2024 Election, Trump

The Gaslighting of America …

Posted on by mjohnson

I filed this column on Thursday before President Biden’s Sunday decision to step out of the presidential race, but that incredibly significant event doesn’t change the essential need for the party of Donald Trump to confuse, lie and distort the reality of the last eight years.

Buckle up, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

——

“Gaslighting is an insidious form of manipulation and psychological control. Victims of gaslighting are deliberately and systematically fed false information that leads them to question what they know to be true, often about themselves. They may end up doubting their memory, their perception, and even their sanity. Over time, a gaslighter’s manipulations can grow more complex and potent, making it increasingly difficult for the victim to see the truth.” — Psychology Today

———

In the 105 days until American voters elect their next president, we will experience the greatest deluge of political gaslighting in the long history of the republic.

We’ll be told that God spared Donald Trump at his Pennsylvania rally and, by logical extension, God apparently cared nothing for a retired firefighter who died at that same rally trying to protect his family.

Presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump gestures as he gives his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S., July 18, 2024. REUTERS/Mike Segar

We’ll be told the one-time views of JD Vance, Trump’s new running mate — like the views of so many others in his party — have “evolved,” that Vance no longer views the three-time Republican presidential candidate as possibly “America’s Hitler,” and that those who vote for him must be “idiots.”

We’ll be told that the inexcusable, horrendous violence that marked the Trump rally was prompted by Democrats and others who have the courage to highlight the manifest dangers of another Trump term. We can and should thank God that Trump was spared, both for the humanity of that thanksgiving but also because — at least temporarily — the violence that might have been set off has been tempered.

We’ll be asked to forget that it was the three-time Republican candidate for president who called fellow Americans vermin, who pledged to provide retribution to match the grievances of his white Christian nationalist followers, who joked about the vicious attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, who summoned a mob to Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, with a promise that it would be “wild” and then did nothing when that mob chanted: “Hang Mike Pence.”

We’ll be told to disregard Trump’s 34 felony convictions and his civil liability for sexual assault and defamation of his victim.

We’ll be told that “justice prevailed” when a Trump-appointed judge did everything in her power to delay adjudication of charges that Trump illegally removed top secret documents from the White House and stashed them in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom. And when delay was no longer enough, the judge totally dismissed the charges citing justification as flimsy as J. D. Vance’s resume.

We’ll be told the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity — a case almost certainly shielding Trump from any future accountability for January 6 and the worst Supreme Court decision since the Dred Scott case — was not all that big a deal, just good conservative constitutional rewriting from the bench.

We’ll be told Trump presided over the greatest economy since the beginning of time, that he handled a deadly pandemic and its million victims “beautifully” and that the hundreds of former officials who worked for him and saw him up close and came to consider him unfit are just a bunch of losers.

“I have no idea who is behind it,” Trump said of the Heritage Foundation’s catalogue of grotesque policy proposals, the so-called Project 2025. We’ll be told time and again that the 140 ex-Trump staffers involved in the plan that would destroy the nonpartisan civil service, gut Social Security, implement mass deportations, cripple the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and heap benefits on the wealthiest among us is nothing more than a random collection of policies, not an astonishingly crackpot blueprint for a second, authoritarian Trump term.

Vance’s positions — a national abortion ban, ending support for Ukraine and opposition to same-sex marriage — will be minimized and, where possible, ignored. He’s a Yale graduate masquerading as a bearded hillbilly from Appalachia. But since he looks the part and coat-checked his character before entering the Senate chamber, he’s the perfect Trumpian Mini-Me.

Inventing “alternative facts” has been the Trump — and now the Republican Party — playbook since they claimed the largest crowd in the history of presidential inaugurations showed up in Washington, D.C., in 2017. And make no mistake: These fabrications are ripped from the playbook of every demagogue, every charlatan, every would-be authoritarian who ever craved public attention and sought unbridled political power.

The gaslighting has only one purpose: to get as many Americans as possible to consume enough “false information that (it) leads them to question what they know to be true, often about themselves.”

The grifting MAGA podcast host Steve Bannon, now behind bars for refusing to tell Congress what he knows about January 6, distilled the essence of Trumpism when he said it was about “flooding the zone with shit.”

“What we’re facing is a new form of propaganda that wasn’t really possible until the digital age,” Sean Illing wrote in 2020. “And it works not by creating a consensus around any particular narrative but by muddying the waters so that consensus isn’t achievable.”

Sort the crap from the important while remembering even a fraction of the Trump actions that have brought our country to this extraordinarily dangerous moment is simply exhausting. Many give up and give in.

Yet, facts are facts. The Republican presidential candidate, celebrated this week by his cult following, is a twice-impeached convicted felon who stole national security secrets and owes millions to a woman he defamed after losing a civil trial for sexual assault. He lies repeatedly about a “stolen” election that he lost, and he desperately tried to cling to power by inciting a violent mob to attack the seat of our government. His own vice president stopped the formal part of the Trump insurrection. You can bet a Vice President Vance will carry out any orders no matter how extra-constitutional they might be.

All that is left this a question: Is this the kind of country you want to pass along to a next generation? Do you really want a felon in thrall to Russian President Vladimir Putin with his stubby finger on the nuclear button?

As the always-sensible journalist Margaret Sullivan wrote recently: “Let’s be steered not by political opportunism, delusion and blame-casting, but by a more constant North Star: the rule of law and the truth.”

Were it to be. Were it possible to be.

—–0—–

Further Reading:

City Manager Announces Resignation, Says She Was Bullied

This may just be one of the most depressing stories I’ve read in a week of depressing stories.

“Despite having moved the city forward on many fronts, Kelsey Young said she has received abusive calls from a handful of people in the community and, as such, has decided to take up a city manager position in another city twice the size of Sweet Home.”

The city manager of Sweet Home, Oregon (apparently not everyone there is all that sweet) is leaving her job because of … threats. The. City. Manager.

Not New York or Atlanta, but Sweet Home, population 9,828.

Read the entire story.

You Think This Year’s Presidential Conventions Will Be Crazy? 1924’s Fights Over the Ku Klux Klan Were Wilder

I’ve long been fascinated by the Democratic convention of 1924, held in New York City and featuring an epic party split over the Klan, and the Republican convention held in Cleveland to bless the candidacy of Calvin Coolidge. Both parties struggled to condemn the Klan (sort of) without alienating its followers.

