Towers Just Want to Have Fun
I know many people are thoroughly confused about why the power goes out.
Trumpian Ignorance
The Donald has “issued an ultimatum” to the Congress. I’ve heard or read this line about a half dozen times in the past 30 minutes. This is not only ridiculous, but demonstrates the president’s incredible lack of understanding about the separation of powers and co-equal branches of government.
The President heads up the Executive, which is tasked with implementing and enforcing the laws passed by the Congress. It is the Congress which is tasked with legislative and fiscal responsibility. The President can ask Congress to enact laws. He cannot demand them.
Trump’s ignorance of the Constitutional process is woeful. Does he really presume to tell Congress what to do? The bill he wants passed has been widely panned as the only way to actually make the health care system worse. If it fails later today (as seems likely) and Congress produces a straight repeal bill in June, will he hold to his threat and veto it? To do so would be political suicide. Of course he would sign it.
The reality here is Trump is learning a lesson he should have learned in his pricey boarding school: the President is at the Congress’ mercy on legislative matters. He cannot set deadlines, he cannot set the legislative calendar and he cannot dictate terms. Regardless of how much he bloviates, how many tantrums he throws or how often he tweets, every President runs the risk of becoming impotent if he offends Congress.
Donald Trump runs the risk of becoming a neutered, one-term, inconsequentialPresident if he continues to antagonize his governmental equals. He loves to compare himself to Andrew Jackson. But in reality, his presidency is looking more like another Democrat voted into office to”shake things up.” Another President who ignored political norms, made enemies of his own party, relied more on sycophants and family than people who understand how government functions.
Yes, at this point, the Trump Administration is looking more like the Carter admin than the Reagan years.
It’s Never Easy to Say Good-Bye
As I’m sure many of you know, I’ve dealt with an aggressive case of Crohn’s Disease for almost 26 years. As much as I hate to admit it, I’ve won most of the battles (including a couple when, by all rights, I should not have survived), but the disease is winning the war. That’s why, as of today, I am officially retired.
This hasn’t been an easy decision for me. Willingly giving up my business is one of the most gut-wrenching decisions I’ve ever made. It isn’t one I did on the spur of the moment, but really, my body made the decision for me. I was strongly contemplating it last Fall; by Thanksgiving it was fairly obvious which way I was leaning. I had pretty much made up my mind by New Year’s. My hospitalization in January only served to confirm my decision.
Most people nowadays are at least aware of Crohn’s Disease and know it has something to do with frequent bathroom breaks. That’s a far cry from when I was diagnosed in 1992, when almost nobody had heard of it (I certainly hadn’t). What most of you probably don’t know is all of the other ways Crohn’s can play hell with your life. Over the past 6 years, this disease has shown itself not content with ruining my digestive tract. It’s spread (in order of appearance) to my eyes, my vascular system, my bones, my heart, my lungs and my endocrine system. The most recent organ to feel Crohn’s wrath is my pancreas, which has my blood sugar yo-yo’ing like a hyperactive toddler on a teeter-totter.
Then there’s the chronic fatigue and chronic pain. Sadly, there isn’t much anyone can do about the fatigue. I power through as best I can, but between the sugar spikes and pain I find myself expending energy just to sit upright. As for the pain, literally every joint in my body – from my neck to my ankles – is constantly throbbing, aching and burning. In a way, it’s a good thing: I don’t notice the pain in my gut nearly so much. When it gets unbearable, I’ll take a couple of Tylenol. The doctors have offered me a wonderful cocktail of Tramadol and Flexoril, but as long as I can grin and bear it, I’ll prefer bourbon and rum in my cocktails.
Of course, since I was confirmed legally blind in November I’ve lost my driving privileges. To be honest, that wasn’t a huge blow. I’d noticed months before that my eyesight was failing and drove sparingly. But it’s still just one more reason that retiring now makes sense.
Finally, there is my family to consider. Fortunately, my sons are all doing reasonably well for themselves. But I can’t work myself into my grave so long as my wife is willing to stand by my side. And I’ve cheated death too many times not to feel his grip on my shoulder. Hopefully, God will hold off a while before He decides He needs another Marine to guard the Pearly Gates.
As for what the future holds, well, I don’t really know. I know I need a heart valve replaced; I’ve begun the testing to see if the rest of my body can stand the strain. I suppose I might do more woodworking and fishing. I’ll probably have time to read the 40 or so unread books in my Kindle library. And I suppose we’ll start looking at property in warmer climes. Even though this winter has been relatively mild, the simple fact is my body starts to shut down when the mercury dips below 50°.
So, it’s time to say so long to Rothfeldt Consulting. It’s been a good ride, but all good things must come to an end.
President Trump, Russophile?
The dominant political news of the week was the dismissal of Lt. Michael Flynn (ret.), President Trump’s first National Security Advisor. His abrupt departure brought back a few issues that should have been answered during the fall campaign, but weren’t. In a multi-part series, I’ll be examining the following:
1. Were the leaks that led to Flynn’s ouster justified? Are leaks ever justified?
2. Is the President’s Russophilia damaging to his Presidency and the nation writ large?
3. Should career civil servants place greater emphasis on conscience or policy?
It’s been a nagging question for something like 18 months now: what is the relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin? The questions first arose during the campaign, when Trump seemed to be sending public love notes to Putin. The questions reappeared after President Trump, rather than accept that Putin is a diabolical dictator, preferred to argue that the US government operates in the same nefarious manner as the Russian. And they roared into prominence this week, with the revelations about former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn’s tête-à-tête with the Russian ambassador and the leaks about the Trump campaign’s contacts with the Russian SVR.
The President’s conduct towards Russia and Vladimir Putin certainly engender some questions.
1. Why is Trump so reluctant to condemn Russia and Vladimir Putin in particular?
I’ve given this some thought, and I have a sort of good news/bad news idea about the subject. The good news: I do not think President Trump is being blackmailed by, or in any other way criminally beholden to the Russian Federation. Do I think he has business interests there? It would be ludicrous to think a man who once held a beauty pageant in Moscow and has at least minority interests in resort properties around the world doesn’t have some sort of similar arrangements in Russia. Do I think those holdings are substantial enough that the Russian government could leverage them to their advantage? No. Not even someone as vain as Donald Trump would be willingly complicit in treason over a few hotel rooms. If he is, then we’ve plumbed new depths of depravity.
I suspect the reason is simpler, but far more disturbing. Based on public statements going back nearly 30 years, I believe our President wants to be Vladimir Putin. He admires and respects the way Putin handles things, with an autocratic iron fist wrapped in a cement glove. Killing political opponents? Perfectly fine (remember, Trump once praised the Chinese for running down dissenters with tanks). Invading foreign countries and plundering them? It’s cool – just keep the oil. Operating above, below and in conflict with established law? From abusing eminent domain in the 1980’s to his “so-called judges” remarks in the last few weeks, Trump has consistently demonstrated that he thinks laws apply to everyone BUT him. Even Stephen Miller’s outburst last Sunday (“the President’s authority will not be questioned!”) demonstrates a very totalitarian view of government, the kind of government prevented by our Constitution. That he’s constrained by the Constitution and its provisions against executive overreach galls Trump (and, sadly, his supporters) to no end. Putin has no such constraints and when he did, he was able to just ignore them until the Russian constitution was changed.
2. Why was his campaign in “constant” contact with Russian officials?
This is, of course, still unproven. However, the fact is that there is an investigation into the likelihood of contact between the SVR and the Make America Great Again campaign, and that it’s been partially leaked, suggest there’s more than just smoke to this question. As for why it would have occurred, see the above conclusion that Donald J. Trump stars in “Crazy about Vladdy.” The one thing that nobody seems to recall is that Vladimir Putin actually won a democratic election in 2000, on a platform eerily similar to the one Donald Trump ran on in 2016. If the person you venerate over all others might be in a position to offer advice and encouragement, any of us would seek their counsel.
3. Why didn’t Trump tell Vice President Pence that former national security adviser Mike Flynn wasn’t being honest about the nature of his conversations with the Russian ambassador?
3a. Why wasn’t Flynn fired the second Trump learned he was deceiving the vice president?
Once again, if the President is attempting to model his administration on that of his favorite Russian dictator, neither of these questions is difficult to answer. In fact, they both have the same answer: Flynn was ordered to lie to Pence by Trump. As to why Trump would have Pence lied to, there are two reasons. The first is that Trump was certainly aware that having Flynn reach out to the Russian ambassador regarding the latest Obama sanctions was a clear violation of the Logan Act. He also knows that despite decades in public office, nobody has ever accused Mike Pence of malfeasance or corruption. He knew then that Pence’s reaction would, at best, be another tepid endorsement of the President’s orders and Flynn’s duplicity in carrying them out.
The other thing to remember on this point is that part of Vlad’s governing style, and one that has thus far proven true of Trump’s, is a dedication to the idea of equal but rival teams in open competition. Pence is the de facto leader of the ‘establishment’ group. Flynn was very much part of the ‘apocalyptic’ group. In effect, Trump was already pitting those two groups against each other before he even took office. That he waited nearly 72 hours before firing Flynn after the first revelations about that phone call, and Flynn’s duplicity towards Pence, looks for all the world like Trump was waiting to see if there would be any blow-back on Pence. After all, Trump is also aware that of all the people in his administration, the two most admired on Capitol Hill are Mike Pence and James Mattis. Pence, being his Constitutionally appointed successor should he be unable to complete his term, therefore presents a clear and pressing danger. The fact that unlike Obama with Joe Biden, or George HW Bush with Dan Qualyle, his VP is considered one of the few sane members of his inner circle poses the threat, essentially giving cover to Democrats if they decide to implement clause 4 of the 25th Amendment.
The larger question that needs to be answered is: does the President’s infatuation with Russian style politics and deep admiration of authoritarianism endanger the nation? So far, the answer is not in any lasting way. The Constitution was written by men who were intimately familiar with being ruled by a tyrant and designed to ensure that no one person could unilaterally impose his will on the government. As they intended, the structures they built have soundly defeated Trump’s every move to emulate his idol’s governing style, much to his chagrin. The separation of powers works.
That is not to say Trump cannot inflict serious damage, at least on the United States and the western democracies strategic position. But dealing a fatal blow to the Constitution does appear to be beyond his scope.
There are other questions, but we don’t have enough information to speculate on the answers. For instance, who in the campaign was speaking to the Russians? Are they now in the administration? Were any of those people responsible for the leaks to the Washington Post that started this ball of wax? The President could, of course, put an end to all this by issuing a statement that answers those questions.
But then again, we know Trump isn’t about to do that. He’ll continue his current method of dealing with this crisis, attacking the press for asking the questions and attacking the leaks themselves. Because, after all, that’s what Vladimir would do.
