Why Is the GOP Fighting to Preserve Monuments to Traitors?

When goes to France, one does not see statutes of those who held positions in the Vichy government.  Across the former Soviet block one sees few monuments to communist leaders and even in Russia, there has been a resurgence of recognition of the tsarist era which in retrospect was no where near as repressive and murderous as the communist era ushered in by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Brutal regimes and the losers in the stage of history are not typically honored by statutes and monuments once the regimes have fallen.  Except in the American South where a battle now rages over the statutes to the Confederacy - most erected during the Jim Crow era, not the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.  On the side of honoring those who in effect were traitors to the United States is the Republican Party, the descendant party of the one that fought the Civil War to end slavery and defeat those honored by monuments and statutes such as those on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, a truly beautiful street and grand residential area. An editorial in the New York Times asks the question of why.  My own short hand answer is that today's GOP is the party of white supremacy lead by the racist-in-chief, Donald Trump.  Here editorial highlights:

Confederate statues are being pulled down across the South — from Birmingham, Ala., to Decatur, Ga., to Richmond, Va., the Confederacy’s former capital. The U.S. Navy and the Marines have banned public displays of the Confederate battle flag — as has NASCAR.

Now, Congress is taking its own halting steps forward. On Thursday, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, announced that portraits of four former House speakers who also served the Confederacy would be removed from display in the Capitol in observance of the Juneteenth holiday.

The portraits are of Robert M.T. Hunter of Virginia, who was speaker from 1839 to 1841 before serving in various high positions in the Confederacy, including secretary of state; Howell Cobb of Georgia, who was speaker from 1849 to 1851 and later served as a Confederate Army officer; James L. Orr of South Carolina, speaker from 1857 to 1859, who went on to serve in the Confederate Army and in the Confederate Senate; and Charles F. Crisp of Georgia, the House speaker from 1891 to 1895, who served in the Confederate Army as a young man.

“As I have said before, the halls of Congress are the very heart of our democracy,” Ms. Pelosi wrote to the clerk of the House, requesting the removal. “There is no room in the hallowed halls of Congress or in any place of honor for memorializing men who embody the violent bigotry and grotesque racism of the Confederacy.”

Over in the Senate, Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, tried to nudge his chamber forward as well. He and the Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, moved Thursday to pass a bill by unanimous consent that would remove 11 monuments to Confederates from the National Statuary Hall Collection displayed in the Capitol.

Not all of Mr. Booker’s colleagues agreed. Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri, blocked the move. . . . The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, was more outspoken in his opposition. On Tuesday, he derided brewing efforts to “airbrush the Capitol and scrub out everybody from years ago who had any connection to slavery” as “nonsense” and “a bridge too far.” He even felt moved to list for reporters some of the early presidents who owned slaves.

None of those presidents, it should be noted, went to war against the United States to defend slavery. Nor are all the 11 statues of peripheral figures who had just “any connection” to the war for chattel slavery. The statues include one of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America; Alexander Hamilton Stephens, the vice president; and its most famous general, Robert E. Lee. There are other statues of men less central to the rebel cause. But given that states can select any person of note from their state, surely there are many other men or women who don’t have the Confederacy on their résumés.

Is this really the hill that the Party of Lincoln wants to fight on in 2020? What an ignoble, lost cause.

Once again, America is showing itself to be exceptional, but not in a good way.

Miami Herald Trashes Marco Rubio

This blog often looks at the moral bankruptcy of today's Republican Party and various Republicans who have put even basic decency aside in their quest for raw power or due to fear of the ever more ugly base of the party.  Too often these craven and/or spineless individuals get away with little public indictment for their behavior.  But not always.  Over the weekend the Miami Herald looks at the despicable behavior of Marco Rubio and how he has sold his soul to Donald Trump and the party base.  The irony is that once upon a time some viewed Rubio as a "savior" of the GOP.  Not anymore.  Here are excerpts from the scathing column:

Witnessing Sen. Marco Rubio’s pathetic response last week to President Trump’s latest racist outrages, it is impossible now to believe that Florida’s senior senator was once hailed as “The Savior of the Republican Party” on the cover of Time magazine.

