My cousin Judy, from the bohemian side, was woken by her father one summer dawn. “Get up,” he said. “There are diamonds in the grass.” Toddler Judy traipsed downstairs. It was true! Thousands of diamonds sparkled in the weak light. She stooped to gather some. “They’re not real!,” she complained. Uncle Bob corrected her. “The diamonds are real. They can’t be possessed.”
Nancy Pelosi faces a like dilemma. We are a constitutional republic with checks and balances against a cruel, lazy, ignorant, self-dealing demagogue. But any effort to enforce the law—or principle, or simple good taste—dissolves like morning dew in a greedy palm so long as a party of bad faith installs a solid 34 senators. Power investing the powerful with immunity is a working definition of fascism. Impeachment can’t restore the Constitutional order. Yet not impeaching is dereliction under the Constitution.
Impeachment becomes a purely academic exercise—the perfect summer school for We the People flunking civics. The people’s business can’t be transacted, anyway, through Mitch McConnell’s Senate. Pelosi thereby has a free hand to expand the curriculum to other warranted impeachments that history failed to deliver.
Three other presidents stand out as Constitutional vandals. Andrew Jackson evicted the “civilized” Cherokee from their Carolina farmsteads, and condemned them to the Trail of Tears, in defiance of the Supreme Court. (“Justice Marshall has ruled. Let’s see him enforce it!,” chortled Jackson in perhaps the ur Tweet.) James K. Polk usurped Congress’ warmaking powers to invade Mexico. Polk appears to have lied about the war’s direct pretext, as well. The third candidate for censure tests liberal capacity for principled consistency.
Abraham Lincoln turned military firepower upon American citizens to preserve a Union nowhere permanent under the Constitution — and, practical and reasoned factors argue, should reconfigure occasionally. Lincoln was being set up by history as one of its ugliest villains, but he turned the tables. Lincoln was reprieved by victory — and martyrdom — but also a public relations stroke of genius. He changed the purpose of the war to expunging the great, intractable American sin of slavery.
There is a sequel to Lincoln’s feat. America fought World War II without an expressed purpose. The War Office hired Frank Capra to explain “Why We Fight.” The best he could come up with was the circular argument, “To get the job done!” Only postwar did Nazi evil become the missing casus belli. America emerged the surviving global superpower as the least invested in the carnage. The meek had indeed inherited the Earth, and with the redeeming conviction that Nazi bluster, cruelty and self-regard ill became an unassailable power. American intentions to be the Good Guys have often lapsed. But they are as sincere as a toddler’s desire to see diamonds in the grass.
It’s a mistake to assert Nazism uniquely German. There is a little Nazi in every human agitating to Greatness (Again) at the expense of goodness. Good (it chagrines this atheist to admit) boils down to the teachings of Jesus: pacifism, socialism, tolerance. Evil is exemplified by the various cults of Jesus, which anoint the cultists Good Guys thereby blessing any holocaust they launch against the holdouts.
Trumpism is Nazism. Before this toss-up election Democrats need to remind voters of their version of Americanism by broadcasting the transgressions of the master racist, Mein Trumpf. But concentrate on the sex and swindles. Entertainment addiction is more American than soul searching.
You know, after listening to our illustrious president’s Fourth of July speech, I realized a couple of things about Trump. First of all, he only sounds intelligent when someone else writes his speeches and tells him what to say and think as he reads their beliefs off of a teleprompter. Secondly, Trump wants to so badly identify with America as someone he can never be — a military veteran who actually served our country for selfless reasons.
Arthur Laffer is a flimflam economist. In the 1970s, he spun the theory that if you cut taxes on the rich, the resulting economic boom would more than pay for the tax cuts. Yippee.
Laffer’s theory (Supply Side Economics) was the pseudointellectual basis for Reagan tax cuts of the 1980s. Despite what it promised, the result was record deficits. Budget Director Stockman later admitted that they knew Laffer’s theory wouldn’t work, but they welcomed the deficits to put a curb on demands for social spending. In practical terms, it helped them rob the poor and give to the rich, which was the goal all along.
Pressed by the Republicans, who claimed the deficit was now suddenly an urgent crisis, the Clinton Administration eliminated the deficit. We were actually reducing the National Debt for a couple of years, but no gratitude to the Democrats.
For then came the W. Bush crew. Ignoring the progress on reducing the National Debt, Bush pointed to the surpluses paying it off as an excuse for more tax cuts. “It’s your money!”, but it was money already spent. And despite the failure of Laffer’s theory, they invoked it again to promise that the Bush tax cuts would pay for themselves. The result? Even bigger deficits than before. Plus an economic collapse.
