“Immoral Majority: Why Evangelicals Chose Political Power Over Christian Values.”

A new book by a writer and filmmaker with the title used for the heading of this post looks at the growing moral bankruptcy of evangelical Christians in the age of Trump.  The author argues that as long as evangelicals prioritize political power over true Christian behavior and persuasion by charitable actions, their pews will be continue to lose occupants and their national influence will dwindle in the long term. The author perhaps unrealistically argues given the lust for power of those like Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell, Jr., and Tony Perkins, that if evangelicals hope to avoid cultural irrelevance in the years to come, they will have to value humility over ego, and resist the seduction of political power, no matter the cost. Nowhere does the hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of evangelicals reveal itself more than in their cheering support of the Trump/Pence regime's brutality towards children of undocumented immigrants.  

Frighteningly, I suspect that many evangelicals would look at the image of the crying child above and not feel any remorse for the simple reason that the child is not white. The further irony, of course, is that while these evangelicals want to "take back their country," those against whom they target their hate are the descendants of the the original indigenous populations of the Americas  and who had their lands stolen from them by white European conquest.  Here are highlights from a column in the Washington Post by the author of “Immoral Majority: Why Evangelicals Chose Political Power Over Christian Values”:

As the debate about how to handle applicants for refugee status at the U.S. southern border gained urgency in recent months, Pew Research Religion waded into the social-media fray on July 7 with a tweet about the results of a poll the organization conducted last year. Pew reported, and online commentators quickly noted, that white evangelical Protestants were the least likely group — amid results sorted by age, race, education and religion — to say that the United States “has a responsibility to accept refugees into the country.” 

Sixty-eight percent of white evangelical Protestants said the country has no responsibility for refugees. No other demographic group came within 10 points of that result.

[S]ome evangelical leaders had been taken aback when the Pew results were originally released in May 2018, and urged their flocks toward change. But back then, the main question about refugees concerned those fleeing the brutal civil war in Syria. “When faced with a potential conflict between prominent evangelicals’ biblical pro-refugee arguments and [President] Trump’s opposition,” Brian Newman of Pepperdine University noted in The Post, “the vast majority of white evangelicals choose Trump.”

A year later, with the focal point on refugees from Central America, in much greater numbers and more likely to be vilified by the president, evangelical leaders are largely as one with their congregations.

Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the public-policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, ventured this observation on Twitter: “The reports of the conditions for migrant children at the border should shock all of our consciences. Those created in the image of God should be treated with dignity and compassion, especially those seeking refuge from violence back home. We can do better than this.”

Moore’s comments didn’t sit well with Jerry Falwell Jr., inheritor of his father’s Christian empire, president of Liberty University and a prominent evangelical figure.

Some were dismayed by Falwell’s response, but you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone paying attention the past few years who was surprised by it. 

Falwell is one of several leaders in the modern evangelical movement who have helped solidify Christian principles as synonymous with the Republican agenda, and specifically with the [Trump’s] president’s agenda.  Trump, of course, welcomes this way of thinking.

Yet the idea that without Republicans, Christianity is lost, is not unique to the Trump era. The merging of evangelicalism and Republicanism has been underway for decades. It is simply more visible and pronounced under this president — primarily because evangelical support for Trump requires a much higher degree of cognitive dissonance.

That is, fighting for conservative Christian values by unquestioningly supporting someone who not only doesn’t share them but has lived most of his life actively, and unapologetically, in opposition to them. 

Stomaching Trump’s behavior and rhetoric — which could generously be described as not characteristic of a Christian — has been rewarded with much-improved prospects for stricter abortion laws and achieving other long-sought goals in what conservative Christians regard as a desperate and escalating culture war.

The evangelical embrace of Trump has been an electoral positive for the Republican Party, but for those who would evangelize, the new reality is tragic.

[True Christians are] meant to speak the truth in a way that invites strangers in, welcomes them, makes them feel loved.  To care for the least of these is a Christian value. Expressing and demonstrating it is spreading the Word.

That’s called evangelizing. A movement that based itself on the term but now embraces its antithesis is becoming difficult to recognize.

Yes, there are good Christians, but until they loudly and continually condemn evangelicals on a daily basis, they are allowing evangelicals to be the face of Christianity and the result is the exodus of people, especially among younger generations, from religion entirely.  Meanwhile, being a Trump supporter and a true Christian are mutually exclusive.

Breaking the Republican Lock on God

For years now the Republican Party has claimed to be the party of god and god-fearing Christians - even though its policies over the last 20 years are diametrically opposed to Christ's social gospel message: feed the hungry, cloth the naked, give shelter to the homeless, care for the sick. The GOP instead wants to throw the poor in the gutter and to hope that the sick will conveniently die despite constant disingenuous statements of "thoughts and prayers" when it is social programs that are what is really needed.  Swarming to the GOP banner have been the evangelical Christian and far right Catholic crowd seemingly motivated solely by anti-abortion fervor and anti-gay hatred and a willingness to close their eyes to the anti-gospel agenda of the Republican Party.  Best representing this false Christianity are Mike Pence and "mother" his bigoted wife and, of course, the loud professional Christian set that rarely focuses on the issues Christ talked about and instead amasses personal wealth and strives for political power. This hypocrisy and anti-Christian behavior is now being repeatedly called out by unlikely sources: a gay Christian and a black woman in the persons of Pete Buttigieg and Stacy Abrams.  I left the GOP years ago when I concluded that one could not be a decent, moral person and remain a supporter of the GOP.  That belief has only intensified with Trump in the White House.  Whether one calls them-self a Christian or not - I typically do not since evangelicals have so sullied the label -  if you believe in the social gospel message, you cannot support the today's GOP.  A column in the New York Times looks at this much needed call for decent people to challenge the GOP and strip it of its claim to be the party of god.  Here are highlights:

We know that slaveholders in the American South used Scripture to justify keeping their fellow humans in bondage. They could find no words from Christ on this, for there are no words from him. Just a line in the New Testament from mere mortals presuming to speak for him.

