GOP

Conspiracy, GOP

Anatomy of a Conspiracy

Posted on by mjohnson

During a career devoted to little more than climbing the political ladder, Idaho Senator James E. Risch has been defined by a handful of moments when his outrageous behavior made news.

Risch’s greatest hits include the time he sprinted around the gallery of the Idaho state senate ordering state police officers to arrest demonstrators who had the audacity to object to something the then legislative leader was involved in.

Risch brought the U.S. Senate to a prolonged late-night halt in 2018 when he objected to a provision in a spending bill to name a central Idaho wilderness after a political rival, former governor Cecil D. Andrus. Risch threw a “temper tantrum” during which the Idaho Statesman editorial board called “a petty and embarrassing episode.” Andrus, who disliked few people made an exception for Risch, and the former governor had been dead for months when Risch displayed his pique.

The Lewiston (Idaho) Tribune ran a classic headline about the scene: “Risch picks fight with dead man, loses.”

When the Senate debated whether to impeach Donald Trump for his shakedown of the Ukrainian president, Risch fell asleep. A sketch artist captured the diminutive ultra conservative napping, head in hands. Spokesman Review columnist Shawn Vestal noted, correctly: “Nothing so clearly represents the nothing-matters, say-anything nature of the GOP response to impeachment, the collective, cynical shrug in the face of a slam-dunk case, as Sleeping Beauty Risch.”

Artist version of Risch napping during Trump impeachment trial

In contrast to his embarrassments, Risch’s accomplishments rarely make news for the simple reason he doesn’t do politics that way. He’s a partisan striver, always touching the right conservative talking points, always on the attack, but never doing the hard work of actually addressing an issue that might be important to his constituents. But that MO is good enough anymore to get a replacement level Republican elected and re-elected in Idaho. And Risch has been elected time and again – with one notable exception – since the 1970’s.

Look up “career politician” in the dictionary and you’ll find a photo of Jim Risch.

Risch has clearly reached the zenith of his political career. After a short run as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Risch is now the ranking Republican on what once was considered the most prestigious committee in the Senate. This week the junior senator from Idaho used that position to advance a right-wing conspiracy theory growing faster than Pinocchio’s nose.

For weeks there has been a constant drumbeat of conspiracy to the effect that President Joe Biden is a tottering idiot, not in command of the government let alone himself. You can see this lie promoted daily on Fox, OANN, at Breitbart, and the Rupert Murdoch owned New York Post. Trump himself suggested this week that former president Barack Obama “is probably running the government now anyway, according to many.”

Many people are saying this is head slapping, crazy-town nonsense, but Risch fanned this silliness during a Senate hearing this week, repeatedly asking Secretary of State Antony Blinken about a “mute” button that some unnamed official in the White House allegedly uses to cut off Biden, presumably to keep him from blurting out, like Risch, something silly. Blinken said, repeatedly, it was nonsense.

As reporter Amber Phillips noted: “The senator’s line of questioning seemed derived from conservative media. Fox News commentators were questioning the same thing that same morning, noted Daily Best media report Justin Baragona.”

Assessing Risch’s descent down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole Dana Milbank wrote, “The episode is worth unpacking because it shows, in miniature, how misinformation infects the Republican Party, rapidly spreads through partisan media and contaminates elected GOP leaders — who amplify and defend the falsehood, even when it’s shown to be wrong. This is how lies are born.”

Short story: when Biden was in Boise early in the week he met with Idaho’s governor and wildland fire officials at the National Interagency Fire Center. As is typical with the White House – any White House – a press “pool” is allowed to “spray” the gathering and then is ushered out. This is what happened in Boise. Biden’s mic wasn’t cut. The pool coverage of the event ended. It’s routine. It’s not a conspiracy.

(Some Idaho reporters were miffed that they had limited access to Biden, which I understand, but that is a separate issue. The White House – any White House – typically tightly controls this kind of access. Maybe they shouldn’t, but they do.)

Risch took this little non-issue, subsequently amplified by a Republican National Committee social media posting and a New York Post article and made a federal case of it. More importantly, Risch used almost half his time during a hearing where Blinken was on the hot seat about the clearly badly handled U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan talking about a make-believe White House “mute” button. None of his questions were designed to illicit real information. It was all a performance for the cameras.

If there is a better example of how unserious American politics on the political right has become, I don’t want to see it. But Risch’s motivation was as clear as his questions were crazy. He was angling to land on Fox News, and of course he did the obligatory “hit” with Bret Baier.

Risch is, by the way, 78-years old, the same age as the president he attacks for being too old for the job.

But one suspects there is even more to Risch’s motivation for raising his phony issue with the secretary of state, and in the process channeling a Trumpish conspiracy. There are no coincidences in politics and often cause and effect.

Less than a month ago, conservative Idaho firebrand Bryan Smith excoriated Risch in a newspaper op-ed for his vote in favor of a $1.2 trillion infrastructure proposal. Smith, a leading figure in the ongoing effort to push the Idaho GOP to the rightwing edge of the earth, said Risch’s vote – and Senator Mike Crapo’s – was proof that the Republican senators have been in office too long.

“The fact is that the longer Risch and Crapo serve in Washington, the more they become like the liberal swamp they claim they are fighting against,” Smith wrote, attempting to make the case that Idaho’s senators are closet liberals.

Risch has always been a purely transactional politician, so what better way to shut down attacks from the flat earth right than to embrace a favorite conspiracy theory of the flat earth right. You can’t reason with them, might as well fully join them.

It would be tempting to treat Jim Risch’s latest embarrassment as just another example in the long history of his blatantly ill-natured partisanship, a part of his life-long effort to protect his hard right flank, but unfortunately it is more than that. Risch’s performance is now the Republican brand: conspiracy, conceit and contempt for truth.

Idaho voters should have muted him a long, long time ago.

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Additional Reading:

A few other items worth your time…

9/11 was a test. The books of the last two decades show how America failed

Great piece in The Washington Post on the books of the last two decades that explore the events of September 11 and the aftermath.

“Rather than exemplify the nation’s highest values, the official response to 9/11 unleashed some of its worst qualities: deception, brutality, arrogance, ignorance, delusion, overreach and carelessness. This conclusion is laid bare in the sprawling literature to emerge from 9/11 over the past two decades — the works of investigation, memoir and narrative by journalists and former officials that have charted the path to that day, revealed the heroism and confusion of the early response, chronicled the battles in and about Afghanistan and Iraq, and uncovered the excesses of the war on terror. Reading or rereading a collection of such books today is like watching an old movie that feels more anguishing and frustrating than you remember.”

Here is the link:

Trump-Era Corruption Eclipses Even Teapot Dome

Good piece in The Bulwark where the author argues – I agree – the corruption in the recent Trump Administration makes Warren Harding’s corruption seem pretty tame.

Trump corruption worse than Teapot Dome

“The Teapot Dome saga began in 1921, in the first months of Warren Harding’s administration. At the center of the scandal loomed Albert Fall, a lawyer from New Mexico who was in his second term in the U.S. Senate when his close friend Harding tapped him to be secretary of the interior. Harding’s first choice for the job—the oilman whose money had done much to win Harding the Republican nomination—died after being shot by his mistress. Harding knew Fall, an anti-conservationist, would be amenable to using the office to pay back the oil interests.”

I like the piece, but do have one nitpick historical correction. The author mentions Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana as at one point leading the Teapot Dome investigation. It’s a mistake repeated many times and I have never understood why. Wheeler was an investigator of the Harding Administration, but his focus was on the Justice Department and Attorney General Harry Daugherty. Wheeler’s Montana colleague, Senator Tom Walsh, was the lead investigator of the oil leasing scandal.

Shameless plug: I wrote a book about Wheeler and all this.

In any event…it’s still a good piece. Link here:

100mph fastball? 450ft home run? Why that’s no problem for Shohei Ohtani

And a great baseball story. The Japanese ballplayer who pitches as well as he hits, or is it the other way around.

“As his fourth season concludes, Shohei Ohtani showed he can do more than acclimate himself to a new culture or put himself in position to be the American League’s Most Valuable Player. At 27, Ohtani is beginning to assert the kind of multidimensional dominance that few athletes have displayed.”

From The Guardian:

Thanks for following along. Stay safe.

GOP, Insurrection

Some Legacy…

Posted on by mjohnson

No politician ever admits to caring about a “legacy.” It’s a lie. They all want to be remembered, to be memorialized in some way for their good works or brave deeds.

They all wonder what the third paragraph of their obituary will say about them. “Senator Snort led the defense of Social Security when the program was under attack.” Or “Congressman Cleverton engineered the federal funding for Cleverton Dam, the massive concrete structure that bears his name.”

