Religious Extremism

Posted on September 26, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 26, 2024

War is humanity at its worst. Things that happen during wars are so terrible, we had to invent new definitions for war crimes, since killing and maiming, which would be capital offenses in civilian life, are routine and accepted in warfare. We even have rules of war and a Geneva Convention, but they’re only followed when doing so serves the propaganda purposes and convenience of the combatants.

Attempts to humanize warfare only make it easier for wars to start. They accept a reality in which war is inevitable and attempt to impose a veneer of civilized behavior and values on something that is neither. If that’s true, why do nations choose killing each other as a knee-jerk reaction rather than reserve war as a last resort when everything else fails?

The answer depends on the conditions that spark the fighting. Wars of revolution against oppression we understand. Wars of desperation fought by people watching their children starve or succumb to preventable diseases are also understandable because those who fight believe they have no other choice. The same is true for the other side of the coin. An autocrat’s first priority is maintaining power and control. Thus, countries like Russia and China launch pre-emptive wars against their own rebellious provinces. These things we abhor, but we understand them.

But there is major cause of war that is beyond rational comprehension: religion. Religious differences may be responsible for more bloodshed and killing than anything else in the history of the world. Millions of indigenous people were murdered in the name of Christianity by early European explorers like Christopher Columbus. Catholics and Protestants went to war against each other for centuries in Europe. The American colonies were settled mostly by people attempting to escape religious prosecution. And, historians tell us there has been an ongoing war between Islam and the Judeo-Christian world since the time of Mohammed, fifteen hundred years ago…

…which brings us to the Middle East. The war over the Holy Land has been raging since the time of Christ. The introduction of Islam to the conflict, six hundred years later, only made it more deadly and intense. Religious extremists are responsbile for every problem that has occurred there in the last hundred years.

In 1920, the League of Nations issued the Mandate for Palestine, which gave Britain stewardship over what is today Israel and Jordan. Included in the mandate was the Balfour Declaration, which required the British to find a homeland for Jews who had inhabited the region for two thousand years. For reasons which today seem inexplicable, the Palestinian people, who had resided there as long as the Jews, were left out. Palestinians are as entitled to their own homeland as Jews, but in World War 1 era Britain, the Zionist movement pressed for a Jewish homeland, while no such support existrd for Palestinians, nor has one ever existed in the Muslim world.

Muslim nations are mostly kingdoms or some form of autocracies. It has never been in the interest of Arab leaders to recognize the rights of Palestinians. Thus, when Israel was created in 1948, the Palestinians were relegated to protectorates in Gaza and the West Bank, then part of Jordan. The Zionists had been offered a home in what is now Uganda in East Africa, but religious fervor demanded that any Jewish homeland contain Jerusalem. Since equally militant Christians and Muslims claimed Jerusalem as their spiritual home, the creation of Israel as a nation amidst neighbors that outnumbered it a hundred to one and vowed its destruction from day one set the stage for the war raging in Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon today.

Everyone has the right to worship or not as they please. Freedom of religion, as defined in the First Amedment to our Constitution is a universal human right. But organized religion’s unholy connection to governments and politics may be one the most dangerous threats to today’s world.

The nations of the ancient world replaced polytheism with monotheism, but they all had their own ideas of who the one true deity was. This single distinction has kept conflicts simmering in the Middle East since 1948. They erupted into war every couple of decades, as the situation was exacerbated by foreign actors who used Israel and its neighbors as surrogates during the Cold War. Today, however, saner heads must realize that killing thousands of people over whose God is the right one is un-Christian, un-Jewish, and un-Muslim. All three religions advocate peace, yet when it comes to each other, they’d rather fire rockets than co-exist.

This has gone on far too long, and the reason is religious extremism. Right-wing militant Israelis who support Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government are as guilty of prolonging the seventy-six-year-old conflict as Muslim extremists. The common denominator in all this is the institution of religion that is more interested in its own power and influence than the lives and health of its people.

It’s time we grew up and weaned ourselves off the crutch of religion. If we don’t, it may destroy us all.

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Assassination

Posted on September 16, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 16, 2024

When Catelyn Stark and her entire entourage of lackeys and bodyguards had their throats cut during a state dinner, it was a thing of beauty, artistically. It was a perfect coup executed precisely, and it resulted in enough blood and death to satisfy fans of Game of Thrones. But that was fiction.

I was not a fan, at first, because I thought the graphic violence and sex were gratuitous substitutes for quality writing and acting. I was wrong about that, and the brilliance of George R. R. Martin’s epic story won me over. After a few episodes, the blood and gore seemed almost cartoonish, hardly the thing of horror movies, and that troubles me.

Assassinations are common tropes of fantasy and spy novels. In real life, they are acts of desperation. A political assassination sparked World War 1, and another one threw our country into chaos in 1962, when John F. Kennedy was murdered by Lee Harvey Oswald. The failed attempt by John Hinckley to assassinate Ronald Reagan two months after he was inaugurated averted even worse chaos as the country was still healing from Vietnam.