But perhaps it made those who tore apart families, who whipped insubordinates until they passed out, who sold children and cotton bales as similar commodities feel better to know that the monstrous crime of their daily enterprise could be a blessed act.

These days, no less an authority than Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said recently that God “wanted Donald Trump to become president.”  She offered no sourcing for this assertion, as is the case for vaporous claims that rise from the rot of the Trump presidency on a daily basis.

Mocking Sanders and the many Ned Flanders of the G.O.P. team is unlikely to make much of a dent. Nearly half of all Republicans believe God wanted Trump to win the election. To them, secular snark is a merit badge on the MAGA hat.

But there is a better way to sway the electorate of faith, as the rising Democratic stars Pete Buttigieg and Stacey Abrams have shown us. They apply something like a “What Would Jesus Do?” test to rouse religious conscience on the political battlefield.

Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Ind., is a Navy veteran who served in Afghanistan, a Rhodes scholar, married to a junior high school teacher. He’s gay and, more surprising for a modern Democrat, he is an out Christian, as quick to quote St. Augustine as Abraham Lincoln.

Like Abrams and Senator Cory Booker, Mayor Pete says his faith made him a progressive. Scripture directs him to defend the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the societal castoffs.

But Buttigieg goes much further than mere Bible-citing. He’s taking it directly to Trump and to Vice President Mike Pence, who flashes his piety like a seven-carat diamond on his pinkie finger. It’s hard to look at the actions of President Trump, Buttigieg said, “and believe they are the actions of somebody who believes in God.”

The mayor calls Pence the “cheerleader of the porn star presidency,” and he wonders whether the vice president “stopped believing in Scripture when he started believing in Donald Trump.”

Buttigieg’s marriage to Chasten Glezman “moved me closer to God,” he said in a speech last Sunday. To the “Mike Pences of the world,” he said, “your quarrel is not with me — your quarrel, sir, is with my creator.”

Abrams, who narrowly lost her race for governor of Georgia last year, also uses faith, part of a long African-American tradition, to marshal Christian principles against the repulsive acts of man. The daughter of two Methodist preachers, she said in one of her television ads, “My reading of the Bible says that Jesus Christ was a progressive.”

[W]hen a president is held up by his own spokeswoman as an extension of divine will, and that president is embraced by the evangelical community as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy, it’s fine to use the source material to fight back.

The best Christian argument against Trump comes from Christ. The essence of Christianity is his exhortation that people treat the sick, the hungry, the poor, the imprisoned as they would treat him. “Whatever you did to the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did to me.”

No one can know what’s in Trump’s heart. But his policies are inhumane in the extreme. Cursed are the meek, for under Trump’s command, children have been put in cages, and the poor in red states are denied the health care that should be available to them under Obamacare.

Trump is all about self. His bigotry, his boasting, his lies, his pride, his scams of the vulnerable, his worship of materialism, his insults of the dead, his turning a blind eye to refugees, his bragging of adulterous behavior, his treatment of “the least” among us — all of this is antithetical to Christian philosophy.

Buttigieg is right to call him on this. He’s right to attack Pence’s hypocrisy. But the moral high ground is a fragile perch, best visited on rare occasions. He’s thrown down a needed challenge. Now let Trump and Pence try to prove him wrong.

In what many of the "godly folk" would find ironic, most of the LGBT people I know are far more Christian - meaning they support Christ's social gospel message - than the evangelical crowd.  The vast majority of us oppose Trump and the GOP and we support the very social safety net that the GOP seeks to destroy.   Calling oneself Christian and parking your ass in a pew each Sunday doesn't prove one is Christian.  Rather it is how one approaches supporting feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, giving shelter to the homeless, caring for the sick and caring for refugees. The Pences of the world utterly fail this test.

Walmart Wins the Wrath of "Christian" Hate Group for Valentine's Commercial

Here in America many children and elderly adults go without adequate nutrition and health care and in various parts of the globe, people are literally starving to death and dying of easily treated diseases. One would expect true Christian organizations to be focusing on addressing such situations and striving to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, provide medical assistance to the sick, and provide housing to the homeless.  But not American Family Association ("AFA"), a certified hate group. Instead of doing Christ's bidding, AFA is launch a campaign against Walmart which aired a Valentine's commercial that featured, the horrors, gay men shopping for a blind date.  Sadly, AFA is but one of a number of "Christian" organizations that make a mockery of Christ's message and traffic instead in hate and bigotry (others include Family Research Council, Traditional Values Coalition, and Focus on the Family).  Metro Weekly looks at AFA's spittle flecked rants against Walmart.  Here are excerpts: 

Anti-gay organization the American Family Association is not happy about Walmart’s new “pro-homosexual” commercial.

The retailer released a series of videos on social media to celebrate Valentine’s Day, showcasing various people visiting Walmart stores for blind dates.

One episode of “Love Is In The Aisle” features same-sex pairing Pat and Andy. The fairly innocuous video shows the men discussing their habits, shopping for hair and cooking products, and Andy giving Pat a Creme Pie.

Unfortunately, two men sharing a Little Debbie snack was apparently enough to rile AFA, which sent a livid message to its followers demanding they rise up against Walmart and its “cultural revolution.”

“In a move that most Christians probably never expected to see, retail giant Walmart has posted an online video that normalizes homosexual relationships,” the organization wrote in a press release, adding, “for most Christians and other traditionalists, the idea that marriage is between a man and a woman is sacred.”

