Living in the Swamp!

This Kavanaugh situation is such a travesty!  What we are witnessing is no less than the corruption of our ideals as a system based on the rule of law, and the procedure of 'regular order' that is agreed upon for the operation of the government.  

Mitch McConnell stood up in the Senate yesterday and pompously and self-righteously excoriated the Democrats crying “Shame, Shame!” for somehow conspiring to derail the nomination of Kavanaugh.  What a worm!  That disingenuous accusation coming from a man who openly announced that it was his mission to make Obama a one term president; and then who opposed every legislative initiative proposed by the Democrats for 8 years and capped it off with denying a President with a year still in office from appointing a Supreme Court justice by corrupting the rules of the Senate.  This is a man with no shame at all who is the personification of all that is evil and rotten in the quest for power at the expense of American ideals.

The Kavanaugh mess is just what he deserves!  And now he promises to ‘plough through’ the accusations of sexual assault against his President’s candidate for the Supreme Court and try to ram through a vote, discarding all the rules of due process for consideration for the advice and consent of a nominee for a lifetime appointment.

Precedent for these kinds of hearings and process is being discarded.  The FBI has, in past proceedings, been requested to provide investigations and evidence to inform the questioning of candidates for approval.  Not anymore!  Republicans lead by McConnell and Grassley just want to force through the vote to get their man on the court so they can appease their base.  

It doesn’t matter if their nominee may have major character flaws, like being a sexual predator and a liar!  Of course, let's have someone with those 'admirable' character traits on the court who can decide cases on women’s choice?  After all, self righteous white men are surely the best and final arbiter of a woman’s right to decide what to do with their own bodies! 

Excuse me, but what is so wrong about getting to the bottom of this?  Why are Senators Grassley and McConnell so afraid of finding out the truth about what happened? Why don’t they want to allow the calling of additional witnesses, or the assembling of additional evidence?  You would expect that Kavanaugh would push hard to get to the bottom of the matter.  No, he just mouths his talking point about wanting a 'fair process'.   It's truly fair, in the meantime, that Grassley, McConnell and Trump and other 'fine' Republican members of Congress  continually are undercutting Professor Ford, assuming her 'imagining' the whole affair and blaming the Democrats for a smear campaign.

Let’s not forget why the sycophantic Republicans want to get this man on the court.  He is perhaps the world's most energetic proponent of protecting the President from any accountability for obstruction of justice or indictment for crimes he may have committed.  And, of course, he might not object at all to the President pardoning his family and himself.  Kavanaugh is perhaps history’s most avid proponent of executive power, and will most probably make decisions on the Supreme Court to that end. 

The Republicans in the Senate, at least most of them who have abandoned all allegiance to our American ideals of the rule of law and the oversight that they are supposed to provide in the quest for checks and balances, proceed in lockstep for reasons that can only be imagined.  They have abrogated their responsibility to the Constitution and the country as members of the Senate.

I saw something really striking last night.  I forget where I saw it on TV, but there was a discussion about the people running for office in the upcoming midterm elections.  First there was a screen full of faces of the Republicans running for office, both in the Senate and the House.  There were only faces of white men dutifully wearing their ties and jackets and looking like a composite picture from a fraternity house in the 60s.  Then there was the picture of the Democratic faces running for the same offices and there was a mix of men and women, both black, white and tan, dressed casually and neatly.  The question asked was “Which picture looks more like people who represent the ‘real’ America?”  Need I say more?

What my country has become at the hands of these Republican ‘Stepford-like’ conservative abusers of our American ideals is the true tragedy.  How sad that what makes America and the American ideal the dream of literally billions of people around the world should be represented by people who lie, who value only money and power, and who really don’t care a whit about the average American citizen.  These people are the image we present to the world because of the influence of big wealth in politics and idolation of money and power by the billionaires who have hijacked our Republic. (Thank you Citizens United!)

This is all so disgusting.  We all need to think about who the people are who are currently in power.  We need to shed ourselves of the Republican rot that has manifested in our statehouses and federal government.  It is time to turn them out and allow some real representation of the people of America in the People’s houses of Congress!

A Warning from the Past....

When the United States came into being in the late 1700s, there was great debate as the founders tried to envision a governmental structure that would prevent the rise of a dictator or aristocracy that would take control of the levers of power and foreclose the control of the new government by the people.  The brilliance of their creation gave us the Constitution and a society based on the rule of law and the establishment of regular elections to be able to change the course of government.