In some cultures, assassination is an acceptable means of transferring power, as in North Korean leader Kin Jong Un having his uncle murdered. In ours, there is absolutely no justification for attempting to kill a leader, ever. Aside from the basic immorality of the crime, resorting to that kind of violence creates crises that destroy nations or plunge them into horrible conflicts. Then why do they happen?

For two reasons: insanity and politics, not necessarily exclusively of each other. Oswald was a Communist sympathizer who had earlier defected to the Soviet Union and supported Fidel Castro in Cuba. He hated fascism, and while Kennedy was hardly a fascist, in Oswald’s distorted worldview, anyone who attacked Communists had to be a fascist. His history of problems with the law both as a civilian and a U. S. Marine, suggest sociopathic tendencies. John Hinckley, on the other hand, had no political motive. He was just nuts, and his jury concurred.

The two recent attempts on Donald Trump’s life follow similar patterns of motivation. Thomas Matthew Crooks, who attempted to kill Donald Trump in July, was a disturbed young man. He had right-wing leanings, and he had stalked both Trump and President Biden on the internet. We don’t know why he did what he did, but’s it safe to assume he wasn’t entirely sane. And yesterday’s apparently failed attempt to kill Trump by Ryan Wesley Routh seems to have been motivated by his support for Ukraine and his fear that Trump would allow Russia to overwhelm that nation.

It’s easy to blame the divisiveness Trump has promulgated, but it’s more complicated than that. First, none of the four incidents described above was overtly political – that is, none of them appears to have been about a left- or right-wing extremist attempting to kill an opposition leader. That’s the only good news in this madness. One thing that stands out, however, is that all four incidents involved guns the perpetrators shouldn’t have had.

It’s a simple truth that modern America is locked in a battle over sensible gun control laws that is continually being won by right-wing extremists. This has nothing to do with the Second Amendment to the Constitution which was intended to maintain a well-armed, regulated militia. It is about profit and political gain at the expense of a culture that has become wholly irresponsible. The latest school shooting, in Ohio, had more to do with an irresponsible father instilling a young son with the wrong values than anything else.

As a supporter of policies that cause people to think they have right to take up arms to get what they want, it’s reasonable to remind Trump that he is as much a part of the problem as the nut cases who use guns to commit mayhem. Two attempts on his life might make Trump rethink his position on gun control, but it’s more likely that he’ll blame progressives for going after him.

Trump’s ever more extremist positions as a candidate have America frightened, both by the prospects of a second Trump term, and by the divisive, angry climate he created. He has energized the worst tendencies in Americans and attempted to normalize them for his own benefit. I do not support political violence of any kind, but I also have no sympathy for Trump. If you believe in karma, he deserves what he got.

We seem caught in a vicious cycle in this election season. One side continually advocates violence, and then looks on in wonder as it erupts against them. This is the culture Trump has fostered, and it must stop. The sooner he’s off our radar, the better off we’ll be.

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Desperation

Posted on September 13, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 13, 2024

As children we were fascinated with animals. Our first books were about lovable, cuddly creatures who talked and played like we did. As we got older, we learned to be wary around animals. My experiences as a Boy Scout were populated by gems of wisdom like, “Don’t ever get between a bear cub and its mother;” “A rattlesnake will only bite you if it feels threatened;” “Never approach a wounded or frightened animal;” and cliches like “As dangerous as a cornered rat.”

We know animals have feelings, and stripped of civilized mores, their reactions to threats are entirely driven by their survival instincts. We think of ourselves as superior to lower animals, but the worse the circumstances we find ourselves in, the more our reactions mimic theirs. Fear, vulnerably, and terror cause us to forget our civilized training, and focus on survival.

Like all animals, if something or someone we care about is threatened, we fight to protect it; if we feel personally endangered, we either cower in fear or strike out pre-emptively; if we’re hurt or terrified, we often act irrationally or unpredictably; if we’re desperate, we’ll do virtually anything to save ourselves. For most of us, situations that evoke those behaviors are rare. We obey our civilized conditioning most of the time, unless we find ourselves in a raging fire or the middle of a terrorist attack.

But those of us who are insecure or suffer from psychiatric disorders, those of us who are unconscionably self-centered and incapable of feeling sympathy or compassion, those of us who are so emotionally retarded and desperate for love and adulation that those needs dominate our every action – those people behave like predatory animals at the slightest provocation.

