Tag Archives: the former guy

Did he really say that?

Posted on by under Election 2020, History, Law and justice, Political commentary, Re-blogs, Social commentary

I well remember the time my young son, who had been outdoors playing with his sister and the neighborhood kids, came running into the house, breathless, saying, “Mom … whatever they say I did, I didn’t do it!” That was in the 1970s, long before I ever heard of Donald Trump, but the refusal to accept any responsibility for anything is the same. This latest attempt by the former guy to blame others for his lies and the consequences of those lies is jaw-dropping, even though we should be used to it by now. See what our friend Keith has to say about it …

musingsofanoldfart

From the mouth (or fingers) of a person who is well known and documented from multiple sources for presenting untruthful statements, yet one more statement is making the rounds this morning. S.V. Date wrote an article in the HuffPost called “Trump Blames Mike Pence For Jan. 6 Violence For Not Going Along With His Coup Attempt.” The article can be linked to below, but here are the first two paragraphs.

“Donald Trump, whose coup attempt on Jan. 6, 2021, put his vice president’s life at risk as a mob of his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol, on Monday blamed Mike Pence for the violence that day because he didn’t go along with the scheme.

‘Had he sent the votes back to the legislators, they wouldn’t have had a problem with Jan. 6,’ the former president told reporters on a flight to an Iowa campaign stop. ‘So in many ways, you…

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The East Palestine Disconnect

Posted on by under Economic issues, Environmental Issues, History, Law and justice, Political commentary, Re-blogs, Social commentary

My granddaughter has, rightly, taken me to task for not giving more attention to the catastrophic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, just a few hundred miles from our home. But, try as I might, I have been unable to stay focused on it long enough to write a post. The disaster has become both a political football and a racial one, thanks to certain politicos, and I find myself growling and cursing every time I try to put fingers to keyboard. Jeff, however, has no such problem and has written a well-researched, timely, and passionate post about the disaster and the situation to date. Thank you, Jeff! I owe you one!

On The Fence Voters

So Donald Trump visited East Palestine, Ohio, yesterday. Visiting the scene of the crime is what immediately came to mind when I saw him arrive in “Trump Force One.” But what I saw from many in that community was nothing of the sort. There were cheers, clapping, and fawning – something resembling a rock star coming back on stage for an encore.

What in the hell is wrong with these people?

I’m sorry. I do not mean to lump everyone in East Palestine into the same camp. Indeed there are folks there who despise the man. But let’s face it. Trump got over 70 percent of the vote in that area in 2020. Certainly, those are landslide numbers by any stretch of the imagination.

And what they do not know, at least most of them, is that when Trump came into office in 2017, he gutted scores of regulations spanning…

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Tired

Posted on by under Bits 'n Pieces, Economic issues, education, Free Press Issues, guns, Law and justice, Personal, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary

I’m tired, my friends, and I imagine you are too.

