Politics posts

Two recent quotes for you this morning.

“I could not, would not, in good conscience go to my birth country when there is such an authoritarian bully in the White House, and when the craven Republicans in the House and the U.S. Senate are complicit in their silence.”

-- author John Irving, 83, on why he's not traveing to the U.S. to promote “Queen Esther,” his 16th novel, during an interview with The New York Times. Love the fact that he calls out Republicans. Most don't get it and just say “Congress.” 

**

“[Trump] doesn't have any policies, he has whims. It scares the shit out of me. The ignorance, the hubris, the lies, the perfidy. He knows better, but he's an instrument of the status quo and he's making money, hand over fist, while the world goes to hell in a handbasket. ... I don't know of a greater criminal in history.”

-- actor Harrison Ford in The Guardian.

As a young man, I chose my heroes well.

A post, from earlier in the week, from the once and future Pope Hat, Ken White, a criminal defense attorney out of LA:

This was in response to Vice President J.D. Vance's comments on how nobody wants foreign-speaking neighbors. 

Vance agreed with host Miranda Divine when she said it “creates division and hatred” for people of other cultural backgrounds to move into a neighborhood after he gave an example in which “20 people” price out U.S. citizens by moving into “a three-bedroom house.”

“Their next-door neighbors are going to say, 'Wait a second, what is going on here? I don't know these people. They don't speak the same language that I do,'” Vance said.

What nice people. 

Meanwhile, last night, Donald Trump held a Gatsby-style Roaring '20s Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago even as Americans are starving, because he doesn't think starvation, due to curtailing SNAP benefits/food stamps as a result of the ongoing government shutdown, is a situation worthy of using our emergency funds. Starvation does not mean emergency to Trump. If the right people are starving.

“A little party killed nobody” was the official response to criticism. It's the new “Let them eat cake”; Trump's version is “Let ME eat cake.”

I was recently in Minneapolis, where I saw a lot of the above lawn signs, along with a lot of beautiful blue/green ribbons tied around trees.

The school/church shooting at Annunciation was just a month ago, but the world has moved on. The national media has probably spent 10,000 times the energy on the Charlie Kirk killing than on another school shooting, where two kids died, and where every child who survived is traumatized for life. How do they go back to school without thinking it might happen again? How do they go back to church? How do any of us?

Six years after Sandy Hook, Joe Posnanski wrote the following lines that I think about a few times a month:

How did we not all die in Newtown?
How did any of us walk away unchanged?

This is particularly true if you've read any part of Elizabeth Williamson's “Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth.” Early in the book, she gives us the perspective of a state trooper who was one of the first to enter the building. He walked past the bodies of the principal and the school psychologist. In one classroom, Classroom 8, he saw the bodies of two teachers. Then he opened what he thought was a closet door:

He saw a damp heap of cloth that in his shock he mistook for some kind of art project. Describing what happened next in his report, Cario's detached official language turned ragged and anguished. “As I stared in disbelief, I recognized the face of a little boy . . . I then began to realize that there were other children around the little boy, and that this was actually a pile of dead children.”

How did any of us walk away unchanged? 

So the lawn signs are good but they're not accurate; our collective heart is not with Annunciation. As long as it's easier for people with severe mental health problems to get guns than to get help, this will happen again. There will be more dead children, and more traumatized kids, and more traumatized parents who will never be the same, who will carry an unbearable sadness to the grave. I'm probably being reductive, but I feel like the question for the politicians of America is this: Do you make it easier for people with mental health problems to get help? Or do you make it more difficult for them to get guns? Because you have to do one, or the other, or both. Because this will happen again.

When was the last time I watched the entirety of a 12-minute speech by a governor from another state on a Monday in August? Ever? And agreed with every word and every tone? And felt in my bones it was exactly what needed to be said? And was relieved? Like the polar opposite of every time I turn on NPR or listen to national Democrats not only not meeting the moment but missing it by thousands of miles?

Yesterday, Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois, faced with an authoritarian president threatening to send National Guard troops to his city, Chicago, in defiance of his wishes, met the moment head on. He began by saying he wanted to speak plainly and did exactly that. He spoke truth to power in language that was plain, tough, smart, resonant.

Here's the speech, via video or transcript. Check it out for yourself.