Or will the legacy be, as was the case with Congressman Charles E. Wiggins when he died in March 2000, a fact the gentleman from California would rather we forget?

California Congressman Charles E. Wiggins in 1974. He’s seen with the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Peter Rodino, of New Jersey during the impeachment hearings for Richard Nixon

“As a congressman, Mr. Wiggins was considered one of [Richard] Nixon’s staunchest defenders. Along with two other members of the House Judiciary Committee, he led the president’s defense when the Watergate hearings began in the summer of 1974. The strategy was to construe the evidence as narrowly as possible, require ironclad proof and propose benign explanations of information damaging to the president.”

In fairness to the memory of Mr. Wiggins – he later became a federal judge – he eventually decided Nixon was a crook and came around to support his impeachment. As the New York Times reported, in order to change his mind, Wiggins had to hold in his hands the transcript of the taped conversation where Nixon committed to obstructing justice. Wiggins had to read the actual words of presidential betrayal to believe what he had been defending was a lie.

I thought about the long-forgotten Charles Wiggins when earlier this week, a burly, bearded Capitol Police officer, Harry Dunn, recounted for a congressional committee his experiences during the January 6 insurrection. Dunn was graphic, detailed and totally believable. He laid bare the lie that the riot of Donald Trump supporters was no big deal, as well as the fiction that Trump had not helped instigate the attack on American democracy.

“This n—– voted for Joe Biden!” Officer Dunn said a rioter screamed at him, prompting the crowd to turn on him with shouts of “Boo! F—— n—–!”

Later, Dunn implored elected members of Congress to uncover the full extent of Trump’s role.

Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn

“There was an attack on January 6, and a hit man sent them,” the police officer said. “I want you to get to the bottom of that.”

Imagine being, as old Charles Wiggins was in 1974, among the last to call into question the actions of a president in the face of such obvious and total depredation of democracy?

Imagine, for example, being Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, who first attempted to turn a bipartisan investigation into a clown show and then refused to participate at all. McCarthy couldn’t be bothered to watch Officer Dunn’s testimony this week. Too busy, perhaps, working on denial of his own role on January 6. We know McCarthy spoke to Trump that day. What do you suppose they talked about?

Or imagine being Montana Congressman Matt Rosendale, an election denier, who expressed his disappointment with the words of fellow Republican Liz Cheney, one of the few Republicans who has called for a reckoning with Trump and his incitement of insurrection. Cheney, who is in perpetual GOP purgatory for her embrace of the truth, urged lawmakers to find out “what happened every minute of that day in the White House” on January 6. “Every phone call, every conversation, every meeting leading up to, during and after the attack.”

“We did not have an armed invasion of the Capitol,” Rosendale said in response. “We had a breach in security.” Try telling that to the Capitol Police officer who testified under oath that one Trump supporter tried to gouge his eye out. Or the story of another officer caught in a scrum where one attacker shouted to get his gun and kill him with it.

Or imagine being Idaho Senator Jim Risch or Wyoming’s John Barasso or Montana’s Steve Daines, all of whom opposed an independent, bipartisan investigation of January 6, and near as I can tell had no reaction to the officer’s testimony this week. What the three senators were outraged about was a letter written more than 30 years ago by a college environmental activist who warned that trees in a proposed Forest Service timber sale had been spiked. Tracy Stone-Manning will be the next director of the Bureau of Land Management, but Risch, a little man in high performance dudgeon, called her a “terrorist” and a “criminal.”

Risch and Barasso and Daines have been on this attack line for several weeks but have nothing significant to say about an attack on the Capitol that put their own lives are risk. They have gladly enlarged the January 6 memory hole of denial and deflection; the modern characteristics of what it takes to be a leader of the Republican Party. And let us not let Senator Mike Crapo continue to skate away in silence. Crapo voted against an independent investigation and now sits on his hands awaiting a re-election he demonstrably does not deserve.

What perverse level of political sycophancy, what degree of moral depravity has overtaken these people and dunked them in the turgid water of Trumpland?

The conservative writer Mona Charen has it right. It’s easy to blame it all on the far-right “base” of the Republican Party, the deplorables who have hijacked conservatism in fealty to conspiracy, science denial, and the anti-democratic Trump cult. But Charen argues the base excuse is a cop out, pardon the pun.

“We have seen the end of 160 years of the peaceful transfer of power,” Charen wrote in The Bulwark. “We’ve seen the majestic United States Capitol turned into a scene from a dystopian fantasy; an armed mob attempting to subvert an election. They smashed and tortured and caused deaths. They erected a gallows and hunted for the speaker of the House and for the vice president. And Republicans, almost to a man and woman, are excusing, downplaying, or whitewashing what happened. An entire political party has abandoned commitment to the rule of law.”

Recall that these Republicans – Risch, Crapo and all the rest – who quake in fear of the authoritarian reality of their party and its leader could have done something. They did nothing. They knew he was a con and a crook, and they were against him before they weren’t any more.

“The great tragedy of this moment is not that Trump attempted what he did,” Mona Charen said, “but that so few Republicans tried to stop him when it would have made a difference.”

That is their legacy. And the country’s legacy, too.

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Additional Reading:

Some good reads culled this week from many sources…

The Beltway Can’t Stop Talking About Him. The Voters He Needs Barely Know Him

When J.D. Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy came out I read it with considerable interest. Many of us were trying to understand the heartland appeal of the former guy. Vance seemed like an interesting guy: up from poverty, stellar education, business success and perhaps a new kind of conservative, a populist with ideas. It also seemed like he totally saw through the Donald Trump appeal and saw the faux business tycoon as a conman.

JD Vance, the venture capitalist and author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” speaks with supporters after a rally Thursday, July 1, 2021, in Middletown, Ohio, where he announced he is joining the crowded Republican race for the Ohio U.S. Senate seat being left by Rob Portman. (AP Photo/Jeff Dean)

More and more the hype around the book and the follow on movie seems like it was manufactured to promote a political career, which Vance is now trying to launch. He’s a candidate for the U.S. Senate. He’s taken great pains to cleanse his anti-Trump views.

He may just be another opportunistic rich guy trying to get into elective office. And as this story makes clear, he has some work to do. From Politico.

“Vance has countered with an apology tour of sorts, scrubbing his old tweets and making the case, often and to anyone who will listen, that though he was at first skeptical of Trump himself, he bought into Trump’s ideology all along, and has since come around on the man too. Meanwhile, a super PAC supporting Vance, financed by $10 million from the tech investor Peter Thiel, has spent six figures on digital ads that emphasize Vance’s criticisms of Democrats and Big Tech, and his Hillbilly Elegy story.”

A story from Ohio that may leave you wondering – again – just how it is that the American conservative movement has fallen so far.

4 Reasons I’m Wearing a Mask Again

Some confusing, or maybe just unwelcome guidance out of the CDC this week about masks and the effort to control a still raging pandemic.

I think The Atlantic has done remarkable work covering this huge story. Here’s reporter Katherine J. Wu on why she’s gone back to wearing a mask.

“If I get infected, that affects more than just me. I worry about the strangers I encounter—many of them maskless—whose immune status I don’t know. I worry about the youngest kids in my social network, who aren’t yet eligible for shots, and the elderly and immunocompromised, whose defenses may be weaker than mine. I worry about the people in my community who have been structurally barred from accessing the vaccines, or who are reluctant to take the shots. My risk of getting COVID-19 is low. Theirs is very much not.”

Get the shot. Wear a mask indoors. Be smart. Be safe. Read the full story here:

ARE YOU ALLOWED TO CRITICIZE SIMONE BILES?: A DECISION TREE

The satirical site McSweeney’s has created a decision tree in response to the criticism of Simone Biles, the sensational gymnast who decided to end her participation in the Olympics. An, yes, I know there are big issues here about the rights of athletes, mental health, social media, etc.

This cuts through all that…funny.

Thanks for reading. Stay in touch.

GOP, Idaho

A Long Time Coming…

Posted on by mjohnson

I’ve been reading “letters to the editor.” It’s fun, occasionally even enlightening. A sample: 

“Once we get together and rout the extremists from the midst of the Grand Old Party we will be able to go back to sane and sensible party politics in which we debate alternative programs toward progress in terms of facts and feasibility.” 

A letter to the editor…

“To all who believe in the right of individualism and all freedoms the Constitution once, yes once, gave you, become alert to the poisoned gifts of socialist order or you shall surely march down the corridors of slavery to the end that Lenin and his disciples have promised you.” 

