The Biden Era Begins

Posted on January 19, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, January 19, 2021

When Barack Obama was inaugurated as President in 2009, Mitch McConnell, who was Senate Minority Leader at the time, said, “My job is to assure that Obama is a one-term president.”  He did not achieve that goal, but his constant obstruction made everything more difficult for Obama. Today, the most significant vestige of McConnell’s efforts is the struggling Affordable Care Act. McConnell was able to scuttle the public option, an essential aspect of the original bill which was intended to set a competitive price bar that would keep premiums affordable.

When Joe Biden is inaugurated as our forty-sixth president tomorrow, McConnell will begin a new tenure as Minority Leader. He addressed the Senate today, and his remarks were in stark contrast to twelve years ago. The previously obstructionist McConnell today spoke about seeking bipartisan agreement wherever possible and said even when they disagreed, Republicans and Democrats should treat each other with respect.

Perhaps signaling good faith, he for the first time unambiguously blamed Donald Trump for the attack on the Capitol on January 6th, agreeing with Democrats that Trump and his supporters had spent their time since the election spreading lies and inciting violence. Does that mean he intends to vote to convict Trump when the Senate holds its trial? He seemed to imply that, but of course, McConnell is skilled at choosing his words. The phrase “savvy politician” might have been coined for him. We’ll know in a few days.

One of the most significant things the Trump administration accomplished was hijacking control of the Republican Party. At first, that seemed to only exacerbate the hyper partisanship that has had Congress gridlocked for nearly thirty years. When Trump took control of the party, it was a frontal attack against McConnel’s power, and McConnell’s career has been far more about personal power than ideology. They were political allies only when their objectives overlapped. McConnell, with House Speaker Paul Ryan, had been trying to  pass the 2017 Tax Law for twenty years, and he was legislatively in sync with Trump in trying to kill Obamacare and in packing federal courts with conservative judges.

Make no mistake – there’s no love lost between McConnell and Trump. As allies, they were as uneasy as Churchill and Stalin when they united to fight the Nazis in World War II. McConnell kept mum when Trump railed against immigrants and refused to condemn White Supremacists in Charlottesville. He was likewise silent when refugee children were separated from their parents at the Mexican border and Trump scuttled efforts to address the status of DACA recipients, not exactly the moral high ground, but at least he wasn’t marching in lock step with the worst of Trump’s actions.

McConnell is far from my favorite politician, but as an institutionalist, he silently worked to protect the Constitution from Trump. That’s why McConnell began his remarks in the Senate today by condemning Trump’s role in attacking the Congress. He didn’t have the political courage to stand up to Trump when he should have – the pandemic is a prime example. He had a moral responsibility to attempt to save American lives rather than allow the Trump Republicans to lie to the country about the virus. He has blood on his hands for that failure, not as much as Trump does, but he’s far from innocent. But this is politics. Morality is not an absolute for politicians; rather it is something to be weaponized against rivals, or held up as an ideal when it’s convenient.

As McConnell attempts to rebuild the Republican Party along Constitutional lines, he may find himself more aligned with President Biden than some in his own caucus. Perhaps, at 75, he knows this might be his last term in the Senate, and he is thinking more about his legacy than tomorrow’s legislative battles. There is no doubt that while he surely despises Donald Trump, he has much in common with Joe Biden. McConnell can do a lot for his legacy by helping Biden heal the country in the aftermath of Trump. Despite their political differences, he shares a common heritage with Biden based on their years in the Senate. They disagreed on policies, but they both believed in the separation of powers outlined in the Constitution.

Perhaps it’s ironic that in helping Biden succeed as a strong president, he can also strengthen the Congress. Together they can reduce the gridlock, defeat the pandemic, and restore the stability of the economy, and Biden will be generous in sharing credit for their success. It’s likely that the Trumpers in the Republican caucus will be a thorn in both their sides. There have been stranger bedfellows.