AFA sent an “Action Alert” to its followers urging them to sign a petition demanding Walmart remove the video and “remain neutral on controversial issues.” (It should be noted that homosexuality is not illegal, and same-sex marriage has been legal nationwide since 2015.)

“We’ve seen many large corporations reject that in their marketing, but I honestly never thought Walmart would join the cultural revolution and reject the beliefs of its customer base,” said AFA President Tim Wildmon. “It’s clear that Walmart is on the path of elevating homosexual relationships to the same level as the male-female model of marriage.”

Wildmon continued: “We have no choice but to ask our supporters to let the company know how customers feel about Walmart’s shift away from neutrality on this controversial issue to full support for same sex relationships.”

AFA is no stranger to anti-LGBTQ campaigns, having previously spearheaded campaigns against Walgreens and Target over their transgender-inclusive restroom policies.

It should be noted that there are currently zero reported incidents of a transgender person harassing women or children in restrooms — but multiple counts of transgender people being harassed or discriminated against for simply trying to use a toilet.

[I]n 2015, AFA’s Bryan Fischer blamed horrendous flooding in Texas on “sodomites,” agreeing with a caller who opined that “sodomite mayor” Annise Parker (Houston’s openly lesbian mayor) was the cause of the floods.

AFA also tried to scare its followers in 2014 by asserting that “homosexual activists” were “intentionally seeking out Christian business owners for the sole purpose of attacking and destroying religious liberties.”

It is "christian" organizations like AFA that have driven 40% of the under 30 generations from religion.

Trump May Try to Kill Medicaid by Executive Fiat

To me one of the prime signals that the Republican Party is the antithesis of so-called Christian values that per the gospels include caring for the poor, the sick, the hungry and the homeless is the party's incessant obsession with killing Medicaid and other government programs that assist these desperate populations.  The GOP's basic message if you are a member of any of these categories is basically, "do us a favor and just die."  What's disturbing is that evangelical Christians - today's Pharisees motivated by hate rather than Christ's message - fully support the GOP agenda, or at least until grandma needs to go into a nursing home or they lose their job and their health insurance.  Besides being un-Christian, this mindset is stupid and these greed driven cretins fail to grasp that America's healthcare costs are sky high because we do not cover preventive care and force many to rely on non-profit hospital emergency room care - the least cost effective means there is.  Add to this the failure to catch illnesses when they have an inexpensive fix and it's a recipe for fiscal disaster.  The result is that ALL OF us end up paying ridiculously high hospital costs as hospitals seek to recover lost revenue. Medicaid is one mechanism that addresses this ass backwards approach of America's broken healthcare system and recognizes the lives of the less fortunate.  So what does Der Trumpenführer want to do?  Basically kill Medicaid as we know it, in part to pay for his tax cuts to the obscenely wealthy and, in my view, in part because he sees the poor as little more than vermin.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at this dangerous Trump/GOP agenda.  Here are highlights: 

One of the most ancient Republican policy hobbyhorses has been eliminating Medicaid’s status as a federal-state entitlement program guaranteeing health-care services for low-income Americans and certain other categories of needy people. You think killing Obamacare is an obsessive Great White Whale for conservatives? Attacks on Medicaid’s basic structure date back at least to the beginning of the Reagan presidency (fittingly, since the Gipper was one of the most visible opponents of the original Medicare and Medicaid proposals back in the early 1960s). In fact, an effort to arbitrarily “cap” federal Medicaid payments was one of the few early legislative setbacks for his administration.

GOP efforts to turn Medicaid into a “block grant” (i.e., a proposal in which the federal government would appropriate a fixed sum of money that states could use to deal with the Medicaid population, with the federal contribution expected to wither away over time), terminating any individual entitlement to benefits, have come back over and over again like a recurring nightmare. There was a Medicaid block grant in the 1995–96 Gingrich budgets that Bill Clinton repeatedly vetoed. George W. Bush proposed the same thing in 2003. It was a regular feature of all those “Ryan Budgets” during the Obama administration. And most recently, Republicans tried to smuggle it into law as part of their unsuccessful bills to “repeal and replace” Obamacare, under the guise of rolling back Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid.

Even as such frontal assaults on Medicaid continued, the Trump administration, under Medicare and Medicaid director Seema Verma, has been working hard at using “waiver” powers originally designed to help states cover more people under Medicaid to let them move in the opposite direction via work requirements and other provisions aimed at discouraging eligibility. Last year there was even talk of letting conservative states impose an arbitrary lifetime limit on how long childless adults could receive Medicaid benefits, which would have been a pretty clear abrogation of congressional authority . . . .

Now, with the 2018 midterm elections ending any fantasies of Republican-style “health-care reform” legislation making any progress before 2021 at the earliest, Verma is reportedly contemplating a giant and audacious leap into the past: turning Medicaid into block grants via state waivers, or to put it another way, abolishing Medicaid as we have known it by executive fiat. Politico first reported the scheme:

The Trump administration is quietly devising a plan bypassing Congress to give block grants to states for Medicaid, achieving a longstanding conservative dream of reining in spending on the health care safety net for the poor. … new limits could apply to all Medicaid populations — including nursing home patients — or just a smaller subset like working-age adults.

Any way you slice it, though, any block-grant-by-waiver initiative would change Medicaid’s basic structure and purpose, with the clear intention of abrogating congressional powers. The reaction from Democratic Members of Congress has been predictable:

“Hell no,” Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) wrote on Twitter on Friday evening, vowing to oppose the administration’s block grant plan “through legislation, in the courts, holding up Administration nominees, literally every means that a U.S. Senator has.” 