A letter to the editor…

“I am so ashamed of the man who calls himself governor of Idaho … I have known for quite some time he leaned left, or as they like to call themselves, moderates or liberals.” The same writer observed about the losing presidential candidate in the last election: “The abuse, lies, and all the venom that spewed forth, it seemed to me the evil forces of Satan were against him.” 

And a particular favorite letter: “I am getting fed up about these so-called Americans who believe in the John Birchers, Ku Klux Klan and many others who are trying to undermine our society. I have read the trash they publish and air. It only appeals to the mind of a seven-year-old.” 

A letter to the editor…

Each quotation is from a genuine “letter to the editor” – and there are dozens more like them – that appeared in an Idaho newspaper – in 1964. 

The radicalization of the conservative right in America has been a long time coming, but it is possible to pinpoint 1964 – the year the GOP nominated Barry Goldwater, a card-carrying right winger, for president – as a critical milestone in the radicalization. To be fair, the origins of the radicalization that grips the GOP today actually go back even farther to post-war McCarthyism and a manufactured crisis over communist infiltration of American society and government. 

Barry Goldwater in 1964

Even accounting for a few momentary detours to something less radical than today’s Republican Party – think Gerald Ford, John McCain or Mitt Romney – conservatism in America over at least the last 70 years has been the happy home of conspiracy, contempt for facts and commitment to grievance. 

And Idaho has not infrequently been a central melting pot for the conspiracy and anti-government sentiment. Frank Church, arguably the state’s most important national legislator from the 1950’s through the 1970’s, regularly felt the sharp end of this kind of politics. At various points in his 24-year career in the Senate, Church was labeled a socialist sympathizer and a “baby killer.” His stand against the Vietnam War was reason for the right to label him un-American and his investigation of the nation’s intelligence agencies led to the ludicrous accusation, made by allegedly responsible voices on the right, that he had singlehandedly destroyed the CIA. 

An essay Church wrote in January 1965 for Look magazine – the piece was entitled “Conspiracy USA” – gave me the idea of going back and looking at all those old letters. 

Church dubbed what he saw in 1965 “the slowly boiling outrages of extremism” and he warned, “we have already become accustomed to a level of political absurdity that would have seemed, a few years ago, quite impossible.”

You might think the fabricated outrage about the teaching of American history among a new generation of the right’s conspiracy spreading McCarthyites is a recent phenomenon. It’s not. 

In his essay, Church quoted a letter printed in the Idaho Statesman in 1964: “The ‘Social Studies’ program [in the high schools] was initiated 30 years ago by American education intelligentsia after the Soviet plan, for the acknowledged purpose of promoting the ‘collectivist society’ in America.” 

That nonsense of decades ago is not all that different from the public education bashing “task force” formed recently by Idaho’s lieutenant governor and aimed at rooting out “teachings on social justice, critical race theory, socialism, communism (and) Marxism” from public schools. 

The co-chair of this witch hunt, Representative Priscilla Giddings, is always in high McCarthy dudgeon. As reported by the Idaho Capitol Sun, Giddings said “she found examples of indoctrination or critical race theory in libraries, the Idaho Public Television budget, early childhood development programs and ‘a little bit’ in K-12 public schools. She said she was particularly concerned where the words ‘equity’ and ‘privilege’ are used.” 

Idaho Senator Frank Church at about the time he warned about the Radical Right in 1965

The late Senator Church provided some context for all this in his 1965 essay. 

“Scholars differ on why so many conscientious Americans are being caught up in the Radical Right,” Church wrote. “It is clearly a revolt against the established order by the discontented, motivated by a mixture of reasons: a quest for some higher purpose than is satisfied by the commercial standards of our times; a fear of the new relationships being generated by the burgeoning growth, urbanization and automation of the country; a resistance to the complexities of modern life, to the bigness of government, to the racial revolution, to a ‘cold war’ that never ends, to the absence of quick and easy solutions; a frustration over the inability of the United States, in the nuclear age, to swiftly work its will upon the world. These are the conditions of life with which we must cope, but they stir
a rebel to go forth in search of a cause.”  

Church wrote – and again it’s important to remember he spent his career under attack from these merchants of conspiracy and fear – that it was essential to expose the “delusions of the fanatical right” including its “propaganda, its frequent resort to outright intimidation and coercion” and what he called nothing less than its “totalitarian methods.” 

Church was a prophet before our time. The Morning Consult polling firm reported this week that 26% of the U.S. population now qualifies as being “highly right-wing authoritarian,” twice the share of people who hold similar views in Canada or Australia. 

There is nothing new, absolutely nothing new, in the playbook of the radical right. Tossing off “socialism” at every opportunity, condemning public education, ridiculous allusions to Satan, the life and death struggle for “freedom” are all pages in its well-thumbed playbook. 

Optimists might take comfort in the fact that Goldwater lost in 1964, but his followers – and now a new and even more radical generation – have kept right on. These radicals delude themselves into thinking they are saving their country. What they are actually doing is taking aim at the very ideas of America: free expression, tolerance, community, inclusion and reason. 

But, then again, what they are trying to sell is an old story. You can look it up. 

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Additional Reading:

A few other items worthy of your time…

The War on History Is a War on Democracy

Historian Timothy Snyder has been a touchstone for me during the last several years. Snyder is an expert totalitarianism and the methods of authoritarians like Stalin and Hitler. He has written about the Holocaust and how democracies fail. His current essay in The New York Times is a must read, putting efforts by Republican legislators to control the teaching of history in historical context.

“This spring, memory laws arrived in America. Republican state legislators proposed dozens of bills designed to guide and control American understanding of the past. As of this writing, five states (Idaho, Iowa, Tennessee, Texas and Oklahoma) have passed laws that direct and restrict discussions of history in classrooms. The Department of Education of a sixth (Florida) has passed guidelines with the same effect. Another 12 state legislatures are still considering memory laws.”

Read the full piece here:

How Rumsfeld Deserves to Be Remembered

WASHINGTON – JUNE 23: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gestures as he testifies during a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee June 23, 2005 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. The hearing was focused on U.S. military strategy and operations in Iraq. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

The death this week of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld brought forth a great deal of commentary. George Packer in The Atlantic was one who weighed in, not softly.

“Rumsfeld was the worst secretary of defense in American history. Being newly dead shouldn’t spare him this distinction. He was worse than the closest contender, Robert McNamara, and that is not a competition to judge lightly.”

Read the entire story:

Presidential Historians Survey

And speaking of the worst…or best…ever. C-SPAN is out with its regular assessment of where American presidents stand in the view of a host of historians.

Number One on the greatness scale is Lincoln. And it turns out the “former guy” is rated as the worst. Close, but not the absolute bottom. Check out the rest of the survey here.

The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America’s Judicial Hero

And I’m anxious to read this new biography of a late 19th and early 20th Century Supreme Court justice.

John Marshall Harlan: a great dissenter on segregation among other things

“John Marshal Harlan’s life and opinions are well worth studying. But he may be easier to admire than to understand. His intellectual roots stretch back to antebellum America and even to the era of the country’s founding. In that sense, his jurisprudence is not so much a prophecy of the future as the dying gasp of Radical Republicanism—a political vision the nation had abandoned by 1896 in favor of the macabre splendor of the Gilded Age.”

A review of The Great Dissenter.

As alway, I appreciate you reading and providing your reactions. All the best and have a safe and sane Fourth of July.

2020 Election, GOP, Politics

Political Depravity…

Posted on by mjohnson

Many of the same congressional Republicans who recently opposed creation of an independent commission charged with investigating the deadly January attack on the U.S. Capitol voted this week against a proposal to award Congressional Gold Medals to the police officers who literally protected their lives. 

Think about that for a moment. And think about the depravity of that for even longer. And then think about what it means for our democracy. 

Trump supporters clash with police and security forces as they push barricades to storm the US Capitol in Washington D.C on January 6, 2021. – Demonstrators breeched security and entered the Capitol as Congress debated the a 2020 presidential election Electoral Vote Certification. (Photo by ROBERTO SCHMIDT / AFP) (Photo by ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images)

Twenty-one House Republicans, including many identified most closely with militia and anti-government groups and, not incidentally, with the last Republican president, refused to honor law enforcement personal, including many who were beaten, assaulted and scarred by a mob of dead-end Donald Trump inspired insurrectionists. 

We need to admit that the United States House of Representatives has always been a refuge for a certain number of cranks, loonies, crackpots and losers. So there is that. 

Montana once sent a doctor to Congress who owned also owned a nudist colony in Butte. If you’ve been to Butte you might not automatically think “nudist colony.” The Gentleman from Montana was a one-termer who filled the Congressional Record with pro-Nazi propaganda and then, thankfully, disappeared into history. 

