GOP

2024 Election, Churchill, GOP, Trump

Loving Putin, Hating the U.S. Military …

Posted on by mjohnson

At this stage of a presidential campaign it can become difficult to keep up with, let alone keep straight the flood of noise and bombast dominating the television screen or interrupting your dinner with one final desperate plea for – pick one or more – money, a vote, a response to a survey, an attack on a candidate …

I’ve come to value the days when presidential candidates campaigned from their front porches, greeting delegations of visitors and largely ignoring the kind of bat crappery that has become the essence of American political campaigns.

Warren Harding campaigning from his Ohio front porch in 1920

Our campaigns don’t really tell us much about the candidates, but they sure tell us a lot about the country, which is why it’s important to find the few nuggets of enlightenment in our political sewage treatment plant of nonsense.

Two bits of current enlightenment seem important with both casting light on fellow Americans who seem willing to embrace, for the third time, the fake everyman from Queens who promises to be a dictator, but only on his first day back in office.

The first ray of enlightenment involves the former Fox News talking head Tucker Carlson, a trust fund man of the people whose present shtick involved serving as a propaganda vehicle for the Butcher of Kiev, Vladimir Putin. (You may recall that Carlson interviewed the great man a while back, an interview that largely consisted of Putin schooling the Swanson TV dinner heir on the fine points of Russian history – Putin style – since the days of the Czars.)

In every conceivable way the interview was embarrassing, particularly if you understand Carlson’s motive for traveling to Moscow to interview a dictator, which was, of course, to simply kiss up to a dictator. And not just any dictator, but one who has – remarkably – grown in favor with many far-right Americans while trying to wipe Ukraine off the map.

Not incidentally, the Justice Department moved this week to shutdown Russian disinformation schemes again designed to effect the November election.

Wow, it really is the Russia thing – again.

Carlson, a featured speaker at the recent Republican National Convention who helped convince Donald Trump to select J.D. Vance as his running mate, has now doubled down on normalizing historical revision.

On a recent podcast Carlson featured a two-hour interview with “historian” Darryl Cooper – “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States,” Carlson said – who declared Winston Churchill the true “villain” of World War II and preposterously claimed that Adolf Hitler really didn’t seek the most gruesome war in human history.

Winston Churchill WAS NOT the villain of World War II

“He didn’t want to fight,” Cooper said of the man who invaded Poland 85 years ago this month, beginning World War II. For good measure Carlson’s “honest” historian threw in a big dose of Holocaust denial, while the Trump whisperer let him talk and talk and talk.

“Actually, this is pro-Nazi propaganda,” said the conservative truth-teller Liz Cheney, the former congresswoman from Wyoming who was run out of the Republican Party for opposing Trump.

But it is actually worse than mere propaganda. It is calculated Kremlin-inspired disinformation on a vast scale designed to confuse and misrepresent history in the interest of elevating a view that western democracy is at fault in the long twilight struggle against authoritarianism.

Moreover, Carlson is the leading media figure in Trump World, a confidante of the former president, who crackpottery seems to know no boundaries. Carlson speaks and the Trump base responds, no matter the level of offensive BS that tumbles out of his microphone.

Yet, when you consider that the party that once celebrated American exceptionalism is now led by a man who avoided military service, trashes military heroes like the late John McCain, sides with Putin and bases his current campaign on the ridiculous notion that America has failed, it somehow follows that the party’s most prominent media figure is Tucker Carlson, crackpot.

But there is more.

Donald Trump’s gross and grossly incorrect 2015 comments about McCain not deserving hero status because he had been captured should have, in any sane world, ended any thought of him in the White House. That did not happen because party leaders tolerated the McCain slander that only grew, as his Marine general chief of staff confirmed, into calling Americans killed in World War I “suckers and losers” and climaxed with Trump questioning the value of the Medal of Honor.

But since Trump World has no bottom, there is always room to go lower as Trump did with his blatant political stunt at Arlington National Cemetery, a photo op designed to give a draft dodger a platform to criticize his opponent for the pullout of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

Like the authoritarian leader he intends to become, Trump’s campaign ignored laws about not using hollowed Arlington ground for political purposes, and when confronted manhandled a civilian employee of the cemetery attempting to enforce the law. In the process, as the Washington Post detailed, Trump systematically misrepresented his own role in the Afghan departure to the very people who lost loved ones there.

The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg has written extensively about Trump’s attitudes toward those who have served their country. “The record is plain,” Goldberg says. “This is the truth of Donald Trump: He has contempt for men and women who serve their country.”

The military men who served under Trump – Generals John Kelly, Jim Mattis, Mark Milley, among others – confirm his unfitness for office.

So here is a nugget of enlightenment at the dark heart of our politics: Conservatives, up and down the Republican Party, have tolerated and embraced a truly unfit and unAmerican individual as their candidate. And most of them will easily shrug off the Carlson holocaust denial, the Hitler revisionism and the Arlington stunt for reasons that I cannot adequately explain.

We are left with this, again from Jeffrey Goldberg.

“If you could count on anything in America, and especially in Republican politics – if you had a list titled ‘Things Republican Candidates Cannot Do’ – I think ‘insulting war heroes’ would be near the top of that list. Our society venerates combat heroes. Trump very often treats them with open contempt. Just think about how he has repeatedly demeaned wounded veterans, demanding that they be kept out of parades, out of his sight. And yet Republicans have nominated him for president three times. I still cannot adequately explain it.”

There is no explaining such nonsense.

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Additional Reading:

If Republicans Want to Win, They Need Trump to Lose — Big

I have little expectation that a Trump loss, even a big loss, would cause a redirection of the Republican Party, or a return to more traditional conservatism. But in this piece Jonathan Martin of Politico makes the case, as I do believe, that many GOP officeholders are sick and tired of the Trump nonsense and chaos.

They want him gone. They just can’t – or won’t – say it.

As Martin writes: “As they’ve demonstrated for going on a decade now, Republican leaders will repeatedly bow to the preference of their base over their own judgment when it comes to Trump.”

Therefore, no reason to think that is going to change. Read the entire piece.

The Baseball Hall of Fame

I had one of my “bucket list” experiences recently during a day-long visit – I could have stayed longer – at the fabulous baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

What a great, great place.

I was particularly moved by an outstanding exhibit devoted to the great Henry Aaron, a great player and I think an even better person.

Hank Aaron is an all-time great

If you enjoy baseball. Go to the Hall. You won’t be disappointed.

Here’s a story about the dedication of the Aaron statute earlier this year.

“The Hall of Fame wanted the Aaron statue at the entrance because that’s how it’d make the greatest impact. As thousands enter the Hall each year, they’ll first be greeted by Aaron, in his Braves uniform, propping himself with a bat.”

Thanks for reading. Do what you can to impact the coming election. Democracy is on the ballot.

GOP, Idaho Politics, U.S. Senate

A New Right Darling …

Posted on by mjohnson

Steve Symms was a politician ahead of his time. And that is no compliment.

Symms, an Idaho Republican who served in the House of Representatives and the Senate for 20 years, died August 8 at age 86. The former Canyon County fruit farmer was remembered by current Senator James Risch as a “staunch defender of conservative values in Washington, D.C., for the people of Idaho.” Idaho Governor Brad Little, who announced Symms’ death, called him “a true patriot … God bless this fighter for Idaho values.”

There is no question that Symms was a political figure of consequence, and not because of any list of legislative accomplishments — there are none — but because Symms was one of the earliest and most effective practitioners of the so-called “New Right’s” politics of grievance and resentment.

Steve Symms, here surrounded by reporters, was a true darling of the New Right

As effective a retail politician as almost anyone in the state’s history, a back-slapper who was quick with a quip, Symms knew how to work a room and charm voters, while often peddling genuine nonsense — or worse.

Beneath his sunny personality beat the heart of a cultural warrior ready at any moment to flay the liberal enemy. Symms’ defeat of four-term Democratic Senator Frank Church in 1980 marked a decisive turning point in Idaho’s political trajectory as well that of the national Republican Party. In many ways, we are living with the politics that Symms and others on the 1970s New Right ushered in.

Symms was a charter member of a group of young, far-right conservatives who came to Congress in the messy years when Richard Nixon was forced to resign the presidency. In the view of many of these sharp-elbowed conservatives, moderate Gerald Ford, who replaced Nixon, was little more than a RINO (Republican in name only).

When Ford nominated former New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller as vice president in 1974, Symms opposed the appointment. Rockefeller, Symms said, was evidence “of the rapid movement to the left by the Ford administration.” The choice of Rockefeller was “abrogation of liberty,” Symms said, “what we can expect from the mish-mash of unphilosophical ooze that the two-party system has degenerated into.”

You might think the incessant Republican attacks on the Environmental Protection Agency, the IRS or the media are a 21st century phenomenon, but Symms was regularly attacking the same “enemies” 50 years ago.

In 1980, for example, Symms supporters sported bumper stickers reading: “I’m voting for Steve Symms, the Statesman made me do it,” a reference to Idaho’s largest newspaper that had reported extensively – and fairly – on the support Symms received from New Right groups.

It was little noted in Idaho before 1980, but Symms was deeply involved with the founding fathers of the ideological, grievance-obsessed movement that engineered the GOP transformation in the mid-1970s.

