June 2016 Archives

Dear America,

This Republican insistence on displaying hypocrisy has become a compulsion like spreading peacock feathers in mating season.  First there was the Senate thwarting a Republican bill, submitted by Senator Susan Collins of Maine, that would keep guns from being sold to people on the national "no fly" list.  The theory behind the bill is obvious: if we don't want you to get on a plane with innocent people, we don't want you to have a gun in a society full of innocent people.  But could the Republicans support it?  No-o-o.  The Republicans insist that you've got to give potential armed assassins their due process rights, whereas the right to be free of murderous, armed assassins doesn't seem to require what's called "substantive due process" at all.  (For the uninitiated, substantive due process is adequate and effective representation in congress.)  And those priorities were echoed in The House.  When there was a massacre in a gay night club in Orlando, Paul Ryan insisted on a moment of silence for the victims...not a minute, but ten seconds.  And when the same kind of bill as that floated by Senator Collins was proposed by Democrats, Ryan adjourned The House rather than call a vote, and then had the audacity to call the ensuing Democrat sit-in a publicity stunt that impaired the function of The House.  Apparently, absolving your party colleagues of the obligation to legislate by adjourning a session two days early isn't impairing function, but insisting on a vote is...at least according to the Speaker of the Hypocrites, Paul Ryan.  Before you decide whose right, remember that all the Democrats wanted was for Ryan to call a vote--the protest wasn't about the outcome of a vote, just about the Republicans' refusal to take one.   And now, they are all home for the Fourth of July holiday, where, one might hope, the 90% of their constituents who favor passage of such a bill are telling them that voting on it is their function, refusal to vote is the impairment of that function.  And then maybe they'll add, if you don't vote, and I mean vote "Aye," you've lost my vote.  That will do the trick, NRA money or not.

This is the second show of flagrant self-interest through use of parliamentary procedure that the Republicans, led by Paul Ryan, have perpetrated in the past month.  The last one was when members of The House tried to pass a measure prohibiting ordinances that keep LGBT citizens out of the bathrooms required by their gender self-designations.  They first stopped a vote for the measure long enough to coerce five of their members to switch their votes from aye to nay in order to prevent it from passing...in accord with the vast majority opinion of the American people.  Again, they chalked it up to simply doing "the people's business."  Then they did the same thing the next week when it came up again by preventing a vote altogether.  They seem to think that they are obfuscating their true sentiments, which run toward denying the majority of the American people the fundamental rights that they are insisting on just because the reactionary fringe of their party doesn't like them   And speaking for them is a self-styled pragmatist, who yielded to that contingent's demand that they be able to put any poison pill amendment on any bill they don't want to pass as he denies the rest of the house, even his own moderate party members, the right to vote on issues on which the fringe would lose if the vote were taken.  And then, the Republican hypocrite-in-chief has the audacity to say that he is the democrat, not the dissenters who want him to let congress do its job and vote.  All the while, no one seems to call him on it, and no one castigates the majority of Republicans for allowing it.  Ryan took the job of Speaker on the premise that he would be a force for compromise and action in The House, and now, it turns out, he is just another casuistic, liar like his predecessor.  And by the way, Paul, if you're reading right now, consider this.  If you ever aspired to national office, you have just about written yourself off by being the lackey of your reactionary colleagues through your contrivance to avoid going on record by voting.  Don't moan about it.  It's what you deserve.

I find myself writing such remarks as these over and over again.  Of course, the fact that one old hippie progressive harbors such sentiments isn't exactly an inducement for any Republican to reexamine his actions, much less to plumb the shallow depths of his conscience.  And I must concede, I don't even know if anyone anywhere is reading this, much less any members of the Republican Party.  But someone who does get read should be saying these things too.  And they should be saying them in an extremely loud voice, because our democracy is little by little being eroded into a parliamentary exercise by a group of bloated egos whose only real concern is staying in power.  There is an election coming up in November, and everyone is focused on Donald Trump and the hazard he represents for our country.  But the real hazard is the reelection of a Republican majority in either or both houses of congress.  Because if the people of the United States--us, America--want a democracy rather than an oligarchy of bigots and plutocrats (more than half of all congress people are millionaires), we'd better wake up and take Our House and Our Senate back.  The President gets only one vote, albeit the most potent one.  The members of The House and Senate get 535 between the two bodies.  They are the ones who are keeping us from effecting prudent and pervasive change.

