Democracy in America

 

Mitch McConnell shares the ignominy of Donald Trump for doing more shredding  our democracy than any other of the conservative actors of our time.

McConnell thought Donald Trump was in his political death throes after Trump’s slim escape from conviction in his Senate impeachment trial.  After voting not to convict, McConnell passed the task off to the Justice department, which under Merrick Garland, diddled about prosecuting a clearly criminal insurrectionist and his enraged band of miscreants.  “Trump will be held accountable by the justice system,” McConnell asserted.  Maybe not.  Trump is trying to run out the clock.

When Al Gore lost the election of 2000, the Supreme Court throwing the election to Bush, Gore dutifully stepped aside “for the good of the country.”  How wistful, even naïve, that seems today, one would ever thinking that Trump would ever do anything for the good of the country.  Instead, he puts country through the worst constitutional agonies since the prelude to a civil war in which 700,000 Americans died slaughtering each other. 

In 1857, the Supreme Court issued the infamous Dred Scott decision, denying essentially that black people are humans, instead they are chattels, like cows or dogs.  Roger Taney,  chief justice, owned slaves and was apparently determined to keep them.  His decision was supported by other members of a slave-owner influenced court.

The Taney court was, for the time, a national disgrace, contributing to national anger, the court repealing the Missouri compromise by judicial fiat.  The Missouri compromise was an attempt to balance the entry of slave states with free states entering the Union. Dred Scott enraged abolitionist and popular opinion, eventually electing Abraham Lincoln.

The Roberts court will, in 100 years be looked upon the same way as we look on Taney’s abortionate decision (forgive the pun).  This court has in short order, repealed a woman’s right to reproductive choice, exacerbated the presence of dark money in politics, and arrogated unto itself the rewriting of the 14^th Amendment that had clearly barred insurrectionists from holding office.   Add to this, corrupt practices and gifts received by the justices the largesse of which comes from billionaires having potential interests to be protected by their judicial friends, including Clarence Thomas, whose wife helped fund the festive party at the Capitol on January 6^th.  

And let us not forget the Roberts court’s evisceration of the voting rights act, that had required those great bastions of civil liberties, Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi to preclear voting districts to protect minorities.   We have done all the civil rights work necessary, says Justice Roberts, all is well, no further protections needed. 

Justice Samuel Alito, that paradigm of intolerance, cited that a 17^th century precedent in English common law that criminalized the killing of a fetus.  Originalism run wild, authored by a religious zealot. He forgot to mention the burning at the stake part.

The sad part of all of this is that the present court comprises justices appointed by two presidents elected by a minority of American voters.  By a president who lost the popular vote to Al Gore, and a president who lost the popular vote by millions to Hillary Clinton. Abetted by leader McConnell who would not even consider Merick Garland because it was too close to an election, except when it was Amy Coney Barrett, who needed a quick confirmation close to the next election. Public sentiment be damned.  So when one speaks of American exceptionalism, it is in the pejorative sense.  Frank Underwood would be proud.

Moreover, the coming election will have two candidates, neither of whom inspires much confidence.  One is an unhinged criminal defendant trying, with the aid of his judicial friends, to stay out of jail, and the other who projects being feeble and frail.  Perhaps he is not, but that is the popular perception, and perception being reality, these days, you fill in the blanks.  All of this to be decided by a few thousand voters in battleground states. The Electoral College says, why should voters on the coasts where most of the people live have an equal say with rural overrepresented voters?  After all, 500,000 voters in North Dakota should have two senators, just like the 40,000,000 people who live in California.

 That’s the way it was in 1789; it should stay the same in 2024, don’t you think?

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Obsessions

War clouds are festooning over Europe. 

 In August 1914, Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, famously said, “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime,” announcing the beginning of the Great War. 

After losing in 1918, Germany was forced to disarm and pay backbreaking reparations to the Allies under the Versailles Treaty. This planted the seeds of the next war. 

In anger over the treaty, Hitler obsessed with Germany’s defeat, stoking public opinion, playing the humiliation of the German volk, incorporating it in his rise to power, marked by enormous illegal rearmament. Territorial demands followed.  In 1939, came the invasion of Poland and the start of World War II.