“The late Paul Weyrich was the foremost political strategist of the movement,” columnist Stuart Rothenberg has written. “He was joined by people such as Ed Feulner of the Heritage Foundation, Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus, televangelist Jerry Falwell and direct-mail guru Richard Viguerie, all of whom … wanted to steer the country dramatically to the right.”

Symms, along with North Carolina’s Jesse Helms, Indiana’s Dan Quayle and the only member of this group still in the Senate, Iowa’s Chuck Grassley, were darlings of the New Right. Symms attended their trainings, utilized their talking points, sat on their advisory committees and, of course, vacuumed up their campaign money.

You hear echoes of these original New Right warriors in the current assaults on higher education, libraries, climate science and reproductive and voting rights. And that list doesn’t really get to the main feature of the modern GOP – total disdain for basic character and decency.

GOP vice presidential candidate JD Vance was born during Symms’s first Senate term, but the generational difference doesn’t mean they aren’t members of the same ideological family.

The political brilliance of people like Weyrich and Viguerie — and the racist Helms — resided in their understanding of how to appeal to “low information voters,” who are, not incidentally, the largest group of Donald Trump followers. These folks display only passing interest in politics and governing, but are mad as hell about immigrants, the “deep state” and “communists.” The New Right’s originalist strategy was to rile up these infrequent voters with dystopian visions of a country going down the toilet because of guys like Frank Church, who, after 24 years of distinguished service, was accused of being “too liberal for Idaho.”

Richard Viguerie used incendiary direct mail to target low information voters

The National Conservative Political Action Committee — Roger Stone was a founder — saw in Symms a vehicle to remake the national party. NCPAC’s landmark — and grossly unfair — attacks on Democratic incumbents in 1980 seem almost quaint by today’s smashmouth political standards. Yet, the histrionic direct mail, distorted television and big lies worked. And they still work.

The issue mix in Symms’ 1980 race against Church included, of course, opposition to abortion, challenging whether “liberal” New York City deserved financial help from Washington, D.C., undermining the treaty that returned control of the Panama Canal to Panama and promoting the wholly invented Sagebrush Rebellion, an issue that worked particularly well in Idaho with Symms talking constantly about federal government overreach allegedly destroying the state’s economy.

There is, of course, some irony in Idaho’s governor praising Symms’ support of “conservative values,” not including apparently Symms peddling the entirely fabricated but widely disseminated story that Kitty Dukakis, the wife of the 1988 Democratic presidential candidate, Michael Dukakis, had once burned an American flag.

And missing from most Symms obituaries was any reference to why he left the Senate in 1993 after two terms at age 54.

This 1991 Twin Falls Times-News editorial helped end a senate career

“He duped her, then he dumped her,” editorialized the Twin Falls Times-News after it broke the story in 1991 about Symms campaigning with his wife, Fran, to get reelected in 1986 and then, after being romantically linked to a staff member, filing for divorce.

That interview with the Times-News in June 1991 was the only one Fran Symms gave regarding the divorce and the rumors of her husband’s affair.

“Steve Symms is under fire, not for the divorce, but for being two-faced,” wrote Bill Hall of the Lewiston Tribune. “He has cynically used, not only his wife, but the people of Idaho to whom he has also been legally linked for two decades. They should copy their remedy from him: Divorce him.”

The senator announced his retirement two months later.

This much of Governor Little’s tribute was correct: The Symms who trafficked in smears, was concerned about Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s appointment because of her views on abortion and said that when all else fails, American justice should come from “the cartridge box,” exemplified what surely have become Idaho’s political values.

Steve Symms was a man before his time.

—–0—–

By the way …

I wrote about Symms and the New Right’s influence on American politics in my book Tuesday Night Massacre: Four Senate Elections and the Radicalization of the Republican Party. The University of Oklahoma Press published the book in 2021.

Additional Reading:

A few other items I found of interest …

Lessons in Leadership from Howard Baker

Remembering a different kind of Republican.

“Although Baker is best remembered as one of the heroes in the Watergate drama, his most remarkable work came when Jimmy Carter decided to negotiate two treaties by which the Panama Canal would be returned to Panama. Five presidents before Carter, starting with Eisenhower, had recognized the damage that anger about American control of the Canal was doing to America’s relationship with Panama and Latin America but chose to do nothing about it. With tensions rising in Panama, Carter decided it was imperative to act. Many years later, Baker would remember his reaction to Carter’s call in August 1977 asking for his support. ‘I wished he hadn’t asked,’ Baker said. ‘It was an unwelcome challenge.’ He wondered then: ‘This has been kicking around for years. Why now, and why me?'”

A very nice piece from the Washington Monthly.

Trump’s visit to Montana demonstrates he’s all bluster and no policy

My friend Darrell Ehrlick writes about Donald Trump’s recent visit to Montana and concludes it’s a fool’s errand to try to fact check the former president. As Darrell writes:

“We shouldn’t inform people of when Trump misstates or gives the wrong information: That happens so often that when fact-checkers report them, they hardly have any time to register before the next fact-free statement is made.

“Instead, fact-checkers and journalists may want to consider only reporting what Trump said that is tethered to verifiable facts.”

Good idea. Here’s the full piece.

How to Start a Professional Sports Team, Win Games, and Save the Town

I’m a San Francisco Giants fan. But I have always liked the team across the bay in Oakland, and it is a sad, sad fact that the A’s are going – apparently and eventually – to Las Vegas.

This is awful news for a loyal fan base and for an entire city, but the actions of one rapacious owner, John Fisher, has stimulated something in Oakland. Great story about two guys, Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel, and their perfectly crazy and wonderful idea.

Paul and Bryan are in the middle

“What Fisher sought to dispossess Oakland of, in Paul’s mind, was far more than just a business or even a beloved team, but a cornerstone of the East Bay’s self-conception, and its importance to Oakland felt well-evidenced by the reverse boycott. The boycott had been designed to prove that Oakland remained a vociferous sports town deserving of teams that loved it back. Paul left convinced and inspired. He texted Bryan, who was in L.A. (Bryan, a member of the WGA, was on strike.) “I have a crazy idea,” Paul wrote. “I like crazy ideas,” Bryan replied.

Read the whole thing.

See you again soon. Many thanks for reading. All the best.

2024 Election, GOP, Trump

The Appeal of Our Authoritarian …

Posted on by mjohnson

(NOTE: This column was filed before a New York City jury on Thursday returned guilty verdicts on 34 felony charges against Donald Trump.)

—–

Well, it isn’t as though we haven’t been warned.

Some of us, believing that common sense — even common decency — would ultimately prevail, continue to expect the best in the face of the worst. The good old USA has been through a whole lot, they say, and we’ll get through this.

Others, believing their political opponents are always wrong and seething with anger at the changing faces of their country, talk of “derangement syndrome.” They are willing to pass off former President Donald Trump’s vulgar threats to judges, insults to women, “Muslim bans,” “Mexican rapists” and unhinged suggestions that a gulp of bleach could end a deadly pandemic. His boast that a third term, the Constitution notwithstanding, is part of his plan doesn’t faze them.

Our felon-in-chief …

Still others believe our courts will enforce the rule of law against our authoritarian and his lawless acolytes, even as he stood outside his courtroom mouthing the endless lies of a lifelong con man who promises to pardon the men and women convicted of mounting an insurrection to overturn an election he lost. He knows democracy works on the honor system and he has none.

Some contend the old man in the White House is the problem. President Joe Biden is too feeble, too liberal, a destroyer of some idealized vision of America that never was and never will be. It’s all about the economy, they say. But after a prolonged pandemic that our authoritarian mishandled with deadly consequences, the U.S. economy is doing quite well.

As The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell notes: “In reality, the U.S. economy has been growing consistently for nearly two years, even after accounting for inflation. By virtually every benchmark, in fact, we’re exceeding growth expectations. The U.S. economy has been outperforming other advanced economies. We’re also doing better than pre-pandemic forecasts had situated us by now, both in terms of gross domestic product and the number of jobs out there. This generally isn’t true elsewhere in the world.”

But those are facts, not the hard liquor of grievance that powers authoritarian politics.

It’s not as though Trump hasn’t told us he plans to be a dictator — only for a day he confidently proclaims — and such talk is easy for some to dismiss, but only if you don’t listen to the detailed plans for his second term. He’s really not going to destroy the nonpartisan civil service, is he? Those mass deportations and internment camps are just campaign season talk, aren’t they? Withdrawal from NATO: Can he do that? Wholesale pardons? Surely not.

Sure he provides a platform for white nationalist racism and posts a video saying all liberals will die when he’s back in power, but that’s just the way he talks, right? Claims of total immunity? Not to worry. The courts won’t let anything really, really bad happen, will they?

He talks of “human scum” and tells supporters he will deport all the pro-Palestinian protesters while courting Wall Street and Big Oil with promises of more tax cuts and more warming of the climate. But he was good for business, wasn’t he? At least his tax cuts worked for the people who frequent his golf courses.

Trump has outsourced his plans for another term, such as they are, to the Heritage Foundation, which has produced “Project 2025,” an ultra-right-wing manifesto that proposes to be the playbook for an authoritarian American state: Eliminate public education, white Christian Nationalism, further restrict abortion, deport millions and institute a loyalty test for anyone in the federal government. The “project” is our “Mein Kampf” for the 21st century.