Louisiana sent a Democrat to Congress some years ago who was caught accepting bribes. Not a big surprise in the land of Huey Long, perhaps, but the novelty of his corruption was singular. The FBI found a cool $100,000 in cash in the congressman’s freezer. Bribes on ice. There is no vaccine for stupid, it seems. and corruption is a bipartisan characteristic. 

Clearly, we don’t always send our best people to Congress. (See: History, First District of Idaho.) 

But these crazy no votes on awarding the Congressional Gold Medal transcend old style mundane crazy. We are in a whole new territory here. Until recently these votes – votes against law enforcement, against common decency – would have simply been unthinkable. Now, for many on the political right this kind of vote is an affirmation of American values. 

These twenty-one votes are a profoundly un-American, anti-democratic statement of nihilism and anarchy. The fact that these people inhabit the heart of the modern Republican Party is a harsh indictment of a political movement that slips daily toward a post-Trump American authoritarianism that gnaws at the very foundation of democracy. 

If you aren’t worried about where these people are taking half of the country you’re either OK with their direction or you’re simply not paying attention. 

Many of the same House Republicans who voted against Congressional Gold Medals for Capitol Police officers also voted this week against legislation to create a federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery.

Montana’s Republican Congressman Matt Rosendale was one of the 21. He hardly even tried to justify his no vote, just offered up a word salad of nonsense about how it was all Nancy Pelosi’s fault. At one level these are profoundly unserious people. No policy, just performance. No patriotism, just pique. 

American democracy is teetering on the edge. Guys like Rosendale – and Idaho’s Russ Fulcher, who almost certainly would have voted with the seditious 21 were it not for a newspaper like this one to hold him to some account – have become the grave diggers of our democracy. Fulcher, let it never be forgotten, signed on to the now well documented Trump effort to overturn a free, fair and fairly won presidential election. Fulcher spends most of his time as a member of Congress performatively calling out Pelosi, pushing some hot button social issue and living in the lala land of the House Freedom Caucus. His last original idea was when he filed for Congress. 

Fulcher has made a virtue of refusing appropriations to enhance highways and bridges in his First District. His conservative Idaho colleague, Mike Simpson, has appealed for $17 million in projects in five southern Idaho communities, including a stormwater system in Pocatello and public transit enhancement in Boise. “It is important to note that eliminating any one of those projects would not have reduced federal spending by one penny,” Simpson said, justifying his utilization of  what we call earmarks. “In the end, I can either seek these projects for Idaho or allow the funding to go to another state,” he said. 

Fulcher opted to let funding that might have benefited his constituents to go to another state. Of course, Fulcher’s constituents will almost certainly return him to Congress next year, because, well, we don’t always send the best people. 

This level of political incoherence and, in the case of recognition for Capitol Police officers, depraved incoherence is, at the most basic level mere stupidity. At a higher level – or is it at a baser level – it is a mark of wholesale abandonment of politics as the means by which we organize society.  

So, while many of us can unite to condemn the craziest of the loons, we generally ignore the larger implications of their behavior, and the behavior of those who continue to enable, tolerate and use them to keep political power.

We learned this week one more piece of the January 6 puzzle. Donald Trump, according to records of his communication immediately after the presidential election, pressured the Justice Department to help him steal an election he lost. In other words he perverted the legal system to attempt a political coup. That his attempted failed is not remarkable, that it was tried is. 

Even more remarkable has been the lack of outrage from conservatives who are sworn to uphold the Constitution. Given the disintegration and degradation of American conservatism over the last decade or so it is no surprise that people like Fulcher and Rosendale have ascended and people who know better like Idaho’s Mike Simpson and Washington’s Cathy McMorris Rogers have gone silent. These craven enablers clearly crave their political sinecures more than they care about democracy. 

Here’s the bottom line: We are slouching toward an apocalypse. Fantasies about January 6th being “a peaceful protest” are widely embraced in conservative media. Lies about election irregularities have led to draconian restrictions on voting in many states. A strong majority of conservatives seem predisposed to accept any destruction of democratic norms if the trashing will help defeat their opponents. And Republicans seem poised to win control of the House next year and perhaps the Senate, as well. 

The first coup failed. It’s not likely the next one will. 

—–O—–

Additional Reading:

A few things I stumbled on this week that I think are worthy of your time…

If this isn’t nice, what is?

This college commencement speech by the late, great Kurt Vonnegut lifted even my dark mood. Hard not to smile after absorbing Vonnegut’s advice.

The late, great Kurt Vonnegut

“I had a bad uncle named Dan, who said a male can’t be a man unless he’d gone to war. But I had a good uncle named Alex, who said, when life was most agreeable—and it could be just a pitcher of lemonade in the shade—he would say, ‘If this isn’t nice, what is?’ So I say that about what we have achieved here right now. If he hadn’t said that so regularly, maybe five or six times a month, we might not have paused to notice how rewarding life can be sometimes. Perhaps my good Uncle Alex will live on in some of you members of this graduating class if, in the future, you will pause to say out loud every so often, ‘If this isn’t nice, what is?’

Read the full piece. Like every good commencement speech it is short.

The Dominican Republic and the United States: A Baseball History

I also loved this piece about baseball and the Dominican Republic.

“It is a time-worn cliche that baseball is ‘America’s game.’ As long ago as 1889 poet Walt Whitman called baseball ‘our game’ and enthused that it ‘has the snap, go, fling, of the American atmosphere.’ In fact, baseball has long been an international game and nowhere has it been played with more passion than in the Dominican Republic.”

Andrew Mitchel reviews the relationship between the United States, the Dominican Republic, and the game that both love.

Trump-inspired death threats are terrorizing election workers

From the sublime to the terrifying.

Reuter’s had a stunning piece recently that underscores the threats that remain to American democracy. It is a shocking bit of first-class reporting.

“Election officials and their families are living with threats of hanging, firing squads, torture and bomb blasts, interviews and documents reveal. The campaign of fear, sparked by Trump’s voter-fraud falsehoods, threatens the U.S. electoral system.”

Be prepared. Read the story here.

Thanks, as always, for reading. Always love to hear from you. Drop a line. All the best.

GOP, Governors, Idaho Politics

A Little Giant…

Posted on by mjohnson

Given the current dominance of the Republican Party in Idaho it is difficult to remember it wasn’t always so. 

When Wilder, Idaho onion farmer Phil Batt was elected in 1994 as Idaho’s 29th governor he became the first Republican governor in 24 years. Batt defeated a popular incumbent attorney general, and the man some – including his political adversaries – call “the little giant” deserves the lion’s share of the credit for rebuilding a party that had fallen on hard times in the early 1990’s. It was a sea change moment. 

A new book just out celebrates Batt’s life and legacy. The little volume is a timely reminder of a better, more civil, more accomplished time in the state’s politics. Without meaning to do so the book also casts light on how reactionary and radical the state’s dominant political party has become in the last quarter century. 

Phil Batt at the time he was Idaho’s governor from 1995-1999

(The book – Lucky: The Wit and Wisdom of Phil Batt – has been published by Caxton Press, the venerable Idaho publisher based in Caldwell. All sale proceeds will benefit the Wassmuth Center for Human Rights.)

The book’s author, Rod Gramer, a long-time Idaho journalist who now heads Idaho Business for Education, a group trying to push the state’s education system into the 21st Century, conducted a series of interviews with Batt and also commissioned several essays about the man who broke the string of six consecutive Democratic gubernatorial wins. 

Cover of the new book about Batt

I’m honored that Rod asked me to write one of the essays about Batt, a man I’ve known and observed in a variety of roles since 1975. Former governors Butch Otter and Dirk Kempthorne also contributed, as did former Batt staffer Lindy High, journalist Randy Stapilus and long-time political analyst Dr. Jim Weatherby. The book is a fine contribution to Idaho political history. 

Several things distinguish Batt – now 94, a bit frail, but as sharp as ever – particularly when his life and career is considered side-by-side with what passes for Idaho conservatism these days. His legacy really comes down to two big ideas: advancing human rights and resisting an often unaccountable federal bureaucracy. 

In the first instance Batt was – and remains – the state’s foremost advocate for the Human Rights Commission. He championed the creation of the state agency, helped nurture it in its infancy and supports expanding its authority. Batt told Gramer that he supports, without conditions, the long-delayed adoption of human rights protections related to sexual orientation. “They should not be discriminated against,” Batt said in usual terse, authoritative style. 

This position is, of course, at odds with the vast majority of Republicans in the state legislature who have refused with blind determination to even discuss the issue of human rights protections for LGBTQ citizens. 

Batt, the conservative farmer, also insisted on providing worker compensation insurance coverage for farm workers. “Why should a farmworker have to put up with injurious practices when nobody else had to do it,” he asks. 

