Ukraine and China

Posted on February 18, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan zendell, February 18, 2023

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reaches its first anniversary…I find it difficult to even finish this sentence. The very idea of a vicious war raging in Europe for a full year with no end in sight is horrifying. And this is more than just a war. The Russian military vastly outnumbers and outguns the Ukrainians, and while Ukraine is fighting a defensive battle for its survival, Russia is razing cities to the ground, targeting and killing civilians by the thousands, and its only justification is Vladimir Putin’s assertion that Ukraine has no right to be an independent nation.

That’s because it wasn’t independent until the dissolution of the Soviet Union thirty years ago. The fledgling nation has struggled with corruption, organized crime, and economic instability, in large part because of Russian infiltration. But what began as Putin’s pipe dream of restoring the former Soviet empire has become an embarrassing debacle. His military, thought to be one of the most formidable in the world, has shown itself to be badly trained, unmotivated, and poorly equipped with mostly obsolete, badly maintained equipment. Beyond that, the unprovoked brutality of Russia’s tactics are visible for the entire world to see. Except for rogue regimes like North Korea, even governments that feel supportive of Russia in general have not spoken out in support of the invasion.

Russia has seen its military hardware decimated and its supplies of missiles, drones, and ammunition run out, so it is reduced to begging assistance from countries like Iran, North Korea, and China, and even re-supplied with munitions and hundreds of thousands of recruits thrown into the fight, the media talking heads are nearly unanimous in predicting that Ukraine will beat back the new assault planned for Spring – unless Russia resorts to using nuclear weapons. The war has turned into a dangerous game of chicken with Putin under attack domestically and a pariah in the eyes of most of the world, and his country’s economy badly suffering from sanctions.

While no one completely discounts the possibility that Putin might be obsessed and crazy enough to risk all-out war with NATO, most observers believe he will lose politically and ultimately be blamed for hundreds of thousands of deaths, the destruction of entire cities, and the displacement of millions of people, not to mention a looming possible economic collapse at home. Russia’s allies see that as well as we do, and no one wants to be on the losing side, even if it’s their friend who’s losing.

I believe Putin is continuing the war, and will be even more brutal in its second year, because he believes the Trump wing of the Republican Party will undermine American support for Ukraine, which could well result in the dissolution of NATO that President Biden did such an amazing job of shoring up. As NATO prepares to expand by including Russia’s neighbor, Finland, the question is whether Putin is so committed to his war that he’s willing to risk total destruction. Perhaps that’s why leaders of nations like India, Iran, and China are not speaking publicly in Putin’s defense. It’s almost certainly why China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi addressed the Munich Security Conference about the need to end the “warfare” in Ukraine.

Observers who like to parse such things note that it was the first time a representative of the Chinese government used that word concerning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Wang went on to say the raging war must end, and that China will soon propose a peace settlement that respects the sovereignty of all nations. On its face, that statement sounds far more supportive of Ukraine than Russia, because Ukrainian President Zelensky says Ukraine will fight until all Russian forces withdraw from Ukrainian territory. But not so fast…is it likely that China will live up to that statement, given its own threats against Taiwan? China’s attitude toward Taiwan is very similar to Russia’s claim that Ukraine has no right to be a sovereign nation.

If China follows through and is willing to throw its weight behind respecting Ukraine’s sovereignty, it could be a crucial contribution to the future of a stable world order. If it’s true, and not just diplomatic spin, China’s intervention at the ministerial level could be the most constructive initiative of the twenty-first century. Whether or not Putin can rein in his ambitions and accept the humiliation of defeat, Russia’s allies clearly have no interest in being the collateral damage of a third world war, assuming such a conflict would leave enough standing to rebuild.

From the point of view of the United States, I’ll be watching to see if new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy retains enough integrity to separate himself from Trump and crazies like Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene. America has a long tradition of uniting and putting its differences aside when the nation’s security is at stake. If we don’t, the entire world is in great jeopardy.

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State of the Union, 2023

Posted on February 9, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, February 9, 2023

Article II of our Constitution requires that the President “shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” It’s a simple, expository decree that tells us a fair amount about how the founders pictured it happening. The first thing that jumped out at me was that the President is referred to as “he.” Does that mean that if Hilary Clinton had won in 2016 she’d have been exempt from having to address Congress?

More to the point, the formal, yet casual phrasing suggests a sedate process in which the President executes his duty to keep the country informed and takes responsibility for initiating the debate on what projects ought to be funded in the coming year. It’s almost as if Jefferson, Adams, and Hamilton foresaw a Congress populated by responsible adults whose primary concern was governing the country. Congress would eagerly await the sage advice of the nation’s leader, and “he” would deliver it in sober unemotional tones.

