Life Under the Bus

Posted on October 3, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, October 3, 2023

Whether in business, politics, or personal relationships, one of the worst things we can experience is being betrayed by people we trust. What could be more damaging than investing heavily in someone only to be thrown under the bus when they no longer need you? Very few missteps are more hurtful than misplacing trust or committing ourselves to people for whom loyalty is purely transactional. Today, that most clearly applies to everyone who ever took a knee in service to Donald Trump and to the parties and factions that make up our House of Representatives.

The former President has spent his life demanding unflinching loyalty from everyone in his orbit and discarding them when he no longer had any use for them. He has always believed that between his powerful allies and his money, he was untouchable, no matter how much he hurt people who had sworn fealty to him. Based on stories that are dominating the news this week, he’s finding out he was wrong.

Former loyal aides like Cassidy Hutchinson and Alyssa Farah Griffin have been speaking out since the January 6th insurrection, stating clearly that Donald Trump was responsible and unfit to be president again. The fact the they’re both attractive young women must have been a particular blow to Trump’s ego, and he’s hasn’t been stingy with bombast and degrading comments about them. Respected generals like Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley and Trump’s former Chief of Staff John Kelly both spoke out passionately this week about Trump’s incompetence, lack of character, and narcissistic self-interest. Their conclusion was familiar: Trump has no respect for our men and women in uniform and no idea what America stands for. He is unfit to lead.

Trump’s former Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, and former Attorney General, Bill Barr both described Trump as dangerous and a threat to our Republic. And in what has to be a classic case of the deliciousness of revenge served cold, Trump’s former fixer, Michael Cohen, who spent three years in prison for his loyalty to Trump’s illicit business schemes and was thrown under the bus by his former boss, will now testify against Trump in the civil fraud trial brought by the New York Attorney General. The result of all of these prominent people speaking out at once can only have the effect of giving cover to hundreds more who fear telling their stories. Trump’s knee-jerk attacks on all of them on TV and social media have to be getting old. I expect that to show up in the polls any day now.

Unfortunately for the United States of America, the disease of behaving like Trump has spread to the House of Representatives. It took years for many to realize that Trump couldn’t be trusted. Hundreds of people have invested their careers and legacies in serving the former president only to discover that with Trump, loyalty works in only one direction. Given that model behavior, it was no surprise when extremist Trump supporters, cheered on by Trump, staged a mutiny in the House Republican caucus. If the furor over January 6th centered around anything, it was the spectacle of an elected leader betraying his oath of office.

Trump set the example for everyone else. He told us it was okay to use any means to avoid paying taxes and to cheat everyone he did business with. He told us the oath to support the Constitution isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. He demonstrated to the world that it’s acceptable for a leader to be driven solely by raw power and narcissism, but mostly, he showed us that the only way he knows how to govern is through chaos and complete disregard for our democratic values.

Thus, today, Matt Gaetz and ten other Republican extremists committed to Trump’s kind of governing voted to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy. It was a vote born of vindictiveness and faithlessness with no clear purpose other than punishing McCarthy, whom they have been abusing publicly throughout this Congress. The entire charade is anti-American. Not only is it the polar opposite of balanced bipartisan government, it’s anarchy. Gaetz’s gang know they will never have the votes to elect someone they approve of to the Speakership. They haven’t even put forth a replacement, because that’s not what they’re about. Like Trump, all they know how to do is obstruct and destroy.

I tried to give McCarthy the benefit of the doubt, but it seems that like Trump, he will pander to anyone, make any necessary promise to secure what he wants. And like Trump, he won’t hesitate to break promises and throw allies under the bus when a better deal comes along. McCarthy may be just as likely as Trump to screw anyone who gets in his way, but poor Kevin’s just not very good at it. If it were only his misfortune I wouldn’t care, but his behavior puts us all at risk.

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Happy New (Fiscal) Year

Posted on October 2, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, October 2, 2023

Many people begin a new year by partying hard and watching football with the next day’s hangover, but there is also a tradition of atonement associated with turning over the calendar. Some make new year’s resolutions about everything from losing the weight they gained the previous year to treating family and friends better. Jews and Muslims have a prescriptive approach to atoning for past sins. Observance of the Jewish Yom Kippur and the Muslim Ashura, both of which occurred two weeks ago, includes a day of fasting and a week of self-reflection, apology, and even compensation.

Ringing in a new fiscal year is different. In recent years, the end of September has become increasingly contentious and vitriolic, with the negativity centering around the coming year’s budget. Ever since tribalism and divisiveness began defining our politics, morality, and social interactions, the beginning of a new fiscal year has been a battleground with potentially serious consequences. The government shutdown that was averted on September 30th could have done mortal damage to our economy, our military, the security of our transportation system, our trade relationships, Ukraine, and our struggle with inflation.

