Category: Politics

Warren – Sanders: the non-handshake that shook progressives

Fundamentally, Bernie Sanders is another clueless male

When there was so much dust being kicked up around the contretemps between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, at first I thought – meh, she’ll get over it, or he’ll find a way to resolve it  that will bring her around; the dust will settle and things will go on as before . . . .  Such was his expectation after Warren charged him with calling her a liar on national television . . . then, when Warren refused his handshake and waited, looking him in the eye with clasped hands, as if beseeching him to admit a wrong, he said they should talk about it later and turned aside.

It doesn’t matter if “things will go on as before” on the surface, because at a deep level the damage has been done, and given what we saw, it will continue to get done.

Reflecting on my own version of male cluelessness, I have a good guess as to what must have happened to (1) elicit Elizabeth Warren’s fury over Sanders telling her a woman couldn’t get to be president, then denying it; and (2) explain his denial.

I think it comes down to Sanders just not getting it. Whatever his exact words, she took it as an aspersion back then, and in the heat of the Iowa race felt driven to spit it out. And Sanders, instead of taking her to heart, instead of conceding he may have made a mistake, flatly denied saying it.

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Tyrant in Your Pocket: Part II of Treading into Darkness

So much of dictatorial power comes from just showing up. Everywhere.

Soon after my return from Vietnam, I was living in Boston and saw a notice of an upcoming Black Panther Party meeting.  At the time I wasn’t sure just what they were doing, but I knew one of their primary objectives was protecting the black community from aggressive policing.

In the Army I had rubbed shoulders with enough African-Americans to understand what comes of being systematically oppressed. Although I was troubled  by the shootings of police on the West Coast, the Panthers’ Boston chapter had not been accused of violence, and was  ostensibly oriented toward helping blacks with food and education—it seemed like a positive move toward peaceful support of the black community.

I went to the meeting, curious to see what was up, and even considering helping them out. I also had a notion of showing that not all white people were clueless.

But I was greatly disappointed.  It was a small gathering of young black men in a windowless room (lacking windows made sense, but it was depressing nonetheless). While I, as the only white person there, was understandably greeted with suspicion, they seemed more curious than hostile. It was a good start. But then I began asking questions, and before answering, whoever I was talking to would consult the Little Red Book (“The Sayings of Chairman Mao”) which everyone possessed.  Where the book was not actually lying out in full view on a table or shelf, it would be in someone’s pocket—pants pocket, shirt pocket, out it came.

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Democracy’s Downward Slide and Totalitarianism’s Upward March – Treading into Darkness, Part I

Recession of democracy

On the day I began writing this (December 18), the depressing spectacle of the House of Representatives impeachment vote on Donald Trump occurred, and I happened to come across an even more depressing op-ed by Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post.  Zakaria described a trend toward repression of minorities, tribalism, and incipient totalitarianism.

    • The widening schism between Hindus and Muslims in India,  now being codified into laws that repress the latter. For a look at the rising persecution of Muslims in India, check out this in The New Yorker.
    • Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Trumplike attack on the Israeli justice system, together with an accusation that the police and prosecutors are attempting a coup.
    • Hungary’s  Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s moves to silence opposition voices, curtail the power of local governments, and throttle immigration with fences and razor wire and a limit of 10 asylum applications per day.
    • The massive government persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar.
    • White-hot partisanship in the U.S. political system (compounded by the resurgence of White Nationalism), whipped up by a demagogue whose bent is toward autocracy.

Zakaria refers to the human rights watchdog group Freedom House finding a worldwide decline in global freedom over the past 13 years. He quotes Stanford’s Larry Diamond, coeditor of The Journal of  Democracy, saying that we are seeing a worldwide “Democratic Recession.” Zakaria puts it more strongly: it may be a “Democratic Depression.”