“In 1924, both Republicans and Democrats tried and failed to find broadly acceptable language to denounce racist hate speech and hate crimes. One hundred years later, the problem remains. It’s not that we can’t find quite the words to express shared values. It’s a frightening lack of clarity about whether the values needed to make democracy work—tolerance, inclusion, equality—are widespread enough in the first place.”

Good piece. And there is a terrific book about the Democratic convention in 1924 – Robert Murray’s The 103rd Ballot. That’s how long it took the party to nominate a guy who lost big time.

Thanks for reading. All the best.

2024 Election, Nixon, Supreme Court, Trump

Nixon’s Revenge …

Posted on by mjohnson

If you enjoy a little irony to compliment your summer this has been a week for you.

Irony one: on the day the United States Supreme Court dramatically realigned our historic understanding that “no man is above the law,” granting every former president “absolute immunity” for acts committed in their official capacity, former Donald Trump advisor Steve Bannon reported to jail for refusing to provide information to Congress about the failed Trump coup attempt on January 6, 2021.

Bannon in the slammer, Trump leads in the polls

Bannon, whose reason to be centers on dismantling the “administrative state,” is a world-class grifter who stands to enlarge his toxic influence in a second Trump administration. Bannon has no more cause to be near the presidency than does the man he worked for, but while he is paying a (small) price – four months in a minimum security prison – the instigator of the coup, thanks to the Supreme Court, will likely never face any consequence for one of the most heinous acts in the long history of the Republic.

If Trump makes it back to the presidency – an increasingly likely outcome – he will never face a jury for trying to overturn an election or any of his other crimes, while the flabby mouthpiece of white nationalism and a proponent of the January 6 insurrection goes to jail, not for cheerleading the riot but for refusing to talk to Congress about cheerleading the riot.

Another irony: While Americans celebrate the nation’s independence this week, a movement initiated 248 years ago against a mentally unstable English king, the Supreme Court has effectively put the once and future crimes of an American president out of reach of the vaunted “rule of law.”

A certifiably crazy former president is now set to be a certifiably crazy king.

As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent against the Court’s gobsmackingly outrageous decision – “immune, immune, immune, immune.”  

“We are the United State of Amnesia,” the novelist Gore Vidal once wrote, “we learn nothing because we remember nothing.”

Remembering nothing, for instance, like Richard Nixon. Fifty years after Nixon resigned the presidency under a cloud of crimes associated with the Watergate caper that the Supreme Court has now decided that was no big deal. Nixon acted as president when he authorized the CIA to concoct a cover story for the break in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee in 1972. He was acting in his official capacity when he ordered the break in of the doctor’s office where the medical records of the leaker of the Pentagon Papers were housed. Nixon was acting officially when he order hush money payments to keep witnesses quiet.

“As I looked at it, I realized Richard Nixon would have had a pass,” said no less an authority than John Dean, the White House counsel who helped reveal the extent of Nixon’s crimes.

“Virtually all of his Watergate-related conduct,” Dean said and, “virtually all that evidence falls in what could easily be described as ‘official conduct.’”

And here’s law professor Jeffrey Toobin writing in the Washington Post: “The strongest evidence that Nixon obstructed justice in the Watergate investigation was the so-called smoking gun tape of June 23, 1972. In that conversation, Nixon told H.R. Haldeman, his chief of staff, to instruct the CIA to tell the FBI to curtail its investigation of the Watergate break-in on spurious national security grounds. Nixon told Haldeman: ‘When you get … these people in, say, ‘Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing. … That will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab there’s a hell of a lot of things and that we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further.

“Under Trump v. United States, Nixon’s statement would not amount to obstruction of justice because it related to his ‘official’ duties — that is, supervising the FBI and CIA. ‘Investigative and prosecutorial decision-making is ‘the special province of the Executive Branch,’ Roberts wrote, ‘and the Constitution vests the entirety of the executive power in the President.’ Accordingly, ‘the President cannot be prosecuted for conduct within his exclusive constitutional authority.'”

Nixon, of course, accepted a pardon from President Gerald Ford for the simple reason that he knew he faced prosecution for the crimes he committed and abetted. Now, the Supreme Court says forget it. Turns out Nixon was right when, after his resignation, he infamously told interviewer David Frost, “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”

Richard Nixon in a screen shot from his post-presidential interview with David Frost

Toobin argues that the evidence of Nixon’s obstruction, the “smoking gun” audio recording, could not, under Roberts anti-constitutional reading be used as evidence. That’s right. Read it again.

“What the prosecutor may not do, however,” Roberts wrote based on nothing more than his own ideology and aiming for his desired outcome, “is admit testimony or private records of the President or his advisers probing the official act itself. Allowing that sort of evidence would invite the jury to inspect the President’s motivations for his official actions and to second-guess their propriety.”

The ultimate Trump card delivered by not a conservative Supreme Court, but a radical and reactionary court with a majority more activist than judicial, more driven by its desire for a political outcome than by fidelity to the Constitution.

But it that this American way? Do we really want to encourage an already overly powerful president to have the ability to commit crimes in his official capacity and be held immune for his actions? Is this the way our 248 year experiment in checked and balanced government ends?

To see where this is going read the dissents to Chief Justice John Roberts’ outrageous opinion for the court, an entirely ahistorical document that would almost certainly make even the old Watergate defendant squirm.

“Never in the history of our Republic has a President had reason to believe that he would be immune from criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal law,” Justice Sotomayor wrote. “Moving forward, however, all former Presidents will be cloaked in such immunity. If the occupant of that office misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop.”

Sotomayor ended with this: “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”

Roberts dismissed such concerns with the high handed authoritarian impulse he has now effectively amended the Constitution to permit. He argues that a president, shielded now with immunity granted by six unelected judges, has the power to be “bold.”

Was Nixon being “bold” when he initiated the coverup of his crimes, all done, by the way, to further his own political prospects and to punish his political enemies?

Unlike Roberts, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has read history. In her dissent Jackson quotes the great Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and in the process demolishes the claim that the Constitution encourages an all-powerful executive.