If Verma goes ahead with this scheme, a legal challenge will most definitely arise. But it’s an indication of how determined conservatives are not just to fight the long-term trend of making Medicaid a de facto universal health coverage program for the poor, but of rolling it back as far as possible.

But make no mistake: most ideologically-prone Republicans hate Medicaid with the heat of a thousand suns, and they won’t give up trying to hamstring it, restrict it, cut it, or kill it so long as a devious way to go about it has yet to be deployed.

I truly do not see how a decent, moral person can be a Republican any longer.

Trump/Pence Continues Its Brutal Treatment of Immigrant Children

One of the mysteries in politics is how the Republican Party continues to claim it is the party of "Christian values."  The same applies to evangelicals who continue to support a self-confessed serial adulterer and sexual molester.  Yet much of the main stream media never confronts the Republican lies much less the falsehoods and acceptance of evil by right wing religious "leaders" such as Tony Perkins, Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell, Jr. - and many more - who are 100% on board with the GOP's anti-Gospel message policies.  Polls have shown that roughly half of evangelicals want Brett Kavanaugh confirmed even if he is guilty of the various allegations against him.  But nowhere is the moral bankruptcy of today's GOP and its base more telling than in the manner in which detained immigrant children are being treated.  Such treatment underscores the reality that to the GOP base - including the hypocrisy-filled evangelicals who fill church pews - only whites are human.  Everyone else is to be treated like animals.  A piece in Think Progress looks at the continued mistreatment of detained immigrant children.  Here are excerpts:

Migrant children separated from their parents at the border under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy have been subjected to harsh conditions in U.S. detention facilities, an unpublished report by the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Office of Inspector General found.

The report, obtained by The Washington Post, found at least 860 migrant children were held in Border Patrol holding cells longer than 72-hours, the maximum length of time mandated by the U.S. courts. One child was held for 12 days and another for 25.

The Border Patrol holding cells are notoriously torturous, earning the nickname of “hieleras,” or “ice box,” among the immigrants who have spent time in the frigid spaces with few — if any — blankets.

The holding cells were designed as a temporary stop for minors as they wait to be transferred to shelters run by Health and Human Services (HHS). Aside from their frigid temperatures, many of them also lack adequate beds, have zero shower facilities, and are essentially chain-link holding pens. Reports of harsh physical conditions were outlined in a court filing earlier this summer and based on interviews between immigration lawyers and detained children, about their time in the holding cells and contractor-run detention facilities for unaccompanied minors.

“There is no privacy. It is dirty and they don’t clean it,” a Guatemalan boy named Erick said, describing his first three days in Border Patrol custody. “The room is always cold. The guards took my sweater. I sleep on the floor. There are 3 mattresses, but the boys from Honduras have taken them.”

The DHS OIG report also describes just how poorly mismanaged the zero tolerance policy was — how it left parents with little-to-no information on their children’s whereabouts and no plan for how to reunite them.

DHS investigators discovered that officials shared minor’s files via Microsoft Word email attachments because the government’s internal systems were unstable. “Each step of this manual process is vulnerable to human error, increasing the risk that a child could become lost in the system,” the report stated.

Border Patrol agents separated children who could not yet speak from their parents and did not provide wrist bracelets or any other form of identification to the children, nor were they ever fingerprinted or photographed to ensure they were linked to the correct case file. Though the abusive family separation practice was technically ended through executive order months ago — the Trump administration effectively reversed its own previous policy — hundreds of children remain separated from their parents, most of them deemed “ineligible for reunification by the federal government.” 136 children are still in custody, 3 of whom are under the age of 5. Many of their parents say they were deported before they could be reunited with their children, and some claim they were pressured to give up their right to reunification by officials who used English-only documents and confusing instructions.

Proud to be an American?  I am not - I am ashamed.  Next time you hear some Trump supporter pontificating and, worse yet, spreading misogyny, please throw this reality in their face.  If they support these policies, know for certain that they are NOT true Christians.  They are evil. 

GOP Message to Most Americans: Get Sick, Go Bankrupt and Die

Liar and modern day Pharisee, Mike Pence.

Sitting in Le Marais area of Paris as I type this post, several things come to mind.  One is that the French truly have a love of life and, unlike Americans work to live rather than live to work.  Another is that they are free from the constant fear of that one major illness or pre-existing medial condition that could wipe them out financially,  Why this freedom of such fear?  It's simple: France's healthcare system, rated by many as the best and most cost effective in the world. Yes, the French pay higher taxes, but walking around the city one sees few signs of poverty and an enviable lifestyle.  The contrast could not be greater compared to America where health care cost remain a continued concern for all but the very wealthy.  Indeed, the message the Republican Party seemingly sends to millions of Americans is like the caption of this post: get sick, go bankrupt and die.  This from the political party that pretends to embrace "Christian values"  and that now finds it strongest support from evangelical Christians and white supremacists (in my view, the two are increasingly synonymous).  A column in the New York Times looks at the menace of the GOP towards millions of Americans:  Here are excerpts:

Despite his reputation as a maverick, John McCain spent most of his last decade being a very orthodox Republican . . . . But he redeemed much of that record with one action: He cast the crucial vote against G.O.P. attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. That single “nay” saved health care for tens of millions of Americans, at least for a while.

But now McCain is gone, and with him, as far as we can tell, the only Republican in Congress with anything resembling a spine. As a result, if Republicans hold Congress in November, they will indeed repeal Obamacare. That’s not a guess: It’s an explicit promise, made by Vice President Mike Pence last week.

In the case of health care, however, there’s an even deeper problem: The G.O.P. can’t come up with an alternative to the Affordable Care Act because no such alternative exists. In particular, if you want to preserve protection for people with pre-existing conditions — the health issue that matters most to voters, including half of Republicans — Obamacare is the most conservative policy that can do that. The only other options are things like Medicare for all that would involve moving significantly to the left, not the right.

