August 2020 Archives

Dear America,

The irony in the poisoning of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny is that it is not terribly significant for the people of Russia.  Their president of choice, Vladimir Putin, has at the very least countenanced the attempts to murder opposition politicians before, sometimes even after the attempts succeeded.  Boris Nemtsov was shot dead on a bridge near the Kremlin in 2015, and the attempt to poison a former Russian spy who defected to England is in everyone's recent memory.  The fact that Putin's toadies rid their patron of troublesome enemies with impunity is common knowledge in Russia, and no one seems to care much within the majority that voted for constitutional changes that essentially make Putin president-for-life, the modern iteration of The Czar.  But the assassination attempt has profound significance for the American democracy.

It happens that our mountebank of a president doesn't just sell snake oil.  He believes in it, and Putin is an example of Trump's misguided admiration for violent autocrats who, as Trump himself aspires to do, sell themselves as the salvation of their countries.  Consider whom Trump has praised among international leaders.  He detests Angela Merkel, but he thinks Kim Jong-un is a great guy.  In fact, he relished the talk of a "bromance" between himself and Kim publicly, though you don't hear Trump talking about the North Korean dictator anymore since he basically flaunted before the world that he had taken Trump for a ride in the international open.  And of course there's RT Erdogan of Trukey.  He is another of Trump's "very good friends," as Trump himself put it, who has no compunction about imprisoning his opposition and worse.  All three autocrats hold elections, but somehow, no one ever beats them, despite what the ways in which they stanch democracy and free speech with tyrannical measures that sometimes have lethal effects for their citizens.  Of course, Xi Jinping of China's ranking in the Trump taxonomy of dictators has slipped somewhat since Xi went to Mar-a-Lago and sat at the head table with The Donald and his inner circle.  That was all about money, and in the end, Xi kept his and a lot of ours as well.  Trump doesn't like getting bet in the making of a deal, and Xi seems to have whipped him pretty well.

But with or without irony...with or without patronizing sarcasm...Trump's adulation of Putin is a threat to everything we value in this country.  His refusal to condemn Putin for the Navalny assassination attempt and its sequelae, which include keeping Navalny prisoner in the hospital until the risk that the poison in his body could be detected and identified at the risk of the comatose politicians life, is appalling, if not ominous and unforgivable.  It was one thing to gush over a brutal dictator's "strong and powerful"--apparently our "stable genius" of a president doesn't know the word adamant--self--serving denials of election interference that was proven to the entire American intelligence establishment's satisfaction, but now we are talking about political murder and arrogation of power to oppress hundreds of millions of people.  If you conflate Trump's adulation of Putin with his exhortation to the attendants of a rally he held in Texas last year to "ask for twelve more years" instead of just four, you gain an understanding of not just our president's lust for power and control, but of the lengths to which he might go to obtain it.  We are talking as a nation about the election that is going to take place on November 3 and the fact that Trump is already laying the ground work for discrediting the election process, but no one seems concerned about the fact that no matter what else Trump does, he might just refuse to give up the presidency whether the election is a win, loss or ostensible draw for him. 

Until now, I have always thought that such a coup was impossible in this country.  Our institutions have always seemed too robust and well defined to be co-opted by a tin horn dictator like the one that Trump would be if he succeeded, either in winning the election, credibly not losing, or not caring and just seizing what he craves: our America.  And my confidence in the past hasn't been a function of the lack of people with the intelligence, charisma or poise to pull it off.  It has been because I have never suspected that another politician who reached the White House would even contemplate such an endeavor.

My confidence is shaken, America.  Maybe yours should be too.  For the first time in my life, I fear for our democracy.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

With the conventions going on, Donald Trump gets mentioned derogatorily, whether explicitly or implicitly, with great regularity, and he certainly deserves it.  But in my opinion, Mitch McConnell is just as derision-worthy as Trump is, and perhaps even more so.  Trump is what he is and we have all seen it now for three and a half years.  He loves being on television, so he volunteers to be several times a week.  And it doesn't matter to him whether what people say about him on those occasions is pejorative or complimentary.  He just wants to be seen, and in a sense that makes him more idiotic than menacing.  But McConnell doesn't appear on television more often than is absolutely necessary.  I can only recall seeing him interviewed on a news program once, and frankly, he handled himself quite well.  The interview was about the last round of pandemic relief proposed by The House, and he countered direct questions about the house bill with alternatives that he and his contingent in the Republican senate caucus, which didn't really answer any questions of significance.  He left the interview "stage" unscathed because he had been interviewed, not made to compare what he proposed with the alternative.  I give him credit for being clever with regard to the positions he puts himself in; he never takes a risk.  But he is as Machiavellian as they come, and his tactics are subtle enough that no one ever asks him about them.