So here's my suggestion if you are still making up your mind as to how to vote.  If you don't mind income inequality as well as the dearth of opportunity for prosperity that we now enjoy, vote Republican.  If you are really an American, vote for the other guys.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I had dinner with my son last night, and as must be a part of every conversation, Donald Trump--and with him, the fear that he might become president--was a part of ours.  At one point, my son said that the fact that Trump has such ardent supporters, and so many of them, made him ashamed of our country.  Frankly, I am also ashamed that so many Americans could be co-opted by a sharper like him making promises to them that all their fears will be addressed and everyone will get well financially.  For me, it isn't a moral question...well, it is, but that isn't my point right now.  My point is that he has appealed to the greed and xenophobia of modern Americans with a promise to make them richer than they have ever been, and to isolate them from the evil in the world by building a wall along the Rio Grande while prohibiting all Muslims from immigrating to this country.  My guess is that it is only a matter of time until he proposes to put all Muslims already here in camps as we did the Japanese during World War II.  What he has said so far--his rhetorical past--seems likely to me to be prelude. 

But beyond the menace to human dignity and liberty that he constitutes is the hypocrisy that he has virtually institutionalized.  I mentioned this when the NY Times article about his business practices regarding his casinos came out, but it bears reiteration.  Trump declared bankruptcy five times after issuing what amounted to junk bonds so he could pay himself huge bonuses.  In other words, he deliberately took money from people who invested in his companies in good faith and put it in his own pocket rather than spending it for the purpose of making his casino enterprises sound, which was his stated purpose.  He stole that money, but since he did it legally, he explains it by saying that the casinos were a "cash cow" for him.  That's a mighty polite way of admitting that you are a scammer, and so far, no one but the NY Times has even mentioned it to the best of my knowledge.  And then there are the other accusations that are flying around, like the one that has him importing Polish labor on a promise to pay the workers a given wage, and then paying them far less and telling them that they could take it or take nothing.  And all the while that no one is taking notice of his slimy practices, he is unctuously calling Hillary Clinton "Crooked Hillary," and suggesting that the Clinton foundation, which has raised and spent hundreds of millions of dollars to cure malaria and participate in other humanitarian efforts, is a money making scam undertaken by the Clintons for the purpose of self-enrichment.  It reminds me of when Richard Nixon got caught off guard during his final interview and excused his Watergate activities by saying, "if The President does it, it's legal."  The unmitigated casuistry of Trump's calumniation of the Clintons doesn't seem to bother anyone.  Why is that?

That's where the shame comes in.  A large segment of the American electorate isn't asking Trump to explain himself on these points.  They blithely follow him wherever he leads, even if his leadership is despicable...without question.  I just don't understand why someone isn't publicly pillorying him for being a smarmy robber baron...and bragging about it as if that's a good thing.  So, while I don't condone calling people who see politics differently from the way you do stupid, there is something really dubious about the willingness of so many Americans to walk down Trump's primrose path toward hell with him.  He lies like the rug he wears, which is not very well and not convincingly at all, but he is succeeding somehow.  Now I ask you, what does that say about the people with whom he is succeeding, and by extension, the rest of us Americans?

I still believe that there is enough sagacity in the American electorate that Trump will be sufficiently sullied by his own conduct and polemics, crude as they are, and that his candidacy will ultimately be rejected by the majority of our people.  I can't believe that a suede shoe salesman like Donald Trump could sell one wall to so many people...like W.C. Fields with the Brooklyn Bridge.  I actually feel fairly confident about that.  Enough of us Americans will see the light long before November, and Trump will go down in flames.  But what if I'm wrong?  And consider this.  Trump is a walking ego, so even if he loses the election, he will make excuses and claim that his loss was a function of nefarious conduct on the part of his foes.  That is significant if you consider the fact that he is actually turning a profit on this election by renting space and airplanes to his campaign, which means that the campaign is paying Trump to run, because all that rent and those usage fees go straight into his corporate business accounts.  No doubt, he considers that some kind of an accomplishment, just as he certainly did the applause he got when he came down the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy.  Trump is a walking ego, and this whole fiasco is nothing less than one long stroke of his ego.  As the Russians say, even when he loses, "he gets out of the water dry."  He gains financially, he puts Republican presidential nominee on his resume, and he isn't even breaking a sweat.  He's playing golf at his new Scottish golf resort this extended weekend.

