At this stage of a presidential campaign it can become difficult to keep up with, let alone keep straight the flood of noise and bombast dominating the television screen or interrupting your dinner with one final desperate plea for – pick one or more – money, a vote, a response to a survey, an attack on a candidate …
I’ve come to value the days when presidential candidates campaigned from their front porches, greeting delegations of visitors and largely ignoring the kind of bat crappery that has become the essence of American political campaigns.
Our campaigns don’t really tell us much about the candidates, but they sure tell us a lot about the country, which is why it’s important to find the few nuggets of enlightenment in our political sewage treatment plant of nonsense.
Two bits of current enlightenment seem important with both casting light on fellow Americans who seem willing to embrace, for the third time, the fake everyman from Queens who promises to be a dictator, but only on his first day back in office.
The first ray of enlightenment involves the former Fox News talking head Tucker Carlson, a trust fund man of the people whose present shtick involved serving as a propaganda vehicle for the Butcher of Kiev, Vladimir Putin. (You may recall that Carlson interviewed the great man a while back, an interview that largely consisted of Putin schooling the Swanson TV dinner heir on the fine points of Russian history – Putin style – since the days of the Czars.)
In every conceivable way the interview was embarrassing, particularly if you understand Carlson’s motive for traveling to Moscow to interview a dictator, which was, of course, to simply kiss up to a dictator. And not just any dictator, but one who has – remarkably – grown in favor with many far-right Americans while trying to wipe Ukraine off the map.
Not incidentally, the Justice Department moved this week to shutdown Russian disinformation schemes again designed to effect the November election.
Wow, it really is the Russia thing – again.
Carlson, a featured speaker at the recent Republican National Convention who helped convince Donald Trump to select J.D. Vance as his running mate, has now doubled down on normalizing historical revision.
On a recent podcast Carlson featured a two-hour interview with “historian” Darryl Cooper – “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States,” Carlson said – who declared Winston Churchill the true “villain” of World War II and preposterously claimed that Adolf Hitler really didn’t seek the most gruesome war in human history.
“He didn’t want to fight,” Cooper said of the man who invaded Poland 85 years ago this month, beginning World War II. For good measure Carlson’s “honest” historian threw in a big dose of Holocaust denial, while the Trump whisperer let him talk and talk and talk.
“Actually, this is pro-Nazi propaganda,” said the conservative truth-teller Liz Cheney, the former congresswoman from Wyoming who was run out of the Republican Party for opposing Trump.
But it is actually worse than mere propaganda. It is calculated Kremlin-inspired disinformation on a vast scale designed to confuse and misrepresent history in the interest of elevating a view that western democracy is at fault in the long twilight struggle against authoritarianism.
Moreover, Carlson is the leading media figure in Trump World, a confidante of the former president, who crackpottery seems to know no boundaries. Carlson speaks and the Trump base responds, no matter the level of offensive BS that tumbles out of his microphone.
Yet, when you consider that the party that once celebrated American exceptionalism is now led by a man who avoided military service, trashes military heroes like the late John McCain, sides with Putin and bases his current campaign on the ridiculous notion that America has failed, it somehow follows that the party’s most prominent media figure is Tucker Carlson, crackpot.
But there is more.
Donald Trump’s gross and grossly incorrect 2015 comments about McCain not deserving hero status because he had been captured should have, in any sane world, ended any thought of him in the White House. That did not happen because party leaders tolerated the McCain slander that only grew, as his Marine general chief of staff confirmed, into calling Americans killed in World War I “suckers and losers” and climaxed with Trump questioning the value of the Medal of Honor.
But since Trump World has no bottom, there is always room to go lower as Trump did with his blatant political stunt at Arlington National Cemetery, a photo op designed to give a draft dodger a platform to criticize his opponent for the pullout of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
Like the authoritarian leader he intends to become, Trump’s campaign ignored laws about not using hollowed Arlington ground for political purposes, and when confronted manhandled a civilian employee of the cemetery attempting to enforce the law. In the process, as the Washington Post detailed, Trump systematically misrepresented his own role in the Afghan departure to the very people who lost loved ones there.
The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg has written extensively about Trump’s attitudes toward those who have served their country. “The record is plain,” Goldberg says. “This is the truth of Donald Trump: He has contempt for men and women who serve their country.”
The military men who served under Trump – Generals John Kelly, Jim Mattis, Mark Milley, among others – confirm his unfitness for office.
So here is a nugget of enlightenment at the dark heart of our politics: Conservatives, up and down the Republican Party, have tolerated and embraced a truly unfit and unAmerican individual as their candidate. And most of them will easily shrug off the Carlson holocaust denial, the Hitler revisionism and the Arlington stunt for reasons that I cannot adequately explain.
We are left with this, again from Jeffrey Goldberg.
“If you could count on anything in America, and especially in Republican politics – if you had a list titled ‘Things Republican Candidates Cannot Do’ – I think ‘insulting war heroes’ would be near the top of that list. Our society venerates combat heroes. Trump very often treats them with open contempt. Just think about how he has repeatedly demeaned wounded veterans, demanding that they be kept out of parades, out of his sight. And yet Republicans have nominated him for president three times. I still cannot adequately explain it.”
There is no explaining such nonsense.
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Additional Reading:
If Republicans Want to Win, They Need Trump to Lose — Big
I have little expectation that a Trump loss, even a big loss, would cause a redirection of the Republican Party, or a return to more traditional conservatism. But in this piece Jonathan Martin of Politico makes the case, as I do believe, that many GOP officeholders are sick and tired of the Trump nonsense and chaos.
They want him gone. They just can’t – or won’t – say it.
As Martin writes: “As they’ve demonstrated for going on a decade now, Republican leaders will repeatedly bow to the preference of their base over their own judgment when it comes to Trump.”
Therefore, no reason to think that is going to change. Read the entire piece.
The Baseball Hall of Fame
I had one of my “bucket list” experiences recently during a day-long visit – I could have stayed longer – at the fabulous baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.
What a great, great place.
I was particularly moved by an outstanding exhibit devoted to the great Henry Aaron, a great player and I think an even better person.
If you enjoy baseball. Go to the Hall. You won’t be disappointed.
Here’s a story about the dedication of the Aaron statute earlier this year.
“The Hall of Fame wanted the Aaron statue at the entrance because that’s how it’d make the greatest impact. As thousands enter the Hall each year, they’ll first be greeted by Aaron, in his Braves uniform, propping himself with a bat.”
Thanks for reading. Do what you can to impact the coming election. Democracy is on the ballot.