That’s a sweet fairy tale. As we know, our founders weren’t shy about expressing their differences, as their heated arguments over federalism proved. The competition for power between states’ rights and central authority and between the Executive and Legislative branches of the federal government was in full swing in the 1780s. Given the tradition of loud, often acrimonious debate in Britain’s House of Commons, which was the model from which our Congress was designed, they surely understood that the annual State of the Union would not be a paragon of harmony and unity.

I doubt, however, that they imagined the spectacle the SOU has become. In my lifetime, it was usually an opportunity for the President to tout his accomplishments and express his goals for the coming year. The tradition of Representatives and Senators rising with polite applause to signal their agreement or silently sitting on their hands to express disapproval took on the form of an annual ritual. As such it was predictable, with a rhythm of its own, and since we generally knew the positions of all the key players in advance, rather boring unless you find rites of passage inherently fascinating.

I’m of two minds about this year’s SOU. On one hand, President Biden gave a pretty accurate reading of the accomplishments of his administration, working with the previous Congress, to reach bipartisan agreement whenever possible. The speech was powerful and effective, reaching out to several constituencies, communicating how the last two years of surprisingly robust legislation affected each of them. The audience rose and cheered or sat mum predictably. But what was most apparent was the degree to which the divisions in our country have come to dominate our politics.

On display was a Democratic Party that, at least for that one evening, put on a show of unity rarely seen in recent years. Also on display was a Republican Party looking like an iceberg about to calve into fragments. In January, the world watched Kevin McCarthy demonstrate that the only thing he cared about was being elected Speaker of the House, regardless of what it cost both his party and the country he’d sworn to govern responsibly. We saw him compromise his principles and integrity daily, as the most rabid adherents to Trump’s MAGA philosophy ripped him apart like sharks going after a kill, then danced and mocked him on their pet media outlets.

Regardless of which side you favor, it was apparent to everyone that McCarthy does not now and probably never will be able to control and unify his party. That means the party has no platform, no plan for the future except obstructing everything the President and his party put forth. That’s not a political statement, just an obvious conclusion. While McCarthy sought to have his party conduct themselves with decorum, showing respect for the institutions of government if not for a President they despise, the gang of Trumpers, led by Marjorie Taylor Greene behaved like rude, unruly children.

The result was a party and a Congress in disarray. Equally unseemly were reports that White House staff cheered and fist-bumped when Biden baited the MAGA crew and they went after him with bared fangs, while he smiled benignly. As a performance on the world stage, it was embarrassing, and perhaps worse, with the world watching to see whether America still has what it takes to lead the Free World, it was chilling. How can we expect our allies to have confidence in us when we openly parade our dysfunction for everyone to see?

The State of the Union was never intended to be a gladiatorial fight to the death, nor was it intended to be a contest of crude, vulgar behavior on the part of those who govern us.

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Global Priorities

Posted on February 6, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, February 6, 2023

If you read my recent post, Connectedness, you’ll recall that I ended it by suggesting that we, as Americans and citizens of Earth may have our priorities upside down. Most of our stress during the past year centered around political dysfunction, craven politicians putting greed and power ahead of governing, domestic gun violence, and the war in Ukraine. Those are all very serious problems that threaten our very existence, but one event that the news media quickly put to rest represented a far more serious threat than all of them.

Two weeks ago, Mother Nature reminded us who or what controls the real power over our lives. Though most of us never gave it a thought until Morgan Freeman, playing the President of the United States, informed us that Mom had arranged a mass extinction event, as a large asteroid was on a collision course with Earth, such potential catastrophes could occur at any moment. In fact, the near certainty that one day Earth will be devastated by such a collision is a major motivating force driving our exploration of space and neighboring planets. Humanity may need another place to live one day.

Yesterday, in case we failed to get the message, Mom sent us another reminder. A series of major earthquakes struck the area around Turkey’s border with Syria. The death toll, based on bodies recovered in the first twenty-four hours was nearly 4,000, and likely to go much higher as whole cities and towns were turned into piles of rubble, burying countless innocent people. That initial death count already far exceeds the number of people killed on nine-eleven and if casualties pile up as expected, it will easily surpass the annual number of U. S. deaths from mass shootings per year, and will very likely surpass the total of more than 7,000 Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Do we need more reminders? We all learned about the evolution of climate cycles in school. A couple of billion years ago, Earth’s surface temperature was far too high to support most life. As the planet cooled, life of every form and type flourished. Earth’s climate went through many changes since then, too. Left to her own devices, Mother Nature brought us ice ages and extended periods during which deserts expanded to cover most of the surface. Sea levels rose and fell, and our polar ice caps increased in size and shrunk again as conditions changed. Whole seas dried up, continents moved, some islands disappeared, and others suddenly rose from the ocean floor.