  • I’m tired of being told that more than 3,200 deaths by guns, including 44 mass shootings in less than 28 days is simply the ‘price of freedom’. Freedom to … WHAT?  Get shot to death at the grocery store?  To have our children killed in school?  If that’s the price of freedom, you can keep the damned freedom!
  • I’m tired of the altogether too frequent killing of people by the police … the very people we are supposed to be able to trust to protect life. The relatively few police who take the lives of primarily Black people who have done little or no wrong, have given police officers everywhere a bad name and frankly, if I see a cop in a store, I turn the other way, hoping he doesn’t even notice me.  If I see one behind me at a traffic light, my heart stops and I try so hard to look innocent that I probably look guilty!
  • I’m tired of being called a ‘Marxist’ because I believe in human rights, believe that nobody should amass huge amounts of wealth while others go to bed hungry at night, or live on the streets in cardboard boxes.
  • I’m tired of spending more than half of my monthly Social Security stipend on medications that are essential to keep me from dying, while seeing the profits of the pharma companies that manufacture those drugs skyrocket.
  • I’m tired of listening to Republican politicians threatening to cut that very same Social Security that a) I paid into all my life, and b) is not enough to support me if I lived on my own! This is a threat against the very survival of those of us over a certain age, so apparently those politicians have decided that our lives no longer add value to the world.
  • I’m tired of conspiracy theories, especially those lies told by politicians who know the truth, but find it more expeditious to their own ends to push the lies.  And I’m tired of the ignorance in the general public that allows so many everyday people to believe those lies.
  • I’m tired of companies that raise their prices for one of a variety of excuses – supply chain issues, staffing shortages, increased production costs – and then at the end of the year show a huge increase in their profits.
  • I’m tired of the bigotry that is on the rise in this country. Anti-LGBTQ sentiment, racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, misogyny … all are increasing at significant levels, thanks in part to religious ‘leaders’ who have zero tolerance for any that don’t fit their pat little images, and in part due to politicians like Ron DeSantis and others who promote the idea that ‘other’ is bad, ‘other’ is to be shunned.
  • I’m tired of a free press that keeps shoving the former guy down our throats. By now, he should have faded into obscurity to the point that if we saw a picture of him, we’d say, “Oh yeah … I remember that fat slob … what was his name again?”  But no, we have to see his picture and read every word that comes out of his lying mouth on a daily basis.
  • I’m tired, most of all, of Republican politicians in Congress who are bastards. Sorry, Keith, but that fits them to a ‘T’.  They take our hard-earned tax dollars to the tune of $174,000 and more every year, and then fail miserably to do the job for which we paid them.  They don’t legislate, they retaliate.  They don’t build, they destroy.  They don’t govern, they campaign.  Before the current 118th Congress was even seated, they were already plotting their next election campaigns.  I’m tired of our government being so divided by party that ‘party’ is the only thing that matters, not people.
  • I’m tired of feeling helpless to change any of the things I’m tired of. I’m tired of being ashamed of this country I’ve lived in for almost 72 years now, tired of wishing I were almost anywhere but here.  My vote is my voice, but it is a very small voice, made even smaller with such tactics as gerrymandering that dilute my voice.

I could probably think of more, but … I’m tired of writing for tonight, so I think I’ll go read for a while now.

More Important Things To Worry About

Posted on by under Free Press Issues, Law and justice, Political commentary, Social commentary

I refuse to waste either my time or energy on the game of false equivalencies, on Republicans’ efforts to play the ‘whaddabout’ game, and thus I have little to say about the handful of documents found by President Biden’s own lawyers that were promptly returned to the National Archives.  The fact is that it wouldn’t surprise me one bit to find they were planted there, but I’m not going to dive into the world of conspiracy theories … eventually the truth will out.  Meanwhile, this nation has more important things to focus on, such as the ongoing attempts to destroy our democratic foundations, the ever-growing effects of climate change, a looming debt ceiling fight, a recent surge in Covid cases/deaths, voting rights, women’s rights, Putin’s war against the world, and much more.  So, I will share Robert Reich’s words about the false equivalencies between the fewer than 20 documents found among the President’s possessions and the truckloads of documents that Trump stole upon leaving office.  Beyond this, I can only say that the mainstream media is playing into the hands of the radical right and I shall not write on this topic again unless there is a valid reason to do so.

False equivalence

Biden’s documents

Robert Reich

For years, Trump and his enablers in Congress and on Fox News have accused Hillary Clinton and then Joe Biden of doing exactly what Trump has done, or worse, and the mainstream media has usually played along by making false equivalences. But of course there’s never been any valid comparison. Trump repudiated the Constitution and staged an attempted coup, which he’s still mounting, among other things.

And now we have the specter of Biden being accused of having done exactly what Trump did when Trump brazenly stole top-secret documents from the United States.

But let’s be clear: The Biden documents were discovered by Biden’s own lawyers, who then reported the discovery to the Justice Department. The Trump documents were requested repeatedly by the National Archives. Trump repeatedly refused to produce them. They were then found by the FBI over the objections of Trump and his lawyers.