We often use animals as surrogates. TV commercials use lovable dogs to put viewers in a receptive frame of mind, and scenes of tortured or neglected animals to rend our hearts. Donald Trump and JD Vance’s desperation in the presidential race caused them to fabricate a story about Democrats looking the other way as rapacious, murderous migrants steal and eat people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio, JD Vance’s state. Despite the town’s mayor and Ohio Governor Mike Dewine debunking the crazy rumors, and local police saying there is no evidence any such thing ever occurred, Trump and Vance continue to push the story despite being mocked throughout the news and social media. Why would they do something so ridiculous?

The easy answer is to review how animals react when they feel frightened or trapped, and to recall that stripped of filters and values, we’re animals, too. Donald Trump, who is as amoral, narcissistic, and unfettered as he can be, is the perfect test subject. He knows he’s unqualified to lead, he’s totally ignorant about governing and diplomacy, and his record is one of failure and ignoring the needs of the vast majority of Americans. But he’s obsessed with winning, and in this campaign, of staying out of prison for his crimes. He’s frightened and desperate, so he behaves like the uncivilized animal he is.

But before we conclude that the election is all but over, that the next fifty-two days will see a steady deterioration in his behavior and ability to function rationally, let’s hear what Pete Butttigieg has to say about that. The low-keyed, intelligent, former presidential candidate believes Trump is dissembling and sabotaging his own campaign, but he warns that there’s another, chilling dimension to this madness.

Trump is not just a desperate cornered rat, he’s also a sly fox and a dangerous snake in the grass. Buttigieg believes his craziness is part of a strategy. He says Trump knows he can’t run on his record, and he can’t compete with Kamala Harris on policy because he knows nothing about policy himself, and he denies any connection to Project 2025, which was written by his supporters as a blueprint for a second Trump administration. He is beside himself because the media love Harris and he’s unable to get the spotlight to stay on him.

Buttigieg says Trump’s only remaining course of action is to do and say crazy, outrageous things to force the media to pay attention to him. His base has never cared whether anything he said made sense, so why would they start now? If Pete is right, and I believe he is, Trump is even more unhinged than we thought. He’s terrified of losing, of being rejected by the voters, and ultimately, of being held accountable for his crimes. As such he is as dangerous as a cornered rat or a wounded tiger.

Someone like that must not only be defeated, he must lose by a margin that cannot be questioned, no matter how rabid his base is. I know you’re tired of hearing this, but the next election may be the most important event of our lives.

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Conflicting Moralities

Posted on September 12, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 12, 2024

Like most people who slogged through tortuous university educations, I endured several courses in literature and philosophy. It wasn’t apparent back then, but with the perspective of time, I realized that the school of thought that made the greatest impression on me was the German fascination with the contrast between the basic natures of the powerful and the weak.

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche believed that there are two distinctly different moralities which he called Master Morality and Slave Morality. The former describes the values of “aristocrats,” the latter of everyone else. Together, they offer insight into Donald Trump and his MAGA movement.

Nietzsche’s aristocrats, people we would today describe as autocrats and dictators, believe they possess a God-given right to rule over others. They believe themselves to be noble and inherently superior to the masses they govern, almost as if they were a different species. They value power and freedom, but that freedom extends only to those who possess the wealth and power to attain what they desire.

The oppressed, the subjects of the aristocrats, value charity, sympathy, and compassion. To Nietzsche, this was a double-edged sword. On one hand, it enabled slaves and other downtrodden groups to maintain sanity and dignity, because in their powerless, poverty-stricken state, they needed to believe these were good things. But it also defined the aristocrats’ values as evil, kept the masses completely separate from the masters who despised them, and often gave the oppressed the energy they needed to revolt.

According to Nietzsche, these two moralities have driven western civilization for thousands of years. Keeping in mind that Nietzsche’s use of “master” and “slave” are simply surrogates for the powerful and the masses, we can make the case that the current struggle for American democracy between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris is an example of that struggle. Trump exhibits all the attributes of the aristocratic morality while Harris champions the tenets of the morality of the governed or the oppressed, depending who’s speaking.

The traditional view of history is that culture drives morality, but Nietzsche believed the opposite, that morality drives culture. That’s a very powerful concept, and it is a principal foundation of Nazism. Nietzsche, like Karl Marx before him, would describe the ebb and flow of the last century and a half of history as the struggle between the master class attempting to impose its will and the desires of the governed to live freely.

An article titled The Master and Slave Moralities: What He Really Meant offers insight into how this applies to Trump: “Masters are strong, creative, wealthy, and powerful. They can do whatever they like. They love themselves and see themselves as good. They name the opposites of themselves, the weak and feeble, as bad.” In an almost ironic nod toward Trump, the article notes that a system based on Master Morality “isn’t a blank check for sociopathy, but it [acknowledges that] some people might need to step on others to actualize themselves. Nietzsche compares the problem to hawks having it in their nature to eat lambs, [because it is] what the hawk needs to do to fully be a hawk.”