Of course, it’s not like he has any real plan to improve anything. But that’s not the point, is it? He makes some of us feel really good by saying outrageous things and giving a middle finger to all the old complications of democracy. He speaks for me, some say, when he speaks of hatred and revenge and attacks a “crooked” legal system that strangely is best exemplified by his Supreme Court, which reeks of the entitlement, arrogance and elitism that his supporters believe he’ll eviscerate.

After promising to destroy 50 years of established law concerning abortion, he now has no straight answer about whether he’d support a national ban or how he feels about contraception. Testimony at his recent trial confirmed he didn’t wear a condom with the porn star, so perhaps we have his views on the subject.

As Marianne Levine wrote in The Washington Post: “In under 48 hours this week, Donald Trump’s social media account promoted a video featuring a term frequently associated with Nazi Germany and later removed it. He suggested he was open to states restricting access to contraceptives and then walked that back. He falsely accused President Biden of being ‘locked & loaded’ to ‘take me out.’ And in between, he was in court as his legal team rested its case in his ongoing criminal trial.”

It isn’t as though we haven’t been warned.

“His campaign speeches these days ring with Nazi rhetoric,” The Guardian’s Margaret Sullivan wrote this week, “as he claims that immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood of our country’ and that his political opponents are ‘vermin.’ ”

Trump recently posted a video calling for a “unified Reich.” This language isn’t any longer a mere dog whistle, it is a blaring claxon. And it is working with many of his followers who willingly embrace his brand of American fascism.

George Orwell wrote knowingly of the appeal and danger of authoritarians

To understand the appeal of what has happened one must understand the history of authoritarian movements, as the great British journalist and writer George Orwell understood them in the 1930s and later.

In his famous 1940 review of Adolf Hitler’s manifesto — the aforementioned “Mein Kampf” — Orwell wrote: “The initial, personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is here. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon.”

The appeal of the authoritarian is visceral and very personal, Orwell said, for “Hitler could not have succeeded against his many rivals if it had not been for the attraction of his own personality, which one can feel even in the clumsy writing of ‘Mein Kampf,’ and which is no doubt overwhelming when one hears his speeches. … The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. One feels it again when one sees his photographs … a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way, it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that that is how Hitler sees himself.”

Our authoritarian has, of course, repeatedly compared himself to Jesus.

It isn’t as though we haven’t been warned.

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

A few other items worthy of your time …

How Paul Manafort Tried to Make Money With a Project Supposedly Tied to the Chinese Regime

I grant you that it is difficult to keep track of all the con men, grifters, low lifes and convicted felons in Trump World. But never forget Paul Manafort, among the sleaziest bottom feeders in American political history.

Manafort before he was pardoned by Trump

Manafort, convicted of assorted felony crimes during the Trump Administration, was ultimately pardoned by Trump largely, one assumes, for keeping his mouth shut concerning the role he played in handling Trump campaign material, including polling information, over to a known Russian agent. Someday we may know the full story. Today we know Manafort is back in Trump World, as greasy as ever. David Corn has a summary.

“A more recent Manafort business venture—unknown to the public—raises further questions about him and his attempt to return to the Trump fold. According to documents obtained by Mother Jones—including a memo written by Manafort—two years ago, Manafort was trying to orchestrate a $250 million deal to create a streaming service in China in a project that he asserted was blessed by the Chinese government and that was partnering with a Chinese telecommunications firm sanctioned by the US government.”

Read the full story.  

Is this the point where we recall that Trump World spends almost as much time fixated on China as it does the southern border, yet a guy reported to be helping Trump at this summer’s GOP convention is trying to do big dollar deals in … China?

Trump supporters call for riots and violent retribution after verdict

While most of us continue to live our lives with some belief that all the wild talk is just that – wild talk. I submit this is a mistake. This stuff is increasingly serious, increasingly ugly and increasingly dangerous.

“After Trump became the first U.S. president to be convicted of a crime, his supporters responded with dozens of violent online posts, according to a Reuters review of comments on three Trump-aligned websites: the former president’s own Truth Social platform, Patriots.Win and the Gateway Pundit.”

And this: “Jacob Ware, a co-author of the book ‘God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America,” said the violent language used by Trump’s followers was testament to the former president’s ‘ironclad ability to mobilize more extreme supporters to action, both at the ballot box and through violence.'”

The story from Reuters. It not like we haven’t been warned.

Mansfield and Dirksen

I was interviewed for another podcast this week, this time for the New Books Network.

Here is a link.

And speaking of podcasts …

I’ve really been enjoying the 99% Invisible podcast episodes are the remarkable Robert Caro book The Power Broker.

The series host Roman Mars is joined by the incredibly funny and articulate writer and comedian Elliott Kalan to dissect the massive book about New Yorker Robert Moses, the man who made or remade New York City from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Caro published The Power Broker in 1974 and won the Pulitzer Prize for his examination of how Moses, with the innocuous sounding title of parks commissioner, amassed vast political power and used it, at times, viciously, to create the Big Apple.

The series is extraordinarily interesting. Here’s a link to the website.

Thanks for reading. Take this political moment very seriously. All the best.

2024 Election, GOP, Trump, Ukraine

RIP: The Party of the Gipper …

Posted on by mjohnson

It never occurred to me, at least before Donald Trump rode down his escalator, that the Republican Party would, all in my lifetime, embrace the sunny optimism and national security mantra of the actor-cum-President Ronald Reagan and then turn on a dime and completely bury Reagan and the GOP he built.

Authoritarian cults are mighty powerful draws, apparently.

In a new book, Grand Old Unraveling: The Republican Party, Donald Trump, and the Rise of Authoritarianism, John Kenneth White, a professor of politics at Catholic University, attempts to explain what has happened to the party of the Gipper. His brutal assessment is made all the more damning by its stark truth.

An important new book from the University Press of Kansas

“After consecutive losses in 2018, 2020, and 2022, Republicans should be entering a period of reflection and reconciliation,” White writes. “But Donald Trump will not permit either to occur. Instead of redefining conservativism for a twenty-first century audience composed of multicultural and multiradical voters, Republicans are fixated on stoking their angry base of older white Baby Boomers who once defined the nation’s past but not its future. Instead of reckoning with the Trump presidency and the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Republicans are determined to erase the latter from their collective memories. Rather than rejecting election deniers, Republicans elevated them to positions of power.”

There is something within the DNA of the Republican Party, as White concludes after detailing the history both before and since Reagan, “that makes it prone to conspiracy theories, election deniers, and top down presidential leadership that is fraught with danger.”

Fraught with danger, indeed, particularly given the widespread willingness of Trump backers and their elected representatives to ignore the mountain of damaging facts about the former president — what one writer calls Trump’s “kaleidoscopic corruption” — while embracing the nonsense that stokes that angry baby boomer base.

New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu is the latest A-list example to go full in on the nonsense. Sununu, son of former conservative governor and one-time White House Chief of Staff John Sununu, appeared recently on ABC’s Sunday morning TV show.

As interviewer George Stephanopoulos questioned the once harsh Trump critic, he finally put to Sununu the only question that really matters for every Republican officeholder, not to mention voter.

“So just to sum up,” Stephanopoulos said to Sununu, “you would support (Trump) for president even if he is convicted in classified documents. You would support him for president even though you believe he contributed to an insurrection. You would support him for president even though you believe he’s lying about the last election. You would support him for president even if he’s convicted in the Manhattan case. I just want to say, the answer to that is yes, correct?”

Sununu’s response: “Yes, me and 51% of America.”

Setting aside the fact that Trump has never polled higher than 48% in the average of all national polls, in other words set aside that the governor is lying about Trump’s level of support, Sununu says nothing matters other than electing a Republican president. Nothing matters: not the lies, not the law, not the Trump promise of retribution for his opponents. Nothing matters but political power.

It’s also worth remembering that Sununu, as Peter Wehner noted in The Atlantic, has in the recent past — while trying to help Nikki Haley in GOP primaries — referred to Trump as a “loser,” an “asshole” and “not a real Republican.” Sununu, before debasing himself on ABC, said the country needs to move past the Trump’s “nonsense and drama.” Speaking of the legal morass Trump faces, Sununu said last year, “This is serious. If even half of this stuff is true, he’s in real trouble.”

The real trouble here is the obscene obsequiousness of politicians such as Sununu, the enablers and apologist for what passes for a political party led by the most flawed man to ever sit in the Oval Office.

Pick an issue — book bans, diminishing education, abandoning international leadership — the party of Reagan is dead, buried like Trump’s ex-wife on the back nine of a golf course where the GOP nominee goes to cheat.

Reagan spins in his grave as Trump demands congressional Republicans refuse critical military aid to Ukraine, the same country he attempted to coerce into manufacturing political dirt on President Joe Biden, a brazenly un-American scheme that earned Trump his first impeachment.

The country Reagan deemed “an evil empire” is now run by a truly evil man arguably worse than any Russian leader since Joseph Stalin. Yet many in the GOP embrace Vladimir Putin, mouth his propaganda and take his money. The white Christian nationalists who now define the party’s policy agenda, such as it is, are beholden not to a Reagan or a George W. Bush or even a Dwight Eisenhower philosophy. Instead they praise Hungary’s strongman, Viktor Orbán, and the new right-wing crackpot, Javier Milei, who is running Argentina over a cliff.