Leaks vs. Whistleblowers
The dominant political news of the week was the dismissal of Lt. Michael Flynn (ret.), President Trump’s first National Security Advisor. His abrupt departure brought back a few issues that should have been answered during the fall campaign, but weren’t. In a multi-part series, I’ll be examining the following:
1. Were the leaks that led to Flynn’s ouster justified? Are leaks ever justified?
2. Is the President’s Russophilia damaging to his Presidency and the nation writ large?
3. Should career civil servants place greater emphasis on conscience or policy?
One of the more interesting results of the Flynn Fiasco is the President’s relentless damning of the news articles that forced his hand and the leaks that made those news articles possible. While part of the attacks are typical hubris that nobody, except the Trumpers, takes seriously (sorry, the stories weren’t “fake news”), as with all good propaganda there is an element of truth to them. We’re all aware that Trump takes criticism about as well as a child. Those stories weren’t the opinion-filled pieces that Trump has been able to dismiss as terrible journalism. They are hard-hitting, factual articles that were made possible by the type of inside information that isn’t ever supposed to see newsprint.
In short, the President is rightly incensed about the leaks which have plagued his administration from Day 1. Regardless of the fact that we know Trump values personal loyalty above all other traits, leaks of this sort can constitute a national security threat.Take away that Trump feels personally slighted by what he perceives as an internal attack from the “deep state,” and we’re still left with the reality that someone (or several someone’s) within the National Security Council staff went and blabbed to the Washington Post about Flynn’s violations of the Logan Act, and to the New York Times and CNN about the Trump presidential campaign’s contacts with the Russian intel services as far back as 2015.
Americans have always had a love/hate relationship with government leaks. We celebrate Mark Felt, the leaker later famously revealed as “Deep Throat,” whose information exposed the corruption and malfeasance of the Nixon administration. We vilify Bradley Manning, whose leaking apparently drove him/her/it to finally lose whatever grasp on reality him/her/it ever had. Then there are figures like Edward Snowden, about whom we are ambivalent: the leaks were damaging and showed illegal government activity, but we can’t quite make up our mind whether he’s a whistleblower, a pawn or a traitor.
Now add in that often, our government will purposely leak information. Whether it’s Scooter Libby giving David Ignatius “deep background” about Iraqi WMD, or James Jones’ leaking Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s Afghan plan, the previous two administrations have used strategically timed leaks from the National Security Council to advance their agenda. That’s not inconsequential; the last 16 years have seen increasingly aggressive actions against leakers.
So the question before us is this: when is a leaker a whistleblower? Felt was undoubtedly a whistleblower, Manning a leaker.
The answer seems to be more one of public opinion than anything else. Had the nation simply shrugged off the Constitutional breaches of Richard Nixon as “Nixon being Nixon” and “politics as usual,” Jeffrey Zeifman would have been tasked with hounding Woodward and Bernstein to reveal their source. If we had publicly decided that Wikileak’s publication of Manning’s data dump revealed a pattern of illegal conduct by US forces, he might not be trying to get the taxpayers to pay for having his genitals whacked off. As for Mr. Snowden, he will probably find himself in permanent exile – while the NSA spying certainly violated the 4th Amendment, that Constitutional protection isn’t terribly popular at the moment.
Another factor is whether the government wants to pursue charges against the leaker. An example of such a situation is Scott Davis, the man responsible for exposing the Department of Veteran’s Affairs allowing veterans to die before ever seeing a doctor. He leaked internal documents showing VA was well aware of the problem but not doing anything to address it, a clear violation of 18 USC 793, 794. Yet, even the notoriously anti-leak Obama administration passed on filing charges against Davis. This was despite the fact that few leaks embarrassed the former President quite as badly as the revelation that even as he was sending American servicemen into harm’s way, he was turning a blind eye to their care upon their return.
And so, in this way, we’ll be able to eventually determine which of these leaks merit whistleblower status. That Gen. Flynn broke the law is beyond doubt; that he demonstrated woefully poor discretion likewise. (Seriously, a career spook who didn’t know a phone call to the Russian ambassador was being recorded by both the NSA and the Russian FSB? That’s…terrible). The level of demonstrated incompetence alone should have resulted in his dismissal, much less the willful lying to the Vice President. Similarly, if the ties between the Russian intel service and the Trump campaign are proven, then those leakers will likely rise in American lore to match that of Deep Throat. If it results in nothing more than innuendo, the President will be fully justified in rooting out and charging the people responsible.
The Phone Call
It’s late one evening. Behind the bar at Andy’s Cafe in Cincinnati, a spray tanned older gentleman laughs quietly with his guests when the phone rings.
“Andy’s, where the beer is cold and the music is hot,” he answers.
“Hey, John! It’s Paul – Paul Ryan, remember me? Well, I’m sure glad I caught you. I need some advice.”
“Well, you know I left that life behind, Paul. Breaking up bar fights is easier on a 67 year old body than those squabbles on Capitol Hill.”
“I know, I know. But look, I’m in a real pickle here. Was kind of hoping to bounce some ideas off you and see what you think.”
“Are you recording this? Is this some sort of practical joke? You know, like when y’all ran that celebrity real estate developer for President. Man, that was a doozy!”
“No, no, this is serious. And yeah, glad you liked that one. But there’s something you may not have heard about, yet.”
“Really? Shoot.”
“That guy is now the President of the United States. And I don’t mean the United States of Benetton. And he’s part of the reason I need your help.”
“You mean, you idiots ran the only man in America who uses more spray tan than me and lies more than Nancy? Wasn’t that script for ‘Trading Places 2’ rejected by Hollywood?”
You can hear the pause before Ryan responds, “Maybe it was. But he and that gawd-awful combover are in charge now.”
“Oh, you are truly and greatly screwed. Like Big Green Weenie screwed. No, better yet…”
“John, this is serious. Everyone thinks he’s a Russian spy or something, and DC is so busy not tripping over one another over they haven’t noticed the Chinese star-and-sickle tattoo he got the other day.”
“Right, serious. Speakering of which, you haven’t introduced that tooth repair kit I invented yet, have you? Give me a couple a days Head Start.”
“How droll.”
“I know, hahahahahahaha! ”
“So, do you have any advice for me?”
“Retire. Buy a bar in Wisconsin. You can get royally drunk and nobody gives a shit.”
“No, look, this is serious. Do you know what he asked me to do this morning? He asked me to draw up legislation selling Alaska back to the Russians!”
“Well, he is a real estate developer. I imagine he got a good price.”
“Mitch is beside himself over this. Jeb Hensarling wants to know if he can get something similar from Spain for California. This whole thing is going off the rails.”
“You guys are the ones who nominated him. If I remember right, you had a chance to turn him away at the convention. You gotta deal with him now.” The old bartender belches loudly. “Damn, that was a GOOD one! Did you hear that, Paulie boy? Rattled the doors with that one, I did!”
Ryan sighs, loudly. “That’s history. What do I do now?”
“I told you. Retire. Buy a bar. Get drunk.”
“You can’t be serious!”
“Sure I am. I did and look at me now. I’m hanging out with my friends, only using spray tan once or twice a week and I’ve only cried once in the last year. Best move I ever made was coming back to this bar.”
“Thanks, John. You’ve been a real help.”
“Glad I could be, Paul. And next time you’re in Cincinnati, the beer is on me.”
A Message to the Trumpers
I am writing this on a Tuesday, before the sun peeks it’s head over the horizon. I am giving myself time before I actually publish, because the topic I’m about to cover is one that angers me beyond almost anything else imaginable. Before I write something so intemperate it results in my home being firebombed, I’m giving myself time to cool off between writing and publishing. Because friends, I’m about to hold a mirror up to you – and some of you aren’t going to like what you see. You’re going to be angry with me for pointing out your hypocrisy, angry enough to fight. That’s fine. As long as you also realize the reason you’re angry with me is because I’ve been bold enough to force you to recognize your own stupidity, I can live with the epithets and bruised feelings.
See, today I want to discuss not only President Trump’s obvious disdain for the nation he was elected to lead. That is bad enough. What makes it worse – what has me ready to start tearing people’s heads off their necks – are the apologists giving him cover on this. They all claim to be patriotic Americans, yet every single one of them is ready to denigrate their country in defense of party and President. Trump’s megalomania has the potential to be problematic. It is the enablers, the apologists and mindless partisans who make that potential reality.
Are you one of those mindless partisans? Ask yourself this: if Barack Obama had, during an interview with Anderson Cooper during the Super Bowl pregame festivities, compared the United States to the government of Fidel Castro, how would have you reacted? Sounds silly, right? After all, we know how you would have reacted. During his Great Apology Tour to begin his presidency, President Obama made dozens of inflammatory statements apologizing for United States leadership, for defeating communism, for leading in the Global War on Terror and for other perceived sins. He was roundly criticized for those statements, and rightly so.
I’m not going out on a limb here when I say you were part of that chorus of condemnation. I know you were. I spoke with many of you on the subject. Your Facebook and Twitter timelines from the Spring and Summer of 2009 are filled with statements of derision for the egregious positions taken by the President. And you know what? We were justified in our contempt for a President who willingly, eagerly even, held his nation up to international ridicule.
Yet on Sunday, Donald Trump took Barack Obama’s anti-american rhetoric and ratcheted it up to 11. Never before has a president told the world that the United States murders political dissidents, assassinates reporters, invades foreign countries and threatens global peace in order to enrich a few privileged members of the government. Never mind that the veracity of such a statement wouldn’t stand 5 minutes of examination. The very idea that a President would ascribe such a motive to our governance is as noxious to our national soul as chlorine gas would be to your lungs.
But rather than being roundly and strongly condemned for saying it, there was muted concern by some Republicans. There was no reaction at all, other than some faint applause, from many of you Trump train passengers.
Personally, the President’s statement left me incredulous and stunned. But YOUR reactions have made me so upset I actually feel physically ill.
*********
It is now early in the afternoon on Tuesday. I needed to take a break. My blood pressure was rising and my vision narrowing, and my infamous temper was beginning to boil over.
Around lunchtime, the Trump administration decided that anyone critical of them was trafficking in “fake news.” They even took the unusual step of not only releasing a press statement to that effect, but sending a White House spokesman on a TV tour to press home their point. Well, so be it. Sorry, President Trump, but I think this is important enough to intrude upon your dream world. This is one time trying to bend reality to your will won’t work.
Over the past two days, I have found myself in a few heated arguments regarding the president’s embrace of soviet tactics. One person is so convinced of the certitude of Trump’s position they now refuse to talk to me. The other was trying to convince me that the half-hearted reprobations being offered by various Republicans on the Sunday talk shows demonstrated sufficient outrage. I think some feelings got hurt there. too.
Those condemnations were anything but. The statements made by people like Marco Rubio, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan and the like were right to note that the United States does not conduct national or international politics in the same vein as Vladimir Putin. But what each of those mealy-mouthed politicians, those sorry excuses for men, the morally challenged of US politics failed to do is what was required of them. Not a one actually said anything along the lines of, “The President is clearly wrong in his assertion.” None of them could muster the courage to link the President to his outrageousness. From a purely political POV, I understand. None of them are willing to chance losing the Trumper vote. It does absolutely nothing for my esteem of their character (they have none), but I understand.
Indeed, in the 60 hours or so since news of the President’s adoptive tone of soviet style tactics broke, I have only heard two elected Republicans take Trump to task. One is Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska. The other is Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma. That’s it. Two men with the basic courage to stand up for what is right and to castigate wrong. Folks, we aren’t doing JFK proud here.
