More Saturday Male Beauty

 

Trump and MAGA Republicans: A Threat to National Security

The recent NATO meetings in Helsinki, Finland, and Vilnius, Lithuania, contrasted with a meeting in Helsinki five years ago and ongoing efforts by MAGA Republicans in the House of Representatives to block further aid to Ukraine underscore the reality that the GOP under Trump and his acolytes is the party of Vladimir Putin and international despots and no friend of democracy either here in the USA or across the globe. Five years ago Trump did everything but give Putin public fellatio - causing many to still wonder what blackmail material Putin has on Trump - and put the word of a now international war criminal over the findings of America's intelligence community.  The late John McCain described Trump's self-prostitution to Putin as “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.”  Trump and his MAGA minions should be anathema to anyone who cares about America's national security even as these individuals lie and describe themselves as "patriots" while spouting Putin's talking points. The reality is that these people are traitors in our midst and as the 2024 elections approach decent Americans need to understand that a vote for a MAGA Republican (I would argue for any Republican candidate) is ultimately a vote against democracy and a vote against America's national security.  A column in the Washington Post by a former Republican looks at the contrast between five years ago and today under the Biden administration.  Here are highlights:

If you want to know the differences on national security between Democrats and MAGA Republicans, it all boils down to one word: Helsinki.

Five years ago, on July 16, 2018, President Donald Trump met in the capital of Finland with Russian President Vladimir Putin. There he delivered what Sen. John McCain called “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.” Standing next to Putin at a news conference, Trump refused to condemn Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election or even to admit that it had occurred. This came a little more than a year after Trump had attended a NATO summit in Brussels at which he refused to affirm the alliance’s Article 5 collective security guarantee. (He later reluctantly endorsed Article 5 but continued to criticize the alliance relentlessly.)

On Thursday, President Biden visited Helsinki for a very different purpose. He came not to kowtow before Putin but to stand up to him — and not to undermine NATO but to strengthen it. This visit was meant to celebrate Finland’s recent accession to membership in the alliance, and it came shortly after Biden’s attendance at a NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, where the alliance showed greater unity than at any time in recent history. Ukraine did not get a timeline for joining the alliance, but Sweden broke through the Turkish roadblock to its membership, and the allies signaled resolve in aiding Ukraine and bringing it closer to the alliance.

“I’ve been doing this a long time. I don’t think NATO’s ever been stronger,” Biden said during a meeting with Finnish President Sauli Niinisto. He’s right, and he deserves a world of credit for that achievement. Biden has shown more skill at marshaling an international coalition than any U.S. president since George H.W. Bush during the 1991 Gulf War.

Biden has often dragged his feet on aid to Ukraine for fearing of triggering World War III, but over and over again he has done the right thing in the end, supplying everything from Stinger and Javelin missiles to M777 howitzers to HIMARS multiple-launch rocket systems to Patriot air defense batteries to Bradley fighting vehicles to cluster munitions.

It’s safe to say that none of that would have happened if Trump had still been in the White House. Just this week, Trump expressed opposition to Biden’s decision to provide Ukraine with cluster munitions — a type of munition that the Russians have used in abundance. Trump argues that Biden is “dragging us further toward World War III by sending cluster munitions to Ukraine” and boasts that he could end the war in a day. To which former vice president Mike Pence replied: “The only way you’d solve this war in a day is if you gave Vladimir Putin what he wanted.”

[T]here is a large and growing faction in the GOP that is hostile to U.S. global leadership and to assistance for Ukraine. A recent Pew Research Center poll showed that 44 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said the United States is sending too much assistance to Ukraine compared to only 14 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents.

The MAGA Republicans would rather wage culture wars at home than support Ukraine’s war of territorial defense against Russian aggression. Members of the House Freedom Caucus are offering amendments to the defense authorization bill making its way through Congress, demanding that the United States cut back or eliminate aid to Ukraine and even leave NATO. Meanwhile, the Marine Corps is now without a confirmed commandant for the first time in 164 years because Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) has put a hold on hundreds of nominations for senior officers to protest a Pentagon policy enabling service members and their families to travel to states where abortion is legal to have the procedure performed.