He was supposed to be a rising star who would help shake the party up after the disastrous election of 2012. The son of immigrants, he would help the party overcome its long-term demographic challenge as its older base shrinks and America becomes ever more diverse.

But Rubio flamed out in the 2016 presidential election, among the last victims of Donald Trump’s brutal, degrading, slash-and-burn campaign — though not before lowering himself by trying to beat Trump at his own game, ridiculing the size of his opponent’s hands, suggesting that it reflected on other aspects of Trump’s physiology.

Rubio tried to regain a bit of dignity when he left the race. “America needs a vibrant conservative movement,” he said. “But one that’s built on principles and ideals, not on fear, not on anger and not on preying on people’s frustrations.”

But during the first two-and-a-half years of Trump’s presidency, Rubio abandoned the pretense of idealism or principles, except, perhaps, in his on-target approach to the crisis in Venezuela. Otherwise, he has transformed from Trump critic to a sycophantic cheerleader — derided by former adviser and Washington Post columnist Max Boot as a “Trump fan-boy” — to the point that he’s willing to kill Obamacare even though his own state leads the nation in enrollment. . . . [Rubio] could not find the spine to do more than mildly criticize Trump after his blatantly racist attacks on four Democratic congresswomen.

Even after Trump whipped a crowd in Greensville, North Carolina, into a hateful froth against U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar that erupted in chilling chants of “Send her back! Send her back!” — Rubio couldn’t muster the courage to truly object to the horrifying display of blatant racism. He called the chant “grotesque,” which it was, but he reserved most of his vitriol for “left wing politicians and many in the media.”

How disappointing. Obviously, he was not the only Republican to punt or remain silent last week. But, Rubio, in particular, should know the dangers of this moment and the path down which Trump is taking his followers, his party and the nation. He should have a deeper understanding of America’s tortured racial history and comprehensive knowledge of the animosity once faced by Cuban immigrants like his parents. He can do better. It leads us to ask whether he thinks his Senate bill, filed Thursday, to extend TPS for Haitians is compensation for his timidity in the face of Trump’s “go back” tweets.

Rubio, far from the Republicans’ savior, seems just another slick politician with his finger in the wind — pushing the party deeper into Trump’s swamp.

Again, Rubio's rejection of morality and decency is not unique in today's GOP.  Sadly, it is the norm.

Republicans Refuse to Punish Trump for Openly Racist Rhetoric

The Republican Party of the past is dead and gone and has been replaced by a political party that relishes open racism and misogyny in general. The takeover the of the GOP base by white supremacists and religious extremists is nearly complete.  Old school Republicans who refuse to leave the party and/or pretend that the party of the past still exists are not only deluding themselves, but are complicit in the sins of the GOP and its head, Donald Trump. Seemingly, there is nothing beyond the pale that will cause Republicans to push back against Trump and the destruction of any shred of morality in the GOP.  They either enthusiastically support his overt racism or are such cowards they refuse to confront the hideous elements of the party base. Trump's racist tweet rant over the weekend has failed to bring any punishment or for that matter, even much hand wringing. A piece in CNN looks at the Republican refusal to condemn or rein in Trump.  Here are excerpts:

The most shocking thing about Donald Trump's racist tweets is that possibly the most fundamentally un-American outburst of modern presidential rhetoric did not come remotely as a surprise.

The second most shocking aspect of an episode that would have rocked any other administration is that the President knows he can trade in such base tactics because he will pay no price in a Republican Party cowed by his fervent political base. Many GOP voters and lawmakers are uncomfortable with Trump's conduct and sentiments. But most are sufficiently satisfied with the ideological direction of his presidency that they are willing to turn a blind eye to such behavior, making it a useful political weapon as he seeks to drive a rampant base turnout in 2020. In an attack clearly aimed at four minority Democratic lawmakers – [Trump] the President did not name the "progressives" in his tirade -- Trump underlined how his presidency has used bigotry as a lever of power and made it a fact of 21st century political life more than half a century after the peak of the Civil Rights era. His use of the nation's most revered office to make such unequivocally racist remarks emphasizes how a presidency stewing in rage, fear and identity politics lacks boundaries. And Trump's xenophobia made it more obvious than ever that he plans to win reelection by carving a nativist schism between white, rural America and the increasingly diverse population being courted by Democrats. He risks opening divides that will take years to heal.

