Category Archives: Politics
Commentary on the US ways of politics
And Now?
Stonewalled by Trump, out numbered by McConnell, we’re staring Defeat in the face. If only there was a Democrat in the race for President who could realistically defeat Trump in November 2020. Since it worked the first time, he will undoubtedly cheat again somehow. Yet that is all that’s left. After Iowa, that’s not a very appealing idea.
Bernie Sanders strikes me as another angry old man, his “socialist” proposals like pie in the sky idealism. Biden appears to be a ghost of himself, not at all the “savior” he was promoted to be. Mayor Pete seems so far to be smart and likeable, but his life style may be a turnoff for many, and Elizabeth Warren may remind too many of the school teacher she used to be. The Democrats are a diverse lot. but all those folks are white. Why didn’t Harris and Booker gain enough support to stay in the race? Castro would have been an excellent candidate with party support. The party lost its chance to display its diversity, and to give its voters a real choice.
How is it fair for the Socialist to run as a Democrat? Doesn’t he pull funds and support away from the other candidates? I really don’t want to see Amy or Chang chewed up by lying, cheating, dirty player Trump.
So much for Friday Gloom.
The boy prince:
Read this:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/01/jared-kushner-peace-plan-palestinians
He says he’s read 25 books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Really? And arrogantly blames the Palestinians for their troubles. Married to the daughter of the “President”, he seems to think he can pontificate with little knowledge and expect to be taken seriously.
Mr. Kushner, go live with a Palestinian family in the Gaza strip for a year and learn to speak arabic as well as hebrew. Let them teach you what it is really like to live in an open air prison. Give up your income for a month or so. Go through the daily grind of trying to feed your family, find medical care, evade the Israeli bombs, visit relatives in the West Bank and deal somehow with the Israeli police.. Ask your grandparents or other elders what it was like to live in the Warsaw Ghetto. Then you will have some idea of what the Palestinians go through every minute of their lives. Your entitled arrogance will do nothing but more harm. Read the Lemon Tree.
Now What?
The House is done with its presentation. It’s the President’s turn.
Back in October, I pulled the following, and called it the Age of Shamelessnes:
In the Age of Shamelessness, you cover all your bases in defense: we didn’t do it, fake news, but even if we did do it, it’s not a crime, OK we did it, but everybody does it and we do it all the time. You can even backtrack to saying it didn’t happen after saying you do it all the time. It can be Fake News and Totally Normal, Nothing to See Here all at once. Because the truth doesn’t actually matter. Language and rhetoric are hammers you use to bludgeon the various enemies until they stop fighting back. Trump’s Republican allies will soon enough be saying that withholding military aid until a foreign power ratfucks your political opponent so you can win an election is good and smart. Also, it never happened.
This is the Alice-down-the-Rabbit-Hole Republican fantasy world we are living in. The attempted shake down of a weaker needy nation which may indeed have failed because it came to public light, is none the less the crime of attempted bribery, and therefore impeachable.
The attack by the “Mafia Don” in the Whitehouse
In the memorandum, Trump says to Zelensky, “I would like you to find out
what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say
CrowdStrike… I guess you have one of your wealthy people… The server,
they say Ukraine has it.”
Buzzfeed on this subject:
… for CrowdStrike to make its way into the
president’s conversation with a foreign leader — and to be subject of
mainstream news articles (like the one you’re reading right now) — is
vindication of a yearslong conspiracy theory. Here’s how CrowdStrike
bubbled up from the online sludge and into the mouth of the American
president — and may become part of the impeachment investigations.In
2016, the Democratic National Committee hired CrowdStrike, which is
based in Sunnyvale, California, to investigate a breach into their
servers. The cybersecurity firm concluded that Russian government–backed
hackers compromised the network, rejecting the idea that the hack was
instead carried out by a lone wolf hacker named “Guccifer 2.0.”CrowdStrike outlined their initial findings in a June 2016 blog post: “We
observed the two Russian espionage groups compromise the same systems
and engage separately in the theft of identical credentials.”But the minute CrowdStrike released that conclusion — a full report came in December 2016
— they became a character in a sprawling online conspiracy, which
sought to debunk the Russians’ involvement. After BuzzFeed News reported on the findings, hyperpartisan website Breitbart raised concerns, based on CrowdStrike’s financial ties with Google.That planted the seeds of doubt.