Now, as I was saying, I may not be thrilled with the limp-wristed elected officials of the GOP but I understand their stances. It takes real leadership to risk losing your office in defense of the nation’s moral character these days. That it does brings me back to the real problem – the average Trumper reading this right now.
*********
It’s now late in the afternoon. I was interrupted by an internet outage, which I guess can get filed under “stuff happens.” But you know what I can’t put in that “stuff happens” file? Presidents throwing the country under the bus.
There’s a lot of things this President has done, and I’m certain will do, that can get filed there. His inept speaking style certainly qualifies (even if he does have the biggest words). The botched messaging behind, and terrible rollout of, the visa moratorium does, too. Likewise the really poor Cabinet appointment process. But those are the kinds of things that can be chalked up to political inexperience, bad timing and concerted (and often over-the-top) political resistance.
But in admitting that he respect’s Vladdy Putin’s management style, President Trump created what would for anyone else be an unforced error. Except in Trump’s case, this isn’t an error. Even if he hadn’t spent the campaign praising Putin, watching how incensed he became at Bill O’Reilly’s rightly calling the dictator a “killer” gave away his true feelings. In fact, when you watch that segment (the pertinent part begins at the 2:10 mark) and watch Trump’s facial expression and body language, it’s the same you see right before a bar fight breaks out.
Why?
Why, indeed, would the President of the United States of America then launch into a diatribe about how the United States is no better, drawing a moral equivalence between soldiers killed on a battlefield and the summary execution, torture, and murder of political opponents? How can he possibly countenance a man who had some 13,000 Syrian dissidents hung in Aleppo and think the US government commits equally heinous acts???
Had the President said something along the lines of, “Look, we all know Putin is a dictator who used terrible means to get power and does horrible things to stay in power. But I think we might work together to rid the world of islamic terror, kind of like we worked with Joe Stalin to eradicate Nazism” I doubt anyone could take him to task. It’s factual and it’s an opinion of a possible policy approach that does have some upside.
Instead, we have the President defending the world’s worst dictator since the fall of the Soviet Union by saying the United States uses soviet political tactics. Oy gevalt!
It demonstrates one of two things. The less onerous, and sadly less likely, is that President Trump is terribly misinformed about the character of Putin. Given his defiant refusal to accept even the most basic intel, it is a possibility. But far more likely is that Trump does respect Putin and his methods. It fits a pattern that Trump has exhibited for as long as he’s harbored political ambitions (remember, in 1990 he praised Deng Xiaoping for the way the Chinese Communist party put down the pro-democracy movement, exemplified by having tanks run down students in Tiananmen Square). In short, Trump loves him some dictators.
That our President equates strength with authoritarianism shouldn’t surprise anyone. He has given wink and nod deference to the Constitution, while showing he has no idea what comes after, “We the People”. That, in itself, is not troubling. He is not our first President to prefer trying to run the country as an autocrat. Some of our best (Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR) and some of our worst (Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter) presidents pushed the limits of the executive authority given them by the Constitution. What ultimately kept those autocratic tendencies in check was that when they overstepped, even their most die-hard supporters rose up to say, “Wait a minute, Mr. President!”.
Once the election was over, I accepted the decision and said I would support the President when I thought he was right, and would come down on him like a brick wall when he was wrong. He has done some good things already, and I’ve offered my praise and support for those things. I think most of his cabinet choices are excellent (with the exception of the Secretary of Veteran’s Affairs nominee). I applaud the idea of implementing an visa moratorium on nations without a functioning government but highly functioning terrorism training camps. I applaud the decision to move forward with the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines.
I cannot and will not accept that our president is on television, in the lead-up to the most watched event on the planet, telling the world that the United States government sanctions the murder, torture and persecution of it’s political opposition. That is more than a bridge too far. It may even be treasonous. Let’s face it – that clip is likely to wind up in an ISIS or Al Qaeda video at some point. I can just hear Anwar al-Awlaki narrating in the background, “See? Even the American President believes the United States is the Great Satan!”.
Those of you who are sitting on the sidelines, holding neither this president nor the members of his party accountable for such vile sentiments, are even worse. You demonstrated by this election that the real power in this nation still rests with you. During the election, many of you promised that if a President Trump overstepped his bounds you would hit him, hard, despite your unwavering support for his campaign.
I’m still waiting. Much as I worried then, you’ve drunk too deeply of the orange Kool-Aid and left your objectivity behind. Rather than challenging Trump on a patently dangerous and unamerican statement, you’ve opted to ignore it. Or even worse, to actually defend the indefensible. You have, in short, abdicated your citizenship in favor of not being uncomfortable. Because let’s face it, having to admit that you might have something in common with the avowed Trump haters would be uncomfortable, wouldn’t it?
But you know what it would need? It would need you to grow a pair, to have a little moral courage, to believe in something other than a spray tanned narcissist. So far, ALL of you are lacking in the cajones department. Even though you know I’m right, I’m not willing to bet more than 10% of you actually come to your senses. But I am willing to bet most of the remaining 90% will find it easy – fun, even – to adopt the President’s authoritarian attitude.
Because you would rather not be Americans anymore . You would rather be Trumpers.
And that, my friends, is the saddest thing of all.
An Open Letter of Praise for the VA
Those of you who have been following my blog for a while should know a few things about me. I am a proud veteran, and I have Crohn’s Disease. And I have been an outspoken critic of the Veteran’s Administration, and the Veteran’s Health Care System in particular. But I try to be fair in my criticisms, and when someone does something right they deserve to be recognized. Such is the case with my recent hospitalization at the East Orange VA Hospital. Following is a letter I wrote to the Secretary of Veteran’s Affairs (Des.), David Shulkin and the Director of the New Jersey Veteran’s Health Care System, Vincent Immiti.
Gentlemen,
I am a Cold War era veteran who has dealt with the Veteran’s Health Administration since 1994. Over the intervening years, I have had my share of complaints. I have been either an inpatient and/or outpatient recipient of services at multiple hospitals: Ft. Lauderdale, Wilmington (DE), Philadelphia, New York Harbor and, of course, the Lyons and East Orange campuses of the NJVHCS. I am not writing to tell you that rainbows are blooming over the VHA – only a fool would believe that. But I feel that after years of heaping some well-deserved abuse on what has proven to be a dysfunctional system, my most recent experience is deserving of praise for a job well done.
On Saturday, January 21 of this year I was brought into the East Orange Veteran’s Hospital Emergency Room. I have suffered with Crohn’s Disease since 1994 and this was the beginning of yet another hospital stay for me. I was not looking forward to it, as my previous partaking’s of the VHA’s hospitality always left me feeling more as if I were a POW than a patient. Allow me to say, I was pleasantly (as pleasantly as a hospital stay can prompt) surprised by this admission.
It truly was a night and day experience, compared to all my previous hospitalizations. Whereas in the past, my concerns and questions were met with derision or (even worse) indifference, this time I found the medical staff earnestly answering my questions, explaining the anticipated course of therapy and being attentive to my concerns and those of my family. In past hospitalizations, medications would arrive haphazardly without any semblance of a schedule, nurses would be impossible to find, even when called, and doctors acted as if I, the patient, were a burden they would rather not deal with. The only thing they seemed interested in was prescribing high doses of pain killers and moving on to the next victim.
Hospital cleanliness was always a concern, as I could go days without seeing a mop or broom used. As you’re probably aware, Crohn’s patients in the middle of an extreme flare are prone to having accidental, violent bowel movements. In 2009, after once such episode, the nursing staff did eventually come in to change the bedsheets – but with a set of blood-stained ones. Such was the level of contempt that the overall staff seemed to have for the patients in their care.
As veterans, we do not ask for anything special. Every veteran I’ve ever met is proud of our service to our nation and would gladly reenlist should the nation need our services again. As patients, all we’ve ever asked for is to be treated with the basic respect anyone should give another human being. The anger and disgust many of us feel towards the VHA is rooted in the failure of the VHA to recognize and act upon that humanity.
But as I mentioned, this hospitalization was not only what one would expect at any medical facility, but in many ways surpassed even the highest expectations one could have of any hospital. The staff exhibited all the hallmarks of a professional medical organization: courtesy, attentiveness, compassion and competence. Nurse calls were answered promptly, and if an RN was needed but unavailable, the LPN’s explained the situation. My attending physician not only provided timely and pertinent explanations of my care – in terms a layman can understand! – but proved an exceptional coordinator with the specialists I needed (gastroenterology, pulmonology and cardio). Tests that were performed were explained beforehand, including not only descriptions of the procedures but the reasons for them. The residents, interns and medical students did not treat me as an object of fascination on par with a living cadaver, but as a suffering patient with information they needed to perform their duties. Even the orderlies, janitorial staff and other support staff approached their jobs with a general friendliness and professionalism that made the otherwise dread of a hospital stay comforting.
The change is remarkable. I was going to attempt to single out individuals for jobs well done, but then realized everyone associated with my care deserves special recognition.
I am not a medical professional. I suppose you could say I’m a professional patient, given my history, but that’s the extent of my medical training. However, my post-military career has been in operations and program management. As such, I can recognize and appreciate when an outstanding manager has taken control of a bad situation and is effecting a complete turnaround.
As I began, I’m not going to gloss over the fact that there are still major problems and deficiencies throughout VHA. However, Mr. Shulkin, upon your confirmation I can think of no better place to start turning around the system than seeking out your best, listening to what they’ve done and implementing those practices throughout VHA. Based on my recent stay, you would do very well to begin with Mr. Immiti. The change he has effected is nothing short of amazing.
I thank you for your time and again, congratulations on a job well done.
Semper Fi and Regards,
Raymond Rothfeldt
Combat Vets Are Not Insane
Yesterday, Esteban Santiago-Ruiz, an Iraq combat veteran since discharged from the Alaska National Guard, opened fire in Ft. Lauderdale’s airport, killing 5 and wounding 6 more. He boarded an Air Canada flight in Anchorage and flew to Ft. Lauderdale. Upon arrival, he took his lone bag into the restroom, unpacked and loaded a 9mm pistol (along with two spare magazines) and then went into the baggage claim area of Terminal 2. It was there he went on his murderous rampage. Once he was out of ammunition, he assumed the position and waited for the police to arrest him.
Those are the facts. What we do not know is Santiago-Ruiz’s motivation, but two explanations seem likely. One, he joined a terrorist group and carried out an attack. According to news reports, he visited the Anchorage FBI office in November and said he was hearing voices that were telling him to join ISIS. The other probability is that Santiago-Ruiz is suffering from a form of schizophrenia, suffered a psychotic break, and the voices in his head told him to carry out this attack.
Based on the evidence so far, the second scenario seems the more likely – and that worries me greatly. For much of the 1970’s, 80’s and 90’s, the public perception of combat veterans was that they were all ticking time bombs. Movies like Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter and Rambo: First Blood were all Hollywood blockbusters and terrific viewing. Unfortunately, they all showed combat veterans as being psychopathic murderers when the reality couldn’t be further from that portrayal.