The Constitution’s “separation of powers was adopted by the Convention of 1787,” Brandeis wrote in 1926, “not to promote efficiency but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power. The purpose was, not to avoid friction, but . . . to save the people from autocracy.”

Final irony: a former president with autocratic ambitions – Trump took to social media this week to assert, that is to lie, that former Congresswoman Liz Cheney had committed “treason” for investigating his coup activities – has had those ambitions supercharged by the authority of the nation’s highest court.

In short, the Supreme Court majority – three of them appointed by Trump – has vastly increased the likelihood that should he gain office again Trump will rule like the “dictator” he has pledged to become.

Joe Biden had an awful debate last week. He’s too old to be president. He should stand down. Trump’s court has emboldened his desire for absolute power and his lust for revenge against his opponents. What a choice.

We can have a dime store Nixon with a third the mental capacity of that corrupt former president and ten times the venality, or we can have a diminished man whose entire career supports the American ideals the Supreme Court has now kicked in the ditch.

With fear for our democracy, I despair.

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

A couple of other items of interest …

We may not have kings in America, but we now have ‘official acts’

Montana journalist Darrell Ehrlick captures my own mood of despair with this telling essay.

“The Fourth of July has always been a happy occasion to celebrate the inspired ideals that have set us apart, not because we were able to reach the lofty concepts given to us by our founders, but because they continue to call us to be something exceptional.

“But today, we have the man who wrote ‘Proud to Be An American’ hawking cheap Bibles along with a convicted rapist who talks openly about becoming a dictator on Day One of a presidency and taking revenge on his enemies, and a Supreme Court who says a president is above the law just by uttering a magical incantation of ‘official act.'”

The piece won’t make you feel any better, but it’s heartfelt and honest.

Small cities in US Rust belt are leading an urban transformation charge

Something here at least a bit uplifting.

“At a time when some major US cities are grappling with business closures and high rents, a number of small, post-industrial cities in the midwest are experiencing a boom centered on their downtown cores.

“In Lansing, Michigan, another former industrial hub that’s lost tens of thousands of residents since its mid-20th century heyday, local and state authorities plan to invest more than a quarter-billion dollars on housing, a music and arts center and other community projects.

“Similar experiences are playing out in Dayton, Ohio; Charleston, West Virginia; and other smaller, once-struggling manufacturing towns.”

From The Guardian.

That’s all I got this week. Stay safe … and cool if you can.

2024 Election, Idaho Politics, Law and Justice, Trump

The Second Big Lie …

Posted on by mjohnson

The Trump Era – and, of course, the convicted felon himself – have done potentially irreparable harm to American democracy by perpetuating the greatest lie in our history, namely that a presidential election was fraudulent.

By repeating this lie over and over and over again an idea has been deeply embedded in the minds of millions that no election save the one Donald Trump wins is legitimate. All the court cases, the indictments and convictions for election interference, all the fraud of this big lie has reshaped American politics.

One poll earlier this year found one-third of Americans continue to believe the lie, and apparently there is no dissuading them.

Supporting Trump after his felony conviction is the gist of the second big lie

The January 6, 2021 insurrection at our nation’s Capital was a natural outcome of this enormous lie. People who believed Trump and his fellow lie spreaders, and some who clearly wanted to believe, attempted to halt the peaceful transfer of power, a bedrock concept of American democracy that was never before in doubt, even in the tumultuous days before our Civil War.

Now comes Trump’s second big lie, namely that his recent conviction in a New York state court on 34 felony counts was a rigged process perpetrated by a “weaponized” U.S. Justice Department acting at the direction of the president of the United States.

This lie, as with the other big one, has now been amplified by nearly every Republican member of Congress, many of them with law degrees, providing at least a modicum of evidence that they know better, but still they lie.

Idaho: One State’s Embrace of the Big Lies

Consider the stunning pandering to Trump of former prosecutor now senator James E. Risch.

“As a former prosecutor,” Risch said, “I learned early the importance of our constitutional right to the due process of law. Due process is simply basic fairness … New York’s mock trial did not attempt even an appearance of fairness.”

Or Mike Crapo, a Harvard educated lawyer, who took to social media to proclaim that “a politically motivated prosecutor has ashamedly and unprecedentedly weaponized the legal system against a former United States President.” A “dangerous move,” the senator said, “threatening the security of our entire justice system.”

Or Congressman Mike Simpson, in full MAGA dudgeon and singing from the Trump script, also invoked the term “weaponized.” Trump’s unanimous guilty verdict, Simpson thundered, was the result of an “absurd political trial.”

Or Congressman Russ Fulcher: “Americans are awake; the current president’s unjust sham trial of a political opponent has mobilized an army of freedom-loving Americans to take our country back!” Fulcher actually attempted a twofer with his denunciation of the justice system, for good measure throwing in a reference to “unsecured elections.”

Let’s unpack the views of this Grand Old Party of “law and order,” as it once could call itself, by remembering an old saying that has never seemed more pertinent: “If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell.”

First, and most strikingly, no Republican, least not the four mentioned here, proclaimed Trump’s innocence. None dealt with the actual charges brought against him, including falsifying business records to hide a hush money payment related to his one night stand with adult film actress Stormy Daniels. Through this illegal scheme, prosecutors argued, and a 12 person jury agreed, Trump was determined to keep the tryst with a porn star secret from voters by paying hush money. The timing of these acts matter because at the time they happened the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, where Trump bragged of grabbing women’s genitals, had recently been released.

This second big lie, like the first, can’t be bothered by evidence presented or the deliberate judicial process that brought 12 jurors to a unanimous decision. None of this was manufactured. Donald Trump did this to himself.

Then there is the Trumpian charge that Joe Biden engineered all this – “the current president’s unjust sham trial” – simply to get his political opponent. Again the facts are inconvenient.

New York prosecutor, Alvin Bragg, is a state prosecutor not answerable to the Justice Department. Biden didn’t appoint him. New York voters elected him just as Ada County voters elected Risch back in his prosecutor days. Trump might have been prosecuted in federal court for his crimes, but he wasn’t. It was a state-level prosecution based on state law.

And what of the “weaponized” Justice Department of a Democratic administration? Maybe Republicans are referring to the “weaponized” prosecution of the president’s son, Hunter Biden, by the U.S government.