To some of our leaders, acknowledging past wrongs is a sign of weakness. Thus, a small minority of extremists encouraged by a former president, who care nothing about either our Constitution or their oath to govern responsibly, rung in our new fiscal year with a rear-guard action to prevent our government from functioning. The MAGA movement, led by Donald Trump and populated by people who cling to his coattails, was in full battle mode.

But Trump and his congressional wrecking crew lost a major battle on September 30th. I believe the start of FY 2024 may be the beginning of the end of MAGA proponents’ attempts to replace our republic with a fear-based autocracy. They pulled out all the stops trying to shut down the government, and they will undoubtedly continue their efforts, because Trump’s chances of winning re-election and the Republicans’ chances of controlling Congress depend on the same chaos, confusion, and lies that defined the 2020 campaign. But what Kevin McCarthy, Hakeem Jeffries, Mitch McConnell, and Joe Biden pulled off Saturday was a clear statement that they will not permit a rabid minority to control the governance of the United States.

The new fiscal year was also marked by three other events which signal the ultimate end of Trump’s dominance of our politics. Moderate, sane Republicans in both the House and Senate finally began speaking out against the tyranny of an extremist minority and the likelihood that nominating Trump in 2024 will sink the Republican Party, not to mention the nation. And yesterday, in a powerful, passionate defense of democracy and our Constitution, retiring Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley made it clear that he believes Trump is unfit to serve again as president and represents an existential threat to America. Finally, today, Trump appeared for his civil fraud trial in New York, after viciously verbally attacking both the judge and the State Attorney General outside the courthouse.

Unless Republicans not named Trump figure out a way to stop him from getting the presidential nomination, we’re going to choose between Trump and President Biden again, next year. Some Americans, possibly a third of us, have bought into the Trump narrative, but people who identify as Independents or genuine Conservatives will be up for grabs on Election Day. That leaves me feeling pretty good, about avoiding the disaster of a second Trump presidency and forcing the MAGA movement back into its caves. Rabid supporters liken his legal struggles to the persecution of Christ, but it’s hard to imagine everyone else not abandoning him in the end.

When the best many former Trump voters can say is “I don’t like the man, but I like his policies,” I have to believe the next few months of watching him abuse judges, prosecutors, and anyone else who disagrees with him will end his reign of terror. For some, it will be what the media call “Trump fatigue.” For others it will be an overload of disgust and the realization that he really is as dangerous as his critics claim. Anyone who has a child who throws tantrums when he doesn’t get his way will ultimately recognize Trump for what he is.

If you’re a sailor, you might call this weekend a sea change. If you’re a mathematician you could think of it as a positive shift in the second derivative. If you work hard to support your family, you’ll finally realize that Trump and his cohort have no interest in you; it’s all about their egos and lust for power. If you’re everyone else, you’ll just breathe a sigh of relief when Trump goes down, defeated and bankrupt, as he deserves to be.

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Bipartisan Politics

Posted on September 30, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 30, 2023

It wasn’t too many years ago that politicians ran for office promising to work across the aisle. They believed it would put them above the partisan fray, and voters rewarded them for it. But so far in the twenty-first century, the culture of divisiveness spawned by extremists at both ends of the political spectrum seems to have convinced voters that compromise is weakness.

Both parties practice extreme politics, although Progressives like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fight hard for what they believe, but they have never attempted to take over their conference. In the end, their priorities are doing the job they were elected to do – governing. Egged on by Donald Trump, however, right-wing extremists led by Florida’s Matt Gaetz believe a leader’s job is to fight relentlessly for what he wants and never give in.

Gaetz attempted to hijack the Republican caucus in the House and hold the entire Congress hostage. The opposition party always tries to prevent the party in power from achieving all its goals, but the MAGA movement wants to control everything. There are twenty-one MAGA members in the House, less than five percent of the total, yet this small, rabid minority nearly brought our government to a halt this week, regardless of the consequences to our economy and military.

Their extreme views on cutting taxes to benefit the wealthy, restricting women’s health, immigration, the federal safety net of social programs, and cutting support for Ukraine against Russian aggression are not popular with American voters. The MAGA crowd knows they’ll never achieve a majority to pass their programs, so instead, they resorted to extortion. I can’t fault their tactics – they knew Kevin McCarthy desperately wanted to be speaker, and they forced him to eat crow to get their votes, including accepting a rule that allows Gaetz to initiate a vote of no confidence by himself.

No one knew how far the MAGA crowd would go, but early on it seemed that McCarthy’s appetite for public humiliation was limitless. They obstructed all of his attempts to move legislation, and it was easy to accuse him of caring more about his personal power than doing his job. Gaetz, who has never accomplished anything significant in Congress, was drunk on power. As long as McCarthy kept caving to him, nothing would get done. Any reasonable observer could see that the only solution to the debt ceiling and budget crises forced by Gaetz was cooperating with Democrats on a bipartisan bill, but the Republican Caucus had a majority of only four seats, and they were determined to retain control of the House.

