Trump Supporters and Brexiters: the Same Ugly Mindset

As noted numerous times on this blog, in my view the mindset of Trump supporters and those in the United Kingdom who continue to support Brexit - a form of national economic suicide - remains very much alike.  Both groups long for a past that was never as ideal as they now fantasize and, rather than embrace change and work for a better future, they are willing to destroy everything out of anger and bitterness, and especially, their hatred of racial minorities.  If Britain does end up leaving the European Union, the economic consequences will be catastrophic - a fact the Brexiters refuse to face as they long for lost empire.  Here in the USA, Trump supporters cheer the destruction of America's leadership in the world, tariffs and economic policies that are not saving jobs as promised, and which are poisoning the environment and shredding the social safety net.  All that matters is that they feel good lashing out and patting themselves on the back for their "patriotism," although one has to question how patriotic it is to harm ones country and seek to demonize millions of one's fellow citizens.  An op-ed in the New York Times looks at the disaster that is the Brexit movement in the UK and the mindset that accompanies it.  The parallels with America are profound (not to mention that both groups were manipulated by Russian cyber attacks aimed at fomenting political chaos).  Here are excerpts:

It’s not just our political life that feels suffused with the toxicity of Brexit, but also our cultural and even personal lives, too. At dinner with friends and family, on our couches in front of the television, even in our attempts at cinematic escape, there is only one subject of conversation: our departure from the European Union, the need to either oppose it or enact it. As we walk the supermarket aisles, speculating as to the continuing availability of our favorite foods, as we sit with our European loved ones and try to convince ourselves of the security of their stay, as we lay out the day’s medicines and fret about the continuing viability of their procurement, Brexit is inescapable.

Brexit is not just an event, it is a feeling — suffocating and dispiriting and freighted with gloom. With no refuge from that feeling, we seek solace in another: national pride.

We’re the world’s fifth-largest economy and likely to sink to seventh this year. Industry and finance are falling over themselves to flee. Nor am I convinced that anyone should be “rightly proud” of a country in which, according to the homelessness charity Crisis, the number of people sleeping on the streets has risen 140 percent since 2010; in which over a million emergency food packages were given to those struggling financially in the 2017-18 financial year; in which over 4 million children are living in poverty; and in which local councils in England face an £8 billion financial black hole by 2025, endangering not only their upkeep of communal spaces, but also their ability to provide adequate care for children, the elderly and people with disabilities.

So here we are, facing more delays and uncertainty. The Defense Ministry reportedly is hunkering down in a nuclear bunker, preparing for “no deal,” a crash headlong into a future from which we mistakenly thought our past would protect us. We are pathologically unable to say what needs to be said: that nostalgia, exceptionalism and a xenophobic failure of the collective imagination have undone us. This is not a time of national pride, it is a moment of deep and lasting national shame. We are unable to lead yet determined never to follow. We have nothing of note to say and yet still refuse to listen. The very forces that have shored up our self-regard and poisoned our place in history are about to erode us from within, and unless we find in ourselves the humility we’ve always abhorred, we face a brutal and potentially permanent humbling.

Cups of tea will neither turn back time nor show us, in their cold and increasingly bitter leaves, the future we’ve failed to imagine: a future in which what limited achievements we might have been proud of — our system of social care, our commitment to protecting the people least able to protect themselves — lie in ruins, and all we can do is sit in the dark, paying our favorite celebrities to chant to us, over and over again, our tattered mantra of virtue.
 

Trump Has Concealed Details of Meetings With Putin

The Washington Post is reporting that Donald Trump has gone to great lengths to conceal the details of his conversations with Vladimir Putin, including keeping details from top officials in his regime. Frankly, no one should be surprised.  Why would Trump want the U.S. public or his own officials to know the details of his conversations with his handler?   It is all part and parcel of the very disturbing pattern of Trump's pandering to Putin at the expense of American interests at the same time Trump is undermining alliances that Putin detests.  Mere coincidences?  Personally, I think not. Nor did the FBI when it launched its investigation of Trump as a possible foreign operatives as reported by the New York Times as noted in a prior blog post. NONE of this is normal and one has to wonder why "conservatives" who proclaim their patriotism don't see the lashing alarm bells.  Oh, I forgot - they love Trump's racist, pro-white supremacist policies more than they care about the nation's future.  Here are highlights from the Post piece:

President Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin, including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials, current and former U.S. officials said.

Trump did so after a meeting with Putin in 2017 in Hamburg that was also attended by then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. U.S. officials learned of Trump’s actions when a White House adviser and a senior State Department official sought information from the interpreter beyond a readout shared by Tillerson.

The constraints that Trump imposed are part of a broader pattern by [Trump] the president of shielding his communications with Putin from public scrutiny and preventing even high-ranking officials in his own administration from fully knowing what he has told one of the United States’ main adversaries.

U.S. officials said there is no detailed record, even in classified files, of Trump’s face-to-face interactions with the Russian leader at five locations over the past two years. Such a gap would be unusual in any presidency, let alone one that Russia sought to install through what U.S. intelligence agencies have described as an unprecedented campaign of election interference.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is thought to be in the final stages of an investigation that has focused largely on whether Trump or his associates conspired with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign. The new details about Trump’s continued secrecy underscore the extent to which little is known about his communications with Putin since becoming president.

Former U.S. officials said that Trump’s behavior is at odds with the known practices of previous presidents, who have relied on senior aides to witness meetings and take comprehensive notes then shared with other officials and departments.

Trump’s secrecy surrounding Putin “is not only unusual by historical standards, it is outrageous,” said Strobe Talbott, a former deputy secretary of state now at the Brookings Institution, who participated in more than a dozen meetings between President Bill Clinton and then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s. “It handicaps the U.S. government — the experts and advisers and Cabinet officers who are there to serve [the president] — and it certainly gives Putin much more scope to manipulate Trump.”

Senior Democratic lawmakers describe the cloak of secrecy surrounding Trump’s meetings with Putin as unprecedented and disturbing.

Rep. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in an interview that his panel will form an investigative subcommittee whose targets will include seeking State Department records of Trump’s encounters with Putin, including a closed-door meeting with the Russian leader in Helsinki last summer.