Democrats have an old-fashioned belief that democracy requires truth, facts, and logic. So when mistakes are made, they usually try to explain them to the public, as the White House is now doing with regard to the documents found in Biden’s possession.

Unfortunately, the White House did not disclose the discovery to the public for two months, apparently waiting until after the November midterm elections before which the disclosure could have been damaging to Democrats.

Yesterday, Attorney General Merrick Garland, citing what he called “extraordinary circumstances,” appointed a special counsel to investigate the handling of the documents — inviting more false equivalence between two investigations: Biden’s unknowing possession of such documents and Trump’s knowing possession.

Republicans have no such qualms about democracy, facts, and logic. A Republican House hellbent on investigating Hunter Biden, the FBI, and anything they can find to embarrass Biden and the Democrats is already making as much political hay as possible out of the discovery of the documents in Biden’s possession, as are their mouthpieces on Fox News.

The task for Biden and the White House will be to keep an even keel by not getting distracted by this commotion, and continuing the important business of governing the nation. Over the long term (meaning during the next two years of run-up to the 2024 election), the contrast between the House Republicans’ zany partisan escapades and Biden’s seriousness of public purpose will offer the most potent means of avoiding all false equivalences.

Tearing It Down, Not Making It Great …

Posted on by under Economic issues, Election 2022, Global Issues, Political commentary, Social commentary

We’ve become so used to hearing the term ‘maga’ that perhaps we’ve forgotten what those four letters were originally intended to stand for (though they never did): “make America great again”.  It was the campaign slogan for the former guy back in 2015-2016 and should have gone into the dung heap thereafter, for he did nothing to make anything great.  However, the media kept applying the term to any and all who supported said former guy, and now it’s become part of American slang … much to my our chagrin.  Paul Krugman, an economist and astute political observer writing for the New York Times, posits that what the ‘maga crowd’ have done and are doing today is actually quite the opposite of making the nation ‘great’, and I fully agree with his take on the subject …

Making America the Opposite of Great

Paul Krugman

05 January 2023

I admit it: Like many liberals, I’m feeling a fair bit of MAGAfreude — taking some pleasure in the self-destruction of the American right.

There has, after all, never been a spectacle like the chaos we’ve seen in the House of Representatives this week. It had been a century since a speaker wasn’t chosen on the first ballot — and the last time that happened, there was an actual substantive dispute: Republican progressives (yes, they existed back then) demanded, and eventually received, procedural reforms that they hoped would favor their agenda.

This time, there has been no significant dispute about policy — Kevin McCarthy and his opponents agree on key policy issues like investigating Hunter Biden’s laptop and depriving the Internal Revenue Service of the resources it needs to go after wealthy tax cheats. Long after he tried to appease his opponents by surrendering his dignity, the voting went on.

But while the spectacle has been amazing and, yes, entertaining, neither I nor, I believe, many other liberals are experiencing the kind of glee Republicans would be feeling if the parties’ roles were reversed. For one thing, liberals want the U.S. government to function, which among other things means that we need a duly constituted House of Representatives, even if it’s run by people we don’t like. For another, I don’t think there are many on the U.S. left (such as it is) who define themselves the way so many on the right do: by their resentments.

And yes, I mean “resentments” rather than “grievances.” Grievances are about things you believe you deserve, and might be diminished if you get some of what you want. Resentment is about feeling that you’re being looked down on, and can only be assuaged by hurting the people you, at some level, envy.

Consider the phrase (and associated sentiment), popular on the right, “owning the libs.” In context, “owning” doesn’t mean defeating progressive policies, say by repealing the Affordable Care Act. It means, instead, humiliating liberals personally — making them look weak and foolish.

I won’t claim that liberals are immune to such sentiments. As I said, MAGAfreude is a real thing, and I’m feeling a bit of it myself. But liberals have never seemed remotely as interested in humiliating conservatives as conservatives are in humiliating liberals. And a substantial part of what has been going on in the House seems to be that some Republicans who expected to own the libs after a red wave election have acted out their disappointment by owning Kevin McCarthy instead.