Because I care deeply about our country, I choose to believe that McCarthy’s strategy all along was to give Gaetz enough rope to hang himself and then crush him. Working quietly behind the scenes with the White House and his Democratic counterpart, Hakeem Jeffries, McCarthy offered Gaetz every possible attempt to behave reasonably, but like his idol, Trump, Gaetz continued to ridicule and belittle the Speaker from the House floor.

McCarthy deserves a heap of praise for the way he handled the situation. He held out until that last possible moment. Then, armed with assurances from Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, and President Biden, he brought a bipartisan continuing resolution up for a vote. The resolution, which keeps the government operating until November 14th, received 209 Democratic votes and 126 Republican votes, while 90 Republicans and one Democrat voted “No.”

There’s one glitch, however, and McCarthy still has to prove that he can keep promises he makes when he negotiates with Democrats. The one concession to the MAGA right was withholding additional funding for Ukraine in the CR, but we’re told McCarthy assured the president it would be in the final budget. That promise should be easy to keep, as a significant majority of House members and voters want to support Ukraine.

Gaetz and MAGA lost, and everyone else – the rest of the Congress, the White House, and the entire country won today. We’ll have to wait and see whether Gaetz puts on another show over the final budget and Ukraine funding. People like Gaetz and Trump are shameless narcissists whose behavior is hard to predict. But for now, I applaud McCarthy’s mastery of the situation. I care more about his support for a bipartisan solution to avoid a shutdown than the specifics of his politics.

I’ve often said that Donald Trump is the most dangerous person in America. It’s people like Geatz and his MAGA mob that make Trump so dangerous. They’re the potential Brownshirts in Trump’s fantasy of being America’s first dictator. I believe Kevin McCarthy has neutralized them. They’ll still obstruct everything they can, but we learned two things, today. McCarthy’s strategy worked, and bipartisanship is alive and well at crunch time.

Finally, Hakeem Jeffries deserves as much praise as McCarthy. He avoided harsh rhetoric as Gaetz was trashing McCarthy and the Democrats, and when the CR passed, he was gracious in praising the bulk of his Republican colleagues.

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How Did We Get Here?

Posted on September 28, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 28, 2023

In less than three days our government will “shut down.” I put that in quotes because it’s not a phrase that can be taken literally. An article by the Brookings Institution explains that the Antideficiency Act makes it illegal for federal agencies to spend or obligate any money without approval from Congress. If any of the 12 annual appropriation bills that fund federal agencies are not passed and signed by the president by the start of the new fiscal year, (October 1, 2023,) every agency not funded must cease all non-essential functions, though the definition of non-essential is up to each agency head.

Since debating and appropriating government funding is the primary role of Congress, a shutdown represents a total failure of Congress to do its job, although to be fair, the Senate has done its part impressively, and in the process demonstrated that bipartisan government can still work when lawmakers remember that they are elected and paid to uphold our Constitution and act in the best interest of the country.

Beyond that, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell upbraided his party’s caucus in the House of Representatives for their failure to act. McConnell said, correctly, that a government shutdown accomplishes nothing. I was a federal employee during the last three shutdowns, so I can confirm that there is no upside but considerable downside. Millions of federal employees and contractors don’t get paid during a shutdown, but they all receive full paychecks for the shutdown period as soon as it ends. The only real impact on them is being locked out of their offices when there is important work to be done.

The real harm is suffered by people who depend on federal programs, and to a lesser degree, by federal law enforcement and the military. Consider the war In Ukraine. A long government shutdown will affect our ability to support Ukraine against Russia, but even a short one has the effect of weakening us, both at home and internationally. Our allies can’t count on us when an extremist fringe is able to turn our policies upside down whenever they please. And no one will be happier about a shutdown of our government than Vladimir Putin. He smells weakness and instability like the predator he is, and he knows that the more Donald Trump’s influence grows the more his own power is enhanced.

McConnell implied but didn’t say explicitly that a shutdown can only result when extremists in his party put politics and power ahead of their sworn duty. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries characterized them as trying to shove their right-wing fringe politics down the throats of the large majority of Americans who oppose their views. Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, who has assumed the role of outspoken leader of the group, behaves as if he believes he was elected for the sole purpose of disrupting and paralyzing the government.

Gaetz is carrying Donald Trump’s water in the House. He and his mob believe that Trump so dominates the Republican Party that remaining in his favor is their only priority. The only thing they care about is helping Trump win re-election, despite the fact that he is under indictment by two states and the U. S. Department of Justice for nearly a hundred felonies including conspiracy to overthrow the government, and a New York State judge confirmed, yesterday, that Trump’s businesses have operated fraudulently for decades.