The concerns have been compounded by actions and positions Trump has taken as president that are seen as favorable to the Kremlin. He has dismissed Russia’s election interference as a “hoax,” suggested that Russia was entitled to annex Crimea, repeatedly attacked NATO allies, resisted efforts to impose sanctions on Moscow, and begun to pull U.S. forces out of Syria — a move that critics see as effectively ceding ground to Russia.

At the same time, Trump’s decision to fire Comey and other attempts to contain the ongoing Russia investigation led the bureau in May 2017 to launch a counterintelligence investigation into whether he was seeking to help Russia and if so, why, a step first reported by the New York Times.

[S]everal officials said they were never able to get a reliable readout of the president’s two-hour meeting in Helsinki. Unlike in Hamburg, Trump allowed no Cabinet officials or any aides to be in the room for that conversation.

Trump also had other private conversations with Putin at meetings of global leaders outside the presence of aides. He spoke at length with Putin at a banquet at the same 2017 global conference in Hamburg, where only Putin’s interpreter was present. Trump also had a brief conversation with ­Putin at a Group of 20 summit in Buenos Aires last month.

Senior Trump administration officials said that White House officials including then-National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster were never able to obtain a comprehensive account of the meeting, even from Tillerson.

“We were frustrated because we didn’t get a readout,” a former senior administration official said. “The State Department and [National Security Council] were never comfortable” with Trump’s interactions with Putin, the official said. “God only knows what they were going to talk about or agree to.”

Noe of this is normal and true patriots ought to be concerned and demanding that the behavior cease immediately.

NRA Affiliated Russian Woman Charged with Spying for Moscow

Russian spy and NRA affiliate, Maria Butina.

On the same day that Donald Trump was throwing America under the bus and serving as Vladimir Putin's bitch boy, Maria Butina, 29, a Russian national affiliated with the National Rifle Association ("NRA"), was indicted for meeting with U.S. politicians and candidates to establish ‘back channels’ and secretly reporting to Kremlin.  Stated more directly, she was indicted for being a Russian spy.  Unlike the other Russians indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller, Butina was physically taken into custody and will face active prosecution.  This comes atop stories that the $30 million thrown into the 2016 presidential election to back Trump by the NRA may well have been monies sourced from Russian nationals.   One can only hope that Butina spills her guts to strike a plea deal and helps expose the NRA's nefarious activities.  A piece in The Guardian looks at her arrest.  Here are highlights:

A Russian woman has been charged with spying for Moscow in the US by infiltrating the National Rifle Association (NRA) in an attempt to influence the Republican party and American politics.

Maria Butina, who purported to be a pro-gun activist, met American politicians and candidates to establish “back channels” and secretly reported back to the Kremlin through a high-level Russian official, according to the US justice department.

Prosecutors said in a statement that Butina, 29, had been “developing relationships with US persons and infiltrating organisations having influence in American politics, for the purpose of advancing the interests of the Russian federation”.

Butina was charged with conspiracy to act as a Russian agent within the US without notifying the attorney general. She was arrested on Sunday and appeared before a magistrate in Washington on Monday, officials said. In an affidavit, an FBI agent said investigators had searched Butina’s laptop computer and mobile phone.

The NRA did not respond to requests for comment.

Butina has come under increasing scrutiny amid the investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Footage emerged of her asking Trump a question in front of an audience at a conservative event in July 2015.

She is known as a protege of Alexander Torshin, a senior official at the Russian central bank, who is also a longtime associate of the NRA. Torshin, who met Donald Trump Jr at an NRA event in 2016, was placed under sanction by the US in April.

Charging documents unsealed on Monday say Butina was directed by a “high-level official in the Russian government”. The unnamed official’s biography matched that of Torshin, but he was not identified by name.

Two unidentified Americans, one of them described as a “political operative”, were said in the charging documents to have assisted Butina in her efforts to make political contacts in the US. Neither was charged with a crime.

Butina has a longstanding working relationship with Paul Erickson, an NRA member and conservative operative based in South Dakota. Erickson did not respond to a voicemail left on Monday afternoon.

Prosecutors said Butina emailed the first American associate in March 2015, suggesting a specific political party “would likely obtain control over the US government after the 2016 elections” and noting the powerful role in this party played by a certain gun rights organisation.

According to prosecutors, she reported that a Kremlin official had given approval for the back channel she was building, and she told the American: “All we needed is ‘yes’ from Putin’s side. The rest is easier.”

Officials said the investigation into Butina was conducted by the FBI’s Washington office and was being prosecuted by the national security sections of the US attorney’s office in Washington and justice department headquarters. The office of Robert Mueller, the special counsel, played no immediately apparent role.

Little surprise that the NRA and Erickson failed to respond to inquiries.  The irony, of course, is that it is quickly turning out that those who have been the loudest about their supposed patriotism are the ones supporting treason.  Sadly, I doubt the news of the last couple of days will sink in with some "friends" who continue to post what is little better than Russian/Trump propaganda on Facebook.   I sincerely hope that before all of this is over, the Republican Party will become synonymous with treason and traitors. 

The Dangerous Cancer That Is Fox News

One of the first things any authoritarian government does is to (i) establish its own news outlet to disseminate propaganda, and (ii) attack legitimate, non-censored news outlets with a goal of discrediting them and, if possible, shutting them down.  If readers have never done so, they would do well to study what the Bolsheviks did in Russia after the October 2017 Russian Revolution and what Hitler did as he rose to power to news outlets.  If he could, Trump would readily do something similar and, at least for now, he continues his daily assaults on legitimate and credible news outlets that do not regurgitate the correct propaganda.  As far as establishing a state news outlet apparatus, Trump has had no need to do so.  Fox News has willingly and enthusiastically stepped up to perform that role, wilfully lying to its viewers and working to undermine American democracy as it falsely wraps itself in the American flag and clutches a Bible edited to remove all but the passages utilized to condemn others.  Recently, Ralph Peters, a retired Army intelligence officer, with experience in Russian affairs, resigned from Fox News.  His op-ed in the Washington Post is an indictment of Fox News, and by extension, those who blindly eat up its lies and propaganda.  Here are highlights:

You could measure the decline of Fox News by the drop in the quality of guests waiting in the green room. A year and a half ago, you might have heard George Will discussing policy with a senator while a former Cabinet member listened in. Today, you would meet a Republican commissar with a steakhouse waistline and an eager young woman wearing too little fabric and too much makeup, immersed in memorizing her talking points.