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Trump’s Loose Ends

Posted on January 18, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, January 18, 2021

On the penultimate day of the Trump administration, this is the state of the Union:

The Pandemic – By far, the most stunning and disturbing loose end of the Trump administration is the number of Americans who died from the COVID virus. When Trump boards Air Force One for the last time, more than 400,000 American deaths will have been recorded, with the number still rising at more than 3,000 per day because of Trump’s refusal to mandate CDC and NIH recommended preventive measures.

The pandemic has been with us for eleven months, with an initial peak in cases in April. Despite warnings from virtually every epidemiologist and health care professional, Trump’s misinformation campaign and his demands to open the economy resulted in one shocking fact. Instead of slowing down, the COVID infection rate steadily increased. More than half of all infections in the United States have occurred since Election Day, seventy-five days in which the President has totally ignored the pandemic and spent all his energy trying to subvert the election.

Unemployment – Notwithstanding that the way the Bureau of Labor Statistics computes the unemployment rate is seriously flawed – for example, it ignores jobless people whose unemployment benefits have run out – the rate was 4.8% when Trump took office, 3.6% a year ago, and 6.7% as he departs. Reducing unemployment was touted as one of Trump’s two crowning achievements, the other being the change in the tax code that enriched the wealthiest Americans and added three trillion dollars to our deficit.

For perspective, consider that Barack Obama inherited an unemployment rate of 7.8% which ballooned to 10.0% in the aftermath of the banking crisis that occupied the final year of Bush-43’s term. From its peak in October 2009, the Obama administration reduced unemployment by an average of 0.385% per year. In its first three years, the Trump administration decreased it by 0.4% per year, which supports the idea that Trump’s policies simply continued the progress Obama made. Omitting the 2009 peak, Trump’s failure to contain the pandemic left the nation with the highest unemployment rate in twenty-nine years.

Elections – Every recount, audit, and review; every court that was asked to determine whether there was evidence of fraud; every state elections administrator from both parties all agreed that the 2020 was the most accurate and secure election we’ve ever had. That was because unfounded predictions of fraudulent or incorrect vote counts caused many states to completely overhaul their voting rules and systems during the pandemic. Yet, false claims of a stolen election have left millions of Americans wrongly believing that Joe Biden’s victory wasn’t legitimate. They have also widened and exacerbated the schisms in our country, leaving us with an explosive situation as anarchists and other extremists continue to threaten the violent overthrow of the government.

But even after the demonstrations and insurrections calm down, we will be left with an election process that was badly flawed before 2020. Billionaires have been trying to buy elections ever since the Citizens United Supreme Court Decision, and in most cases, it’s impossible to identify who the actual donors were. Gerrymandering still causes legislative election results to incorrectly represent popular vote totals, and this cements one-party control in many states. Finally, there is the Electoral College. Enough said.

Climate Change and the Environment – Using Executive Orders and the Executive Branch’s power to change regulations, Trump has done everything possible to subvert attempts to mitigate the effects of climate change. He withdrew from the Paris Accords, and the New York Times reported in November 2020, that over four years in office, the Trump administration has dismantled major climate policies and rolled back more than 100 rules governing clean air, water, wildlife and toxic chemicals.” Fortunately, President Elect Biden will reverse most of those on his first day in office.

Trade, Diplomacy, Immigration, and International Relations – Trump has shaken our allies’ confidence in the United States to a degree that most experts fear has done permanent damage to NATO and our influence throughout the world. His administration and he personally have been an object of ridicule in almost every foreign capital, friends and adversaries alike.

The renegotiation of NAFTA and renaming it USMCA strengthened the agreement, but in every other respect, Trump’s trade wars have been a disaster. Promised incentives to force American corporations to bring jobs back from overseas labor markets never materialized.

There has been no progress in formulating a new immigration policy, and the status of 643,000 DACA recipients is as uncertain as the day Trump took office. The worst stain on Trump’s record is the separation of thousands of refugee children from their parents at our southern border. The children aren’t in cages anymore, but more than 500 of them have parents whose whereabouts are unknown because immigration authorities “can’t locate them.”