And does anyone doubt that resentment on the part of those who felt disrespected was central to the rise of Donald Trump? Are there any pundits left who still believe that it was largely about “economic anxiety”?

I’m not saying that the decline of manufacturing jobs in the heartland was a myth: It really did happen, and it hurt millions of Americans. But the failure of Trump’s trade wars to deliver a manufacturing revival doesn’t seem to have turned off his base. Why?

The likely answer is that Trump’s anti-globalism, his promise to Make America Great Again, had less to do with trade balances and job creation than with a sense that snooty foreigners considered us chumps. “The world is laughing at us” was a consistent theme of Trump speeches, and his supporters surely imagined that the same was true of domestic globalist elites.

And I have a theory that Trump’s own underlying ludicrousness, his manifest lack of the intellectual capacity and emotional maturity to be president, was part of what endeared him to his base. You fancy liberals think you’re so smart? Well, we’ll show you, by electing someone you consider a clown!

The irony is that the MAGA movement has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of sinister globalists (if any exist) in making America the opposite of great. Right now the world really is laughing at us, although it’s terrified, too. America is still the essential nation, on multiple fronts. When the world’s greatest economic and military power seemingly can’t even get a functioning government up and running, the risks are global.

I mean, even with a speaker in place, how likely is it that the people we’ve been watching the past few days will agree to raise the debt ceiling, even if failing to do so creates a huge financial crisis? And there may be many other risks requiring emergency congressional action even before we get to that point.

Of course, the world is laughing even harder at Republicans, both the ultraright refuseniks and the spineless careerists like McCarthy who helped empower the crazies. For what shall it profit a man, if he shall lose his own soul, and still not gain enough votes to become speaker of the House?

I’m not sure what we are in store for, nor is anyone else. One thing is sure, however: America is already less great than it was when Nancy Pelosi ran the House, and it’s shrinking by the day.

The Next Two Years …

Posted on by under Bits 'n Pieces, Election 2024, Free Press Issues, History, Political commentary, Social commentary, voting rights

Looking ahead to the next two years in the United States Congress, I think we all foresee chaos.  I don’t anticipate that the work of government, the work of We the People will be done, since the Republican-led House of Representatives has already told us they have no intention of doing their jobs.  They have made it clear they plan to obfuscate and obstruct the will of the people by impeaching not only the president (not for any crimes, real or imagined, but simply in retaliation for the twice-impeached former guy), and then they plan to defund the FBI, but only after a lengthy, costly investigation led by the likes of Gym … er, Jim Jordan, himself a criminal.  So, it would be easy to slip into despair, wondering why we are even bothering to pay taxes to keep the government running if they aren’t planning to do a damn thing about such important issues as the environment, guns, healthcare, education, voting rights, women’s rights, and the multitude of things that we hired them to address.  But Robert Hubbell has a slightly different take, one which I think deserves some pondering.  Here is a portion of his post …

The next two years.

Robert Hubbell

02 January 2023

As we enter 2023, there is no escaping the fact that we are beginning the long march toward the presidential election of 2024. As we start that journey, we have every reason to be confident about our ability to rise to the occasion. We did so in 2022, as we did in 2020 and 2018. The lesson of each of those campaigns is that our biggest challenge is overcoming the persistent media narrative that the Democratic Party is in disarray while the MAGA wing of the Republican Party is ascendant. That has not been an accurate description of the political dynamic in America since 2016, but the media has been like a dog with a bone—it won’t give up the negative narrative about the Democratic Party despite all objective evidence to the contrary.

          On the Democratic side of the scale are the results of the last three elections (or four if you consider the popular vote in 2016). On the Republican side are four losing elections and truly daunting challenges entering 2023. While we should never count on Republicans to defeat themselves, the narrative is misleading if we focus exclusively on the challenges facing Democrats—a favorite journalistic technique whenever a story is needed to predict doom for the Democratic Party.