He called bullshit bullshit. He said there was no reason to deploy armed personnel to the streets of Chicago; that crime rates were falling in Chicago, and that crime ratios were worse in red states. So why not go there? Then he said why:

This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey, Stephen Miller, searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities and end elections.

He anticipated the awful coverage from the legit media and chastised them appropriately:

This is not a time to pretend here that there are two sides to this story. This is not a time to fall back into the reflexive crouch that I so often see, where the authoritarian creep by this administration is ignored in favor of some horse race piece on who will be helped politically by the president's actions. Donald Trump wants to use the military to occupy a U.S. city, punish dissidence, and score political points. If this were happening in any other country, we would have no trouble calling it what it is: a dangerous power grab.

And he reminded the cowards and opportunists of the GOP that pendulums swing and chickens come home to roost:

Finally, to the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous: we are watching and we are taking names. ... If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law.

He ended with Dr. King's line about the arc of the moral universe but reminded everyone that the thing doesn't bend on its own. “History tells us we often have to apply force needed to make sure that the arc gets where it needs to go. This is one of those times.”

Amen. He also knew his words, as good as they were, were just words, and Trump was Trump, and rationalilty might not prevail, and Illinois and Chicago might face “an unprecedented and difficult time.” He reminded Chicagoans to protest peacefully. He reminded them that if the National Guard shows up, most of them are there unwillingly. He didn't say it but he said it: the enemy isn't on the streets of Chicago. He's in the White House.

It was the best speech of the year. It was the best speech I've heard in a long fucking while.

“There's no deal until there's a deal.”

-- Donald “Dipshit” Trump

No, Donnie. First I drink your milkshake. Since you obviously don't need it yourself.

This is from last week—or about a year ago in Trump administration years:

It's amazing how clueless the “legit” media is to their right-wing slant. Or maybe it's just a dipshit slant. I.e., it's not news when Trump does or says something awful (since he's awful), just when Biden or Harris or other good people do it. Yeah, I wish it were that, but it's not. Biden old, but when he did old man things, man was it news. Old Man Trump doing old man things? Not. It's right-wing bias. It's the media still running scared from 50 years of “liberal media” charges.

Anyway it's impossible to keep up with Trump's batshit bullshit. Here's some of it from the last week:

• Reposted on his own social media site a photo of himself as THE POPE
• Reposted on the White House Twitter account a doctored photo of a muscle-bound Trump with a red light saber and “May the Fourth” message that compares “Radical Left Lunatics” to the Evil Empire (psst: red light sabers = the Dark Side, Donnie)
• Reposted on the White House account an image of Abrego Garcia a la Obama's famous HOPE poster, but with MS-13 below it
• Talked to Meet the Press' Kristen Welker and said the following:
• Some of the economy is his doing. Which part? “I think the good parts are the Trump economy and the bad parts are the Biden economy.”
• He took credit for how well the stock market is doing even though it's down 6% since he took office—and only recovered even that much when he delayed his tariff war.
• Encouraged Americans to buy less.
• Said: “We were losing hundreds of billions of dollars with China. Now we're essentially not doing business with China. Therefore, we're saving hundreds of billions of dollars. It's very simple.”

But the big one? 

Welker: Your secretary of state says everyone who's here, citizens and non-citizens, deserve due process. Do you agree, Mr. President?
Trump: I don't know. I'm not, I'm not a lawyer. I don't know.
Welker: Well, the Fifth Amendment says as much.
Trump: I don't know. It seems — it might say that.

No, it does say that. Fifth amendment, Bill of Rights, U.S. Constitution. Even I know that, and I didn't swear an oath on a Bible to uphold it.

Il est ici. Our former governor on recent tragic events:

We're all the frog in the pot of boiling water—Trump expects us to be the frog in the pot of boiling water—so it's good to pull back like this and remind everyone what's going down.

It always amuses me when Republicans talk up the “paid protesters” at left-wing or anti-Trump rallies. Have they been to one of these? I went to the #HandsOff rally at Seattle Center yesterday, one of hundreds, maybe thousands of such protests around the country, as people gave up part of their weekend to protest ... well, everything Trump is doing, but mostly the dismantling of our federal government by unelected boobs (as opposed to the Big Elected Boob), and—here's the point—I must've seen a thousand signs and no two were the same. That's us. That's the left. Nothing uniform about our sign-making. The issues were all over the spectrum. Could be about Trump dismantling the government, could be trans issues, could be immigration or tariffs or the stock market, or the unconstitutionality of almost everything he's doing, and the ignoring of the courts and the upending of the rule of law and American democracy, I mean, just so, so much that is so, so wrong with that sad, sad fuck, and it was all there on all these handmade signs held by all these people who gave up part of their weekend. We're cohesive on nothing save hating everything Trump is doing.

