More Saturday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 

America's Divide Is Moral, Not Political

Time and time again, Republican "friends" will contend that they and I should not allow "politics" to drive us apart and that we need to simply "agree to disagree." Anything rather than face the reality that differences in morality are what really divide us, not merely political differences. This is particularly true in the era of the Felon and his MAGA base where hatred of others due to skin color, national origin, sexual orientation or differing religious beliefs and a near revelry in cruelty towards those deemed "other" are the defining nature of both the MAGA base and the larger Republican Party.  A desire for paying less in taxes does not excuse closing one's eyes to cruelty and the hate spewed by the Felon on an endless basis.  True, America has much ugliness in its past - think slavery, Jim Crow, genocide against Native Americans, and racial bigotry - but  we appear to be at another low point in national morality in part because the Felon has given a green light to behavior and policies that once would have been unacceptable.  Perhaps most ironic is the embrace of the Felon, a thoroughly immoral individual, by evangelicals and "conservative Christians" who endlessly wear their religiosity on their sleeves even as they totally betray and ignore Christ's gospel message. A piece by a pastor looks at this moral divide  that underlies so-called political differences.  Here are highlights:

This mess we’re in? It has nothing to do with politics.

The current President is a court-adjudicated rapist who recently paid nearly 6 million dollars in damages for sexual assault and defamation. His name appears tens of thousands of times in the Epstein Files, and he has been credibly accused by dozens of women of sexual assault and harassment. He is a 34-count felon, indicted four separate times, with 88 charges, ranging from fraud to election interference. The only reason he is not in prison right now is that he has assumed the Presidency and marshalled the vast resources of the office to pervert our judicial and legal processes.

Despite all of this, we still have family members, friends, former friends, and neighbors who would vote for him again right now.

In what universe, in what iteration of this nation over the last 250 years, would a being this bereft of human decency have been tolerated in office, let alone passionately embraced? In what legitimate political movement would rape and treason not be dealbreakers? The answer is none. This isn’t a political fracture. I wish it were, though, as that would be relatively easy to navigate.

We are not a nation, as we’ve often thought, simply positioned on either side of the aisle working to craft reasonable, good-faith compromise somewhere in the humane middle. Sadly, that ship left the port a long time ago.

We aren’t even contending with a blind political tribalism that sees party over country, as the GOP of a decade ago has long since been rendered unrecognizable, abandoning its calls for a limited Government in exchange for unabashed authoritarianism.

The prevailing narrative of the last decade is that America has been fractured by political ideologies, bunkered down in disagreement on what path will most serve the common good. This is a dangerous fiction we need to discard once and for all.

The dividing lines in America have nothing to do with party affiliation anymore.

Just open up your phone, eavesdrop at the checkout line, or talk to your neighbor, and you’ll see the lines along which we now find ourselves:

One side celebrates innocent people being assassinated in front of their children, without due process. One side rejoices in strangers going without food or medical care or housing, without knowing a single one of their stories. One side applauds the bombing of foreign school children and the destruction of entire populations. One side blindly despises other people for their gender identity, despite it having no impact on their lives whatsoever. One side reduces an entire population to terrorists and drug dealers to justify their swift eradication. One side conflates whiteness with righteousness. One side defends the protection of pedophiles. One side steadfastly worships a felonious, treasonous rapist.

And none of this is about politics; it’s about when faced with the suffering and injustice in our path, whether we will default to compassion or to cruelty. America’s present divide reveals the orientation of our hearts as we move through the world, the story we tell ourselves about other people, and what we want our lives to be marked by. . . . Will we see empathy as our highest calling as human beings, or as a character flaw needing to be discarded?

One of the greatest lies we’re asked to accept as gospel is that all opinions are valid, that every position is somehow equally worthy of merit and deserving of consideration. We’re often led to believe that in every situation where an impasse is reached, the most humane response is to “agree to disagree”.

Of course, we can disagree on all sorts of issues without that disagreement being a relationship killer, but there are some things that, as people of faith, morality, and conscience, we simply will not allow—and these things transcend politics.

Refuse to be gaslit and guilted for allowing “politics” to get in the way of your relationships because that’s not what’s happening here. This is an effort by people around us to sidestep conversations that call them to accountability for their beliefs, choices, and alignments.

It’s time we stopped pretending that our current national crisis is political, as that only serves to distract us from the far more worrisome truth that we need to reckon with:

We’re not politically divided; we are morally fractured.