Already, news outlets and social media are reverting to that image of the combat vet when discussing Santiago-Ruiz’s actions. Yes, his aunt said he “changed” after his combat tour. That shouldn’t surprise anyone. Everyone I know who has been in combat is changed by the experience. Odds are, that Santiago-Ruiz suffers from PTSD. It’s a relatively common occurrence among combat veterans, and for good reason. Any experience where you spend months on end in life-and-death situations, where not only your life but the lives of your closest friends depend on your actions and reactions, is going to rewire your brain.
However, PTSD is not related to homicidal rage, nor does it even begin to closely resemble the type of psychotic break required to shoot up an airport. Indeed, the type of break exhibited by Santiago-Ruiz generally isn’t induced by combat, unless there’s a traumatic brain injury involved (from what we know thus far, it doesn’t seem he suffered one).
So far, these basic truths haven’t stopped the media from reverting to the tired “psycho vet” meme as an explanation for Santiago-Ruiz’s actions. That’s lazy journalism at it’s worst, and it’s too bad this is the route the media has chosen to exploit. I urge you to ignore any outlet that tries to push this narrative. Remember, combat veterans make up less than 2% of our population. They answered the call the rest of the nation ignored and put their lives on the line to defend the United States; a test of public service most would fail. To ostracize them over fake story lines generated for cheap ratings, is to cheapen their service and lessen our nation. Shame on those who would advance such stories, and shame on those gullible enough to believe them.
Hacking, Hacked
On Friday, the Washington Post essentially recirculated a months old story about the DNC email leak and possible involvement of the Russian government. However, in the best interests of turning mole hills into mountains, they changed two aspects of the story. First, they claimed the Central Intelligence Agency is certain of the Russian government’s involvement. Second, they claimed the Russian government’s agenda was to deny Hillary Clinton the Presidency. In the ensuing days, the Democrats and neocon wing of the GOP have leapt in with both feet in beating the war drums against Moscow.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Russia is not a historic ally of the USA and Vladimir Putin is not a friend. We also know the DNC was hacked and thousands of their internal emails embarrassingly released in the weeks leading up to the election. We also know the organization that leaked the emails was not the SVR or FSB (the Russian clandestine services) but Wikileaks.
Here’s some other things we know.
- The news outlet that released this scoop, the Washington Post, actively campaigned against Donald Trump throughout the presidential campaign. Since the campaign ended, it has actively sought to undermine the coming Trump administration before it even takes office. This includes attacks on the election itself, including attacks on the Constitution and feeding the false narrative that “fake news” led to Mrs. Clinton’s defeat. Interestingly enough, the paper has also claimed that most “fake news” is generated in Russia.
- The FBI earlier released their own report regarding the DNC hack, concluding that while it was “probable” that the Russian government had a role, it did not find that role as consequential. It also noted a failed hack attempt at the RNC.
- The CIA does not “leak” investigations through “unnamed sources.” First, the CIA cannot investigate anything on US soil. Doing so breaks US law. Second, anyone at CIA (other than political operatives with White House cover) wouldn’t dare leak anything. Doing so guarantees a life of turning big rocks into little rocks at Ft. Leavenworth.
- Ordinarily, a story of this magnitude (cyber warfare directed against the US by our greatest enemy of the 20th century) would have had dozens of follow-on pieces from rival news organizations, all working to scoop the competition. Yet, so far, everyone from CNN to MSNBC to ABC to the New York Times has only quoted the original report.
- Finally, the story appeared mere hours after President Obama (you know, that totally non-partisan paramour of righteousness) called for the US intelligence services to deliver a full report on Russian hacking activities during the election.
For the sake of argument, I’ll go ahead and assume that the Washington Post didn’t publish a fabricated story. I’ll say they actually did have someone at CIA break their oath to leak this particular story. I’ll go ahead and pretend the likelihood that the CIA conducted the fastest investigation in history is just that. I’ll further pretend that the probability of story not originating in the Post’s press room but the White House Press Office is practically zero.
That still doesn’t leave us with much of anything. Why? Well, because the CIA report cited in the Post’s story is all supposition. According to the anonymous source, the CIA “thinks” the Russian government worked through various international cut-outs and behind the curtain of the “dark web.” It “believes” the RNC was successfully hacked but the Russian government didn’t release any of the information they gathered (remember: the FBI said conclusively that the RNC was not hacked). Finally, the CIA “infers” that the motive behind this nefarious activity was that the Russian government wanted to ensure Donald Trump’s election. There is no proof, no smoking gun, no documentary evidence.
And yet, after all that, the brilliance of the Russian plan came down to this: the Russian intelligence services would have had to convince Putin that by showing us how the DNC systematically worked to deny Bernie Sanders the Democratic nomination, Americans would become so disgusted with those machinations we would vote for Trump.
If you’ve ever played chess with a Russian, you know how convoluted and implausible that is. What I wouldn’t doubt is the Russians planting the seeds of that kind of story, letting the American left trip over them and come up with the exact scenario now being presented. Why? Because the American left is nothing if not predictable, and undoubtedly still mad as hell about having their mail server hacked. Oh, that and Putin loves playing the American left for fools. He’s been doing it for well over 15 years now.
It’s either that, or a contrived news story originating in the Obama White House, with their obedient lackeys at the Washington Post doing the grunt work of publishing the latest bit of fake news to come out of the mainstream media. I’m not sure which. But either way, Putin wins. Kind of a last little “screw you, America” from our friends on the left before their God-Man leaves the Oval Office.
Surprise! The First Amendment Doesn’t Protect Flag Burners
This morning, our President-elect took to Twitter with this:
Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag – if they do, there must be consequences – perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 29, 2016
Immediately, the world became unhinged.
“Flag burning is reprehensible, but it’s protected by the Constitution” is the general refrain I’m hearing. But does that statement hold water?
The supposed Constitutional protection for flag burning isn’t actually written anywhere into the Constitution. In fact, 48 states and the federal government have explicit statutes proscribing a penalty for burning, or otherwise desecrating, the United States flag. The federal statute is 18 US Code 700 and in part reads,
Whoever knowingly mutilates, defaces, physically defiles, burns, maintains on the floor or ground, or tramples upon any flag of the United States shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than one year, or both.
I realize I’ve probably just sent your heads spinning, so I’ll give you a moment to recover. Go ahead, grab a glass of water (or whatever) and I’ll wait.
(Oh, good. You made it back. Had me worried there, for a minute. I know this is pretty shocking stuff and I’d hate to think I just gave someone a heart attack.)
Chances are, anyone under the age of 45 has been indoctrinated that flag burning is a Constitutional right. Indoctrinated by the media, indoctrinated by schools, indoctrinated by every institution controlled by the socialist (and treasonous) left in America. Sadly, that’s most of them. Actually, liberals have been trying the “Constitutionally protected” approach to flag burning going all the way back to 1907. That was the year the Supreme Court decided in Halter v. Nebraska that flag desecration was not a fundamental right.
What most people point to now in their zeal defend flag burning is the 1989 decision in Texas v. Johnson, in which the court invalidated the conviction of Gregory Lee Johnson. In 1984, Johnson decided to make his displeasure with President Reagan’s policies known by burning a flag during the Republican National Convention. He was convicted, sentenced to a year in prison and fined $2,000. He appealed, claiming his First Amendment right to political speech was violated.
What’s interesting is that the court did not overturn his conviction on First Amendment grounds. That narrative springs forth from Justice Anthony Kennedy’s concurrence, in which he wrote:
For all the record shows, this respondent was not a philosopher and perhaps did not even possess the ability to comprehend how repellent his statements must be to the Republic itself. But whether or not he could appreciate the enormity of the offense he gave, the fact remains that his acts were speech, in both the technical and the fundamental meaning of the Constitution. So I agree with the Court that he must go free
Kennedy felt the need to mention the speech issue in his concurrence because that is not the grounds the Court used for issuing it’s 5-4 reversal. Instead, the court based the majority opinion on the basis that the Texas statute was designed to prevent rioting. Since both the state and defendant agreed that there was no riot, or even an incitement to riot, the statute violated the defendant’s 8th and 14th Amendment rights.
Not his 1st Amendment rights.
Why does this matter, you might ask? Isn’t a violation of a citizen’s rights still egregious, regardless of which right was violated? That’s rhetorical, of course. Any time the justice system violates Constitutionally protected rights is a perversion of justice. That’s precisely what the Court upheld.
However, buried in the Court’s decision was an affirmation of the 1907 decision in Halter v. Nebraska. That was the first Supreme Court case that upheld flag desecration as not protected by the Constitution. The majority opinion, penned by Justice Brennan dances around the subject of 1st Amendment protection of flag burning. He states that while the Court cannot find reason to grant a special class to speech involving the flag, it is within Congress’ purview to do just that, concluding:
Congress has, for example, enacted precatory regulations describing the proper treatment of the flag, see36 U.S.C. §§ 173-177, and we cast no doubt on the legitimacy of its interest in making such recommendations.
So, if you set aside what you’ve been told and what you’ve been taught, all of a sudden the President-elect’s statement is no longer quite so outlandish as at first seems. I cannot say I agree with his idea of stripping citizenship. After all, there is no crime for which we strip citizenship, not even treason. But jail and a fine? That seems perfectly acceptable. And as it turns out, Constitutional, as well.
Liberals STILL Don’t Get It
A little over a week ago, I posted my thoughts on why the election turned out the way it did. As I wrote,
When you’ve already been painted as a racist misogynist homophobe, a dolt incapable of anything other than collecting welfare and shooting heroin, you’re not going to worry too much about voting for a guy who actually is a racist misogynist – after all, it’s not like you have anything left to lose.
Since then, I’ve seen some postings on various blogs (like these, here and here) that show a few liberals have figured this out. But far too many have taken the wrong lessons from the election, or no lesson at all. The recent kerfluffle over the the way the cast of Hamilton has reacted is one example. The Democrat party’s seeming determination to shift even further left is another. And finally, there is the unending grief I and other conservatives are receiving from the on-line liberal tribe, as well my liberal friends. None of them seem capable of recognizing, much less understanding, what happened in this election.
So here’s a quick synopsis for you.
- Donald Trump did not win this election, so much as Hillary Clinton lost this election. This is an important point to remember.
- This was not an election about issues. Equally important to remember. This was not about emails, Benghazi, immigration, or “identity politics”. In the end, none of that mattered. The great swath of undecideds didn’t break for Trump because they agreed with his plans, or because of Hillary’s probable corruption. They didn’t abandon Hillary because she’s a woman, or out of racism.
- This was an election about attitudes and respect. This is the point that liberals are getting especially hung up about. If the election was about respect, how could the least respectful candidate since George Wallace win? It’s because they ignore the first half of that statement: attitudes. For a generation, the great swath of middle America has endured an attitude from the genteel class that says their values and lifestyle are worthless. This was the year when they finally told the genteel class to go to hell.
In short, for 30 years the vast middle of America was told by cultured elite that they need to respect everyone, but no one need respect them. They were called “bitter clingers” and “deplorable” and “trailer park trash.” Their values, which also happen to be the ageless values of hard work, loyalty, family, church and patriotism, were derided as passe.
