September 2020 Archives

Dear America,

This morning I heard Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas, interviewed about his new book on NPR.  Toward the end of the interview, he was asked about the current Republican intention to confirm Trump's most recent Supreme Court nominee, submitted just weeks before a presidential election despite their denial to the Democrats of the opportunity to even have a hearing on their nominee during the last year of the Obama administration, claiming that the people should decide who appointed the next justice that November.  Cruz is probably the most despised senator in Washington, even by his own party, and this morning he showed the reason in the answer he gave.  He said that the difference between 2016 and 2020 is that now the Republicans have both the presidency and a senate majority, which the Democrats didn't have.  He apparently thought that he could get away with what lawyers--and Cruz is a lawyer--refer to as "a distinction without a difference."  What that means is, in layman's terms, so what!  You see, when you distill his answer to its true meaning, unadorned by demagoguery and hypocrisy, it means, we could do it to you then, but you can't do it to us now.  We misused the power of our majority in what is supposed to be the repose of wisdom and comity to thwart both.  We had the power to be deceitful with impunity, so we did it and we're doing it again.

My point isn't to say something that everyone knows but that the only people who could change it don't care to even acknowledge.  Rather, this is an appeal to any of you Americans who might be Republicans to ask yourselves if you want to be branded as someone who does things like this: someone who lies and then swears to it.  I wrote a few days ago about the diminution in status of Republicans in my opinion, but I doubt that there will be any groundswell against the Republican scam just because I don't like it and it makes me wary of every Republican, not just those in Washington.  But the fact is that I am not alone in my newly enriched scorn for Republican conservatism, which today is a euphemism for, "I'm more righteous than you so I am going to use any trick in the book to control what you do."  This Supreme Court thing is a new nadir for the integrity, or more aptly the lack thereof, of Republicans as a political column, and it just may be that rank and file Republicans view it as a bridge too far, even if it's to achieve their goals.  It may be that there are Republicans capable of thinking for themselves instead of robotically toeing the party line.  It may be that for some Republicans, the fact that a national politician says something doesn't make it necessarily dispositive of all of the issue or all of the cognate considerations, like honor, probity and trustworthiness.

Now Ted Cruz is often deferred to because he putatively was a very effective litigator, especially in the Supreme Court.  But given what he tried to fly regarding this most recent Republican transgression and some of the other palpably idiotic things he said thinking that no one would try to analyze them, it is demonstrable that Ted Cruz hasn't ever had an original idea.  He is a follower just like Lyndsey Graham, who is the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mitch McConnell, who will drink any kind of KoolAid that Donald Trump pours for him in the name of partisan loyalty and self-aggrandizement regardless of what it costs the nation, and the minority leader in The House, Kevin McCarthy, who, when asked what qualified him to be Paul Ryan's successor as Speaker of The House when the Republicans still controlled it, said with pride that he had led his cronies in stopping Hillary Clinton by defaming her (isn't he half an idiot.)  But regardless of intelligence or the lack thereof, they are all quislings.   Quisling was the Hitler's puppet who ran Norway for the Nazis during World War II and sacrificed his own nation for personal gain.  That sounds a lot like all those members of congress, and one other guy.  Donald Trump has vacillated, dissembled and outright lied all toward the end of perpetuating his own power, which is coextensive with his ego.  He is a vainglorious, preening bully who has confused opportunism with assiduity.  And Graham, McConnell, McCarthy and all of the rest of the obsequious Republicans in Washington are kowtowing to him as Quisling did to Hitler.  What does that make them?  And if you vote for any of them, what does that make you?

So, in a gesture of flexibility as to my opinion, I am suggesting to you Republicans that it is not too late to redeem your good name.  All you have to do is let the Trump toadies know that your loyalty to party is secondary to your loyalty to principle and rectitude, and it is at stake if they don't relent.  As to the consequences if you don't, think about the analogy I just made.