          The stories circulating at the top of the news cycle this week highlight the challenges the Republican Party will face as it begins to awake from a six-year binge with a strange bedfellow whose appearance in the harsh morning light of 2023 should give the GOP a sinking feeling of regret and panic. Let’s see what the GOP sees in the mirror at the dawn of a new year.

The impossibility of breaking up with Trump.

          A sizable portion of the Republican Party is done with Trump—but it will be impossible for the GOP to break up with Trump. He will either be the 2024 GOP nominee, or he will destroy the party in the process of losing the nomination. Worse, just as MAGA extremism appears to have crested at the polls, Trump is forcing contenders for the nomination to “out-Trump Trump” in their quest for the 2024 nomination. See, e.g., Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, and Kari Lake.

          Trump began the new year by sending a warning shot across the bow of the Republican Party. Last week, Trump posted an article titled The Coming Split on his vanity social media platform, Truth Social. The article urged Trump to run as a third-party candidate if the GOP does not nominate him for president in 2024. See Huff Post, Trump Appears To Float Third-Party Threat If GOP Won’t Back Him | HuffPost Latest News.

          The author of the article, right-wing journalist Dan Gelernter, wrote the following:

Do I think Trump can win as a third-party candidate? No. Would I vote for him as a third-party candidate? Yes. Because I’m not interested in propping up this corrupt [GOP] gravy-train any longer. . . . What should we do when a majority of Republicans want Trump, but the Republican Party says we can’t have him? Do we knuckle under and vote for Ron DeSantis because he would be vastly better than any Democrat? I say no, we don’t knuckle under.

          As noted in the HuffPo article, current RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel told Trump that if he runs as a third party, “We [the GOP] will lose forever.” McDaniel is right. If Trump leaves the GOP, it will be nearly impossible for another GOP candidate to win in a general election. And the result will be the same if Trump mounts a third-party challenge or merely sulks at Mar-a-Lago, hurling insults and raising money for Trump-affiliated PACs that he spends on legal defense and tacky parties.

          Despite Trump’s weakened state from the midterms and mounting legal problems, Kevin McCarthy’s inability to secure the votes to become Speaker is directly related to Trump’s continuing gravitational pull on the GOP. The Freedom Caucus and assorted crazies in the GOP are demanding that McCarthy veer to the extreme edges of MAGA extremism to garner their support. For example, McCarthy has floated the idea of Jim Jordan leading a Judiciary Committee investigation into FBI Director Christopher Wray because . . . . well, you know. In MAGA-world, “FBI bad, Oath Keepers good.” Trump appointed Wray as FBI Director but has been highly critical of Wray’s unwillingness to pursue Trump’s revenge agenda against Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, etc.

          Likewise, Ronna McDaniel is trying to keep her job as the Chair of the Republican Committee by saying that the top priority of Republicans in the new congressional term is “getting to the bottom of Hunter Biden’s laptop.”  That should be a pretty easy task since Rudy Giuliani has had a copy of the hard drive from Hunter Biden’s laptop since October 2020. If there is anything on the laptop worth getting to the bottom of, it should have emerged by now. More importantly, the obsession with Hunter Biden’s laptop illustrates that the Trump revenge agenda is eclipsing the ability of the GOP to pursue a substantive agenda.

          So, there you have it. Trump won’t let the GOP walk out the door without starting an internecine war that may destroy the party. And even without Trump actively trying to destroy the party, he has unleashed reactionary forces that even he cannot restrain. Over the weekend, McCarthy reportedly offered a concession to the radical wing of the Freedom Caucus that would allow a handful of Representative to call for a “no confidence” vote on the Speaker—something McCarthy previously said he would “never” do. As a result, the extremists in the GOP, like Matt Gaetz, will be controlling the GOP agenda in Congress. See Newsweek,  Steve Bannon says Matt Gaetz Will Be ‘De Facto’ Speaker After McCarthy Concessions.