To be honest, I didn't think I'd go. I was about 40-60 against. But the weather was nice, I was going for a walk anyway, might as well head toward something meaningful as the world caves in. Maybe we can shore up part of it. 

“To put things into perspective: I had a Canadian passport, lawyers, resources, media attention, friends, family and even politicians advocating for me. Yet I was still detained for nearly two weeks. Imagine what this system is like for every other person in there.”

-- Jasmine Mooney, “I'm the Canadian who was detained by Ice for two weeks. It felt like I had been kidnapped,” in The Guardian. I've seen plenty of movies about autocracy taking over democracies, “Missing,” “I'm Still Here,” etc., and we're here now. That's us.

Well, at least some lawyers, even Trumpian ones, are in favor of rule of law. 

Trump's DOJ wants to dismiss the corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, in the Southern District of NY, apparently to ensure his cooperation on removing immigrants from the city and who knows what else. Border czar Tom Homan (w/Adams!) was on Fox News this morning, and said the following:

“If he [Adams, sitting next to him] doesn't come through, I'll be back in New York City, and we will be sitting on the couch. I'll be in his office saying, 'Where the hell is the agreement we came to? We're going to deliver for the safety of the people of this city.'”

The agreement we came to. Interesting. What quid for what quo, Gracie?

Better, DOJ is having trouble finding anyone in SDNY to actually dismiss the Adams case. A sepulchral figure named Emil Bove, straight out of central casting, but currently the acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General, has sent out orders to do just that; but the Trump appointee leading the SDNY office, Dannielle R. Sassoon, who clerked for Antonin Scalia and is a member of the Federalist Society—i.e., her con credentials are all there—resigned yesterday rather than go through with it. Because it's so contrary to everything. Bove responded to her resignation with a long, nasty letter, standing in for the boss, and then searched for someone else to do the deed. Right, it's Saturday Night Massacre all over again. One thing we know? Hagen Scotten, AUSA, won't be Robert Bork. 

He sent a letter to Bove, and ... OK, before we get to the really good stuff, we get the funny stuff. Scotten has to let Bove know that, though he received a letter saying he refused to dismiss the Adams case, he says he was never asked to dismiss the Adams case. He never got the opportunity. Chef's kiss. The Trumps are not just mean but incompetent, and probably incompetent first. 

My favorite part of Scotten's letter, which is short and sweet, is that he already brands the future Robert Bork:

But any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials [i.e., Eric Adams], in this way. If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me. 

Encore, please. 

The update, as I was writing this post, is that apparently someone has been found to dismiss the case, a career federal prosecutor, who claims he's doing it so others won't have to quit. But he still has to make his argument before a judge. One hopes, if he's the guy we hope he is, that he burns a few people in the process. 

In a month without much hope, all this gives me a teaspoon of it.

From a Guardian article by Peter Rothpletz on what Democrats need to do to get their message out effectively instead of what they've been doing. 

The Democrats who have emerged as the most successful communicators in the last few years—Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, Senator Chris Murphy, Senator John Fetterman, and the aforementioned [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez—are those who made a concerted effort to reject this conventional risk aversion. They curse, they go on Fox News, and they're extremely aggressive in calling out their conservative counterparts. They've renounced the long Democratic tradition of bringing not a knife to a gun fight but a butter knife to a bazooka fight. Their messaging reflects the urgency of this moment.

He's missing Pete Buttigieg, maybe because Pete doesn't quite fit his formula. He'd go on Fox News and politely dismantle the other side's insane arguments. Even so, Rothpletz's point stands. He adds:

In response to the Trump administration's move to freeze trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans, the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, should not have waited hours upon hours to finally issue a marble-mouthed, oddly sexual statement from behind a podium. No, the most talented Democratic communicators should have been immediately deployed to nursing homes and preschools in their respective districts. They should have taken to Instagram Live and decried—with F-bombs aplenty—the utter inhumanity of throwing the future of Medicaid and Head Start into doubt.

