May 2021 Archives

Dear America,

Reluctantly, I have to admit that there is disingenuousness on both sides of the congressional aisle these days.  President Biden's "infrastructure package" does comprise infrastructure measures, but it also includes measures that have nothing to do with infrastructure.  And now the Republicans have introduced their own infrastructure bill that comes to almost a trillion dollars, but it is strictly infrastructure as we have always used the term.  They are on the right side of this argument in my opinion, but that doesn't change the character of the party on other issues in general.  For example, the Republicans' insistence on investigating the Black Lives Matter movement concomitantly with the Democrat's proposed investigation of the January 6, 2021 invasion of the halls of congress is pure partisanship, and no amount of sophistry can change that.  Their complain that there are already too many investigations of the insurrection when they initiated more than a dozen investigations of the attack on the Benghazi consulate by Libyan rebels in the hope that they could fabricate some connection to the events on the part of Hillary Clinton is nothing short of a contrivance.  Republican shills like Daryl Issa and Trey Gowdy shamelessly and knowingly hyperbolized their purported righteous indignation to justify their public zeal for what they tried to characterize as the quest for just deserts...all to no avail by the way.  And of course, the list of Republicans' overt insincerity goes on.

Who can forget Mitch McConnell's crocodile tears over his refusal to allow the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Merrick Garland because, he purred like the asp in The Garden, there was only a year until the next election and he insisted that the electorate decide who should be on The Court.  Then, less than three months before the 2020 election he rammed through the Trump initiated nomination of Amey Coney Barrett in record time claiming some lame distinction that was without a difference between the two events as Ted Cruz wove a spider's web of historical precedents that didn't seem to come to mind when the nominee was put forward by a president from the other party.  And most prominent of all Republican canards is the fixed election trope.  It is so preposterous that the leadership of the party has disavowed it, but they have done nothing to prevent Donald Trump and his acolytes from perpetuating what can only be described as a malignant, self-serving fairy tale that actually inspired an attempt to overthrow the government by preventing congress from affirming the electoral college vote.  People died on that occasion, yet Republicans like Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, is satisfied to call it a dead issue that we should all forget rather than investigate to determine who is to blame.

It would be one thing if all this were anomalous, but it is just a continuation of party history, and I don't mean just the politicians.  In our family there are Trump voters who continue to harbor the delusion that Trump actually won the election along with the majority of registered Republicans.  And you can go back to Nixon's "silent majority"  and beyond for more of these false narratives that have allowed a minority of the American polity to claim themselves to be our nation's proper governors.  The prolongation of the Vietnam War was Nixon's aim, but "The Pentagon Papers" proved that the war and its expansive lethality were a long lost cause that didn't justify the loss of life that occurred during the six years of the Nixon tenure.

And so, here we are again having to listen to the Republican prattle about a deficit in our budget that they gleefully embraced when they passed a tax bill favoring people like their new moral leader more than they did anyone else, and led to a trillion dollar deficit in its first year after enactment...this from the party of fiscal restraint.  And we can add to their two-faced protestation their bemoaning of the impending withdrawal from Afghanistan, which one of their own started purportedly solely to effect the apprehension of Osama bin Ladin after 9/11.  At that time the country was controlled by the Taliban, and  now the Republicans profess to fear that they will ascend to control of the county again, ignoring the fact that without American intervention and the consequent losses of life and fortune, such would have been the case all along.

I've said it before and I'll say it again.  There are moral differences between Republicans and Democrats that are fundamental.  And while Democrats exhibit their own moral frailties, they don't rise to the level of nefariousness.  I don't think the Republicans can say that of themselves.

Your friend,

Mike    

Dear America,

Mitch McConnell committed himself, and thus the Republican Party in the Senate, to obstruction of the Biden administration's efforts to direct government toward service of the American people as opposed to service to the wealthiest Americans at the expense of the rest of us.  He said, "100% of my focus is standing up to this administration."  He went on to opine that the Biden administration was moving the country toward socialism, and by necessary implication away from the Reaganomics concept of "trickle down" or "supply side" economics.  Notably, since it's dissemination as an economic doctrine in the early 1980's by conservative economists through Ronald Reagan, the putative "great communicator," economic stratification has only gotten more worse as the gap between the affluent and those who go to work every day has steadily grown.  Yet, conservatives like Mitch McConnell continue to cleave to that doctrine despite its total failure to accomplish what it was purported to facilitate.  And the corollary to supply side economics--if it's not supply side, it's socialism--has become the disingenuous canard with which conservatives condemn those who advocate for provident government rather than plutocracy, and that tactic is a giant step toward the institutionalization of the honi soit qui mal y pense strategy that the Republican Party has adopted.  Basically, it's the claim that if your not one of us, your evil, all the while claiming to rue what they characterize as a lack of bipartisanship.  President Biden invites them to the White House to discuss compromise, and the response is Mitch McConnell dedicating himself to obstruction rather than compromise, and that's alright with Republicans.