Or perhaps Republicans are thinking of the “weaponized” prosecution on federal corruption charges, again by the Biden Justice Department, of two Democratic – New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez and Texas Congressman Henry Cuellar. Menendez is being prosecuted for, among other things, accepting payoffs from foreign governments, a charge problematic enough for Democrats that they risk a safe Senate seat as a result. Yet, Biden’s “weaponized” Justice Department is pressing the case against a high profile Democrat.

And what of those 12 New York jurors? It was telling that Trump trial judge, New York County Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, told potential jurors at the outset of jury selection that anyone who didn’t want to be considered for the Trump jury could simply leave. Many did, presumably some of them not eager to run the risk of being harassed, or worse, by Trump and his followers.

The remaining jurors, including all those selected for the trial, were subject to vetting by Trump’s defense team. The dozen selected, at least before the verdict, satisfied those lawyers.

Imagine their responsibility: The first former president indicted and convicted of a felony. That these jurors took their civic duty as a solemn, patriotic responsibility of citizenship deserves not only respect but deference.

Calling the Trump trial an “absurd political trial,” as Simpson did, or a “mock trial,” as Risch has done has one particularly pernicious outcome. It denigrates the American citizens who served on that jury – the people who actually heard the evidence and had the duty to sift through all of it – despite knowing they might well jeopardize their own personal safety by signing on for the responsibility.

And what are these Idaho elected officials saying by playing their own voters for such rubes? How do they credibly dismiss 34 felony convictions? And what of the 54 charges still pending against Trump? Is each and every one a manufactured “absurd political trial” where “mock” justice will play out?

We know – all of us know – why Risch and Crapo and the rest are behaving as they are. They are afraid.

Afraid of Trump.

Afraid of the MAGA mob.

Afraid of a future primary opponent.

Afraid of losing a job.

Afraid, as former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan has discovered, that one can be cast out of the party of “law and order” for simply saying that Americans should respect the outcome of a trial.

The second big lie joins the first as Trump’s contribution to America’s future. Recovery from these lies will not be easy or quick, and the next few months will determine whether recovery is even possible.

This November we will not merely elect a president. We will conduct a referendum on whether American institutions, including courts and judges and juries, can again be respected and defended.

Tragically, many Republicans have already voted NO.

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

A few other items of note …

A Republican Election Clerk vs. Trump Die-Hards in a World of Lies

Remarkable story here about how the lies have impacted a long-time county clerk in a rural county in Nevada.

“This is actually insane,” said Angela Jewell, the deputy clerk. “This is how democracies end. There must be some way to reason with a few of these people.”

Link to full story here.

The MLB just integrated its records. The Pulitzers should follow baseball’s lead

“Now and then since 1974, the Pulitzer Prize Board has offered special citations to figures, mostly in music and the arts. These have included Black artists such as Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Scott Joplin and Aretha Franklin, who joined white honorees such as George Gershwin, Bob Dylan and Hank Williams.

“The work of those Black artists could certainly be joined with future Pulitzer Legacy Prize winners which, over time, would create a coherent historical, literary, cultural, and journalistic record that would fill out the story of America’s greatness.”

Great piece from Poynter.

The death and life of the great British pub

I’m a sucker for this kind of story.

“Dave Murphy was 11 in 1978, the year his parents signed their first lease at the Golden Lion, and moved the family in to rooms on the building’s upper storeys. Their previous home, in Holloway, had backed on to a prison. Now Dave got to tell school friends he lived in a pub. Before remaking himself as a landlord, John Murphy, originally from Cork, had worked for years in London as a bus driver. Mary, from Galway, had been a nurse. ‘You’re nursing the sick. And suddenly you’re nursing the drinkers,’ Mary recalled, of the transition. ‘I don’t think I found it too difficult.'”

From the archives of The Guardian.

Thanks for reading. Always good to hear from you. And all the best.

2024 Election, GOP, Trump

The Appeal of Our Authoritarian …

Posted on by mjohnson

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

—–

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

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

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

Our felon-in-chief …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

George Orwell wrote knowingly of the appeal and danger of authoritarians

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

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

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

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

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

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

A few other items worthy of your time …

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

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

Manafort before he was pardoned by Trump

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

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

Read the full story.  

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

Trump supporters call for riots and violent retribution after verdict

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

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

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

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

Mansfield and Dirksen

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

Here is a link.

And speaking of podcasts …

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

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

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

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

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

2024 Election, Supreme Court, Trump

The Week That Was …

Posted on by mjohnson

This is the week that was.

The governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, boasts in a book about herself that two decades ago she took the family dog, reportedly a rambunctious 14-month-old wirehaired pointer named Cricket, to a gravel pit on the family farm and shot the pup. For good measure, Noem also shot and killed a goat she didn’t like. Both animals had clearly annoyed her.

Noem, angling to play second fiddle as vice president to her political idol, Donald J. Trump, drew a few headlines for these confessions.

Considering the pre-release publicity, I’d say the title is pretty accurate

“Politicians and dog experts vilify South Dakota governor after she writes about killing her dog,” said The Associated Press.

“South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem stands by decision to kill dog, shared it in new book,” said CBS.

And my personal favorite in USA Today: “‘That was rough:’ Steve Bannon, Donald Trump Jr. criticize Kristi Noem for killing her dog.”

The two MAGA A-listers amplified:

“Kristi Noem, I think, is maybe a little too based,” Bannon added. “Shooting the puppy in the gravel.”

“Too based,” I’m informed, is slang for someone who maybe, just maybe, is a little too willing to speak their truth.

“That was not ideal,” Donald Trump Jr. responded. And both men laughed.

“Not ideal,” Trump Jr. said. “I read that and I’m like: ‘Who put that in the book?’ I was like ‘Your ghost writer must really not like you if they’re gonna include that one. That was rough.’ ”

But, if you are a puppy-shooting, right-wing governor, you never, ever admit a mistake. Blame the “fake news” Right?

No, really, right?

For Noem, the week that was continued into a second week. The headlines tumbled out. Including a new round of “what the hell was she thinking” when there were reports that she claimed she once met with the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un. She didn’t. She lied.

Noem’s vice presidential chances seem as dead as a dog in a, well, you can finish the sentence.

