Politics – Page 5 – Forecast: partly sunny with a chance of cataclysms

Crimes against Nature, I: Border Wall

Inhumanity compounding inhumanity: the monumental price of “homeland security”

Trump’s border wall, an embodiment of cruel immigration policies, is inhumane to people to a degree that is criminal—if not according to written law, then according to moral laws we grasp by intuition. Even many of those whose job it is to enforce draconian immigration policies intuit those laws—it’s just that they don’t obey them.*

Border Wall dividing and conquering life

There’s another, less visible, less publicized inhumanity, that is not so plainly criminal. But in the long run it may be just as devastating to the living world as to refugees and asylum seekers. That’s the way a continuous wall carves up vital, often fragile habitat, puts up barriers to creatures who have neither understanding of, nor use for, political boundaries, and robs the environment of resiliency. We know how habitat fragmentation has diminished the capability of living things to cope with such additional man-made injuries as climate change. However, some things that fragment and destroy habitat have at least the excuse of some utility: roads, farms, power lines, airports, wind farms, solar energy arrays, etc. But this ugly artifice has little purpose besides division for division’s sake. It is a monument to human vanity, and especially the vanity of one corrupt, depraved individual, U.S. President Donald Trump.

So many wildlife refuges and sanctuaries are already under assault by the Wall or are soon to be, that I gave up trying to list them here. Just do a search on a string such as “threatened wildlife refuge border wall,” or similar keywords, and you’ll find enough of them to make you seethe, or weep. One particular lovely and imminently jeopardized landscape can be seen at Lower Rio Grande Valley Wildlife Refuge

The horrific and potentially irreparable damage resulting from extensions of a continuous border wall would spread well beyond wildlife refuges, as described in a paper in the journal Bioscience and summarized last summer in an article in Cosmos. (I referred to this same piece in a post last year; it’s even more urgent today.) The article had 16 co-authors and was endorsed by 2,500 scientists worldwide.

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Is She Too Tough? Amy Klobuchar Takes Heat

Klobuchar staffers cry Bad Boss

Presidential Democratic candidate Amy Klobuchar got sandbagged last week by Klobuchar staffers who were characterized as “terrified aides” likening her to no less a petty tyrant than Donald Trump. Reports of her abusiveness headlined in Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post, followed up by a piece in Vanity Fair by Tina Nguyen (February 8). Nguyen’s coverage fortunately came around to positive comments by Klobuchar supporters (yes, current and former aides! with skins, we are made to think, are like a rhinoceros!).

Last week, NPR’s night anchor Mary Louise Kelly was interviewing a politics specialist regarding Klobuchar, who had at the time not yet declared as a candidate for President. The guest journalist mentioned the knock against Klobuchar’s alleged bitchiness, at which Mary Louise observed that the same kind of criticism would rarely be leveled at a male candidate for office.* The reporter (a woman whose name I don’t recall) hesitated for a moment and then said, in the tone of someone being thrown slightly off her game, something like “yeah, you have a point.”

Mary Louise Kelly’s suggestion of a double standard being applied to Senator Klobuchar does not excuse Klobuchar’s behavior if she was/is in fact, cruelly abusive. Of course I don’t know what goes on behind closed doors, but I do know that many admired and inspiring leaders do not and have not suffered fools gladly. I also know that there are other staffers who have come to Klobuchar’s defense. I know that on the Rachel Maddow show a few days ago Klobuchar admitted to losing her temper on occasion, with her usual matter-of-fact tone, sans defensiveness. (She made a similar admission to George Stephanapoulos on live TV.)

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How Bad a Joke Are “Alternative Facts?”

What you see is often not what you get.

The now infamous video of a confrontation between a Catholic high school student and a Native American elder near the Lincoln Memorial on January 18th shook the cable news landscape like the launch of a Saturn Five rocket. Much of what was left after the first 48 hours of media conflagration was a lot of hot dust and scorched earth. Many were outraged, some were burned, many were confused, and no one was happy.

(I’ve embedded the initially-released video at the very end of this post.)

After a cool-down of a few days, some perceptive commentators noted that what went most terribly wrong in the immediate aftermath of the incident was the dependence on one three -and-a-half minute video, shot from one angle with the camera held almost perfectly still throughout, to convey truth. It was that video— and one intense image in particular pulled from it—that triggered a righteous media blast from the Left. A tweetstorm erupted, blown initially from the Left and soon answered by gusts from the Right, while more, and increasingly ambiguous, information flowed in.

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Trump Gets Pushback from the Senate; Mitch McConnell Calls Dysfunction Dysfunctional; Reagan Anti-Government Crusade Marches On

McConnell implies Trump may have gone a step too far

While Senate Republicans cast about for some legislative hodgepodge to satisfy both President Trump and House Democrats in order to prevent another government shutdown, Mitch McConnell was saying, publicly, that he was “for whatever works that prevents the level of dysfunction we’ve seen on full display here the last month.” This not only addressed the narrow matter of the border wall standoff, but also spoke to calls from Democrats and some Republicans to create a legislative mechanism to prevent both the President and the legislature from using government shutdowns as a bargaining tool on any legislation. McConnell, with the weight of 35 years in the Senate and at least six government shutdowns behind him, commented, firmly “I don’t like shutdowns. I don’t think they work for anybody.”