Having no regard for lambs may be natural for a hawk, but in humans, sociopathy and the inability to feel compassion are mental illnesses. They are not characteristics we seek in leaders; they are anathema to basic American values. Nietzsche went on to describe how the attitude of the aristocrats invariably resulted in a revolt of the masses, either physically or by revising attitudes. This occurs when divisiveness and resentment caused by constant overreach of the ruling class reach a boiling point that cannot be sustained.

Today, we see all of this playing out in an attempt by a minority of far-right extremists beholden to Donald Trump to impose their will on everyone else. Such a movement can only succeed in an environment of chaos and confusion that obscures truth, and one that plays on the fears and insecurities of people, especially those who struggle to make ends meet. It also depends on having a leader so psychotically intent on power and believing in the delusion of his own greatness that he appears fearless and indomitable.

Trump wants his opponents to interpret that as strength, but the more we learn about him the clearer it is that it’s just an artificial construct to hide his insecurity and weakness. It’s frightening that the United States could have come to such a pass. If there’s any comfort to be found, it’s in recognizing that if Nietzsche was right, all this has happened before, hundreds of times.

It’s simply the latest struggle between the forces of oppression and those of good will. It’s America’s turn to prove that we’re worth saving.

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If You Watched the Great Debate…

Posted on September 11, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 11, 2024

Usually, presidential debates do not deserve the name debate. A debate whose purpose is to illuminate competing policies and visions for the future can only work when both participants are there in good faith. By that definition, any debate that includes Donald Trump must fail. For Trump, debates are about intimidation, anger, lies, fantasies, and an immense ego constantly competing with good sense.

Last night’s debate between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris was true to form, except for the outcome. When Hillary Clinton debated Trump in 2016, it was clear that neither she nor her staff were prepared to deal with the onslaught of venomous rants he threw at her. In fairness, neither were any of the fifteen Republicans he vanquished in the primaries. No one was because no one like Donald Trump had ever been on a presidential debate stage before.

Never in all the presidential elections I’ve witnessed has a candidate running for an office that bears responsibility for defending our democracy and our Constitution been as craven and self-centered, so completely devoid of compassion and concern for the American people. For Clinton, it must have felt like going to a petting zoo and finding herself facing an angry, desperate lion in the savannah.

The same tactics that partly unnerved Clinton, didn’t work quite as effectively against Joe Biden in 2020. But in 2024, against an older, frailer Biden who was already trailing badly in the polls because of his age, Trump’s predatory, nonstop assault looked like the Nazi blitzkrieg of Poland. Clearly off his game since Biden dropped out of the race, we knew Trump didn’t possess the discipline to debate Harris properly. That’s partly because Trump has no policy details to offer, but mostly because he’s mentally ill with a narcissistic disorder that leaves him vulnerable to anyone who recognizes his Achilles heel.

Clearly, Harris and her handlers did. They knew the debate would not be won on policy. Harris presented her vision for a strong middle class, but as usual, Trump couldn’t focus on policy for more than a couple of minutes, when his fractured ego took over. If Trump’s plan was to smother her in a torrent of insane rants, hers was to needle him and get under his skin, and she did that with the accomplished skill of a successful federal prosecutor. She did it without raising her voice or sneering, and she delivered the most telling blows looking him straight in his eyes, while he, noticeably, seemed unable to look at her.

If the debate wasn’t about policy, what was it about? In the cult of personality that is the MAGA movement, Trump’s ego was all it could have been about. We’ve heard from most of the senior members of Trump’s Cabinet, most notably his Chiefs of Staff, Security Advisors, and Defnese Secretaries, about what it was like to be on the inside of his administration. In a world in which military leaders never speak out against their Commander in Chief, each of them described Trump as unfit to lead, incompetent, and dangerous. They told us how everything Trump does is transactional, ego-driven, and primarily focused on his own self-interest and prejudices. But Trump claims he fired them because they couldn’t do their jobs, and now they’re  getting even by undermining his candidacy.

That has worked well enough in the past to fool about two-fifths of America. Trump has always been masterful at turning things around and accusing his accusers of exactly what he is guilty of, and much of America has been unable to see through that. Any professional writer will tell you that a good story must show the reader what happens rather than just tell them about it, and that was Harris’s strategy.

Calling him names and insulting him would simply reduce her to his level. Instead, she calmly and skillfully executed a plan to enable us to watch Trump immolate himself, and he took the bait every time. He took it because he was unable to resist taking it, and he plunged into deeper and deeper rabbit holes every time. And while he fumed and ranted, becoming more incoherent and absurd with each passing moment, Harris smiled, arched her eyebrows, and used subtle body language to let everyone know she was in complete control.

Harris showed us she is ready to lead, and that she possesses both the strength and integrity to be president. But more importantly, she manipulated Trump into showing America why he can’t be trusted with power. If a multi-racial woman, whom he has repeatedly called stupid, weak, and incompetent could rattle him to the point where he was dysfunctional, Americans should ask, today, how easily he could be manipulated by people like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. Trump’s vulnerability is America’s vulnerability, and the world is far too dangerous for us to take that kind of risk.