Events like those of the last two weeks may have reminded us where the real power in the universe lies, but if the past is any indication, we’ll conveniently forgot those lessons as soon as they leave our television screens. Our politicians tear their hair and clamor each time a lunatic with a gun mows down innocent people and then breathe a sigh of relief that they didn’t actually have to tackle the problem when the public moves on to more important things like which team makes the playoffs this year. In the same way, since Nature’s warnings are few and far between, we express horror, today, at the scenes of devastation in Turkey, but a month from now, half our politicians will still find it in their self-interest to deny that climate change is an equally serious existential threat.

It’s difficult enough to convince people that the gradual increase in average surface temperature on Earth is a threat when 100 million people spend a week under record-low winter temperatures and ice storms. Yet, the science is clear – every responsible scientist not in the pay of people who profit from maintaining the status quo accepts it. Rising sea levels, melting ice caps, thawing tundra in the arctic and Antarctic releasing huge volumes of methane and biological terrors all pose serious threats to our children and grandchildren. Climate change threatens food production and ocean currents like the Gulf Stream that keep land masses more than about forty degrees north or south of the equator habitable. It results in more frequent and violent hurricanes, tornadoes and extreme swings in local weather patterns.

There are some things we know with certainty. While climate change is a natural phenomenon, we know that carbon emissions and heat pollution accelerate the process from one that takes thousands of years to events that can occur in a single generation. The worldwide use of fertilizers and the burning of fossil fuels change our atmosphere, causing it to retain heat from the sun, rather than allowing it to radiate back into space.

It’s really a simple process at the macro level, yet we never seem heed the old adage: “Don’t f**k with Mother Nature.”

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Connectedness

Posted on January 28, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, January 29, 2023,

Eastern philosophies like Hinduism and Buddhism treat spirituality differently than Western religions. While each applies its own spin, what they have in common is a belief that everything in the universe is connected. Life and death are a continuum, not a beginning and an end, and there’s the idea of karma. Not to put too fine a point on it, karma is about fate or inevitability, that we are responsible for what befalls us, based on how our actions measure up against what the universe considers good or bad.

Raised in the Judeo-Christian part of the world, we see things differently from people who grew up elsewhere. As westerners, we tend to focus on individuals, our personal destinies and fortunes. Asian cultures think more collectively; ideologies like Communism aside, eastern societies think more in terms of the masses than individuals. Similar differences relate to time. We tend to live in the present and the immediate future – how we feel, what we’re doing, what may occur tomorrow. Eastern cultures take a longer view, thus the pan-Asian tradition of each generation sacrificing for the good of future ones.

Perhaps that’s why western governments tend to be transitory. The combination of democracy and individualism produces governments that can change sharply every few years, while Asian countries tend toward stable, more autocratic and therefore, predictable societies. The same is true for the way people relate to their families and ancestors. The point is, our planet is split into groups that think about their lives very differently from each other. Those differences struck me in a surprising and unusual way this month.

Consider the idea of threats to our existence. Our news media have reported them at four very different levels in the last few weeks. In the United States, we’ve seen a record number of mass shootings so far in 2023. Gunviolencearchive.com reports 78 deaths and 176 injuries that also changed the trajectories of the lives of the thousands of people they touched. Politically, we hear cries from both sides – from the left that the MAGA movement is an existential threat to democracy, and from the right, that progressivism is a threat to individual rights.

At the international level, the world is struggling to come to terms with a recalcitrant Russia that seems determined to pursue its war in Ukraine, regardless of how many other nations are united against it, raising the specter of the existential threat of nuclear extinction we’ve lived with since World War 2. And just in the last few days, we were reminded of an even worse threat that effects us all, one that makes all the rest seem petty and almost trivial, and reminds us that everything really is connected to everything else in ways we rarely think about.

The effect of the death of every person from needless gun violence spreads like ripples in a pond to friends, relatives, and everyone who sees it played out endlessly in the media. Political divisions have split our country into opposing armed camps bent on destroying each other. The war in Ukraine already affects a billion people in North America and Europe – we’re all involved whether we like it or not. But two days ago, I began to see all that differently.

Early this week, a Ukrainian telescope maker and amateur astronomer, who had previously discovered the first known interstellar comet, made another startling discovery. Gennadiy Borisov, working in Russian-occupied Crimea, discovered a previously unknown asteroid the size of an SUV, in near-Earth space. A couple of nights ago, it passed within 2,200 miles of Earth, the closest near-collision with a significant astronomical body in modern times. We were never in danger from the asteroid, and had it entered our atmosphere, it likely would have turned into a spectacular fireball that sprayed a few chunks of rock into the South Atlantic.