Trump is famous for his delaying tactics and his ability to create chaos, and the Gaetz gang believe they can use the same techniques to win. But Trump is also famous for stabbing his loyalists in the back when he no longer needs them. Gaetz is clearly not as smart as he thinks.

The shutdown drama was reaching its peak in the midst of the Republicans’ second presidential debate. Voters may have hoped to hear meaningful policy discussions, but all they heard was a bunch of unimpressive also-rans screaming at each other. With a government shutdown looming, the debate was a perfect opportunity for any of them to demonstrate leadership and a commitment to the nation’s priorities by addressing the state of affairs in the House and the failure of their own Majority Leader to control his caucus. But not one of them had the courage to mention the issue, nor would they address the fact that the leader of their party is a dangerous criminal and a gangster.

If there’s any chance of saving our future, it depends on all of us honestly asking how we got to this place. How is it that a narcissistic hate-monger controls one of our major parties and the rest of our politicians act like craven cowards whenever he speaks? How is it that hate crimes and mass shootings have hit an all-time high in America? If you think those things are unrelated, I suggest you rethink it.

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Polling

Posted on September 25, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 25, 2023

Voter preference polling is one of the media’s favorite tools for grabbing attention. It plays a vital role in ratings wars and attracting sponsors, but the lingering question remains: are the results meaningful? Public response to polling, especially more than a year out from an election and before a single primary vote has been cast, is mixed. Some people read polls on the edge of their seats while many others ignore them. Sadly, most people don’t understand them well enough to judge.

To people who do understand, particularly in a presidential election, national polls don’t mean much, because in today’s world, a handful of swing states determine the outcome. In 2020, the margins in five swing states (Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Arizona) totaled 280,000 out of 155 million, less than 0.2% of the votes cast. They mean even less the further away the election is.

Some polls, like the just-released ABC-Washington Post survey on the 2024 presidential election, generate considerable controversy. There are many polling organizations, some that purport to be entirely objective, while others have clear biases. Those biases can manifest in the way sampling is conducted and in the way questions are worded. In virtually every poll I’ve participated in, I felt that most of the questions weren’t biased as much as worded in a way that I didn’t have a clear response.

The problem with the Post-ABC poll, which was conducted from September 15-20, was that its results were very different from polls conducted by other groups. The Washington Post acknowledged that simply by describing it as an outlier – a correct conclusion, but one that caused me to ignore it completely. Even if it had agreed with other, similar polls, I’d have had trouble taking it seriously. Why?

Consider how polls are conducted today. According to The Post, it used “a random national sample of 1,006 U.S. adults, with 75 percent reached on cellphones and 25 percent on landlines,” and the results have a margin of error of at least 3.5%, 4% among registered voters, and it’s much larger than that when results for smaller subgroups are presented. Four percent doesn’t sound like a lot, but that number is only valid if all the assumptions made in conducting the poll were correct.

The most important assumption is that the sampling universe accurately reflects the opinions of likely voters. One problem is that 11% of the people sampled for the ABC-Post poll were not even registered to vote. But the more serious problem is whether even the 89% who were registered actually represented the nation at large.

The Post reported that about 750 people were contacted on cellphones and roughly 250 on landline phones. Thus, the entire poll was conducted by interviewing people who answered their phones and were willing to speak to pollsters. And for people who work for a living, that means they could only be contacted outside their work hours. Does that sound like anyone you know is represented by the sample of people questioned? I and virtually everyone I know ignore phone calls from numbers I don’t recognize or those identified as likely spam or marketing calls. So, who is actually being counted in the results?

It sounds to me like the only people who respond are those who answer their phones every time it rings. Maybe they’re lonely or bored or have nothing better to do, given that more than nine times out of ten, the caller is either a robot or someone trying to sell you something you neither need nor want. But that group certainly doesn’t think the way I or most of the people I know do. Another factor is that even among those people who answer a pollster’s call, most are too busy or disinterested to take the time. My guess is that people who are willing to spend fifteen minutes talking to pollsters have intense feelings, usually including anger bordering on rage about one of the candidates or a hot-button policy issue.

I cannot take such polling seriously. I have no confidence that either the sampling universe used represents actual voters who enter a polling place or that the questions they posed really touch on what most voters think is important. As RCA Chairman David Sarnoff, in the movie Twenty One, says to the federal investigator who proved that the quiz show of the same name was rigged – No one ever said it was honest. It’s just entertainment.

I recommend that we view national polling the same way. State by state polls, for either primary or general elections, especially close to voting days are likely to be a lot more reliable, but in the end, it really doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. Your vote belongs to you.