For example, more than a year ago, when the topic of everyone's mind was immigration, Republican senator Lyndsey Graham, who still had a little integrity, was at the White House with Democratic senator Dick Durbin, who retains all of his, among others and they were there to discuss immigration reform.  Trump was just reshaping his promise about "the wall" into something that he would do and we would pay for rather than Mexico doing so, and he was pressing his case despite the opposition he was getting relative to funding in particular.  But without mentioning funding for the wall, he said on television news that if Durbin and Graham, thus both parties acting in accord, brought him an immigration reform bill, he would sign it no matter what was in it.  The implication was that with or without wall funding...with or without a resolution of the DACA controversy relating to children of undocumented immigrants...if the two parties could agree, he would too.  Well, a week or so later, Graham and Durbin were back with a bill on which they agreed, and Trump's response was that he wouldn't sign it because there was no funding for the wall.  He could have been forced to if McConnell had agreed to put the bill up for a vote, because Trump would have had to stand alone against amicably arrived at reform of our immigration, but McConnell didn't do that.  In other words, he shielded Trump, who was the only obstacle to resolution of a national problem that even George W. Bush wanted to fix, and his opposition was just that a project on which he had hung his political future wasn't funded.  McConnell was his enabler and millions of people will suffer on account of it.

Now, there are two relief bills floating around in The Senate.  The first one has been there for over three months now, and it has already been passed by The House.  The second one was forged by McConnell and his insider clique, but there are about twenty Republican senators who don't like it, not to mention most or all of the Democrats.  But McConnell knows that if he puts his bill up for a vote it will fail, and those twenty Republicans will be exposed to condemnation by their constituents, which means voted out of office in a few months.  So he is using the same tactic as he uses to defend Trump; he just doesn't allow a vote on either bill, and meanwhile, people are losing their houses, the children are hungry and their unemployment benefits have been reduced to meaninglessness.  But McConnell has protected his party's majority in The Senate, and that's all he cares about...that and protecting Trump from losing his constituency due to an unpopular veto.

There are lots of other examples of McConnell personally being the fly in the legislative ointment in service of Trump's needs relative to reelection and that of his fellow senators as well, but the point is made.  Donald Trump is a menace, but he's an oaf, and my guess is that even those in his "basket of deplorables" see that now...at least enough so to get him out of the seat of perhaps the greatest power in the world.  But if they don't see it, it's because McConnell has protected him from going on the record with his despicable, self-serving nature.  I just hope that the people of his home state of Kentucky value true democracy enough to throw him out with Trump this November.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

As Donald Trump thrashes about trying to find a way to excuse himself for the fact that he ran for president when he had no idea how to do the job, I find myself almost desperate for reassurance that his tenure will end after this coming election.  It is incomprehensible to me that about 40% of Americans continue to approve of him overall, but it is somewhat reassuring that the polls show that if the election were held today, Biden would beat him by something between 4 and 9 points.  That should be consoling, but until the votes are counted, and even then, until Trump actually vacates the White House, I won't feel safe.  I know that he will try to invalidate the election results--at best he'll do plenty of puling about election fraud, still without any evidence mind you--and thus I am not confident that he isn't going to pull some coup type trick to get into the Putin-Erdogan-Xi autocrat club.  I am convinced that he admires those guys and thinks that they are imperial in nature, which is what he thinks of himself.  Unless it's a landslide, Trump will try to crown himself king, but we can worry about how congress, the police or the military are going to handle that when the time comes.  In the interim, we can all just take our Xanax before bed and try to sleep through the night.

It seems that the more things he gets wrong, and the more often he bumbles through denials or excuses for them, the more secure we are from the threat of another Trump four year debacle, or worse: eight years or even twelve as he exhorted his base to ask for at a rally in Texas last year when they started to chant, "four more years!"  It sounded an awful lot like an admission that he was planning the aforementioned coup, but let's hope he isn't that stupid.  In fact, sending troops to Portland and other cities against the will of their mayors looked an awful lot like a dry run.  Well...let's just cross our fingers and think good thoughts for safety's sake.  It's hard to admit, but the more bad luck we have as a nation, the better the chance that we will be rid of its cause come next January.  In other words, there may be a consolation to the misery and chaos the pandemic is inundating us with.  The morbidity of Covid-19 is approaching 5 million and will surely reach six or seven: 2% of the population.  Fortunately, the mortality rate has fallen from 6% of cases to about 3.5%, presumably because there are finally enough ventilators and Remdesivir has been discovered, but no thanks to our crack-pot-in-chief's ascription of curative properties to Lysol and hydroxychloroquine. Between his lies and the canards he has spread to his willing and eager dupes, we're lucky that more people aren't dead.

I'm not saying that I am glad that the pandemic is devastating our country, and the world for that matter.  Like every other civilized person, I grieve for those lost and the misery of those who survive.  And as to Trump's coup fantasies, they scare me, but it is important that we all think about the possibilities that the Trump ego trip might end up in our peril.  The bottom line is this; if you know someone who doesn't plan to vote, make sure he or she changes his or her mind...unless we're talking about a Trump voter.

Your friend,

Mike