By telling the four women — three of whom were born in the US — to "go back" to where they came from, Trump employed the most basic and crude racial taunt. He also implicitly rejected the motto emblazoned on America's Great Seal — E Pluribus Unum — from many one. He is implying that any American who is not white and native born has no place in the country. The silence from Republicans Sunday about Trump's tweets was near universal, emphasizing how his outlandish behavior is tolerated by lawmakers who represent half of the electorate and who won't risk their own political careers to condemn him. [T]he already poisonous tone of Trump's reelection campaign seems almost certain to become far, far worse. The question is whether Trump will alienate sufficient crops of more moderate voters to swing the White House to Democrats or whether his raging culture wars will maximize turnout in his own party and hand him a second term.His attack is a logical extension of an election strategy that is clearly designed to exploit racial and social divides. The reason why Trump's attack was not surprising is because it fits into a pattern of racially charged rhetoric that he has been willing to use in private life — dating back to his comments on the Central Park Five and the "birtherism" campaign against Obama. While it is shocking to see such open racism expressed by a President of the United States, Sunday's tweets were far from the first time that Trump has dealt in such toxicity in office. . . . The debate about whether Trump is a "racist" that pops up after such comments seems increasingly academic.
 Republicans who support Trump by margins of close to 90% in recent polls have long ago made peace with the President's outrageousness or are willing to look the other way as he implements a conservative agenda, especially in the courts. Trump's incessant catering to his base means he has little to fear politically from the modern Republican Party. [Trump] The President has only one hope of winning reelection -- thanks to the way that he has conducted his presidency. He must hope his fired up political base will show up to the polls in greater numbers than voters supporting Democrats that he is painting as extreme and bent on a communist takeover.  That's why Sunday's tweets are probably not a historical aberration but a taste of things to come.

Republican "friends" who consider themselves moral, decent people are running out of time to prove their decency.  The time has come to either leave the GOP or become complicit in its sins.  There really is no middle ground. 

Who Joins White Supremacist/Alt-Right Groups

Today is the anniversary of the Alt-Right and White Supremacists assault on Charlottesville, a city that I and countless University of Virginia hold dear.  Ironically, given last year's violence, Charlottesville is perhaps Virginia's most progressive city - it voted heavily for Clinton in 2016 and Democrat Ralph Northam got roughly 85% of the vote in 2017 - and, thus, represents what the far right hates most: education, knowledge, tolerance and non-discrimination. While frictions erupted last night in Charlottesville, today's main gathering of haters will take place in Washington, DC, near the White House - a fitting location given Trump's refusal to condemn the white supremacists who violated Charlottesville last year and killed a counter-protester.  A piece in Newsweek looks at who joins the Alt-Right and by extension, makes up much of Trump's hardcore base.  Here are excerpts:

A new University of Virginia study found that white nationalists are likely to be low-income, divorced, uneducated and unemployed.

One year after the Unite the Right marches in Charlottesville, Virginia that led to the death of 32-year-old Heather Heyer and dozens of serious injuries, scholars at the nearby university analyzed the demographics of potential alt-right members in hopes of discovering what makes certain Americans susceptible to joining white nationalist movements.  

Researchers at UVA’s Institute for Family Studies studied responses to 2016 American National Election Survey, and singled out respondents who had a strong sense of white identity, a belief in the importance of white solidarity and a sense of white victimization.

The group found that unemployed white Americans without a college degree and with an annual income between $0 and $29,000 were more likely to agree with the principles of the white nationalist movement. These respondents were also much more likely to be divorced than married or never married. Religious beliefs, gender and age had little impact on whether a white American was held supremacist beliefs or not, the study found. “Divorce does seem to increase the likelihood a respondent will believe whites suffer discrimination and the likelihood that a white person will agree with all three of the basic premises of white identity politics,” wrote George Hawley, an assistant professor of Political Science at the University of Alabama, in the studies findings.