We are not fighting legislative battles but a war to stay human or abandon our humanity altogether. No election result will change that. No power balance in Congress will remedy it. No dictator’s expulsion will heal the brokenness of the people around us. The question is, what will?

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Is Trump Dooming His Own Party

Poll after poll shows that the main concern of the vast majority of Americans is the economy and cost of living issues and that the Felon's war of choice with Iran is deeply unpopular. With the 2024 mid-term elections less than four months away and given the dismal poll numbers of the Felon on the economy and the issue of affordability - something the Felon says Democrats have fabricated - one would think a sane occupant of the White House would have used a prime time address to lay out some message of hope and/or a plan to address the overriding concerns of voters.  Instead, the Felon whined and repeated lies about the 2020 election where he lost - something his sick and demented ego still cannot come to terms with - and provided "evidence" of foreign influence etc. that his own people from his first administration and dozens of court case found to be false.  Joe Biden won the 2020 election despite the Felon's never ending lies and delusions. Even many in the MAGA universe were not pleased with the Felon's rant and repetition of recycled lies and Republicans running in competitive congressional races likely found little solace in the Felon's demonstration yet again that he is solely focused on himself and his narcissistic ego.  A piece at The Atlantic by a former Republican looks at the Felon's disservice to his political party. Here are highlights:

In early 2021, Republicans were poised to win a majority in the U.S. Senate. Had they won, they could have stalled President Biden’s agenda and forced him to govern on Republican terms. All they had to do was win the two Senate seats in Georgia headed to a runoff in January.

Then [the Felon] Donald Trump opened his yap. He had just lost the presidency. To assuage his own ego injury, Trump attacked the election as fake and rigged. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported the effect of this talk in Georgia. In rural and conservative areas of the state, 752,000 Georgians who had voted in November stayed home in January. Turnout rose by 228,000 in Democratic-leaning areas. [The Felon] Trump had discouraged his own voters and energized his foes. His party lost both seats and any hope of retaining the Senate.

Tonight [Thursday night] [the Felon] Trump repeated his self-destructive behavior.

If you are an anti-Trump voter who watched all or part of tonight’s speech to the nation, you saw a president removed from reality, babbling about conspiracy theories, threatening your right to vote. You probably came away from the speech alarmed, angry, and motivated.

If, on the other hand, you are pro-Trump, you heard a message of despair. Your president, in whom you trust, described a hopelessly compromised voting system, so broken that it fooled even Trump himself in his first presidency. Between the Chinese, the illegal aliens, and the hated liberal media, your vote will probably count for nothing. Plus, it’s crooked and unpatriotic to vote by mail. It’s all hopeless. Why bother?

When presidents face tough election environments, they typically look for ways to rally wavering voters to the cause. In October 2010, President Obama promised supporters, “If everybody who showed up in 2008 shows up in 2010, we will win this election.” Trump’s message was one of futility, as if to say: It doesn’t matter how many of us show up, because of all the sinister plots against us. We’re doomed almost no matter what we do.

That message makes psychic sense for Trump. He’s probably going to lose at least one congressional chamber in November, perhaps two, and he desperately needs an explanation as to why it’s not his fault.

But the message makes no sense for the Republicans who are actually on the ballot in 2026. There are marginal Republican-held seats that might be saved by an exciting message about Republican themes, by an economic plan to curb inflation, by some good news about the war in Iran. Instead, Trump is serving dismalness. Even the people credulous enough to believe that Trump lost the presidency in 2020 because he got outsmarted by crafty Venezuelans cannot be too eager to return to the polls so he can be outsmarted again.

We’ll know soon enough just how many Americans watched the speech, how many heeded Trump’s call to demand that their representatives pass his SAVE America Act. But among those who watched for sure—the hard-pressed Republican candidates begging for Trump to throw them a frickin’ bone on some issue of concern to voters—how mad are they tonight?

Trump is always about Trump first. Tonight was about Trump alone. He’s abandoned his allies because it’s his nature; he cannot help it. Soon he’ll discover what it’s like to be even more isolated and embattled than he needed to be, because he could not speak for—or about—anything other than himself.