          [Update: McCarthy’s humiliating offer to allow a “motion to vacate” by five members was rejected in a letter by nine Republican members sent on New Year’s Day.]

          Whatever challenges Democrats face as they move toward 2024, those challenges do not include an inevitable struggle for control of the party that will inflict grievous injury no matter the outcome. Democrats face challenges, too, and we will be reminded of them early and often by the media. So, keep in mind that the next two years will be extraordinarily difficult for the GOP, even if the media fails to mention that fact.

Dealing with the polls over the next two years.

          It was not your imagination. Polling regarding the 2022 midterms was not only wrong, it was so wrong that it may have negatively affected Democratic prospects in some contests. The NYTimes published a lengthy analysis of the polling errors in 2022. See NYTimes, The ‘Red Wave’ Washout: How Skewed Polls Fed a False Election Narrative. Kudos to the Times for engaging in introspection about how the media amplified misleading polls. The Times does not mention its own prominent role in distorting the narrative to the detriment of Democrats.

          The lengthy analysis in the Times can be distilled to the following:

  • Polls are not elections.
  • In a closely divided electorate, polls communicate virtually no useful information.
  • Republicans have figured out how to manipulate polls.
  • Polling aggregators like Fivethirtyeight.com and the media amplify the misleading polls generated by partisan affiliates of the GOP.
  • Misinformation from junk polls depressed Democratic turnout in certain instances.

          The ability of Republican pollsters to distort the media narrative had real-life consequences on the outcomes in 2022. Democratic funders abandoned Mandela Barnes in his race against Ron Johnson when garbage Republican polls began to suggest that Johnson was pulling ahead of Barnes by five points (or more). In the end, Barnes lost by one percentage point. But the “negative narrative” resulted in a fundraising edge by Ron Johnson of $26 million.

          What if Democratic funders had not abandoned Barnes based on misleading polling? Would Barnes have fared better if the Democrats had not ceded the fundraising advantage to Ron Johnson? We will never know the answers to those questions for certain. But we can stop falling for the same stupid Republican games in the future.

          So, here’s the point: Don’t stress out over polls during the next two years. We must go about our business as if every vote might be the deciding vote in every election.

A Conservative Voice … With Reason!

Posted on by under Bits 'n Pieces, Election 2022, Global Issues, Political commentary, Social commentary

It is rare that I will post the words of a conservative commentator these days, but there are a few exceptions.  Bill Kristol is a conservative, but an intelligent man with a conscience, one who is not your typical “maga” sort of Republican we see so much of today.  His post for the New Year crossed my radar and I want to share it with you, for while he is fully cognizant of the problems facing the world today, he also sees hope arising from the past 12 months.  Take a look …

A (Surprisingly) Happy New Year

2022 was better than expected; 2023 is key.

William Kristol

30 December 2022

A year ago, as we approached New Year’s Day 2022, things seemed grim.

Things were grim.

At home, Donald Trump was ascendant in the Republican party. Elise Stefanik’s Dear Leader sycophancy and Big Lie enthusiasm seemed to be the future. Liz Cheney’s truth-telling seemed to be the past. And it seemed that no one of any prominence would pay a price for January 6th. President Biden’s approval ratings were plummeting and a Democratic Congress was not producing legislation. A red wave for an unredeemed Republican party looked likely.

Confidence in the U.S. abroad had been damaged by the Afghanistan withdrawal. Vladimir Putin was threatening Ukraine and looked like a good bet to topple the Ukrainian government and partition the country. The mullahs’ grip in Iran appeared unchallenged as they continued to progress toward nuclear weapons. America was divided at both the elite and popular levels, the country uncertain of its global role—still apparently reeling from Trump’s presidency, but not yet strengthened by Biden’s.

The new year in 2022 was not a particularly happy one.

But politics, like life, does not proceed in a straight line.

Things turned around.

Actually, let me retract that last sentence—because it suggests fatalism and a lack of human agency concerning important events, which is both untrue and demoralizing.