Now, as I’ve said, I’ve found very few who lean left who seem able to grasp this simple concept. It might be the heavy indoctrination that turns one into a liberal precludes them from recognizing that heaping scorn on half of the country is not going to endear you to the masses. Instead, I see comments like these:
A significant reason Hillary lost this election was because men (mostly white) came out in unprecedented numbers to remind us – violently & vehemently – that a woman is not welcome at the table.
If you voted for Trump, you might not be a racist, but you support one
The only difference between a Trump voter and a Nasi (sic) is the Nazi has a brain
I’m not saying Trump’s people are idiots, but they can’t spell cat if you spot them the C and A.
And those are the mild ones. The left is intent on casting Trump’s voters as racists, woman haters, gay haters, idiots – in other words, as “deplorable.” When I’ve mentioned that no, most of Trump’s voters are telling you eggheads they’re tired of having their values trashed and lives stepped on, I get replies amounting to, “Who cares? They voted for Trump.”
If I were purely partisan, I wouldn’t much care. As long as the left maintains this tone deafness about America, their electoral chances remain concentrated in the cities. They will never regain any strength in the Congress, and they will continue to lose elections at the local and national level. One of the most shocking results of this election is that Democrats only won 57 counties this year. 57 out of nearly 3200. Now THAT’s deplorable!
But I am not a pure partisan. I am an American, and while we on the right understand the left’s POV (we haven’t been given a choice, really – it’s crammed down our throats), if the left doesn’t understand ours, the country will remain hopelessly divided. Regardless of which side of the political divide you find yourself, I think we all agree that would be a horrible, no good, very bad result.
Hate Didn’t Elect Donald Trump; People Did
Exactly this —>”It’s easy to point to these small, impoverished towns and name racism, the second amendment or plain stupidity as the only reasons why these people would ever vote for a man like Donald Trump. I find this to be highly intellectually dishonest, though. To write this off as simple racism is to ignore the very real and very heartbreaking struggles small town America faces.”
Over the summer, my little sister had a soccer tournament at Bloomsburg University, located in central Pennsylvania. The drive there was about three hours and many of the towns we drove through shocked me. The conditions of these towns were terrible. Houses were falling apart. Bars and restaurants were boarded up. Scrap metal was thrown across front lawns. White, plastic lawn chairs were out on the drooping front porches. There were no malls. No outlets. Most of these small towns did not have a Walmart, only a dollar store and a few run down thrift stores. In almost every town, there was an abandoned factory.
My father, who was driving the car, turned to me and pointed out a Trump sign stuck in a front yard, surrounded by weeds and dead grass. “This is Trump country, Tori,” He said. “These people are desperate, trapped for life in these small towns…
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2016 Proves the Electoral College Works
Clinton supporters are claiming that since Hllary won the popular vote, it proves the Electoral College is a dysfunctional anachronism that impedes modern democracy. They don’t seem to understand, or care, that statements like those only prove the reasons for the Electoral College in the 1780’s remain with us today.
First and foremost, the Founding Fathers had deep, abiding distrust of unfettered democracy. James Madison wrote in Federalist 10:
A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.
This understanding that direct democracy is an unwieldy form of government, certain to end in direct violence of neighbor versus neighbor, is what drove the Founders to establish the United States as a representative republic. They strove, at every level of the federal government they were creating, to isolate the democratic forum to the smallest, most localized unit possible. Indeed, one of the striking aspects of American governance is the interplay between the states and the federal government they devised.
A large part of the reason for establishing that interplay between state and federal government was the Founder’s understanding that, even in the earliest days of the nation, there were stark differences between the various states and regions, and competing interests between heavily populated areas and sparsely populated ones. In establishing a federal government that was an equal partner of the states as regards most matters, they allowed local control over local issues, while allowing for an overarching national policy that might be in direct contravention to what a state preferred. Factionalism, which they understood was an unremarkable and inevitable feature of human society, could thus be controlled. No single faction could become so omnipresent as to impose its will on the rest of the nation.
This theory of government extends through to the idea of the Electoral College. Most of us are familiar with the idea of the Electoral College as stated by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 68:
It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice. A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.
But very few of us have given much thought to this part of the same essay:
The choice of SEVERAL, to form an intermediate body of electors, will be much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements, than the choice of ONE who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes. And as the electors, chosen in each State, are to assemble and vote in the State in which they are chosen, this detached and divided situation will expose them much less to heats and ferments, which might be communicated from them to the people, than if they were all to be convened at one time, in one place.
Here we see expressed the idea, once again, of deference to state preference, even when contemplating a federal election. Yes, the election of a President would occur in all the states simultaneously, but it was not a singular electoral event. Rather, it was to be the continuation of state elections. To ensure that each state was not pressured by outside influences, each states electors are to meet in that state and vote. They are not to travel to the seat of national government. The method of their meeting and deliberation is left to the states to decide.
So how does the 2016 general election demonstrate that these ideas are still needed today? Consider this: Mrs. Clinton will assuredly wind up with more raw votes, if tabulated nationally, than Mr. Trump. But, that is due to her extreme support on the Pacific Coast. Her share of the popular vote in California, Oregon and Washington is around 65%. Of the roughly 61 million votes she received, nearly 9.5 million of them came from those three states versus only 4.3 million for Mr. Trump. To look at in reverse, in every other region of the nation, Mr. Trump outpolled Mrs Clinton by some 5 million votes and had the far higher share of the total, with nearly 53% of the votes cast.
If we were to do as Mrs. Clinton’s supporters ask, and amend the Constitution to abolish the Electoral College, we would be saying that only 3 of our states were electing the President. The other 47, despite a preference for the opposing candidate, would be shunned.
But the hidden beauty of the Electoral College is in ensuring that every state and every region receives import upon the selection of the President in proportion to its size and influence in the federal government. So yes, Mrs. Clinton is assured the 74 electoral votes from those states. All she needed was another 196 (or 38% of the remaining) electoral votes to win the Presidency. But Mr. Trump, by virtue of his running a broader campaign that appealed to more voters across a wider swath of the nation, gained more electors in the other states. He outpolled Mrs. Clinton in the deep south, the midwest, the plains states, the mountain west and battled her to a near draw in the northeast.
I understand its a bitter pill for her supporters to admit that Mrs. Clinton’s message did not have the type of broad appeal that resonated across the nation. But one again, the Electoral College is ensuring the candidate with the broadest support will assume the Presidency on January 20.
What Goes Around…
I’m a person with a slightly bent sense of humor. I realize it, most of my friends have learned to live with it, my wife tolerates it and my kids (fortunately) didn’t inherit it. I find Monty Python hilarious, roar with laughter throughout The Rocky Horror Picture Show, still guffaw at Peter Seller’s portrayal of Inspector Clouseau, and laugh for hours with The Three Stooges. I love watching Wile E. Coyote fall off cliffs, Bugs Bunny put one over on Daffy Duck and Yosemite Sam always puts a smile on my face.
I mention this, because despite the arduous training in the sublimely ridiculous that the many hours of such entertainment brought about, I’ve never seen anything as nonsensical as the current state of the American left wing. Setting your cities on fire because your candidate lost is like a lost scene from Dr Strangelove. Indeed, the only person on the left I’ve come across in the last 4 days with any sense of why we have President-elect Trump is this guy here:
But even he only half understands it. Yes, Hillary Rodham Clinton was probably the worst possible candidate the Democrats could have stood for President. As awful a candidate as Trump was, Hillary proved to be even more awful. Approximately 6.3 million fewer votes were cast this election versus 2012. The Democrat nominee garnered only 91% of the votes President Obama did just four years ago. So, while Trump was holding on to 98% of the Republican vote won by Mitt Romney, Hillary couldn’t generate anywhere near the enthusiasm from Democrats. And why would they be? Hillary is easily the most corrupt, least trustworthy and most befouled politician of the last quarter-century. And Democrats voted their displeasure, with 5.4 million fewer of them voting for her.
Ok, so Hillary is obnoxious, condescending and reeks of corruption. How is it that her opponent, a man so vile and disgusting that his sanity has been questioned, could hold on to such a large percentage of the vote from 4 years ago? That story begins with TARP and ends with the “basket of deplorables.” In the 8 years in between those events, the non-urban American has been vilified, denigrated, insulted and belittled. We were told we’re “bitter clingers” for believing in the God of Abraham and Isaac, and owning firearms. We were told we’re homophobes for not wanting our pastors to be forced into performing gay marriages, our bakers forced into baking cakes for gay weddings or our florists and caterers forced into serving those events. We were told we’re misogynists for not wanting nuns to be forced to pay for abortions. We’re denounced as racists for not supporting #BlackLivesMatter, when all we see in that “movement” is a bunch of ill-informed youth intent on hate and destruction. We’ve been told we have to believe in global warming – except when that theory blew up in the face of evidence, we were told that it was just another way of saying “man-made climate change.”
We’ve been told we have no rights, except the ones our benevolent government decides we have, that we’re too stupid to read the words in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. In the meantime, we’re also told those very documents that founded our nation are now irrelevant because they’re old and don’t reflect modern times. At the same time, we’re ordered to buy a government approved product from a government market because somehow, that’s not an abrogation of our rights as a free people? Maybe the left is trying to be funny or something, because usually if something works you don’t try like hell to break it.
We’ve been virtually ordered to send our kids to college, even though the local electrician’s union is hiring apprentices at $25/hour and my kid happens to enjoy working with his hands, so they can be brainwashed into spouting the same nonsense. And how do we know this is vitally important? Well, it must be. After all, we’re also told our sons become rapists and our daughters will be gang raped the moment they step onto campus at Whatsamatta U. If the only hope our kids have of a future is to willingly live and study in that cesspool, then it must be awfully important, right?
(Ah, yes. Whatsamatta U, where if you’re lucky your child will graduate with a degree in French History, $100,000 of debt and no prospects for a job, other than working as a part-time barista at the local coffee bar.)
But nobody dare say anything about how nonsensical all of that is, because then you’re violating some precious snowflake’s safe space. Unless that safe space is the bathroom, where we’re told the plumbing God gave you doesn’t count and so we have to let grown men use the same facilities as our mothers, wives and daughters. It makes sense, really – how else can we ensure the rape culture has a steady supply of victims? Besides, we’ve been told, that’s progress!
Oh, and because of man-made climate change, all you people who made a living mining coal or pumping oil from the ground, or building pipelines or driving trucks to move it around; yeah, well, here’s one final, mighty FUCK YOU, SORRY NOT, your jobs have to go. Grab a mop, sonny boy – the local Chuck E. Cheese needs someone to clean up behind the kiddies.
So after 8 long years of hearing this nonsense, of course people voted for Trump. When you’ve already been painted as a racist misogynist homophobe, a dolt incapable of anything other than collecting welfare and shooting heroin, you’re not going to worry too much about voting for a guy who actually is a racist misogynist – after all, it’s not like you have anything left to lose. Yes, Donald Trump can’t figure out which policies he supports and doesn’t support. In the end, that doesn’t matter. We’ve grown accustomed to politicians making extravagant promises they never intend to keep and position papers that would take an hour to read, and could be summarized as “I have no frigging idea what I’m talking about.” No, what mattered isn’t that Trump is a lout or that he doesn’t even seem to care about policy.