For me, the best moment was when Harris told Trump that world leaders mocked him, and he responded by spending a full minute telling us how much Hungarian dictator Viktor Orban loves him.

Did you see enough?

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Lock ’em Up

Posted on September 10, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 10, 2024

There are many things dictators and wannabe-dictators do to stay in power. The most common is the use of political arrests. Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran all do it, and Hungary, which is still technically a democracy almost matches them. In 2020, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban forced a law through his parliament making it illegal to speak out against the government. In 2023, the same Orban forced the same parliament to pass a law making it illegal for any Hungarian to be involved with a foreign power attempting to influence Hungarian policy. Both laws were excuses to imprison anyone Orban considered a threat to him.

Russia and China have never been shy about incarcerating their opponents to keep them quiet, and if that doesn’t work, they tend to turn up dead in the tradition of Josef Stalin who is considered responsible for killing more than eight million of his own people. North Korea seems to have a tradition that murdering a relative is the most effective form of governmental succession. Iran’s intolerance for opposition figures explains why the families of thousands of people connected to the former Shah’s royal family now reside in Europe and North America.

If it’s not obvious where this is headed, look at what Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro did to remain in power. He declared victory in last July’s presidential election, although independent vote recounts showed that he had lost to opposition leader Edmundo Gonzalez by a significant margin. With the possibility of massive unrest or civil war looming, Gonzalez had to be rescued from Venezuela by Spain where he was granted asylum.

If this doesn’t remind you of Donald Trump, we don’t live on the same planet. In 2016, Trump instigated crowds to chant, “Lock her up!” in response to the highly exaggerated Hillary Clinton email scandal. Someone on Clinton’s staff had clearly used poor judgment in allowing her to use her personal email account for government business, as her counterpart in George W. Bush’s cabinet, Colin Powell had admitted doing.

What Clinton inadvertently did wasn’t a crime, and compared to Trump claiming he had a right to retain classified documents after leaving office in clear violation of federal law, it was a trivial matter. By contrast, when the crowd at one of Kamala Harris’s rallies chanted, “Lock Him Up” over the federal indictments and convictions Trump faces, she quieted the crowd and said, “No, we don’t do that.”

Trump believes that the President should have the power to lock up anyone he perceives as a political enemy (if and only if he is the president.) This one minute video shows him insisting that Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden all be imprisoned, and includes a 2016 clip in which he raises the horrifying possibility that if Clinton defeated him we might have a sitting president under criminal indictment who would have to stand trial.

In recent days, Trump has expanded his threats. He says he plans to cast a wide net and prosecute everyone he perceives as disloyal to him. As he has demonstrated repeatedly, Trump makes no distinction between supporting the Constitution and the president and personal loyalty to him.

People used to refer to President Reagan as “teflon Reagan” because none of the scandals or missteps in his administration ever hurt him politically. But Reagan, like Harry Truman, understood that the buck stopped with him, and he always stood up and accepted responsibility for his actions and those of his subordinates. He understood that Americans are forgiving of people who admit their errors. But Trump is neither Ronald Reagan nor a principled Conservative. In the fight for the minds of the several thousand undecided voters in battleground states, I’m betting those voters will see the difference.

Trump has benefitted from a different form of teflon coating than Reagan’s. Known everywhere as a serial liar, and somehow, not paying a price for it, he now winks at us when he tells us his plans to become a dictator and tear up the Constitution, as though it’s all just a big joke. But it’s not. As the majority of his former cabinet and top military leaders, including his ultra-Conservative Vice President, Mike Pence have assured us, Trump’s plans to undermine our democracy aren’t lies. He means every word of it, and he is unfit to ever wield power again.

As tonight’s debate looms, for the sake of our future, I hope Kamala Harris is able to drive the point home. As Hillary Clinton advised her, the surest way to defeat Trump is to give him enough rope to self-destruct, and I believe Harris will.

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Debate 2.0

Posted on September 4, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 4, 2024

Debate 2.0 is a direct consequence of Debate 1.0, in which Donald Trump put on a shameless display of ignoring every rule and shot gunning President Biden with a nonstop assault of lies, exaggerations, and complete fabrications. At the time, we who believe that re-electing Trump would have catastrophic consequences for America could only hang our heads. In retrospect, it’s doubtful that any of us, expecting a rational debate and unprepared for the kind of attack Trump launched would have handled it well, but for the nearly 82-year-old president who was still weakened from a bout with COVID, Debate 1.0 raised questions like – what if Putin or Xi went after him with the same tactics?