It was people—both extraordinary leaders and ordinary folk—who turned things around in 2022.

At the end of 2022, Putin is still Putin. The mullahs are still the mullahs. Trump is still Trump. Those actors have not changed.

But the world around them changed because of the struggles and successes of those who fought for democracy and for freedom.

Volodomyr Zelenskyy and the people of Ukraine stood heroically firm. The Iranian people bravely rose up. At home, the American electorate rejected the worst of the election deniers and continued its rebuke of Trumpism for the third straight election. Congress passed a fair amount of reasonable legislation, including the Electoral Count Act. The January 6th Committee conducted itself seriously and honorably and in the course of its work documented a great deal of important evidence which was not previously known. Partly as a consequence of their labors—which were dismissed both early and late as being obscure and inconsequential—the Department of Justice now seems likely to try to enforce some accountability not just for the foot soldiers, but for the leaders of the insurrection. And for Donald Trump.

What happened in 2022 was as remarkable as it was unexpected. And as a result, we enter 2023 in better shape than we could have reasonably hoped a year ago.

Because—and this is the key part—people did not accept the reasonable expectations. They fought and organized and worked. They bent the curve of the future.

Perhaps we will one day look back at 2022 not just as a lucky bending of the curve, but as an inflection point—as a true Zeitenwende, to use the term invoked by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

But we don’t know. More to the point, we can’t know. Nothing about the future—nothing about 2023—is inevitable.

It’s equally possible that we could look back on 2022 as a bear market rally for democracy. That we will one day judge it to have been a false dawn, a brief surge of democratic willpower and energy on behalf of freedom that peters out in the face of the illiberal forces arrayed against it.

But the successes of 2022 have given those who care about liberty and democracy, about human decency and human dignity, a fighting chance in 2023.

In 2022 democracy and liberty didn’t just hold the line—they gained some ground. The defenders of liberalism fought back more effectively than the last decade suggested they were capable of doing.

What comes next will be the product not just of implacable forces, but the choices and actions of real people. Some of those people will be consequential and their choices will be seen by the world. You will know—or learn—their names. The vast majority will not be. Many of the choices will be made by ordinary people, acting individually or collectively, often in quiet—but important—ways.

Will Trump be further weakened by the end of 2023? Will demagoguery and authoritarianism be pushed back both in America and across the globe? Will Ukraine win? Will Putin remain in power? Will the Iranian people topple the mullahs?

There are unexpected opportunities for 2023. But they need to be followed through on, not frittered away.

So now is no time for celebration. To use a World War II analogy, we’ve survived Dunkirk, the Blitz and Pearl Harbor—but much damage has been done, the enemies of liberalism remain formidable, and we’ve only just begun the effort to regain ground. Even if victory is possible, there is a long and difficult road ahead.

Perhaps Churchill’s 1941 Christmas Eve address from the White House, where he was visiting Roosevelt, is apt.

“Let the children have their night of fun and laughter,” he remarked. And “Let us grown-ups share to the full in their unstinted pleasure.”

But Churchill added that, after sharing that moment of pleasure, we will have to “turn again to the stern task and the formidable years that lie before us, resolved that, by our sacrifice and daring, these same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world.”

This isn’t World War II, of course. But it is the challenge of our time. And history will judge us on whether we meet it.

The Week’s Best Cartoons 12/17

Posted on by under Bits 'n Pieces, cartoons, Holidays, Humour, Law and justice, Political commentary, Re-blogs, Social commentary

This week there were a number of easy targets for the talented cartoonists, including Elon Musk, Kyrsten Sinema, Kevin McCarthy, the former guy, and more.  The cartoonists picked up those balls and ran with them and, as usual, our friend TokyoSand over at Political Charge was in line to catch them!  Thank you, TS!!!

How ironic that the deeper we get into the holiday season, the more the news is covering the antics of incredibly selfish people. Check out how editorial cartoonists covered the likes of Kyrsten Sinema, Trump, and Elon Musk.