What mattered was that at the end of the day, after being insulted for 8 years, there was finally a candidate willing to insult the Powers That Be back. To give as well as he got, to take it from the gutter to the sewer if need be. Every “Little Marco” and “Lyin’ Ted” and “Crooked Hillary” was music to the ears of the disenfranchised. Every 3am tweet calling someone a lying SOB, every pronouncement at a campaign rally against his enemies only showed he was willing to fight. So what if he’s a New York billionaire? The other billionaires never liked him – and they never liked him because he never stopped being the brash kid from Queens.
So, go ahead and burn down your cities. Enjoy the bonfires in Portland, the smashed windows in LA, the blocked roads in New York. Throw your hissy fits and keep complaining about “whitelash” or whatever idiotic, progressive bullshit name you want to give it. It’s nothing more than the vast middle of America saying, “Enough, already!”.
And if you’re willing to leave your safe space and actually engage in something other than name calling, I’m the guy over here sipping a cold one and laughing at your idiocy. Hell, I might even slip on a Make America Great Again cap so I’m easier to find.
Support the Orange President
As I’m writing this, Hillary Clinton needs a miracle of biblical proportions to prevent Donald from winning the Presidency. Odds are, I’ll win the Powerball lottery before she does.
I’ve made no secret that I do not think Mr. Trump will prove to be a good President. I’ve been #NeverTrump since he announced his candidacy because I’ve felt a government led by him will be a disaster. As person dedicated to small government, Trump’s big government tendencies are an affront to my sensibilities. So are his attitudes on race, gender and immigration. And his love of authoritarianism and total ignorance of our Constitution remain deeply troubling, and dangerous, flaws. All of this led me to vote today for Evan McMullin.
Regardless, the man has won the Presidency. It was a herculean effort that required defeating the best political machine ever created. Now, it is my duty to support this man as President.
Support does not mean blind obedience. Support does mean pointing out those occasions when his conduct is unbecoming of his office. Support also means going to loggerheads when I believe he is advocating policies that will harm our nation. In short, support does not require anyone vacillate on their principles. Rather, it means defending those principles to the fullest while allowing Mr. Trump to govern in his way.
Indeed, it is by being supportive that we can mitigate any damage President Trump causes best. Given his history, this is likely to happen often. We must be prepared.
And it is our duty, as United States citizens to so. But for now, I’m off to bed.
Political Baseballs Endorses…
It’s possible the United States has had worse candidates for President in our history. We’ve certainly had our share of horrible campaigns, and we’ve had our share of horrible Presidents.
But you’ll be hard pressed to come up with a worse combination of candidates and campaigns than 2016 has brought.
The incumbent party nominated a woman with a 40 year history of corruption and scandal. How can anyone be surprised that, true to form, she may well become the first President-elect under indictment in our history? If elected and she manages to avoid prosecution for what certainly looks like egregious violations of the law, Hillary Clinton’s presidency would be kneecapped before she ever takes the oath of office. Nobody trusts her. Nobody can even pretend to believe anything she does or says any longer. As her own campaign staff has said, she has demonstrated terrible instincts and decision making. To call the next four years under her “leadership” a disaster in the making is to be generous – to disasters.
Ordinarily, a candidate that bad and that flawed wouldn’t have a chance in hell of being elected. But the Republicans, in a remarkable display of self-immolation, nominated someone as equally awful. Every character deficiency exhibited by Mrs. Clinton is personified in spades by Donald Trump. Self-dealing? Corrupt? Narcissistic? Check off all those boxes. And just as Hillary “bleachbit” her copy, I’m not even sure Donald has even read the Constitution. But he loves his petty dictators, from Vlad Putin to Deng Xiaoping. As for the rest of us, he’s already he told us what he thinks: “For the most part, you can’t respect people because most people aren’t worthy of respect.”
I had held out hope for the Libertarian candidacy of Gary Johnson. That was before he started talking and proved that (a) he’s either insane or killed his brain in a fog of hash smoke and (b) he’s actually not a Libertarian. He is, however, obviously just as opportunistic as both of the major party candidates.
So, the top three pretenders for President of the United States are unqualified and unfit for the office they aspire to, and probably belong in prison. What is a patriotic citizen to do this November 8th?
There is an answer. There is one candidate who, despite probably not able to carry more than a couple of states, embodies the strength of character, dedication to Constitutional principles and belief in the greatness of America we’ve found so lacking in the other candidates.
That is why, for 2016, Political Baseballs is proud to endorse Evan McMullin of Utah for President of the United States.
Since he’s only listed in 11 states, odds are you will have to write his name in on your ballot. I encourage you to find out the vagaries regarding write-in candidates in your state and take the effort to write him in. As mentioned, he likely will not win. But casting your vote for Mr. McMullin will not be wasting it, for two reasons.
First, the entire concept of “voting for the lesser evil” is what has left our nation in it’s current state. Far too often, we accept the idea of a binary choice between two poor options. This leaves voters voting not as much for a candidate, as against the opposing candidate. It’s a terrible situation that our current political parties have delivered to the American people, one who’s likely outcome this time will be the worst four years for our republic since the Civil War. By voting for Mr. McMullin, you can actually vote for someone who isn’t corrupt, isn’t beholden to either political party, isn’t bankrolled by all of the usual power players and isn’t responsible to anyone other than his own conscience and the voters. Rather than needing to rinse the stink off from voting for Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton, you can be proud of your vote.
Second, by now even the most partisan among us have to realize something has gone terribly wrong with our political parties if the best candidates they can come up with are the parasites they’ve nominated. If you truly want to send a message that we, the People, have had enough of their nonsense, there is no better way than to vote for a candidate who is inviolate in his beliefs. Even if you do not agree with Mr. McMullin’s conservative viewpoint, you cannot deny his uncompromising defense of his principles. I’ve heard many of you over the last two years, both conservative and liberal, say you want to “blow up the system.” Voting for Mr. McMullin is a shot right into the heart of the unscrupulous parties that have placed power and wealth above the country.
So, when you vote, don’t worry about pulling a lever or punching a hole. Write in the only candidate worthy of your vote: Evan McMullin.
Today Is Why You Should Never Vote Early
Quick question: are you one of the 15 million or so people who cast their vote for President already? You know, two weeks or more BEFORE election day?
If you are, how foolish did you feel when you woke up this morning?
I’m asking because I’ve never understood what motivates people to vote weeks before Election Day. In fact, I’ve never really understood the needless, mindless drive among our public officials to keep “expanding” early voting. Other than the most die-hard partisan, who’s going to vote for straight party ticket, you have absolutely no business saying you’ve heard all you need to hear and learned all you need to learn a month or so before your vote is actually counted. And you k now what? If you’re that die-hard of a partisan, you shouldn’t be voting. Yes, I said it: if you’re so partisan that issues, candidates and positions don’t matter, YOU SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO VOTE. You’re the biggest reason the country is in the mess it’s in. But more on that later.
If there’s one thing recent history has shown us, it’s utter foolishness to pretend nothing new happens at this stage. Four years ago, two major events impacted the race over the last two weeks. First came the tape of Mitt Romney decrying the “47 percent.” A few days after that came Superstorm Sandy and “The Hug.” Romney and Obama went from a flat-footed tie to the President winning reelection by a better than 5% margin in the popular vote. Now this year we have the sudden reemergence of “Email Gate,” but with the added twist of “Weiner Gate” for good measure. Overnight, the WaPo/ABC tracking poll shed 10 points off Clinton’s supposedly insurmountable lead. I mean literally, overnight.
So, now there are 15+ million ballots cast, without those voters knowing as much as they know now. How many of them want to change their votes? How many of them are slapping their foreheads and wishing they had waited a couple of weeks to mark their ballots?
Look, I understand showing up at the polls on election day is kind of a bother. Hardly anyone gets the day off. The lines can be long. The poll workers are usually clueless (just for fun, ask one how to vote for Evan McMullin and watch their expression go to sheer terror). When they have coffee, it’s as cold and dreary as the weather. In short, most of the time, voting on election day isn’t fun, easy or simple. But being in charge of something as important as the greatest nation to ever grace this humble planet isn’t ever easy or simple, and it’s rarely fun.
Voting is supposed to be serious business. It isn’t about fun, about wearing your colorful campaign buttons and outrageous hats and showing up to the polls in a big, happy group singing songs about your favored candidate. If you want to do those things, more power to you (personally, I’m a big fan of buttons). But you’re supposed to have studied the issues, contemplated the candidates, done a bit of introspection and decided which person running for which office best matches your personal views on the issues that are most important to you. After all, you are not deciding who would make the best pasta on the next episode of “Master Chef.” You are helping to decide the people who will be taking care of this republic of ours.
I get that everyone has the right to vote. Everyone also has the right to bear arms (regardless of what some of the more liberal among us think), but that doesn’t mean everyone should bear arms. If you can’t handle being a responsible weapons owner, you shouldn’t exercise that right until you figure it out. Voting is like that, only with 100 times more responsibility. After all, being an irresponsible gun owner might get a few people killed. Being an irresponsible voter might get the entire country killed.
We seem to innately understand the dangers of irresponsible gun ownership, by placing restrictions on who can and can’t own weapons. The wisdom that went into those regulations is a another topic for another day. But heaven forbid we discuss putting reasonable regulations (a familiar phrase, eh?) in place to limit the damage from irresponsible voting. You’ll be decried as an undemocratic racist out to deny people their rights! No, instead as a society we’re hell-bent on encouraging ever more irresponsible voters to cast their uninformed ballots, as early and easily as possible.
Of course, then everyone complains about how terrible government is and horrible the people are entrusted with governance. It seems nobody is happy that we get a Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as the major party presidential nominees. Everyone complains about the clueless boobs that make up the majority of our congressmen and senators. Yet, still we insist that everyone, regardless of how uninformed and unserious they may be, get out and vote. And nobody draws the correlation between the boobs voting and the boobs being elected. Instead, we just keep making it easier and easier for the boobs to get out and vote for the boobs who wind up in office.
Sorry for ranting a bit, but I just find the whole situation ludicrous. Talk about beating our heads on a brick wall and expecting a different outcome! Except we’ve been at for 60 years now, and have run face first into that wall so often we’ve blinded ourselves to the sheer lunacy of it.
Reality Check
This was the BEST the GOP could do?
Good Morning! In just 16 short days, our long national nightmare, almost two years in the making, will be over.
And when we wake up on November 9, Hillary Clinton will be the President-Elect of the United States of America.
I don’t say this with any glee, but more a sense of resignation. While many will blame Donald Trump or the GOP establishment for an outcome that seemed impossible 24 months ago, they worked hand in glove to bring it about. The political bosses, in a series of unnerving and politically driven moves, made three crucial decisions that paved the way for Trump to sap the energy out of the conservative wing.
First, they insisted on open primaries – a system that allowed anyone, regardless of primary affiliation, to decide the Republican nominee. It’s akin to the membership of the American Legion allowing Code Pink to select their chairman. It’s Ford letting GM pick their board. It’s insanity, is what it turned out to be. Yes, almost 32 million people voted in this year’s Republican primaries – but less than 69% of them were registered as Republicans prior to this year. Nearly 1/3 of the “Republican” electorate wasn’t Republican.