This wasn’t a case of the rats leaving a sinking ship. The best sailors were driven overboard by the rodents.

As I wrote in an internal Fox memo, leaked and widely disseminated, I declined to renew my contract as Fox News’s strategic analyst because of the network’s propagandizing for the Trump administration. Today’s Fox prime-time lineup preaches paranoia, attacking processes and institutions vital to our republic and challenging the rule of law.

Four decades ago, as a U.S. Army second lieutenant, I took an oath to “support and defend the Constitution.” In moral and ethical terms, that oath never expires. As Fox’s assault on our constitutional order intensified, spearheaded by its after-dinner demagogues, I had no choice but to leave.  My error was waiting so long to walk away.

As early as the fall of 2016, and especially as doubts mounted about the new Trump administration’s national security vulnerabilities, I increasingly was blocked from speaking on the issues about which I could offer real expertise: Russian affairs and our intelligence community. I did not hide my views at Fox and, as word spread that I would not unswervingly support President Trump and, worse, that I believed an investigation into Russian interference was essential to our national security, I was excluded from segments that touched on Vladimir Putin’s possible influence on an American president, his campaign or his administration.

I was the one person on the Fox payroll who, trained in Russian studies and the Russian language, had been face to face with Russian intelligence officers in the Kremlin and in far-flung provinces. . . . Yet I could only rarely and briefly comment on the paramount security question of our time: whether Putin and his security services ensnared the man who would become our president. Trump’s behavior patterns and evident weaknesses (financial entanglements, lack of self-control and sense of sexual entitlement) would have made him an ideal blackmail target — and the Russian security apparatus plays a long game.

As indictments piled up, though, I could not even discuss the mechanics of how the Russians work on either Fox News or Fox Business. 

All Americans, whatever their politics, should want to know, with certainty, whether a hostile power has our president and those close to him in thrall. This isn’t about party but about our security at the most profound level. Every so often, I could work in a comment on the air, but even the best-disposed hosts were wary of transgressing the party line.

Listening to political hacks with no knowledge of things Russian tell the vast Fox audience that the special counsel’s investigation was a “witch hunt,” while I could not respond, became too much to bear. There is indeed a witch hunt, and it’s led by Fox against Robert Mueller.

The cascade of revelations about the Russia-related crimes of Trump associates was dismissed, adamantly, as “fake news” by prime-time hosts who themselves generate fake news blithely.

Then there was Fox’s assault on our intelligence community — in which I had served, from the dirty-boots tactical level to strategic work in the Pentagon (with forays that stretched from Russia through Pakistan to Burma and Bolivia and elsewhere). Opportunities to explain how the system actually works, how stringent the safeguards are and that intelligence personnel are responsible public servants — sometimes heroes — dried up after an on-air confrontation shortly before Trump’s inauguration with a popular (and populist) host, Lou Dobbs.

[I]t reached the point where I hated walking into the Fox studio. Friends and family encouraged me to leave, convinced that I embarrassed myself by remaining with the network  . . . .

During my 10 years at Fox News and Fox Business, I did my best to be a forthright voice. I angered left and right. I criticized President Barack Obama fiercely (one infelicity resulted in a two-week suspension), but I also argued for sensible gun-control measures and environmental protections. I made mistakes, but they were honest mistakes. I took the opportunity to speak to millions of Americans seriously and — still that earnest young second lieutenant to some degree — could not imagine lying to them.With my Soviet-studies background, the cult of Trump unnerves me. For our society’s health, no one, not even a president, can be above criticism — or the law.

Trump idolaters and the merrily hypocritical prime-time hosts are destroying the network — no matter how profitable it may remain.

Hopefully, history will judge Fox and its lying anchors very harshly.

Trump: Thoroughly Corrupt and Unfit for Office

As the husband and I an friends enjoy our stay in Key West - a city's with a motto of "All One Human Family" - it is difficult to not feel that perhaps we are witnessing the death of American democracy as the utterly foul occupant of the White House does all in his power to stop an investigation likely to expose both his criminality and treason.  Sadly, too many seem to be paying nowhere near enough attention to the daily parade of lies and efforts to end the rule of law and the concept that no one is above the law.  Trump's mode of operation increasingly seems modeled on that of Putin and other despots.  A a piece in the New Yorker looks at Trump's ongoing effort to destroy the rule of law.  Something that ought to distress every patriotic American. That latter category, of course excludes Trump's base and evangelical Christians, perhaps the most morally bankrupt people in America, if not the world.  Here are article excerpts:

If you wanted to tell the story of an entire Presidency in a single tweet, you could try the one that President Trump posted after Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired Andrew McCabe, the deputy director of the F.B.I., on Friday night.

Every sentence is a lie. Every sentence violates norms established by Presidents of both parties. Every sentence displays the pettiness and the vindictiveness of a man unsuited to the job he holds.

The President has crusaded for months against McCabe, who is a crucial corroborating witness to Trump’s attempts to stymie the F.B.I.’s investigation of his campaign’s ties to Russia.

McCabe behaved with the dignity and the ethics consistent with decades of distinguished service in law enforcement. He played by the rules. He honored his badge as a special agent. But his service threatened the President—both because of the past exoneration of Clinton and the incrimination of Trump, and for that, in our current environment, he had to be punished. Trump’s instrument in stifling McCabe was the President’s hapless Attorney General, who has been demeaning himself in various ways to try to save his own job.

After McCabe was dismissed, on Friday night, he said in a statement that the “investigation has focused on information I chose to share with a reporter through my public affairs officer and a legal counselor. As Deputy Director, I was one of only a few people who had the authority to do that. It was not a secret, it took place over several days, and others, including the Director, were aware of the interaction with the reporter. It was the type of exchange with the media that the Deputy Director oversees several times per week.” The idea that this alleged misdeed justifies such vindictive action against a distinguished public servant is laughable.