Health economists have explained this point many times over the years; but as always, it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

If you want private insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions, you have to ban discrimination based on medical history. But that in itself isn’t enough, because if policies cost the same for everyone, those who sign up will be sicker than those who don’t, creating a bad risk pool and forcing high premiums. That was the case in New York, where premiums for individual policies were very high before the A.C.A. For what Obamacare did was provide incentives to get healthy people to sign up, too. On one side there was a penalty for not having insurance (the individual mandate). On the other, there were subsidies designed to limit health expenses as a share of income. Republicans have tried to sabotage health care by doing away with the mandate, and have succeeded in driving premiums higher; but the system is still standing thanks to those subsidies.

The point, again, is that Obamacare is the most conservative option for covering pre-existing conditions, and if Republicans really cared about the scores of millions of Americans with such conditions, they would support and indeed try to strengthen the A.C.A.

Instead, they’re going to kill it if they hold on in two months. But covering pre-existing conditions is popular; therefore, they’re pretending that they’ll do that, while offering proposals that would, in fact, do no such thing.

Do they imagine that voters are stupid?  Well, yes. In recent rallies Donald Trump has been declaring that Democrats want to “raid Medicare to pay for socialism.”

But the more important target is the news media, many members of which still haven’t learned to cope with the pervasive bad faith of modern conservatism.

Sadly, when it comes to the GOP base, they are stupid.  Or, in the alternative, are so motivated by their racial hatreds that they blinded to the reality that they are voting against their own interests in most instances. 

Sarah Sanders Embodies the Danger and Moral Bankruptcy of the GOP

Since I left the Republican Party I have watched the steady descent of the party into moral bankruptcy as the truth and objective facts have ceased to matter and tribalism has gained ascendancy as the party has pushed two main goals, that of the selfish wealthy and that of the reactionary Christofascists.  Added to the mix has been a steady dose of racism that, until the rise of Donald Trump, was at least somewhat hidden and denied if called into question. As I have often noted, the beginning of this slide toward ugliness and moral bankruptcy corresponded with the rise of the "godly folk" within the GOP base. In today's GOP, one of the best examples of the how foul the GOP has become is Sarah Sanders, Trump's press secretary who lies as often and with as little self-reflection as her boss, all the while feigning devout "Christian" belief.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at Sanders conduct and the dangers of the tribalism she steadfastly supports.  Here are excerpts:

It is a well-worn cliché of the Trump presidency—which is also to say, it is a well-worn cliché about the Trump psyche—that, within a White House as vertically integrated as this one, loyalty counts above all. And Sarah Sanders, the press secretary who will have been on the job, this week, for one year—the White House announced her promotion to the role in July of 2017—performs that loyalty every time she meets the press.

This is a White House that prioritizes the scoring of points over the complexities of compromise. Sanders, on behalf of the president she works for—a happy warrior in a culture war that has found a front in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—takes for granted an assumption that would be shocking were it not so common in the American culture of the early 21st century: There are things that are more important than truth.

Things like, for example, the claiming of victory against the other side. Things like, for example, the owning of libs and the trolling of Dems and the ability to victor-write history so thoroughly that you can claim, with an air of annoyance about being asked to make such a clarification in the first place, that the president’s long history of commentary on Russia has now been nullified because the president had, in a single public event, “misspoken.” All of which made Wednesday’s briefing—the president will work with his team—both deeply typical and astounding: Here was one of the most prominent representatives of the White House choosing partisanship over patriotism. Winning above all.

Sometimes standing by the president—supporting Team Trump from within—comes down to subtler work: taking Trump’s actions and coating them with the palatable veneer of evident normalcy. Michael McFaul, Bill Browder, Vladimir Putin, the notion that the United States might decide to use its citizens as bargaining chips in order to make deals with a despotic regime known for murdering dissidents: We’ll let you know if there’s an announcement on that front. But it is also an approach that is wholly consistent with the Trumpian worldview—one that valorizes strength above all (he has “great control over his country,” the president has mused of Putin), one that is populated by a collective of uses and thems, one whose sum, always, is zero. A world of winners and a world, consequently, of losers: It is perhaps the clearest distillation of Trumpism. This White House, whether it is taking on health care or gun policy or tax policy or immigration policy, assumes everything is a competition—and reveres, to the general exclusion of the alternative, #winning. Sickness is weakness. Poverty is weakness. Otherness is weakness. And Trump understands the world according to one crucial insight: He himself is not weak. He is strong. Sanders has transformed the job of the press secretary itself in the year that she has spent as its occupant. Gone are the tense cordialities that defined the tenures of the Obama administration press secretaries Robert Gibbs and Jay Carney and Josh Earnest; gone, too, are the shouted lies of Sean Spicer and the swaggering camp of Anthony Scaramucci.

Instead, briefing by briefing, Sanders strides to the lectern in the Brady briefing room and makes an argument about who belongs among the world’s winners . . . . and who must be counted among its losers (congressional Democrats, Democrats in general, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, the American news media who are not on the payroll of the Fox News Channel).

It’s partisanship, all the way down. (When reporters point out that the president lies—more than 2,000 known ones at this point—Sanders often responds by accusing them of being agents of an anti-Trump agenda.)

In the summer of 1954, a group of 22 boys, all of them rising sixth graders, were invited to spend time at a summer camp in the Sans Bois Mountains, in southeastern Oklahoma. . . . would come to be known as the Robbers Cave experiment.