But – in 2013, an asteroid roughly three times its size created a shock wave over southern Russia that shattered windows for hundreds of miles. What if this new asteroid had been even bigger, and it had been on a collision course with Earth while a battle for control of Crimea was underway, preventing Borisov from discovering it? What if, unchalenged, it impacted Kyiv, Moscow, Berlin, or Paris? Millions could have died, with consequences affecting the entire planet.

Western religions tell us God works in mysterious ways to effect His plan for us. Eastern philosophies say basically the same thing, attributing those effects to the unknown forces that control the universe. I’m struck by the connectedness of it all, and that makes me wonder if our priorities are all wrong. Perhaps we’re focused on the wrong things, fighting the wrong battles, when we should be concentrating our resources on the long-term survival and welfare of all of us.  

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Doomsday

Posted on January 24, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, January 24, 2023

Several scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project during World War 2 established the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and its iconic Doomsday Clock after atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. Midnight on the Doomsday Clock represents the annihilation of life on Earth, and every year since 1947, scientists have reset the Clock’s time to reflect current world conditions. Originally, the Clock was used as a signpost for the risk of nuclear war, but in recent years the time resets have also reflected the incidence of plagues and pandemics, the likelihood of biological warfare, the condition of the world food supply, climate change, and the stability of major governments.

When the Soviet Union exploded its first hydrogen bomb in 1953, the Doomsday Clock was set to two minutes to midnight, the first time it had been that close to The End. As the Cold War dragged on, the minute hand gradually receded until, after arms limitation treaties were put in place and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it was set to seventeen minutes to midnight. Since then, however, the rise of terrorism, nine-eleven, and ever-increasing tensions with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, caused the time to creep back toward midnight.

In 2018, nuclear tensions and inaction on mitigating climate change resulted in the clock being set to two minutes to midnight for the second time, where it remained in 2019. Trump’s trade war, the weakening of NATO, and a huge increase in cyber-attacks and the spread of false information caused the Bulletin to reset the clock to 100 seconds to midnight in 2020; COVID and its resulting impact on world economies kept it there through 2022. Today, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the daily risk of escalation of that conflict came home to roost, as the Doomsday Clock was set to ninety seconds to midnight for 2023, the closest it has ever been to total annihilation.

Does that mean we’re doomed? Certainly not. The Doomsday Clock is a metaphor, but one we ignore at our peril. In the minds of some of our most brilliant scientists, we are closer to destroying ourselves than ever before. The good news is that Europe and the NATO alliance are more united than they’ve been since the Berlin Airlift in 1948. That’s surely a better situation than one in which Putin is allowed to create havoc throughout Europe, with China, Iran, and North Korea licking their lips in anticipation of the fall of the West. But it also increases the risk of direct confrontation between the world’s nuclear powers, and Putin rattles his nuclear sabers every time his military suffers a setback in Ukraine.

There are also a lot of other ominous signs. Since Trump’s MAGA movement took hold, our democracy has been under siege, and it’s not just in America. Hungary leans more toward Fascism every year. That and the recent attempted coup in Brazil, mimicking Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election are warnings we can’t afford to disregard. If you’ve felt that the world seemed to be spinning out of control lately, perhaps what you’ve been sensing is the minute hand moving ominously closer to 12:00.

We don’t have to look beyond our own borders to see worrisome signs. America is in the throes of major change, and it’s impossible to know where it will lead in the end. Will MAGA recede into the annals of history, or in the worst case, will it come storming back to wreck our democratic institutions? Less chilling, but still very dangerous, is the likelihood that our political divisiveness will paralyze our ability to act decisively, or worse, convince our allies that they can no longer rely on our leadership. If the newly elected Republican leadership in the House is willing to threaten to limit military aid to Ukraine, to bring us to the edge of default, and to prevent any meaningful legislation from being passed, that can only embolden our enemies, and emboldened enemies are prone to making rash decisions that blow up in everyone’s face.

We could take the view that there’s nothing we can do to keep the Clock from ticking toward midnight, but that would be a tragic mistake. There’s a lot we can do as individual Americans, because America is the most important stabilizing force in the world. We must find a way to silence those who seek public office, not to defend our Constitution, but to undermine it for their own profit and power. Pundits like to tell us all politics is local, but if fringe districts with petty grievances keep putting people in Congress who don’t even recognize the sanctity of our elections, then maybe we are doomed, after all. Even the cockroaches might not survive this time.

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The Land of Opportunity

Posted on January 19, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, January 19, 2023

Once upon a time, there was a mythical place called America, where the free and the brave lived, to which everyone looked as the Land of Opportunity. Each generation of Americans, especially those not far removed from immigrant status, lived the promise that their children would have more and live better than they did. In an evil, oppressive world, America was where the good guys lived. Flush from victory over the Nazis and other Fascists, it was the savior of the Free World. It and its neighbor, Canada, were the only major nations that were relatively untouched by the war, no bombed-out cities or devastated industries, and no one could threaten them because only America had the atomic bomb.