In his statement, McCabe spoke with bracing directness. “Here is the reality: I am being singled out and treated this way because of the role I played, the actions I took, and the events I witnessed in the aftermath of the firing of James Comey,” he said. In other words, McCabe was fired because he is a crucial witness in the investigation led by Robert Mueller . . .

What’s clear, though, is the depth of the President’s determination to prevent Mueller from taking his inquiries to their conclusion, as his personal attorney, John Dowd, made clear. . . . Rosenstein is on notice that his failure to fire Mueller might lead to his own departure. And Sessions, too, must know that his craven act in firing McCabe will guarantee him nothing. Trump believes that loyalty goes only one way; the Attorney General may still be fired at any moment.

Sessions could be replaced with someone already confirmed by the Senate—perhaps Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the E.P.A.—who could take office in an acting capacity. At the moment, Mueller’s investigation is supervised by Rosenstein, the deputy Attorney General, but presumably a new Attorney General, without Sessions’s conflict of interest, would take over that role. And that new Attorney General could fire Mueller. Such scenarios once seemed like the stuff of conspiracy theories. Now they look like the stuff of tomorrow’s news.

[T]his is far from a great day for the men and women of the F.B.I., who now know that they serve at the sufferance of unethical men who think that telling the truth amounts to “sanctimony.” The lies in this story are about the F.B.I., not from the F.B.I. The firing of McCabe, and Trump’s reaction to it, has moved even such ordinarily restrained figures as John O. Brennan, the former director of Central Intelligence, to remarkable heights of outrage:  . . . . When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America...America will triumph over you.

The haunting question, still very much unresolved, is whether Brennan’s confidence in America’s ultimate triumph is justified.

Trump Shouldn’t Be President

One of the standard bloviating points for Republicans is to talk about "supporting our troops" and "supporting our men in uniform."  When it comes to putting words into action, with a few exceptions Congressional Republicans never follow through.  Be it sending troops to war without proper equipment and armor as happened in Iraq and Afghanistan or cutting veterans' benefits (or somewhat similarly cutting funding to the State Department for security and then whining and throwing conniption fits over Benghazi), Republicans time and again confirm the old axiom that "talk is cheap."   Of course, Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, has taken dishonesty and disrespect for our members of the military to new heights as he displayed utter callousness toward the widow of a young soldier, Sgt. La David T. Johnson, who was killed in an ambush in Niger - for Fox News viewers, Niger is a country in West Africa.  

Perhaps I take such things more personally than Der Trumpenführer who never served in the military (thanks to questionable deferments) or ever had family members in the military.  While, thankfully, I did not lose a family member, we came very, very close when one of my sons-in-law was badly wounded in Afghanistan on his THIRD deployment to that hell hole.   He languished for three days at Bagram Airbase before he was finally flown out to Germany (and then to Texas) to receive much needed medical care only after Democrat U.S. Senator from Virginia, Mark Warner's office got involved at my request.  Frankly, I am over the lying and dishonesty of the majority of Republicans when comes to supporting and respecting our men and women in uniform.  Der Trumpenführer could whine and tweet about NFL players "disrespecting our troops" yet his callousness and broken promises toward gold star families speaks volumes.  

A piece in the Washington Post looks at the situation of Sgt. Johnson after Trump lied about his unacceptable behavior.  Here are highlights: 

The mother of a soldier killed in an ambush in Africa said Wednesday that President Trump “did disrespect my son” with remarks in a condolence telephone call.

Sgt. La David T. Johnson’s mother, Cowanda Jones-Johnson, told The Washington Post that she was present during the call from the White House on Tuesday to Johnson’s widow, Myeshia Johnson. She also stood by an account of the call from Rep. Frederica S. Wilson (D-Fla.) that Trump told Myeshia Johnson that her husband “must have known what he signed up for.”

“President Trump did disrespect my son and my daughter and also me and my husband,” Jones-Johnson said.  Trump lashed back at Wilson. He denied her account in a Twitter message Wednesday.

But as is always the case with Trump, the family of Sgt. Johnson are not alone in the disrespect and mistreatment they have received at the hands of the foul individual in the White House.  A piece Talking Points Memo looks at Trump's broken promise to Chris Baldridge, the father of Army Cpl. Dillon Baldridge, killed in Afghanistan.  Here are excerpts:

Another simply bizarre new thread in the Trump bereavement call story. The Post called the families of service members who’ve died in the line of duty since Trump became President. There were some good stories, some bad; some had never heard from the President. There were a lot of what you might call Trumpian moments. But the really bizarre story was his conversation with Chris Baldridge, the father of Army Cpl. Dillon Baldridge, killed in Afghanistan. 

Trump told him he’d send him a personal check for $25,000. Not standard and complicated, inasmuch as presumably the President isn’t going to cut everyone a check. But it’s not unprecedented. I believe I remember that there are records of President Obama sending sums of money to private citizens who were struggling.  But then Trump forgot about it.

Trump apparently told Baldridge he’d have the White House staff set up an online fundraiser for Baldridge too. But then nothing happened.

So it certainly sounds like the check was sent after the Post started asking questions, in other words, sort of like how the Niger calls shook out.

The bottom line is that Trump is unfit for his office in so many ways that it is difficult to count them all.  Worse yet, as these stories underscore, he doesn't give a damn about anyone but himself.  If working class whites who voted for Trump think he gives a rat's ass about them, they are utter and total fools.   When Trump attacked Khizr Khan before the 2016 presidential election, anyone decent and moral should have known all they needed to know about Trump and should have voted for anyone other than Trump.