I used to think of that kind of conduct as just dissemblance, that is, concealment of true intent.  After all, they're just politicians.  But given the brazen admission by McConnell of his despicable intentions--especially in light of his outright betrayal of his own commitment to let the American people decide by election who should be on the Supreme Court during the last year of the Obama administration and his insistence on denying them that right in the last two months of the Trump administration--the Republicans' intentions can no longer be considered that benign.  We are witnessing not just prevarication but outright lying.  And given their openness in doing so and the near unanimity with which the party's members subscribe to the lies, I can only be concerned about the future of American democracy.  If the American people cannot identify what the Republicans are doing and reject, if not repudiate it by leaving the party, how can we conclude that true democracy is what Republicans want.  After all, Joe Biden won the presidential election by about seven million votes, and so he can reliably be concluded to be the choice of the American voting majority, so how can overt obstruction of his policies be considered democratic?  In 2016, Trump lost the popular vote with 63 million votes, almost 3 million fewer than Hilary Clinton got, but he ascended to the presidency anyway.  Yet Republicans constantly invoked the argument that the will of the people was being thwarted when Trump was impeached, seemingly ignoring the will of the nearly 67 million voters who voted against him.  Didn't they ever hear of the goose and the gander?

I don't mean to make light of all this.  Over the past few decades I have been confirmed in the belief that Republicans know that they are dishonest and that their tactics are knowingly devious.  I go back to Speaker Newt Gingrich and his ilk in the House of Representatives all the way up through Paul Ryan, and I think back on the naked misrepresentations they made in pursuit of policies that were advocated only by a minority of the American people as if God was on their side, and I despair.  What is their intent?  Unfortunately, our bicameral legislature facilitates their usurpation of power in that the Senate in which each state, large or small, urban or agrarian, gets two senators, resulting in the conservative minority having more senators than does the majority in many legislative sessions.  The effect is veto power over every bill much of the time, despite the will of the majority of the American people.  Similarly, the electoral college, which was intended to prevent the election of a populist demagogue, allowed exactly that in 2016.  Thus, as long as the Republican Party lacks integrity and good intentions and basks in its willingness to engage in the arrogation of popular power, democracy is just a myth in our country.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Donald Trump has prescribed a new philosophy for Republicans and they seem in large numbers to have embraced it: "Honi soit qui mal y pense."   It is an ancient phrase that endures today on the crest of the British royal family, in British court rooms and on their passports as well as in other places where official business is done.  It's meaning has been variously interpreted from the language, but in this context, the meaning that I would ascribe to it is, "Evil to him that does not believe".  And it is apt for anything associated with Trump; I see no way to debate that premise.  Anyone who crosses him will experience irrational vituperation, spiteful retribution, and as a consequence, opprobrium from a substantial swath of the Republican Party.  It is the motto of an aspiring autocrat, an irrational Inquisitor, a shameless demagogue, a paranoid megalomaniac, an unapologetic prevaricator, an advocate for palpable lies, an inveterate cheat in business and marriage, a disloyal ally and friend, a general hedonist, and to pull it all together, an ego with feet.

Frankly, I don't care if Trump is all those things as long as he continues to hold his Mad Tea Party at Mar-a-Lago and no one but the Mad Hatter and the March Hare attend.  He can keep his little confederacy of the irrational down there in Florida where they can't really do any harm and I don't have to hear or read about it.  But it seems that Trump is not content just to hold his demented court.  He is rumored to be preparing to resume his courting of the lunatic fringe with more of his inimitable rallies, presumably in anticipation of an attempt to return to power.  And he now has acolytes doing the same in his name, like Margery Taylor Greene, who fits right in to the Mad Tea Party scenario, Q-anon subscription and all.  There is some danger for us all in that because by some electoral college kind of quirk in our system, it is conceivable that the malefactor in chief could stage a comeback.  Between Trump's conceit and the gullibility of his fanatical adulators, and with the new prominence of AI manipulation imbedded in everyone's cell phone, the possibility cannot be dismissed without further attention.  But even if Trump doesn't return to power, his implicit mantra...Honi soit qui mal y pense...is a recipe for the demise of American democracy, and given the width and breadth of American power, for the demise of liberty worldwide.  It is not the idea that is the danger.  It is the practice that devolves from it.  I mentioned that Trump is an irrational inquisitor when he has it out for someone, and the Inquisition is what I think of when I think of condemnation of all who do not believe in something.  Trump's administration, especially the last eighteen months or so of it, was like an inquisition, though fortunately, unlike the Spanish Inquisition it didn't last for two hundred and fifty years...at least not yet.