A majority of House Republicans opposed additional aid to Ukraine, effectively siding with Putin

The party that fought ten thousand elections with a call to outlaw abortion finally became the dog that caught the car and from Arizona to Idaho to Alabama, the fruits of that “victory,” delivered by an ideologically politicized U.S. Supreme Court, has created a maternal health crisis.

Arizona’s current total ban abortion law dates to the Civil War era, before Arizona was a state and long before women could vote, and Republicans there have refused to entertain any change.

In Idaho, many OB/GYN docs have left for fear the state’s extraordinary restrictions on abortion not only imperil the lives of patients with pregnancy complications but hold a real risk of sending doctors to jail. The overwhelmingly Republican Legislature in Idaho recently adjourned after ignoring any fix that might have slowed the physician exodus, while protecting women’s health.

Meantime, stoking fear and grievance with the Trumpian base, governors from Republican states spend millions of their taxpayer’s dollars to send state police and National Guard personnel to the southern border in what is nothing more than a performative act made for cable television.

Republicans had a chance earlier this year with bipartisan border security legislation to do something that would actually address border concerns, but at Trump’s behest they opted for performance over substance.

This is not a serious political party, which makes it truly dangerous. Real political parties have real policy proposals based, of course, on an ideology, but also rooted in facts and realism. You want to “fix the border”? Tell us how you would do it. You support Ukraine? Show us the plan.

Real political parties don’t let people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz or George Santos assume outsized influence. Real political parties consign the quarrelsome clowns to the deepest back bench and ignore them. Republicans now elect them speaker of the House. Or run them for president.

Near the end of his book, White quotes conservative jurist Michael Luttig: “The Republican Party has made its decision that the war against America’s Democracy and the Rule of Law it instigated on January 6 will go on, prosecuted to its catastrophic end.”

That is where the one-time party of Reagan stands in the early 21st century. It’s a scandal. It’s dangerous. Only voters can fix it.

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

A few other newsy items worthy of your attention …

The potential boondoggle of Greater Idaho

Make no mistake there are reasons for rural Americans to feel abandoned and unheard on a host of important issues. But also make no mistake their elected leaders, generally speaking, have zero real answers for the tough issues rural America faces. So, the default is to stoke the grievance. Case in point the pointless effort to create “a Greater Idaho.”

Rebecca Tallent pokes holes all over the idea in this piece from The Idaho Capital Sun.

“Greater Idaho’s organizers claim there will be a $170 million per year benefit to Idaho, but without major industry and declining existing industries, how does this make sense?

“This means current revenue dollars would need to be stretched even more thinly to support roads, provide health and human services, license certain professions, education for both K-12 and higher education, land management, regulating alcohol and other products, and many other aspects of government. Idaho’s Legislature currently has trouble doing this for the state’s existing land mass, what if Idaho almost doubled its size?”

As Tallent points out in just one example there is a university and three community colleges in eastern Oregon. Idaho can hardly afford to support its existing higher education system. How could it absorb even more institutions?

Link here:

The Greatest Book a Politician Ever Wrote

Bob Graham, the former Florida governor and senator, died recently at 87, still perhaps the most popular politician the state has ever produced. Michael Grunwald has a fond remembrance of a good leader, the fascinating book he wrote about working in dozens of different jobs and how Graham practiced a better kind of politics.

The late Florida governor and senator in one of his many, many jobs

“You don’t have to be fascinated by people to be effective in the political arena, but it helps” Grunwald writes. “I happen to believe, and I’m not alone, that Al Gore could have won Florida and changed history in 2000 if he had chosen Graham as his running mate. I also believe, and on this I may be alone, that if Graham hadn’t suffered some heart issues in 2003, he might have beaten John Kerry for the Democratic nomination and ousted George W. Bush. He was a centrist swing-state Intelligence Committee chair who opposed the war in Iraq on the grounds that it was crippling the war on terror.”

Worth your time.

Five years after the Mueller report into Russian meddling in the 2016 US election on behalf of Trump: 4 essential reads

You still see a lot of nonsense related to Russian interference in the 2016 election, most recently from a disgruntled NPR editor who blasted his (former) employer for various (mostly untrue) allegations that the network hyped the Russian story. You know who, of course, still refers to the entire episode as “a hoax,” but it wasn’t a hoax.

I rely on The Conversation, a great news site that features deeply sourced and thoughtful coverage from genuine experts – historians, economists, social scientists, etc. – on all kinds of issues. I was struck by this recent piece.

“Over the past five years, the Conversation U.S. has published the work of several scholars who followed the Mueller investigation and what it revealed about Trump. Here, we spotlight four examples of these scholars’ work.”

Read it for yourself.

And don’t forget the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian election interference. As Roll Call reported in 2020:

“The Senate Intelligence Committee … released the final report on its investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, finding numerous contacts between the Trump campaign and Moscow posed a ‘grave’ counterintelligence threat.

“’We found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling,’ Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., acting chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement, directly refuting President Donald Trump’s repeated assertions that Russian interference was a ‘hoax’ perpetrated by Democrats.”

Here’s a link to the key findings of that Senate report that seems to have all but disappeared from our collective memory. A key finding, never fully fleshed out, was that Paul Manafort, a Trump campaign aide in 2016 and a lobbyist for Russian friendly Ukrainians – Manafort is reportedly back helping Trump prepare for the Republican convention – was in regular contact with known Russian agents during the 2016 campaign and “shared sensitive internal polling data or Campaign strategy” with his contacts.

Manafort, you may recall, was convicted of bank and tax fraud (he had a secret foreign bank account) and sentenced to more than seven years in prison. Trump pardoned Manafort after the 2020 election.

Which kind of brings us full circle, doesn’t it.

Marco Rubio has become one of the Trumpiest defenders of the man whose campaign, at a minimum, maintained numerous contacts with Russian agents in 2016 – Rubio actually led the investigation into this mess – and that same man is now on trial for another attempt to influence the 2016 election, a sleazy scheme to pay off a porn star to bury a sex scandal that might well have ended his campaign.

Rest in Peace … the Gipper.

Thanks for reading. All the best.

2024 Election, GOP

Careers of Ridicule and Dread …

Posted on by mjohnson

One of the truly astounding features of the last half-dozen years of American politics is how willingly so many Republican politicians have debased themselves in service to the man who now owns the GOP lock, stock and criminal liability.

The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg wrote a fascinating — and ultimately deeply disturbing — piece this week about this phenomenon by focusing on Sen. Rob Portman, a generally well respected, often serious and very conservative politician from Ohio who retired at the close of 2022.

Goldberg interviewed Portman in front of a live audience not quite two years ago on the same day a Trump White House aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, testified before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol. You may recall — or, if you’re inclined, you may have dismissed — Hutchison’s chilling testimony.

Cassidy Hutchinson testifies before the January 6 committee in 2022

As a young aide to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, Hutchinson, displaying remarkable courage and calm, told the House committee of former President Donald Trump watching impassively as the mob, attacking the Capitol, chanted “Hang Mike Pence.” She testified that Trump thought his vice president deserved that fate because Pence refused to violate the Constitution in order to keep Trump in office even though he had lost both the popular vote and the Electoral College.

Did Portman, hearing such first-hand testimony, regret that he had voted to acquit Trump in his second impeachment trial in 2021, Goldberg wanted to know? That trial was, of course, a turning point in American history where the Republican Party might have, with impeccable and urgent reason, banned an insurrectionist from ever holding office again.

Portman never really answered Goldberg’s question but instead became indignant that a journalist had the audacity to ask such a question.

Former GOP Senator Rob Portman who blamed Trump for January 6, but voted against his impeachment

“It would be unfair to blame Portman disproportionately for the devastating reality that Donald Trump, who is currently free on bail but could be a convicted felon by November, is once again a candidate for president,” Goldberg wrote. “The Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, denounced Trump for his actions on January 6, and yet still voted to acquit him. Trump’s continued political viability is as much McConnell’s fault as anyone’s.”

But here’s the thing: Portman knew he was debasing himself in front of the reality of Trump’s lies and incitement of violence, yet he debased himself willingly. Portman, who worked in the George H.W. Bush White House, knows about the value of character in politics, but he chose to ignore Trump’s lack of character.

At one level, this degree to suspension of belief is a great case study in human psychology. How does a person, experienced and smart, capable of critical thinking and understanding basic right and wrong, decide to ignore what looms right in front of him?

Portman, like Idaho Sen. Mike Crapo and several others, withdrew his endorsement of Trump after the “Access Hollywood” tape became public in 2016 — Trump boasted of grabbing women by the genitals, a certain “high” point in American political history — but Portman (and Crapo) eventually came back around and willingly supported a sexual abuser for president.

Nothing, it seems, absolutely nothing is beyond the pale when it comes to Republican officeholders debasing themselves in order to stay, even temporarily, on the right side of Trump.

Nothing. Not the praise of dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, not the unprecedented indictments, not the former president’s outrageous attacks on judges, prosecutors and their families, not the increasingly blatant incitement of violence against his opponents, not the promise to pardon those convicted for assaulting police officers on January 6, not the civil conviction for sexual assault, not the family takeover of the Republican National Committee in order to pay his legal bills — nothing, absolutely nothing constitutes a red line for the Debasement Caucus.