Fun fact: Noem’s book has its official release May 8, but Amazon has already discounted the $30 cover price 37%. If you are interested in a copy of the book I would advise waiting, it will get cheaper, rather like the story it tells.

This was the week that was.

For the first time in American history, which, if my math is correct, is quite a long time, a former president continued to stand trial involving felony charges that he allegedly falsified business records in order to distribute hush money to make sure his affair with a porn star didn’t interfere with his 2016 presidential campaign. Just months before the alleged affair occurred, Trump’s wife, Melania, had given birth to their son, Barron. But don’t get bogged down in details.

The best comment on that trial so far — this will be famous — came from Utah Republican Sen. Mitt Romney, who clearly is having trouble with the position of the defendant in this case.

“You don’t pay someone $130,000 not to have sex with you,” said Romney, a former LDS bishop.

Oh, the humanity.

Oh, the absurdity.

Trump on trial … and we are on trial, too

And since the defendant simply can’t keep his Big Mac hole shut, the judge in the so-called “hush money case” fined the former president $9,000 for violating an order that prohibits attacks on people involved in the case, you know, people like witnesses, for example.

So, taking stock: The first former president to be indicted — I forget how many counts there are in four separate cases — becomes the first former president to be fined for trying to threaten and intimidate witnesses in his porn star payoff case. Got it? And you thought “The Godfather” movies were really great.

Meanwhile the defendant attacked the judge — again.

This was the week that was, or perhaps the week after the week that was.

For the second time involving a case featuring the former president of the United States, the Supreme Court, to which the former guy appointed three of nine members, struggled mightily to avoid confronting the actual Trump case they were asked to consider.

You’ll recall a while back that the six Trumpy justices on the nation’s highest tribunal backflipped their way to a decision that a single state, in this case Colorado, even in the face of the clear language of the Constitution, simply could not prevent an insurrection-inciting former president from running and potentially winning the White House again. It was deemed essentially too messy by the justices to confront the real issue, the 14th Amendment language prohibiting an insurrectionist from holding high office. We had a Civil War around some of these issues, but the Supreme Court is meh.

That case, if you love historical footnotes, featured many references to Salmon P. – the “P” stands for Portland – Chase, a former senator, Treasury Secretary and Supreme Court chief justice. Chase, like all who make it to the highest tribunal, was a supremely ambitious man. He wanted to be president so badly he campaigned for the Free Soil ticket and sought the presidential nomination of the Republican Party and finally the Democratic Party. He never made it. A salmon swimming upstream.

Chase’s name came up in the Trump disqualification case because of a case he decided while sitting as a circuit judge. Chase’s ruling in 1869, as legal analyst James D. Zirin noted, “refused to vacate a criminal conviction because the trial judge had fought for the Confederacy.” Zirin pointed out that the ruling was hardly a grand precedent, particularly for a Supreme Court presented with a former president who actually instigated an real insurrection on January 6, 2021.

But dealing with the clear facts of January 6 was just too on point for our Supreme Court, so the justices invented an approach to effectively ignore a key provision to the Constitution they are sworn to uphold.

Oh, and there is this: The wife of one of the justices actively participated in the planning of that January 6 coup, but that justice — Clarence Thomas — opined on the case nevertheless, upholding the rights of the insurrectionist. You don’t have to be right, apparently, but you do have to have power.

These politicians in robes are fixing to do the same thing with a second Trump case on the question of whether a former president has immunity from prosecution for crimes allegedly committed while president. The smart money is on a ruling of no absolute immunity, but a ruling containing just enough delay so as to remove the prospect of any legal consideration of an insurrectionist running for president before the November election.

No man is above the law, but if you know the right people …

Remember when conservative politicians used to rage against “activist” judges who made things up to arrive at a desired political outcome? Yup. I remember that, too.

This was the week that was.

Let’s end on high note. Time magazine is out with a big story about the former president’s plans once he’s back in the White House. The author of the piece, Eric Cortellessa, who did two lengthy interviews with the former president, said Trump would, among other things, “gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.”

There is more, lots more: concentration camps for migrants, a prosecution of Joe Biden, a federal takeover of education (so much for local control), an abandonment of NATO, and tariffs to make your inflation worries seem like so much background noise.

You really should read the whole article if only to see in one place how deranged and deluded the Grand Old Party of Lincoln has become under its indicted leader-king.

“Time included the full transcripts and a piece fact-checking Trump’s assertions,” historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote. “The transcripts reflect the former president’s scattershot language that makes little logical sense but conveys impressions by repeating key phrases and advancing a narrative of grievance. The fact-checking reveals that narrative is based largely on fantasy.”

That was our week.

More attention, generally speaking, was paid to a poor 14-month-old puppy shot dead in a South Dakota gravel pit by a once rising star of the MAGA world than to a mad would-be king in a New York courtroom. But somehow it all fits together.

Shooting a dog apparently is the “red line” no right-wing politician should cross. Flaying the Constitution, on the other hand, is the party platform.

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

A few other items of interest …

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at 200

The birthday of the fabulous Ninth.

The composer who still fascinates

“The composer insisted upon conducting the symphony from a conductor’s stand. The official conductor at the concert, Michael Umlauf, had instructed the musicians – a Viennese orchestra and choir – to ignore Beethoven, who was completely deaf and who theoretically could not be relied upon to keep time.

“The performance was interrupted several times by rapturous applause from the approximately 2,000 attendees, but Beethoven could not hear the reaction. According to eyewitnesses, the composer “threw himself back and forth like a madman” and fell several bars behind in his “conducting.'”

Read the entire piece.

Political Hell-Raiser Coming in Paperback

My good friends at the University of Oklahoma Press are planning on issuing my book on the legendary (and still controversial) Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana in a paperback edition later this summer.

I could not be happier.

The book, my first, was nominated for the Western Writers of America Spur Award, and tells the story of Wheeler’s life from his Quaker roots in Massachusetts to the rough and tumble mining town of Butte, Montana where he settled. Wheeler won a Senate seat in 1922 and served until 1947, 24-years of big battles and bigger controversy, including fights with Franklin Roosevelt over packing the Supreme Court and American foreign policy prior to World War II.

Wheeler was a Democrat, but his political and personal friendships ranged over the ideological spectrum – Louis Brandeis, Norman Thomas, Robert LaFollette and Harry Truman.