Vladimir Putin is also obsessed--with Russian humiliation by the greatest tragedy of his life:  The collapse of the Soviet Union.  This low-down KGB blood-soaked thug rose to the pinnacle of power in a country that never enjoyed democratic traditions. A thousand years of authoritarian culture-- Czars, Bolsheviks, and now a pitiless dictatorship.

Putin’s agenda is as clear as a moonlit night on a mountaintop.  He craves weakening NATO, perhaps invading a small NATO country like Lithuania, daring the west to challenge him.  He wants to expand his empire to enhance his flailing economy.  Poles are terrified.  Lithuanians, too.  They think the United States will not come to their aid if they are attacked.  It might not. If Ukraine falls, they are next. Maybe us too.

GOP house members are also obsessed.  Their hard right obsesses about impoverished migrants purportedly flooding the country; they want to trade crucial aid to Ukraine as though it were some sick parlor game.  House Republicans obsess how they can support an unhinged criminal defendant in his own obsession--staying out of jail.

In 1938, Winston Churchill stood in the House of Commons, presciently obsessing that failure to rearm would lead to war.  No one listened.  He was a warmonger.  Instead, Neville Chamberlain, obsessed with “peace in our time,” naively signed the Munich agreement giving away the Sudetenland; one year to the date before Hitler invaded Poland, starting the bloodiest war in history. 

Europe faces a new fascist threat, the murderous Vladimir Putin, beginning to reverse his initial failures in Ukraine.  European leaders are panicking.   Europe has not rearmed, nor has it mobilized. War is coming without more force to stop a revanchist Russia, with a leader whose Czarist obsessions are both pathological and propelled by his other obsession--being deposed or assassinated. 

Germany needs to massively rearm and to possibly institute conscription.  France as well. They need to exponentially increase defense expenditures.  Some experts think it will take 5 years to reach parity and by then it might be too late.  Russia has one thing Ukraine has not.  Overwhelming manpower.  The same manpower that overwhelmed Hitler’s legions.  The same manpower that defeated Napoleon.  If Ukraine falls, war will surely come to us. 

Any Russian opposition is crushed by an avalanche of propaganda and fear. Navalny murdered.  Others tossed out windows, shot, poisoned, wings falling off their airplane.  Putin’s agenda is audacious, abetted by perverted congressional politics and Trumpian attention to his own criminality.

Putin sees NATO as a threat to his imperial ambitions.  He seeks to destroy the alliance which has preserved the world order since the end of World War II.  With Trump’s help that could happen.

The US should immediately pass the aid to Ukraine Bill, which only represents 2-3% of our defense budget.   Not likely to happen, but reinstitution of military conscription in the US and in Europe could send a strong signal to Moscow. 

This sounds alarmist, but Lenin himself said, “Push forward the bayonet.  If you find steel, pull back.  If you find soft flesh, push forward.”

Lenin is Putin’s hero.  The free world should obsess about that.

 

 

 

The Oral Argument from Hell.

The Oral Argument from hell.

 

The idea that Trump might not be evicted from the ballot, judging from the discussion at oral arguments this week before the Supreme Court is supremely depressing.   Trump continues to plague America like the ineradicable odor of a skunk.

 

After all, the constitutional scholars on television had pretty much agreed that Trump should not be a choice for a befuddled and divided electorate after all the prognostications about how Section III of the 14^th Amendment clearly states that Trump is disqualified, after the incitement of an insurrection, after people died, after a committee of congress presented all the damning evidence, after courageous witnesses risked their lives and safety to speak the truth, after a trial found Trump guilty of insurrection and the  Supreme Court of Colorado found Trump an insurrectionist and held him clearly disqualified from office, the justices of the United States Supreme Court are mentally masturbating whether disqualifying Trump would cause a disparate result in the various states, with some keeping him off the ballot, and other states doing the contrary.  The Justices asked questions about procedural minutia, hinting that they would avoid the issue like a root canal, and let him stay.

 

I hope that they rule on the briefs and the overwhelming historical analysis, and that oral argument was not an omen of judicially avoiding the lessons of history.  Court rulings in the past have caused national disruption, such as Brown v. Board of Education, but then the court was courageous and fair.