In school, I learned a sanitized version of America’s history of slavery and genocide, and the Russians soon had thermonuclear weapons of their own. Third world countries who America claimed as allies turned out to be supplicants run by brutal dictators we helped keep in power. After revolutions in countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, and Iran, after the French were evicted from Indochina (Vietnam) leaving the vacuum we foolishly filled, and after our “friends” in Saudi Arabia allowed the ISIS movement to gestate and flourish, culminating in nine-eleven, the myth of America was replaced by reality.

Still, conditions in most of the world were so bad for so many millions, people continued to flock to America in droves, turning it browner, yellower, and blacker each year, and we learned some truths about ourselves. We are not homogeneous in our openness and generosity. We do not universally welcome others with open arms and treat everyone as equals, nor do we all believe everyone should have the opportunities we have.

Among the people who first recognized that was Roger Ailes, an ambitious television executive with a talent for reading and influencing masses of people. Ailes perceived that much of America felt disenfranchised, left out by the wave of progressivism that was leveling the playing field, promoting education and health care systems, and building a national retirement system. He understood that the disaffected third of America was comprised of two disparate groups: the wealthy, who feared they would have to finance all that progressivism, since only they had the resources to pay for it; and at the other end of the spectrum, evangelists, racists, white supremacists, xenophobes, misogynists, extremists, anarchists, the chronically unemployed, and everyone who felt cheated by “the system.”

All of them, and this was Ailes’ true genius, were angry and looking for someone to blame for their circumstances, and many of them were well armed. He convinced Ruppert Murdoch to create the Fox News Channel, which wouldn’t be about news or journalistic integrity, but a propaganda machine to activate and energize the angry masses. His final stroke of genius was to recruit Donald Trump to lead his social revolution.

Remember how shocked we were when Trump won the presidency? Remember how it felt to realize that more than a third of us supported everything Ailes and Trump stood for, and they were able to stir up enough anger and hatred for the Clintons among the rest of the population that suddenly America wasn’t sure who it was anymore? And what did progressives and decent moral people do? They screamed in ineffectual protest, hoping America would figure out what a terrible mistake it had made and that Trump would ultimately destroy himself, if he didn’t destroy America first. As we know, he came dangerously close to destroying America, even as his own star waned.

Now, we’re faced with the destruction of another myth, that once Trump lost power, everything would return to normal. We made a good start, electing Joe Biden in 2020 and giving him a razor-thin majority in both houses of Congress. There’s nothing like dodging a bullet to make us realize how fragile everything we hold dear is, but the bullet of Trumpism turned out to be a fragmentation grenade spewing shrapnel everywhere it touched, and those fragments may be as deadly as Trump.

One is Marjorie Taylor Greene, who proclaims that she represents the face of the Republican Party, not the fringe her critics relegate her to. Another is Matt Gaetz, who after leading the movement to disembowel House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, after getting concessions McCarthy swore he would never accede to, mocked him publicly, claiming that the only reason he stopped demanding changes was there was nothing more to ask for. Our House Speaker, who is second in line for the presidency, is completely emasculated and serves at the mercy of a gang who supported the January 6th insurrection and refused to acknowledge the election of President Biden.

I probably should have begun with the standard disclaimer – any resemblance between this America and the mythical one I grew up in is purely coincidental.

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Classified Documents

Posted on January 13, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, January 13, 2023

It’s obvious on its face that no matter how you feel about them, Donald Trump and Joe Biden are entirely different kinds of people. The kerfuffles over the handling of classified documents is but the latest example.

Throughout his business life, Trump consistently trod the line between legal and illegal, right and wrong, moral and unethical. He has been sued countless times by people who worked for him and accused him of not paying them for completed work, and by people who paid him for something (enrollment at Trump University, for example) and claimed they’d been defrauded. Trump, for his part, has always bragged that creating chaos and opacity and graying the line between right and wrong were evidence of his brilliant business acumen.

Throughout his decades of public service, Biden has at times been less than perfect, his two most memorable lapses being the infamous plagiarism scandal that sank his first attempt to run for president and his regrettable failure to shield attorney and witness Anita Hill from vile personal attacks during Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearing. While one can never be certain everyone told the truth, the plagiary incident appears to have been the fault of Biden’s speechwriter. No one has ever suggested that Biden was a knowing participant in the incident. And as much as I’ve admired Biden over the years, the Anita Hill incident was clearly a failure on his part, possibly the low point of his career.