Be sure to check out the rest of the ‘toons!

If You Cut Off The Head Of A Snake …

Posted on by under education, Election 2024, History, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary

Robert Reich’s piece yesterday titled “When Will the GOP Reach the anti-Trump Tipping Point?” made me think.  Although Reich predicts that the GOP won’t quit Trump just yet, I think his ship is sinking and will be shades of the Titanic by November 2024.  (Note that I predicted he couldn’t possibly win in 2016 and look how wrong I was then!) While I will be happy to see the GOP disavow Trump, they won’t be disavowing the movement he started.  Maga will be, I fear, with us for a long time to come, for like a carnival, people are drawn to it and Trump was, perhaps, only the beginning. And like a carnival, the movement has attracted a fair share of snake oil salesman and carnival barkers. Trump’s arrogance, his oversized ego, and the crimes he has committed against the people of this nation will bring his reign to an end … perhaps already have.  But others have been watching, learning, observing what it was about him that drew people, and they will use their observations to fine-tune maga into something less unsavory on the surface, yet far more dangerous.

Consider, for example, Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis who is largely expected to throw his hat into the presidential ring sometime in the not-too-distant future.  DeSantis is ‘trumpian’ in some ways … he knows how to rally the people … but his public demeanor is calmer, he is more literate, able to string entire sentences together, and his ego is not as glaringly obvious.  He doesn’t make ludicrous statements such as “I alone can fix the system” or “I would qualify as not smart, but genius….and a very stable genius at that!”  DeSantis does, however, indulge in ludicrous behaviour, such as his stunt sending asylum seekers from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard.

More recently, he has launched a campaign designed to lure the anti-vax crowd, claiming he will seek a grand jury to potentially prosecute the manufacturers of COVID vaccines.  He further claims he will set up a “Public Health Integrity Committee” to oversee the medical establishment.  What could possibly go wrong when a politician without an ounce of medical knowledge attempts to outwit the experts, the scientists, and play Russian roulette with people’s lives?  DeSantis claims that “our CDC, at this point, anything they put out, you just assume at this point that it’s not worth the paper that it’s printed on,” hence the pseudo-justification for his committee.  Two of the people on his committee are authors of an open letter, the “Great Barrington Declaration”, published in October 2020, that called for achieving “herd immunity” by letting COVID spread naturally, whatever the cost for the vulnerable, rather than implementing shutdowns and lockdowns. At this point, I can only be thankful that I don’t live in Florida!

And then there’s Senator Rick Scott, also from Florida, who is one of the most abominable men on my radar, but he seems to know how to win the maga crowd’s hearts.  During Mr. Scott’s tenure as chief executive of Columbia/HCA, once the nation’s largest private for-profit health care company, the Department of Justice won 14 felony convictions against the company, which was fined $1.7 billion in what was at the time the largest healthcare fraud settlement in U.S. history.  That, in itself, should make him a political pariah, but not among the maga crowd.  Honesty and integrity are not among their criteria.

So yes, Donald Trump’s days are numbered, as evidenced by his utterly ludicrous scheme to sell digital trading cards with a picture of his head on someone else’s body for $99 apiece, but there are others waiting in the wings to follow the path into the culture war.  According to Christopher Sebastian Parker, professor of political science at the University of Washington and co-author of a recent research paper on maga culture …

“Right now, these people feel like they’re losing their country and their identity. They feel like they’re being displaced by communities of color, by feminists and by immigrants. These people are motivated by what they see as an existential threat to their way of life.”

Translation:  they are seeking to turn the United States into an all-white, straight, male-dominated, gun-totin’ Christian nation.  Any candidate who can convincingly promise that will stand a chance at winning the maga arm of the Republican Party over in 2024.  Governance?  Justice?  Environment?  International relations?  Education?  Civil Rights?  None of that matters to the maga crowd. They have listened to Trump & Co long enough that even when Trump is either six feet under or in a prison cell, the movement will not die out any time soon.