Batt came by his human rights views in the old-fashioned way: he observed the Jim Crow South up close while in the military in Mississippi. “I saw Blacks forced off the sidewalk to let Whites go by,” he told Gramer. “Separate toilets. Separate drinking fountains. Blacks forced to the back of the bus. Just totally unacceptable, but most of the people didn’t think it was. I thought it was totally unfair. I didn’t like it. It did make an impression on me.” 

The other major piece of Batt’s legacy is the agreement he forced the U.S. Department of Energy to accept that gave Idaho legal leverage over nuclear waste clean-up and further waste storage at the Idaho National Laboratory in eastern Idaho. No other state has such a comprehensive, binding agreement that protects the ground water, health and livelihood of Idaho. Tellingly, Republicans in the congressional delegation and the legislature have been trying to undo the deal every day since Batt signed the agreement in 1995 with the support and encouragement of his friend and occasional political adversary former Democratic Governor Cecil Andrus. 

Batt with his always friend and occasional adversary Cecil D. Andrus

Batt is clearly in the last lap of his long and productive life, and he is correctly predicting that his nuclear waste handiwork will be further eroded when he takes leave. Idahoans will rue the day that happens. Given the arrogance and ignorance of the current ruling class, count on the fact that after the final tributes have been paid to the former governor they’ll do what they can to destroy the best protection Idaho ever had from the overreaching hand of the federal government. 

There is much else to be said about Phil Batt. He can tell and take a joke. He is a farmer who plays a mean jazz clarinet and plays it well enough to have jammed with legendary pianist Gene Harris and guitarist Chet Atkins. He can write – speeches and newspaper columns and humorous essays. He was, as Andrus often said, as honest as the day is long, a man of his word, a giant. 

The two former governors enjoyed a mutual admiration society. As different in their politics as they were in their physical appearance, Batt and Andrus were totally alike in understanding that when practiced by honorable, candid, decent people politics is the way we get things done in our world. You work things out. You make a deal. You compromise. You understand what the other guy needs and find a way forward. 

So much of the modern Republican Party has slipped from the political moorings of a conservative like Phil Batt as to make one wonder if the guy who served in both houses of the legislature, became the leader of the state senate, then lieutenant governor, party chairman and finally governor could win a Republican primary today. He might be too pragmatic, too committed to the process of politics and problem solving to navigate in the land of conspiracy, misinformation and anger that now passes for conservatism.  

“The current political climate is a shameful thing,” Batt told Gramer. “I don’t have an answer for it, but it has badly damaged our country worldwide and can get a lot worse.” 

He’s right, of course, and if Idaho wants a model for how to rescue the state’s politics from the white supremacy, nationalism and fact-free grievance that now consumes the majority party they could do no better than to look to the life and legacy of the committed conservative from Wilder, Idaho. 

—–O—–

Additional Reading:

A couple of other items worthy of your time…

Trump’s place in history? He is the supreme American demagogue…

A piece from the Los Angeles Times on The Former Guy’s place in history.

“Trump is not going away. The Republican leaders who have disregarded the truth to enable him should know what future historians are going to say about the former president — and them, by association. He will be showcased for decades to come as the greatest symbol of American demagoguery of all times. Compared with Trump, demagogues like Huey Long and Joseph McCarthy will become footnotes.”

Read the entire thing:

PANCHO VILLA, THE BATTLE AT THE RIO GRANDE, AND WHY THE REVOLUTION NEEDED A MOVIE STAR

 How the Mexican revolutionary turned to the movies.

“Convinced he could follow and defeat the federals at will, Villa paused in Chihuahua City to act as self-appointed state governor. He issued a decree that all hacendados in the state would have their lands confiscated; profits from their operation would now engorge the public treasury, providing Villa with a steady source of money to pay his soldados. After Huerta was defeated, the land would be divided up among all the people of Chihuahua.”

Fascinating story:

Thanks for hanging around here. All the best.

GOP, Guns, Politics

Rejecting Character…

Posted on by mjohnson

There was an almost perfect alignment on the political right this week of two seemingly disconnected issues, and where things head with both will tell us a lot about the future of the Republican Party and American democracy. 

At issue in both cases is what was once called character – moral and ethical behavior as a necessary condition for public leadership. Conservatives made a choice, whether they realized it or not, when they embraced as their leader a congenital liar with the ethics of an alley cat, and I know that is damning to alley cats everywhere. 

There are a multitude of reasons why American democracy is imperiled, but one political party abandoning character is pretty high on the causation list. 

So, two examples right now: 

In a Dallas courtroom this week a federal judge ruled that the National Rifle Association (NRA) could not use a bankruptcy proceeding to shift its operations from New York to gun friendly Texas simply in order to avoid governmental oversight. The NRA has been sued in New York in an effort by the attorney general there to shut down the powerful and powerfully corrupt outfit. 

Wayne LaPierre, executive Vice President of the National Rifle Association speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Florida, U.S. February 28, 2021. REUTERS/Joe Skipper/File Photo

“The NRA’s influence has been so powerful that the organization went unchecked for decades while top executives funneled millions into their own pockets,” New York attorney general Letitia James said when she filed the lawsuit last year. 

The Texas judge essentially agreed that the NRA defense against fraud charges was itself fraudulent. Now, as the New York litigation proceeds, we will almost certainly get a detailed look at the millions and millions of dollars of blood money that have gushed for years through the NRA, enriching charlatans like Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s chief mouthpiece. This money, ginned up by gun manufacturers and gullible Americans who have bought the fiction that any restrictions on guns is tantamount to a commie plot, has allowed an allegedly non-profit organization to make the Republican Party its wholly owned subsidiary. 

LaPierre testified during the bankruptcy proceeding, as the New York Times noted, “that he didn’t know his former chief financial officer had received a $360,000-a-year consulting contract after leaving under a cloud, or that his personal travel agent, hired by the NRA, was charging a 10 percent booking fee for charter flights on top of a retainer that could reach $26,000 a month for Mr. LaPierre’s globe-trotting travel to places like the Bahamas and Lake Como in Italy. Mr. LaPierre’s close aide, Millie Hallow, a felon, was even kept on after being caught diverting $40,000 in NRA funds for her son’s wedding and other personal expenses.” 

The judge was astounded that LaPierre had cooked up the bankruptcy ruse without consulting many top NRA executives or informing most of the organization’s board of directors. In the “all politics is local” department: former Idaho Senator Larry Craig has been on the NRA board since 1983 and a former executive director of the Idaho Republican Party has run the public relations shop at the NRA for years. Both have had front row seats on the alleged corruption. Expect to hear more about their roles. 

Almost everyone even vaguely familiar with the NRA over the last 40 years should have seen its corruption was hiding in plain sight. Lavish spending on its executives and sweetheart contracts with law and marketing firms were part of the grifting, as were the political contributions flowing to Republican candidates and doubling as protection money.

Republicans nevertheless kept cashing the NRA checks because, well, why not. And stoking anger about Democrats coming for your guns has proven to be good politics even if the weekly mass shootings are kind of difficult to explain. In other words: character be damned. 

A few hours after the fraud and corruption at the NRA was made even more obvious, Republicans in the House of Representatives sacked from her leadership position the not-so-gentlewoman from Wyoming, Liz Cheney. Cheney’s crime was, of course, to take issue with the biggest lie – and the biggest liar – in the history of American politics. Fundamentally Cheney was calling out the GOP’s abandonment of character. 

Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney speaks to reporters minutes after losing her House leadership job over her criticism of the former guy

“Remaining silent and ignoring the lie emboldens the liar,” Cheney said before her cowardly colleagues, including Idaho’s two House sissies, sent her packing on a wimpy non-recorded voice vote. “I will not participate in that,” Cheney said. “I will not sit back and watch in silence, while others lead our party down a path that abandons the rule of law and joins the former president’s crusade to undermine our democracy.”

Cheney understands that there are bigger things at stake here than retaining political power. She’s playing a long game, hoping enough conservatives come to their senses and realize the party’s future shouldn’t involve the guy who incited an insurrection over the lie that an election was stolen. 

Lord help her. She’ll need it. 

“The pattern is striking,” Jeff Greenfield wrote recently in Politico, “if you want to survive as a Republican official, you will support the former president; if you support the former president, you will support laws that reflect his conviction that the election was stolen; if you enact those rules, you are making it more possible that he will win a second term. The party is talking with one voice; the voice is Trump’s, and it’s one that plenty of Americans are still perfectly receptive to.”

Once you accept the proposition that character is fungible, that lying to your supporters is the price to be paid for re-election and that your office in the Rayburn Building is more important than resisting an open attack on democracy, what’s left? 