A July Anti-Defamation League study also found a clear link between misogyny and white supremacy. “Misogyny has the potential to act as a gateway into the white supremacist world,” said report author Jessica Reaves, an expert at ADL’s Center on Extremism. “The hatred and resentment of women voiced by groups like involuntary celibates and Men’s Rights Activists is disturbingly similar to white supremacists’ hatred of minorities. And some white supremacists, especially those on the alt-right, use the same degrading, violent anti-woman rhetoric we hear coming from misogynist groups.”

“Pundits and scholars have spent the last several years debating whether racism or economic anxiety is the main catalyst for right-wing populism and white racial identity politics,” wrote Hawley. “It turns out that economic variables are some of the stronger determinants of white attitudes on racial questions. Higher incomes are associated with lower levels of white racial identity, racial solidarity, and feelings of discrimination.

I doubt many of my country club/yacht club Republican "friends" would associate with these people socially, but they voted with them and sadly, seemingly subscribe to the same ugly racism.  My late mother always told us as children that we'd be known by the company we kept.  My Republican "friends" have said a lot about themselves given the politically kindred spirits and it's not something positive.

Immigration Storm Bears Down on Republicans

Many of the Republican Party's problems are self-created and many stem from the party's self-prostitution to Christofascists and white supremacists (typically, the two groups overlap each other by a wide margin).  Other than perhaps abortion and gay marriage, nowhere is the toxicity of this self-prostitution worse than in the realm of immigration and immigration reform.   Despite the Bible passages on welcoming strangers and norms of common decency, nothing sets off the Christofascists and white supremacists more than the prospect of non-whites entering American, a nation stolen from Native Americans by force of arms and genocide. Insanely, one "friend" who supports Trump and his inhumane policies has lamented being called a racist even though she is, in fact a racist, given the hideous Trump/Pence agenda that she supports.  A piece in Politico looks at the no-win situation in which the GOP has placed itself on immigration.  Here are excerpts:

House Republicans left Washington last week relieved that their ugly, months-long fight over immigration was behind them. The reality? It’s far from over.

Donald Trump has been pestering Congress to send him big money for his border wall with Mexico, a demand that could lead to a government shutdown just weeks before Election Day.

And lawmakers might not even have that long to ignore the issue. A series of court rulings expected in the coming weeks on Dreamers as well as separated migrant families will crank up the heat up on GOP lawmakers and underscore their inability to govern when it comes to immigration.

Trump may enjoy campaigning on immigration, but it’s far from what Republican leaders want to highlight as they battle to keep their majorities this fall. GOP lawmakers have repeatedly shown an inability to unite behind any sort of immigration plan, and Trump has failed to lead on the matter as well — creating a constant whiplash as he changes his positions from day to day. Trump’s reversals are one of the major reasons House Republicans were unable to pass a pair of GOP immigration bills addressing the fates of Dreamers just before the July Fourth recess — even though they’d spent months negotiating among themselves. . . . It went down in a whopping defeat, 121-301, as conservatives panned the bill as “amnesty.” The vote was a rebuke to both GOP leadership, which tried and failed to reach a consensus in the conference, and the president, who endorsed the legislation in an all-caps tweet hours before the vote. The Senate, meanwhile, has been trying to come up with a bipartisan bill to keep families united. Lawmakers fear that a federal court will strike Trump’s executive order intended to ease the firestorm engulfing his administration by allowing children to be detained with their parents beyond a 20-day limit. And the Senate wants to have legislation ready if the problem boils over in July.  But even if the Senate strikes a deal, House Republicans say they won’t take up anything unless the White House fully endorses the plan.

Even as Republicans struggle to pass a modest package on immigrant families, they could face pressure to go broader. A conservative-leaning federal court in Texas is expected to rule on the constitutionality of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program as early as mid-July, pushing the issue to the fore again.

The case, brought by Texas and several other Republican-dominated southern states, could contradict a previous court’s decision that halted Trump’s move to end DACA. The result could be that Dreamers again face the risk of deportation unless the Supreme Court — or Congress — weighs in.

Should GOP leaders somehow dodge a thorny DACA and family-separation debate this summer, Republicans are still unlikely to wriggle out of an immigration fight before the election. The federal government runs out of money on Sept. 28, and Trump has made no secret of his demand for border wall funding in any spending legislation he signs. In fact, during a meeting with appropriators last week, Trump pressed Republicans to give him $5 billion as a down payment on his wall — well over the $1.6 billion senators had proposed and the $2.2 billion the House had planned.