The Republican Party Has Become Unrecognizable

Not to beat a dead horse, but I come form a family of (now former) Republicans.  I was once an activist in the Republican Party.  The party that existed in those days is dead and gone and what now parades under the name "Republican" has become something hideous and unrecognizable.  As I often said, when did the Party begin to morph into something horrible?  In my view, when the evangelical Christians and fundamentalist Christian, perhaps a majority of whom are racists, hijacked the Party with the aid of establishment types who thought they could control the unwashed and insane.  With the election of Der Trumpenführer and now Roy Moore, the death of the GOP of old is complete. Religious extremism, hatred of anyone deemed "other" - which includes anyone who is not a white, heterosexual right wing "Christian" - and a desire to bring back a combination of the Gilded Age and the Jim Crow era are what now define the Republican Party. Compassion is gone, decency is gone, along with any shred of actually being guided by the Gospel message of the New Testament. The only true deference made to the Bible is through cherry picking Old Testament texts to demonize others and justify hatred of others. I am not the only one horrified by this transformation.  Joe Scarborough, a former conservative Congressman, laments the death of the GOP of old in a column in the Washington Post.  Here are excerpts:

Who are you? I’ve got to say that I really don’t know anymore. It’s kind of a strange turn of events since we went to the same public schools across the Deep South, then attended the same state colleges, cheering wildly on Saturdays for our favorite SEC teams, and spent Sunday mornings together in the same Southern Baptist pews. We even went to Training Union on Sunday nights. Remember how our conversations always seemed to turn to politics? How we criticized Bill Clinton for playing so fast and loose with the truth? And how shamefully Democrats turned a blind eye to his fabrications and outright lies? Man, how could those Democrats sleep at night?

And what about how the guy we voted for, George W. Bush, running up the federal debt and launching ill-planned foreign adventures overseas? We swore that the next time Republicans got in power, we would pressure them to cut spending, attack the debt and put America’s foreign policy on a restrained and reasonable path.

We were united by the shared belief that politicians must put country above party, right? Right? What happened to you?

The guys I came up with in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and northwest Florida for more than 40 years would never boo a former American prisoner of war — especially one who refused to return home until the enemy released every one of his buddies in the prison camp. . . . why would you even think of booing a man, now fighting for his life, who showed that true grit in real life?

But boo Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) you did, at the behest of President Trump during a rally in Alabama last week.

Trump has been “physically mocking” the thumbs-down gesture McCain used to deliver the deciding vote against the Republican health-care bill in July. Did that mocking involve an imitation of McCain’s stiff arm movements? . . . .  McCain got the hell beaten out of him by the communists who held him in the Hanoi Hilton for more than five years.

At that same time, Trump was dodging the draft by claiming that bone spurs stopped him from serving his country in uniform. And yet this crippling condition didn’t stop the spoiled Ivy League student from playing football, tennis and golf. After four draft deferments, Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1968 on the same day 40 U.S. servicemen were killed in Vietnam.

Meanwhile, McCain continued receiving the beatings that would forever leave him incapable of lifting his arms over his head. He kept enduring torture because he refused to leave his band of brothers behind.

Do you have that kind of character? If you booed McCain at last week’s rally, don’t bother answering. Someone has obviously failed you in your life . . . . And if you still go to church, you may also want to pray for all those around you who put tribal politics ahead of basic humanity.

Then maybe you should drive home and tell your children the story of John McCain’s sacrifice. If you can teach your children that lesson of heroism, there’s a chance they might grow up to have more character than the president you now praise.

 The challenge is to determine (i) how to try to change minds and (ii) in the interim, how to interact with people who seemingly are as morally challenged as the "good Germans" who through complacency and/or prejudice allowed Hitler and the Nazis to rise to power.  Going to church each week and feigning piety and religiosity is nothing more than hypocrisy writ large when one no longer cares about basic humanity or the lives of those in need. 

When Does “Morality and Decency Kick In” for Trump Voters?

This post follows up on the theme of my post yesterday entitled The Trump Voter Paradox. If one listens to the bloviating of many, if not the majority, on the political right, the talk ad nausea about "Christian values" and "family values" as they support a Republican Party war long formulated by the likes of Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell against families, the sick, the poor, and sexual and racial minorities.  Now, Der Trumpenführer is taking the bigotry and hatred to new heights both through his manufactured hysteria about minority NFL players exercising their constitutional right to freedom of speech and expression to his, in my view, deliberate delay in expediting life saving aid to Puerto Rico. And despite all of this, his supporters - like true modern Day Pharisees - cheer him on. People are literally dying, yet Trump supporters are still whining about standing for the national anthem.  For the record, I support the players' refusal to stand.  Anyone not afford the Constitution's promise of equal protection under the law (which includes the LGBT community) has every reason to protest.  A piece in Salon looks at what I believe to be the moral bankruptcy and blatant racism of Trump supporters.  Here are excerpts:

On Monday, head coach of the San Antonio Spurs Gregg Popovich articulated his support of the ongoing national-anthem protests taking place across the sports world. In declaring his support of any players who should decide to participate, he — as he has before — drew a sharp line under the racial issues surrounding the remarks by Trump and the way people of color are treated in this country.

“Obviously, race is the elephant in the room, and we all understand that. Unless it is talked about constantly, it's not going to get better. . . . 'Oh, that again. They pulled the race card again. Why do we have to talk about that?' Well, because it's uncomfortable,” he said "They have our full support and no matter what they might want to do or not do is important to them, respected by us," Popovich said in support of protesters. "And there’s no recrimination no matter what might take place, unless it’s ridiculous egregious."

Popovich also commented on the response by the president more specifically and asked when Trump supporters would wake up. “I wonder what the people think about who voted for him, where their line is, how much they can take, where does the morality and decency kick in?”

Popovich is not the only one to take aim at Trump's remarks; in fact, the floodgates have opened for pro sports teams to take a stand (or knee) against him. Tony Dungy, former NFL player and coach, commented on the protests on "The Today Show" Sunday, specifically about the backlash and the shift in the tides.

“Up until yesterday, the players would want people to know, this was not about the flag, this was not about patriotism. In their opinion, it was about social change,” Dungy said. “But yesterday this was a group of our family got attacked and called names and said they were unpatriotic and should be fired for, what we feel, is demonstrating our first amendment right. We’re gonna [ . . . ] band together as a family and they reacted."

Sportscaster Dale Hansen used his position as a Vietnam Veteran to defend the protests, in opposition to those against the protests who claim that the action is disrespectful to veterans.“The young, black athletes are not disrespecting America or the military by taking a knee during the anthem,” Hanson said. “They are respecting the best thing about America. It’s a dog whistle to the racists among us to say otherwise." He condemned those who don’t believe in white privilege as well. “They, and all of us, should protest how black Americans are treated in this country. And if you don’t think white privilege is a fact, you don’t understand America.”