In a host of ways many conservatives, maybe even most have made their deal with the devil in his many forms. In the near term the bet looks pretty good. You can fool some of the people all of the time, after all, and maybe even win back the House next year. 

In the longer run, by abandoning character, honesty and facts as the foundation blocks of democracy you’re left with a political movement that believes in nothing – except power. A Republican Party that continues to embrace the NRA and reject a Liz Cheney is precisely such a political movement. 

—–0—–

Additional Reading…

The Secret Papers of Lee Atwater, Who Invented the Scurrilous Tactics That Trump Normalized

This is a very good story by a very good reporter, Jane Mayer. I would only quibble over whether Lee Atwater “invented” his approach to politics. I argue in my latest book that he adapted his style from an even earlier group of conservative activists, but Atwater certainly perfected the scurrilous tactics.

Lee Atwater (right) with Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, three guys who helped create the anger, grievance and fear tactics that now dominate the political right

“In the nineteen-eighties, [Lee] Atwater became infamous for his effective use of smears. Probably his best-known one was tying Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, Bush’s Democratic Presidential opponent in 1988, to Willie Horton, a Black convict who went on a crime spree after getting paroled in the state. A menacing ad featuring Horton was a blatant attempt to stir fear among white voters that Dukakis would be soft on crime. At the very end of his life, Atwater publicly apologized to Dukakis for it. But Atwater’s draft memoir makes clear that he had already mastered the dark political arts as a teen-ager. In fact, it seems that practically everything Atwater learned about politics he learned in high school. It’s easy to see the future of the Republican Party in the anti-intellectual dirty tricks of his school days.”

Read the whole thing:

The Republican War Against Trans Kids

“Across the country, 33 states have introduced more than 100 bills that Chase Strangio, the deputy director for transgender justice at the ACLU, argues have a clear-cut goal in totality—’to stop people from being trans.’ Notably, the bulk of these bills focuses on kids: Some would prevent trans kids from using the restroom or locker room that corresponds with their self-identification; some would ban trans kids from participating in same-gender youth sports; others would outlaw gender-affirming health care for minors; and still others would essentially ban LGBTQ issues from being taught in classrooms. In April, the Florida state house even passed a bill that would allow for genital inspections of trans student athletes.”

Read the story here and another related piece here.

Seeking Stillness and Sunlight: On the Art of Fly-Fishing

The fishing life…

“Angling is about anticipation and planning trips far in the future, but it also has a storied history. This sport has been practiced since Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler was published in 1653, in ways that are, to the naked eye, fairly unchanged today, like a Shakespeare play performed on a thrust stage. Some people justify fly fishing with claims that it’s poetic, and, yes, there are moments of pure poetry, but the pleasures of fishing are also tactile and immediate. The theoretical considerations tend to enter my mind, sometimes against my will, when I’m not catching anything..” 

If you love to fly fish you’ll enjoy this piece. David Coggins on the fishing life. 

GOP, Insurrection

Whitewashing Insurrection…

Posted on by mjohnson

By one account local and federal law enforcement authorities have arrested at least 444 people and charged them with crimes related to the violent January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the insurrectionist assault that left five dead and dozens, including many police officers, seriously injured. 

One of the injured, Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police officer Michael Fanone, who was brutally assaulted by the mob, said this week he has had difficulty watching some Republican elected officials “whitewash” the outrageous episode over the last few weeks. 

“I experienced the most brutal, savage hand-to-hand combat of my entire life. Let alone my policing career, which spans almost two decades,” Fanone told CNN. “It was nothing that I had ever thought would be a part of my law enforcement career, nor was I prepared to experience.”

Police officers stand guard as supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump gather in front of the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, U.S., January 6, 2021. REUTERS/Leah Millis

One of the latest Northwesterners arrested was a 62-year-old Hillsboro, Oregon man who, among other things, is charged with striking police officers and breaking through barricades. Nearly a dozen residents of Idaho, Washington and Oregon have been charged in what has been described as the most documented crime in American history. Many of the insurrectionists took time out to snap selfies or willingly commented to journalists on camera. 

Yet, even with nearly daily reports of more arrests the unprecedented events of January 6 feel more and more like ancient history rather than a still fresh wound. Part of the reason is our collective short national attention span, but an even more important factor about why this bloody riot is rapidly receding is what Officer Fanone identifies – a conservative whitewashing of events that took place in real time on live television over the space of several hours. 

The man with the most to gain from erasing history – other than the guy who incited the riot – is, of course, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy of California. By continuing to downplay the events of January 6, McCarthy is hoping fellow Republicans can use their gerrymandered districts across the country to reclaim control of the House next year. McCarthy, as craven and vacuous a politician as our craven and vacuous age is able to produce, would then almost certainly become Speaker of the House. 

“After the House chamber was evacuated on January 5, Mr. McCarthy retreated to his Capitol office with a colleague, Representative Bruce Westerman, Republican of Arkansas,” Mark Leibovich reported recently in the New York Times. “When it became evident the rioters were breaking in, Mr. McCarthy’s security detail insisted he leave.” But Representative Westerman was left behind, as he confirmed in a recent interview.

Fearing for his own life, while rioters shouted “hang Mike Pence” Westerman said he grabbed a Civil War sword from a display in McCarthy’s office and then barricaded himself in the minority leader’s private bathroom, waiting out the siege, crouching on the toilet.

To appreciate the extent of the effort by McCarthy and numerous others to diminish and ultimately dismiss January 6, you have to recall in some detail what transpired in the immediate aftermath of the riot and then analyze that information side by side with what is happening now. 

While the riot was underway, McCarthy called the instigator at the White House to implore him to call off his mob. We know this because Washington state congresswoman Jamie Herrera Beutler reported that McCarthy told her the substance of the call and that the then-president dismissed the attack, lying about its origins as the work of antifascists. 

After McCarthy told the president he was wrong – and the president knew he was wrong because he had spoken to his supporters that very day and then watched them storm the Capitol on live television – the then-president responded: “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”

House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy stands to gain from whitewashing insurrection

A week after the riot McCarthy told the entire House of Representatives, the American people and the world: “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters. He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding. These facts require immediate action by President Trump.” 

Fast forward to last Sunday when McCarthy is sitting across the table from Fox News Sunday questioner Chris Wallace. “I was the first person to contact him when the riot was going on,” McCarthy said in a feeble and fabulist effort to defend the indefensible. “He didn’t see it, but he ended the call . . . telling me he’ll put something out to make sure to stop this. And that’s what he did. He put a video out later.” Hours later. 

Recalling this timeline is important not only for what it says about the lengths political figures like McCarthy are willing to go tell us what we saw with our own eyes and heard with our own ears didn’t really happen, but also because it’s a reminder that the shape shifting McCarthy is no outlier as a Republican whitewasher. 

With a very few notable exceptions, Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney, Herrera Beutler, and Congressman Adam Kinzinger of Illinois among them, the vast majority of Republican officeholders have quietly and gladly moved on from January 6. Northwest lawmakers like Idaho’s Mike Simpson and Washington’s Cathy McMorris Rogers immediately decided they wouldn’t hold the highest figure in the government accountable for his actions leading up to and including January 6. They have said nothing of substance about it since. 

Idaho Congressman Russ Fulcher remains deeply implicated in the January 6 events due to his very public efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, so his silence about the still unfolding aftermath and efforts to whitewash history makes sense, at least from the standpoint of avoiding having his reprehensible role in encouraging the violence highlighted over and over. 

No Northwest Republican has called for the kind of investigation of January 6 that would in more normal, rational times receive bipartisan support. No major Republican figure in Idaho has joined Cheney in saying the riot instigator should have no future in the party. None have acknowledged that the domestic terrorism behind the insurrection has been, as the FBI director said in March, “metastasizing across the country for a long time now, and it’s not going away anytime soon.” 

“The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack,” Liz Cheney said back in January. “Everything that followed was his doing.” 

Morally deficient Republicans want us to forget the single greatest threat to democracy in our lifetime. They lack courage. And honesty. It’s up to us to hold them to account just like those who stormed the Capitol to kill, maim and destroy democracy must be held to account.  

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

For your consideration…some worthwhile items…

PANDEMICS – THEN AND NOW

John Barry is the historian of the 1918 pandemic. He writes in Wilson Quarterly about the lessons learned and lost from the last time the world faced what the world is still facing. 

“In 1918, the public was lied to, and the lies mattered. Initially, when the public still believed official pronouncements, lies killed people who exposed themselves. But soon deaths became too common for anyone to trust what the government said. I believe that ultimately society is based on trust, and as trust dissipates, society begins to fray; one saw this alienation in 1918 both in large cities and rural communities – even to the extent that people starved to death because others lacked courage to bring them food.” 