In comparing Trump and Biden, it’s clear that their failures and errors were of entirely different natures. With Trump, pushing the envelope, brash, narcissistic behavior, and a general lack of respect for rules, standards of conduct, and other people is a way of life. In Biden we have what I believe is a highly moral, committed politician who does not lean toward extremes, but like the rest of us, is human and fallible. While Trump often doesn’t appear to know the difference between truth and lies, Biden’s openness and sometimes careless seeming, off-the-cuff frankness caused the media to label him a gaffe machine.

We’ll have to wait for the special counsels’ investigations of the classified documents incidents to know the details of what actually occurred, but we already have clear indications of what may have happened. Trump’s problems occurred when the National Archives and Records Administration investigated why many documents that were public property and required by federal law to be preserved under its auspices appeared to be missing.

During more than a year of back-and-forth, as investigators continually turned up more evidence of mishandling, Trump: claimed the FBI had no right to raid his office, though they clearly did; asserted that as a former president, the documents were his personal property; repeatedly said he had returned all documents requested by NARA, although subsequent searches turned up cartons filled with them; and when it was finally clear that there was no record of him ever de-classifying them, absurdly claimed that he had de-classified them with his mind. When Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel, Trump screamed it was part of the never-ceasing witch hunt aimed at discrediting him and evidence of the Democrats weaponizing the government against him.

When Biden’s own people discovered a small number of documents marked classified while cleaning out the Wilmington office he occupied after leaving office as Vice President, they immediately reported the incident to NARA and turned the documents over as required by law. When additional documents were found locked up at Biden’s home, his attorneys did the same thing, and when Garland assigned a special counsel to look into the matter, neither Biden nor any of his people objected. Notably, Biden didn’t claim to have telepathic powers.

In another interesting contrast, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has repeatedly supported Trump’s accusations that the investigation of his documents was politically motivated and characterized the appointment of a special prosecutor as window dressing.  In the Biden case, he claims that the appointment of a special prosecutor is simply a tactic to head off a Congressional inquiry.

It’s impossible for anyone to predict the outcome of either investigation, but Garland has been clear and consistent, treating them equally, even though one involves a former president who is now a private citizen and the other is a sitting president. It’s worth noting, too, that as president, Trump often claimed he was above the law. Biden has always said no one is above the law, and though his White House has been accused of handling the issue clumsily, there has been no public denial of wrongdoing. The White House is letting the Department of Justice do its job.

Whichever way the two investigations turn out, the mishandling of classified documents is a serious matter that must be exempt from politics.

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Frankenstein’s Monster

Posted on January 6, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, January 6, 2023

We all know the story of Frankenstein, the obsessed scientist who creates a living creature from used body parts. There are different versions, the original Mary Shelley novel, and four Hollywood movie screenplays, but they all have some things in common. The creature, known as the monster because of its grotesque appearance, is wrongly accused of murder, driven mad by alienation, persecution, and rage, and becomes a dispenser of death and destruction. Some versions suggest that the monster ultimately turns on his creator, but it’s actually the creator who turns on it and concludes that it must be destroyed.

We can learn a few things by looking at Donald Trump’s MAGA movement through the eyes of Mary Shelley. Trump created his movement largely from the discards of society, people who felt disaffected and disenfranchised, who had retreated into a variety of cult-like settings. From survivalists to ad hoc militias to xenophobes, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis to uncared-for PTSD-damaged war veterans, Trump patched together a movement of angry people looking for someone to blame for their circumstances. The resulting grotesque political monster swept Trump into the presidency and attempted to take over the Republican Party.

No allegory is perfect, and while Frankenstein’s monster is driven mad by being falsely accused of murder, Trump’s monster is guilty as charged. Trump dreamed of becoming a Vladimir Putin-like autocrat, with his monster protecting him and keeping him in power. But like the fate of most mentally ill narcissists, his dream of wielding power and controlling his MAGA movement was delusional. He motivated his misfits to attempt a violent overthrow of the Congress and the Constitution. But having once experienced the heady corrupting force of power and notoriety, the monster realized it no longer needed him. And Trump made things worse by abandoning his minions to the justice system and ripping them off to the tune of nearly a billion dollars in contributions whose only purpose was to enrich Trump further and cover his legal fees.

The 2022 midterm election and the attempt to seat the newly elected Congress show us what happens when monsters are allowed to run free. Like Doctor Frankenstein, Trump found the monster he hoped would bring him fame and fortune was beyond his control. Having enabled it and encouraged it to release its fury against the government and the clear majority of Americans who rejected it at the polls, he is slipping into decline while his followers wreak havoc in Congress, threatening to turn what was a barely functional body into a carcass.

This is being further enabled by another, not overly smart narcissist who craves being elected Speaker of the House, while the hard core remnants of Trump’s monster vow to prevent that from happening. While there is great entertainment value in pitching Kevin McCarthy against the uncompromising MAGA holdouts and Trump himself, the drama is being played out on live television to a worldwide audience, with pundits informing us that until a Speaker is elected, the legislative branch of our government is essentially offline. That means no action on the debt ceiling or on appropriations to keep government agencies, including the Defense Department and the military operating.