Perhaps the most scathing rebuke was from former tight end Shannon Sharpe on Undisputed, where he commented on the solidarity of the NFL and the hypocrisy of the people in power in the league. “This wasn’t a protest. This was unity. So, what are we showing solidarity against?” He continued. “We’re showing solidarity because President Trump challenged the very men. Wealthy, wealthy men, billionaires, and he told them, what you should do if someone protests, you should fire them. They don’t like being told what to do.”

 These self-styled "godly Christians" care more about a piece of cloth than travesties done to living, breathing  - at least until they are gunned down by police - individuals.  Indeed, these people are the antithesis of Christ's message.

American Exceptionalism is a Lie

Fifty years ago America's disaster in Vietnam began to accelerate in earnest.  Locally, as one might expect in an area with a huge military population, the local newspaper has begun running some commemorative articles on the misadventure in Vietnam and to date the stories only put a positive spin on the story.   Sadly, it is part of the myth of American exceptionalism that keeps too many Americans from being honest about the many truly ugly aspects of the nation's history.  America has not always been the guy in the white hat out of some western movie.  Indeed, there are times that America is the bad guy - not that one would ever hear such an admission from xenophobic "patriots."  A piece in Salon looks at the need for Americans to be honest about the past so that future misdeeds can perhaps be avoided.  Here are highlights:

“I didn’t know there was a bad war,” George Evans recalled. . . .  there was one thing George trusted completely—his nation’s military power and the good that it did. With all his heart he believed the United States was on the side of justice and freedom and all our wars were noble.Despite personal hardships, you could always count on Americans to be the good guys, and always victorious. It was simply unimaginable that the United States might betray that faith. “I was raised in a family and neighborhood of extreme patriots,” George explains.

But George’s faith in America’s global goodness was forever destroyed in Vietnam, where he served as an air force medic. “I realized that the country I was from was not the country I thought it was.” One day at the hospital in Cam Ranh Bay he was ordered to clean the bodies of two young Vietnamese boys. They were dead.  . . . . George later learned that the boys were hit by an American military truck driver who may have been competing with other drivers over “who could hit a kid. They had some disgusting name for it, something like ‘gook hockey.’ ”

With the possible exception of the Civil War, no event in U. S. history has demanded more soul-searching than the war in Vietnam. The false pretexts used to justify our intervention, the indiscriminate brutality of our warfare, the stubborn refusal of elected leaders to withdraw despite public opposition, and the stunning failure to achieve our stated objectives—these harrowing realities provoked a profound national identity crisis, an American reckoning. The war made citizens ask fundamental questions: 

The Vietnam War still matters because the crucial questions it raised remain with us today: Should we continue to seek global military superiority? Can we use our power justly? Can we successfully intervene in distant lands to crush insurgencies (or support them), establish order, and promote democracy? What degree of sacrifice will the public bear and who among us should bear it? Is it possible for American citizens and their elected representatives to change our nation’s foreign policy or is it permanently controlled by an imperial presidency and an unaccountable military-industrial complex?

My main argument is that the Vietnam War shattered the central tenet of American national identity—the broad faith that the United States is a unique force for good in the world, superior not only in its military and economic power, but in the quality of its government and institutions, the character and morality of its people, and its way of life. A common term for this belief is “American exceptionalism.”

[T]he faith in American exceptionalism has hardly disappeared. Countless times since the Vietnam War our presidents have invoked it in support of wars and interventions around the world. Although the public has been more reluctant to use military force than its leaders, there is still substantial support for the idea that our power is benign and that America remains a singularly admirable nation. That’s why virtually everyone who runs for higher office in the United States pledges allegiance to the creed.Yet even many ardent believers understand that the faith is no longer as broad or assured as it was before the Vietnam War.

When it finally ended in 1975, 58,000 Americans had died, and three million Vietnamese.  . . . . many others believed the war exposed American exceptionalism as a dangerous myth. 

[T]he broad acceptance of Cold War policies was bolstered by the era’s equally broad religiosity. The idea that the United States was engaged in a godly crusade against atheistic Communism was not an extreme position in the 1950s, but part of everyday discourse.

It was still unimaginable to most Americans that their own nation would wage aggressive war and justify it with unfounded claims, that it would support antidemocratic governments reviled by their own people, and that American troops would be sent to fight in countries where they were widely regarded not as liberators, but as imperialist invaders. 

By 1971, 58 percent of Americans had concluded that the war in Vietnam was not just a mistake, but immoral. More than at any time in our past, broad sections of the public, cutting across lines of class, gender, race, and religion, rejected the claim that American military power was an invincible force for good. Many concluded that the United States was as capable of wrongdoing as any nation or people, if not more so. And by 1973, when the final U. S. troops were withdrawn from Vietnam, only a quarter of Americans still trusted the government to do the right thing.

For the political right, defeat in Vietnam was an intense motivator. Conservatives were determined to rebuild everything they thought the war had destroyed—American power, pride, prestige, and patriotism. Above all, they wanted to resuscitate a faith in American supremacy. Their restoration project was a key factor in the rightward movement of American culture and politics in the decades after Vietnam. It depended, in part, on efforts to redefine the political and moral meanings of the Vietnam War. Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980 saying Vietnam had been a “noble cause”—a war that should have been fought and could have been won.. . . .a new mainstream consensus emerged around the idea that the Vietnam War had primarily been an American tragedy that had badly wounded and divided the nation. 

The attacks of 9/11 decisively destroyed the cautionary lessons of the Vietnam War, at least among the tiny group of people who formulated American foreign policy. George W. Bush launched a “Global War on Terror” premised on the idea that the United States was an exemplar of all that was good in the world fighting against all that was evil. He started two wars that led to protracted occupations and provoked bloody anti-American insurgencies.

If the legacy of the Vietnam War is to offer any guidance, we need to complete the moral and political reckoning it awakened. And if our nation’s future is to be less militarized, our empire of foreign military bases scaled back, and our pattern of endless military interventions ended, a necessary first step is to reject—fully and finally—the stubborn insistence that our nation has been a unique and unrivaled force for good in the world. Only an honest accounting of our history will allow us to chart a new path in the world. The past is always speaking to us, if we only listen.