But GOP leaders know that Senate Democrats will reject the request without relief for Dreamers, and Republicans can’t pass a single appropriations bill in the Senate without them.

It’s possible that Trump allows Congress to pass a stopgap bill that extends government funding into a lame-duck session. But Republicans know by now that it’s not easy to pin down the president. And then they could have a shutdown on their hands.

Quote of the Day - Michael Steele, Former RNC Chair

Former RNC chair, Michael Steele

With Republicans and the usual voices of right wing media - who would tell you it was raining on a bright sunny day if it fit their purposes - trying the blame the federal government shutdown on Democrats, a few responsible voices from the right are not buying it.  One is former RNC chairman, Michael Steele who I listen to often on satellite radio on my evening commute.  I sense Steele's frustration with what the Republican Party has become and his disgust with the current occupant of the White House.  Here's a quote from Sterele via Politico:

Despite the rhetorical effort to paste Democrats with “Schumer’s Shutdown” and to redefine what constitutes majority control of the senate (“60”? Really?), the fact remains that this shutdown rests at the feet of the GOP and it appears a majority of Americans agree. I don’t like it. It certainly could have been avoided, but the President wound up negotiating against himself by taking a potential agreement off the table, leaving Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to lament, “As soon as we figure out what he is for, then I would be convinced that we were not just spinning our wheels.” That put Republicans in the position to spin their wheels right into another government shutdown. Pitiful.

Yes, 60 votes were needed in the Senate, so that means Republicans need to compromise.  Yet, that is something they are unwilling to do as is the lunatic in the White House who increasingly acts as if he is bi-polar and definitely not staying on his meds. One moment his conciliatory and then the next he swings back into obstruction.   believe that intelligent voters - sorry, but that excludes Fox News viewers - will understand that the blame falls on the GOP and Trump. 

A Timeline of Trump Campaign's Contacts with Russia

As numerous actual news outlets - this, of course, excludes Fox News, a/k/a Faux News, which increasingly mimics Pravda from  the old days of the Soviet Union, and Breitbart - are reporting, it is becoming increasingly difficult to conclude anything other than that Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions, et al, are  lying trough their teeth about dealings between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin's operatives. Yesterday, Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe used the word that too many, especially Congressional Republicans who place their party over the country, are afraid to use: treason.  McAuliffe rightly said that, if Americans cooperated with Russia in interfering with the 2016 presidential election, they were nothing less than traitors.  The irony to me is that by appealing to racism and religious extremism, Trump suckered those who see themselves as "real Americans" into electing the stooge of a hostile foreign government.  Putin must still be laughing his ass off.  With the indictments earlier this week revelation that a guilty plea had been copped by a Trump foreign policy adviser, former GOP Congressman Joe Scarborough suggests in a Washington Post column that we may be close to learning why Trump has gushed over Putin even as he destroys democratic norms in America,   He also lays out a useful time line of Trump/Russia dealings.  Here are highlights:

I don’t get it, and I never have. Why has President Trump kowtowed to Russian President Vladimir Putin since the beginning of his presidential campaign? I’ve asked this question on the air, and off, to those close to the president and to the president himself. No one has a good answer. The man has insulted everyone from war heroes to the pope, and yet his admiration of the Russian dictator remains intact.

To this day, Trump has been steadfast in his defense of an autocrat who views the Soviet Union’s collapse as a tragedy and the United States as an enemy. Why? Soon I may not have to speculate. This week’s news out of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s office suggests that what has long been opaque will soon become clear.

Here’s some of what we know so far. It seems to be enough to make any self-aware president panic.

• June 16, 2015: Trump announces he’s running for president.

• October 2015 to January 2016: Trump lawyer Michael Cohen tries to make a deal with Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.

• Dec. 10, 2015: Top Trump ally Michael Flynn is seated beside Putin to celebrate the Kremlin propaganda outlet Russia Today.

• March 21, 2016: Trump tells The Post that Carter Page and George Papadopoulos are key members of his foreign policy team.

• April 26, 2016: Kremlin-connected professor Joseph Mifsud tells Papadopoulos that Moscow has “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, including “thousands of emails.”

