The Russia Investigation’s Spectacular Accumulation of Lies

Several news outlets have scrutinized Donald Trump's statements for truth and veracity and over 3/4th are untrue or largely untrue.  Stated more directly, Trump lies roughly three quarters of the time. As the Russiagate investigation continues, it is quickly becoming apparent that most of those in the Trump campaign and now the Trump/Pence regime have similar problems with telling the truth be it Jeff Sessions who is either a complete liar or so wracked with dementia that he is unfit for office to Sarah Huckabee Sanders who lies daily at White House Press conferences (being raised by a Baptist preacher, she learned to lie from a master).   Conservative columnist Michael Gerson - who was a member of the George W. Bush White House staff - looks at the huge accumulation of lies that the Russiagate investigation has exposed to date.  There is every expectation that even more will follow.  Here are column highlights which also contain an indictment of evangelical Christians supporting Trump (and Roy Moore):

I spent part of my convalescence from a recent illness reading some of the comprehensive timelines of the Russia investigation (which indicates, I suppose, a sickness of another sort). One, compiled by Politico, runs to nearly 12,000 words — an almost book-length account of stupidity, cynicism, hubris and corruption at the highest levels of American politics.

The cumulative effect on the reader is a kind of nausea no pill can cure. Most recently, we learned about Donald Trump Jr.’s direct communications with WikiLeaks — which CIA Director Mike Pompeo has called “a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia” — during its efforts to produce incriminating material on Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election. But this is one sentence in an epic of corruption. There is the narrative of a campaign in which high-level operatives believed that Russian espionage could help secure the American presidency, and acted on that belief. There is the narrative of deception to conceal the nature and extent of Russian ties. And there is the narrative of a president attempting to prevent or shut down the investigation of those ties and soliciting others for help in that task.

In all of this, there is a spectacular accumulation of lies. Lies on disclosure forms. Lies at confirmation hearings. Lies on Twitter. Lies in the White House briefing room. Lies to the FBI. Self-protective lies by the attorney general. Blocking and tackling lies by Vice President Pence. This is, with a few exceptions, a group of people for whom truth, political honor, ethics and integrity mean nothing.

What are the implications? President Trump and others in his administration are about to be hit by a legal tidal wave. We look at the Russia scandal and see lies. A skilled prosecutor sees leverage. People caught in criminal violations make more cooperative witnesses. Robert S. Mueller III and his A-team of investigators have plenty of stupidity and venality to work with. They are investigating an administration riven by internal hatreds — also the prosecutor’s friend. And Trump has already alienated many potential allies in a public contest between himself and Mueller. 

But the implications of all this are not only legal and political. We are witnessing what happens when right-wing politics becomes untethered from morality . . . . What does public life look like without the constraining internal force of character — without the firm ethical commitments.

It looks like a presidential campaign unable to determine right from wrong and loyalty from disloyalty. It looks like an administration engaged in a daily assault on truth and convinced that might makes right. It looks like the residual scum left from retreating political principle — the worship of money, power and self-promoted fame. The Trumpian trinity.

It looks like Breitbart News’s racial transgressiveness, providing permission and legitimacy to the alt-right. It looks like the cruelty and dehumanization practiced by Dinesh D’Souza, dismissing the tears and trauma of one Roy Moore accuser as a “performance.” And it looks like the Christian defense of Moore, which has ceased to be recognizably Christian.

This may be the greatest shame of a shameful time. . . . . A hint: It is the institution that is currently — in some visible expressions — overlooking, for political reasons, credible accusations of child molestation. Some religious leaders are willing to call good evil, and evil good, in service to a different faith — a faith defined by their political identity. This is heresy at best; idolatry at worst.

Many of the people who should be supplying the moral values required by self-government have corrupted themselves. The Trump administration will be remembered for many things. The widespread, infectious corruption of institutions and individuals may be its most damning legacy.

Perhaps the biggest loser in all of this - assuming Trump doesn't trigger a nuclear war that kills countless millions - is Christianity which through the actions of evangelicals and fundamentalist Christians have shown the faith to be morally bankrupt.  They have, of course, had plenty of assistance from the Roman Catholic Church which still has not been honest about its worldwide sex abuse scandal. Combined, the net effect is that fewer and fewer want any connection to organized Christianity.  Hence why one-third of those under 30 years of age have walked away.  Expect the trend to accelerate and spread to older generations. 