100%. Stop playing by the rules. These people are not your friends. Don't let America end because you were too polite to stop it.

For decades Democrats have misdiagnosed why Reagan was popular. They think it was the “Morning in America” bullshit, that old-time American secular religion, the smile and the wave and the Cheerios, and they've been trying to play into that for years. They've forgotten an important ingredient: resentment. Reagan was all about that, too. He built his base that way, as Trump has. So Dems just need to figure out what's on the Republican ledger that most Americans resent. I have a few ideas. 

Some posited Obama was running interference for the Bushes but the seating appears chronological. As for Michelle?  

Earlier this week, George W. Bush, the 43rd president of the United States, put out the following statement following the death of Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States.

"James Earl Carter, Jr., was a man of deeply held convictions. He was loyal to his family, his community, and his country. President Carter dignified the office. And his efforts to leave behind a better world didn't end with the presidency. His work with Habitat for Humanity and the Carter Center set an example of service that will inspire Americans for generations.

Nicely said. I also can't help but read it as throwing shade at (on?) the 45th/47th president of the United States. Carter was loyal to family, community and country? Trump is only loyal to his own sad self. Carter dignified the office? Yeah, as opposed to You Know Who. Carter's efforts to leave a better world didn't end with his presidency ... while Fuckstick there hasn't even begun. The opposite. He will leave the world much diminished. If Clarence the Angel showed DJT what the world would be like if he'd never be born, I can only imagine a much happier place.

In the fall of 1976, at Bryant Junior High School in South Minneapolis, Ms. Hebert's homeroom class held a debate about the upcoming U.S. presidential election, and two students were chosen to argue the cases for the two candidates. I was tapped to defend the challenger, James Earl “Jimmy” Carter, which seemed like an easy task. His Republican opponent, Pres. Gerald Ford, was a clutz who took office only because the previous Republican president and vice-president were both corrupt—and corrupt in different ways. Ford became VEEP when Spiro Agnew resigned for tax evasion; and he only took over when Nixon resigned because of the Watergate break-in and its year-long cover-ups. Then Ford promptly pardoned Nixon. Not a popular move. Plus Ford was lampooned weekly by Chevy Chase on this new show “Saturday Night,” and everyone liked that. So my task seemed an easy one. Problem? I wasn't as smart as Ms. Hebert (or I) thought. I was a kid who knew the big stories (Watergate), and the pop-cultural ones (Gerald Ford always falls down), and that was it. I did so poorly talking about actual political matters that Ms. Hebert tried to help me along toward better answers. It was embarrassing. I didn't do my job. I didn't defend Jimmy Carter well. 

You could say we've spent the last 50 years not defending Jimmy Carter well.

He was our the first rock 'n' roll president, digging the likes of Bob Dylan and the Allman Brothers and quoting their lyrics. He was the first serious presidential candidate with long hair—hair that went past his ears—and that wasn't slicked into place with Vitalis or some shit. He was a deep Southerner (and we hadn't had one of those in a while), and overtly religious (ditto). He also took advantage of the new primary system to come out of nowhere to win it. Didn't I see a “60 Minutes” piece about Carter going door-to-door in the snow of New Hampshire a year before the primaries? That was his idea: win the early ones, gain attention, and ride that all the way to victory. Which is what he did. What's standard operating procedure began with him.

What happened on his watch? Stagflation, a second oil crisis (this time with long gas lines), and the Iranian hostage crisis. Oh, and the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and we bowed out of the Olympics. Oh, and a rabbit attacked Carter while he was on vacation. A rabbit! This was the guy leading our nation—someone even rabbits knew was fair game. The nation felt dispirited—that was the big issue. We had a hole in the national soul you could drive a mack truck through. The liberal press didn't help—they really played up the “killer rabbit” story. Liberal Hollywood didn't help, either—they released movies like “Americathon” (1979), in which, in the near future, America has run out of oil, Americans are living in their now-useless cars, and the national government, long bankrupt, holds a telethon to raise money to in order pay back a Native American who wants to foreclose on the country. That was the mood.

Carter detailed our troubles in his infamous “malaise” speech, for which he got flak, since he got flak for everything, but I don't know if the speech should be infamous. If you watch “20th Century Women,” and you should, you get a great chunk of that speech, and boy if he didn't nail what was (and is) wrong with us:

There is a growing disrespect for government, the schools, the news media, and other institutions. ... Too many of us now tend to worship self indulgence and consumption. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We always believed that we were part of a great movement of humanity itself, involved in the search for freedom. We are at a turning point in our history. The path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest, down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom. It is a certain route to failure.