Never dull, Wheeler was always in trouble.

Here’s the link to the most recent OU Press catalogue. Lots of good stuff here.

The Wolves of K Street review: how lobbying swallowed Washington

A new book on the fourth branch of DC government – lobbying.

“Brody Mullins, a Wall Street Journal investigative reporter and Pulitzer prize winner, and his brother, Luke Mullins, a contributor at Politico, deliver a graduate seminar on how lobbying emerged and became a behemoth, an adjunct of government itself, taking its collective name from the street north of the White House where many of its biggest earners sit.

“Smoothly written, meticulously researched, The Wolves of K Street informs and mesmerizes.”

From The Guardian.

And … more on money and politics

I was delighted to be interviewed recently for an NPR podcast series called “Landslide.” The whole series, produced by Ben Bradford, is well worth your time if you care to delve into the long history of how the conservative American right began to transform in the 1970s into the party that gave us Donald Trump.

The segment I participated in deals with political money. You can listen here.

More soon. Thanks for reading. Stay in touch.

2024 Election, GOP, Trump, Ukraine

RIP: The Party of the Gipper …

Posted on by mjohnson

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

Authoritarian cults are mighty powerful draws, apparently.

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

An important new book from the University Press of Kansas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

A few other newsy items worthy of your attention …

The potential boondoggle of Greater Idaho

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

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

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

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

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

Link here:

The Greatest Book a Politician Ever Wrote

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

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

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

Worth your time.

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

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

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

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

Read it for yourself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rest in Peace … the Gipper.

Thanks for reading. All the best.

2024 Election, GOP

Careers of Ridicule and Dread …

Posted on by mjohnson

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

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

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

Cassidy Hutchinson testifies before the January 6 committee in 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—-0—-

Additional Reading:

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

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

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

And then there is Vermont.

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

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

Great story from the Associated Press.

To Break the Story, You Must Break the Status Quo

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

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

Come on, North Idaho

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

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

She’s not wrong.

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

Idaho, Philanthropy, Politics

The Goodness of a Great Man …

Posted on by mjohnson

In one way this is a tragic story of a brave and talented fellow who that devil cancer took way too soon. Being diagnosed with glioblastoma, the aggressive brain cancer that claimed, among others, Arizona Senator John McCain, is a death sentence. End of story. Always a tragic outcome.

But in another way this is not really a sad story. Quite the contrary. It’s a story of uplifting decency, a story of living your life to make the world better for others.

Fred Cornforth, the Idaho businessman, philanthropist, education evangelist and absolutely one of the most decent and caring people I’ve ever known, died last week, fighting brain cancer all the way to the end, at the too young age of 64.

Fred Cornforth … a man of genuine goodness in a difficult world

His is a story of how to live and make the world a better place for others, a story of how you can choose to live when it’s certain you have little time left to live.

I met Fred Cornforth on a Zoom call at about the time he became chair of the Idaho Democratic Party in March of 2021. He had just taken a job, I reminded him, that was about as glamorous – and perhaps futile – as being a lifeboat superintendent on the Titanic. Salmon aren’t the only endangered species in ultra-right Idaho, Democrats always swim upstream there.

Given more than 40 years in and around the state’s politics, I’ve seen a lot of enthusiastic party leaders come and go – often quickly – and I figured Fred, with a very limited background in party politics, was sure to find the role thankless, tiring and frustrating. But I underestimated Fred Cornforth.

He won the chair role, as former Idaho Congressman Larry LaRocco told me, the old fashioned way, by “getting on the phone and getting in the car.” Fred, a guy who reveled in the data and research of life and politics, “figured out who would be voting, and he called them because no one ever does that.” And he listened and listened, and LaRocco became a fast friend and huge admirer.

His cancer diagnosis forced Fred to step down prematurely from his political role in 2022, but he made a difference in a short time, professionalizing the state party, ramping up fundraising and pushing back against the utter nonsense that comes to the surface in a one-party state.

If that was all there was to Fred’s story, it would be enough. At a fraught time for American democracy, a very successful businessman thought enough of the importance of politics and preserving democracy to get involved in order to try and make a difference.

But that was only part, and a relatively small part, of Fred Cornforth’s goodness.

Fred made a tidy fortune doing good – he developed affordable housing and community renewal projects in at least a dozen states – and then proceeded to give that fortune away to do even more good.

As a kid Fred lived at the ragged edge of poverty. He didn’t always have enough to eat when he attended college at Idaho State University, so he funded a food bank there, and also at Boise State and the University of Idaho. When he sat in a dentist chair years ago to get 16 cavities taken care of the dentist took pity and did the work for free. So, with that generous memory firmly planted, Fred funded dental clinics.

While in high school in Belgrade, Montana, Fred had a chance to attend a Model United Nation’s program. He said it changed his life, so he gave the Frank Church Institute at Boise State University $750,000 to underwrite the Institute’s Model UN program. The 300 kids who attended this year’s program in Boise had their own life changing experiences thanks to Fred. 

“He was just the brightest light, the biggest star in the sky,” Jodi Peterson Stigers, the executive director of Boise’s Interfaith Sanctuary Homeless Shelter told me. Jodi met Fred at a political fundraiser, and shortly thereafter he became a $500,000 donor to her efforts to build a new shelter for folks caught in awful circumstances due to a lack of housing.

“He was so fascinated in what we were doing. Wanted to know everything about Interfaith Sanctuary, how it worked, who we served, everything,” Peterson Stigers told me. Like most everyone Fred touched, Jodi and her husband the jazz musician Curtis Stigers, became fast friends with Fred and his wife Jill.

But there is more, and with Fred there was always more. Fred funded 45 orphanages in countries around the world. Read that sentence again – 45 orphanages.

Fred played football at Belgrade High School, in fact was the quarterback on the state championship teams of 1977-78. The school needed a new scoreboard for its football field last year, so Fred funded the classiest video scoreboard in Montana in honor of his high school coach, Bill Green.  

“The things I learned in football,” Cornforth told the Belgrade News. “It’s a great reminder in life, when you call a huddle, what you talk about and listen to. You can’t always be the quarterback; you have to listen. I learned how to listen in huddles. It helped me to do what I do now,” which was to build a billion dollar company that does good.