The very real possibility that Trump could win back the presidency in 2024 fills U.S. allies with dread — and offers hope to U.S. enemies. John Bolton, who was Trump’s national security adviser, has said Trump came close to pulling out of NATO in 2018 and would do so if elected to another term. It’s also a good bet that Trump would try to stop the flow of U.S. weapons to Ukraine. Indeed, the very prospect that Trump could return to office encourages Putin to prolong the conflict. . . . from the Kremlin’s perspective, “the main thing” is that Biden (“the guy with dementia”) not win reelection.

So, if you believe in making America, rather than Russia, “great again,” it’s imperative for Biden to win in 2024 and maintain the policies that have so greatly strengthened NATO and Ukraine. As long as the MAGA wing remains as strong as it is, Republicans cannot be trusted on national security policy.

The author's final paragraph is 100% correct and anyone who is a true patriotic American should vote against the party of Trump and Putin in 2024 (and 2023 here in Virginia).

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Friday Male Beauty

 

Holding Senate Republicans Accountable for SCOTUS's Reactionary Rulings

During its last two terms the the right wing extremist controlled U.S. Supreme Court has ignored precedent and overturned long standing rulings as the zealots on the Court strive to move the nation backwards in time to the 1950's or before. Among other things Roe v. Wade was overturned, affirmative action has been outlawed for college admissions - and soon likely for other issues - and Christofascists have been granted the right to ignore public accommodation laws and non-discrimination laws so long as they couch their bigotry in religious belief.   Some think racial discrimination could soon be similarly condoned by the religiously extreme majority and some talking heads on the far right are saying they want to see Griswold v. Connecticut while allowed contraception overturned. NONE of this would have occurred but for the machinations of Mitch McConnell and his fellow Republicans who contrary to tradition and many decades of precedent refused to confirm Merrick Garland to the Court and then rammed through Amy Coney Barrett just weeks before the 2020 presidential election. But for this unprecedented and outrageous behavior, the Court would now have only four far right zealots instead of six.  Of course, the always disingenuous and dishonest McConnell wants voters and Americans in general forget about these Senate Republican misdeeds and the consequences they have wrought as we head towards the 2024 elections where McConnell wants to win back a Republican majority so even more travesties can be unleashed on the majority of the citizenry.  This cannot be allowed to happen and voters must take out their displeasure on Republicans and make sure the Democrats hold control of the Senate (and hopefully regain control of the House of Representatives).  A piece in the Washington Post looks at McConnell's dissembling and lies as he tries to play voters for fools.  Here highlight:

Mitch McConnell wants you to know: The Court That McConnell Built — the Senate minority leader is, more than anyone else, responsible for its current configuration — is an unremarkable, by-the-books institution. In McConnell’s telling, the court is an “ideologically unpredictable body” that “produces diverse outcomes” . . .

You’ve heard about damned lies and statistics? The maxim applies to the Supreme Court, too. The Kentucky Republican is using numbers to try to sand the edges off a hard-right court, and the most intriguing thing about his argument, made in a recent Post op-ed, is that he felt compelled to make it at all.

Building a conservative-dominated federal judiciary has been McConnell’s passion project, but his greatest passion is achieving — or, in this circumstance, regaining — power. With control of the Senate up for grabs next year, McConnell must be worrying about whether the court’s actions, in particular its overruling of Roe v. Wade, are taking a toll on his chances of retaking the chamber and again becoming majority leader.

Because that is the best explanation for why McConnell is choosing to minimize the enormity of his accomplishment — his transformation of the Supreme Court from a wobbly center-right institution into a far more conservative, at times aggressively radical, body.