So what is to be said about timid men like Crapo, Portman and so many others? Many, like career politician Crapo, are clinging to power so they dare not follow normal political instincts and abandon their authoritarian leader. Normal would be, of course, to distance oneself from a many-time-indicted, violence-spouting insurrectionist.

Other Republicans hide behind the fiction that somehow President Joe Biden presents a greater danger to the country than a man attacking judges and threatening to set free criminals who assault cops, a greater danger than a man who makes excuses for Putin and threatens to destroy a finally recovering U.S. economy by imposing sweeping tariffs that really will hit every American pocketbook.

The hyperpartisan nonsense that a steady, experienced political veteran is a greater danger to Americans than a twice-impeached grifter who will soon be the first former president to ever face a criminal trial is routinely spouted by Republicans like Idaho Senator James Risch and South Dakota Senator John Thune. But this line of argument is so blatantly flimsy as to further debase those who peddle it.

Republicans are obviously entitled to their policy differences with Biden. But to consider him a greater threat than Trump is to inhabit a la-la land of partisan fantasy.

Others who stand with Trump in the face of a mountain of evidence as to his venality are surely just afraid — afraid — of having the MAGA mob unleashed on them or their families. It’s a logical fear. But fear that doing the right thing will be uncomfortable or career-ending is simple cowardice. But when you have no red line, or the line continually moves, cowardice and the acquiesces that comes with it becomes a way of life.

Meanwhile, some Wall Street CEOs who thought Trump was done after January 6 and somehow found the courage then to distance themselves are back in the fold and writing big checks to pay his lawyers and fuel his campaign. There is no red line when it comes to the wealthiest among us putting their fortunes ahead of the country’s democracy.

All this is reminiscent of the death stages of Weimar Germany when, as recounted in Eric Vuillard’s brilliant book, The Order of the Day, 24 of Germany’s top corporate chieftains assembled in Berlin in February 1933 to bless and finance the election of a man they all disdained, but believed would be useful to them, their futures and fortunes.

The man who won that election was a sociopath, a virulent racist and the instigator of a failed coup. But he promised a return to order and stability and to conduct a war against democratic institutions. He would Make Germany Great Again, and then would destroy it.

“We never fall twice into the same abyss,” Vuillard wrote of these enablers of another time, “but we always fall the same way, in a mixture of ridicule and dread.”

As The Atlantic’s Goldberg notes, just 10 Republican senators could have reclaimed their party and ended their own nightmare by convicting Trump for his actions on January 6. That they did not will be their legacy — and ours. Theirs indeed are careers of ridicule and dread.

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Additional Reading:

In Vermont, ‘Town Meeting’ is democracy embodied. What can the rest of the country learn from it?

I’ve been living in Oregon for some time now, but I remain a bit amazed that both of the state’s United States senators hold public town hall meeting every year in each of Oregon’s 36 counties. You read that right – every year. Not many speeches, just questions and answers on everything under the sun.

Over his years in the Senate Ron Wyden has, at least count, conducted 1072 of these meetings. I’ve been to many. They are some of the best, most civil examples of person-to-person democracy anywhere.

And then there is Vermont.

“Across the United States, people are disgusted with politics. Many feel powerless and alienated from their representatives at every level — and especially from those in Washington. The tone long ago became nasty, and many feel forced to pick a side and view those on the other side as adversaries.

“But in pockets of New England, democracy is done a bit differently. People can still participate directly and in person. One day each year, townsfolk gather to hash out local issues. They talk, listen, debate, vote. And in places like Elmore, once it’s all over, they sit down together for a potluck lunch.’

Great story from the Associated Press.

To Break the Story, You Must Break the Status Quo

“Part of the job of a great journalist, a great storyteller, is to examine the stories that underlie the story that you’re assigned, maybe to make them visible, and sometimes to break us free of them. Break the story.”

Rebecca Solnit on why journalists need to cause trouble. Link here.

Come on, North Idaho

Journalist Leah Sottile has written extensively about white supremacy groups in the Pacific Northwest. She had an excellent recent Substack post on recent events in Coeur d’Alene, a beautiful place with a history.

“I think we can safely say that things like what happened to those University of Utah basketball players will keep happening until something significant changes in the region. Communities around Idaho have been ‘fighting their asses off,’ as Betsy Gaines Quammen put it to me, when far-right figures try to take over their school boards and county governments. It’s about conservative communities drawing a line in the sand, and rejecting bigotry and hate.”

She’s not wrong.

Thanks for check in. And keep reading – lots of things.

2024 Election, GOP

No longer a ‘vice,’ GOP’s extremism is a norm …

Posted on by mjohnson

When then-Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater took the stage at the Cow Palace in San Francisco in 1964 to accept the Republican nomination for president, he uttered one of the most famous — or infamous — lines in American political history.

“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Goldwater told a raucous GOP convention crowd. “And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

Hearing those words, one shocked observer blurted out that the candidate really was going to “run as Barry Goldwater.”

Barry Goldwater in 1964

Yet Goldwater’s entire career — he served in the Senate for 30 years before and after his presidential campaign — was, at least by the standards of the modern Republican Party, more conventionally conservative than not. His enduring line about extremism was as much a rhetorical device to rally the conservative base — sound familiar? — as an ideological proclamation.

Goldwater needed the radicals in his party in that long-ago campaign. Despite being a devoted anti-communist, opposing the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and preaching low taxes and small government, Goldwater was stepping up to lead a party going even farther right. At the same time, Goldwater was decidedly not a cultural warrior, issuing warnings late in his career against the emerging “New Right,” and particularly the role of conservative preachers.

“I’m frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that, if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A, B, C or D,” Goldwater said in 1981. “I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate.”

Goldwater also warned against packaging cultural issues, including abortion, as core conservative values. Goldwater and his wife supported Planned Parenthood, for example. Goldwater, seeing how far his party had gone in service to radical right, said in the twilight of his career that he would oppose pro-life organizations like the Moral Majority and “fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of ‘conservatism.’ ”

One suspects Goldwater, the old Cold War conservative, would be appalled by the accelerating rightward trajectory of his party in 2024. It’s inconceivable Goldwater would identify with the GOP factions in the House and Senate who willingly aid and abet Vladimir Putin’s aggression against a democratic Ukraine. The cozy winks Donald Trump has repeatedly given Putin and his murderous regime would be something Goldwater would frankly be “sick and tired of.”

Goldwater’s 1964 campaign against Lyndon Johnson was dogged by the reality that the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan openly embraced arguably the most conservative Republican candidate since Calvin Coolidge. Goldwater tried to distance himself from that level of extremism with mixed results, while other Republican leaders bluntly rejected the Birchers.

“Let me emphasize this with as much vigor as I can — that the John Birch Society is NOT a part of the Republican Party,” Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois said in 1965. “It never was and I don’t suppose it even pretends to be.”

Dirksen was, of course, wrong.

Today, the radicals who helped diminish Goldwater’s national appeal largely run things at the GOP grassroots. The husband of the authoritarian chairperson of the Idaho Republican Party, Dorothy Moon, sits on the Birch Society’s national board. And Moon’s own politics are farther out on the political spectrum than Robert Welch, the founder of the Bircher movement, ever hoped to be.

Welch, the candymaker turned far-right radical, as his biographer Edward H. Miller has written, “was not consumed by issues of sex and religion.” But the modern party certainly is consumed by both. In legislature after legislature where Republicans are dominant, mean and punitive legislation aimed at reproductive rights, birth control and the LGBTQ population abound.

Robert Welch, head of the John Birch Society, at the publishing site of the Society’s magazine American Opinion.

This new Republican mainstream, heavily in debt to historical Bircher extremism, doesn’t care to keep Putin, a former intelligence operative for a Communist regime, from overtaking Ukraine. But they are just fine with wacky state legislators proscribing what you read, who you can love and how and whether you can have a family. Gun restrictions are unthinkable but invading your bedroom and your doctor’s office is party policy.

For example, your individual circumstances might dictate that you need in vitro fertilization (IVF) to hope to have a baby. Good luck. The party of extremism is pretty sure you shouldn’t have that option. A new way to measure radicalism is to assess whether your state’s legislators are passing laws that are forcing physicians to leave because they fear prosecution for merely practicing their profession. Idaho has lost 22% of its OB/GYN docs since the state put draconian abortion restrictions in place. More departures seem certain.

As historian Matthew Dallek — he wrote a new history of the Birch Society — said last year: “For decades, conservative leaders tried to consign the Birchers and their intellectual heirs to the fringes of their coalition, but today’s Republicans are awash in Birch ideas. These include rampant conspiracy theories (notably about vaccines and election denialism), a penchant for isolationism, and a belief that federal law enforcement agencies are ‘the enemy of liberty,’ in the words of Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla.”

As Elaina Plott Calabro noted recently in The Atlantic, a dozen years ago the Conservative Political Action Conference refused to allocate space for a Birch Society booth at its annual cattle call. The Bircher brand was just too toxic then. This year, CPAC rolled out the red carpet to the Birchers, happily embracing the latest conspiracy theories and anti-globalist message.

Where Welch campaigned against fluoride in drinking water as a Commie plot, today the cranks oppose measles vaccines and claim a new era of American isolation.

