terrorism Advisory System, stating that the U.S. ‘remains in a heightened threat environment.’ It noted that ‘[t]he continued proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding current events could reinforce existing personal grievances or ideologies, and in combination with other factors, could inspire individuals to mobilize to violence.’ Stories that the government is unwilling or unable to secure the southern border and the upcoming Supreme Court decision about abortion rights might lead to violence, it said. 

“Also, it noted: ‘As the United States enters mid-term election season this year, we assess that calls for violence by domestic violent extremists directed at democratic institutions, political candidates, party offices, election events, and election workers will likely increase.’”

Pay attention.

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Additional Reading:

A few other items that may be of interest …

Two Stories Illustrate the Ongoing American Battle Over Education

The first from South Dakota where, as in many “red” states, the educational agenda is be framed by national conservative groups who aim to target teachers and destroy – not too harsh a word – public education.

Excellent reporting here from South Dakota News Watch.

And this from the Wisconsin Examiner. “Over the past few months, some Wisconsin Republican legislators have been scouring school libraries in their districts for potentially ‘inappropriate’ books … GOP lawmakers appear to be setting the stage for debates around what books should be restricted, and whether staff should be held accountable for providing them to students.”

The culture wars are raging.


Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire

This review of historian Caroline Elkins’ latest book is proof positive of why the effort to dumb down history by focusing only on the glories and not also the tragedies is so darn dangerous.

“Her detailing of [the violent] reality [of the British Empire] involves a deconstruction not only of the self-delusion, seductive mythology and doublespeak of the largest empire in human history, but also the deliberate official destruction of large parts of its historical record.”

From The Guardian.


“We’re Living in an Era of Extraordinary Corporate Power”

An interview with Katie Curran O’Malley, a candidate for attorney general in Maryland, who is vowing to focus on the growing anti-competitive nature of American business.

From Washington Monthly.


The Kystriksveien: Earth’s most beautiful road trip?

A travel piece from the BBC.

A part of Norway’s spectacular coastal road

“Seeming to wrap itself around the country like a protective shield from the freezing Arctic, Norway’s coastline appears to have shattered under the strain, riven as it is with islands and fjords cutting deep fissures inland. Along such a coast, it seems impossible that a road should exist here at all. In short, it seems like a miracle.”

The road is a “triumph of human ingenuity and perseverance.”


On that lovely note I’ll say thanks … and do what you can to speak out and defend our democracy. All the best.

Democracy, Trump

The Coming Reckoning . . .

Brace yourself.

In the next few months, perhaps even weeks, a former president of the United States is going to be indicted, charged with serious crimes that almost certainly will shake the fragile foundations of American democracy.

To date speculation about charges against Donald J. Trump, the 45th American president, have been largely taking place among legal and Constitutional scholars who watch every development as it unfolds amid the long threads of Trump’s legal exposure. But now the reality of what is likely to happen is increasingly in plain view. The man’s own words – Trump never hides what he’s really thinking or worried about – betray the peril he faces.

Former US President Donald Trump gestures as he speaks during a “Save America” rally in Conroe, Texas on January 29, 2022. (Photo by Mark Felix / AFP) (Photo by MARK FELIX/AFP /AFP via Getty Images)

Trump is committing a type of obstruction in public. During a typically rambling, grievance laced performance in Texas recently, the former president was clear about two things. He read these lines straight off the teleprompter.

“If these radical, vicious racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protest we have ever had … in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta, and elsewhere because our country and our elections are corrupt.”

And this: “If I run and I win, we will treat those people from January 6 fairly,” Trump said, and then underscoring his intentions “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.”

Will Bunch, a practiced Trump watcher who writes for the Philadelphia Inquirer, called it one of the “most incendiary and most dangerous speeches in America’s 246-year history.” He is not wrong.

In a few words, Trump was signaling again that those not cooperating with investigations into his incitement of an insurrectionist mob on January 6, people like former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, should hang tough. He’ll pardon them when he’s back in power. And that promise has particular influence. Trump’s done it before.

Even more astounding – and more dangerous – Trump is broadcasting to his most committed followers that any effort to hold him to account will be met by protests, and likely violence. There is simply no parallel in American history for a former president to behave in such a reckless, lawless fashion. This is not normal.

As Harry Litman, a former top Justice Department official and now a law professor, wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “Under Justice Department prosecution standards, just the publicly available evidence is sufficient to bring an indictment against Trump for the federal crime of obstruction or impeding an official proceeding – in this case, Congress’ certification of a presidential election.”

Prosecutors in Georgia examining Trump’s efforts to intimidate that state’s election officials into “finding” the votes he needed to defeat Joe Biden immediately asked the FBI to assess the risks prosecutors face after Trump’s threat.  

Litman goes on: “The guideline for federal prosecutors specify that prosecutors ‘should’ generally commence prosecution if two circumstances exist: first, the person’s conduct constitutes a federal offense – i.e. the prosecutor has determined that the defendant really is guilty and the prosecution is righteous – and second, the admissible evidence will ‘probably be sufficient’ to convict.”

We also know from extensive reporting, including on the record interviews, that Trump was actively involved in not only the events of January 6, but efforts before the Capitol attack to change the outcome of the election. And that word “change” is important because Trump and his defenders have peddled the fiction that he was just buying time to “investigate” alleged election irregularities. The trouble for Trump is there are no irregularities. Sixty unsuccessful lawsuits drive that point home conclusively.