This may seem like nothing more than an idle rant, but to me it is a rational fear.  Devious people like Donald Trump are profound menaces when they ascend to power.  Think of Nicholas Maduro, Vladimir Putin...hell, think of Idi Amin.  You may be inclined to think such references to be hyperbole, but think again.  If Donald Trump had the power to prescribe to our Department of Justice whom to prosecute and for what, would you be comfortable speaking out in the American tradition about Trump's behavior?  Would you trust him to be just?  Would you trust him not to abuse his power?  Would you trust that he couldn't do you harm with his impunity if he had such impunity?  And now, he has the seemingly incontrovertible credence and loyalty of at least 70% of one of our two major political parties.  Granted, 70% of the mere 25% of our registered partisans is only about 17% of all voters, but look how much damage they did in 2020.  This honi soit qui mal y pense mentality is a threat of a profound proportion, and it is no idle fantasy.  Because it is such a danger, it needs to have its name attached to it.  Don't be afraid to say it out loud now, because if you don't, you may wake up one day in 2024 and find that it's too late.  An autocrat and his cabal are like a malignant tumor.  They won't just go away.  Remember: Honi soit qui mal y ponse.   It is the new Republican modus operandi, and it is the juggernaut that Donald Trump will try to ride back into town...Washington, D.C. that is.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Every time I contemplate another Republican Party debacle I think, this is the party's nadir.  The sinkhole into which it has fallen cannot be infinitely deep, so this must be the bottom.  Then a few weeks go by and I think, well, that wasn't rock bottom, this is.  Now, here I am again contemplating what looks like the bottom, but this time, I'm not going to fool myself.  As long as Donald Trump is around, there will be toadies to lick his boots, and thus, there is no bottom to look forward to.  That means that a change in the party's trajectory is not a prospect in any foreseeable future.  The Republican Party has become our nations historical mutt, and Trump is holding it by the nape of the neck, sicking it on anyone he perceives to be an adversary, whether from within the party or from without.  I have no love for either Liz Cheney or her father, whom I consider to have been one of the most despicable, diabolical figures ever to have succeeded in American politics.  But while I see Liz's politics as being as abominable as her father's, it seems possible, maybe even probable, that at least her motives are pure and she is sincere, misguided or not.  This Stefanik character, on the other hand, is an unpredictable hazard to all of us.

She is trying to become the number three leader of the Republican Party in the House of Representatives at the expense of the incumbent, Cheney.  While I find Liz Cheney palpably indefensible in her adherence to her hyper-conservative guiding tenets, by virtue of her outright condemnation of Donald Trump, his election canard and the cognate assault on our electoral process on January 6, 2021 she is now one of my heroines.  She probably shares much of Trump's and his acolyte's hateful ethos...their sub rosa nazi sentiments regarding race, chauvinism, egalitarianism and the like...she at least understands that the American democracy is sacrosanct and that Trump's willingness to cast it down in the service of his psychotic quest for demi-god status menaces all of us, even those of a conservative bent.  Cheney's dogged and adamant repudiation of Trump's bizarre election fraud abject lie is admirable in light of her political ambition and the related sacrifice her confrontation with Trump constitutes.  The Republican toadies who make Trump and his enduring control of their party as hard to remove as a three-day-imbedded tick are as vindictively pursuing her downfall as their patron is.  Cheney crossed the boss, and now everyone around her is clearing out so as to avoid his wrath.  That's easy for the two partisans ahead of her in the chain of command: Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise.  If there were ever two more subornable politicians I am unaware of them.  McCarthy has risen to the position of minority leader by putting party ahead of everything else, even when the welfare of the nation hangs in the balance.  When he was being considered as a replacement for John Boehner as Speaker, he was interviewed on the news one night and adduced his leadership of the effort to scuttle Hilary Clinton's ambitions as a qualification for the job, apparently never considering the possibility that the Speaker has a higher duty than fending off political party adversaries.  He's a shill in a perpetual search for a quid pro quo.  As to Scalise, he had the misfortune to get shot by a lunatic radical assailant at a Republican party baseball practice, but he has turned that misfortune into a passport to party-political prominence and he uses it shamelessly.  That's the quality of Cheney's second and third most formidable adversaries, and while that quality may be tawdry and unscrupulous self-service at anyone else's expense, it's what makes them formidable...not because of who they are but because of who can buy them.