Our Military – Trump’s autocratic tendencies have caused an unprecedented number of current and former military leaders to condemn his policies and publicly describe him as unstable and unfit to lead the country.

Moral Leadership – The lack of moral leadership has been the single overriding constant of the Trump administration. Trump’s incitement of insurrection was only the final act in his disgraceful performance as president.

The Worst President – The debate over whether Trump was the worst president in American history may never be resolved, but since he’s competing with Andrew Johnson, Warren Harding, and Calvin Coolidge for that dishonor, the bar is pretty low.

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Charismatic Leaders and Their Mobs

Posted on January 17, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, January 17, 2021

The summer I was seventeen, I worked for the Herald Tribune Fresh Air Fund at a summer camp. The Fund took hundreds of kids out of the New York City slums, and gave them a couple of weeks in the mountains, away from the poverty and crime, and in many cases, abuse they’d known all their lives. That summer taught me some valuable lessons that are as relevant today as they were in 1960.

The first lesson was about the power of charismatic leaders, and their ability to indoctrinate their followers. The victims of this brainwashing aren’t evil or stupid – they’re pretty much like the rest of us. In most cases, they’re not even aware of what’s been done to them.

Case in point: an eighteen-year-old young man named Tom from rural Alabama, a really nice kid, full of wide-eyed excitement over coming to New York. He’d lived his entire life in a community dominated by a fire-and-brimstone Baptist minister who railed about Communists, Satan worshippers, and Jews. I met Tom during orientation, at lunch with him and two others from the New York area. We listened as Tom confided that he was nervous about having left home for the land of Satan. I thought it was a pretty brave thing he had done.

He’d come to help improve the lives of poor Negro children (his words.) For him it was a dream – he’d never seen an urban ghetto. Then he confided his greatest fear. He’d been warned that he would meet Jews there. Did we know what they were like? He actually asked if Jews had horns, like his rabble-rousing minister said. By then we’d spent an hour with Tom, as sweet and innocent a young man as you’re likely to meet. The counselor who was there to orient us said, “Tom, everyone at this table except you is a Jew.” Tom’s pale complexion turned stark white. To his credit, he didn’t faint.

We all got to be good friends that summer. Tom was fortunate that all it took was working side by side with Jews, blacks, and Puerto Ricans to detoxify the hate he’d been raised with. Lesson number one: charismatic bigots are dangerous.

That was reinforced during day two, when we were taught how to deal with the kids coming from Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. They’d been raised around gangs, and our counselors knew that the first thing some of those kids would do was compete for dominance. It was amazing how quickly the gang mentality could take hold. Our first task was to identify the potential leaders and neutralize their ability to make trouble.

Unfortunately, we failed with the first group. Within three days, a very nasty twelve-year-old, unusually big and strong for his age, invisibly to us organized a gang. He had formed a lynch mob whose target was a mentally challenged six-year-old. They were going to roast him over a campfire when we intervened. It was terrifying to see how the other kids had been whipped into a frenzy so easily.

We’d stopped them in time, but now we had more than twenty kids who had been about to murder a helpless child on our hands. Jimmy, my mentor, said not to worry. They’d seen things like this before. Once the leader was neutralized, the newly formed gang always fell apart. He likened it to a snake with its head cut off.

That’s the way law enforcement is approaching the threats of violence aimed at Joe Biden’s inauguration. They’re going after the leaders of the groups that descended on Washington on January 6th. They know that members of these groups are basically drones who require strong direction from their charismatic leaders. Once the leaders are taken down, police and the FBI hope those groups will lose their motivation and stay home.