Read the full piece. Worth your time. 

HOW DONALD TRUMP WANTED THE END OF HISTORY

The great Rebecca Solnit reckons with the end of the last presidency. 

“To those who opposed him, the years felt like a constant barrage of insults to fact, truth, science, of attacks on laws, on rights, on targeted populations from Muslims to trans kids, on the environment, on scientists, on institutions that might protect or promulgate any of these preceding things, and on memory itself. It was a disorder from which we were forever trying to emerge into order, like people clawing a slimy bank, only to slump back into the ooze.”

Read her piece here:

NEVER STUPID TO ASK QUESTIONS 

“Philip Marlowe, that most self-reliant of fictional detectives, had no boss and no one to boss around. Not so his creator, Raymond Chandler, who needed some help.”

Chandler

I love Chandler’s stories. This is good. 

Thanks for reading. Be careful out there.

2020 Election, GOP, Idaho Politics

It Was a Deadly Stunt…

Posted on by mjohnson

When it comes to outstanding members of Congress Idaho’s sprawling 1st District isn’t known for them. Over the last half century, the district has frequently been represented by a collection of non-entities, clowns and down right embarrassments. The sanity of an occasional member like Jim McClure or Larry LaRocco hardly makes up for the cranks, mountebanks and conspiracists like Helen Chenoweth, Bill Sali and Raul Labrador. 

Chenoweth, who long ago flirted with the kind of malevolent criminal militia-types who attacked Congress last week, was an early adherent to the nutty fiction that “the deep state” employed black helicopters “filled with United Nations-sponsored storm troopers eager to swoop into the broken-down ranches of the rural West and impose international law.” 

Sali argued that there was a direct link between abortion and breast cancer and Labrador, as ambitious as slimy Texas Senator Ted Cruz but without the charm, held firmly when he lied that “nobody dies because they don’t have access to health care.”

Yet, even considering this gallery of forgettables, has any Idaho member of Congress ever so completely debased themselves in the service of political ambition and crackpot conspiracy theories as the 1st District’s current piece of furniture, Representative Russ Fulcher?

For a virtually unknown backbencher, January 6, 2021 began with heady stuff for Fulcher, who one suspects most of his 434 colleagues couldn’t pick out of a lineup. Up early and primed for sedition, Fulcher was booked, in the language of the Beltway, for “a hit” on Fox News where he was introduced as a participant in “the final challenge to the 2020 election.” 

The Fox interviewer announced that aw shucks Russ would explain his objections “to the Electoral College result.” And so, he did. 

Idaho Congressman Russ Fulcher’s January 6 Twitter feed

How will this go down, Fulcher was asked? Well, “there will be at least four states – Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia,” and then no kidding he couldn’t remember the fourth state, “that will be challenged.” 

“This is going to be a monumental day in American history,” Fulcher said, “make no mistake about it, especially if the trend continues in the state of Georgia you will see the stakes go monumentally higher.” It’s hard to tell what Fulcher meant by that, which is not surprising considering the source. Was it a reference to the two U.S. Senate seats that by the time of his interview were slipping away from Republicans to give Democrats control of the Senate? Or was he suggesting – or lying – as the president he has slavishly served has repeatedly lied, that Georgia’s presidential election results were somehow tainted. 

Those results weren’t tainted in any way, just for the record, a fact confirmed again for the umpteenth time this week by a newly installed U.S. attorney in Georgia. The previous guy in that job left abruptly when Donald Trump determined that he wasn’t working hard enough to steal the election. But back to Fulcher’s monumental day and his Fox interview.  

Why did you decide to challenge the election result, the gentleman from Idaho was asked? 

“Because,” Fulcher responded, “the fact that there were multiple states, the ones that get cued up today and challenged today simply broke their own laws.” He went on to spin a word salad of alleged election law violations devoid of a single specific example of law breaking before ending with the assurance that somehow the mere allegation of impropriety “in and of itself pulls into question the results of those elections.” 

Then the coup d’ grace: “There are tens of millions of people who want to see some action on this, and they are absolutely convinced there is election fraud.” Or put another way, despite Trumpist legal failure in dozens of vacuous lawsuits, despite the gross and now deadly lying about a stolen election, despite the statements of a bipartisan collection of state election officials, the attorney general of the United States and the Supreme Court that there is absolutely nothing to “see some action on,” Fulcher embraced warmly the biggest lie ever told in presidential politics. 

Shortly after his Fox hit, Fulcher posted, with obvious satisfaction, a photo of himself on Twitter with the line: “Formal objections filed.” He was effectively documenting his own sedition. By midafternoon, after Fulcher had joined with 146 other House Republicans in an attempt to throw out presidential votes in Arizona, he was lamenting “the violence seen today.” 

A few hours before a pro-Trump mob marched on the Capitol in an assault on Congress, Fulcher was repeating lies about a fraudulent election

But, of course, it was not merely violence, but deadly insurrection aimed squarely at the Congress where Fulcher serves, propagated in an effort to prevent the constitutionally required certification of state electoral votes. Not then and not since has Fulcher offered even a hint that the violence that claimed a half dozen lives, trashed the Capitol and saw thugs insisting that they would “hang Mike Pence” was incited by lies, including his own. He has, of course, offered no condemnation of Trump’s incendiary speech minutes before the assault on Congress. 

In subsequent interviews, including with Bill Spence of the Lewiston Tribune, Fulcher insisted he was just trying to get to the facts about the election and not overturn the result. But that’s another lie. You can’t say, as Fulcher has, that states need to run their own elections and report their own Electoral College results and at the same time lie about Congress having a role in policing what states do. 

So, what was Fulcher’s end game in this fiasco? Had the objections he lodged been sustained – he also rejected Pennsylvania’s vote and did so after the Capitol mayhem had claimed lives  – a Joe Biden victory would still not have been voided. If Fulcher supported an extra-constitutional “commission” to investigate the election as Cruz sought, he never said so. So, what he was really doing was a political performance, just a stunt. 

A stunt that magnified a gross lie. A stunt demanding something be done to get the “facts” that have never once been disputed by state election officials or any court. A stunt to gin up the rightwing militia types, the Q-Anon conspiracists, the Fox News addicted groupies, the fact free Trump base. A stunt that spawned insurrection, got people killed and shook the very foundation of democracy. 

Fulcher’s “monumental day in American history” should mark the end of his short, hideously incoherent and disgraced career in Congress.

It takes real effort to be the most disreputable person to have ever served the 1st District of Idaho, but Fulcher clearly owns that distinction. 

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Additional Reading:

Some other stories I found of interest this week…

The Duchy That Roared

Luxembourg doesn’t get a lot of press, but the tiny country sandwiched among Germany, France and Belgium did make headlines this week. The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum talked to Luxembourg’s foreign minister about his critique of the U.S. president.

“Lucky are the foreign ministers of very small, very consensus-driven countries, for those who play their cards right sometimes get to hold office for many years. One of the luckiest card players out there is Jean Asselborn, the amusing polyglot who has been the foreign minister of Luxembourg since 2004. Although his country is tiny (population 613,000), the longevity of Luxembourg’s top diplomat gives him the confidence to say what he thinks—even if it is, well, undiplomatic. Last week, following the insurrection in Washington, D.C., Asselborn did exactly that: ‘Trump is a criminal,’ he told RTL, his country’s leading broadcaster. ‘A political pyromaniac who should be sent to criminal court. He’s a person who was elected democratically but who isn’t interested in democracy in the slightest.'”

Read the entire piece:

Ted Lasso

The premise is, well, ridiculous. A small-time U.S. football coach from Kansas, the very epitome of a hayseed, is hired to manage a big time Premier League soccer club in the U.K. When a friend suggest I watch it I was reluctant, but boy am I glad I found the series on Apple+

Ted Lasso is really good

“No one expects Ted’s kindness and persistence to have a ripple effect on just about every person in the orbit of the team. In 10 deeply satisfying, funny and smartly crafted episodes, Ted Lasso avoids the most predictable jock stories, sketches a dozen indelible character portraits, and earnestly delves into the lives of people who begin to believe in each other, even as they start to make halting progress toward making amends for their cluelessness, cruel actions and mistakes.”

Go for the escapist good time and stay for the sweet messages. A good review in Vanity Fair.

Mickey Edwards Leaves the GOP

The crisis of the modern Republican Party is well stated by the former congressman from Oklahoma.

“I have been a Republican for 62 years. I have been a Goldwater conservative, a Reagan conservative, and a W conservative.