CPAC, where Ronald Reagan once preached the gospel of balanced budgets and a strong national defense, this year welcomed not only new generation Birchers but, as NBC reported, individuals openly espousing racist, anti-Semitic and anti-democratic views, while claiming that the next Jan. 6 will succeed.

“In one of the most viral moments from this year’s conference, conservative personality Jack Posobiec called for the end of democracy and a more explicitly Christian-focused government,” NBC’s Ben Goggin reported. “While Posobiec later said his statements were partly satire, many CPAC attendees embraced his and others’ invocations of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.”

An earlier generation of Republican leaders saw the Birchers and others on the far-, far-right fringe as a genuine danger to the larger conservative movement. They had the courage — and the democratic instincts — to speak out and fight back. Today the fringe is the party.

And if you don’t believe them when they say they are coming for your democracy, you aren’t listening carefully.

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Additional Reading:

Sandra Day O’Connor is an Arizona icon, but too ‘undistinguished’ to warrant statue, GOP says

I saw this, read this and then slapped my forehead.

“[Arizona Rep. Alexander] Kolodin said that O’Connor, who was the first female majority leader in the nation while she served in the Arizona Senate, was a good lawmaker but an awful Supreme Court justice. He specifically took offense with O’Connor’s rulings on abortion and affirmative action.”

Sandra Day O’Connor at the time of her Senate confirmation hearing in 1981

Full story … and, of course, Mr. Kolodin, a lawyer, has been sanctioned by the Arizona state bar for his election denying lawsuits “that made implausible and evidence-free claims of massive election fraud.”

Just the guy you want passing historical judgment on Justice O’Connor.

Wow. Just wow.

How old is too old? Well, American voters have been here before

My friend Darrell Ehrlick edits The Daily Montanan. He has thoughts.

“There are plenty of reasons to be frustrated with the choices for president. And there are plenty of reasons to be frustrated with both Biden and Trump — they both have vulnerabilities. And while seeing Trump on the ballot for a third time in a row is exasperating in the era of very short attention spans, such appearances are hardly rare in the history of American presidential elections.

“And if you look closely at presidential elections, the ‘old man’ argument doesn’t hold up so well.”

Read the entire piece.

Why Anatomy of a Fall should win the best picture Oscar

Best film I’ve seen in a quite a while.

“Praise is due for a film that takes the familiar – unhappy marriages, courtroom procedurals, the ethically compromised thrill of true crime – and produces something that feels new and lingers long in the mind.

A review from The Guardian.

I’ll leave it there for this week. Keep the faith, stoke the fire (of democracy) and vote like your country depended upon it – it does. Thanks.

2024 Election, GOP, Insurrection

Our Failure to Imagine …

Posted on by mjohnson

“In any case this week has probably finished (Trump) as a serious political figure. He has cost Republicans the House, the White House, and now the Senate. Worse, he has betrayed his loyal supporters by lying to them about the election and the ability of Congress and Mr. Pence to overturn it. He has refused to accept the basic bargain of democracy, which is to accept the result, win or lose.”

“It is best for everyone, himself included, if he goes away quietly.”

Wall Street Journal editorial, January 7, 2021

—–

“Trump warns of ‘bedlam,’ declines to rule out violence after court hearing”

Washington Post headline, January 9, 2024

—–

A failure of imagination, the inability to consider the probability attached to something that no American alive has experienced, could portend the death knell of the world’s oldest democracy.

Think about it.

What are Donald Trump and his most fevered supporters – not to mention those officeholding Republicans who lack the moral clarity to oppose his ridiculous, fact-free ignorance and desire to rule like a Mafia don – trying to do?

Quite simply the Trumpians need to rewrite the history of what happened three years ago this month. They have to keep alive the demonstrable big lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. They must challenge the fact that a violent insurrection to prevent the lawful counting of electoral votes for president and threatened the vice president, among others, was merely a peaceful protest of patriots. The more than 700 of our fellow citizens who have pled guilty or been found guilty of participating in the assault on the Capitol aren’t criminals, in this whitewash they are “hostages.”

The front pages on January 7, 2021

Additionally, the MAGA crowd must convince just enough gullible Americans through lies, stupid social media posts, phony news sites and unhinged Trump rallies that the Orange God is a victim simply because the nation’s prosecutors and courts are attempting to get to the bottom of his vast range of criminal behavior.

By the normal rules of American politics, given his boorish personal behavior, his incitement of insurrection, his footsie with dictators, his civil conviction of rape charges, his White House grifting and his obvious disdain for our Constitution Donald Trump would have been consigned to the dust bin of history. It is the man’s great – and only gift – that he can lie his way through all of it.

The rewriting of history is necessary to keep Trump from accountability, all he really cares about, and make sure he can live to corrupt again. We are living in Trump’s Orwellian word of up is down, in is out and a get out of jail free card is his prize. And it will get worse – much worse.

It is a great threat to American democracy – arguably the greatest since the Civil War – that members of his own party let him get away with it and in doing so endorse the clear threat that he has long been. They imagine he can be tamed. It’s a fiction.

Consider one of his enablers, a Republican senator from Oklahoma most Americans have never heard of and when his career has ended will not remember why he mattered. But Senator Markwayne Mullin does matter in one sense. In video of January 6, 2021 that became public this week at a trial of one of the “patriots,” Mullin, then a congressman, can be seen and heard with another Republican lawmaker admonishing the attackers of democracy. “You should be ashamed,” they said.

Mullin was there.

He saw what happened.

He’s a big, burly guy, but he would have been foolish not to fear what would happened if the attackers busted through the door he was standing behind with a Capital police officer.

Despite his personal experience on January 6, Mullin endorsed Trump on February 10, 2023, one of the earliest Trump endorsements by a sitting senator. He made his endorsement knowing what Trump had done. The same goes for the 22 other incumbent GOP senators who have endorsed Trump as of this week, most of whom voted not to convict him of inciting insurrection.

And consider the case of another Republican senator, Jim Risch of Idaho. Risch was in the Capital on January 6. We know, not from him but from the vast video record of that infamous day, that Risch’s own private office in the Capitol was trashed by the Trump “patriots.” He has never said anything about those events – nothing.

When I first filed this piece last Thursday, Risch hadn’t endorsed Trump for another term, but I predicted that he would. And true to form, late on Saturday he made his endorsement, not to an Idaho media outlet but rather where the endorsement would gain maximum inside the Beltway exposure.

In a statement to Politico, released just before the Iowa caucus, Risch said: “I realize President Trump greatly aggravates the left and the national media. I believe that is a small price to pay for righting this ship of state which is so greatly listing. I hope Republicans will join me in nominating President Trump.”

“Aggravated the left and national media?”

The gaslighting is simply astounding. It’s as if the last seven years, January 6, all the indictments and incitement never happened. The rewriting of history in a nutshell.

The hyperpartisan Idahoan couldn’t resist a swipe at Joe Biden for “reversing” Trump’s foreign and domestic policies. Of course, he offered no specifics.

Risch knows what Trump did after the last election and during the course of his chaotic presidency it simply doesn’t make any difference to him.

Perhaps the greatest failure of imagination in American political history occurred when Republican senators refused to hold Trump to account via a conviction during his impeachment trial for the events leading up to and including January 6.

One rationale for refusing to disqualify Trump – Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader, said as much – was that, despite his clear responsibility for the insurrection, Trump could still be held to account by the criminal justice system.

That is happening, which is why Trump is so aggressively and improperly attacking the special counsel and others who have charged him and intend to try him. And, of course, Trump isn’t really attempting to defend himself from the indefensible. He’s frantically trying to delay his days in court. He’s offering up fantasy defenses, including that he can’t be held accountable for anything he did while president.

To make this defense even remotely plausible Trump has argued that the failure to convict him in the Senate was in effect exoneration for January 6. “Interestingly,” as historian Heather Cox Richardson noted recently, “Trump’s argument that he cannot now be charged with crimes makes the Republican senators who voted to acquit him complicit. It’s an acknowledgement of what was clear all along: they could have stopped him at any point, but they repeatedly chose not to. Now he is explicitly suggesting that their behavior shields him from answering to the law.” 

Democracy can and may die in many ways. Most notably when those most directly charged with upholding democratic values succumb to their egos, give in to their need for power and embrace what are clearly anti-democratic actions, including inciting insurrection and violating the Constitution.

It is not original to me to refer to these politicians, men like Mullin and Risch, as “Vichy Republicans.” The reference is to the politicians who went along through ambition, ego, fear or need to cling to any shred of power to accept the abandonment of French democracy in 1940.

They accommodated even when they knew it was wrong, profoundly wrong.

That shameful period, the embrace of a treasonous armistice that forged a corrupt alliance with their country’s Nazi German occupiers, still clouds the French nation and haunts French politics. That’s the thing about expediency – to accept the unacceptable you must come to refuse to imagine what principle and character can accomplish.

When the French nation attempted, after World War II, to reckon with their own “Vichy Republicans,” it was left to the resisters, most notably Charles de Gaulle, to rebuild from the rubble.

But the epitaph of this shameful period was left to a former French premier Léon Blum, who had resisted and was imprisoned by the Nazis. Testifying during the treason trial of President Philippe Petain in 1945, Blum recalled how he saw men – the Vichy traitors to French democracy – “transformed and corrupted in front of [his] eyes, as if they had been dipped into some kind of toxic bath.” 