Those questions may or may not have been fair. Backed by talented aides and the best minds available, facing off in the Situation Room in a crisis or at a G7 or summit meeting is something Biden has been doing for decades – he could still do it in his sleep. But perception is everything in politics, and younger voters who think older people should be content to be grandparents had lost confidence in him. Since a Trump victory in November would be the worst possible outcome for America, the Democrats turned lemons into lemonade posturing Biden’s withdrawal as passing the torch to the next generation.

If his behavior since Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee is a good indicator, Debate 2.0, which will be aired Tuesday, September 10th on ABC, will feature Trump trying to make it a replay of Debate 1.0. He’ll try but he won’t succeed. The reason Trump has been so successful at destroying the traditional Conservative movement and the Republican Party is that until Trump, no one had encountered a politician who possessed his unique combination of shameless narcissism, willingness to lie and pander about every issue to anyone who could help him win, and the personality of a vicious predator. Trump turned the political arena into a Roman gladiator stage.

While it’s shocking to recall Trump knocking off every contender in 2016 like a bunch of dominoes, we’ve seen his magic wane since then. He lost in 2020, and he is generally seen as the reason Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives in 2020 and regained only the barest majority in 2022. What we learned from all that is that women, people of color, and other educated suburbanites reject the core of who Trump is, and they’re wise to the fact that there is no policy substance in anything he says. It’s really simple – Trump will flip on a dime if he sees an opportunity to increase his wealth or power. The health and security of the United States matters to him only in that if the country fails it will take Trump’s fortune down with it.

The message today is that forewarned is forearmed, and Kamala Harris is younger, healthier, smarter, and quicker on her feet than Trump. Imagine the kind of mind it takes to be a successful prosecutor and to have worked her way up from law clerk to state’s attorney to California Attorney General to U. S. Senator to Vice President, and then increase that by an order of magnitude because Harris did all that as a mixed-race woman. Watching her for the last six weeks, I was most impressed by how calm and cool she was. She hasn’t missed a beat or misspoken; she hasn’t seemed the least bit nervous or flustered; and she has demonstrated that she can work a crowd almost as well as Barack Obama. When she speaks, whether in a packed basketball arena or a stadium, she has them eating out of her hand. And when the crowd is mostly black, she has them in such thrall they sound like a revival meeting.

On September 10th, when Harris and Trump face off, not only will she not be flustered or intimidated by him, she will be the one who appears calm and controlled. If he interrupts or talks over her (muted microphones can’t prevent that) she will smile sweetly and say, “I’m speaking, Donald.” When he attempts to insult or denigrate her, she will simply repeat his list of indictments and convictions, perhaps going back to some of Donald’s best known rip-offs like Trump University. She will remind him that she is a respected prosecutor while he is a convicted felon guilty of fraud and sexually assaulting women. And all Trump will see and hear is that a black/Indian woman is stripping him naked in front of a hundred million viewers.

Debate 2.0 may not have the disastrous immediate impact Debate 1.0 had, but it will leave no doubt in the minds of undecided voters that Donald Trump is a grifter and a bitter old man desperate to stay out of prison. He doesn’t belong on the same stage as Kamala Harris.

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The Media and the Election

Posted on August 31, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 31, 2024

During this election season, traditional news organizations like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post have generally provided Americans with responsible journalism. Fifty years ago, that would have been enough, but in today’s world, most Americans get their news and opinions, often indistinguishable from each other, from commercial news outlets, social media, and online entities like Talking Points, The Drudge Report, and The Huffington Post that represent a broad spectrum of political views.

There was a time when Americans trusted their local newspapers. As elections approached, the endorsement of a major newspaper was an intensely sought-after commodity. Today, not so much due to the influence of our video and internet-oriented culture. That’s a problem, because it represents a new paradigm in journalistic integrity. There isn’t much of the latter anymore, and the culprit, as usual, is money.

Social media companies are unregulated in the United States. They are infested with bots and fake actors that are allowed to say whatever they wish until public outrage forces them to take a step back. Foreign adversaries and criminal organizations use Facebook, X, Telegram, Tik Tok, and others to sew discord among Americans and influence our elections. These platforms are safe homes for racists, terrorists, scammers, and revolutionaries, and much of the billions they earn is fed back into the political system by people with extreme views, like Elon Musk.

Cable news networks, with the exception of PBS and NPR, are commercial entities that depend on the largesse of sponsors for their survival. Aside from not offending the hands that feed them, there is nothing regulating the content they stream, and no way for consumers to know whether what they see and hear is true.

Fox News unabashedly brags that despite its name, it is not a news network, but a politically skewed entertainment network, although, since they were punished with a nearly billion dollar fine for supporting election fraud allegations, they’re likely to be more restrained this cycle. With less self-consciousness, networks like Newsmax and America One are even more outrageous in peddling conspiracy theories and promoting the reactionary fringe elements of our society. On the left, MSNBC makes no bones about its progressive bias, and CNN, more than anything, seems uncertain of its identity.