Your friend,

Mike     

Dear America,

There is something ignoble about castigating the dead; they cannot defend themselves, much less rectify their deleterious conduct.  But since the late justice Ginsburg first reported having pancreatic cancer, I have felt that she should retire so that a president we could trust, then Barrack Obama, could appoint her successor.  Apparently, president-emeritus Obama actually had the late justice to lunch in 2013 and subtly--apparently too subtly--broached the subject of retirement with Ginsburg, who was then four years into a battle with a form of cancer with an average 5 year survival rate of just 9%.  She didn't respond to the overture, and my reproof of her is that she should have thought of the nation, and in fact of the very principles for which she stood before she let her personal preferences guide her.

There is no need to attempt to reprise the effects she had on American law and policy.  There has been plenty of that in the media over the past week, but in addition there has been the revelation of her dieing wish that a president other than Donald Trump--that is implied by her statement that she wanted it to be "the next president"--would name her replacement.  Unfortunately, that ship has all-but sailed.  And the irony is that both Trump's arrogation of a prerogative that Mitch McConnell peremptorily denied Trump's predecessor with some casuistry about waiting a year until the next president was elected is probably impelled by the same thing that motivated Ginsburg to decline to retire: hubris.  Ginsburg clung to power just like Trump is doing, and for the same reason.  Thus, in some sense, Trump's nomination of the young female version of the late justice Antonin Scalia is a kind of cosmic justice...karma if you prefer.  Obama could have been more forceful.  Ginsburg could have actually been humble, not like Niel Gorsuch, who claimed to be humbled by his nomination to the Supreme Court when what the context of his remarks translated to the fact that he was actually proud of it.  (Apparently he knows that pride is the first of the deadly sins but he was sly enough not to admit it, or maybe dumb enough not to know the difference.)  But Ginsburg wasn't humble, and Obama doesn't have forcefulness in him, so here we are: a president afflicted with near fatal egotism and megalomania is choosing who will replace a justice who thought herself above contemplating the future that her conceit assuredly guaranteed.  It's a synergy of egotism that has left the rest of us bereft of legal outcomes that would have protected us, and thus exposed to the risk of outcomes that will circumscribe our lives in undesirable, if not abhorrent ways.

I remember thinking exactly that when word of Ginsburg's pancreatic cancer was announced to the world.  She had already overcome colon cancer in 1999, which reduced her prospects of surviving pancreatic cancer for five years from 37% to 12%.  She was starting her tenure under a new administration in 2009 with a meager chance of surviving all the way through it, and I thought that it would be prudent for her, in the name of all she believed in, to retire.  She had survived the disastrous presidency of George W. by the grace of God, risking more appointments like Bush's other two, Alito and Roberts, all the while.  But now, with the election of Obama she could leave at an opportune time.  Time passed and she stayed on.  My mother-in-law fought pancreatic cancer bravely but she lasted only 6 years with the disease, and that was against the odds.  However I tried to reassure myself that Ginsburg would do even better, and she did, but not long enough.  She took an awful chance and we all lost.  Now we get Trump's choice, and while she may be brilliant, she is what you would expect from Trump in terms of her juris prudence, personal philosophy and policy tendencies.  She, Amy Coney Barrett,  will round out a six justice conservative majority, the oldest member of which is only 72.  We have at least 15 years of conservative slant in our highest court's opinions ahead of us, and probably considerably more.  That's enough to put guns in the hands of every lunatic in the country without the regulation that the first four words of the second amendment require regardless of what the "originalists" insist violates that very amendment, send women back to dirty allies and back rooms for abortions, insert God into most everything we do and require us all to swear our allegiance to Him, flag and country.  It's long enough to change our democratic republic into a virtual dictatorship, perhaps with Donald Trump still in power like some of the tyrants in more and more countries around the world: Xi, Un, Putin, Erdogan, Lukashenko, and so forth.