“And I have now left the Republican party. A party that has been at the center of my entire adult life. A party that defined me to others and to myself. It has become the opposite of what it was. It has become a cult idolizing a ruler, a trasher of institutions of democracy driven by falsehoods and hatreds.”

Worth your time:

See you soon. Thanks for reading.

2020 Election, GOP, Trump

The Death of the GOP

Posted on by mjohnson

It was always predictable – even inevitable – that it would end this way: defeat, disgrace, disgust and decay. After all, the whole enormous con was built on only one thing, an absolute mountain of bull excrement. 

It was predictable – even inevitable – that the fetid smell would spawn a disease that would finally stain everyone close to its source, while everyone inhaling the vapors would be left sickened and stunned.

Lying, and not merely the garden variety truth shading that has always been a feature of politics, will be the lasting take away of the last four years. That so many people, the once principled, the merely ambitious, as well as the graspers of conspiracy and the enablers of fraud, would accept it – even revel in it – will remain a mystery as the Grand Old Party splits along seams that can no longer be reconciled.

A pro-Trump rioter with a Confederate flag in the U.S. Capitol on January 6

Built on lies and ended with lies. Where the Republican Party finds itself in January of 2021 recalls nothing more clearly than Horace Greeley’s mournful lament of the last and fatal victory of the dissolving Whig Party in 1848 when an unprincipled, incompetent political outsider – Zachery Taylor – fueled that party’s destruction. Trump Republicans, like the ancient Whigs, were, in Greeley’s phrase “at once triumphant and undone.”

Each of the provable lies, the evidence of deadly incompetence and the profound corruption of the cult king must be reckoned with even as the leader’s end game – recorded on tape attempting an electoral coup by threatening fellow Republican elected officials – will leave a putrid stain on our body politic for a long, long time to come. 

That so many elected officials would willingly embrace the absurdity that a presidential election was stolen; embrace that fiction against absolutely all evidence, in opposition to five dozen unsuccessful court challenges and in the stark face of common sense, is the maximal proof of the intellectual and moral rot that has hollowed out the modern Republican Party. 

The repercussions and recriminations will be vicious and ongoing. Such it is when a coup fails. And the harshest rebukes will come from conservatives mourning the death of character and ideals in which they once found salvation and hope. 

Missouri GOP Senator Josh Hawley, a leader in attempting to reverse the outcome of the presidential election

“No one who has participated in this poisonous buffoonery should ever hold office again,” says the conservative columnist Kevin Williamson in the National Review. “There was a time when there was a plausible if sometimes self-serving rationale for working for the Trump administration — that the president is a clueless poseur surrounded by crackpots and frauds, and that he desperately needs good counsel from responsible adults. But the Trump administration is not currently under the guiding influence of any such responsible adults — and there simply is no defending what it is up to. This cannot be excused or explained away.”

As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel said of one of the most odious bootlickers, Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson: “He has violated his oath of office and in doing so, Johnson has forfeited his right to represent the people of Wisconsin.” Close to half of Congressional Republicans fit the same description. 

When the president of the United States told his Washington rally audience on Wednesday: “your leadership has led you down the tubes” he spoke for him rare truth. His sycophantic vice president, whatever reputation Mike Pence once had is now as repulsive as a wad of gum stuck to the bottom of a shoe, will be the fall guy for the enormous lie. And everyone eventually touched by this rot will forever be diminished. 

More in sorrow than anger, Utah Senator Mitt Romney told journalist McKay Coppins this week, 

“A huge portion of the American public has been misled by the president about the outcome of the election.” Romney, who will forever be remembered for having the courage to acknowledge that the president should be impeached for attempting to force a foreign leader to interfere in an American election, is the rare conservative officeholder speaking truth about the scams. “The president was right that there was an effort to corrupt the election,” Romney said, “but it was not by Joe Biden. It was by President Trump.”

Pick your outrage of the last four years: the inexplicable embrace of Putin, the scandalous pardons of murderers and crooks, often only to serve the cult king, the stoking of racial and anti-immigrant hatred, refugee children separated from their parents, claims that a deadly disease that has claimed 360,000 American lives was “a hoax,” a stolen election. 

It has all been a lie, a con, an unprincipled embrace of authoritarianism unprecedented in our history. To ignore this, to tolerate it, to act in its service is the most fundamental debasement of democracy. 

What should have ended – ended before all this carnage came – with a videotaped confession that this cult leader was so depraved as to not only abuse women, but boast about it, ended in deprave insurrection in the halls of the U.S. Capitol, a monumental outrage incited by a lying poseur unfit for jury duty let alone the Oval Office.

This dark and demented man, as writer Neal Gabler observed recently, “has stripped away the vestiges of morality, enthroned self-interest — particularly his own — over common good, inverted our values, and ripped the needle off the moral compass, leaving us aimless at best, cruel at worst. It is important to emphasize that our democracy has never been protected by constitutional guardrails, which are altogether too fragile. It has always been protected by something stronger: our moral underpinnings.”

Capitol Police using flash devices to push back the Trump mob

And now Republicans have demolished their moral underpinnings in service to what, a man who promised his fevered followers “so much winning,” but who in fact has presided over a party putting forth such a stream of craziness that Republicans lost the House, the Senate, the presidency and its soul on his watch. 

“The Republicans are not debating big ideas: economic policy, national security, the role of government,” journalist David Corn wrote this week. “The debate is whether to join Trump’s clownish but dangerous attempt at a political coup. There is nothing noble here. Do you accept Trump’s democracy-defying cult of personality or not? For Trump and his followers, this is now what makes a Republican.”

This is the death of reason. The demise of responsibility. And one suspects there is no turning back from this level of madness. Once you embrace sedition, as so many Republicans did this week, what is the end game? 

How appropriate, since Republicans have floated all the way down to the bottom with their mad leader, that loudspeakers at the “Overturn the Election” rally on the Ellipse in our capitol earlier this week were playing the theme from the motion picture Titanic.

Then they stormed your government and he said he loved them.

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Additional Reading:

A few other things I found of interest this week…

Now It Can Be Told: How Neil Sheehan Got the Pentagon Papers

One of the great journalists of the Vietnam era, Neil Sheehan of the New York Times, died this week, having left the “how did that happen” question unanswered regarding his biggest story – the publication in 1971 of the Pentagon Papers. Sheehan told the story to another reporter in 2015 on condition that it not be published until after his death.

Neil Sheehan’s historic scoop

“Recounting the steps that led to his breaking the story, Mr. Sheehan told of aliases scribbled into the guest registers of Massachusetts motels; copy-shop machines crashing under the burden of an all-night, purloined-document load; photocopied pages stashed in a bus-station locker; bundles belted into a seat on a flight from Boston; and telltale initials incinerated in a diplomat’s barbecue set.

“He also revealed that he had defied the explicit instructions of his confidential source, whom others later identified as Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst who had been a contributor to the secret history while working for the Rand Corporation.”

Fascinating. Read the whole thing.

John le Carré

A great piece by John Leen in The Washington Post Magazine.

“He may be better known to you as John le Carré. John the Square. A French pseudonym he chose when he was writing his first spy novels in the late 1950s, when he was still unknown and still a spy himself. The name stuck. He told me that story himself. Then he told me he had told so many stories about the name that he was not exactly sure which one was right anymore. But he was always just David to me. I never called him John.”

Read the story here.

Is There a Republican Party?

Photo from The New Yorker in 1935

One of the New Yorker’s vintage pieces from 1935. It’s pretty good.

“The humorist Frank Sullivan was a master of sly, whimsical sketches that punctured the armor of the smug and sanctimonious. A member of the Algonquin Round Table, he served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army before turning his attention to reporting. His eventual shift toward humor was almost incidental, inspired by a remark by the editor of the New York World after an unfortunate reporting assignment: ‘You’re too emotional for the news columns, Sullivan!'”

Worth your time. 

The Reason Button Down Shirts Have Loops in the Back

OK, not a burning issue, but you know you have wondered. From Mental Floss.

“The apparel industry has presented a number of intriguing mysteries over the years. We’ve previously covered why clothes shrink in the wash, deciphered the laundry care tags on clothes, and figured out why shorts cost as much as pants. But one enduring puzzle persists: What’s with that weird loop on the back of button-down shirts?”

Here’s the answer.

Quite a week. Thanks for reading. Stay well.

2020 Election, GOP

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

Posted on by mjohnson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Additional Reading:

A few other items worth your time this week…

How Biden Should Investigate Trump

James Fallows in The Atlantic…

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

Fallows has a few ideas.

How Trump Changed America 

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

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

From the website FiveThirtyEight:

Maradona: The God of Argentina

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

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

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

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

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

Read the whole thing.

Thanks for reading…be safe.