If such a mechanism could be put in place, that would take away what Trump feels is his strongest bargaining chip. His other chip, the declaration of a national emergency, is proving so far to be too hot for even Trump to handle.

This would be the closest thing to a public rebuke of Donald Trump that Mitch McConnell has delivered since the Republican primary season in 2016 when McConnell supported Rand Paul and made evident his disdain for the eventual winner. He is now, obliquely, standing up to Trump’s cavalier use of the federal government as a hostage in his all-or-nothing campaign to get $5.7 billion for an expansion of the magnificent border wall.

By framing the shutdown dilemma as a matter of process rather than substance, McConnell may dodge a counterattack by the President. He may think Trump owes him something for his month-long refusal to bring to the Senate floor a veto-proof bill to re-open the government. He may think that Trump himself believes he owes McConnell something. Enough to keep his trap shut for a few hours.

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Hands across the Divide: a Softer Approach to Politics

Liberals, listen up! Not all that’s Right is Wrong

In the last two days my left wing partisanship has been mollified by news that undercut my picture of the political right wing as a monolithic tribe.

Of course I’ve been aware that my bias (and possibly yours?) has been simplistic and irrational, but when I hear leaders on the hard Right speak, all my objectivity flies out the window.

Time for a correction through hearing from regular people.

“Hands across the Hills” attempt to bridge a painful divide

On November 29, on NPR’s Here and Now,* came a report on “Hands across the Hills,” a gathering of Trump-voting West Virginians and Massachusetts liberals face-to-face.

A link to the Here and Now story follows. I recommend, if you have the time, to listen to the podcast, which has the greater emotional force. The transcript is quicker, but loses some of the human touch.

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Low Crimes and Misdemeanors: Crushing Democracy One Shovelful at a Time

Scales of justice teetering all one way

Thunk, thunk, thunk, is the sound of Donald Trump throwing shovelfuls of partisan excrement on one side of the sagging scales of justice within a crumbling system of governance. In one week he has named a blatantly partisan operative of the political right wing to the position of Acting Attorney General—without even bothering to give lip service to the obligation to get Senate confirmation—and gone on to deny the legitimacy of elections in places where the sole source of grievance is that the President’s allies may lose to Democrats.

Talk of impeachment is now much in the air, with pundits parsing the meaning of the “high crimes and misdemeanors” to be invoked in the case of impeaching a U.S. President. Here’s the wording of the impeachment clause in the U.S. Constitution: “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

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Hollowing out of the Middle Class: a Second Look

Middle class hollowed out? Kind of. Unhappy? It depends . . .

Progressives like Bernie Sanders and Michael Moore are fond of excoriating the rich and powerful for the “hollowing-out of the middle class.” What they fail to mention—either for lack of information or for political expediency—is that, money-wise, more families are leaving the middle class on the upside rather than the downside. There’s plenty of evidence for this. Check out the following, which is similar to other reports, but I especially like it because it is based on Pew research findings:

https://qz.com/1005068/the-upper-middle-class-is-the-new-middle-class/

A larger segment of the middle class, it seems, is rising into the highest and upper-middle class than is falling into the lowest class (the lower middle has remained unchanged), and the net effect, dollar-wise, of “hollowing out” appears to be a positive. Is this a Good Thing? After all, can’t money buy happiness?

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Settled Law, Settled Liar: Mistrust Rising

When an evasion is really, dangerously, a lie

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s dance around the question of whether he would overrule Roe v. Wade makes one wonder, on what other matter has one of his evasions, stripped of legalistic nuances, amounted to a lie.

Certainly Kavanaugh’s dodge around the Roe issue, that Roe is “settled law,” thus implying it was immune to being found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, is a lie. This was the the lie told to Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a staunch supporter of Roe v. Wade, in what she characterized as a lengthy one-on-one discussion. She reported that Kavanaugh said he regarded Roe as “settled law.”

As one commentator on MSNBC or CNN (sorry I forget which, and who) quipped: “Well, settled law is settled until it isn’t.”

Now, thanks to the recent release of an email heretofore kept under Republican Senate Judiciary Committee wraps as “committee confidential,” we find Kavanaugh, back in 2003, saying “I am not sure that all legal scholars refer to Roe as the settled law of the land at the Supreme Court level since [the Supreme] Court can always overrule its precedent, and three current Justices on the Court would do so.”

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Tribalism, Patriotism, White Supremacy, and the South

Mixed Identity Politics?

Cycling in southern Virginia recently, I noticed a large flag mounted on a 20-foot pole in someone’s front yard—with a conflicted message. The flag, as it turned out, had an identity issue: one side was the conventional Stars and Stripes U.S national flag; the other side was the “Southern Cross” of the Confederate flag (I assume it must have been two flags sewn together; I wasn’t about to stop and ask.) Homes with the two flags displayed separately are not unusual. But this two-faced flag combination captured the mixed identity of those who declare they are patriots, but who owe allegiance to something that is not quite the United States as conceived by the rest of us.

The more common two separate flags in the yard speak loudly for a tribe that has stood for white supremacy* and deep suspicion of the federal government, while also declaring their patriotism. That’s the perversely named “nativist” tribe, by which is meant, not affinity with actual native Americans, but quite the reverse: it’s rather an affinity with white people who invaded from Europe, slaughtered most of the indigenous folks and drove them off their lands. Let’s call the newly arisen nativists “neo nativists.” (Not to be confused with the same psychological term applied to cognitive development.)

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