Totalitarianism in the Information Age: the China model

To Zakaria’s list, we can add human-rights abuses in China, on the cusp of becoming a totalitarian surveillance state (more on that in later parts of Treading into Darkness).  The Chinese leadership’s actions to control its population is pulling it so far away from democracy that democratic aspirations are destined to become an illusion for the people of China (no matter what the outcome in Hong Kong).  The Artificial Intelligence-assisted mass surveillance system they have developed in the Xinjiang region to control, police, detain,  sometimes torture, and imprison minorities (such as the Uighur Muslims) serves as a model to extend throughout China going forward.

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Fake Fears, Legit Fears . . . and Fears of the Undefinable

Happy? Thanksgiving?

Yes, it’s still a beautiful world in  many respects.  So as we head into the holidays with visions of impeachments dancing in our heads, let us rejoice that: we are not in a nuclear war; Donald Trump has not assumed dictatorial powers; William Barr is about to resign in disgrace;* Adam Schiff has not been assassinated (as of this writing); Russia has not annexed the whole of Ukraine; New York City is still above sea level; more than a dozen elephants remain in the wild;  Ruth Bader Ginsburg lives on; and Artificial Intelligence has still not determined that it’s worth taking over this messy, irrational, bigotry-infested world. 

You have much to be thankful for. You can be thankful that, despite much Fox News/National Enquirer-generated fake news, we do not have on our southern border hordes of raping, thieving, murderous people  itching to invade the U.S. and take away our jobs; Ukraine is not hacking our elections although Russia has and is; a non-negligible number of Americans actually understand the value of the rule of law; wind turbines do not cause cancer;  the mainstream media are not Enemies of the People; vaccines do not cause autism; Hillary Clinton is not running a child sex ring; a majority of Americans actually do believe that guns kill people; George Soros has no plan to undermine the American political system.

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Trump’s Immaturity Defense

Are you guilty if you don’t know right from wrong?

Not being a lawyer, I don’t know if the inability to tell right from wrong is a sign of insanity.  What I know of it comes from TV shows, movies, and written fiction. In those cases not knowing right from wrong  is a symptom of either insanity or serious mental defect, which exempts the defendant for responsibility for their acts. 

This line of thinking appears to be the line which the defenders of the President are taking.  Trump said the phone call was “perfect”—that’s the one where he was shaking down the president of Ukraine for political purposes.

The Republican defenders are now casting this manipulation of the newly elected president of a vulnerable, militarily dependent ally as a proper exercise of diplomacy. No matter that this is preposterous—when you are forced to defend the indefensible, any weapon that comes to hand is better than nothing.

It boils down to, the President gets a pass because he didn’t know what he was doing was wrong. Based on a life in which Donald Trump has been largely unaccountable for his actions, this is perfectly plausible.

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Iran: Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Time to pity Donald Trump

Looming over the verbal skirmishes  concerning Iran’s recent attack on the Saudi oil facilities and Mike Pompeo’s calling the attack “an act of war” is the fundamental problem that Donald Trump has created: putting himself between a rock and a hard place. There’s no wriggling out of it without either losing face or getting into a hot war with Iran, which would incur the involvement of Russia and the Chinese—too hot for Donald Trump to handle.

At this point, the end result appears to have been a loss of face—not that Donald Trump would ever admit it. The Treasury Department is to clamp down further on Iran’s financial system—somewhat short of Trump’s bellicose rhetoric. This will wreak further havoc on Iran’s economy, but if the Iranian government asks its people to make big sacrifices to oppose the U.S., they will be ready to starve rather than knuckle under.

We saw a similar Trumpian backpedaling from explosive rhetoric back in July of 2018 as Trump, personally aggrieved by standard Iranian bluster,  thundered back at Hassan Rouhani with threats of annihilation.

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It’s Now or Never: Delay on Impeachment Weakens Democrats

Time’s running out for impeachment

The argument against impeaching Donald Trump gets stronger every day.  Check out liberal pundit Nathan Robinson giving pro-impeachment liberals a scolding in the pages  of The Guardian. Robinson is wrong that impeachment of Trump is a bad idea. But he’s right that counting on Mueller’s congressional testimony to turn public opinion in favor of impeachment was foolish.  Polls still find support for impeachment below 40 percent among the general population, although above 60 percent among Democrats.  Mueller’s testimony didn’t change many minds on either side of the partisan divide, and the center has seemed not to care very much before, during, and after.