Still, he sought to “change” the outcome. Trump tried to find a rationale to seize voting machines in several states, even going so far as to flirt with the idea of using the U.S. military to do the deed. He failed only because subordinates refused to follow through.

Former attorney general William Barr, long-time a Trump enabler, acknowledged to ABC’s Jonathan Karl that he eventually reached even his breaking point and quit. “My attitude was:” Barr told Karl for his book Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show. “It was put-up or shut-up time. If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it. But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bullshit.”

Former attorney general William Barr calls Trump allegations of election fraud “bullshit”

Meanwhile, New York state officials are continuing a separate and long-running investigation into the Trump family’s business activities. Who knows what else is yet to come?

Brace yourself.

When the indictments come, when the charges are filed, the former president has already indicated what he will do. He’ll rally his troops, including the various militia groups that provided the organizational and physical muscle for January 6. He will insist that he is above any accountability, that the American judicial process is “rigged” against him and that his most armed, angry and grievance driven supporters – his brown shirts – must save the country.

The most committed Trumpists are clearly aware of what is unfolding. It is hardly a secret. The vast majority of Americans however, content to feast on insignificance like Tom Brady’s retirement or the host of Jeopardy, seem unaware of the danger ahead. The big lies about the election, Trump’s bluster and an endless pandemic have numbed us and exhausted us. Jeffrey Engel, the director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, says it well.

“I actually think the American public is dramatically underplaying how significant and dangerous this is,” Engel told the New York Times recently, “because we cannot process the basic truth of what we are learning about President Trump’s efforts – which is we’ve never had a president before who fundamentally placed his own personal interests above the nation’s.”

Trump has secured absolutely the leadership of the Republican Party. His most violent prone true believers are locked and loaded. The Vichy-like enablers who have refused at every step to denounce and isolate the cancer at the heart of their party won’t save us. They have had many, many chances. They lack the courage to defend democracy, let alone the rule of law.

Brace yourself.

The real Constitutional crisis is coming. To look on the bright side we will never before have seen what is going to happen. It is wholly unique. The dark side of this uniqueness is more difficult to comprehend.

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Additional Reading:

You may find these items of interest…

Liz Cheney, the GOP’s Unshakeable Gadfly

Fellow Wyoming Republicans have declared she is out of their party and the national party has moved to censure her, but the not-so-gentlewoman from the Cowboy State continues to display real grit and enormous political courage. Books will be written about Ms. Cheney. Whatever you think of her policy positions, she is a profile in courage.

From Washington Monthly: “Like many gadflies who have come before her, Cheney has a knack for calling out the failings of her peers. At times, she seems to relish her newfound role. In a recent interview, she said of [Republican leader Kevin] McCarthy, ‘I wish that he were a brave and honorable man.'”

Read the full piece:


The Marine Who Turned Against U.S. Empire

A good deal of buzz about Jonathan Katz’s new book – Gangsters of Capitalism – a biography, and more, of a mostly forgotten Marine Corps general with the near perfect name – Smedley Butler.

The new book by Jonathan M. Katz

Gangsters of Capitalism is not only a biography of Butler. The long-dead Marine also serves as Katz’s Virgil, leading him on a journey around the world and through the inferno of empire’s afterlife. Katz himself learned about Butler as a reporter for the Associated Press in Haiti. Based in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince during the earthquake in 2010, Katz reported on the disaster, which killed at least 100,000 people; he escaped from the house that served as the AP bureau not long before it collapsed. Haiti’s poverty—the starkest in the hemisphere—unquestionably compounded the natural disaster of the earthquake into a human tragedy. (Chile had a higher magnitude quake the same year, and the deaths numbered in the hundreds.)”

Good read here:


The Texas Electric Grid Failure Was a Warm-up

By the time you read this Texas may be in the middle of another failure of its electric grid. A severe winter storm is forecast for the state. When that happened last year, Senator Ted Cruz went to Cancun (briefly), while lots

of Texans shivered in the dark. It almost certainly will happen again.

“Nobody yet knew just how widespread the blackouts would become—that they would spread across almost the entire state, leave an unprecedented 11 million Texans freezing in the dark for as long as three days, and result in as many as seven hundred deaths. But neither could the governor, legislators, and regulators who are supposed to oversee the state’s electric grid claim to be surprised. They had been warned repeatedly, by experts and by previous calamities—including a major blackout in 2011—that the grid was uniquely vulnerable to cold weather.”

From Texas Monthly.


Dear Mr Joyce: an essay by Edna O’Brien

I celebrated the 100th anniversary of the publication of Ulysses by the great Irish writer James Joyce by taking down my copy and looking at it. I’ve never gotten far reading it. I’ll keep trying.

Meanwhile, enjoy this essay about Joyce, and maybe sip a cocktail in the old boy’s honor. I’m told his favorite (Michael Collins, too) was brandy and orange liqueur.

“In his youth [Joyce] was suspicious, contemptuous, unaccommodating. He saw his countrymen as being made up of yahoos, adulterous priests and sly deceitful women. He classed it as ‘the venereal condition of the Irish.’ Like the wild geese he had a mind to go elsewhere. He wanted to be continentalised. He liked the vineyards. He had a dream of Paris, and a craze for languages. In literature his heroes were Cardinal Newman and Henrik Ibsen.”

Enjoy. From The Guardian:


Be well. Be generous. All the best and thanks for reading.