Some years ago Fred had a family vacation home on the north coast of Oregon where I now live. He understood the community, a haven for vacationing families but also a place where hourly wage jobs barely sustain a family and where decent affordable housing is nearly impossible to find. When I told Fred that the health district I chair was trying to pull off a huge local project – a new health center, a renovated skilled nursing facility and workforce housing for health care workers – he was instantly interested. I didn’t ask him for it, but he came out of the blue and pledged $250,000 to the cause, with no restrictions as to how the money might be used. “Use it where it will do the most good,” he told me.

That incredible gesture was so like Fred, a humble, big hearted man, always looking for a way to help.

At one point in his remarkably accomplished life, Fred was an Adventist minister, a man of God doing genuine Christian work on earth. At a time when many self-proclaimed devout Christians seem more interested in partisan culture wars than in feeding the hungry and comforting the afflicted, Fred lived the true meaning of his faith.

Larry LaRocco believes Fred was drawn to political involvement not for power or fame or the ego rush, but because in our messy, disordered, often dysfunctional country politics can still be a path to meaningful change that helps people have a better life. Fred was, LaRocco said, “All about public service. I think he was trying to take his religious, ethical, moral background and apply it to politics.”

As the Psalmist says, “Good will come to those who are generous and lend freely, who conduct their affairs with justice.”

What a life Fred Cornforth lived. So many, many lives touched and changed. Perhaps the true lesson of such a life is to just live like there is no tomorrow, and when your time is up make sure you leave the world a better place. That is certainly what Fred did.

It was humbling to know this incredible man. And his memory will be a blessing.  

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Additional Reading:

A few other items for your consideration …

Revealed: documents shed light on shadowy US far-right fraternal order

This week in The Guardian.

“New documents have shed light on the origins and inner workings of the shadowy Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR), including methods for judging the beliefs of potential members on topics such as Christian nationalism, and indications that its founders sought inspiration in an apartheid-era South African white men-only group, the Afrikaner-Broederbond.

“They also show that Boise State University Professor and Claremont think tank scholar Scott Yenor tried to coordinate SACR’s activities with other initiatives, including an open letter on ‘Christian marriage.'”

A lot to unpack here. Read the entire story.

A ‘deeply divided’ Congress took no major action on civil rights in 2023, report finds

“This is one of the few first sessions of a Congress in recent history in which neither chamber passed meaningful civil rights legislation as scored by our Voting Record,” according to a report from the Leadership Conference on Human Rights, which has tracked civil rights legislation since 1969. The votes of every member of the House and Senate on bills deemed important by the conference are scored in the report.”

Full story here.

Jon Stewart, still a ‘tiny, neurotic man,’ back to remind Americans what’s at stake

“In 2003, maybe Stewart could call himself ‘a tiny, neurotic man, standing in the back of the room throwing tomatoes at the chalkboard.’ But today, with his return on Monday nights to host ‘The Daily Show,’ he is part of the school administration trying to keep the lights on and the students learning.”

Jon Stewart routinely does a better job than many journalists at cutting through the clutter and crazy of our politics to get to what matters. Good story.

Thanks for reading. Keep the faith and keep working on democracy.

2024 Election, Mansfield, Trump, U.S. Senate

The Senate’s Great Cynic …

Posted on by mjohnson

It’s not for nothing that the best biography of Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky senator who recently announced the end of his long run as Senate Republican leader, is titled The Cynic.

There may have been more destructive personalities in the Senate’s long history — John C. Calhoun prior to the Civil War or Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s — but it’s hard to think of a single American legislator who has contributed more than McConnell to the despair so many voters feel about their government.

Cynic to the end, McConnell went out with the same disdain of sincerity and good faith that marked the arc of his long political life. That life took him, as The Cynic author Alec MacGillis tells us in his biography, from being a moderate Republican supporting abortion rights and public employee unions to the GOP leader who viciously — and correctly — lashed former President Donald Trump to the crimes on Jan. 6, 2021, and then pivoted cynically to endorse the man the entire world knows he detests.

John C. Calhoun, senator, Cabinet member, vice president … a rival for historically evil influence

McConnell once said of Trump: “His behavior during and after the chaos (of January 6) was … unconscionable, from attacking Vice President Mike Pence during the riot to praising the criminals after it ended.”

McConnell’s Senate speech after Jan. 6 detailed the very definition of insurrection, he even called what happened an insurrection. “Fellow Americans beat and bloodied our own police. They stormed the Senate floor. They tried to hunt down the speaker of the House. They built a gallows and chanted about murdering the vice president. They did this because they had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth because he was angry he lost an election. Former President Trump’s actions preceding the riot were a disgraceful, disgraceful dereliction of duty.”

In response, Trump used racist language to disparage McConnell’s Taiwan-born wife, Elaine Chao, went years without speaking to McConnell and regularly referred to him as an “old broken down crow,” “a piece of shit” and a “dumb son of a bitch.”

McConnell knows better than almost anyone what a reprehensible, incompetent, Constitution-crashing boob the former president is. His wife resigned from Trump’s Cabinet in protest after Jan. 6. Yet none of that matters to McConnell or, in Trump’s telling, his “China loving wife.”

The Associated Press called the Trump endorsement “a remarkable turnaround” by McConnell. But that’s not the correct term. Everyone knew the level of crassness McConnell would eventually employ. Everyone knows a cynic doesn’t change. Power, partisanship and personal self-interest are the cynic’s only motivations.

“I love the Senate. It has been my life,” McConnell said as he announced that he will step down from leadership at the end of the year. “There may be more distinguished members of this body throughout our history, but I doubt there are any with more admiration for it.”

What’s the saying? You always hurt the one you love.

McConnell’s professed admiration for the Senate as an institution is in reality just window dressing for his cynical use of raw partisan power to corrode — even destroy — the fabric of an institution that by its very nature demands compromise, consensus and comity.

McConnell’s one historic accomplishment, securing his place in the history books, has been to weld in place for a generation or more a hard rightwing Supreme Court populated with activist judges who, as Republicans have so long accused Democrats of doing, use their positions to make partisan political decisions. The Supreme Court has become so extremely political that its recent decision ruling that Colorado could not unilaterally remove Trump from that state’s presidential ballot was followed by days of analysis about what the McConnell Court really had said with its ruling.