Robbers Cave, Lord of the Flies but with better experimental design, remains a dire warning, not only when it comes to psychology, but also when it comes to democracy—a lurking suggestion of how readily humans can be convinced to turn against one another on the grounds of otherness itself. It has lingered throughout American history. James Madison worried about factions and Alexander Hamilton worried about demagogues and the Framers as a messy collective worried about the inevitable inertias of human pettiness . . . .

It is a fear that is realized every time the person whose job it is to help the American people understand the daily doings of the executive branch instead mocks White House reporters to their face. It is a fear that is realized every time Sanders, the daughter of a man who has made a career with the help of regular denigrations of the “media” (a collective to which, through a TV show broadcast to the masses, he insists he does not belong), uses her pulpit to promote the president’s “fake news awards.” It is a fear that is realized every time Sanders accuses reporters of “purposely putting out information you know is false” and “purposefully misleading the American people”—offenses that, anyone familiar with the workings of the press will know, are grounds for instant firing.

This is a time of factions, of widespread bad faith, of normalized trolling, of the plodding weaponization of everything. But Sanders, for her part, serves as an omen in real time: a reminder of what happens when the airy ideals of republican government—compromise, commonality, objective truth—get refracted through competition and resentment and battle It is this team—her team—that Sarah Sanders stood up to defend on Wednesday, as she has done so many days before: a team that, in her apparent estimation, included the president of Russia but did not necessarily include her fellow Americans. Hours later, Sanders had more news to break: The president is planning to invite Vladimir Putin to America, to visit the White House, this fall. Neatly wrapped in the language of bureaucratic protocol (“ongoing working-level dialogue”), you can almost overlook the fact that Sanders is announcing that a dictator will soon be welcomed to the West Wing. This is the new world order to which Sanders is so fiercely loyal. This is Donaldpolitik. Her president, right or wrong.

Be very, very afraid.

House GOP Seeks to Cut Medicare, Social Security to Balance Budget After Massive Tax Cuts for Wealthy

While much of the American public is focused on the horrors and deliberate cruelty taking place on America's southwest border, House Republicans are conspiring to unleash cruelty on those who rely on Medicare and Social Security to survive.  The pretense for harming countless lives?  The need to cut the federal budget deficit which is hemorrhaging red ink in the wake of the $1.5 trillion (yes, trillion with a "T") tax cuts for the very wealthy and large, rapacious corporations.  It has been Paul Ryan's sick and morally bankrupt dream to destroy the social safety net for years, and now the massive give away voted in by Republicans is being grotesquely used to harm the poor and the elderly.  While Catholic bishops are condemning the Trump/Pence family separation policy, they might also want to bar Ryan from the sacraments given his utter disregard for the poor, the hungry and the sick. Trump cruel border policy did not arise out of thin air.  The GOP has been pushing a cruel agenda for many years.   A piece in the Washington Post looks ate the GOP's manufactured crisis and those whom they seek to harm.  Here are excerpts:

House Republicans released a proposal Tuesday that would balance the budget in nine years — but only by making large cuts to entitlement programs, including Medicare and Social Security, . . . .

The House Budget Committee is aiming to pass the blueprint this week, but that may be as far as it goes this midterm election year. It is not clear that GOP leaders will put the document on the House floor for a vote, and even if it were to pass the House, the budget would have little impact on actual spending levels.

Nonetheless the budget serves as an expression of Republicans’ priorities at a time of rapidly rising deficits and debt. Although the nation’s growing indebtedness has been exacerbated by the GOP’s own policy decisions — including the new tax law, which most analyses say will add at least $1 trillion to the debt — Republicans on the Budget Committee said they felt a responsibility to put the nation on a sounder fiscal trajectory.

Democrats have little interest in addressing it except as part of a larger deal including tax increases — the sort of “Grand Bargain” that eluded President Barack Obama.

The House Republican budget, titled “A Brighter American Future,” would remake Medicare by giving seniors the option of enrolling in private plans that compete with traditional Medicare, a system of competition designed to keep costs down but dismissed by critics as an effort to privatize the program. Along with other changes, the budget proposes to squeeze $537 billion out of Medicare over the next decade.

The budget would transform Medicaid, the federal-state health-care program for the poor, by limiting per capita payments or allowing states to turn it into a block-grant program — the same approach House Republicans took in their legislation that passed last year to repeal the Affordable Care Act (the repeal effort died in the Senate, but the GOP budget assumes that the repeal takes place).  It also proposes adding work requirements for certain adults enrolled in Medicaid. Changes to Medicaid and other health programs would account for $1.5 trillion in savings.

Social Security comes in for more modest cuts of $4 billion over the decade, which the budget projects could be reached by eliminating concurrent receipt of unemployment benefits and Social Security disability insurance. . . . And the budget proposes $230 billion in cuts from education and training programs, including consolidating student loan programs and reducing Pell Grant awards.

The budget also relies on rosy economic-growth projections . . .

Democrats were quick to criticize the GOP proposal while contending that Republicans were opening themselves up to election-year attacks by releasing it at all.

“The 2019 Republican budget scraps any sense of responsibility to the American people and any obligation to being honest,” said Rep. John Yarmuth (Ky.), the top Democrat on the Budget Committee. “Its repeal of the Affordable Care Act and extreme cuts to health care, retirement security, anti-poverty programs, education, infrastructure, and other critical investments are real and will inflict serious harm on American families.”

The farce is that the GOP pretends to be the party of "family values" and "Christian values" yet other than slavishly prostituting itself to hate-filled anti-abortion, anti-gay Christofascists, NOTHING in the GOP agenda is family friendly or remotely in keeping with the Gospel's social message.   