Second, they let anyone and everyone run for the GOP nomination. As a result, what should have been the strongest field of conservative candidates in a generation became diluted to the point of irrelevancy. Centrist champions? There was Bush, and Kasich, and Fiorina, and… you get the point. The same for conservatives, for the religious right, for the libertarian wing, for the neocons, and on and on and on. When the starting gun sounded, there were 22 people announced as running for the Republican nomination for President of the United States. The RNC, for reasons known only to Reince Priebus, treated them all as if they were equal of stature, of seriousness and ability to win. Overconfident? Drunk? Who knows? But when you insist that Rick Santorum be given as much gravitas as Jeb Bush, what you get is Donald Trump. Because it became nothing more than a popularity contest, and not a contest of ideas, this primary season naturally wound up favoring the reality TV star who’s spent 40 years crafting a popular image.
Third are the convoluted rules about delegate apportionment. The front-loading of “winner take all” state primaries meant that despite no candidate gaining 50% of the vote in any of the first 15 primaries, Trump had an overwhelming delegate lead. He eventually won the nomination with support of only 38% of the vote. If you really want to get into the weeds on this point, Donald J. Trump won the Republican nomination with only around 8.5 million Republican votes – the rest of his margin came from those non-Republicans the RNC allowed to vote in their primaries. When you wrap your head around that fact, you realize that he’s actually done a pretty good job of parlaying today’s polarized partisans into his roughly 2/3 support among Republican voters in the general electorate.
And so here we are, 16 days from President-Elect Clinton and the Republican Party has nobody to blame but themselves. It isn’t that Hillary Clinton became a better candidate as this election season wore on. If anything, the questions regarding her use of a private email setup for official business, the general shadiness of the Clinton Foundation and still unanswered questions about her role in the Benghazi disaster should have sunk her campaign. But the RNC threw in with the only politician in America more disliked and distrusted than Mrs. Clinton. Those of us who have been #NeverTrump since the beginning warned the rest of the party that Trump would be easy pickings for the Clinton political machine. That we’ve been proven correct doesn’t do us any good, unless the party recognizes the mistakes it’s made and works to rectify them.
At this point, that Donald J. Trump is going to lose, and lose badly, is not in question. (Well, not in question, except among his most vitriolic supporters, the ones who have forgone reason in the quixotic quest to “blow it up”). The only question is how badly the worst GOP nominee in over 100 years is going to harm the Republican brand. The Presidency is gone. The Senate is most likely gone, as well. Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire and Ron Johnson in Wisconsin are dead people walking. That means the Democrats only need to pick off two more seats to gain control, and they’re likely to grab at least three others (Indiana, Illinois and Colorado), as well as hang on to the retiring Harry Reid’s seat in Nevada. Should Trump continue his freefall, his coattails could well spell doom for the GOP held seats in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Florida, too.
For all the talk about how Hillary Clinton needs to be stopped, if for no other reason than to prevent her ramming through thoroughly liberal Supreme Court justices, the RNC has shot itself in the foot. It hitched a ride with Trump and is likely to lose the only vehicle available for forcing at least a compromise on that front. And yes, it is a serious threat to the very nature of the Constitution. In the last debate, Mrs. Clinton avowed her preference for justices who will do many, many unconstitutional things from the bench. Side with the people? What? The entire reason the court exists in the form the founders created was so that they could deliver unpopular opinions without fear of recrimination. This is not to say it is a perfect system or that the court hasn’t a history of overstepping its bounds (Dred Scott, anyone?). But I cannot recall a President, at any time, essentially telling the American public that the court should ignore the Constitution when ruling on the Constitutionality of a statute. Also, Mrs. Clinton’s propensity for feint-and-maneuver was on display during her Heller answer. I had to go back and re-read the case just to be certain, but the case never referenced murderous toddlers. It was wholly about whether a jurisdiction (in this case, the District of Columbia) could ban an entire class of firearm (handguns).
Again, a real conservative would have pounced all over that particular gaffe. But the RNC’s Golden Man-Child, who until last year was a proud contributor to Michael Bloomberg’s anti-gun crusade, couldn’t even muster one of his trademark “WRONG” outbursts.
This is the reality that Priebus and his ilk have foisted upon the nation. We will have at least four years of a Hillary Clinton presidency. At least the first two of them will include her party controlling the Senate. There is a very real possibility that the Trumpster doesn’t go quietly in the night, continues to rail against the Republican party and conservative movement, giving Hillary the latter half of her term with full control of Congress and the Supreme Court.
There’s also another reality that Mrs. Clinton’s party and the national media are already attempting to ignore. In no way, despite the severe drubbing Republicans are facing, should anyone assume this indicates any sort of mandate for leftist policies. Yes, Trump is likely to lose by well over 150 electoral votes. Yes, for the first time in generations, Texas, Georgia, Utah and Arizona are toss-ups. But that is not an acceptance of the socialist dreams co-opted by Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. Rather, it is a repudiation of all things Trump and Trumpism. The Clinton machine would do well to remember Hillary will begin her tenure with the lowest approval ratings of any President in history. If her goal truly is to unify the nation, she’ll need to find areas of agreement between the GOP House and Democrat Senate. I have my doubts, as Clintonism is about partisanship first, country second. I fully expect her to attempt to ram through her personal goals of HillaryCare, tax increases and gun control measures in her first 100 days – and a nation more antagonized and polarized than even now.
That’s reality, folks. And you can thank the spineless idiots in the RNC and their equally hopeless candidate for making it so.
The Debate from Hell: Whiners & Losers
Fight!
If you’re a masochist, or just needed a good excuse to drink heavily, you sat through all 90 minutes of last night’s “Presidential Debate.” If you managed that and still retained your sanity, congratulations! You’re better off than either of the two candidates.
Ok, so who won? Who lost? Did anyone have an aneurysm on stage and put us out of our misery?
Winners:
- Donald Trump – look, somebody had to win this shit storm. I suppose the winner is the guy who threw the most shit. Unfortunately for Donald, he came on stage last needing to do two things. First, he had to stop the hemorrhaging his campaign endured over the weekend. Second, he needed to convince people he’s something more than an angry old man. He may have succeeded on the first – the next couple of days will tell us. But he definitely failed on the second.
- Breitbart TV – Stephen Bannon & Roger Ailes dream of an alt-right TV network survives! Expect a launch date of January 20, 2017.
- Liquor distributors – The real slogan of this campaign should be, “Make America Drunk Again”.
Losers:
- The truth – Look, we know all politicians lie. We’re surprised when one doesn’t fib. But last night might have set a record for lies per second.
- The audience – Imagine you’re invited to ask the candidates a question. You sit, waiting, and you never get a chance to actually ask it. Or even worse, you do get a chance to ask it – but both candidates and both moderators just ignore it. Yeah, it was like that. It was EXACTLY like that.
- Mike Pence – after doing his all to save his running mate’s hide and killing any future in politics he had, Trump threw the Indiana governor under the bus. Not only that, he backed up and ran him over again. The poor guy is going to be a punch line in jokes for years to come.
- Duels – It seems that in the same year the play Hamilton is playing to rave reviews (btw, deservedly so), we could revive the same method the title character and his main political rival used to settle their differences. Could you imagine the TV ratings? Maybe it’ll be the first live event broadcast by Breitbart TV.
- Children – if you have kids, this entire election is a good reason to ban them from watching television. Last night encapsulated it.
- Bill Clinton – if you haven’t seen this, it’s all you need to know about Bill’s night…
Hurricanes
August 24, 1992 was a night I’ll never forget. I’ve been through some flat-out dangerous circumstances in my life, but that night was the only time when I thought I was going to die.
That was the night Hurricane Andrew came ashore in South Florida.
Now I’ve been watching the coverage of Hurricane Matthew and that same sense of dread is hitting me. Andrew was a beast, but Matthew looks to be every bit as bad with two important differences. For one, this storm covers a much greater area than Andrew did. For another, Matthew is moving slower and his track means a storm of much longer duration.
Andrew effectively wiped southern Dade county off the map. Matthew has the capacity to virtually wipe out the Atlantic seaboard from Palm Beach, FL to Myrtle Beach, SC.
I know some of you might think riding a storm out like this is a wonderful adventure. Others might be fearful of leaving behind a lifetime’s worth of treasures. Others just don’t want to deal with hanging out in a shelter for a few days.
But take it from someone who’s watched a house fall apart around his ears. Literally. You DO NOT want to mess around with a storm of this magnitude. Leave. Get out. Vamoose.
If you’re fortunate, your home and/or business will survive intact. But if it doesn’t, you don’t want to be in there. Trust me on that.
In the meantime, I’ll be asking the man upstairs to be looking out for all of you.
Oh, Another Debate? *yawn*
In case you missed it, the two Veep candidates debated last night. I’m going to be perfectly honest here; I doubted either would say anything interesting. So I spent my TV time split between the AL Wild Card game and a Hogan’s Heroes rerun. The game was certainly more exciting and I suspect the old sitcom more believable than anything Messers Pence and Kaine said.
Judging by the overnight reviews, Mr. Pence was the decisive winner. When even hard left outlets (NY Times, Huffington Post) declare the Republican the winner, you know it wasn’t a good performance for Team Clinton. Particularly if forced to cede a victory to Mike Pence, whom liberal publications think of as Ted Cruz with a better smile.
Apparently, Mr.Kaine was a cross between an incoherent Clinton sycophant and a killer clown, while Mr. Pence remained calm and rational. Or, Mr. Kaine did his best Donald Trump impersonation while Mr. Pence reminded the GOP that they could have nominated someone other than an insane troglodyte. Alas, the GOP has hitched their wagons to Team Trump, and the result is a political campaign where the number two choice is better than the standard bearer.
Anyway, these Veep debates never have a major impact on the election. Given that nothing newsworthy came out of this one and neither man melted down, I doubt the 2016 version will, either. I mean, if Dan Quayle getting spanked didn’t effect an election, these really are a waste of time.
Oh, and how about those crazy Canucks? And here I thought Red Sox fans were unhinged.
American Exceptionalism
Our current President forever lost my support when in April 2009 he said, ” I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” As James Kirchik wrote later that month in the LA Times,
“If all countries are ‘exceptional,’ then none are, and to claim otherwise robs the word, and the idea of American exceptionalism, of any meaning.”
Mind you, even the very liberal Kirchik was offended at the offhand way in which the new President (and latest liberal icon) had dismissed American exceptionalism as being, for all intents and purposes, non-existent. In fact, the problems that have risen during this Presidency are directly attributable to this President’s inability to identify what American exceptionalism is and why our past reliance on it has always overcome even the most overwhelming obstacles.
So, what is American exceptionalism? The idea was first expressed by the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville in his book, Democracy in America. In 1835, the United States did not have an economy the rest of the world envied. We had few factories, few railroads, and our merchants were forced to trade in British pounds sterling or gold bullion. Our military was not feared, large, or respected. In fact, the 1835 graduating class from West Point totalled only 56 officers – of whom, 38 quit the Army after their 5 year commitment.