 

No one, not even the liberal justices, expressed any concern about preserving the Republic. Or the intent of the framers.   There was no discussion of the historicity of the 14^th Amendment, designed to keep insurrectionists off the ballot.   Con men can be popular.  And Trump has announced his revenge agenda.  I think the court should believe him.

 

This did not seem to bother the justices when they overruled Roe v. Wade.  The states are busy enacting different rules and creating a hodgepodge of laws, most of which are detrimental to the health and safety of young women.  Or when they gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder allowing enlightened places like Mississippi to disenfranchise as many African American voters as possible.

 

“Why were there no prosecutions after the Civil War and the 14^th Amendment?” asked Clarence Thomas.   Well, because there was post war amnesty passed in Congress in 1872.  Guess you did not learn that from Harlan Crowe.   And because no one else and no President ever caused an insurrection since then, until Donald Trump.

 

 

Welcome 2024 (or not)

 

 

2024 promises to be a year filled with high and low expectations, judicial decisions affecting American democracy, trials of one especially ignominious former President, war in Europe, war in the Middle East, and a host of other undesirable scenarios, including a battle between two gerontocrats for an office that turns people gray and demands youthful vigor.  Except they already are gray, if Trump shuns the hairdresser. Trump used his vigor to pour fuel on a bunch of Fox news brainwashed pseudo patriots, demonstrating their loyalty to the constitution by invading the capitol and hitting capitol police with shovels and crowbars.  “Hang Mike Pence,” patriotism writ large.  Biden has shown his vigor by announcing today that Trump is a threat to democracy, his voice modulating between a normal rasp and a shout. He needs to get out and talk to young people.

 

Over the past few years, it seems like people do not care about threats to democracy.   They have bought into the “good-old-days-were-better” argument.

But were they really?  Yeah, we had Elvis and the Beatles, Cecil B. DeMille, and “out of my cold dead hands,” Charlton Heston, but we also had Segregation, the Cuban missile crisis and nuclear brinksmanship.  Civil rights were on the back burner.  Forget about accommodations for disabled people or being inside a restaurant with clean air.  After all, tobacco was good for your T-Zone, said the Lucky Strike hucksters, as they lied about tobacco’s dangers, or that your T-Zone might have to be irradiated or need a voice box and a hole in your neck or your tongue removed.  You get the picture.

 

The Supreme Court is about to rule whether Trump should be kicked off the ballot.

It’s rich that Trump argues that kicking him off the ballot will disenfranchise millions of Americans when he tried to send his slate of fake electors to the capitol.  The argument is that it is anti-democratic to deprive the voters of their say.  Well, so is not allowing felons to vote, not allowing people under 35 to be President, not allowing Johnny rebs to return to office, and keeping a narcissistic charlatan from being qualified to run again.  Protecting minority rights is also not democratic.  That is why we have a constitution and a bill of rights.  A government of Laws, not men (or women or of whatever pronoun you want.)

 

Some people think we have made progress in perfecting the Union. In the 1950s Americans were petrified about the communist (Soviet) menace. Children in elementary schools did drills hiding under their desks to avoid being vaporized by an H-Bomb.  Black school children had to be escorted to class by the national guard.  Racism was rampant.  “Segregation forever,” cried George Wallace.   George got a lot of votes until someone shot him. Everyone has a gun, remember? And let’s not go back to a civil war or enslavement, which Nikki Haley did not mention and had to be called out upon.  Nikki wants Trump voters.

 

People nowadays are concerned that we have no attention span, purloined by the little screen we carry around, people sitting at the dinner table, their phones at the ready, to look up a fact or check a movie while their real-life companions are ignored, feeling the frustration of abandonment.  How can we solve global problems when we do not talk to each other? 

 

If Franklin Roosevelt were running for office today, CNN would be doing close up pictures of his leg braces and wheelchair, asking questions if he had the stamina to be President.  FDR was only 63 when he died in Warm Springs of a cerebral hemorrhage caused by blood pressure of over 220.  He was running a war, dealing with Churchill, Stalin, and the Manhattan project.  Trump is running so he can avoid the slammer.