One thing Mitch’s judges did not touch in that Colorado ruling is the real point of the 14th Amendment case brought against Trump by Colorado voters — namely, did he foment an insurrection? You may have missed it in the coverage of the McConnell Court’s ruling, but a Colorado court actually considered the insurrection question, heard from witnesses, examined what happened on Jan. 6 and concluded — yes, Trump is an insurrectionist.

McConnell’s contribution to American political life also includes, lest we forget, the single most cynical act involving a Supreme Court nominee in the nation’s history. That would be McConnell’s blocking of Barack Obama’s nomination in 2016 of a moderate and highly respected jurist, Merrick Garland, who was denied a hearing on his merits in McConnell’s beloved Senate.

The upshot of that truly historic and indefensible use of partisan power surely means that no future Democratic president will ever be successful in confirming a Supreme Court nominee in a Republican-controlled Senate. And after leaving Garland to twist in the hot winds of the Senate for months before the 2016 presidential election, McConnell, cynicism be praised, rammed through the nomination of Justice Amy Coney Barrett in 2020 in near record time and days before another presidential election.

It takes a special kind of personality to square these circles and attempting to do so while holding a straight face is another part of the McConnell legacy.

Trump and Mitch in their co-dependent days …

“If you would have told me 40 years later that I would stand before you as the longest serving Senate leader in history — I would have thought you’d lost your mind,” McConnell said recently. He takes great pride in that longevity record, but even that accomplishment is tinged by cynicism.

A more impressive record than the raw years McConnell held party leadership is the record for most years as a majority leader and that distinction is still held by Montana Senator Mike Mansfield, who was a Senate leader for 20 consecutive years and majority leader for 16 straight years.

McConnell, despite his warm remembrances of Mansfield’s years of principled leadership — he praised the Montanan last year in a lengthy tribute — is really the un-Mansfield. The Montanan was universally respected while McConnell isn’t.

The lack of comment from fellow Republicans when he announced McConnell was stepping down was remarkable and entirely unlike what happened when Mansfield retired in 1977. Then-Republican leader Hugh Scott choked up, saying of Mansfield, “I have never known a finer man.”

The quiet, egoless Mansfield insisted on protecting the Senate as an institution even as members of his own party — Southern Democrats during the Civil Rights era — labored to bring the Senate into disrepute. Mansfield never resorted to tricks or raw power to manipulate senators. He practiced restraint, selfless bipartisanship, absolute candor and completely rejected the politics of attack and insult.

By contrast, with his cynical endorsement of Trump, McConnell couldn’t help but take a gratuitous swipe at the current president, a man he knows well and served with in the Senate. It was the kind of partisan slap that Mansfield never used or likely considered, even when the president was Richard Nixon whose conspiracy to cover up his political crimes Mansfield helped expose.

Mansfield modeled the civil and decent behavior he hoped others would embrace. The Senate of today is an often ugly reminder that many current senators have accepted McConnell’s approach of partisanship first, last and always.

The Mansfield Senate became what the Senate must be in order to succeed — more restrained, more respected, more serious and vastly more accomplished than the institution McConnell remade in his own cynical image.

Invoking Mansfield’s approach to political leadership — he was the “more distinguished” senator as McConnell must know he will be considered — is more than a nostalgic reminder of a time past. Mansfield’s greatness reminds us that some things — the Constitution, basic decency, honesty and respect for restraint — are vastly more important than the fleeting political advantage of this week or this term or this presidency.

McConnell will go down in history for sure, but it won’t be for his length of service or his cynical manipulation of the Supreme Court nomination process. He’ll be remembered for cementing Senate dysfunction, breaking American politics and then enabling a budding authoritarian to again grasp for the chance to destroy American democracy.

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Additional Reading:

A few other items I found of interest …

How a lack of local reporting affects the Supreme Court

A fascinating and also infuriating story about basic facts that eluded the Supreme Court in several recent cases.

“Last year the court ruled for a wedding website designer, Lorie Smith, who felt that including LGBTQ language on a website would violate her religious beliefs, even though the only evidence her lawyers produced that anyone had asked her to do so was a letter from a man named Stewart saying that he wanted her to design a website for his wedding to a guy named Mike. It turned out that Stewart was not gay, had been married to a woman for fifteen years, and did not write the letter. Also, Stewart turns out to be a website designer himself, so even if he had been gay and planning to get married, he wouldn’t need outside help.”

The Court deals in the “law,” not in the “facts” and therein is a problem. You might ask, how could they get things so very wrong … you could ask that.

From the Columbia Journalism Review.

How to End Republican Exploitation of Rural America

It is an article of political faith that Democrats have lost most of “rural” America.

“With the rural/urban political divide as stark as it is today, it’s easy to forget that it wasn’t always this way. In fact, for much of our history, rural and urban Americans did not vote all that differently in the aggregate; Republican presidential candidates would usually outpoll Democratic candidates by just a couple of points in rural areas. Beginning with the 2000 election, however, rural and urban votes began drifting apart, and that separation is now a chasm.”

The authors of a new book White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy argue that, while it’s mostly true Democrats have abandoned rural America, Republicans have, too, offering no real policy of approach to dealing with the real problems of real people. Therein lies an opportunity.

From Washington Monthly.

Humanity’s remaining timeline? It looks more like five years than 50: meet the neo-luddites warning of an AI apocalypse

Since everything is going so well how about a little doomsday reporting on artificial intelligence? This piece about about “the luddites” pushing back on AI. Put me down as “interested.”

“Are we doomed? Or is there hope? Will this generation of protesters be remembered in 200 years’ time for their interventions – or will there simply be no one to do the remembering by then? The new luddites I speak to come at these questions with varying degrees of optimism or catastrophising.”

From The Guardian.

Well, spring training is in full flower and March Madness is upon us. Can we make it to opening day? Sure … play ball.

Thanks for following. And share with a friend if you are inclined. All the best.

2024 Election, GOP

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

Posted on by mjohnson

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

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

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

Barry Goldwater in 1964

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dirksen was, of course, wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Additional Reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wow. Just wow.

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

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

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

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

Read the entire piece.

Why Anatomy of a Fall should win the best picture Oscar

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

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

A review from The Guardian.

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