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Ostriches

Posted on September 19, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 19, 2023

Ever since Donald Trump decided that his narcissism could only be satisfied if he became the first American dictator, I’ve been confounded by the way major events have evolved. How often in the past have we asked, “How could this possibly have happened?” How could we have spent the decade of the 1920’s hollowing out the bases of our economy until everything crashed and burned? How, in the 1930’s, could Europe and the United States have sat back and watched Fascism devour most of Europe and Asia? How could we have allowed Russia to beat us into space while we were letting ourselves be dragged into a decade-long conflict in Vietnam?

I could ask a dozen more questions like those, but my intention is to avoid having us all wake up one day in, say, 2028 and ask how we could have turned our country over to a bunch of nihilistic, right-wing extremists and shredded our Constitution. Our founders’ vision, flawed as it was by eighteenth century norms and values, was of a Republic based on majority rule and freedom to speak and worship (or not) as we choose. It was of a government that prioritized the common good and the pursuit of happiness for all Americans.

If you need a clear example of how wrong things can go, recent polling revealed that while fewer than one in ten Americans believe abortion should be illegal in all circumstances, Tommy Tuberville, a football coach turned U. S. Senator has the power to scuttle our nation’s defense appropriation because he doesn’t like the military’s policy of granting leave to servicewomen who believe they require an abortion; an extremist rabble representing a small fraction of the House of Representatives seems to have the power to shut down the government until its demands on abortion, Ukraine, climate change, and public education are met; and most red state legislatures are attempting to enact bans on abortion and books they don’t like into law while recognizing that they do not represent the views of the majority of their constituents.

The problem is far deeper than a Republican Party at war with itself. Trump and his supporters showed us that the political system we have touted as the best and fairest in the world is seriously flawed and at risk. Our two-party system is incapable of defending itself and doing the people’s business when it loses its moral compass and openly supports a culture of lies. And it’s appalling that our media normalize the behavior of people who are willing to destroy our government for the sake of their own power and greed by referring to them as Conservatives.

These people are the anathema of Conservative leadership. Think about what the word conservative means – acting in a manner to conserve and preserve the things we need and value. Referring to radical extremists who prefer government by a fascist oligarchy that subjugates women and non-white populations while telling everyone who they can love and marry and censoring unpleasant truths from public education as Conservatives is a perversion of our language. The point was made clear by a tee shirt I saw while my family was touring the Naval Academy: Make Orwell fiction again.

Unfortunately, true Conservatives like Liz Cheney, Paul Ryan, and Jeff Flake were purged from our Congress because their gutless colleagues were more concerned with their own re-election than what was good for our country. And centrists, who for decades were the glue that held the warring factions in Congress together and enabled it to function, have decided to leave for greener pastures. I can’t say I blame them, but if we don’t react to those things as the glaring warning signs they are, the next generation of Americans will reside in a country we wouldn’t recognize.

Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee for President in 2012, said much the same thing in his new biography: Romney: A Reckoning. While roundly criticizing his Party, he revealed that at the times of Trump’s impeachments, not a single Republican Senator believed Trump to be innocent, yet he was the only one who voted to convict because the others were terrified of Trump’s base. That’s the same base that spawned the insurrection at the Capitol and who still threaten civil war if Trump fails to win a second term as President.

If you still wonder how once thriving economies and civilizations suddenly collapse, we’re watching the process unfold today. I don’t know a lot about ostriches, but I’d bet that burying its head in the sand never saved the life of a single creature that chose to hide rather than defend itself. If we try to hide from the danger of Donald Trump, we’ll be as pathetic as those ridiculous birds.

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The Circus is Back in Town

Posted on September 12, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 12, 2023

When I heard that the Ringling Brothers Circus was making a comeback, my first thought was that when I saw it as a kid, except for the tightrope walkers, I was underwhelmed by The Greatest Show on Earth. I’m even more discouraged to learn that the circus cloned itself, appointing a new tightrope walker-in-chief. We couldn’t have two circuses with the same name, so the clone found a new one. To all appearances, the cloned circus will provide even more balancing acts than the original, with the added dimension that not only will the performers be risking their own lives, but those of every American as well.

The new circus is called the United States House of Representatives, and its chief tightrope walker is Kevin McCarthy. As a kid, I never understood whether tightrope walkers were motivated by the challenge, a need for fame and public adoration, or a strong death wish. As I watch the cloned circus perform, I still wonder the same thing.

In the original circus, tightrope walkers had a safety net. If they fell, the worst thing they usually experienced was embarrassment, and given their training and experience, their actual “death-defying” feats weren’t as daunting as they looked. But McCarthy appears to be struggling for balance every time he speaks, and while a circus performer has the support of their entire cast, McCarthy’s lust for power left him out there on his own. Even worse for poor Kevin, in order to become Speaker, he had to grant one of his crew, Florida’s Matt Gaetz, the power to cut the rope out from under him on a whim.