Accused of a liberal bias, and serving both a domestic and international audience, I believe the network attempts to take a centrist approach, but if their recent efforts are the best their industry can do, the public will not be well-served during the 2024 election cycle. The Trump-Biden debate that forced President Biden to drop out of the race was one example. I don’t doubt that CNN tried to present a meaningful debate, but all they did was demonstrate that traditional debate formats are useless when moderators are powerless to enforce the rules. There will never be a meaningful debate in which Donald Trump is a principal until and unless someone figures out a way to convincingly fact check in real time and force participants to debate issues rather than engage in gladiator matches.

We might have expected CNN to put its best foot forward for last Thursday’s interview with Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Prospective voters hoped and expected to see what the candidates were made of under intensive questioning about their policies. We thought we were tuning in to an hour-long, live interview. What we got was an edited version of an interview that occurred earlier in the day, liberally seasoned with commercials. Dana Bash, who conducted the interview for CNN, sounded more like a colleague chatting with candidates than someone pressing them with tough questions.

It wasn’t Harris’ or Walz’ fault – they generally answered the questions put to them with more specificity than we ever hear from Trump. When Harris was asked about her change in position on banning fracking, she explained that her values hadn’t changed, but as she learned more about new technologies, she’d concluded that the nation’s climate mitigation goals could be met without the need for a ban. I thought that was an excellent answer that should have been followed up with probing questions that gave us more insight into what Harris meant, but that didn’t happen. CNN gave us a half-baked excuse for an interview.

Since 2015, the media have been culpable in allowing candidates to lie, distort, and mislead voters, and create an atmosphere of divisiveness, fear, and uncertainty. Factual reporting and truth have suffered one mortal blow after another, and if the media don’t clean up their acts, we’ll all suffer. We can’t prevent candidates from lying and spreading hate, but we don’t have to give them a free ride when they do so. And if the media don’t collectively fight against fraudulent allegations of rigged elections, next January could be more deadly and violent than January 2021 was.

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Equal Scrutiny

Posted on August 29, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 29, 2024

The first half of 2024 was marked by constant attacks on Joe Biden’s fitness to serve as president for another four years. Were he re-elected, he would have been 86 when his second term ended. Love him or hate him, most people accept that dropping out of the race was the right thing for him to do. They may disagree about whether his decision to withdraw from the race was a noble act of self-sacrifice for the greater good of the country, or an action he was forced to take against his will, but history will likely view it as a fitting coda to his legacy, as will I.

The tell is how he responded afterward. He never said it was unfair, never whined about being forced out. Instead, he has behaved like the classy politician and leader he is, offering full-throated support to his successor for the nomination, Kamala Harris. Whenever he’s asked, he reminds us that the first and only priority in November is protecting the country from a second Trump administration and Project 2025.

Let’s put Donald Trump through the same wringer of public opinion and see how he fares. Despite more than sixty court rulings debunking his claim that the 2020 was stolen from him by a Democratic conspiracy, and dozens of investigations and recounts that found no evidence of the fraud Trump claims occurred, he is so obsessed with his defeat that he repeats his lies and complaints every time he has an audience. Most Republicans are appalled by his behavior, publicly begging him to stay on script.

His 2016 campaign playbook was to seize on the anger and grievances of everyone who was envious of people who were more successful or who had more money and expensive toys. Trump’s history tells us his primary talent is predation; he senses other people’s vulnerability and pounces on it, not letting go until they swear personal allegiance to him. He claims that’s just his style, and campaigning that way offers him the best chance of victory, but is it?

It’s time Trump supporters realized that style has nothing to do with his behavior. His dismal, frightening performances at campaign rallies since Kamala Harris was anointed as his opponent were driven by two things, both of which make him the worst possible choice to govern the United States. One is his inability to control his feelings, particularly his anger and his desperate need for power and adulation. These are well-established symptoms of the Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) he suffers from.

Make no mistake, NPD is a very serious mental illness. What would a competent source that has no political ax to grind tell us? The Mayo Clinic says, “Narcissistic personality disorder is a mental health condition in which people have an unreasonably high sense of their own importance. They need and seek too much attention and want people to admire them. People with this disorder may lack the ability to understand or care about the feelings of others. But behind this mask of extreme confidence, they are not sure of their self-worth and are easily upset by the slightest criticism.” If I didn’t know better, I might think that was intended as a description of Donald Trump. Is that the kind of unstable, filterless, irrational person we want leading us?

On top of his NPD, Donald Trump is 78. Biden’s undoing was a ninety-minute high-speed assault by Trump in his most vicious predator mode. At 81, while still competent to do his job, Biden didn’t have the physical or emotional stamina to withstand the kind of attack that Trump used to take down everyone who opposed him in either party. Biden attended what he thought was a debate. Whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t that.