The Continued Underestimation of the Far Right Threat

James Alex Fields, Jr. - Driver of the murder vehicle

The majority of the acts of terrorism since 9-11 have been committed by far right extremist, yet the media continually down plays the seriousness that these far right elements pose to law abiding citizens. Frighteningly, Der Trumpenführer wants to direct all anti-terror efforts towards Mulsims - no doubt to play to his base and his own bigotry - even as the events in Charlottesville underscore that the real threat is white supremacists/far right Christians (I see the two groups as largely the same since white nationalism is now the true religion of the Christofascists).  As a piece in the New York Times set out, the driver of the vehicle that drove into a crowd killing one and injuring 19 others - just like Islamic extremists in London - showed many warning signs that he was a potential threat. I'm sure in no time - if it hasn't already begun - the far right will claim he had mental illness problems rather than admit it is the toxicity of their beliefs and agenda that is the true cause of what happened on Saturday.  Here are article excerpts:

Although the crash was a grisly coda to a day of clashes between white nationalists and their opponents, family members, acquaintances and internet posts suggested that Mr. Fields had mostly gone unnoticed by the authorities and researchers, even as he trafficked in radical views and unnerving behavior long before the outbreak of violence.

As a young man in Kentucky, he sometimes espoused Nazi ideology at school. A military career ended in less than four months. On Saturday, before the crash that left Heather D. Heyer, 32, dead, and 19 others hurt, he stood in Charlottesville, donned a white shirt and clutched a shield that bore a symbol of the so-called alt-right. He is expected to appear in court on Monday to face an array of charges, including a count of second-degree murder; the federal authorities have opened a civil-rights inquiry.

[O]thers who knew Mr. Fields, especially from his teenage years, said that his demeanor and opinions had troubled them for years.

“On many occasions there were times he would scream obscenities, whether it be about Hitler or racial slurs,” a woman who attended middle school with Mr. Fields in Florence, Ky., said in an email on Sunday.

The woman, who requested anonymity because she feared retaliation, said Mr. Fields “mostly kept to himself” and “didn’t start fights or try to fight.” But she described him as “exceptionally odd and an outcast to be sure.”

“He wasn’t afraid to make you feel unsafe,” said the woman, who was among the students who said Mr. Fields had made them feel unnerved. The sources of Mr. Fields’s ideology were unclear on Sunday, but his Facebook page included memes and symbols associated with the far right. But in Charlottesville, Mr. Fields stood among men believed to be associated with Vanguard America, a group whose manifesto declares that “a government based in the natural law must not cater to the false notion of equality.”

There are many more James Fields out in society and they need to be identified and protective measures taken, including changes to America's gun laws that allow such people to be armed and even more dangerous.  

Anti-intellectualism Is Killing America

Nowhere in America is the embrace of ignorance and anti-intellectualism higher than in the Republican Party base, particularly among the Christofascists and Tea Party elements, which are largely one and the same.  Indeed, the embrace of ignorance and the rejection of science, knowledge and intellectualism is down right celebrated - all as the rest of the world, outside of perhaps Islamic nations and and heavily Christian areas of Africa, is moving forward and embracing modernity and knowledge.  The Founding Fathers embraced knowledge and intellectualism.  Today's GOP abhors these things.  As a piece in Psychology Today notes, the rise of anti-intellectualism is harming America and the nation's future.  Here are article highlights:

The tragedy in Charleston last week will no doubt lead to more discussion of several important and recurring issues in American culture—particularly racism and gun violence—but these dialogues are unlikely to bear much fruit until the nation undertakes a serious self-examination. Decrying racism and gun violence is fine, but for too long America’s social dysfunction has continued to intensify as the nation has ignored a key underlying pathology: anti-intellectualism.

America is killing itself through its embrace and exaltation of ignorance, and the evidence is all around us. Dylann Roof, the Charleston shooter who used race as a basis for hate and mass murder, is just the latest horrific example. Many will correctly blame Roof's actions on America's culture of racism and gun violence, but it's time to realize that such phenomena are directly tied to the nation's culture of ignorance. 

In a country where a sitting congressman told a crowd that evolution and the Big Bang are “lies straight from the pit of hell," where the chairman of a Senate environmental panel brought a snowball into the chamber as evidence that climate change is a hoax, where almost one in three citizens can’t name the vice president, it is beyond dispute that critical thinking has been abandoned as a cultural value. Our failure as a society to connect the dots, to see that such anti-intellectualism comes with a huge price, could eventually be our downfall. 

Rational public policy, including policies that allow reasonable restraints on gun access, simply isn't possible without an informed, engaged, and rationally thinking public.

An anti-intellectual society, however, will have large swaths of people who are motivated by fear, susceptible to tribalism and simplistic explanations, incapable of emotional maturity, and prone to violent solutions. Sound familiar?

What Americans rarely acknowledge is that many of their social problems are rooted in the rejection of critical thinking or, conversely, the glorification of the emotional and irrational. What else could explain the hyper-patriotism that has many accepting an outlandish notion that America is far superior to the rest of the world? Love of one’s country is fine, but many Americans seem to honestly believe that their country both invented and perfected the idea of freedom, that the quality of life here far surpasses everywhere else in the world.