We face the same problem as a nation. The fact that Donald Trump received 74 million votes is a credit to his undeniable charismatic ability, combined with a shameless ability to lie constantly and an unscrupulous willingness to do anything required to remain in power. Trump has brought the United States to its worst constitutional crisis since the Civil War. The combination of the election and a second impeachment have beheaded the serpent that was willing to destroy the country he led, but the people who supported him are still out there.

We can hope that the headless beast has been throttled, at least until Biden is safely sworn in, but there are millions of angry people among us who have been lied to and misled. Many of them are like Tom. We must defang their leaders and find a way to reach them.

Biden says he’ll counter the lies with which they were indoctrinated with love and understanding, and I believe him. But he can’t do it alone. It’s up to all of us.

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Confronting White Supremacy

Posted on January 13, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, January 13, 2021

Like most Americans, I used to associate stories about White Supremacists preparing to overthrow our government with folk lore. On January 6th, America got a taste of what they are willing to do to achieve their ends. They are brash and aggressive, and possessed of a dangerously twisted view of reality; and they have been allowed to grow unchecked for decades.

If you discovered that the place you lived was infested with deadly snakes, would you (a) ignore them; (b) move somewhere else; or (c) take steps to eradicate them? We face the same choices with the insurrectionist movement in our country. Forget Option (b) – there’s  nowhere to go, even if we wanted to. That leaves two choices. We can do what we’ve done for fifty years – ignore them and hope they go away – or deal with the reality that they are an existential threat.

The assault on the U. S. Capitol on January 6th was the tip of the iceberg. The attackers were a collection of local hate groups from around the country tied together by the Internet. They are armed, believe fervently that America should be ruled exclusively by white males, and subscribe to crazy conspiracy theories concerning everything that opposes their agenda. As they demonstrated at the Capitol, they are capable of causing mayhem, death, and destruction, and they seem to have no fear of repercussions. But a greater threat comes from large encampments of right-wing armies who live under the radar.

Most people who read that will scoff. That’s just a fairy tale to scare children with on dark stormy nights – but it’s not. Ask anyone who lives in the Pacific Northwest. The liberal progressivism for which Washington and Oregon are known is balanced by the existence of survivalist armies that have lived in an uneasy truce with law enforcement for decades. The authorities, from police to national guard to the military have used a strategy of containment with them, choosing to avoid direct conflict because it might result in a bloodbath. The government’s position is: if you stay within your own boundaries and don’t bother the rest of us, we’ll leave you alone. If you come out of your lairs and make trouble…presumably that would change.

These groups have their roots in the Vietnam War. Thousands of soldiers came home suffering from PTSD and other serious emotional and psychological disorders, including drug addiction. But our government chose to sweep them under the rug rather than provide support to veterans’ organizations to treat them. The neglect fed their isolation which grew into an intense hatred of the government fueled by paranoia. They raided armories and lived off the land, leaving no electronic footprint to be tracked.

David Brin’s 1985 novel, The Postman, shined a light on the survivalist army living in the Siskiyou Mountains on the California-Oregon border. He imagined an apocalyptic future after a limited nuclear war in which Oregon is completely overrun by fascist survivalists. The movie version pulled out their big guns recruiting Kevin Costner to vanquish them – if only it were that simple.

Neal Stephenson’s 2011 novel, Reamde, dealt with a similar community in northeastern Washington, northern Idaho, and northwestern Montana. Though he characterized them tongue-in-cheek as heroes, he left no doubt about how dangerous they are.

I might not have believed him except for an experience my wife and I had in 1982. Staying at a remote lake in the Idaho panhandle, we were warned never to venture across it. Why? “Because if you pass the midpoint buoy the people on the other side will shoot at you.”

Driving there, I had encountered a sign on a state highway that read, “End of State Maintenance.” Curious and hungry, I stopped in the adjacent general store and asked what the sign meant. The storekeeper answered in a tone that said another naïve tourist who doesn’t know how to stay out of trouble. He said if I traveled beyond that point I was on my own. If I encountered problems, I shouldn’t expect aid from anyone – police, firefighters – they never entered that part of the panhandle because of the neo-Nazis encamped up there.