In making the case against impeachment, Robinson trots out the  tiresome argument that “the Democratic obsession with the Mueller investigation was symptomatic of a party that has lost touch with the real concerns of working people.” Again, Robinson is both wrong and right.  Wrong that the party has lost touch with the real concerns of working people.  (He knows better—he’s just venting.) But he’s correct that the hype of the Mueller report—primarily on the Left—has given the appearance of a party that has lost touch. That’s not the fault of the Democratic Party, it’s the fault of the media that thrive on whipping up emotions. Their best bet for ratings has been to run juicy Trump-outrage stories to get the liberal tribe thirsting for blood.

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185 Democratic Wafflers Waiting for What?

Yesterday I saw that 50 House Democrats have called for either the impeachment of Donald Trump or an “impeachment inquiry.” The latter is to impeachment what a match is to a fuse—you light it only if you are aiming for an explosion—but the softer term lends the process a tone of propriety.

Which leaves another 185 Democrats waiting to see from what direction the strongest wind will blow. Most of them are in thrall to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who continues to put politics ahead of principle when it comes to calling evildoers such as the U.S. President and his henchmen to account.  (I had my Elizabeth Warren-inspired say on the politics-vs-principle issue in my two-weeks-old post,  The Impeachment Dilemma.)

A welcome breath of fresh air was stirred by Robert Mueller’s long-awaited public statement to the effect that Donald Trump had committed a crime but there was nothing he—Mueller—could do about it because of the absurd (he couldn’t say “absurd” but you know he thought it) Department of Justice policy against indicting a sitting President. Therefore, he implied in the driest but most cutting possible language, it was up to another branch of government (i.e., the legislature) to go get the S.O.B.

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The Impeachment Dilemma: Good Politics versus Good Governance

Impeach Now? Y/N

Answer: Y 

A month ago Elizabeth Warren was the first Democratic presidential candidate to call for the impeachment of Donald Trump ASAP.

Robert Reich, non-presidential candidate but straight shooter, did likewise in The Guardian on May 8.

In both cases, they saw evidence of obstruction  of justice so plainly exposed in what was the redacted version of the Mueller Report, that the case for impeachment was transparent and compelling.

Last night on CNN  Tom Steyer, who has been calling for the impeachment of Donald Trump since the man took office (even before the Special Counsel’s  investigation had started), once again called for impeachment ASAP.  In Steyer’s view, the Mueller (Special Counsel’s) report had strengthened an already ironclad case.

The political counterargument

The argument against starting impeachment immediately is political. It’s the Nancy Pelosi-led camp urging the Democrats to go slowly and carefully with investigations to build a body of evidence incrementally—and to proceed with impeachment only if the body of evidence reaches critical mass. Otherwise, the violence of the reaction from the Trump base, plus the exhaustion of the political center of the electorate, would make Trump the victim he has consistently claimed to be, and turn the public against a rabid, overreaching, unjustifiably partisan Democratic Party.

The put-a-hold-on-impeachment policy is spun as “let the people decide,” as in, the verdict on Trump should be delivered in the 2020 election.   (Based on the questionable assumption that the election will not be decided by Vladimir Putin.)  What outrages Trump may commit in the interval between now and November 2020 are overshadowed by political considerations.

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Cannot Indict a – What?

“Impermissible” – You Gotta Be Kidding Me

Key to Attorney General William Barr’s prevarications about the culpability of Donald Trump, is the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel’s (OLC’s) official policy that the indictment of a sitting president is “impermissible” because it would “unconstitutionally undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions.”

How does that square, Mr. Barr, with Donald Trump’s boast in January 2016, “I could stand in the middle of Times Square and shoot somebody and not lose any voters?”

Trump apologists will say the latter was merely a comic metaphor just to illustrate the utter loyalty of Trump voters. He “didn’t really mean it.”

But what was it he didn’t really mean? Just the shooting part, or the idea  that his followers absolutely believed he was above the law? Or the implication that, if he acquired enough loyal followers, that he really would be above the law?

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