Today's Republican Party is striving to maintain the myth and, worse yet, fanning the flames of racism, bigotry, and religiosity that helped create the Vietnam - and Iraq - nightmare.  One can only hope Americans will open their eyes to the lie. 

Washington Refuses To Admit It Lost Two Wars

Two years ago today, one of my sons-in-law was badly wounded in Afghanistan.  At the time, the U.S. Army was less than truthful and it was several emotional days before he was flown out to Germany for first phases of major treatment.  To this day we don't know if inquires made on our behalf by Senator mark Warner helped get him out of Afghanistan more quickly.  After that, it was months of treatment and recovery.  Thankfully, he had a largely full recovery.  Many, including some of his friends whom I had the opportunity to meet, were not so lucky.  He has since left the military and just completed the Warrior Hike to "walk off the war"up the Pacific Crest trail from Mexico to Canada.  Sadly, the mindset in Washington that set the stage for the fool's errands in Afghanistan and Iraq is alive and well and puts the lives of other young Americans at Risk.  Andrew Sullivan has a good take down of these morons and hypocrites who continue to admit that both wars have been disasters and that the USA lost them.  Here are excerpts:

Let me put this as baldly as I can. The US fought two long, brutal wars in its response to the atrocity of September 11, 2001. We lost both of them – revealing the biggest military machine in the history of the planet as essentially useless in advancing American objectives through war and occupation. Attempts to quash Islamist extremism through democracy were complete failures. The Taliban still has enormous sway in Afghanistan and the only way to prevent the entire Potemkin democracy from imploding is a permanent US troop presence. In Iraq, we are now confronting the very same Sunni insurgency the invasion created in 2003 – just even more murderous. The Jihadism there has only become more extreme under a democratic veneer. And in all this, the U.S. didn’t just lose the wars; it lost the moral high-ground as well.  The president [Bush] himself unleashed brutal torture across all theaters of war – effectively ending any moral authority the US has in international human rights.

These are difficult truths to handle. They reveal that so many brave men and women died for nothing. And so we have to construct myths or bury facts to ensure that we maintain face. But these myths and amnesia have a consequence: they only serve to encourage Washington to make exactly the same mistakes again. To protect its own self-regard, Washington’s elite is prepared to send young Americans to fight in a war they cannot win and indeed have already lost. You see the blinding myopia elsewhere: Washington’s refusal to release the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture merely proves that it cannot face the fact that some of the elite are war criminals tout simple, and that these horrific war crimes have changed America’s role in the world.

What infuriated me about the decision to re-start the Iraq War last August – by a president explicitly elected not to do any such thing – was its arrogance, its smugness, and its contempt for what this country, and especially its armed forces, went through for so many long years of quagmire and failure.

My point is this: how can you behave this way after what so many service-members endured for so long? How can you simply re-start a war you were elected to end and for which you have no feasible means to achieve victory? 

Clemency for Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower

Many - especially in the far right - are calling Edward Snowden a traitor and are calling for life imprisonment or worse for him.  In contrast, I see Snowden as a patriot who believed that Americans and the Constitution were being brutalized by a government surveillance system run amok. Therefore, he decided to be a whistle blower and let the public know what was being done supposedly in their name.  I believe that often the bravest patriots are those who will speak out and challenge wrongs as opposed to those who wrap themselves in the flag (and often religion) and fall into an "America, love it or leave it" mindset.  The New York Times looks at the revelations that Snowden provided and calls for clemency in how he is treated.  Here are editorial excerpts:

Seven months ago, the world began to learn the vast scope of the National Security Agency’s reach into the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the United States and around the globe, as it collects information about their phone calls, their email messages, their friends and contacts, how they spend their days and where they spend their nights. The public learned in great detail how the agency has exceeded its mandate and abused its authority, prompting outrage at kitchen tables and at the desks of Congress, which may finally begin to limit these practices. 

The revelations have already prompted two federal judges to accuse the N.S.A. of violating the Constitution (although a third, unfortunately, found the dragnet surveillance to be legal). A panel appointed by President Obama issued a powerful indictment of the agency’s invasions of privacy and called for a major overhaul of its operations. 

All of this is entirely because of information provided to journalists by Edward Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor who stole a trove of highly classified documents after he became disillusioned with the agency’s voraciousness. Mr. Snowden is now living in Russia, on the run from American charges of espionage and theft, and he faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life looking over his shoulder. 

Considering the enormous value of the information he has revealed, and the abuses he has exposed, Mr. Snowden deserves better than a life of permanent exile, fear and flight. He may have committed a crime to do so, but he has done his country a great service. It is time for the United States to offer Mr. Snowden a plea bargain or some form of clemency that would allow him to return home, face at least substantially reduced punishment in light of his role as a whistle-blower, and have the hope of a life advocating for greater privacy and far stronger oversight of the runaway intelligence community.

 As noted before, Americans now live in a near police state in terms of the domestic spying that envelops us.  America ranks with China and Russia in terms of the lack of personal privacy from the government.  This is NOT what the Founding Fathers envisioned.  I find the NSA's domestic spying to be both troubling and frightening.

Was The American Revolution A Flop?

The mere title to this post will cause hysteria amongst the chest beating uber- patriot crowd who constantly proclaim that America is the greatest nation on earth,  regardless of many statistics that suggest otherwise - e,g., our life expectancy is less than in a number of developed nations, our infant mortality is much higher than in many countries, our prisons are overflowing, many of our citizens have inferior legal rights compared to in some nations, a fact known all too well by gays, etc.,  But the post title does raises some much needed questions that a true American patriot might want to ask himself/herself.  Sometimes being patriotic means not being the mindless cheerleader and instead asking questions some would prefer not be asked and/or exposing America's sins.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the results of the American Revolution from a foreign perspective.  Here are highlights:

The easiest way of assessing whether the United States would have been better off without its revolution is to look at those English-speaking countries that rejected the American Revolution and retained the monarchy, particularly Canada, which experienced an influx of American refugees after the British defeat. The U.S. performance should also be assessed against the ideals the new country set for itself — namely, advancing life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The new republic started advancing life and liberty by keeping a substantial part of its population enslaved. (This, at least, proves the frequent British put-down that Americans don’t have a sense of irony.) By contrast, in British-controlled Canada, the abolition of slavery began almost 20 years before the War of 1812, sometimes called America’s “Second Revolution.” A good number of free blacks fought with the British against the United States in that conflict, even participating in the burning of Washington. And if, as some scholars argue, the Civil War was the unfinished business of the American Revolution, then Americans — like the Russians — paid a very high human cost for their revolutions.