 

Biden might be old, but he is not feeble.  He only seems feeble.   You do not have to be quick to be President. You only must be quick to participate in a Presidential debate with a deranged lunatic.  Being President, you need to sit with your army of advisors and have the wisdom of years of experience to make wise decisions.   Things have gone well for Joe, aside from his Hunter problem. Joe has known pain, is compassionate, and the respect of foreign leaders he has known for many years.   That seems like enough to be President.

 

On the other hand, Trump is blessed with many years of fighting court battles, screwing workers, removing classified documents from the White House, defending himself against rape charges, fraud accusations, and 91 felony counts.  Remember the Obama birth certificate scam?   Any other candidate would have stepped aside for the good of the country.  Not Trump.  He is running to stay out of jail and to make America great again.  This is like Captain Hook taking down the jolly roger and putting up the stars and stripes.

 

 

Fundamentalism and the Supreme Court.

 

Catholic fundamentalist Samuel Alito is not a fan of Thomas Jefferson.  Thomas Jefferson was arguably a deist or a theist, or maybe even a Unitarian.  His statute for religious freedom in Virginia was a template for the separation of church and state, later expressed in the Constitution. His views about keeping the preachers away from government are well known.  He was an enslaver, and a father of enslaved children, but his ideas about religion have been soundly reaffirmed in our republic—until now.  The separation of church and state has allowed different religions to thrive in all the states of the Union.  

 

And now, the Supreme Court of the United States has anointed itself as a priestly guardian of public morality and even worse, the reproductive freedom of women, to the point of reckless endangerment.

 

Everyone my age has heard stories about “fallen women,” back-alley abortions, and ruined lives.  We have heard stories of women dying in illicit, filthy, abortion clinics unstaffed by medical personnel, and seen Hollywood movies of the era depicting melodramatic, but true, tragic denouements to unwanted pregnancies resulting from rapes, incest, and medical emergencies.

 

Donald Trump, a man who never got a majority vote from the American people, appointed not two, but three extremist justices, creating a judicial Frankenstein, a renegade Supreme Court; justices rushed through by Mitch McConnell, who would not even meet with Merrick Garland to offer a balance to the court, lost by Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s death.

 

Let me digress for one paragraph: Mitch McConnell, could have, but refused, to whip votes or vote himself for Trump’s well-deserved impeachment conviction, followed up his vote with a sanctimonious speech about Trump’s possibly being held accountable by the courts…well you know how that has worked out.

 

But let’s get back to the Supremes.  

 

Five robed Catholic religious fanatics have pilfered women of their constitutional right to reproductive freedom, forged over 50 years ago by Roe v. Wade.  Justice Alito, an ideologue par excellence, conducted Machiavellian palace intrigue to rush through his obfuscating opinion as revealed in a recently published article by Adam Liptak and Jodi Kantor of the New York Times.  This, including the arguable leaking of the opinion early to cement the votes of his colleagues who might have been wavering over this ill-thought monumental injustice.

 

Women are now fleeing from unfree states to free states, like the 1850s when slavecatchers roamed across state lines to capture runaway slaves. Ok. No slave catchers today.  Only regressive state legislatures and salivating Attorneys General like Ken Paxton of Texas threatening to sue or imprison women who travel from their home states to seek health care.  Physicians fear making health care decisions for their patients. They might go to prison for 99 years or lose their license.   Forget that a woman whose fetus has a fatal anomaly or that the woman could possibly die. 

 

There was a time when burning people at the stake for apostacy was de riguer.  Now prosecuting them for protecting their lives or their sanity is the fashion in Texas and some other states that have become bastions of religious fundamentalism.

 

The problem of course, is that the law is not purely a religious undertaking.  It is a mélange of both.  If it were not, we would be living in a theocracy, like Iran.   

 

What the anti-abortion crowd truly believes is that life begins at conception.  And it cannot be truly argued otherwise.   But since Roe v. Wade, it has been judicial practice that prior to viability, that the social implications of abortion far outweigh the religious proscriptions.  So, yes, there is a profound difference between truly held beliefs and what has evolved in modern legal thought.  Therein lies the dilemma.  The incurable malady.   Religion or socially desirable mores. Moderation or extremism.   70% of the American public are in favor of moderation.