After all that, part of me was still unbelieving until a 1984 news report. Denver attorney and radio host, Alan Berg, regularly talked about the Idaho group on a clear channel radio station. Four White Supremacists who listened to Berg’s broadcasts traveled to Denver and murdered him. That was serious enough for State Police reinforced by the National Guard to enter the camps and arrest them. All four went to federal prison.

I’ve been a believer ever since. When, responding to Trump’s exhortations to overthrow their Governors last April, armed extremists occupied the capital in Michigan and terrorized the Governor of Kentucky and his family, most Americans felt a brief chill before promptly forgetting about it. After January 6th, no one will forget again.

That is Trump’s legacy. We have no choice but to confront it by every available means.

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To Impeach Again…Or Not

Posted on January 12, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, January 12, 2021

If Vice President Pence and the Cabinet do not invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office, a second impeachment by the House of Representatives is a virtual certainty. The political momentum to prematurely end his term is like a locomotive going downhill without brakes. Even so, it’s worth looking at the pros and cons.

Representative Jim Jordan (R, OH) put on his professional persona today to make a reasonable sounding argument that another impeachment would prevent healing and divide the country further. That might be convincing if it weren’t hypocritical in the extreme. Jordan has been one of Trump’s principal enablers, as responsible as anyone for creating the divisions he now pretends to lament. Jordan supported Trump’s lies and baseless conspiracy theories right to the end. After the Capital was cleared of terrorists on January 6th, and the House went back to certifying the Electoral Vote victory for Joe Biden, after all the mayhem and the death of five people including a U. S. Capitol Police Officer, with the nation reeling from the President’s incendiary rhetoric that sparked the insurrection, Jordan still voted to challenge the election.

A more compelling argument against impeachment comes from Democrats who are concerned about distracting the incoming Biden administration from hitting the ground running. The urgent need for a vaccine distribution plan, re-legislation of Obamacare to assure that Americans have access to health care, and reversal of the most damaging of Trump’s Executive Actions all require immediate action. The argument is also made that another impeachment will significantly reduce the chance of bipartisan action.

Both arguments pale before the risk to national security of Trump staying in power and the moral necessity to hold him accountable for the worst crime ever committed by an American president. Yet, Missouri Senator Roy Blunt warned that a second impeachment would only result in more violence. Really, Roy? With right wing groups threatening violence and vowing to die rather than allow Biden and the Democrats to govern, it’s hard to imagine how that situation could be worse. Blunt and others with his mind set have cynically brought the country to the brink of armed insurrection for no purpose other than to hold on to power. It was politics at its irresponsible worst, and now that it’s all hit the fan, they’re trying to convince Americans that it’s someone else’s fault.

There are two clear truths here. One is that the next ten days could explode into violence that leaves hundreds, possibly thousands dead. And the carnage will be seen all over the world, live as it’s happening. We’ll survive, because the terrorists who call themselves patriots have no chance of winning. The question is whether we can recover from defeating them. The respect for our country internationally will never be the same again, and the scars of such an outcome might take as long to heal as the aftermath of the Civil War.

There are three important reasons to move forward with impeachment. One is that Trump could put a stop to all this by simply telling his supporters to cease and desist. He doesn’t have to admit to his lies or his role in the assault on the Capitol. He simply has to tell them to stay home and respect the Constitution. He has had as many opportunities to do that as there are hours since the insurrection occurred. This morning, when he finally spoke to the media, it was to claim that he had no responsibility for what the terrorist mob did, and his inciting of the mob, abetted by Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama, his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and his son, Don Junior, were appropriate expressions of free speech.

The mobs subsist on a diet of Trump Kool-Aid. Only he can speak to them about drawing down, but he won’t. Instead, he continues to throw roadblocks in the path of the Biden administration. Today, he dumped the government’s complete inventory of COVID vaccines on the states, with no plan for getting people vaccinated, knowing that many do not have the capacity to safely store it. That was after he added Cuba to list of states that support terrorism, something he could have done at any time in that last four years.