So, I blame McConnell for enabling Trump with the support of other hypocrites like Lyndsey Graham, and Trump for seizing the opportunity, but without Ruth Bader Ginsburg, their apostasy wouldn't have been possible.  We and our nation are the victims of pride...not ours, but someone else's, and we can't say that we weren't warned.  St. Augustine bemoaned pride centuries ago, and now we have a concrete demonstration that he was right.

Your friend

Mike

  

Dear America,

I'll admit at the outset that I have always had negative feelings about Republicans.  I have even characterized them in these letters in unflattering ways: that they are oriented toward things rather than people, that their attitude toward complete candor is that it is optional, that eristic palaver is the equivalent to logic in their political discourse, etcetera.  But now we are confronted with a hard reality that does not defy categorization, nor does it merit subtlety.  Mitch McConnell has demonstrated an apostasy that is pure autocracy no less ignoble than that of any tyrant or aspirant to that kind of power, including his boss, in the world.  And his Republican minions in The Senate are going along with him demonstrating that all Republicans in politics are as morally bankrupt as McConnell and Trump are.  I am also presuming that those who elected them will vote for them again, and that there will be no outrage, or even criticism emanating from other halls of politics on either the federal or state level.  Thus, I feel free now to give vent to my unvarnished opinion of Republicans.  They are impious liars, and their claims to piety are nothing but empty sanctimony and they know it, though in the spirit of their party, they will never admit it even when confronted with the indubitable truth.

McConnell didn't even wait until Ruth Bader Ginsburg's body was cold before he proclaimed his own hypocrisy for all to hear.  He stated as if it were a valid argument that refusing to give President Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, so much as a hearing not to mention a vote, was different in kind from his current willingness to give such to Trump's nominee.  Now, McConnell continued to prevaricate, Republicans have had control of The Senate for two election cycles, which constitutes a mandate from the people that justifies this betrayal of his own principles.  He implied that he and his cronies had a popular mandate by dint of their majority control of his house of the legislature and the oval office.  But what he omitted were the facts that despite holding more senate seats than Democrats, Republicans got 8% fewer votes in the process of winning them than their minority Democratic opponents did.  As to Trump, he got nearly 3 million fewer votes than his Democratic opponent in 2016.  The total of all the votes that Republican senators in office received in their elections was 153 million whereas Democrats holding Senate seats now received 168 million in their elections.  So the mandate that McConnell claims didn't come from a majority of the American people.  It came from a minority of the voting electorate.  That's no mandate at all.

The bare fact is that McConnell is shepherding this process through to its ultimate, ineluctable end out of his sheer, brutish, shamelesss willingness to exercise power without regard to moral rectitude or integrity.  And given that he will likely be reelected in November, and that the Republicans up for reelection will win many of their elections too, I cannot help but conclude that Republicans in general are without rectitude, integrity or shame.  But I will concede this.

It may be that my conclusions and opinions about Republicans are wrong.  It may be that come November, Republican voters will determine that they do not want to be tarred with the same brush that McConnell, Trump and their sycophants deserve and will have no choice but to endure in history.  It may be that there are enough noble Republicans in the voting electorate to repudiate and expel from the halls of power those Republican politicians who are perpetrating this offense to decency...this overt abuse of power...to work an injustice that will prevail for decades.

I don't know that I can withhold judgment until the election, and I admit it.  I am so incensed at this moment that I can barely keep myself open to the prospect of associating with the Republicans I know, and to do so in silence as to this abomination, but I will try.  And I will admit that my opinion means nothing to any Republican as righteous indignation isn't within their ken.  But  this is an offense that will never merit forgiveness, not even for a hyper-righteous, would-be saint like Mitt Romney--whose father I believe would have been ashamed of him over his acquiescence in this offense against democracy--no matter how many times Mitt genuflects and prays.