The Foul Legacy of Paul Ryan

Other than Donald Trump, one of the biggest liars and frauds in Washington, D.C., is soon to be former House Speaker Paul Ryan, a man who never deserved to be treated as a serious conservative voice.  His relentless efforts to slash funding for the less fortunate in order to shower massive tax cuts on the obscenely wealthy while feigning to be a devout Catholic demonstrate  Ryan's rank hypocrisy.  Worse yet, since January 20, 2017, Ryan has put the interest of the nation and the rule of law beneath rank partisanship and protecting an occupant of the White House who is likely guilty of obstruction of justice, if not actual treason.  Ryan should never have been given respect much less treated as someone honest.  With Ryan leaving at the end of his current term, a column in the Washington Post  by a former Republican looks at Ryan's foul legacy.  Here are column excerpts:

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s last year in office is proving disastrous, a fitting end to the speakership of a man once considered a principled conservative reformer. His refusal to fulfill his constitutional role as leader of the House but rather play the role of presidential poodle and Republican attack dog for his increasingly unhinged caucus has had dire consequences for the GOP House majority, the intelligence oversight process and the broader conservative movement.

Among his most egregious failures has been his refusal to rein in House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who, in concert with the White House, created a phony “unmasking” scandal and released a misleading memo casting aspersions on the FBI and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in connection with the warrant to conduct surveillance on suspected spy Carter Page. As Nunes’s crowd, together with the president, now threatens to reveal a secret FBI and CIA source, in an unprecedented breach of the House’s intelligence oversight responsibilities, the extent of Ryan’s reckless disregard for his oath becomes clear.

There is no evidence the FBI behaved improperly. (“The FBI commonly uses sources and informants to gather evidence and its regulations allow for use of informants even before a formal investigation has been opened. In many law enforcement investigations, the use of sources and informants precedes more invasive techniques such as electronic surveillance.”) . . . . had the FBI failed to follow up on evidence that a presidential campaign was engaged in secret communications with a foreign government, it would have been excoriated for dereliction of duty. Moreover, none of this was revealed during the campaign — in stark contrast to the airing of the allegations against Hillary Clinton for misuse of email, an action that looks downright trivial in comparison with a far-flung Russian plot to boost Trump, a scheme that at critical points was eagerly greeted by top members of the Trump campaign. 

At any stage in this outrageous attack on American intelligence operations and the Justice Department, Ryan could have stepped in to replace members of the Intelligence Committee, to reprimand them and/or to rebuff the president’s attempt to interfere with and smear investigators seeking to uncover an attack on our democracy. 

Ryan’s legacy will be not only of someone who politically enabled an unfit president, but also of someone who presided over the erosion of trust required for a proper intelligence oversight process. Ryan has done his party no favors in permitting it to become irrational conspiratorialists and antagonists of our intelligence community. His passivity has only encouraged Trump to abuse his powers, which may, when the facts are laid bare, amount to obstruction of justice.

This week Ryan completely lost control of his own troops, watching the farm bill go down in humiliating fashion as he tried to stave off an immigration compromise that might actually pass. He is no longer doing the people’s business . . . . . Perhaps he should retire now. Any temporary replacement could hardly do a worse job for the remaining months of the GOP majority.

The Ongoing GOP Effort to Take Away Health Care for Millions

America stands alone among developed nations when it comes to not having a national health insurance system. America also stands alone in terms of the high level of claimed religiosity of its citizens, especially those comprising the Republican Party base.  Yet, America's healthcare system - if one can even call it a system since it is mostly driven by corporate greed - treats less well of Americans as basically disposable garbage, left to depend on the most expense, least cost effective means of meeting their healthcare needs.  The result is millions without coverage and Americans paying many times more than those in any other developed nation.  And Republicans want to make the system even worse as the go about sabotaging the remaining aspects of the Affordable Health Care Act - even as they mouth claims of supporting "Christian" values.  One has to wonder if they have ever actually read the New Testament teachings on caring for the less fortunate.  A column in the New York Times looks at the ongoing sabotage.  Here are highlights:  

Republicans still hate the idea of helping Americans get health care. So instead of releasing the kraken, they’ve brought on the termites. Rather than trying to eliminate Obamacare in one fell swoop, they’re trying to undermine it with multiple acts of sabotage — while hoping voters won’t realize who’s responsible for rising premiums and falling coverage.

Which is why it’s important to place the blame where it belongs.

The first thing you need to understand is that Obamacare has been a highly successful program. When the legislation was passed, Republicans insisted it would fail to cut the number of uninsured and would blow a huge hole in the federal budget. In fact, it led to major gains in coverage, reducing the uninsured rate to its lowest level in history, at relatively low cost.

[I]nsurers found that the people signing up were sicker, on average, than they expected, leading to higher premiums. But as of last year, the markets appeared to have stabilized, with insurers generally profitable.

Nobody would claim that Obamacare is perfect; many Americans remain uninsured, and too many of those with coverage face troublingly high out-of-pocket expenses. Still, health reform delivered most of what its advocates promised and caused none of the disasters its opponents predicted.

Yet Republicans still want to destroy it. One reason is that much of the coverage expansion was paid for with taxes on high incomes, so repeal would be a way to cut taxes on the wealthy. More broadly, conservatives hate Obamacare precisely because it works. It shows that government actually can help tens of millions of Americans lead better, more secure lives, and in so doing it threatens their low-tax, small-government ideology.

But outright repeal failed, so now it’s time for sabotage, which is taking place on two main fronts.

One of these fronts involves the expansion of Medicaid, which probably accounted for more than half the gains in coverage under Obamacare. Now a number of Republican-controlled states are trying to make Medicaid harder to get, notably by imposing work requirements on recipients.