Under McConnell’s no-holds barred stewardship, Justice Antonin Scalia was replaced — not by President Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, but by President Donald Trump’s, Neil M. Gorsuch. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy retired to make way for Brett M. Kavanaugh. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died just before the 2020 election, and McConnell muscled through her replacement, Amy Coney Barrett.

The bottom line: one significant shift to the right (Kavanaugh) and one mammoth one (Barrett). Two seats that should have gone to Democratic presidents were instead handed to Trump. Thank you, Senator McConnell.

And the new justices delivered. Abortion rights, gone. Affirmative action, gone. Gun rights, dramatically expanded. The administrative state, deconstruction underway. Religious liberties, triumphant; separation of church and state, not so much. Does this sound “ideologically unpredictable” to you?

“What a difference five years makes,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor observed, dissenting from the six-justice conservative majority’s ruling in favor of a Christian website designer opposed to making websites celebrating the marriage of same-sex couples.

Sotomayor’s point is undeniable, yet McConnell prefers to blur it, and to obscure with statistics that assign equal weight to cases of dramatically varying importance. One Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, wiping out constitutional protection or abortion rights, or one Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, eliminating the use of racial preferences in college admissions, matters a whole lot more than a slew of more technical, less ideologically freighted decisions.

McConnell badly overstated his case. “Evidence from this past term indicates that the court’s defining characteristic isn’t polarization,” he wrote. “It is, instead, a politically unpredictable center.”

This could scarcely be more misleading. Once upon a time, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I covered a center-right court that could be accurately described that way. Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, David Souter and Kennedy staked out that ground. The last two terms have witnessed the dismantling of their most important handiwork — preserving the right to abortion and upholding the use of race as a factor in college admissions.

Roberts, Kavanaugh and Barrett are not centrists, not even close. They are committed conservatives who happen to occupy the center of a court that has veered dramatically to the right. Liberal victories are few and far between, and they largely consist of being able to convince a few conservative justices to keep the status quo in place, not taking the law in any expansive new direction.

McConnell might not want you to understand that, but you should — and, McConnell notwithstanding, you should vote accordingly.

If you are unhappy with the Court's lurch to the extreme right, the proper response is to vote a straight Democrat ticket in every election.  McConnell and his extremists must be punished severely and must never have majority control again for at least a generation.

Friday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Thursday Male Beauty

 

Tuberville and the GOP Whitewashing of White Nationalsm

Truth be told, today's Republican Party has become the bastion of white nationalism and right wing "Christian" extremism (there is a huge overlap of the two groups).  After the 2016 election, many pundits and members of the media tried to explain the motivation of Trump voters as being fueled by financial and economic concerns yet later studies revealed when all the smoke screens were stripped away, the real motivation was racial resentment and grievance flowing from the political right's zero sum view of society and the world, namely that if blacks and other racial minorities (and gays) had improved their lot, then whites had lost something, especially their real and perceived privilege.  Ever since, the Republican Party - and Trump who never condemned the white nationalist invasion of Charlottesville in 2017 - has shameless pandered to white racists and white supremacist and sought to sooth their sensibilities by blocking the teaching of accurate history which they claim to be "divisive" and erasing uncomfortable truths about America's - in in Glenn Youngkin's case, Virginia's - true history.  Few have been in the forefront of this effort more than Ron DeSantis, Senator Tommy Tuberville, Alabama's latest self-inflicted embarrassment , and now Ryan Walters, the superintendent of public schools in Oklahoma. A column in the New York Times looks at this whitewashing of white nationalism and racism.  Here are excerpts:

In an interview in May, the senior Republican senator from Alabama, Tommy Tuberville — who is holding up hundreds of promotions for senior military officers because he disagrees with a Defense Department policy that facilitates abortion access for service members — was asked if he believes white nationalists should be allowed in the military.

His answer: “Well, they call them that. I call them Americans.”