To all you Republicans I would offer this exhortation.  God is watching, and he knows that you know that this isn't right.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Since Donald Trump's audacity is endless, we have all been treated to scads of it, but this week we observed unparalleled audacity from even him.  As the governors and other officials of the western states suffering catastrophic brush and forest fires met with him to explain their situation and discuss remedies, Trump's myopic, self-serving view that forest management was the problem was confronted.  Wade Crowfoot, California's secretary of natural resources pointed out that management of the forests had a role, but without abating climate change it would be for naught.  Trump replied that it was going to get cooler and that science didn't know about it, and when crowfoot persisted, Trump told him that he had "drunk the kool-aid."  Of course, the implication was that our paternalistic "stable genius" president did know and everyone should be assured by his confidence.

Other officials later ridiculed Trump's favored solution of raking the forest (he actually said that, just like his suggestion that people inject bleach and Lysol to cure Covid-19) for a couple of reasons, presumably among them is that we're not talking about someone's back yard, but rather millions of acres.  The forests in question in California, for example, that is the ones that are at risk, are only 3% under the control of the state, while 57% are federally controlled lands.  So, if there's raking to be done, maybe our president can pay Eric and Don, Jr. an allowance to do it since the vast preponderance of the forest that is vulnerable is their father's responsibility as the person in  charge of public federal land management.  They aren't doing anything constructive anyway, so maybe they could be imbued with a work ethic while they solved the western states' fire problem and earned a few bucks with honest labor in the bargain.  

In any other circumstance...with any other president...I would be confident that such an admission of narcissistic pedantry would be the coup de grâce, but not with this one.  His "base," since we have already mentioned drinking the kool-aid, seems to just brush such overt bluster aside and credit it to what they excuse asTrump's iconoclastic lack of political correctness, but what is actually, in his case, a psychopathic personality disorder.  His complete lack of empathy for the victims in favor of his Luddite views on the subject of the fires would disqualify anyone else from a second term as president in both parties.  But somehow, Donald Trump has managed to subjugate the Republican Party completely, including what polls show to be 90% of its members.  Of course, the political poltroons in office were immediately cowed by the prospect of Trump's thumbs doing a number on them, so the reality that they have become his sycophants in every respect is no surprise.  But as to the rest of Republicans, those whose views and principles have always seemed wrong but sane to me in the past, I cannot explain their blind loyalty but in the way in which I did recently: they share his sub rosa views on race, immigration, police excess and the extremes of all of the rest of what has passed for conservatism in the past century.

By blindly supporting Donald Trump, his voters are able to advance a collective attitude that they wouldn't admit to otherwise.  Trump will do their dirty work for them while they just sit quietly and nod approval without openly professing his odious preferences.  That is why most of them would condemn Trump's private behavior if it were in any other politician, but dismiss it as nothing but a set of disturbing peccadilloes in his case.  If they expressed the values of conservatism with regard to Trump as a whole, they couldn't have the barbarian who shares their ideals do their dirty work for them.  The Trump voters I know would condemn anyone they knew who acted personally the way that Trump does, from his peccancy to his predations; from his demands for personal loyalty to himself at the expense of loyalty to the nation and its principles to his meretricious use of the presidency to line his own pockets and his utter deceitfulness.  Most of Trump's voters are ten commandments people in every respect other than their fealty to him.  In short, Donald Trump has institutionalized hypocrisy.  It is an unforgivable transgression against our culture.   But maybe our culture was just a veneer.  Maybe he has just brought out the worst in us, like too much drink does to the individual over-indulger.  But maybe if he loses...maybe if enough people reject his deprecation of modern science in favor of a political goal as well as the rest of his villainy...we can at least recover some semblance of civilization for our nation.  Maybe we can redeem our empathy and sympathy for one another if we can just limit Trump to one term.  Maybe we can heal in time.