But it doesn’t. International quality of life rankings place America far from the top, at sixteenth. America’s rates of murder and other violent crime dwarf most of the rest of the developed world, as does its incarceration rate), while its rates of education and scientific literacy are embarrassingly low. American schools, claiming to uphold “traditional values,” avoid fact-based sex education, and thus we have the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the industrialized world.
And those rates are notably highest where so-called “biblical values” are prominent. Go outside the Bible belt, and the rates generally trend downward.

[T]he impact of fundamentalist religion in driving American anti-intellectualism has been, and continues to be, immense.   Interestingly, anti-intellectual fundamentalists are joined in their climate change denial with unusual bedfellows: corporate interests that stand to gain from the rejection of sound science on climate.  . . . these corporate interests encourage anti-intellectualism, conditioning Americans into conformity and passive acceptance of institutional dominance. They are the ones who stand to gain from the excessive fear and nationalism that result in militaristic foreign policy and absurdly high levels of military spending.

At the core of all of this dysfunction is an abandonment of reason. More on this subject in David Niose's latest book, Fighting Back the Right: Reclaiming America from the Attack on Reason

Coming Out: When Parents Are the Enemy

I have several younger friends who has not come out to their parents.  Why?  Because of fear about how their parents - most of whom are described as "deeply religious" - will react.  Meanwhile, as more and more LGBT individuals come out and refuse to live in the closet, especially in their private lives, these individuals face an increasingly daunting prospect of finding enduring relationships because fewer and fewer of us are willing to be someone's "dirty secret."   The suicide death of Leelah Alcorn has focused a spot light on the deadly results of parents becoming the enemy of their child, usually as they cling to ignorance embracing religion or their own concerns over how people will perceive them for having an gay child.  To me, it's the height of parental selfishness.  An op-ed in The Advocate looks at the problem faced by those whose parents are their enemies and the failure of the justice system to protect LGBT youth.  Here are highlights:

A couple of weeks ago, Leelah Alcorn, a 17-year-old transgender girl, walked in front of a tractor-trailer on an Ohio interstate in the middle of the night. She left behind a prescheduled-to-post suicide note on her Tumblr page (which has since been deleted, presumably by her family) that explained in explicit detail the abuse she had experienced at the hands of her parents. 

I don't think I will ever forget how it felt to be surrounded by adults who told 17-year-old me that I was "wrong" and that the most important thing was that I be "normal." These adults were the usual suspects — my mother, the adult friends I spent six months living with after I ran away from home — but most disturbingly, I was told I was wrong by the adults put in place by the system to protect me. My "victim's advocate" assigned to me by the court after my mother pled guilty to felony assault, explicitly blamed me for the violence in childhood home.

Even today, nearly 15 years later, queer youth are being told the same damaging messages about themselves that I heard, and those words are killing them.

For LGBTQ people, our parents are often the enemy. This is particularly true for LGBTQ youth, who are generally legally dependent upon their abusers for food, shelter, and other basic needs. Domestic violence survivors and advocates have done incredible work educating about how damaging and dangerous it is to encourage survivors to maintain relationships with or stay living with their abusers, it's past time for us to share the same messages about LGBTQ youth and abusive parents.  It has been refreshing amid the sadness of the last week, to hear queer activists and advocates publicly acknowledge that parents are the problem and not the answer, and that transgender youth should be removed from homes where they are unsafe due to unaccepting and abusive parents. But where will they go?

It is impossible for us to truly understand Leelah's suicide, the dangers of reparative therapy on the lives of LGBTQ youth, unless we understand the intersectionality of child/adolescent abuse, reparative therapy, dysfunctional foster care systems where LGBTQ youth aren't safe, and the epidemic of LGBTQ youth homelessness. It is one thing for us to demand that transgender youth be removed from unaccepting and abusive homes, it's another to provide the services they need not only to survive, but to thrive.

[W]e must remember that 40 percent of all homeless youth across the country identify as LGBTQ. LGBTQ youth homelessness is not just a problem in large urban environments. Although LGBTQ youth run away and are pushed out of homes in every region in this country, many cities and communities (like the county I'm from) don't have any youth shelter beds, let alone any that are culturally appropriate for LGBTQ youth. 

It is not enough to ban conversion therapy and to pay lip service by saying that transgender youth shouldn't live in homes where they are abused. We must open our hearts, our homes, and our wallets. We must work in partnership with youth to create LGBTQ youth centered programs that will care for them, and we ourselves must care about them too — while they are still alive.

We must make Leelah's final haunting words were a heartbreaking call to action.

There is much work to be done, including making adherents of conservative, anti-gay religious belief utterly unacceptable in society.