[T]he International Centre for Prison Studies ranks the United States ranks first in the world in the number of prisoners per 100,000 residents. That’s well ahead of Canada (which ranks 136th) and even Russia. The U.S. incarceration rate for African American men, which is about six times higher than that of white men, according to 2010 data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, points to yet more unfinished business.

Most Americans work longer hours and have fewer paid vacations and benefits — including health care — than their counterparts in most advanced countries. Consider also that in the CIA World Factbook, the United States ranks 51st in life expectancy at birth. Working oneself into an early grave does not do much for one’s happiness quotient. This year the United States tied for 14th in “life satisfaction” on an annual quality-of-life study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That puts the United States behind Canada (eighth) and Australia (12th).  


Which brings us to the related matter of the revolution’s long-term impact on politics. While the Canadian, Australian and British governments have shown they can get things done, including passing tough austerity budgets in recent years, the norm in Washington has become paralyzing partisanship and gridlock.

In these senses, the American Revolution was a flop. Perhaps it’s time for Americans to accept that their revolution was a failure and renounce it. (For their part, many Russians have.)

Alternatively, rather than being wedded to every practice or institution that arose from the revolution, however counterproductive or dysfunctional today, perhaps Americans can rekindle some of the boldness of the nation’s Founders to create a “more perfect” and happier union. 

Last Fourth of July, while I visited sweltering-but-beautiful Washington, I came across an inscription in the Jefferson Memorial in which the third president warned against allowing institutions to calcify: “I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. . . . [W]ith the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times.”

I am not anti-American.  In many ways America IS a great country.  But it could be much better.  The best honor and respect that we can show to the Founding Fathers is to continue their work to make America keep pace with the times and changing knowledge and circumstances.  The irony is that nowadays those who are the biggest obstacles to this are those who claim loudly to love America the most.  Yes, you guessed it.  The GOP base, the Tea Party and, of course, the Christofascists who are the antithesis of what Jefferson, et al, believed.

Bush and Cheney's Foul Legacy

Squandering billions and billions of dollars on wars that could never be won was but one of the disasters that George W. Bush's toxic administration brought to America,  There are many other things many Americans would like to forget (the GOP base still hasn't admitted that they happened) such as torture as US policy, the biggest security lapse since Pearl Harbor, spying on US citizens, and actions that were clearly unconstitutional.  Despite this foul legacy, Bush and company is trying to make the public forget the damage done by this cretinous president and his megalomaniac vice president.  Maureen Dowd has a column in the New York Times that looks at the Bush Presidential Library's effort to airbrush history in the hope history will forget the damage Bush/Cheney wrought on America.  Here are excerpts:

After four years of bending the Constitution, the constitutional law professor now in the White House is trying to unloose the Gordian knot of W.’s martial and moral overreaches after 9/11. 

In a speech at the National Defense University, Obama talked about how we “compromised our basic values,” and he concluded with a slap at W.: “Our victory against terrorism won’t be measured in a surrender ceremony at a battleship or a statue being pulled to the ground.” 

On the eve of the president’s speech, I was at the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum here, watching the film of Saddam’s statue being pulled to the ground. 

It’s remarkable that Obama is trying to escape the shadow of the Bush presidency just as W. is trying to escape the shadow of the Bush presidency. Browsing the library, you wonder if these two presidents are complete opposites after all, as you see how history was shaped by an arrogant, press-averse, father-fixated, history-obsessed, strangely introverted chief executive.

W.’s library highlights his role in launching the Global War on Terror, an Orwellian phrase designed to conflate the sins of Osama, who was responsible for 9/11, and the sins of Saddam, who was not. That was the fatal mistake and hallmark of the Bush era. W., Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld declared war on a tactic, stoked fear as a smokescreen and treated pre-emptive attacks as just. 

Conservatives can honk, as Senator Saxby Chambliss did, that Obama’s speech “will be viewed by terrorists as a victory.” But this president has killed more top Qaeda operatives than Bush did. While W.’s bullhorn vow after 9/11 to catch the “people who knocked these buildings down” plays every few minutes at his library, I couldn’t find any photos of Osama or acknowledgment of Bush’s failure to catch him. Obama’s library will have a wing for that feat. 

You could fill an entire other library with what’s not in W.’s. Cheney and Rummy have been largely disappeared, and it is Condi Rice who narrates the 9/11 video. You won’t see the iconic “Mission Accomplished” photo, or that painful video in which W. keeps reading “The Pet Goat” to children after learning that America is under attack, or the notorious “flyover” photo of a desultory Bush jetting from Crawford to the White House and looking through the window of Air Force One at Katrina’s devastation. 

Mostly, aside from the word “freedom” reverberating endlessly, we see the kinder, gentler W. conjured by Laura the Librarian.   .  .  .  .  Proving that the library is more a monument to Laura’s artful airbrushing than W.’s artless leadership, there’s a swank Café 43 with fancier fare than W.’s cherished PB&J’s, and a gift shop featuring Laura’s favorite books, from Dostoyevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov” to Truman Capote’s “Music for Chameleons.” 

We need to never forget the disasters Bush and his Republican sycophant brought to America lest we be doomed to repeat the same horrors in the future.  Jingoism and waving the flag and talking about patriotism do not make one a true patriot or protect the nation.  Sometimes, the biggest patriots are those who call out the errors made - and horrors created -   by those who warp themselves in the American flag.  George W. Bush and Dick Cheney betrayed thousands of our nation's service members and thousands paid with their lives or now find themselves horrible maimed.  We need to honor our fallen.  But we cannot forget those who sent many to needless deaths.