If it were a real circus I would ignore it, but I can’t, because McCarthy has the power to create almost as much havoc as Trump does. And in addition to living on a tightrope, McCarthy added juggling to his act. He hasn’t dropped anything yet, but in the coming weeks his show will become more perilous every day. The balls he’s juggling include next year’s budget, without which the government will shut down, our federal deficit, and the civil war being fought between the Trump faction of the Republican Party and responsible Conservatives. Should one of those balls fall and shatter, it could take our entire economy with it.

This morning, Gaetz announced from the House floor that he has taken McCarthy’s balls hostage, and he intends to crush them if the Speaker doesn’t comply fully with his demands. I don’t know whether Gaetz’s arrogance or McCarthy’s impotence is more shocking. McCarthy is being held for ransom by a small gang of right-wing thugs, and his colleagues in the House seem as unable to deal with them as his entire party was when Trump steamrollered it.

If this weren’t bad enough, to gain favor with Trump, that same group of thugs has decided to switch sides in the Russia-Ukraine war. Any tightrope walker will tell you success is all about balance and knowing exactly where you’re next step is. Yet, McCarthy would rather waffle, saying one thing to appease Gaetz’s thugs one day, and the opposite the next day when saner Republicans react negatively.

Thus, on March 1st, when a Russian reporter asked McCarthy if his comments during the previous few months meant he no longer supported Ukraine, McCarthy said, “I support aid for Ukraine. I do not support what your country has done to Ukraine. I do not support your killing of the children, … and I think [Russia] should pull out.” One week later, on March 8th, after Gaetz and his gang read McCarthy the riot act, he rejected an invitation from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to visit Kyiv to discuss F-16 fighter planes. McCarthy knows as well as anyone that support for Ukraine is a yes/no issue. He can’t have it both ways any more than a tightrope walker can survive if he constantly changes his mind about his next step.

Over in Ring Number 3, today, McCarthy ordered a formal impeachment inquiry over President Biden’s alleged involvement in his son’s business dealings when he was Vice President. House committees have been investigating the charges for nine months already. If they had found evidence of wrong doing, would the Gaetz mob have restrained themselves from crowing about it?

Eleven days ago, McCarthy said an impeachment inquiry required a vote of the full House, which was a repetition of what he said when Nancy Pelosi was getting ready to start one into Donald Trump’s actions. But poor Kevin presides over a badly divided House, and he didn’t have the votes, so he ordered it without asking the other members.

I fear that this could be the end of a viable Republican Party. If you’ve ever been to the circus, you know what’s left in malodorous heaps after the show ends. It takes a dozen strong men hours to shovel it all up.

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Turn the Other Cheek?

Posted on September 7, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 7, 2023

When we were kids, our parents, teachers, and clerics all taught us to “do unto others…” and “turn the other cheek.” I quickly learned, however, that such idealistic advice didn’t work in my working-class tenement neighborhood in Brooklyn. Do unto others made us look weak and defenseless to bullies who’d been taught to hate Jews. Like the fledgling State of Israel, I knew at a young age that turning the other cheek would simply get the other cheek hit, too.

As much as we would like to live in a world in which everyone treats everyone else with respect and kindness, all those black eyes and bloody noses taught me that Christian values only work when everyone plays nice. Sometimes, the only way to keep from being destroyed is to fight back. I prefer the survival values of the Old Testament to the Christian ethic. “An eye for an eye,” or as I like to phrase it, ‘If you take one of mine I’ll take three of yours,” works a lot better than smiling at the person who’s trying to rip you apart.

Traditional politicians learned that lesson in 2016. Politics is always a nasty business, but Donald Trump elevated it to an unprecedented level. Most politicians won’t even mention their opponents’ names, but Trump named them and assigned them nasty, insulting nicknames. Most politicians exaggerate and many have a problem separating truth from hyperbole, but Trump introduced lying as a normal mode of campaigning.

For the first time in my memory, a candidate whose primary skill was creating chaos turned lying and misrepresentation into an art form. It was despicable, but it was also entertaining to many and proved effective in enabling loud, angry voices of people with grievances looking for someone to blame for their problems. Never before had we seen a shameless clown run for president. The other fifteen Republican candidates had no idea how to deal with him. Some turned the other cheek, some ignored him, and the few who tried to take him on drowned in a deluge of right-wing extremist money.

Trump might have been defeated if not for his opponents’ egos. Stopping him required a coordinated effort by the other candidates, but that meant some of them who were polling so badly they never stood a chance would have to fall on their swords. That hasn’t happened in American politics since Lyndon Johnson took himself out of the 1968 presidential race because his Vietnam policies were so unpopular.