The
most commonly used 4chan archive, 4plebs, which doesn’t include
everything due to threads 404ing and disappearing, lists March 2017 as the earliest mention of CrowdStrike on the site.“How
did /pol/ spin the whole Trump under FBI investigation and the FBI and
DoJ saying that Obama didn’t wiretap Trump,” one user asks.Another
user responds with a timeline titled “Russia could not have been the
source of leaked Democrat emails released by Wikileaks. Please read.”
The user writes, “[The DNC’s]entire narrative around Russia has been
fictionalized with the help of the CrowdStrike private cybersecurity company.”True? Fantasy? Wishful thinking? There’s more, and it gets wierder and wierder. See the Buzzfeed piece.
A string of observations
Obama’s question. Why are they so angry??? After they won. Good question. On cnn last night (Nov.5), Don Lemon had a bunch of talking heads from both parties. They spent their Time arguing but not listening. Particularly one person angrily questioning Obama’s right to be speaking out during an election, as in “What gave him the right…?” under which you could sense the racial animus.
From the New Yorker (Susan Glasser): 1/7/18
Can we move on? No matter the outcome, no one will ask that question this year. There is a dark certainty to what will follow this election. If the Democrats win, they will go for Trump’s jugular. Investigations, subpoenas, perhaps impeachment will unfold. These moves will not be accepted as legitimate by the millions of Americans who have kept the faith in Trump no matter what he does and says. If Republicans hold on, Trump, emboldened further, will show us what a Presidency unfettered by fears of congressional oversight really looks like. Few doubt that he may fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions or Defense Secretary James Mattis, or the special counsel, Robert Mueller, or perhaps all of them. He already believes himself to be a political “genius” who defied history and the collective wisdom of the experts to take the White House; it takes little imagination to see how he would respond to the validation of a second history-defying win.
If nothing is really changed, what happens during the next 2 years? Trump re-elected? The thought causes nausea extreme. Yet there seem to be too many of us who believe the lies he sells and who prefer fear to hope. People I saw at his rallies on TV; the women who need someone to tell them what to do, who don’t understand or ignore the lies he tells them, what motivates people like that? They are like the good Germans who believed what Hiitler and Goebels told them and went on with their lives in the face of the horrors of the “final solution” as if nothing unusual was happening.
News conference at the Whitehouse. Trump tears into Jim Acosta for no apparent reason and the escalates the battle with an aid trying to take the mic away from the reporter. Acosta just stands there holding on to the mic. Trump calls him names says he mistreats him and Sarah Sanders. A ugly, totally unnecessary incident followed by Acosta losing his White House accreditation and Sanders tweaking a doctored Vid clip making it look as if Acosta raises his arm against the intern so she can say he threatened the intern with violence. Civilized?
Theater for tv cameras. Major erosion of first amendment free press.
Settled by the Court? Acosta should have his badge back by now, but does he?
The Fires and Travel
Terrible, horrible fires in California. So many lives lost. Parts of Paradise look like the Apocalypse has happened. Of course, the Donald has to have something to say, so he criticizes California for poor forest management when if he looked at a map, the forests in California are National Forests under the tender care of his USDA Forest Service. Too much trouble to go look at a map, I guess. Easier to cast blame and talk nonsense about Finland.
Terrible trip to France for the 100th anniversary of the Armistice. Makes you wonder why he went after losing the midterm elections if all he was going to do was sulk in the Embassy and complain about the weather. Poor baby! Does he melt in the rain? He would have been better off staying at home. Maybe then he would have made it to Arlington Cemetery. This is not a President.
The new House of Representatives is full of the victorious from last week’s election. Some of the “progressives” seem determined to be as disruptive as the the Tea Party members were in 2010 only in a totally opposite way. There is something very destructive about the “take no prisoners” attitude of many in politics today. The new young members need to settle in together with the existing leadership before they jump to change everything. Learn the job before you start upending the Leadership.
Not satisfied with his fight with CNN, Trump has to take to Twitter to spew insults at members of Congress (Representative Adam Schiff). It was Sunday. Give it a rest!
Sorry, Mr. President, special counsels do not need Senate Confirmation. Attorneys General do. Decorum for everyone else. Sad, sad, sad.
Kavanaugh
If he had a even hint of Honor and/or Decemcy in him, he would withdraw his name from consideration. So much for that expensive Catholic to Yale education! what happened to the the “Values” that were to be instilled? Will the Supreme Court become the place to get your legal “tangles” fixed? Trump’s get-out-of-jail card?