The modern Republican Party is wallowing in its own toxic bath. We really must work to imagine what comes next.

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

There’s nothing debatable about the Constitutional requirements to become president

Marc Racicot, the former governor of Montana and one-time chair of the Republican National Committee, is a Never Trump conservative. Also a very accomplished lawyer, former attorney general and prosecutor. He has also been ridden out of the Republican Party for his opposition to Donald Trump.

Racicot argued powerfully this week that the 14th amendment to Constitution requires Trump’s disqualification.

“If you’ve taken an oath of office to ‘preserve, protect and defend the Constitution’ and you thereafter betray its provisions by engagement in insurrection or rebellion, the 14th Amendment Disqualification Rule forever bars you from seeking that office again.”

Read the full piece.

Which states will join the new summer meal program for low-income kids? Here’s the list.

It is, to put it mildly, a forehead slapper of a story.

“Republican governors in 15 states are rejecting a new federally funded program to give food assistance to hungry children during the summer months, denying benefits to 8 million children across the country.”

Here’s the detail … followed by the head slap.

By the way, Nebraska’s Governor Jim Pillen, one of the nation’s biggest hog farmers and a pretty well-to-do guy is also rejecting the summer school lunch money. The governor said, “I don’t believe in welfare.”

Tell that to a hungry kid, governor.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s stance against the Vietnam War and how fight for peace in the Middle East

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at an anti-war rally

I highly recommend the daily newsletter The Conversation, thoughtful, well-researched articles on current events and history written by academics for an informed audience. Really good work.

This piece is by Hajar Yazdiha, a scholar at the University of Southern California.

Churchill’s Test of Freedom – Then and Now

A great speech from August 1944 proposed seven tests regarding freedom. It still applies.

From writer and historian Richard Langworth. I recommend signing up for his periodic newsletters.

Thanks, as always. Stay out of the cold. All the best.

2024 Election, GOP, House of Representatives, Idaho, Simpson

The Sadness of a GOP Squish

Posted on by mjohnson

House Republicans this week elected a speaker. Turns out political exhaustion is a big advantage in today’s GOP. A guy who before this week virtually none of us had ever heard of turned out to be the (far, far) right guy at the right time.

After going three weeks with no speaker, while a government shutdown looms (again), the Middle East boils and Ukraine strains to beat back Putin’s totalitarian onslaught on western democracy all the GOP’s many factions united behind Mike Johnson. The new gavel pounder is a Louisiana backbencher whose only real qualification is that he is not Steve Scalise, Jim Jordan or Tom Emmer. For those keeping score at home – those guys all were destined to be speaker until they weren’t.

The new Speaker of the House

Yet, the issue of the week is not that House Republicans elected a genuine political radical from the far, far right as Speaker of the House, but how, as there can no longer be doubt, the entire party has been transformed once and finally into an ideological cesspool of resentments, hatreds, conspiracy, white Christian nationalism and hyper partisan nonsense, or worse.

Exhibit A in the no longer in doubt department is one of the nation’s prime examples of the certain death of real, constructive, character-driven conservatives. Idaho remains as good a case study as any of the vast rot that has polluted conservative politics and turned people who once displayed real character and occasional bipartisanship into craven, quivering opportunists clutching for a grip on power regardless of the cost in their own shame and their country’s democracy.

A week ago, Idaho Republican Mike Simpson, a guy who once stood over Barack Obama’s shoulder in the Oval Office to celebrate a bipartisan Idaho wilderness bill, was pilloried by his party’s state chairwoman for having the audacity – even independence – to vote NO to deny the loathsome Jim Jordan the speaker’s gavel.

Simpson’s “inclination to engage in inside-the-Beltway political games rather than focusing on the pressing business that truly matters to our constituents is disappointing,” fumed Idaho’s top GOP mouthpiece and John Bircher, Dorothy Moon. “Representative Simpson has served in congress for decades. Perhaps all this time away from Idaho has caused him to lose sight of the real work that Americans need on the important issues that impact them and their families.”

In a widely circulated op-ed defending his vote against Jordan, the bomb throwing Ohio election denier, Simpson fell back on the argument that he was merely defending the priorities his Idaho constituents, including workers at the Idaho National Laboratory and the state’s agricultural interests.

“It is abundantly clear the next Speaker of the House could seriously impact Idahoans’ way of life. Fortunately, I know my constituents want me to continue fighting for issues that are important to them. I cannot vote for a Speaker who does not support our state. And I will not take Chairwoman Moon’s ill-advised input when I have been fighting for Idaho longer than she has lived in the state.”

Simpson specifically cited Jordan’s votes against the Department of Energy budget and Simpson’s own Farm Workforce Modernization Act, legislation to give these critical workers a path to citizenship. Trouble is Johnson voted NO on those issues as well.

Simpson withheld support from the former wrestling coach because Jordan has never voted for a farm bill, and while Johnson reluctantly voted for the last major farm bill, he severely criticized the nutrition provisions of the bill, which must be reauthorized before the end of the year.

As Politico reported, Johnson favors deep cuts to the “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the country’s largest program that helps to provide food aid for low-income Americans” and which is a hot button issue that will surely emerge as the dysfunctional Republican majority attempts to pass a new farm bill.

“I cannot – and will not – support a Speaker who has repeatedly taken positions against Idaho’s best interests,” Simpson declared as he tried to hold off criticism of his vote against Jordan. His principled stand had the shelf life of an overripe avocado.

On Wednesday Simpson enthusiastically voted for Johnson, described by one partisan wag as “Jim Jordan in a sports coat,” a guy with a scant experience but with a voting record almost identical to Jordan’s. In the space of five days Simpson went from standing up for his own voting record and policy priorities to voting for a speaker who has never supported the Idaho priorities Simpson found so important before he didn’t.

Moreover, Johnson is every bit as much an election denier and conspiracy theorist as Jordan. He lead the effort to round up congressional support – including that of Idaho’s other House seat warmer, Russ Fulcher – for the whack-a-doodle Texas lawsuit that would have thrown out millions of votes in several states.

Sidney Powell, the Donald Trump lawyer who recently pled guilty to election interference charges in Georgia, was a full throated proponent of the nonsense that a Hugo Chavez inspired Venezuelan plot to rig voting machines cost Trump the election. Fox News spent $787 million to settle a lawsuit over that lie. The man now second in line for the presidency was an “intellectual” architect of this lie.

Johnson has taken fringe positions on LGBTQ rights, opposed same sex marriage and been a champion of a national ban on abortion. Yet, Mike Simpson, the momentarily pragmatic Republican who took flak for his anti-Jordan vote, mentioned none of this in a statement saying he was “proud” to vote for the new speaker.

There is a word for such behavior – gutless.

As the Never Trump conservative Charlie Sykes wrote this week – he might have had Simpson in mind – “For a few halcyon moments, it looked like the center would hold as a modest rump of ‘moderates’ blocked the ludicrous Jim Jordan. But in the end, the squishes did what squishes do; and their defeat was as comprehensive as it was condign.”

It’s Mike Simpson’s screwball critic Dorothy Moon, the election denying crackpot atop the state’s Republican Party, who won this skirmish. The nuts are in full control. No evidence can disabuse them of their fantasies. No farm bill or health concern of a pregnant Idahoan is near important enough for them to back off their fear and loathing for real policy, or heaven forbid actual governing. The gentleman from Idaho had a brief moment, then he again embraced the real power in his party.

Simpson did get one part right – it is abundantly clear that the new speaker will seriously impact the way of life of his constituents.

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Additional Reading:

A few other things I’ve stumbled across that may be of interest …

Former Iowa Sen. Dick Clark dies at 95

Dick Clark’s 1978 re-election campaign features in my book Tuesday Night Massacre, a story about the rise of independent expenditure campaigns and how they have warped our politics.

Clark several a single term in the Senate. It was an impressive six years.

“Clark was elected to the Senate in 1972 after launching a longshot bid against two-term Republican Sen. Jack Miller. With little money for his campaign, Clark opted to walk across Iowa during numerous trips in 1972.”

Read more here.

And here is another story about Dick Clark from the New York Times.

We Don’t Talk About Leonard: The Man Behind the Right’s Supreme Court Supermajority

The news site ProPublica is doing some of the most important investigative reporting in the world right now including this deep dive into the man who masterminded the right wing takeover of the Supreme Court.

Leonard Leo, the man who remade the Supreme Court

“[Leo] advised Trump on the nominations of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Before that, he’d helped pick or confirm the court’s three other conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, John Roberts and Samuel Alito. But the guests who gathered that night under a tent in Leo’s backyard included key players in a less-understood effort, one aimed at transforming the entire judiciary.”

Read the entire story.

Montana Course Teaches Students How to Cut the B.S. Out of B.S.

“An online course, Calling Bullshit examines why it’s so easy to spread misinformation and untruths and why it’s so hard to combat it, while exploring what citizens can do to become better consumers and producers of factual information.

“’The name is definitely provocative, but the class is not about the cussword,’ said course instructor Professor Lee Banville, director of [the University of Montana’s] School of Journalism. ‘It’s about information literacy. People need to be both better sharers of information and better consumers of information.'”