Democrats failed to learn anything after witnessing how Trump picked off and annihilated his 2016 primary opponents. Thus, the politics of lies, misdirection, and slander that won Trump the nomination won him the presidency over Hilary Clinton, who was as helpless against his onslaught as her Republican colleagues.

The new Trump-dominated Republican Party and other right-wing extremists have honed their approach for 2024. Their candidate is carrying ninety-one indictments, many of which could result in decades of prison time if they end in convictions. President Biden, on the other hand, has managed to pass the most impressive package of legislation since the New Deal with a razor-thin majority in Congress. He inherited the economic chaos caused by COVID and Trump’s massive tax cuts for corporations and wealthy individuals that included runaway inflation caused by pandemic-induced production shutdowns and broken supply chains. His policies have steadily reduced the inflation rate, created millions of jobs, breathed new life into American manufacturing, and brought unemployment down to a fifty-year low, yet he’s tied in the polls.

Trumpers react to the fact that their candidate will likely be on trial against serious felony charges throughout the election campaign by attacking Biden’s son over business dealings that occurred when his father was Vice President over a decade ago, and for which there is no evidence that Biden senior did anything unethical or illegal. They react to our rapidly expanding workforce and economy by repeating the lie that our economy is in a shambles, assuming that if they repeat their lies with millions of dollars in right-wing media ads, people won’t know what to believe.

The sad and dangerous truth is that polls indicate they’re right. The people clinging to Trump’s coattails and defending him are as craven as he is. Their only priority is power and the corrupt wealth that accompanies it, with no regard for the damage they are doing to our country. The sadder truth is that Democrats are making the same mistakes everyone who opposed Trump has made for eight years.

Biden’s nice guy image won’t win in 2024. It’s time he and his supporters took off the gloves and fought back. If you want to fight sewer rats, you have to get dirty, and if Biden wants to win, instead of talking about the working-class values of Scranton, Pennsylvania, he needs to show us the bare-knuckled fighting he learned there. Instead of an election, how about a gladiator match between Uncle Joe and The Donald, winner take all.

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Neither Above Nor Below the Law

Posted on August 28, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 28, 2023

“[F]or a federal prosecutor to suggest that we could go on trial in four months is not only absurd, it’s a violation of the oath to do justice.” That’s what John Lauro, Donald Trump’s new lead attorney in the January 6th insurrection case, told Judge Tanya Chutkan this morning. “This man’s liberty and life is at stake and he deserves an adequate representation,” he went on. That was the beginning of his argument to move Donald Trump’s trial date to sometime in 2026. Judge Chutkan promptly informed Lauro that while she understood the pressure of time, “you’re not getting two [more] years.”

Lauro stated what every other attorney has said: Donald Trump is not above the law, adding, “But neither is he below it.” He argued that in order for Trump to receive a fair trial, his attorneys would need three years to prepare his case. Lauro used the word “absurd,” but it applies more to his own argument than the prosecutor’s request for a speedy trial to be held in 2024, before Americans have to decide on whether Trump is fit to serve as president again.

Absurd would be allowing Trump to inject the process with chaos in an attempt to render the entire legal proceeding moot. Absurd would be using our laws and Constitution against themselves as only someone with millions of dollars to spend on his legal defense can do. If our laws are to apply equally to all of us, a defendant’s ability to raise a hundred million dollars from gullible donors based on the same lies that caused him to be indicted cannot be the determining factor in the case.

My favorite part of Lauro’s request was his reminder to Judge Chutkan that Trump’s life and reputation are at stake. First, I’d point out that Trump’s life is not at stake here, only his right to remain free and continue to be the most destructive force in American politics since the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. And his reputation? That seems pretty well sealed in concrete as a result of the public spectacle Trump has made of his life.

To say that Trump’s life is at stake while ignoring the lives, mostly of law enforcement officers, that were lost during the insurrection Trump incited is beyond absurd. To also ignore the reputations of everyone Trump has slandered and maligned, the women he has assaulted in various ways, and the thousands of people he has hurt, like the entire population of Atlantic City, New Jersey, throughout his life would make a travesty of our legal system. He is not on trial for those things now, but we can’t ever forget who he is, and those things define him.

We are repeatedly told that trying a former president on several dozen felony counts is unprecedented. The fact that such trials raise constitutional issues that affect every one of us, and that they are likely to establish new legal precedents makes these trials bigger than life and critical to our future as a nation. Add to the mix that the entire world will be watching to see if American justice chokes and gags, and we have what President Biden might refer to as the most important inflection point our nation has ever faced.

There is a clear line between justice as defined by the history of our badly tarnished legal system and common sense. The broader implication of our Constitution is that our government is charged with acting in the interest of the general welfare of all Americans. When prior precedents do not point to a clear path forward, and our laws have not been tested under comparable conditions, we must take a step back and ask what is in the best interests of the country. Our founders did a remarkable thing when they agreed on our Constitution, but they were neither prescient nor infallible. Not one of them could have conceived of someone like Donald Trump as president; thus, our system is not prepared to deal with him.