For the sake of the Court and the balanced administration of justice, this screamer/crier hysterical should never be allowed to preside or participate in judgements of his fellow citizens. I would be willing to bet that the Judge still drinks to excess. Looking at his wife’s sad face during his diatribe, makes it possible to believe that he remains a “mean drunk” even though that could be my own wishful thinking based on my experience with alcoholics.
Traitor in the White House?
A photo that seems to me to sum up Helsinki.
From the Washington Post Worldview July 19, 2018. (Chris McGrath/Getty Images)
Putin looking like the cat who swallowed the canary with Trump who looks like the kid who just got chewed out in the principal’s office, busily searching his brain for excuses to tell his parents about his bad behavior.
Good grief, America! What have we done to ourselves, our USA? There is no doubt we have let ourselves be taken in by a con man who has no interest at heart but his own, who has been so twisted by reliance on the fringes of right-wing conspiratorial political thought that he could think of selling us out to our firmest of enemies. I suppose that he does not recognize the possibility that his behavior could have that result, but what, exactly, is he thinking?
I wrote that just after the disaster in Helsinki. My gut reaction to Trump now seems to have roots I have known about for a long time, but haven’t researched in any organized way. Today I came across an article in the Smithsonian by Sasha Isenberg that reminded me of the long history of the fundamentalist right in the USA with all the conspiracy theories and religious zealotry. It reminds me that Trump is not an aberration, but a continuation of line of political-religious fever that’s been part of this country practically since the beginning.
Trump’s rallies have a lot in common with the descriptions of camp meetings in Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis.
One small detail from Isenberg’s article gives food for reflection. Hargis and Walker did their tour in 1963.
Walker arrived back in Dallas on April 8 to a
home filled with drifts of fan mail and financial contributions. Two
nights later he was sitting at a desk in his study, working on his
income-tax return, when a bullet shattered his window and lodged in a
wall just behind him, spraying metal shards into his arm. He grabbed his
gun and went outside to look for the shooter, but found no one.
… It would take months for Walker to learn the identity of his would-be assassin: Lee Harvey Oswald.
Irony of ironies.
Go read Main Street and Elmer Gantry and find what we now call Trumpism buried in our roots.
Let down
Last night I watched the movie “All the President’s Men”. In its way it was exciting and a bit scary wrapped in what was at the time the fear of spies and spooks both foreign and domestic. It does a fine job of showing the viewer the kind of hard work that goes into the best of our American journalism and deserves all the praise and awards it got.
I missed something when the film came to an end. I missed what I had always thought of (having lived through it) as the real drama of the Nixon downfall, and that was the hearings by the Congressional Committee where the various members of Nixon’s administration had to anwer the questions of the members of Congress. While the stories of the Woodward and Bernstein are the key ingredient that brought on the hearings, the fact that members of Congress stood up for our country’s democratic principles against their gross distortion by a man obsessed with punishing his “enemies” by any means whatever is the truly heroic feat we should look back on.
It is worth the time in the era of Trump to look back on what was said and done in the Watergate Hearings during the spring and summer of 1973 as a useful insight into what we should think about in the era of Trump. Video of the hearings can be found here. Take a look.
Civility
Lots of talk about civility today. Do we even know what the word means? If we mean in-your-face nasty politics, that began a long time ago. Anyone remember the Tea Party rallies during the elections of 1999 and 2003? Sarah Palin? Lots of racial animus as an undertone then, but with the posters and yellings then we were pointed in the direction we have reached today. Trump just makes it all worse. If civility is as the dictionary says, formal politeness and courtesy in behavior or speech, I’m not sure we ever had it here in our United States politics. It seems more like something out of one of those English movies about Parliamentary history. If we knew more about our own history, we might remember the battles of earlier years when members of Congress threatened eachother with sticks, and duels between members were not uncommon.
The NPR program 1A Wednesday morning had a discussion on “civility” which I came in on the end of. One of the women, Christine Fair, seemed to support civility except when racism or her status as a woman were called into question. There, it seems to me, is the problem. People called names, asked to leave restaurants, denied a wedding cake or other service because of another person’s “deeply held beliefs” seem to have brought this on, at least among “liberals”.
Haven’t we been listening to childish name calling and meanness from the White House for the last year? Why the sudden hand-wringing about civility now? Does it do anyone any good to get in someone else’s face, because you disagree? What good does it do you to ask Ms. Sanders to leave your restaurant, to shout at diners in another restaurant, to call Stephen Miller a facist? Does it make Ms. Waters a better person? Will such behavior do anything to change people like Sanders and Miller or Trump?