My friend Steve sent me an article from a website called www.CommonDreams.org  that I found prescient.  It highlights the writings of Alexander Hamilton in August of 1792 when Hamilton was the Secretary of the Treasury for George Washington.  

Hamilton’s article was a ‘rebuttal to those who were skeptical that an American democratic republic could survive over time, when buffeted by the winds and forces of accumulated wealth and the love of some people for aristocracy.’

Hamilton’s premise was that as long as we continued to have regular elections, the oligarchs and wealthy would not be able to gain a toehold in government.

Hamilton then wrote,

 “The truth unquestionably is, that the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion. Tired at length of anarchy, or want of government, they may take shelter in the arms of monarchy for repose and security.”

Hamilton reasoned that it wasn’t the politicians who would promote the destruction of a state devoted to the ‘general welfare’, but rather it would be the Uber-rich. So, if a group of people with massive riches were to succeed in taking over most of the levers of power in American government, Hamilton believed, our nation then would, actually, be vulnerable to a despot rising to the presidency.  He believed that the real threat to our democracy came from the super rich.

The super rich of Hamilton’s time are the morbidly wealthy billionaires of today who have set out to seize control of every aspect of the political life of America.

Hamilton wrote,

 “When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate [hugely wealthy] in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.”

Does that sound like an uncomfortably familiar scenario?

To quote from the article in Common Dreams,

 ‘Now that the U.S. Supreme Court, in a series of 5-4 decisions, has handed the power to alter elections to a few hundred billionaires and well-funded organizations (including foreign governments), and billionaire oligarch Trump has taken the White House with the help of billionaire oligarch Murdoch, Hamilton’s nightmare is nearly realized.
The question now is whether enough Americans have awakened to this reality to show up in November to defy the wealthy purveyors of fear and discontent who want complete and final control over our nation.’

So, the need to save our republic from those who are stealing access to the levers of government perhaps is now more apparent.  Hamilton envisioned it 200 years ago, and warned us about the rise of someone like Trump.  For those of you who want to read the entire article, here is the link:

https://tinyurl.com/y8eot2xu

VOTE in November like your life depended on it…..it does.

BTW a few more thoughts:
Call your representatives in Congress and ask them if they really believe, as Mike Pompeo does, that selling lethal arms for profit to the Saudis, who we know will use them to kill children in Yemen, is more important than cutting off the sales of those arms and letting those children live.

Also, do you really believe we can’t delay the confirmation of Kavanaugh until we find out if he is a rapist?  Call your Republican congressmen and object if you are rational.

On Not Being Stupid....

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The tragedy of our current political situation is that we ourselves are the cause of it.  Our own ambivalence toward our freedom and the right/obligation to vote is the most nefarious cause of the disintegration of our democratic system.  If we don’t take voting seriously----this time---it may be impossible to mitigate the inevitable loss of freedoms and the dawn of autocracy, even dictatorship.

There is an editorial I read this past weekend that summarizes the challenge and possible outcome if we sit back and leave the task of citizenship to others.  Please take the time to read it:

https://tinyurl.com/y7jhcu6g

The most confounding part of this whole situation is that there is a ‘mass’ of people-- fellow citizens-- who have lost the ability to reason.

It’s one thing to have a spirited discussion and debate with someone who rationally comes to conclusions based on facts.  It’s another to try to have a debate with someone who is unwilling to accept the facts as they actually are and therefore adopts positions that have no basis in reality.

How do you reason with someone in a discussion about immigration when they are prepared to accept the practice of locking up children and separating them from their parents?  Who are we arguing a point with?---someone who does not believe in our democratic values apparently.  Or how do you have a conversation with someone about the outcomes in Puerto Rico after the government’s failure to respond to a natural disaster.  If a government study supports the fact that almost 3000 people died for lack of response over a one year period, how do you convince an opponent that 3000 people actually died when they accept the premise that they didn’t actually die, as the President has claimed.

When 99% of the world’s scientists provide data that our climate is changing and our society’s unrelenting use of fossil fuels is the cause, and yet there are Governors and legislators that simply won’t accept the science, how do you argue with that?  In Florida, Gov. Rick Scott has prohibited the use of the term ‘climate change’ in any official study or report that releases data and proposes policy on changes in the environment.  No one in his administration can utter the words at work?  What kind of nonsense is that?  If the printouts of data showing increasing levels of CO2 and increasing averages of worldwide high temperatures and increasing levels of the sea over the past 50 years being greater than any other time in history, how do your opponents stare you in the face and say, “No, it always gets hot in the summer!” or “It’s just the Democrats trying to make Trump look bad”.