 

What Justice Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett lied about, that they were committed to stare decisis, or long settled law during confirmation hearings, undermines not only their credibility, but their place in history, like the infamous Justice Roger Taney, when he authored the Dredd Scott decision, denying human rights to a Black man.  Even worse, also on the wrong side of history, Alito deserves a special place in judicial infamy for his unmitigated ability to alter modern legal thought into some contorted, thinly veiled religious rationalization actually citing 16^th century law.  A fall back to the good old days.  Those days were not so good, after all, despite what Samuel Alito thinks.  And no, he is no Jeffersonian.  Not even close.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Religion and Real Estate

Religion and Real Estate.

 

 

The guilt of cruising the Aegean as an American and as a Jew while fellow Jews are undergoing the most gruesome assault since the Holocaust makes me wonder why people pray to God. They thank God for good things and call it “providence,” and dismiss the bad, as though some beneficent entity is controlling their lives. 

 

Islam arose around 624 AD, after the much older Jewish monotheism arose in the levant some 3-4,000 years ago, depending upon which source you believe. Early Jewish religion had elements of polytheism, worshipped goddesses and a cult of mother goddesses, according to historian/anthropologist Raphael Patai. In the 300,000 or so years since homo sapiens emerged in Africa, organized religion has only existed for about 4,000 years, a flash of light in terms of the 4.5 billion years in the history of Earth.  

 

Before organized religion, primitives danced around fires and assumed direct relations with the spirits. Shamans then arrogated for themselves the sole ability to communicate with the spirits and therefore control over the populace.  “Only I can communicate with God.”  Sound familiar?  You had to go through them to be safe. Some grievance politicians do the same. Get the picture?

 

Scientists have predicted that in another 250 million years the sun will incinerate our planet.  Meanwhile we are doing a pretty good job of doing it ourselves.  We had better hope Elon Musk’s plans for moving humanity to other worlds works out.

 

So, let’s share a little perspective on the Arab-Jewish/Israeli wars.

 

People have circulated maps showing Palestine as it was before the time of Christ; true believers rely on that map to justify claims on the land. They say Palestinians did not exist at that time and therefore, Jews have a superior claim.  There were Canaanites, Israelites, Assyrians, Egyptians and of course, wars over the land among clashing empires and tribes.

 

The troubles began with the rise of monotheism, which automatically dismissed other faiths, all of which are constructs anyway.  Ours is the only way to God, they say.  Death to the others.  Let’s take their land.

 

Israel is supposed to be a homeland for Jews.  Well, it has been a very inhospitable homeland ever since partition.   When the Ottoman empire collapsed at the end of World War I, the Versailles treaty created the conditions for what followed—another war, even worse than the first one.  And the carving up of the British and French colonies and mandates at the end of World War II perpetuated the conditions for what is happening today, by promising the same land to two different tribes.  

 

Are the territorial disputes tied to religion or are the religions tied to the disputes? Or is it a distinction without a difference? Or is it simply about real estate?  Pretty complicated stuff.

 

New surveys say that approximately 26% of Americans do not believe in a supernatural being that can change the course of history or respond to the pleas of a suffering humanity. Evangelicals are among the strongest supporters of Israel, because in the end of days, Christ will return or some such other theory.  And the theory involves the Holy Land being in possession of the Jews.  It all sounds, excuse the term, Medieval.  One wonders if a professed Atheist can ever be elected to political office in America.  

 

No one denies the soothing aspects of a religious undertaking, and I suppose that is reason enough to feel some comfort that after one dies, they will go to some either defined or undefined place, heaven or hell, purgatory, or some other destination conceived by priests, or those others who need to provide an explanation for the inexplicable.  But religion should not justify demands for real estate and competing claims for land over which bloody wars have existed for millennia.

 

There are only three countries in the Middle East that have been around for centuries:  Persia, which has devolved into a fanatical, theocratic Iran, Egypt, which is a military dictatorship, and Turkey, a putative democracy, the remnant of the Ottoman Empire and the selection of the wrong allies during 

World War I.  The rest are political creations arising from colonial enterprises, and a Jewish tribe with the greatest present date moral claim on a small part of the land (because of the Holocaust.) Israel is so small compared to its Arab neighbors.

 

Why can’t they just leave her alone?