You're being played America.  Wake up from, to coin a phrase, this long, national nightmare.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

When I was a kid, my father used to watch the party conventions every four years, which of course, thrilled me no end.  But in his defense, there wasn't anything else on; we had six or seven channels to choose from, and the three major networks were all carrying the proceedings.  I would watch too if I couldn't find anything else to do, but not with any particular interest.  Now, as I leave middle-age for senior status...well, I still don't like to watch the conventions as a rule, but this year, I think that will be different.  The Republican convention still doesn't mean anything to me, but the Democratic convention, that could affect the entire world.  The main focus of my interest isn't who will be nominated.  No matter what Bernie Sanders says, it's going to be Hillary in November.  But the platform of the party, that's another story.

Sanders has done our polity an enormous favor by running.  His campaign started out as an eccentricity being carried out by an eccentric senator from a second tier state.  Vermont is beautiful, but no one ever said as Vermont goes, so goes the nation.  I thought--and I imagine that many, if not most others thought--that Sanders would go the way of Eugene McCarthy in 1972 or Ralph Nader over and over again, but we were wrong.  First, Sanders made a legitimate run for the nomination, and he almost got there.  It is still the case that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, but Sanders was only a couple of hundred delegates behind when all those votes were counted, and in the course of getting all those votes, he made sure that Democrats everywhere heard him.  His campaign was the first truly populist campaign I have ever witnessed regardless of how many times other candidates have tried to don the mantle of The People's Man.  He pointed his crook of a finger at the banks and the financial industry as well as at corporate America and the avarice of those who run it, which they do, acquiring obscene amounts of wealth in the process, at the expense of the working people who actually create this country's wealth.  He segregated the 1% from the rest of us in terms of virtue, and made it clear that being rich is not a get-into-heaven free pass, even in a somewhat distorted form of capitalism like that which this nation practices.  In this convention, the platform is the thing, and I think I will be watching attentively just to see what eventuates.  I think everyone should.

The quintessence of my interest is to see how the Democratic Party distinguishes itself from the other guys.  Abortion is the avatar for women's issues in general, and the Republicans will almost certainly make a "right to life" plank prominent in their platform.  The Democrats would probably prefer not to mention abortion, but in the end, I think they will have to, and while I doubt that I could have one if I were a woman, not being a woman, I don't think my intuition is at all authentic.  I am strongly in favor of a woman's right to chose, and I always have been, but more importantly, the Democratic Party should be, and I think that a solid position will emerge from the convention platform debate.  Then there's xenophobia, which anyone with Italian, Irish or Jewish immigrant parents will see as central to democratic and Democratic ideology.  Donald Trump stands for a kind of fear and animus that is wholly un-American, and a large segment of the American voting public has taken a citizenship oath at some point in their lives.  Trump is not what they took that oath to defend, and I have no doubt that the Democratic platform will emphasize inclusiveness and generosity of spirit in that regard.  Of course, Trump will fight for a plank about his wall, though the party-elite will probably prevent it from being accepted, and he'll advocate for a plank on reducing taxes, which the Republicans will probably endorse enthusiastically, whereas the Democrats will most likely advocate a fairer division of tax liability to relieve the middle and working classes of some of their burden and impose the onus on the wealthiest of Americans instead.  In short, the platforms will distinguish the ethos of the Democratic Party from that of the Republicans, but then comes the interesting part.

Once the parties as wholes take their ideological positions, how are they going to present them to the voting public?  Will they come out swinging, or will they try to minimize the differences in areas where they are not quite sure of voter sentiment; that is the question that matters most, and that is where Bernie Sanders comes back in.  When the campaigning starts, he will resume his advocacy on behalf of the American working people, and the Democratic Party will not be able to marginalize him.  If they are smart, the Democrats will nominate Sanders for vice-president, which will give him license to be The Party's stalking horse.  He can go out and make the pitch without the party as a whole taking a hit if the public is not on its side with regard to the more contentious issues.  Bernie can put the wood to Trump without making the party as a whole seem too aggressive and unseemly, and he will never have to give Trump the chance to respond to the criticism.  Hillary will debate Trump, but Sanders will never be at the same forum with him, and thus can speak with impunity in terms that the majority of the American people have demonstrably endorsed.

Yes, the conventions matter to me this year.  But its effect on the campaign?  That I'll really be watching for with interest.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The week before last, an energy appropriations bill came up for a vote in The House.  The appropriation was bipartisan and non-controversial, but even with the majority under his control, Paul Ryan couldn't shepherd the bill through to passage.  But that is not what is important about the bill and the vote.  What matters is the hypocrisy that the whole event demonstrates.  Before discussing what happened, some predicates have to benoted.