When your fellow citizen is just hunky-dory with a President that constantly lies; is a sexual predator; openly supports a foreign government that succeeded (and is still trying) to influence the outcome of our elections; repeatedly denies any effort by his own intelligence services to warn him and our countrymen of this increasing threat; creates a cabinet of men who are piece by piece deconstructing safeguards to our health, opposing safeguards on clean air and water, reversing all pollution regulations, removing the neediest from health care coverage, threatening to deconstruct Social Security and Medicare,…. how do you make them understand that this is in opposition to every American Ideal we have fought for for the past 240 years! 

How do you argue with someone who can’t see the value of continued development of sources of renewable energy, and would rather scream their approval at a rally where the President says, “I love coal!”

How do you engage with someone who supports a man who would ‘lock up’ his political opponents and is ready to holler that in a rally?

My point in all this is that a significant portion of people in this country are just damn stupid!  They can’t seem to understand reality, truth, facts, or

consequences.  There unfortunately is no solution to that problem.  The only defense the rest of us have is in our sheer numbers, which outnumber the stupid ones.  That is why the above editorial strikes such a resonant chord for me.

My friends, voting in November is the most important thing you will do this year.  If we are to stop this seemingly incoherent wave of stupidity and destruction to what our founders tried so valiantly to bequeath to us, we must take citizenship and our responsibility to vote seriously.  We must be active, we must not flag, we must stand strong against the forces of ignorance, selfishness, and just plain stupidity!

Vote like your life depended on it.  It actually does.

It is time to get rid of the people in our government that are anti-citizen, which is most of the Republicans currently in Congress, and start to replace them with thinkers and doers who want to offer our citizens, all our citizens, a better life and belief in truth and the rule of law.  At the end of the day, those are the only things that set us apart from every other country on the face of the planet.

Hero or Coward?

Why are we not surprised?...Because we knew all along.  So now….finally….we are talking about the disaster in the White House in an open manner.  I guess that is the first step. 

Awareness on the part of the general public needs to be jarred into attention.  Maybe this is the instrument.  I am, of course, talking about the anonymous editorial in the New York Times.  The canary in the coalmine is finally screaming his warning.  It remains to be seen what happens now.

So the real question is whether this anonymous person is a hero or a coward.  Should the writer of this editorial step up and take responsibility to attempt to be the spark that finally ignites the long missing patriotism and courage of the Congress?  In order for something to change and for us to emerge from the shadow of real danger that a madman like Trump can pose to all our lives, should the writer reveal his identity?  That is the debate this morning.

The harsh reality is that there is so much evidence and confirmation of the erratic and amoral behavior of President Trump from so many various sources (including books by Michael Wolff; Omarosa Mannigault-Newman, and now Bob Woodward) that it is now impossible to deny the reality of the moment.

Everyone in Washington, including the mute Republican members of Congress, knows that the danger is real.  Will they act?

There is a tipping point somewhere in the more or less immediate future.  I don’t know what it will be, but it is clear that there is an ‘ending’ to this coming.  Will it be Mueller’s report that finally breaks the dike, or will Trump do something truly egregious that puts the world at true danger, or will it at long last come from a sweeping Democratic victory in the midterm elections?  What this editorial has finally done is fling open the doors of awareness that the fear of true disaster lives in the minds of the actual people IN the administration.  This raises some other troubling questions however.

Who is really running the government?  It now appears that we have a coterie of unelected individuals who are ‘sub-rosa’ making policy and procedural decisions that are intended to ‘protect us’.  Is that the way our democracy is supposed to operate?  Not really. 

The impotence of Congress as a ‘check on the Executive’ is now completely apparent.  Republicans as a group still show their allegiance to special interests, party, and an unstable individual over the importance of patriotism and love of country.  These people have essentially rejected Democracy as a system.  They prefer to ignore the rules of proper order, the rule of law, and the difference between right and wrong.  Just look at what is happening in the Senate Judiciary Committee right now as the Republicans have abandoned fairness and transparency in their effort to ram through Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. 