My father interviewed him once. This was in 1988, Carter had a new book coming out—post-presidency, he always had a new book coming out—called “An Outdoor Journal: Adventures and Reflections.” My father actually tried to get out of the assignment. “I'm not an outdoorsman,” he told the editor. “Well, talk about something else, then,” the editor replied. “I hear he likes poetry. Talk to him about poetry.” Which is what Dad did. They met at the Rose Gardens by Lake Harriet in South Minneapolis, and the two men talked poetry. Dad said Carter recited from memory Dylan Thomas' poem “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” and talked about the ambiguity of its last line: “After the first death, there is no other.” As a young man, he said, that line hit him hard and made him pay attention. 

Dad also talked to him about another outdoor adventure—the killer rabbit story. Carter said it was what we'd now call fake news:

“That was a story that was created by the Washington press corps,” the former president said with the genial nature that hasn't deserted him, even in retirement. “What actually happened was that I was fishing one day in my little pond, by myself, and a little bunny rabbit was chased by dogs. As any outdoorsman knows, any animal can swim well, and the rabbit, in order to escape the dogs, jumped in the pond and swam across about 10 or 15 feet from my boat, came out the other side and kept running.

”About six months later, (press secretary) Jody Powell was talking to some reporters in a tavern and telling them about this rabbit. They doubted whether rabbits could swim, and out of that came a completely fabricated story that a killer rabbit had attacked me.

"It's one of those things that you don't know whether to let it ride and treat it as a joke, which we did, or to call a press conference and announce officially that a rabbit did not attack the president of the United States.

There is a third option. You can denounce the press as a bunch of partisan liars. That's what the other side would've done, but Carter was more genial than that. He thought we were part of a great movement of humanity itself.

Biden's Unpardonable Hypocrisy: The president vowed not to pardon his son Hunter—and then did so anyway.

That's a headline on the Atlantic site in an article by one-time New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait. It's been said that headlines scream, and sometimes they do, but this one simply tsks. It tut-tuts. It demands purity on the losing side of a very dirty game.

Chait owns up to the fact that one of the charges against Biden's son (lying on a form to obtain a weapon) is something that rarely gets charged, and Hunter Biden was charged for it probably because he's Joe's son. The other charge, tax evasion, well, that gets charged, but who cares? Biden promised he wouldn't pardon his son but who cares? That was six months ago when he was running for president, and he assumed he would win it again and the world would remain semi-stable—meaning wobbly. Nope. He dropped out, Kamala entered, Trump won. Trump is now in the midst of weaponizing the Justice Dept., the FBI, the IRS, everything he can get his small, piglike hands on, as he works on his stated policy of “retribution” and to be “a dictator from day one.” What father would leave his son hanging out there to face that crap? A bad father. Joe made the right move.

I say more. I say encore. This is war. Time to get dirty. 

The week after the election, I posted this on Threads:

Someone born in one year, 1946, has led this country for 20 of the last 32 years—and if Tubby lasts his term it'll be 24 of 36. All from one year. All from a few summer months. All from some postwar fucking in the fall of '45. And we've been fucked ever since. 

In the post, I mention '50s babies because my wife is one, but '30s babies (my father) haven't exactly been represented, either. If you expand it to incude every U.S. president born in the 20th century, you get this by decade:

• 1900s (1): LBJ (1908)
• 1910s (4):  Reagan (1911), Nixon (1913), Ford (1913), JFK (1917)
• 1920s (2): Carter (1924), H.W. Bush (1924)
• 1930s (0)
• 1940s (4): Biden (1942), Clinton (1946), W. Bush (1946), Trump (1946)
• 1950s (0)
• 1960s (1): Obama (1961)

JFK was famously the first 20th century president, “born in this century” as he stated in his inaugural address in January 1961, which is pretty crazy. We're 61 years into the 20th century before getting a 20th century baby? Even crazier: four of the next five presidents were older than him. We went young in '61 and then ... “Nah.” That's our story. Great leap forward, retreat. Progress, regress. Change we can believe in, make American great again.

The regress has gone from Nixon to Reagan to W. to Trump. The arc of American history is short but it bends toward stupidity.