It was an attempt to inject the idea of partisan subjectivity into the defining of the term, a tomato-tomahto innocuous differing of opinions, a cultural variation in how something is viewed and named. But the definition of white nationalism, a decades-old term, isn’t up for debate or a varied interpretation.

Tuberville doubled down on his definition on Monday night on CNN, saying: “My opinion, of a white nationalist — if somebody wants to call them a white nationalist — to me, is an American. It’s an American.

All the “ifs” and “opinions” here are intentional but unnecessary. Terms like “white nationalist” mean something: White nationalism is a form of white supremacy that advocates white dominance and white control. You don’t have to take my word for it, you can look it up. (On Tuesday, Tuberville admitted that white nationalists are racists.)

It’s not the first time that a prominent Republican has tried, particularly on the subject of race, to reduce fact to opinion — to convert the absolute into a matter of partisan interpretation. When they do, they’re engaged in a crusade of etymological alteration, of hijacking and bastardizing the meanings of words and phrases.

In 2018, Donald Trump proudly proclaimed: “You know, they have a word, it sort of became old-fashioned. It’s called a nationalist. . . . Though not explicit, whiteness is coincidental to the nationalism in this construction, but nationalism is cast simply as profound patriotism.

[I]n this stew of adulterated meanings, “white nationalist” gets conflated with being a white patriot and allows any suggestion of racism to become an aspersion cast at white nationalists without cause. Racism, to this way of thinking, can only be unambiguous, naked hatred. And by playing these word games, they are prying apart their politically necessary disdain of open racists from a calm and considered tolerance of intolerance, a muted acquiescence to a racial hierarchy — a skewed view of the history of racial contributions to humanity and the vaunted legacy of the founders of this country.

But that distinction cannot be made here. It is tortured logic and it will lead to ridiculousness.

Last week, Ryan Walters, the superintendent of public schools in Oklahoma, was asked how teaching students about the 1921 Tulsa race massacre could be done without violating the state’s ban on teaching what it calls critical race theory. Walters responded:

“That doesn’t mean you don’t judge the actions of individuals. Oh, you can. Absolutely, historically, you should. ‘This was right. This was wrong. They did this for this reason.’ But to say it was inherent because of their skin is where I say that is critical race theory. You’re saying that race defines a person.”

Be clear: White racists attacked and destroyed the Black community in Tulsa called the Greenwood District, also known as Black Wall Street. And that community was attacked because it was Black.

I guess Walters’s argument, as flimsy as it is, hangs on the word “inherent.” And no, white people are not inherently terrorists or racists. No people are. But, there have been white people who were terrorists and racists and wreaked havoc and destruction in this country. Indeed, there was a period in our country, certainly up to the Jim Crow era, during which many white Americans were at least acculturated to, if not participants in, racial terrorism — can anyone deny that about a deadly mob descending on a thriving Black Tulsa neighborhood?

Racism was preached in church. Law enforcement was part of the racial terror. Elected officials championed resistance to racial equality. People sold and sent postcards of lynchings.

And white nationalism became central to white power and white politics. The rise and maintenance of segregation was rooted in a white nationalist impulse. The rising popularity of hate groups today is due in part to the mainstreaming of white nationalist ideas.

When Fox News fired Tucker Carlson, the Southern Poverty Law Center noted that he had “repeatedly offered a platform to white nationalists” and “voiced fringe racial grievances in an apparent effort to give them greater cultural salience.”

These politicians are trying to use a distorted notion of patriotism and a distorted definition of nationalism to whitewash white nationalists and white nationalism.

That’s the reality. And I can’t change that to soothe anyone’s modern-day sensibilities anymore than I can change the color of the sky.

White supremacy, white nationalism and white terror were fundamental to the creation of America. Those facts don’t change because they make some uncomfortable or others angry. No one has the power to change a yesterday.

This current impulse to wish it away, to ban the books, to pressure the teachers, to alter the language, to muddy the waters, isn’t the answer. And it’s insulting.

Thursday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Wednesday Male Beauty