Could I hear an amen, please. Here’s the full story.

Two stories about hotels – I love hotels.

The opening of a luxury hotel in downtown Portland has divided the city

I’m often leery of national reporting on local issues and this Fast Company piece seems a bit overwrought, but it gets at some of what continues to happen in a once great city that struggles to be great again.

“The story of the Ritz-Carlton’s fraught relationship with the local community dates back to tax breaks folded into the Trump administration’s 2017 tax overhaul, creating the Opportunity Zone program. The idea behind Opportunity Zones was to encourage investors to build in impoverished or struggling areas by allowing them to defer and reduce taxes on capital gains that they reinvest into these developments. If they hold the new investment for a decade, they never have to pay taxes on those gains.”

Link to the full piece.

Inside the Taliban’s luxury hotel

And a wild story about Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan.

“The Intercontinental Hotel, Afghanistan’s first luxury hotel, opened in 1969. It was built in a time that feels much further away than the year suggests. Afghanistan was at war for more than 40 years. Rulers came and went, and every one of them was here, at the Intercontinental. Its former luxury has faded, but the Intercontinental has remained a symbol: those who rule Kabul rule Afghanistan, and those who rule Kabul rule the Intercontinental.”

From The Guardian.

One win, 17,000 defeats – life as a Washington General

And I’ll leave you with this fun piece. Every basketball fan knows that the Washington Generals are the team that always loses to the famous Harlem Globetrotters. Except one time the Generals didn’t lose.

Red Klotz, coach of the Generals, is in the suit. The perennial losers are in green.

“In front of a disbelieving audience in the city of Martin, Tennessee, the man known as Red broke one of the most sacred unwritten rules in sport. As player-coach for the Washington Generals, Klotz shot the winning basket against the Harlem Globetrotters.

“‘They looked at us like we’d just killed Santa,’ Klotz would claim, as jeers rang around the university gymnasium.”

Great story from BBC.

Thanks for reading. All the best.

2024 Election, Democracy, GOP, Trump

Trump’s Mafia …

Posted on by mjohnson

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 …

Abortion, GOP, Idaho

You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet …

Posted on by mjohnson

Note: Idaho is as good an example as any in the American West of a state whose politics have been taken over by a new “political elite” – white Christian nationalists – who have found the traditionally very conservative state rather easy pickings for a power grab that is becoming steadily more radical.

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An old slam against Idaho holds that the state is constantly striving to degrade itself in order to become “the Mississippi of the West,” Mississippi often being dead last in national rankings for education spending and attainment, not to mention poverty rates and other widely accepted indicators of social and physical health.

For a while in the 1980s and 1990s – from the governorships of Cecil Andrus, a Democrat, to Dirk Kempthorne, a Republican – there seemed to be a broad consensus that a state defined by white water rivers and giant baked potatoes could, by maintaining a relentless focus on improving educational attainment, growing higher education opportunities, increasing vaccination rates and generally avoiding divisive culture wars, avoid being the “Mississippi of the West.”

Along the way something went off the rails. Way off.

The Idaho welcome mat is looking a bit tattered

When Idaho makes the national news these days it’s for unconstitutionally attempting to place travel restrictions on its residents who seek medical care. Or criminalizing medical care for transgender kids. Or when its radical attorney general grabs headlines after being sued for issuing a crackpot legal opinion – subsequently withdrawn – that held that “Idaho’s abortion ban prohibits medical providers from referring patients out-of-state for abortion services.”

The Idaho AG, like some good ol’ boy in the south in the 1950s, swore to uphold a Constitution he apparently has never read.

Idaho’s ruling elite once held court in the capital city’s corporate board rooms and sipped their cocktails at a private club nestled along the Boise River. The legislative majority took it’s marching orders from the Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry (IACI), the corporate influence organization long dominated by Micron, the economic engine of southwestern Idaho, as well as home grown big businesses like the J.R. Simplot Company and Idaho Power. It was an insular, clubby, very conservative elite, something I never thought I’d lament passing away. Yet for the most part it has, replaced by a new, very different elite.

In fairness the corporate elite back in the 80s and 90s was generally committed to producing a workforce that kept the wheels of business turning. I can’t remember one time when IACI spent one second attacking local librarians, for example. Their lobbyists sought to keep corporate taxes low, and as a result they hardly celebrated the state’s chronically underpaid educators, but at the same time they didn’t seize every opportunity to bash teachers. And they didn’t, overtly at least, attempt to defund public education.

Culture war fixations on drag queens, hatred of the LGBTQ community and abortion bans – a state policy now officially responsible for driving physicians from Idaho – never appeared on the old elite’s lobby card. Such fights are, after all, generally bad for business and hamper recruiting the talent that keeps the bottom line healthy. But those days are gone. Long gone.

One could plausibly argue that Idaho’s new ruling elite now takes its orders from some shadowy white Christian nationalist “deep state” that has found Idaho – Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri and Florida, even Montana – an attractive place to practice what conservatives used to lament as “social engineering.”

Just this week the Missouri House of Representatives voted to eliminate all state funding for public libraries. The “Show Me State” will now be known as the “Books are Bad State.”

The Tennessee House of Representatives expelled two African American legislators, both young men, and declined to act against a third white woman who protested in the House chamber over the legislature’s failure to do anything about gun violence in the Volunteer State. The protest followed a mass murder at a private Christian school in Nashville.

The expulsion of the Black lawmakers – Democrats in an overwhelmingly Republican state – seemed to many unprecedented, even as the expelled members were quickly reinstated by local officials in Nashville and Memphis. The force them out action was unprecedented at least since such Jim Crow-style tactics are normally better disguised, but the retribution was also of a piece with radical rightwing efforts to broadly disenfranchise voices of dissent.

The Nashville assault rifle slaughter wasn’t even the latest mass shooting in our gun happy land. This week’s mass shooting was in Louisville, Kentucky, a place once known for bourbon and baseball bats. The doctor who treated the victims in Louisville stated the obvious: “You just can’t keep doing what we are doing because you just can’t keep seeing these lives lost, you can’t keep seeing all these people with these horrific injuries.”

But we will, of course, keep doing exactly nothing, except marginalize the dissenters.

Idaho’s ruling elite hasn’t expelled dissident legislators – not yet anyway. Stay tuned. The state’s Christian nationalists have determined that younger voters represent a real threat to the political power of Idaho’s new elite, and they made certain to pass legislation this year banning the use of student ID cards as a form of voter identification. It’s merely the beginning.

Twin Falls, Idaho teenagers supporting Black Lives Matter

As the nonpartisan Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University reported recently, registration among 18- and 19-year-old voters in Idaho increased by 66% from 2018 to 2022, the largest jump in the country. Want to bet they are signing up to vote in order to support bans on medical care for transgender kids or outlaw library books?

Picking voters, as Idaho Republicans increasingly do by restricting who can vote in a GOP primary, is a tactic to reinforce the Christian nationalist grip on the state. In this respect, Idaho is the new Mississippi, or the old Mississippi, more Jim Crow than Jim McClure or Phil Batt. Gone is a generation of conservative politicians who believed politics was a game of addition where growing followers was better than marginalizing opponents.

If you want to really see where the white Christian nationalist elite is headed look South. As University of North Carolina historian Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote recently in the New York Times, the region that birthed our original sin continues to define the far right trajectory of places as far off as Idaho or Montana.

“Nothing about the future of this country can be resolved unless it is first resolved here,” Cottom wrote, “not the climate crisis or the border or life expectancy or anything else of national importance, unless you solve it in the South and with the people of the South.”

The trajectory on the far right of American politics is set, as certain, and as southern, as sweet tea and humidity. Florida man might hang on for one more go around, but as Cottom suggests, “The kind of brutality you need to really summon the South’s ghosts needs more than a televangelist like Trump. It needs a true believer. That’s a Southern specialty.”

Deeply conservative Idaho once tried to resist becoming another Mississippi. Now its ruling elite gladly embraces the full deal. And believe me you ain’t seen nothing yet.

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Additional Reading:

The Dangerous Journey of John Eastman

A really fascinating piece about the conservative lawyer who largely concocted the stolen election dubious legal argument that ended up helping spark an insurrection.

“Today, the strange career of John Eastman raises questions about whether any of those values—civil discourse, careful analysis, mutual respect, the entire small-l liberal intellectual project—have any substance at all, or are just fairy tales that disguise the grim reality that law, and everything else in American politics, is nothing more noble than a knife fight in the dark.”

From The Washington Monthly.

Debunking a Longstanding Myth About William F. Buckley

Matthew Dallek is out with a new book on the Birch Society and its enduring influence on the far, far right of the conservative movement. In this piece, Matt does some debunking of the old story that William F. Buckley and The National Review “purged” the Birchers in the 1960s.

“Over the past decade … the legend has come under scrutiny. Historians now argue that Buckley’s vaunted excommunication of the fringe is a myth. They are not impressed by his supposedly Solomonic decision to repudiate the low-hanging fruit of Welch and his conspiracy theories while sparing the society’s rank and file. By welcoming them into the fold both before and after National Review’s supposed break with the society, Buckley and his magazine continued to benefit from Birchers’ political activism, funding, and engagement.”

From Politico:

See you again soon. Thanks for following along … all the best.