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Trump Risks Another American ‘Forever War’

During his 2024 campaign the Felon promised there would be no more forever foreign wars. Like virtually everything else that comes out of his mouth - including his whining last night about elections -  this promise has proven to be a lie as the war of choice against Iran is shaping up to be a potential "forever war" and the Felon contemplates military action against Cuba.  Adding to the debacle is the reality that the Felon has never had a long term strategy in Iran. He merely thought he'd attack and Iran would capitulate and the war would be quickly over like his military adventure in Venezuela. The driving motivation? The Felon's hubris, delusions of grandeur and a need for distractions to redirect the media focus from the Epstein scandal. No plan, an unhinged Secretary of Defense and the alienation of allies all further compound the mess of the Felon's own creation.  Don't expect the Felon to accept responsibility for this disaster any time soon. A piece in the New York Times looks at how the Felon may be sliding America into a forever war of his own - a war that is almost universally opposed by a majority of Americans. Here are excerpts:

No one starts a war expecting it to last forever. Yet, since Vietnam, American presidents have repeatedly gotten into conflicts that seem like they could last forever, at least until the next president — or the one after that — decides that the expense and political pain are not worth it, declares victory and goes home.

On Iran, [the Felon] President Trump may have fallen into the same trap.

He campaigned for office vowing to end wars, not start them, and to never get involved in a forever war, let alone one in the Middle East. And yet he risks doing so in Iran, his critics say.

The war that Israel and the United States began with such force has alternated between moments of negotiation and military strikes. They have failed so far to reach Mr. Trump’s stated goals of regime change or ending Iran’s nuclear program, while the war has created a new, seemingly intractable problem, bottling up the Strait of Hormuz.

[A] frustrated Mr. Trump finds himself back at war, the cease-fire broken, the strait blocked. The memorandum of understanding he said “achieves everything we set out to accomplish” — despite wildly divergent interpretations of it — is in tatters after less than a month.

[S]aid Ali Vaez, Iran project director for the International Crisis Group. [said] Without a long-term strategy to produce a sustainable settlement, he said, there’s a risk of creating “the circumstances for a forever war.”

The idea of the “forever wars” began with 9/11 and the “global war on terror,” pulling the United States into long military engagements, with troops on the ground, in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Those conflicts, which began by toppling hostile regimes before turning into counterinsurgency campaigns, ended either inconclusively or in defeat after considerable expenditure and loss of life.

Powerful leaders with powerful militaries are prone to fall into “the short-war fallacy,” said Lawrence D. Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College, London, who last year wrote an article, “The Age of Forever Wars.” “They think they can win quickly and not suffer adverse consequences,” he said.

Like Mr. Trump in Iran and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Ukraine, “they fail to appreciate the limits of military power and so set objectives that can be achieved, if at all, only through prolonged struggle,” Mr. Freedman said.

And even the most sophisticated military forces are not enough, if there’s no strategy to turn battlefield superiority into lasting political and diplomatic success. Mr. Trump faces the added challenge of trying to win using only air and sea power, without politically unpalatable use of ground troops on Iranian soil.

The Persian Gulf war of 1991 was quick and succeeded in its aims, because President George H.W. Bush had a limited political objective — drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. That was a lesson lost on his son, President George W. Bush, in the second war against Iraq, which ended up enhancing Iran’s power in the region.

There is an argument, sometimes made by Mr. Trump himself, that he went to war in Iran to finally end what he considered a 47-year war between the United States and Iran, which began with the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979 and the taking of more than 60 American hostages.

Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Mr. Trump, urged by Israel, has also inserted himself in a parallel “forever war” — the one between Israel and Iran, which is being played out with Iran’s proxies in Lebanon, the Palestinian territories and Yemen.

[The Felon] seems to be doubling down, albeit with no clear path to a diplomatic settlement. And his commitment to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, while Iran insists on maintaining control, could mean a very long American military engagement, even with the help of allies.

Still, the Iran war is different, especially compared to Afghanistan and the second war against Iraq. In both of those wars, thousands of American troops were on the ground for long periods of time and ended up fighting militias and terrorists opposed to new governments propped up by the United States — not fighting a state like Iran.

And unlike the case in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan, Iran can inflict economic pain on the United States by blocking access to the Strait of Hormuz, which gives Tehran more effective leverage and is a prime reason it will refuse to give up control.

There will be no return to the situation before the war, said Suzanne Maloney, director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. As in Iraq, American assumptions and misperceptions changed the balance of power in the region, she said, and now the days of the Strait of Hormuz fully free for transit are probably over.

There can be “a new normal,” she said, “but with a much higher American force posture in the region” given Iran’s ability to hit ships whenever it pleases.

But a negotiated end to the war in Iran still feels far away. Both sides have proven they can’t even stick to a minimal framework agreement that defers all the substantive issues to the future, Mr. Vaez said. If they can’t even do that, he added, “that could remove the last barrier between episodic confrontation and a forever war.”

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