Biden’s moment of truth occurred quickly, but Trump exhibits similar limitations and shortcomings more subtly. Critics all over the political spectrum are noting that Trump, who always hated having to obey laws and follow rules, no longer has any guardrails or boundaries. That’s a classical sign of cognitive decline. Consider: a former president of the United States who is running for re-election as much to avoid a prison sentence as to lead, who is in desperate legal trouble and plummeting in the polls, is told by every advisor and supporter that he must run a disciplined campaign. Yet, he shows no ability to do so. Is that style or is it a symptom of a self-absorbed decline into madness?

Do you really want a president who posts that his opponent accomplished what she has by offering blowjobs to powerful people? Or, depending on the moment, that she is stupid, a Communist, or not as pretty as he is? Is it not obvious by now that Trump is beyond dangerous, and our country might not survive another four years of autocratic ambitions?

One thing I will never understand about the last nine years is how people cannot see and understand what is right there in plain sight. Donald Trump is severely mentally ill, sociopathic, and completely lacking a moral center. He cannot ever be allowed near the White House again.

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Presidential Immunity

Posted on August 23, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 23, 2024

When Donald Trump took his claim of immunity to the Supreme Court, his intentions were clear. He was under indictment in two federal cases, for mishandling classified documents and inciting an insurrection; he was under indictment in Georgia for attempting to subvert the results of the 2020 election; and he was awaiting sentencing on thirty-four felony convictions in New York. It sounds like the rap sheet of a career criminal, except that this career criminal is a former president of the United States who wants to be re-elected in November.

When the Court ruled that presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for any actions taken as part of their official duties, it appeared that that might let Trump off the hook in those pending criminal cases. The only remaining issue was how each lower court defined presidential duties. It has been widely assumed by people on all sides, that Trump’s primary goal in running for re-election was to stay out of prison, and given the Court’s ruling, he would then have a free rein to continue his quest to undermine the Constitution if he won. Some people close to Trump have whispered that he really has no desire to be president again, but he’s driven by desperation and his need for adulation.

There is another way to look at presidential immunity, however. I’m surprised none of the highly paid media pundits have addressed it. Given the chaos Trump has caused in our politics and the discord and lack of confidence in our legal system he has fostered, Donald seems to have forgotten about The Law of Unintended Consequences. It’s an error we all make when we’re caught up in the fervor of battle – sometimes what at first seems like a victory can be our undoing, and an egomaniac like Trump is exactly the kind of person who would get caught in his own trap.

Trump has been clear, both from his past actions and his explicitly stated intentions about the future. He will only accept the result of the 2024 election if he wins. He showed us the lengths he’s prepared to go to if he loses in 2020 – more than sixty motions and lawsuits, all either thrown out of court or denied by the presiding judge; the creation of teams of fake electors, and attempts to intimidate state election officials to replace the real electors with them; arousing and enabling heavily armed, right-wing militias to be prepared for anything from coup to revolution; and the final act of desperation: insurrection.

We’ve watched the slow-motion avalanche he created develop, and one way or another, it might crush whomever is in its path this November. Trump knows his magic is waning and that his antics cost him votes with independents, women, immigrants, and people of color. The groundswell of love and support for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz is something Trump neither understands nor knows how to combat. He may not know a thing about history, but his advisors understand that voting trends run in cycles, and American voters have always rejected extremism once they’ve seen it metastasize into a threat to our nation.

Let’s consider what might happen in November. Harris defeats Trump resoundingly in the popular vote and comfortably in the Electoral College. With the likelihood of incarceration staring at him, Trump will be even more driven to win by any means necessary than he was in 2020, and with the brazenness shown by his allies in Project 2025, I wouldn’t attempt to predict their actions. But there will be no guardrails or filters, no lines he won’t cross to try to win. If his past is a valid predictor, he will act purely out of self-interest without regard for federal or local laws or the Constitution. He will force the country into a crisis more serious than even the outbreak of the Civil War.

And that is when his “victory” in the fight for presidential immunity will come back to bite him. When the Supreme Court issued its decision, it addressed acts by a sitting president. Trump’s name doesn’t appear anywhere in their decision. But until January 20, 2025, the president will be Joe Biden, and Trump will simply be a private citizen guilty of treason and dozens of other serious felonies. It will be Joe Biden who suddenly has the power granted by the Courts to lock Trump up as a clear and present danger to the nation. Trump’s lawyers can scream to high heaven, and down the road, they might even prevail in some kangaroo court. But Biden could go as far as declaring marital law and keep Trump incommunicado in solitary confinement, and as long as he was perceived as acting in his official duties to defend the Constitution, he will have the full protection of the Supreme Court.

If that’s not enough, we’ll have a tough-as-nails prosecutor as President Elect, who won’t flinch from doing whatever is necessary to silence the Trump menace once and for all.

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