Let me make it clear that I'm no big fan of Joe Biden. He has more shortcomings than a president would have ideally.  But there is one thing that I feel he is eminently capable of: he can bring out our better selves again just by being himself.  That's enough for me.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

A new Bob Woodward book is just being published, and the publicity about it starts with something Trump said in one of a dozen taped interviews.  In the book Trump says that he minimized the danger of the corona virus because he wanted to avoid public panic, but he knew the virus was dangerous.  Obviously, he would put his disassembling in the best light he could think of with his limited intelligence without contemplation of the negative implications of his claim, which are amply manifested in our current situation and after the woeful losses of life and health they caused.  But while it seems obvious to anyone who is not a blind Trump supporter that claiming that the impending pandemic was "a hoax" or "the latest Democratic hoax" even though he knew it was dangerous was not protective of anyone but him.  He was running on the strength of the economy, and a pandemic would be inimical to its continuing vigor.  That's why he minimized the danger not just the United States, but the world as a whole, was facing.  In his little mind, he probably thought that if he didn't talk about it, no one else would, and hence it would go unnoticed.  The best laid plans of mice and mental midgets often go awry.  But if that is the extent of the Woodward book's damnation of Trump, it's of such little impact that the book is hardly worth reading.  Like its predecessor "tell all" books--Comey's, the third party account of Trump's impious conduct by Michael Wolf, and now that of Trump's niece, the doctor of psychology--there's nothing new in them that anyone who listens to the news or reads the paper doesn't already know.  The book of Trump's former personal attorney is also coming out, so we can hope that there is something new in it, but I doubt it.  Everyone in the world knows what Trump is, and what he does always comes out, so there isn't much hope that there will be an October surprise in any book about him.

What bothers me isn't that the things he does aren't shocking anymore.  After almost four years of his duplicity, petty vindictiveness, bullying and so on, how could anything surprise anyone, even Trump supporters.  No, what bothers me is that nothing that comes to light can change the mind of anyone who intends to vote for him in November.  It's all tolerable to them, and until lately, I have wondered why, but now I think I know.  All these claims of approval for him because he speaks his mind are bogus.  They are just subterfuge for the fact that they believe not what he says, what he believes, and they would be ashamed to admit it.  He lies about everything, including his beliefs, and that is obvious from his conduct, but his supporters can wrap themselves in those lies just as they wrap themselves in the flag.  He said he wanted immigration reform, but when two senators came to him with a plan that he promised to sign before it was even a choate idea, he refused because it didn't have funding for his famous wall.  He promised health care better than "Obamacare," but nothing came of that either, so he just persisted in trying to get the Affordable Care Act legally abolished with nothing in its place.  (What he really dislikes about it is the name, Obamacare.  If it had been called Romneycare because Romney actually presided over the passage of such a plan in Massachusetts, or better yet, Trumpcare, Trump would have been alright with it.)   He was going to promulgate a huge infrastructure program to create millions of jobs...but nothing happened.  His favored tax plan made him and the other rich Americans richer by reducing their already pared down tax obligations while throwing a small bone to each of the rest of us, though he claimed that the tax cut was for all of us, the middle class in particular.  None of that self-serving duplicity, or any of the rest of his misuse of presidential power, dissuades them since they aren't voting for him because of what he has purportedly done,  but really hasn't. They are voting for him because they believe in what he does: white supremacy, Chauvinism, unrestrained gun ownership in spite of the fact that the second amendment starts out with the mandate for gun ownership and carrying to be "well regulated."  They believe that black lives don't matter but that blue ones do.  They believe that the United States should dominate the world and that our system should be everywhere whether the people of the countries dominated like it or not...that we and our culture should have dominion over all others.  They believe that black people get most of the welfare benefits that taxpayers pay for and ignore the fact that more whites than blacks receive welfare.  They don't like a woman's right to choose, but they don't want to talk about it.  That's why they vote for Trump.  He is the embodiment of their baser selves, and he gives them cover so that they can try to implement their ideas accordingly.  What have we become.

So, I won't read Woodward's book, or Cohen's, nor will I read the next exposé.  None of them matter.  We can't hope for reason to prevail in November so what's the use of knowing more reasons.  We just have to hope that we outnumber them.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

There's one thing Donald Trump has working for him that no other candidate for any office can match: Trump fatigue.  Those of us who--and let me set vitriol and pejoratives aside for now--those of us who oppose Trump are so sick of hearing about him and from him that we are becoming inured to his odious qualities.  What frightens me about that is that it could result in ennui, and  more particularly, such dismay that some of us won't even leave the house on election day.  There was a mock Latinism that we used to use in such circumstances when exhorting others to persevere: illigetimi non carborundum, or, don't let the bastards wear you down.  But in fact, he has.