 

Unfortunately, in historical terms, the comparatively new remnants of the colonial empires’ 

division of the land in the most awful, blood-soaked 20^th century, the situating of Israel between the former empires of Persia and Egypt and the bloody competition for a relatively small strip of land is arguably the result of tribal imperatives which have no end in sight, fueled in great part by religious imperatives.

 

 

Pardon Trump? Never!

 

Aaron Burr, the vice-president of the United States was tried for treason for aiding the British during the American Revolution.  Acquitted in 1807, Burr spent the rest of his life trying in vain to rebuild his reputation. His personal reputation destroyed, he spent the rest of his life vainly trying to rehabilitate himself by writing a self-serving memoir and wandering the US and Europe.  He died in obscurity in 1836 on Statin Island, of all places.

 

Richard Nixon, pardoned by Gerald Ford, skulked off to California, and appeared in television interviews attempting to recalibrate his reputation and legacy.  His crimes in office consisted of dirty tricks and covering up a third-rate burglary of the Democratic National Committee.  Nixon had a famous enemies list and sabotaged an early attempt to end the Viet Nam war in order to advance his election prospects in 1972.   But Nixon never tried to effectuate a coup d’etat.  Gerald Ford lost the next presidential election because the electorate was not amused by his decision to pardon Nixon’s criminality.  Ford announced, “Our long national nightmare is over.”

 

Au contraire. It was just beginning; that pardon set a dangerous precedent.  A precedent that if one is in the highest position of trust, the chief magistrate of this great country, you are not subject to accountability.  Your self-serving hubris will and should prevail.  The law be damned. Justice be damned.  Tell the peasants “l’etat c’est moi.”

 

Some have argued that Donald Trump should be pardoned for his criminal activities to avoid a national trauma that would be provoked by a trial and even a conviction.  They argue that a trial and conviction will increase polarization, fueling the ilk of Sean Hannity.  Propaganda has been fed to the public for years now, by billionaire media moguls, interested only in  their unparalleled profits, exacerbated by the continuing Trump circus.  And yes, CNN and MSNBC have enjoyed the ratings also on their evening Trump bashes.  Being in a media silo is a stupefying hypnotic mushroom induced religious experience.

 

Arguing that a Trump trial will increase polarity is fear itself.  It is an acquiescence that our justice system is hopeless.  That accountability for the prominent is untenable.  That the wicked should go unpunished for their misdeeds.  That some future president can come along and do whatever they want to impugn the law and escape accountability. This is unacceptable in a country with a constitution and the rule of law.   Acknowledging misdeeds in one part of an argument and then saying there should be impunity for those deeds is cognitively dissonant and intellectually dishonest, a fear ridden Dickensian, existentialist, despair ridden determinism.  It is depressing beyond the wildest imagination.

 

I prefer the Churchillian outlook, “Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing—after they have exhausted all other possibilities.”   

 

We have gone so far down the rabbit hole--a mishandled pandemic, the minority election of a man exacerbating our national malaise of disunion, 5 years of distraction from the real problems facing the nation, and now those who wish out of fright not to punish those who would subvert our democracy.

 

Our country has been through, to name a few traumas (and this list is by no means exhaustive,)  a civil war killing 700,000 Americans, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the failure of reconstruction, the Jim Crow south, two horrific world wars, a disastrous war in Southeast Asia, a civil rights revolution, desegregation, a white population that still fears its loss of tribal status, the assassination of a young and promising president and his brother, race riots in Los Angeles, racial profiling, and a party that has now become anti-democratic.  

 

We can certainly tolerate the trial of Donald Trump. On TV. In living color.  On every channel. Unvarnished. Unedited. Unexpurgated.  No sound bites.  On the internet live stream. Show them how American justice works.  I have tried many cases in front of many juries.  Let’s do it. Let’s see the evidence.  

 

Television for all those who think there is no justice for the privileged and for those who question the justice system. For all those low information, Fox watching naifs who are sending in $25-35 of their hard-earned money to a scoundrel ostensibly to make America great, but instead who is using 23% of the money to pay his lawyers ($23M and counting). 

 

Many of the little people who smashed into the capitol have been convicted and sentenced, testifying that they did it for “their president.”  What about their leader?  

 

Let’s send the message for the generations to come that a president is not a king, just as George Washington showed us when they offered him a kingdom.

 

No pardon for Donald Trump.