So, if the United States did not have the trappings of power that might lead a European gentleman to presume a national exceptionalism, what did we possess? How could a relatively poor and weak nation so impress this man that he would write a series of books about so seemingly absurd a concept as American exceptionalism?
The answer lies in the very nature of what America is, and what it means to be an American. Unlike any other nation in the history of mankind, the United States of America is unique in our very makeup: we are not of a single ethnicity, we are not defined by natural borders and our history is not rooted in the misty memories of the prehistoric tribes that roamed the rest of the world. Alone among nations of the world, to be American is to pledge fealty not to a man, nor a religion, nor a piece of land, but rather to an ideal: the idea that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights -and that government’s principle duty is to secure those rights for every person.
I hadn’t given much thought about this until our current election. After all, the hew and cry over Mr. Obama’s giving short shrift to the concept of American exceptionalism had come from both the right and left (although, to be certain, it was more pronounced on the right). So it seemed reasonable that the American people understood what made America an exceptional nation, even if the President didn’t. And I kept thinking that, up until Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton secured their respective party’s nominations.
I’m sad to say that it seems most people today have no idea what American exceptionalism means, or where it comes from. There are those who think it comes from an inherent nativism, forgetting that one of the most crucial aspects of Americanism is that anyone, from anywhere, regardless of wealth or circumstance, can become an American. This concept is emblazoned on the base of the Statue of Liberty. You know, the bit about “Give me your tired, your poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free”? That poem isn’t talking about the economically depressed (although the vast majority of immigrants in our country’s history have been far from wealthy). It’s telling the rest of the world, if you value freedom & liberty above all else, this is the place to come. It’s the message that brought my family here during the Cold War. It’s the message that brought everyone’s family here.
Then there are those who think American exceptionalism is rooted in being the greatest economic power on earth. They either don’t know, or don’t want to believe, that the United States’ period of economic dominance was a short one, lasting about 30 years. And it only came about because alone among the world’s actors, the United States wasn’t physically devastated by the Second World War. It has nothing to do with greater industriousness or intelligence of the American worker. If you don’t believe that, I can point to a whole world of people with as strong a work ethic as you’ll find in America.
Many of our fellow citizens think American exceptionalism is a byproduct of military might. There’s nothing wrong with having a strong military, but that’s hardly exceptional. Comparatively speaking, even at it’s strongest our military was a mere shadow of the Macedonian army under Alexander or the legions that secured the Pax Romana.
Each of those are things that any nation can take pride in, but they are hardly exceptional. Other nations have, at other times, established preeminence in trade and military might. Think of the British Empire of the 19th century, the Romans, the Persians, the Egyptians. But none of those nations could truly lay claim to being something exceptional, which is to say, something that nobody had seen before or since. Something unique.
In addition to our national identity being forged of the ideals of liberty and equality, there is one other thing that makes us exceptional. That is our willingness to be introspective and during that introspection, to demonstrate to the world that we are both strong enough and wise enough to understand that we haven’t perfected our society. After all, it took us 90 years to get from announcing to the world that all men are created equal to codifying that precept, and it took another 100 years after that before those laws began to be enforced. What other nation in history has undertaken such monumental efforts, not closeted but openly? Can you imagine the awe of the common Chinese citizen when they compare Tiananmen’s brutal repression with the March on Washington?
That is liberty. That is freedom. That is the “poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
And that is American exceptionalism. I fervently hope those of you who’ve forgotten it remember, before this nation and her ideals are left to rot in the ash heap of history.
Is Trump a Fascist?
Too often, in our poorly educated minds, the words “fascist” and “Adolph Hitler” are transposed. While Uncle Adolph is certainly history’s most infamous fascist, he was hardly alone. Fascism as a political system has existed for nearly two centuries and been used far too often and by far too many dictators to pretend Hitler was it’s only proponent. He was, in fact, only one of several fascists who rose to power in the early- to mid-twentieth century. Benito Mussolini, Hideki Tojo and Chiang Kai-Shek preceded Hitler to power; Francisco Franco, Antonio Salazar, Juan Peron, Engelbert Dollfuss, Getulio Vargas, Jorge Marees, Ionas Metaxas, and Robey Leibbrandt were all peers. More modern adherents include such luminaries as Manuel Noriega, Ferdinand Marcos and Tudor Ionescu.
It is obviously a false equivalency to say they are all acolytes of Adolph Hitler, especially as several of them rose to power as much as a decade before the Reichstag burned. Indeed, Mussolini considered Hitler to be his student. Nor is it correct to say all fascists are natural allies. The Axis powers of World War II were all led by fascist governments, but distrust rather than cooperation was their hallmark. And let’s not forget that despite the aid from Germany and Italy that helped Franco secure power, Franco snubbed all overtures to join them. Franco was busy in an on-again, off-again shooting war with his protege Salazar (one that lasted into the late 1960’s). What this illustrates is the variances within fascism: nazism, clerical fascism, falangism, and so forth.
So, if HItler wasn’t the proto-fascist, who was? Who founded the ideology that dozens of tin-pot dictators have adopted as their own in the past century?
That would be Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), a British philosopher, writer and mathematician. Indeed, if modern students hear of Carlyle at all, it is usually because of his work in mathematics: he is credited with developing the quadratic equation (you know, the joyless algebra equation written as ax2 + bx + c = 0). And while high school freshmen the world over hate him for making their homework harder than they want, their real derision should be directed at his influence on sociology.
Carlyle was a reactionary in his approach to what he viewed as the shortcomings with classical liberalism. Whether the free market economics of Adam Smith, or the idea of natural rights borne out in our Declaration of Independence, Carlyle viewed the advancements made in the 18th Century to be the direct cause of the chaos overtaking Europe in the early 19th. This culminated in his 1840 opus, “On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History”. It is a rather long tome in which he lashes out at the idea of democratic rule and free markets as the antithesis of history’s natural order. He passionately argues that in accepting these ideas, society abandoned the natural roles of the hero as leader, of war as the principle means to glory, of industry being directed towards producing the means of war, and of societal hierarchies (today we would call them “classes” or “castes”).
Carlyle advocated that Great Men are the natural leaders of both government and society and should be elevated as such; if society refused to accept them, then it became their duty to wrest power away from the masses. He had tremendous scorn for free markets and coined the term many use today to describe modern economics, “the dismal science.” It isn’t that Carlyle didn’t believe that business owners shouldn’t be able to keep their profit (after paying the government their “equitable duty”); but rather that anyone in business not producing goods and services that directly benefitted the state should not be in business. A natural hierarchy was emplaced of men, but natural rights were not. The amount of rights a common man could be expected to receive were commensurate with his place in society; those at the top naturally had more rights than those at the bottom. And as for those at the bottom, they were generally an impediment to the advancement of the society. Enslavement or even execution was their only natural right. (Carlyle expounded further on this in “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” in 1849).
Further, Carlyle was a proponent of the state as the only viable method by which the Great Man, or Hero, could extend his rule and direct his will. The principle role of the common man within the state was to prepare for war. Treason in thought or deed were the only crimes that truly promoted social disorder; treasonous activities included anything that could subvert the rule of the Great Man and should be eliminated at all costs. And since the state was the engine that made society possible, it was incumbent upon all citizens to ensure that undesirables be kept out, by all means necessary.
In short, Carlyle’s view of national socialism (he coined the term to separate his philosophy from that of his contemporary, Karl Marx) relied on these key points, in order of importance:
- A Great Man or Hero; the natural societal leader
- A strong, insular state
- A hierarchical society, down to and including slavery
- Policing of society to ensure adherence to societal norms
- Militarism
- Directed markets
- Denial of Natural Rights
Of course, today we call this fascism, not national socialism. That term we reserve for nazism, which differs from straight fascism in its adoption of some Marxist principles, particularly as relates to property rights and the veneer of popular rule.
So the question is, does Donald Trump embody those 7 principles in his vision? Anyone who’s paid attention to what he’s said – and just as importantly, not said -in not only the past 15 months of campaigning but also the past 40 years of public life, will have already recognized Trump’s themes in Carlyle’s worldview. But for those who need further convincing, let us see how Trump and Carlyle agree.
- A Great Man should be our natural leader: An entire forest’s worth of paper has been produced detailing Trump’s narcissism and self-aggrandizement, so no need to expound further on that. Suffice it to say anyone willing to proclaim the virtues of every dictator from Benito Mussolini to Deng Xiaoping to his current infatuation with Vladimir Putin sees himself as a man of similar abilities – and traits.
- The strong, insular state: His motto, “Make America Great Again,” is a paen to this idea. In case you still weren’t sure, remember one of the hallmarks of the strong state is keeping undesirables out. From his proposed Mexican wall to the Muslim ban, a cornerstone of Trump’s campaign is keeping the undesirables out – by all means.
- Hierarchical society, including slavery: Trump certainly views American society as existing within a strict hierarchy. He launched his campaign by demonizing those of Mexican heritage as “rapists and murderers.” He has been sued by the federal government for housing discrimination, but various state governments for employment discrimination and once by a trade union for refusing to pay immigrant workers. It isn’t overt racism, so much as revelation in his belief that if you aren’t in the correct class, you have fewer rights and if you reside at the bottom, you’re unworthy of much more than crumbs.
- Police State: At various times, Trump has advocated for expanded police power to ensure the classes remain in their correct position. Undesirables should be rounded up. Agitators should be put down, with force. Indeed, Trump’s idea of “Law and Order” is less about law and a great deal more about order, enforced at the point of a gun.
- Militarism: “I’d bomb the hell out of them.” “Keep the oil.” “The military would not refuse my orders, even if they found them illegal.” “There’s nobody bigger or better at the military than I am.” “I’m more militaristic than even George Bush.” Tie all of that in with his expressed desire to spend trillions on rebuilding the military machine to Cold War levels, along with his willingness to economically attack the rest of the world and yeah. Donald Trump is definitely a militarist.
- Directed Markets: The other prominent cornerstone of Trump’s candidacy is a complete refutation of free trade. It’s also, in addition to a lifelong commitment to the hierarchal society, the one thing you can go back decades (his very first Wall Street Journal interview, in 1980, in fact) and find a consistent view. In fact, Trump hates free markets every bit as much as Carlyle did in his day. After all, as Trump has said, any business that puts profits ahead of Making America Great Again is engaged in treason and should pay a heavy price.
- Denial of Natural Rights: There are two documents that historians point to as delineating natural rights. One is the French The Rights of Man. The other, fortunately, is enshrined as law in our Constitution; our Bill of Rights. At various points throughout this campaign, Trump has shown contempt for the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th and 9th Amendments. He loves the 7th (I can’t think of another politician who’s filed more lawsuits). He likes the 2nd, but only for certain people (here we go back to the hierarchical society again). That Trump thinks natural rights are a figment of some 18th century scholar’s imagination is pretty obvious.
So, is Trump a fascist? Undoubtedly, and as such, he is the antithesis of every idea this country was founded upon and supposedly stands for today. While frightening, it isn’t that he is, or that he has come within a hair’s breadth of the Presidency that worries me. No, what’s truly frightening is that so many of our fellow citizens remain blind to his nature – or worse, not blind but fully supportive of his goals.
Political Baseballs 