The Republicans took control of The House in 2010, their tenure starting in the session that began in January 2011.  The majority that the Republicans currently enjoy is 247 to 188, a majority being 218 of the 435 member body.  Thus, the Republicans can pass any bill they can agree upon with votes to spare.  But the Republican Party has been divided by the

ascension of the Tea Party movement in our politics, and there are enough hard-core, Tea Party reactionaries in Congress that the rational party majority is no longer a majority of the body as a whole, which allows the Tea Party delegation to thwart the Republican juggernaut whenever they choose.  That is why Paul Ryan is now the Speaker of the House  instead of John Boehner.  Boehner was a hard-core conservative, and a political hack as well, but he wanted to govern, so he prevented the wholesale amendment of  bills by the recalcitrant minority of  the majority, which they were insistently using to try to steer the Republican caucus even farther to the right...like to the Attila-the-Hun right.  By doing so, they stopped  any progress on anything, and eventually Boehner decided it wasn't worth the aggravation anymore, so off he went to his favorite golf course to lower his handicap and augment his tan.  Then came Paul Ryan...kicking and screaming, I might add.  He wasn't interested in inheriting Boehner's aggravation, so he told the hard right that he would, but only under certain conditions (and implicitly that they had better not try any funny business with him).  In return, he was willing to allow their amendments: all of them.  But last week, that funny business started anew.

What happened was that a military appropriations bill, entirely bi-partisan and lacking in opposition, came up and a Democrat tried to attach an amendment to the bill banning discrimination against LGBT people.  At first, the amendment passed, but  the leadership held the vote open until they could twist the arms of seven Republicans and make them change their votes, which caused the amendment to fail, so the appropriation passed without it. Then last week, an energy appropriation bill came to the floor and the Tea Party amendments started to fly: let the North Carolina legislature endorse anti-LGBT ordinances it wanted to without jeopardizing federal funds, roll back the clean water act, take some half-hearted measure relative to the California drought, and while doing all those things, ignore the Flint, Michigan lead-in-the-water crisis. But the Democrats floated an amendment of their own codifying President Obama's executive order to ban discrimination against LGBT people by federal contractors.  And since The Speaker had promised to allow all amendments, what they call a "return to regular order," he couldn't prevent the amendment from being voted on.  But the outcry from their home districts made those seven congressmen think twice, so that when the amendment came up for a vote again, it passed in spite of the arm twisting.  Then, when Ryan called the vote on the appropriation bill, it was defeated.  The Republicans defeated their own bill, albeit with Democratic support based on opposition to the Republican amendments that had preceded the vote, and all this occurred because the new Republican Speaker gave in to the reactionary  right  where his predecessor had refused.  But now comes the hypocrisy.

Ryan was embarrassed by this fiasco, so he went before the press, Kevin McCarthy (he

is the Republican who failed to win the Speakership because he is so terminally

stupid that he admitted that the Republican governance agenda was dedicated wholly to thwarting the Democrats at any cost by embarrassing Hillary Clinton in any way they could)

standing just behind him and blamed the Democrats.  Of course, he saw no culpability

in his own party.  He condemned the Democrats for voting against a bill that contained one of its own amendments, claiming that their sole motivation was to interdict the appropriations process, but he  never mentioned the several Republican amendments...none of which belonged in an appropriations bill that they had nothing to do with...not  to mention that the appropriations bill was a Republican bill voted down by a House of Representatives in which they have the unassailable majority.  The problem was not Democratic obstruction; it was conservative bigotry and the abuse of the amendment process in furtherance of bigotry, which process Ryan himself agreed to, that opened the appropriations process up to this nonsense.  But  admitting the frailty of his own ideas isn't Ryan's strong suit.  So here we still are with a Congress crippled  by institutionalization of abuse of  the rules that the members themselves have  created, with the majority leadership continuing  to  be either unwilling or unable to do anything but  point fingers at the minority despite the obvious fact that the Republicans control their own fate and everyone else's too, and this is what they chose to do.

A long time ago, I lived in Boston, and the governor of the state was a Republican named Frances Sargeant.  He was a good governor...a humanist,and I voted for him...twice. Massachusetts also had a Republican senator named Edward  Brooke.  I voted for him too. I am not a blind partisan by nature, but I couldn't vote for a Republican today, not just because I disagree with them on policy, but because they are casuistic equivocators, cavilers, whiners, blame shifters, intellectually dishonest, and frankly, liars.  Despite protests from both Donald Trump and his party, he is a perfect example of Republican integrity, or more aptly, the lack thereof.  That's why I won't be voting for any Republicans this year.

Your friend,

Mike