President Obama took aggressive steps to pull us out of the Great Recession. Had he listened to Republican squawking it would have turned into a new Great Depression. This required temporarily expanding the deficits, but it was not for the purpose of enriching the rich. So the economy was saved. By the end of his term of office, the temporary deficit had been cut in half and was heading down. But unfortunately his time was up.
Once again, after Democrats had cleaned up a Republican mess, the voters in their infinite wisdom responded by putting the Republicans back in charge. Once again taxes were cut for the rich, bigly. Once again, the Laffer theory has failed. Once again, the deficit has ballooned to new record highs. And once again, Republicans say we need to address the deficit by slashing anything that helps anyone but the rich and corporations.
When will we learn? How many times does Arthur Laffer need to be discredited by experience? Well, guess who just gave Arthur Laffer the Presidential Medal of Freedom? From one flimflammer to another. But he gives them out like Pez. It’s the biggest aware farce since they gave the Peace Prize to Arafat.
If Laffer had any shame, he’d decline the unmerited honor. But we’re being ruled over by shameless people, who have the nerve to claim they’re draining the swamp, when they ARE the swamp all along.
History documents that great wealth inequities are usually cited as factors in the ferment of revolutions and the fatality of civilizations. Remember the “let them eat cake” moment that is associated with the French revolution.
One should think that the most influential segments of our society would try to avoid inviting such a backlash. Not so. Our system of choosing leadership has evolved to a point where an aspiring politician’s easiest path to power is to embrace a coalition of enterprises whose livelihoods ignore our collective best interests. Most of the low hanging fruit in campaign financing has this taint.
Government was idealized to leash the whims of the very rich, not to be the tool that extends their advantage. Mr Epstein’s exploits and associations demonstrate the problems we invite when great wealth is allowed to corrupt and dominate a society. It is not beyond our wit to change this. The foundation to any change is to pass campaign finance laws that are so well thought out that they contain all attempts to game them.
After all the fussing and feuding that came forth regarding the Fourth. it’s amazing how a piece of cloth can be treated better than a human being. Kneeling, standing or sleeping is an individual choice (unless one has insomnia) and such a petty thing to care about how others act or react as long as actions are personal and not harmful.
Thirteen stars, 48 stars, 50 stars — our country drowns and burns, while Puerto Rico is treated like an unwanted stepchild.
Monuments come and go, statues are erected and demolished by man and bombs or stolen by countries to which they don’t belong. If Old Glory had existed centuries ago, it would have been saluted with every slaughter. Now it can’t touch the floor but children can sleep on cement.
Let’s stop paying lip service to small change and spend some bucks on gallons of beige paint to turn the WHITE House into a blended color of mixed diversity.
Then we can all appreciate what the Stars and Stripes should stand for.
Here’s the thing: For some reason, Trump says whatever he wants and the “vehicles” which move his words make those words instantly known to, basically, the whole world. Then he says some more words and those go out … every single word. The problem is, his words are taken as orders to be followed, opinions to be considered, something everyone has to consider. So he gets a power presidents before all this technology didn’t have, and it ends up creating anxiety and chaos, not to mention leaving out any platform for debate or for others to have a voice in an issue.
This undermines our Democracy.
His “wishes” are too frequent and lack coherence for the country to adjust to or consider intelligently. The horrible mess with the migrants on the Southern Border is just one result of his “tweeting.”
Make that illegal to give tweets such power.
While economic indicators keep rising, employee wages stagnate. Where does all the wealth that workers create go? To the top 1% of the top 1%. Working people are stressed. They can hardly make ends meet. They are only one illness or one car breakdown away from drowning in quicksand of debt.They are stressed. And angry.
A coward who bullies the weak, Trump harnesses that anger by talking like a tough guy. Real tough guys, men and women who carry the super-rich on their backs, were raised to “suck it up,” to be tough or else be seen as losers. So they hold festering resentment and smoldering anger inside. The bullying coward points at innocent immigrants to blame.
His followers don’t see that their plight is because an undeserving few take nearly all the wealth they’ve produced. He calls low-paid workers “losers.” His believers are conned to suck it up, blame the “others,” but don’t ever question why the super-rich have so much while they have so little. That’s the con.
Watcha gonna do? Resist? Or continue sucking it up?
As Jesus once said (paraphrased) “Before deploring the speck in your neighbor’s eye, tend to the beam in your own eye.”
Eternal advice!
Before Donald Trump savages the US economy by disrupting the productively organized job market, let him answer to the charge of breach of the oath we all saw him swear at his Inauguration: “… I will … preserve, protect and defend the Constitution … “
From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2019
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