Because McCarthy, like Trump, cares only about his own power and position, the priorities of governing have been derailed. Because McCarthy, like Trump, is a man of limited vision, and one who despite his own view of himself as a master negotiator and deal-maker is showing himself to be incompetent at both, the victim of MAGA’s war against the government will be the United States of America. If McCarthy is ultimately elected speaker, and reports of the things he has given MAGA in exchange for their votes are correct, we will need new words to describe the Congress’ dysfunction.

Stalemate, impasse, and logjam won’t do anymore, because they all suggest temporary situations that can be fixed. If McCarthy empowers Matt Geatz and his crew as he is reported to have done, he will have given them the tools to accomplish their main objective: to tear down the federal government. Every one of the ultra MAGA rebels holding the House hostage voted not to certify the election of President Biden, and several were directly implicated in the January 6th insurrection. They cheered when their former master recently suggested that the Constitution be suspended so he could be reinstated as President.

If like many Americans, you believed that the fading of Donald Trump’s political star would signal a return to normalcy, think again.  We still have a Supreme Court that is seriously out of step with more than two thirds of America, and we have a spineless narcissist on the verge of become Speaker of the House who is willing to give the monster all the power it needs to wreck our political system.

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Intraparty Warfare

Posted on January 4, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Znedell, January 4, 2023

Politics is cyclic. The pendulum of power swings between parties every twenty years or so. Political parties adopt sacred, non-negotiable ideologies, only to reverse themselves as their self-interests change, and parties appear unified or in complete disarray as cycles evolve. For most of the post-Reagan era, it was the Democrats who seemed unable to put a united front together, but that all changed when Donald Trump turned to politics.

Ever since Trump began preaching his unique brand of divisive, morally vague extremism, the Democrats have been more united than ever while the Republican Party has been in a state of civil war, but the seeds for their current problems took root with Ronald Reagan and Grover Norquist almost forty years ago and evolved into the Tea Party in 2009.

Wikipedia describes the Tea Party Movement as calling for lower taxes and a reduction of the national debt and federal budget deficit, support for small government, and opposition to government-sponsored universal healthcare. That sounds like standard libertarian, populist doctrine, but reading between the lines revealed a more sinister, un-American agenda. Achieving those objectives meant severe cuts in discretionary government spending, most of which is targeted at helping lower income people, non-whites, new immigrants and refugees, and women’s health issues. Many people claimed that reading between the lines of its public image revealed that the Tea Party was elitist, racist, xenophobic, and misogynist.

Trump’s contribution was taking the skeletons out of the closet. Rather than pretending the Tea Party’s principles implied a desire to govern responsibly for all Americans, he reveled in bashing both legal and illegal immigration, acknowledging that he was blatantly attempting to assure that nonwhites never dominate our elections. His economic proposals were designed mostly to preserve and increase the wealth of the already wealthiest Americans. His attempt to eradicate Obamacare was merely an attempt to thwart a massive transfer of wealth from the rich to the non-rich. And Trump’s pandering to evangelists was nothing more than a promise to deprive women of their right to manage the health of their own bodies.

Trump himself may leave the world of politics, disgraced and bouncing between criminal and bankruptcy courts, but he leaves behind a dangerously stacked Supreme Court and a gang of irresponsible rebels high on their own notoriety, who show total disinterest in governing. With the rest of the world, we’re watching the results play out on television, as the Republican Party airs its dirty laundry trying elect a House Speaker.

What we are witnessing is a testament to hypocrisy and the result of a once-major party disintegrating because of the lingering influence of one man whose narcissistic lust for power was never concerned with collateral damage. There is no clearer representative of that hypocrisy than Kevin McCarthy. Bill Clinton’s political enemies liked to label him a waffler, because he sometimes changed his mind about serious issues of policy, and I always wondered if Americans preferred leaders who marched in lockstep to outmoded ideas long after they were proved unworkable.

Kevin McCarthy is a different kind of waffler. He floats in the wind based solely on what he believes to be in his self-interest. Concerning the darkest day in the last 160 years of our history, the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol, believing that Trump was guilty of inciting the insurrection, Kevin McCarthy, who had always courted Trump’s support and endorsement, spoke out publicly condemning him. For a brief moment, he seemed to rise above politics, looking like someone worthy of his party’s leadership. But within days, when Trump’s immediate demise no longer looked assured, there was McCarthy in Mar-a-Lago kneeling at his master’s feet again.