What is the point of these work requirements? The ostensible justification — cracking down on able-bodied Medicaid recipients who should be working but aren’t — is nonsense: There are very few people meeting that description. The real goal is simply to make getting health care harder, by imposing onerous reporting and paperwork requirements and punishing people who lose their jobs for reasons beyond their control.

The other front involves trying to reduce the number of people signing up for private coverage. Last year the Trump administration drastically reduced outreach — the effort to let Americans know when and how to get health insurance.

The administration is also promoting various dodges that would in effect let insurance companies go back to discriminating against people in poor health. And when Congress passed a huge tax cut for corporations and the wealthy, it also eliminated the individual mandate, the requirement that people sign up for insurance even if they’re currently healthy.

Preliminary evidence suggests that these efforts at sabotage have already partially reversed the coverage gains achieved under Obama, especially among lower-income Americans. (Curiously, all the coverage losses seem to have happened among self-identified Republicans.) But the worst is yet to come.

You see, G.O.P. sabotage disproportionately discourages young and healthy people from signing up, which, as one commentator put it, “drives up the cost for other folks within that market.” Who said that? Tom Price, President Trump’s first secretary of health and human services.

Sure enough, insurers are already proposing major premium hikes — and they are specifically attributing those hikes to G.O.P. actions that are driving healthy Americans out of the market, leaving a sicker, more expensive pool behind.

So here’s what’s going to happen: Soon, many Americans will suffer sticker shock from their insurance policies; federal subsidies will protect most of them, but by no means everyone. They’ll also hear news about declining insurance coverage. And Republicans will say, “See, Obamacare is failing.”

But the problem isn’t with Obamacare, it’s with the politicians who unleashed this termite infestation — who are doing all they can to take away your health coverage. And they need to be held accountable.

Yet more evidence of the moral bankruptcy of the Republican Party, especially the evangelical Christians who make up a core constituency. To call them modern day Pharisees is far too kind.  Republicans need to be voted out of office in November, 2018.

Mike Pence’s Hypocrisy Filled Sense of Morality

With Rudy Giuliani exposing Donald Trump as a liar - yet again - during an interview on Fox News, the bar for truthfulness and morality is almost non-existent in the Trump/Pence regime.  Yet, Mike Pence, who bizarrely won't be alone in a room with a woman who is not his wife, continues to manage to put the hypocrisy and feigned morality of evangelicals and so-called conservatives on display.  Perhaps one of Pence's most bizarre performances was his description of former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of contempt of court, as a “tireless champion of  the rule of law.”  The takeaway message is that trampling on the rights of minorities - especially those who have brown or black skin - is perfectly fine in the warped moral world of evangelicals.  This, of course, should surprise no one given the historical ties between evangelicals (especially Southern Baptists) and support for segregation and the Jim Crow laws.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Pence's upside down morality.  Here are excerpts:

Until Tuesday, it seemed that Vice President Pence had one primary function within the Trump administration: to be morally offended by everything. There was the time that he walked out of an NFL game because some players took a knee while the national anthem was played. 

Last month “the vice president walked out of the Summit of the Americas when Cuba’s foreign minister was recognized to speak after him,” according to the Associated Press.

Pence has demonstrated his ability to register his moral disapproval even when he does not leave an event. This was the case at the Opening Ceremonies of the 2018 Winter Olympics, when he refused to stand as the unified Korean team entered the stadium.

Pence’s defenders would argue that being rude to dignitaries from North Korea and Cuba just shows how righteous he really is. His brand is as a man of serious moral values who can serve as Trump’s envoy to people of faith.  Pence’s presence in the White House has been a boon for the religious right. Evangelical leaders across the country point to his record on abortion and religious freedom and liken him to a prophet restoring conservative Christianity to its rightful place at the center of American life. 

 

So it is worth noting what Pence, the Trump administration’s righteous man, did in Arizona on Tuesday. . . . . Pence praised former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of contempt of court, as a “tireless champion of … the rule of law” during an event in Arizona on Tuesday.

Pence said at the tax event that he was “honored” by the former sheriff’s attendance, and called Arpaio a “great friend of this president and tireless champion of strong borders and the rule of law,” to cheers from the crowd.

Needless to say, most observers do not view Joe Arpaio as a real big fan of the rule of law. Indeed, Arpaio probably would have fit right into either the Cuban or North Korean regimes. 

 

It is not just Arpaio’s victims who feel moral outage. The National Review editorialized in January: Arpaio was convicted of criminal contempt last summer for willfully violating a federal court order. Specifically, he was convicted of violating an order that he cease arresting and detaining people for whom there was no plausible criminal charge — i.e., the court asked him, pretty please, to stop detaining Mexicans for publicity purposes. 

 

But Sheriff Joe has a thing for arresting people who haven’t committed any crime. He arrested a Republican critic — the county supervisor — on trumped-up charges in 2008 and ended up handing over $3.5 million of taxpayers’ money in a wrongful-arrest settlement. 

 

Red State’s Sarah Quinlan offers up a detailed list of Arpaio’s abuses of the rule of law while he was the former sheriff, concluding: “Nothing about Sheriff Joe Arpaio resembles any sort of justice or law and order under the United States Constitution, and it is disgraceful for Pence to pretend otherwise.”

 

Note who I’m quoting here. These are conservative outlets one would expect to be in lockstep with a good Christian conservative like Pence. But they are appalled — and they are not the only conservatives to react this way. In these politically polarized times, Mike Pence has managed to appall just about everyone across the political spectrum. That takes some doing.

 

[T]he number of officials in the Trump administration who can claim to have preserved their moral bearings in this administration keeps shrinking by the day.

It is possible that the vice president reads this and cancels his Washington Post subscription in a fake moral outrage. It would be on brand for him. It would not change the fact that he has sullied his standing with this act of moral appeasement.