The only ray of sunshine in this pathetic party passion play is that Stefanik may be a much more friendly other-party-foe than Cheney is.  Her voting record has come up in news coverage of her ascendancy, and apparently conservative organizations have rated her disdainable rather than admirably conservative.  Her voting record in Congress pales when compared to Cheney's when assessed for fealty to conservative policy goals.  And ironically, her loyalty to "Trumpism" is even shakier than Cheney's given Cheney's record on votes on which Trump took a position, and substantially so.  Thus, this insurgency against a staunch conservative like Cheney, who has roamed the halls of Republican power formidably for years now, serves Democrats to at least some extent.  Now, when Stefanik takes over Cheney' role of chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, every time she expresses a non-conservative sentiment consistent with her previously espoused political philosophy, she will be excoriated by the party hierarchy.  On the other hand, every time she espouses a conservative position contrary to her own political history in deference to that hierarchy, she will be accused of apostasy by her constituents; she may be trading today's political success for future electoral failure.  Good for us.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Facebook's oversight board has now determined that barring Donald Trump from its pages was appropriate on January 6, 2021 but it must review the exclusion of Trump's patent lies within the next six months, after which Facebook must either relent in its ban or create a rationally based rule for doing so if it intends to prolong the ban.  The board in question was created, appointed and funded by Facebook voluntarily to address the criticisms of its autonomy in the operation of what had become an unrestricted public forum that was home to some of the most absurd, scurrilous, devious, patently false material to ever pollute the internet, such as Trump's self-serving and maniacal rants about the 2020 election being rigged or otherwise tainted.  But all of this is a function of a basic casuistry proliferated by conservatives, Republicans in particular: that the ability to post on Facebook is part of our first amendment right of free speech.  It isn't.

The right to speak freely is the right to be free from governmental restriction in doing so.  It is not the right to come into our homes and speak to us on our computers or over our radios and televisions.  It is not the right to come and stand on my lawn and preach a credo to me either.  It is not the right to make me listen in any fashion, nor is it the right to require me or any other private citizen or entity to disseminate anyone's speech.  That isn't just my opinion; it is the opinion of the Supreme Court, articulated over and over in various contexts: commercial speech, hate speech, slander and libel, incitement to violence, hate speech, fighting words and more.  You can look it up, and I encourage you to do so, America.  In fact, the real problem here is that we Americans, and people all over the world for that matter, don't "look it up."  It perplexes me that with good information so freely available on the world-wide web, so many people never question the bad information that seems to be proliferating geometrically.  One of the characteristics of homo sapiens distinguishing us from the other species is supposedly our ability to act rationally.  We are supposed to be evolving even further, but instead, the internet seems to have precipitated a decline in human rationality.  It's worrisome.

I know that I am repeating myself, but I feel I must in this circumstance.  The problem is our educational institutions around the world.  We need another syllabus to be required of every school all over the world and of every student.  We need required courses in ascertainment of the truth individually as opposed to via the noises that come out of the herd, and especially those on the fringes of it.  We need to stop teaching every student what to think, but rather teach them how to think.  We need to teach everyone, but especially everyone who will be eligible to cast a vote somewhere, that every purported fact should have a bibliography that can be accessed on the same resource from which it was procured.  And if it doesn't have such a credential, we have the internet to supply one.  All we have to do is use it prudently and think about what we see on it critically.  If we can create such an intellectual regimen, we may not need to bar Trump from Facebook or any other forum as long as everyone takes the need to verify claims of fact as a requirement that they must conform their thought processes to.  The rule should be, for every "fact" that you want to consider believing, you must confirm it with a reliable source at least twice...a reliable source, not some wacko propaganda forum.  To institute such a regimen, we will have to teach everyone how to do the research and where to go as well as where not to go and why.  I really don't think that should be too hard or time consuming, so why aren't we doing it?

I don't have an answer for that question.  It's been a prominent issue for a long time, and now that fabrications, canards and bizarre ideas have become ubiquitous on the internet, and now that the vast majority of children have access to them, we need to inoculate them all against things like presidential innuendo, libel and slander and demagoguery in the form of his outright lies, and those of his political acolytes as well.  What Trump did to our collective consciousness over the course of four years should not have been possible, and it would never have happened if we had just started educating our progeny about the sources and use of valid information from the beginning of our creation of a way for them to get it...and to get everything that isn't it as well.

So, America, let's start the next big social movement with our school boards.  In fact, I would say that even if you disagree with me philosophically, getting your children educated as to how to inform themselves in this fashion works for you in your effort to proliferate your beliefs in the next generation.  Even if you believe that the Qanon conspiracy is real, which you may well be the only person in your town who does, teaching your children how to confirm your beliefs through review of reliable sources should serve your purpose if what you think is valid.  So don't be afraid, America.  Cleave to some of the most famous words Ronald Reagan ever uttered, which fell from Reagan's lips in Rejkiawik, Iceland after a summit conference with Mikhail Gorbachev in October 1986: "Trust, but verify!"

Your friend,

Mike