Ms. Fair seemd to think that our very democracy was in danger of being destroyed, but she didn’t have the civility herself not to keep talking over the host, Joshua Johnson when he was trying to get her to stop. Yes, our democracy is in danger, but should we get down in the mud with Trump and his supporters. It seems far more important to do all we can to elect people who support democratic institutions and rule.
What threatens our democracy more is the retirement of Justice Kennedy giving Trump another chance to appoint a justice who will continue the assault on some of our freedoms.
And after several days, I’m still chewing on this topic. When has being civil gotten us anywhere? Civility didn’t halt the lynching of black people, the internment of Japanese, the slaughter and displacement of native Americans or the Chinese expulsion. At this point, Trump and his followers will probably see civility on the part of his opponents as weakness, and ratchet up the ugliness even more as Trey Gowdy and jim Jordan did yesterday in the Rosenstein hearings.
Take a look at this article in the Times, and reflect. Trump’s incivility seems to have gotten him elected. And if you’re still very down in the dumps about the future, read this.
The Bully Backs Down ?
Finally, Trump has signed an order (according to the Washington Post) to keep border crossing families together – to stop tearing small children and babies from their parents. That takes care of what happens right away. I wonder how they will get the children they’ve detained back together with their parents, for our government is now responsible for seeing to it. What if parents have already been deported? Will DHS search El Salvador for them? Or will they set up some fancy phone system that will not work well and the moms from the highland towns without even spanish won’t understand.
Thank goodness Trump is sensitive to media coverage! But keep the pressure on. We still have the 2,000 or so children who need to be reunited with their parents and who are already scattered over the Texas and Florida landscapes. Did he really think he could trade interned kids for his wall?
Details. Will the kids now be detained by ICE with their parents? And if so how much difference is there? Ice can only detain for 20 days. Are we back to GPS anklets in the surrounding communities? From the New York Times:
“There is no system whatsoever to track these family separations, no
efforts systematically to reunite these families,” Mr. Enriquez said.
“There is no supervisor, there is no database saying, ‘child here,
parent there,’ so they can come back together.”
Republican selfish cruelty
It takes ones breath away. If what they did in the House ever becomes the law of the land, they will have much to reckon with. The crowd outside the House had it right with its “Shame, shame shame!” Democrats inside singing should also be shamed. It was not a party victory or defeat. It was a victory for the rich and infamous who have thoughts only for themselves and their wallets. Amazing that some can still call themselves “Christians”.
Let’s face it, anything Barack Obama did as President is anathema to those now in power because he is black. The hatred underpinning the latest Congressional and Presidential actions is barefaced and appalling. It’s even likely to bring on a backlash that will change the make up of the House of Representatives if the Democrats don’t throw away their advantage in their glee at opponent’s seemingly fatal mistakes. It’s much too soon to crow. There is still real danger that this white-men-supremacist measure could become law.
If anyone out there still reads, check this article in today’s Washington Post, and then take a good long look at all of those smug, self-satisfied faces in the Rose Garden as they celebrate taking away health care from those in society who need it most. This is America? Isn’t it time for the USA to join the rest of the civilized world and provide basic government healthcare for everyone?
(AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Those guys turn my stomach.
How many people are aware that the Trump administration has been doing its best to pick apart the ACA even before the “replacement” by cutting funds for pass through payments to insurance companies and doctoring the healthcare.gov website just so they could say it was failing? All that for white supremacy?
If Peter Suderman is correct that this is not a health care bill at all, but a bald effort to cut taxes for the wealthy, then the House Republicans may well have snookered the “Deal Maker” himself (as well as the rest of us) since Trump apparently has little knowledge of what is actually in the bill.
Trump’s continued ignorance about the policy details should worry House Republicans, who are being pressured by the president and his team to support deeply unpopular legislation that the president doesn’t himself understand. (That problem will be compounded and repeated if the bill eventually manages to clear the House, because the Senate is all but certain to significantly alter the legislation, and because those alterations are likely to shatter whatever fragile consensus may exist in the House.)
In a way, Trump’s inability to understand the bill means that he cannot really be said to support it, or at least that his support is far from stable. Privately, Trump has questioned whether or not the bill is worthwhile. During the initial push to pass the bill, Trump sometimes expressed his anxiety about the bill’s merits, according to The Washington Post. He did not possess sufficient understanding of its particular to judge its quality for himself, so he repeatedly asked his aides, “Is this really a good bill?” If you have to ask, the answer is probably no.
areesandeirene.com 