Dark Clouds

I am watching TV this morning after the latest round of primaries, trying to intuit what will happen in November.  I know I am not alone.

The news item that catches my eye is the report of President Trump’s meeting with Evangelists behind closed doors.  It reports that the President told the evangelical group that if the Republicans lose the House to the Democrats, “they” (I assume he means the Democrats) will change all that Trump has done immediately and violently.  Violently??

Here we go!

Remember how the election in 2016 was ‘rigged’, and Trump wasn’t sure he would accept the outcome----unless he won?  Now he is baiting his evangelical toadies with threats of violence.  His message for the midterms is if Republicans don’t win there will be violence.  What a despicable tactic.

Have we not had enough of this kind of divisive kind of language?  When I think of how far our politics has descended to the level of what passes for normal in banana republics around the world, it doesn’t seem far fetched to expect this kind of fetid threat from Trump. 

Tom Friedman writes today in the New York Times of how our politics has become ‘Russified’ after 2 years of Trumpian rule; how our Congress in the hands of the Republicans has evolved to a similar state like that of the Duma in Russia—a rubber stamp body that has abdicated it’s power for oversight and separation of powers that was created by the Founders. It is clear that Trump’s campaign rhetoric will be racially divisive, threaten violence, and play to his trope of ‘truth is not the truth’.

There was a comment written about Friedman’s opinion piece that rang true for me:

“Doesn't it seem odd that a ‘Russified’ country apparently can be redeemed through the magical powers of democratic voting? As though the most corrupt American government in living memory is going to allow itself to lose in a fair election?

At the end of 2018 when our election results are 'highly irregular,' all this effort put into winning a democratic election that we were never going to be given is going to look like the most pointless resistance one could imagine.”

If the House does not wind up in the hands of the Democrats in November, there may be no hope for the preservation of our current form of government.  If Republicans remain in control, we will never find out if the Trump Campaign was complicit in the Russian attack on our democracy since it is the Republican’s mission to corrupt the Russian probe and not let the American people know what really happened in 2016.  Treason and criminal action will have won the day.

Frankly, I am more hopeful that truth and decency will ultimately win out.  It is what our American experiment was all about.

"Have You No Shred of Decency Left, Sir?"

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Well, we certainly have taken a turn in the last 48 hours with regard to the facts that have emerged about the complicity and conspiracy of Donald J. Trump and the campaign finance felonious actions pleaded guilty to by his attorney, Michael Cohen.  Mr. Trump has been flopping like a beached fish on a dock trying to obfuscate his own involvement in Cohen’s criminal activity with comparisons to accidental infractions by the Obama administration as opposed to the criminal intent behind his own actions.  His interviews with Fox News mushing the truth with his gibberish only serve to illustrate his stupidity.  There are tapes, sworn oaths and admissions that clearly implicate the President of the United States in a criminal conspiracy to influence the outcome of a national election to his own benefit!

So really, how stupid are the Congressional Republicans to still remain silent?  Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan haven’t commented……They are in a ‘no-win’ situation.  They are faced with the uncomfortable truth that was inevitable!  Republicans have surrendered their party to people who have no respect for the truth or the rule of law.  They have finally found themselves at the intersection of loyalty to a cult figure and their oath of allegiance to protect and defend the Constitution.  They are faltering and trying to figure out what they should do—hence the silence!

This is perhaps the point of no return for these ‘representatives’ of the people who sent them to Congress.  The sudden realization that the people they represent, the so called “Base” of the party, doesn’t really care whether their standard bearer is a serial liar and a criminal is fully upon them.  Their tolerance for the slow destruction of our institutions, their tolerance for the corruption of our government (from the disgrace of the Merrick Garland nomination to the destruction of the Affordable Care Act to the separation of children from their parents at our southern border), their tolerance for lying and the abrogation of the rule of law has now reached a decision point.

The fact that our President condones criminal activity, lies openly about all manner of things, has surrounded himself with thugs and criminals who have been indicted, plead guilty to criminal charges, and have been found guilty of financial crimes is now openly apparent.  And we still await Special Counsel Mueller's report on the Russian collusion!

And so the moment of truth has perhaps arrived for the Republican party, or what is left of it.  Do they continue to support the Trump cult or do they accept responsibility at this late date to be a patriot and protect and defend the Constitution?  How do they want to be notated in history?

That moment in history when Joseph Welch had the signature conversation with Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Army/McCarthy hearings; when Welch finally asked McCarthy whether he had “any shred of decency left” comes to mind.  Is it time for us to ask Republicans in Congress, “Gentlemen, do you have any shred of decency left?”  Are you ready to be patriots or will history remember you as cowardly supplicants to a fundamentally flawed President.  Your moment of ‘decency’ has arrived at last.

If you don’t choose country over Trump, we need to shed ourselves of all of you! 

"Just a Matter of Timing...."

The recently released audio of Devin Nunes revealing the actual Republican plan for managing the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh vs. the impeachment of Rod Rosenstein unmasks the cynical effort to protect President Trump above all else.  Where the Congress is supposed to act as a check and balance on the Executive Branch, instead Republicans are abdicating their oaths of office to protect their own and Trump’s ass.  Instead of acting in the interests of the people they represent by searching for the truth about what happened in 2016, they rather are attempting to hide the truth, discredit the search for truth and destroy the mechanisms for justice.

Now we discover that the Republicans in the Senate are doing everything they can to restrict the availability of the background documents pertaining to the record of Kavanaugh’s actions and involvement in the Bush White House.  Why?  Because it turns out that Kavanaugh may have lied to Congress during his previous confirmation hearings when he was nominated to be a DC Court of Appeals judge in 2006, and the Republicans are only interested in expediting the confirmation of Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court as fast as possible.  If they restrict the background documents that would clearly answer the question of Kavanaugh’s duplicity and medaciousness, then their goal of confirming him quickly will be met.