April 27, 2016: Despite insisting throughout the campaign that they had never met with Russian officials, Trump and Jeff Sessions greet Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at an event at the Mayflower Hotel.

• June 9, 2016: Donald Trump Jr., campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner meet with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and Kremlin insider Rinat Akhmetshin to gain information that would allegedly incriminate Clinton and her dealings with Russia. In an email setting up the meeting, Trump Jr. expresses excitement about receiving Russian intelligence about the Democratic nominee.

• July 7, 2016: Manafort offers to provide briefings to a Kremlin-linked Russian billionaire.

• July 18, 2016: Trump campaign members succeed in pressuring Republicans to remove a platform plank in support of providing arms to help Ukraine resist Russian aggression.

• July 27, 2016: Trump makes a direct appeal to the Kremlin during a news conference. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

 Sept. 16, 2016: After admitting that he had been in contactwith WikiLeaks — and later revealing that he had contact with a hacker connected to Russia — Trump associate Roger Stone tells Boston Herald Radio that WikiLeaks will soon “drop a payload of new documents on Hillary on a weekly basis” that will damage the Clinton campaign.

• Oct. 7, 2016: The “Access Hollywood” tape is released. About a half-hour later, WikiLeaks begins to publish Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails.

• Dec. 1: Kushner meets with Kislyak in an attempt to create a “channel” for sensitive communications between the transition team and the Russian government, according to U.S. officials briefed on intelligence reports.

● Dec. 29, 2016: Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn calls Kislyak to discuss sanctions placed on Russia by President Barack Obama.

• Jan. 11: At his first news conference as president-elect, Trump said, “If Putin likes Donald Trump, guess what, folks? That’s called an asset, not a liability. Now, I don’t know that I’m gonna get along with Vladimir Putin. I hope I do.” He also tweets, “I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA – NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!”

 Feb. 13: Flynn resigns after he reportedly lied to Vice President Pence about his contacts with Kislyak.

• May 9: Trump fires FBI Director James B. Comey.

• May 10: Trump meets in the Oval Office with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Kislyak, bragging that the firing of “nut job” Comey will ease pressure from the investigation. Trump barred U.S. reporters from the meeting and revealed classified information to the Russian officials.

• May 11: In an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, Trump reveals that he had asked Comey whether he was under investigation for alleged ties to Russia.

• June 7: Comey releases a memo recalling his interactions with Trump, who he said asked for an oath of loyalty from him.

• July 7: Trump meets with Putin at the Group of 20 summit in Germany. A second dinner meeting was undisclosed.

• Oct. 5: Papadopoulos pleads guilty to lying to the FBI as part of a cooperation agreement with Mueller.

• Oct. 30: Mueller’s office indicts Manafort and associate Rick Gates on charges of conspiracy against the United States, being an unregistered foreign agent, money laundering, and seven counts of failing to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts.

I’m starting to think that the answers to our burning questions about Trump’s strange obsession with Russia are revealing themselves in a slow and painful way for the president and all of his men and women. Will the next big reveal in this reality show spectacle come when one of his closest confidants surprises him in the final episode, not with a rose, but with a wire? The ratings would be yuge. Believe me. Yuge.

And this list of events are only the ones that we know about - I suspect there is much, much more.  I'm sorry, but the "real Americans" are those who want Trump/Pence out of office ASAP.  Those who support this foul regime and seemingly too stupid to grasp that they are being played for fools or so blinded by their racial hatreds that they simply refuse to see what is before their eyes. Neither basis for their support of Der Trumpenführer bodes well for America.

Trump Administration Shamed Into Send USNS Comfort to Aid Puerto Rico?