The best we can say about McCarthy is that he disagrees in principle with the unconscionable ravings of the Trumpers who are preventing him from becoming Speaker, but comparing him with Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and Marjorie Taylor Greene is a frighteningly low bar. Until a potential leader of courage and integrity emerges to break the stalemate, Republicans have to choose between a known evil and a man who has shown he cannot be trusted to stand in support of the Constitution when doing so would threaten his political power.

However this turns out, it will at best be an embarrassment, a display for the entire world to see how dysfunctional our experiment in democracy can be. It’s appalling. It’s discouraging. It’s nauseating. As I write this, the House of Representative has failed to elect a Speaker after six attempts, while on the other half of our television screens, President Joe Biden stands with Senators Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) on the bridge connecting Cincinnati, OH with Covington, KY, demonstrating that bipartisan government works far better than the politics of hate and division.

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Happy New Year, 2023??

Posted on January 1, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, January 1, 2023

After we experienced a whole winter’s worth of weather in December, after Ukraine, with massive assistance from NATO, held off an invasion by what everyone thought was a hugely superior Russian military, and after two years of testimony linking Donald Trump to the January 6, 2021 insurrection, we ceremoniously said goodbye to 2022. We enter 2023 uncertain about what will follow, as well as by the triple threat of COVID, influenza, and a surge in RSV cases, and whether a viable Republican Party can emerge from its internecine struggle. Add a couple of other minor issues, like the survival of American democracy and the risk of a recession while the Parties rev up for the 2024 election, and we set the stage for an interesting year.

There were many surprises in 2022, and there are likely more in store this year. Despite more than a quarter of Americans inexplicably believing Donald Trump should still be president and rampant skepticism about whether our legal system can respond effectively to his criminal and unconstitutional behavior, 2023 will almost surely see the unprecedented spectacle of a former president indicted for multiple felonies. Today, outgoing representative Adam Kinzinger, one of two Republicans with the courage and integrity to serve on the January 6th Committee, said Trump must be charged and prosecuted. If not, Kinzinger fears for the future of our country. He said if what Trump did wasn’t criminal, he didn’t know what was, and if Trump isn’t held accountable, the bar for future presidents will be that it’s acceptable for a president to attempt to retain power by any means necessary.

In 2023, the world must learn to deal with a severely diminished Russia which is still led by a paranoid autocrat with a huge ego who has the capacity to wreak nuclear havoc. Vladimir Putin often threatens to use nuclear weapons when his back is to the wall. The world knows how ruthless he is, but is he crazy enough to unleash nuclear war? Are there enough checks and balances within Russia’s government or society to prevent him from doing so? These are serious questions, but they’re not things the average American can influence.

We would be well advised to focus on what we can control, chief among which is the future of our democracy that’s under assault from multiple directions. One thing we can control is the movement among Trumper-dominated state legislatures to rig elections in favor of Republicans. Both parties are guilty of gerrymandering, which has the affect of magnifying votes cast for one party, enabling it to maintain majority control without ever receiving fifty percent of the votes cast, but Republicans use it more abusively than Democrats. The same legislatures are intent on passing laws that undermine our constitutional right to elections determined by voters rather than partisan politicians, but the courts are beginning to take notice of these threats.

2023 will either see the foundations of our democracy strengthened or left vulnerable to politicians who are more interested in preserving their power than defending the Constitution. Congress took a giant step toward the former when it included language in the 2023 omnibus spending bill to assure that an incumbent president can never again attempt to overturn an election as Trump did in 2020. That should clarify any gray area in the Constitution, but if politics is allowed to derail criminal investigations of the actions by Trump and his supporters leading up to the January 6th assault on the Capitol, everyone who believes insurrection is an appropriate way to retain power will be vindicated and enabled.

Since it appears that both the U. S. Department of Justice and the state of Georgia are heading toward prosecuting Trump, we should turn our attention to the upcoming Congressional session. In a fascinating twist, fear among traditional institutionalist Republicans that Trump supporters will dominate and likely destroy their party is forging an unlikely political alliance between Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and President Joe Biden. For all his obstructionist tactics, doing everything possible to thwart efforts of Presidents Biden and Obama to pass bipartisan legislation, McConnell appears to value the Constitution over the Trumpian notion of clinging to power at any cost.

With House leadership in question and Kevin McCarthy having to constantly bend to the will of the more rabid Trump supporters to gain their vote for Speaker, McConnell and McCarthy are on a collision course. As his cooperation on getting the 2023 spending bill passed showed, McConnell wants our government to function, and he’s signaling that he will not permit Trump supporters in the House to return Congress to its dysfunctional recent history.

Americans did their part in the midterm elections, telling our leaders that most of us want democracy and a fair, effective government, but the fight isn’t over. 2023 will likely be a pivotal time in our history, and it’s up to all of us to assure that it turns out well.

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