For our democracy to survive and prosper, the cases against Donald Trump must be brought to trial before the 2024 election, and before the Republican Party is so committed to Trump that we could effectively wind up with a one party election. When the only argument that can be made in Trump’s defense is that the system is rigged against him, that should be enough to convince most Americans that he’s not fit to hold any office again, and if it were legally possible to prevent, to ever participate in a political campaign again.

Trump is a deadly cancer eating away at America’s strength and vitality. Like any malignant tumor, the only way to deal with him is to excise him from system.

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Russia, Bots, and Tragedy in Maui

Posted on August 22, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 22, 2023

Karl Marx wrote that “capitalism is inherently a contradictory system [that] breeds its own seeds of destruction.” Although that notion is most often associated with Marx, it’s an adaptation of the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel’s assertion that “every civilization (but the final one) contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction.” As America appears to be spiraling toward dissolution, it’s enlightening to examine whether those ideas apply to us today.

The right-wing extremist concept of unfettered, unregulated capitalism, which in the hands of Trumpers looks more like Fascism, can be thought of as a surrogate for unrestricted democracy and free speech. Our Constitution and our republic will only endure if we recognize that there is a basic truth in the words of Marx and Hegel: the freer and more open a society is, the more vulnerable it is to those who would destroy it for their own ends.

As Americans, we have spent our lives basking in self-praise and the belief that the ideals our Constitution seems to support are unassailable. Who would argue against democracy and free speech? In principle, not many, but with no controls or protections in place, those very ideals have the potential to destroy our way of life. It’s a cliché that we do not have the right to scream “Fire” in a crowded theater. The fact that only a crazy person or someone who stood to profit from the resulting chaos would do such a thing makes the point.

There are always those among us with nefarious intent who will attempt to use our freedom and openness against us, and with today’s burgeoning technology the risk is of existential proportions. The internet and artificial intelligence are amazing feats of technology and engineering that have transformed our economies and means of disseminating information. But they are completely unregulated, which raises the question: are we willing to entrust our future to Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Ruppert Murdoch?

There is ample evidence that Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and various others are guilty of flooding our media with bots and bad actors writing under false flags. They attempted to influence our elections in 2016 and 2020, and beyond that, their goal is to incite unrest and dissension among Americans. They understand us better than we understand ourselves. They know all about the divisions in America based on race, income, social status, religion, and personal values. They also understand that as a nation we often behave with the kind of intellectual laziness that makes us susceptible to any well-crafted lie.

Fortunately, there are experts who recognize the kind of subversion that weaponizes our own institutions against us. One is Caroline Orr Bueno, who pens the Weaponized Spaces newsletter. Yesterday, she addressed an issue that chilled me, more so because it represents only the tip of the iceberg of similar threats. I urge everyone to read the article referenced in the link, but if you don’t have time, I’ll summarize it here.

Dr. Bueno identified an entirely false campaign to influence America’s policy toward Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that revolved around the phrase “Hawaii, not Ukraine.” The point was to plant the idea in the minds of Americans who are ignorant of the facts that the Biden administration was ignoring the needs of victims of the devastating Maui fires because of the cost of assisting Ukraine’s defense. Think about that for a moment. Whoever began this thread, which soon went viral as a result of a skillful, well-coordinated campaign by influencers and provocateurs, was willing to use the devastation on Maui to mislead people who were unaware of the truth. More than willing – using the tragic circumstances of the victims to gain sympathy for Russia’s attempt to destroy Ukraine was the whole point.

Dr. Bueno goes into compelling detail about her analysis of the way people trying to end our support for Ukraine went about their task. She draws a clear picture of the coordinated effort, which included retweeting the initial thread on right wing media outlets with hundreds of thousands of followers, one of which was an account owned by a far-right candidate for State Attorney General in Arizona.

The final act of this play was when Russian state media jumped on board, the real intended end game. Russian media began attacking President Biden for not caring about the loss of life and homes in Maui, despite Biden taking every measure he was empowered to, to help. No surprise, Russian media claimed that if Biden cared about his own people he’d stay out of Russia’s military action in Ukraine.

Russia would only go to the trouble and expense of mounting such an internet campaign if they knew it would pay off. Not coincidentally, the same dozen Trumpers to whom Kevin McCarthy ceded control of the House of Representatives immediately issued a list of demands, with cutting aid to Ukraine at the top. Bueno identified a clear thread connecting these events. The only remedy is for Americans to think for themselves, close their Facebook and Twitter accounts, and find a safer way to share pictures of their kids online.

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