The Comfort

Recently, I noted in a Facebook post that Der Trumpenführer could find the time to generate a tweet storm for more than 5 days over NFL players allegedly disrespecting the American flag, but he seemingly could not find time to direct his administration to focus the same level of aid to Puerto Rico as was focused on Texas.  I suggested the reason why: The majority of residents of Puerto Rico are brown skinned and worse yet in the mind of Trump and his supporters, a majority do not speak English.  In Trump world and the world of today's GOP that means these people in Puerto Rico are simply not fully human and, therefore, disposable trash.  Yes, I am livid, but it's similar to the mindset that I confronted when I was fired for being gay and had no legal resource under either Virginia or federal law.   I simply did not matter because I was "other." Worse yet, neither did my children.   Ironically, it may have taken tweets by Hillary Clinton to get the Trump administration to get off its ass and order the USNS Comfort - currently docked directly across Hampton Roads harbor from my home - to head to Puerto Rico with its 1000 hospital beds and 80 bed ICU and 12 operating rooms to aid in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria which left many hospitals without power and literally causing people to die:  

President Trump, Sec. Mattis, and DOD should send the Navy, including the USNS Comfort, to Puerto Rico now. These are American citizens.

A piece at Daily Kos looks at the travesty.  Here are highlights:

Eight hundred and ninety-four feet long, 106 feet wide, and weighing 69,360 tons, USNS Comfort is a complete ocean-going medical facility with 1,000 patient beds including 80 for intensive care patients. Along with 12 operating rooms she boasts a complete dental clinic, optometry lab and pharmacy, X-ray machines, CT scanners, oxygen and fresh water production plants, capacity to store 5,000 units of blood, laundry operations, and a morgue.

She’s the size of a 20th century supertanker. Indeed, she was a supertanker — the SS Rose City — until purchased by the Navy in 1987 and converted to serve her current lifesaving mission. She and her sister ship in the Pacific, USNS Mercy, are among the rare few assets of the obscenely wealthy US military devoted exclusively to saving, rather than to taking, lives.

But today, as Puerto Rico and its 3.4 million American citizens slowly die with the island’s hospitals without power and in ruins, Comfort remains snugly berthed in her home port of Norfolk, Virginia.

Thomas LaCrosse, the Pentagon’s director of defense support to civil authorities, said U.S. officials discussed deploying the USNS Comfort to Puerto Rico over the weekend but decided that it should stay in Norfolk because it could not get close enough to any port to avoid using helicopter support to get patients to and from the ship.

True enough, the behemoth ship’s deep draft of 30+ feet bars it from San Juan harbor’s 32 to 35 foot channels even at the best of times (and these are far from San Juan’s best times). But, unmentioned in the WaPo article quoted above, that’s nothing new for the Comfort, which routinely anchors a mile or two offshore to serve disaster sites, as it did following Haiti’s devastating earthquake or, again, as it fearlessly did in 2007 in the teeth of a “storm of a decade” off Corinto, Nicaragua, where it anchored 1.5 miles offshore to receive patients. It is such a common fact in the life of this ship of mercy that militaryfactory.com notes as a mere aside that

Comfort has a deep draft and, in many ports, she has to stand offshore at least a mile. To receive wounded, Comfort has a large day-and-night helo pad.

Puerto Ricans, like all other American citizens, should be deeply chilled by the Trump administration’s stubborn refusal to deploy the Comfort, buttressed by such a transparently flimsy excuse. Because if they’re lying about the reason for their decision, then we must ask what the real reason is...and the answer is terrifying.

It can only be this: Trump intends to abandon Puerto Rico at the first opportunity, leaving its 3.4 million American citizens in their current Stone Age hell forever.

Trump is leaving the Comfort safe in Norfolk’s harbor because he does not intend to devote the years of effort, and the hundreds of billions of dollars, it will require to lift Puerto Rico back out of the Stone Age. And he doesn’t want to make that too obvious when the quiet pull-out soon begins. . . This is #TrumpsKatrina
 UPDATED: As of 3:30 PM Eastern, NBC is now quoting FEMA administrator Brock Long announcing, in a reversal of last night’s DOD comments, that USNS Comfort has just been ordered to sail for Puerto Rico. For those who are wondering, Comfort is normally required to be able to sail within 5 days after receiving the order, although it has occasionally done so within 3 days (there are about one thousand mostly civilian medical personnel + merchant seamen to mobilize, plus enormous stores of perishable medical supplies to load, plus all the usual ship’s stores to support a full complement of 2,000 souls). Comfort’s top speed is about 20 MPH, and it is (very roughly) about 1,200 miles from Norfolk to San Juan. So we’re looking at another 6-8 days before it arrives in Puerto Rican waters.