I have family members who voted for this particular member of the class of illigetimi...the king illigetimatum, if you will...and I don't see any change in their thinking, if what they do could be called that.  As I lie in bed at night sometimes, I imagine a conversation with them in which they say that they like what Trump has done, and I ask them to name one thing.  "He cut taxes," they might say, to which I would reply, "It saved me about $1,000 last year and it saved him millions, and it is going to cost our children trillions.  How much did it save you?"  Or they might say, "Well, he cut unnecessary regulations."  To which I might reply, "Name one, and then tell me who's life it improved...and I mean a person, not a corporation."  Or they might say, he stopped all those Mexican rapists from coming in, and he's building a wall to keep them out."  To which I might say, "Well, he promised that Mexico would pay for his wall, but it isn't, and in the bargain, American agriculture is complaining that there isn't anyone to pick their crops.  Add to that the fact that born Americans commit more crimes per capita than illegal immigrants.  Maybe he'll build a wall to keep us out of Palm Beach."

But after I go through a few more of these calls back to reality for my family members, I find myself grinding my teeth and getting a headache.  Then I recognize that it doesn't matter what I say to them.  Even if I could prevail upon them to educate themselves by checking Trump's brags against a reliable source...I mean everyone has access to the internet these days, so as long as you check your sources for reliability, you can learn anything there....even if  I could do that, they wouldn't change their minds.  One of them is as much a braggart as Trump is.  I think that's why he likes Trump.  And the other is educated, but...well let me put it this way.  It hasn't helped him.  So why should I even think about undertaking such a project.  That's Trump fatigue.  I've stopped even contemplating talking about Trump and the election.  After all, the statistics go something like this: 31% of registered voters are Democrats and 25% are Republicans according to a Gallup Poll. If the independents don't vote, or they break 50/50, we rational people have the equivalent of about a ten or eleven point electoral lead, so why fight the battle with the Republicans, which both of those family members are.  But here's the rub.  The other 44%, the independents, are a wild card.  So, excluding the Republicans, who do we have to talk to to get this guy out of the White House?  All of 'em.

Which brings me to rub number two.  Recently I have heard news accounts of politicians expressing fears that even if Trump loses, he won't leave the White House or give up power.  You may recall that I expressed the same fear recently, but I thought that I was alone in that fear--that it was just a bad day-dream.  But now some other people--some people in positions to express educated fears about such things--are doing so.  It isn't far fetched.  The lies he tells convince the kind of people who carry long guns to stated capitals insisting that the government doesn't have the right to make them wear masks or stay home, in other words, wackos...armed wackos, and all we have is ideas and words with which to defend ourselves and our free country.  The wackos think that doing what you want regardless of whom you harm, or with regard to the pandemic, whom you infect and kill, is tantamount to democratic freedom.  They think that all that counts is that they are free to act irresponsibly and it never occurs to them that they are arrogating our freedom not to be harmed by them.  I can see a wall of heavily armed people, calling themselves the national posse comitatus, encircling the White House and insisting that they are protecting their freedom by taking ours and abandoning democracy in favor of the dictator of their choice.  I can hear them saying that it is in all of our best interests because democracy has run amok.  Oh God.  Now I have another horrific day-dream to try to go to sleep in spite of: carnage on Pennsylvania Avenue and chaos everywhere else; Trump and Putin holding a summit to decide who gets what in the world, and we know who would dominate that discussion.  It'll be poison on every opposition doorknob and a Russian oligarch in every town.

Wait a minute.  Wait a minute.  That's crazy...isn't it?  Tell me it's crazy...please!

Your friend,

Mike    

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