The reason this is crucial to their plans is an emblem of their cynicism.

If Kavanaugh is in place as the swing vote on the Supreme Court, then Constitutional questions arising from the impeachment of Rosenstein or a subpoena of Trump to Mueller’s grand jury that will surely reach the court will probably be decided by Kavanaugh’s vote. 

In 2006 Kavanaugh told the Senate in his DC Court of Appeals hearings for confirmation that, as a member of the legal department in Bush's White House, he had nothing to do with any discussions or decisions about policy regarding enhanced interrogation techniques or torture during the early Bush years.  If that was a lie, as the documents that Democratic senators want to review may reveal, Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court may be in real jeopardy.  Republicans would rather have a duplicitous judge on the Supreme Court to further their own interests, than to insure that the Supreme Court is a check and balance against the Executive and the Legislative branch as the founders intended.

(The first case that Kavanaugh heard in his new position on the DC Court of Appeals concerned the retention of a captured prisoner at Guantanamo and the issue of interrogation.  That particular court hears many similar cases.  If in fact Kavanaugh was not neutral, but had in fact developed or opined on the interrogation policy of the Bush Administration, he would probably not have been confirmed for that judgeship. Senate Republicans want to hide this information so they are now restricting documents detailing his activities in the Bush Administration.)

The reason the impeachment of Rod Rosenstein has been put on hold is that if it were to proceed, then the Senate would have to stop any further business while they adjudicated the impeachment case against Rosenstein.  Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court is more important.  The Republican plan is to take up Rosenstein’s impeachment right after the election.  Even if the Democrats win majority control of the House in November, the Republicans have the time between the election and the seating of the new Congress in January of next year to impeach Rosenstein; try him in what will still probably be a Republican Senate; convict him and replace him with someone who will fire and stop the Mueller probe.

THAT is the plan that Nunes was describing in the surreptitious audio recording made at the re-election fundraising event for Republican Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodger last week.

These people will stop at nothing.  The integrity of our government is clearly at risk.  There is such consummate corruption and deception in this administration that it will take several election cycles to clean out this rot.  However the first hurdle is for all of us to take our responsibility seriously and vote in this midterm election.  If we fail to have a change in the House majority, the next two years will be worse than the last two, and frankly the ruins of our democracy will be all of our faults!

On the "Blues Trail".....

Cecily and I just returned from a fascinating and enlightening trip to the Delta region of Mississippi, known as the ‘Blues Trail’.  The Delta is the birthplace of the ‘Blues’, a truly unique American genre of music that has given rise to practically every type and genre of American music.  The Delta’s reputation as the place where the Blues emerged is worldwide, and we met people from all over the world, trying to experience the essence of the place, in the three days we spent there.

Cecily’s high school classmate, Richard Folsom, is a true expert on the Blues, and after attending a 50-year high school reunion together, she and Richard imagined a TV series exploring this genre and its roots through history.  When Cecily got home, she and I decided to take a ‘flyer’ on trying to put together a ‘sizzle reel/sampler’ of what a series about the Blues experience would look like.  It involved a road trip to the center of the ‘Blues Trail’, Clarksdale, Mississippi.

So, three months later, Cecily, Richard and his wife Jan, and I met at the Memphis airport.   The Folsoms picked us up in their late model pickup truck and we travelled down famous Highway 61 from Memphis to Clarksdale.  Bill Luckett, the former mayor of Clarksdale and owner of perhaps the most famous Blues Club in the world, the Ground Zero Blues Club, had offered to let us stay at his house.

Over the next three days we experienced the unexpectedly genuine hospitality of the Deep South through its residents, both white and black. Equipped with a lean HD camera rig and lavalier microphone we tried to capture the essence of what makes Clarksdale and the Delta region tick.

We ate the food of the South---fried everything!—grits, catfish, tamales, mushrooms, green tomatoes.  All of it was delicious and of course not a calorie to be had!---especially at “Old Grandma’s Pancake House” in Clarksdale!  Yikes!  Great images and fabulous on-camera interviews with ‘real’ people. 

 

The people, were gracious, full of stories about the famous Blues musicians that sprang out of this cradle of land famous for cotton.  Many were relatives to the artists, or knew their histories, which were intertwined with the local history.  All of them were proud of their heritage. 

We recorded performances in famous ‘Juke Joints’ like the Bluesberry Café, Ground Zero Blues Club, the Ebony Club in Indianola, Miss., and new talent, live, at the ‘King Biscuit Blues’ radio hour, just across the Mississippi River in West Helena, Arkansas at the Delta Cultural Center.

The stories of the lives and hardships of the people, especially the Black population which is about 80% of the citizenry of Clarksdale give pause.  The textures of life here, from pre-Civil War times to the present day, inform the content of the music.  It comes from the hearts of these people, filled with emotion, filled with the plaintive calls for a better life, filled with the trials of a society struggling to come to grips with the bleak history of discrimination.

We are screening the footage we shot—almost 9 hours of stuff, and trying to put together a 10-15 minute piece that will communicate the potential of bringing this story to the American people and Blues fans all over the world.  It is a daunting task, but hey, after almost 50 years of telling stories, Cecily and I are energized by the challenge.  Our mission is to get to the ‘heart’ of the story and capture real moments from real people.   I think we have some really golden material, but ultimately, you all will be the judge.  Stay tuned, as they say, and we will keep you up to date on our progress, complete with samples of our work. 

In the meantime, make some grit balls covered with buttermilk and corn meal and throw them in the deep fryer to sample the soul of this place…..only don’t eat too many—they’re killer fattening!