Think about it…..a President who is amoral, unhinged, and an unindicted co-conspirator in a federal criminal felony nominates someone, who most probably will decide his fate; whose decisions reflect predisposition to consider the President above the law.  And the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee are doing everything they can to hide and restrict documents showing the nominee’s predilections from the Committee members who will question him.  When will ‘country’ become more important to these people?  I actually think NEVER!  The only thing we can do is to vote them out of office so we can stop the corruption.

They are the ‘swamp’.

So where does that leave us with regard to the actions of the anonymous editorialist in the New York Times?  There is clearly so much wrong with our democracy right now that only dramatic action seems to get our attention.  I think the New York Times publication of this editorial is heroic in itself, given the constant attack the Times suffers at the hands of Donald Trump.  It had no choice really.  It remains for the author to take the final step in his or her effort to alert us all to the danger posed by this administration.  He or she will be a hero only when they step forward and ring the alarm bell without shame in the effort to save our republic.  Until then, we might assume that they feel their ‘job’ is more important than the salvation of the United States of America.

John McCain's Bequest

This Labor Day weekend was full of John McCain.  I agreed with maybe 50% of McCain’s politics--He was too conservative and too much of a ‘hawk’ for me.  He always wanted to spend more on the military, and was first in line to act militarily against other nations.  Maybe that was somehow a ‘knee jerk’ reaction to his own particular history. 

However he was also someone who fought for the ‘little guy’.  In recent days he was the one lone warrior who foiled Trump’s plan to obliterate the Affordable Care Act, and the one lone Republican who called out the Trump supplicants currently in Congress.

This weekend was full of tribute to the man and I watched most of the services on Saturday.  The Sunday morning programs invited guests from both sides of the aisle to comment on the ‘rebuke’ to Trump and how it would affect the Mueller probe, etc. etc.  The most insightful comments came for Leon Panetta, former Chief of Staff for Bill Clinton; and former Director of the CIA and Defense Secretary for Barak Obama.

When asked what he took away from the services and the overall weekend tribute to John McCain he had a truly thoughtful response.  He said that the services and remembrances of McCain were not only a re-affirmation of the values and ideals of the American Democracy, but also a moment for all Americans to hold up a mirror and ask themselves the question, “Who am I as an American, and who do I want to be?” 

The era of Trump has made this question of paramount importance. 

Over the past two years we have seen a real change in our profile as a nation with ‘ideals’ and ‘moral values’.  Honor, integrity, honesty, and most importantly truth and the rule of law have been corrupted by this administration.  Trump is just the latest incarnation of a drift that began decades ago when our representatives made money and power the most important things in the universe.  John McCain's values were the antithesis of that.  Above all for McCain it was honesty and integrity.

The result has been the inexorable slow ebbing of those most cherished ideals that the founders hoped would guide our actions and decisions as a republic.  The result of that slide has led us to the loss of compromise as a way to make progress, and recent milestones like the Merrick Garland episode, the reappearance of overt racism, fear of the ‘other’, abandonment of our belief that immigration is the strength of our perpetual renewal as a nation, among other events.

So Panetta’s reflection has great relevance.  As the frenetic verbal abuse of our institutions (Dept. of Justice; FBI; the press) by the President grows louder every day, we must ask ourselves, “Is this who we want to be as Americans?”  Are we ready to abandon truth and accept Rudy Giuliani’s statement that ‘Truth is not truth’?  Are we going to accept autocracy and accept the premise that the only ‘real’ truth is from the mouth of Donald Trump?

As I scanned the faces of those who attended that service on Saturday, I was heartened by the cross section of political views and positions that were represented in what was clearly a heartfelt  appreciation for the values that John McCain stood for.  America was his mantra.  As Obama affirmed in his eulogy, recalling the private talks he and McCain had in the Oval during his Presidency, both he and John were ‘on the same team’ no matter how they might have differed on policy.  Can the same be said today about Republicans and Democrats, or more specifically about Trumpists and the rest of us?

I wondered about the hypocrisy of McConnell, Ryan, other Republican legislators sitting in the National Cathedral who are mute as each egregious statement and action oozes forth from the White House.  How is it possible for these men to honor what McCain stood for and then so blatantly abandon those ideals in pursuit of their own agendas?

When pundits, and those of us who still operate in the realm of truth and honesty believe that this election—a mere 60 days away—is perhaps at the fulcrum of the survival of our nation as the founders imagined it, the solemnity of that moment this past weekend is prophetic.