The second reason we need to proceed with impeachment is that if convicted, Trump will never be able to run for federal office again. But the most compelling reason to impeach him now is it will force every Republican in Congress to cast a vote. Everyone will see who was culpable in this mess, and who is still unwilling to turn the page on Trumpism. As information emerges that at least three Republican members of Congress aided the terrorists and fed them critical information, we all need to know whom we can trust to lead us in the future.

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The Coming Reckoning

Posted on January 11, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, January 11, 2021

There will be a reckoning for the Capitol insurrection. It’s not a question of “if” but “when.” And the when is critical right now, as right-wing militant groups enabled and incited by the president and his supporters continue to threaten further violence in Washington and at statehouses around the country. That makes “immediately” the only possible answer to when.

If there was ever a time to act with urgency and dispatch, that time is now. Strong public examples must be made of those who were responsible, whether they took part in murdering a police officer, breaking windows, or standing safely on a raised platform with a microphone inciting the crowd. We need to hear from the FBI and the Justice Department, and if it turns out that Trump has sabotaged his own DOJ to the point where they are impotent, then Merrick Garland, President-Elect Biden’s nominee for Attorney General should speak out. In normal times that would breach protocol, but Trump has trashed every notion of protocol and decorum. We need to hear, right now, that federal prosecutors will be instructed to press for maximum sentences that will put those responsible away for a long time.

We also need to hear from Congress. Their message must be bipartisan and it must be one of zero tolerance with respect to its own members. No half measures like censure or finger pointing. A good start would be the expulsion of the worst offender from each Branch: Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama, and Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri. This can be done quickly and painlessly. Nothing less than a call for unanimous consent will do.

There also needs to be an accounting of how many members of Congress played an active role in inciting the insurrection. Many of the 147 Republicans in the Congress who objected to certifying the Electoral Vote count were simply cowards, allowing themselves to be bullied by fears that Trump’s base would punish them at the polls. But some went further. Some helped stoke the most radical and dangerous people in that base on Twitter, Facebook, and the more dangerous fringe sites. Some helped rile the crowd that invaded the Capitol, and a few even marched with them. They all need to face public humiliation and censure; the worst of them have no business remaining in Congress and should face prosecution as co-conspirators.

There are many legal precedents that hold anyone committing a crime responsible for all the consequences of their actions. A burglar who breaks into someone’s home, unarmed, with no intent to injure or kill, can be charged with homicide if the victim suffers a heart attack and dies as a result of the crime. Likewise, former prosecutors and justice officials are lining up to state that anyone involved in the conspiracy to commit insurrection should be charged in the deaths that resulted as well as attempting a coup and destroying public property. That means everyone from Donald Trump on down who can be shown to have played a role in what we saw on January 6th, including Donald Trump Jr. and Rudolph Giuliani. And we should take a hard look at the actions of Senator Ted Cruz and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

Only fast, dramatic action has a chance of limiting further violence. The anarchists and criminals who want to bring down the government and destroy our republic may not be deterred, but the thousands of hangers on and joy riders who were there just to enjoy the thrill of lawlessness and the false sense of empowerment will realize their errors. If they know they will lose their livelihoods, and in many cases, their freedom; if they know they will face humiliation and ostracism in front of their friends and family; if we make that clear to them, so that even the dimmest among them can understand, it won’t seem like fun anymore, and they’ll stay home next time.

Finally, as the number of Americans dead from COVID streaks toward 400,000 and beyond, it’s also time to investigate the vaccine distribution debacle. It was largely a result of incompetence and criminal neglect, but Americans deserve full transparency on decisions that were made by Trump political operatives. Thousands of Americans die every day because of those decisions. From the moment the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were approved, anyone who died because he couldn’t get vaccinated in time will have died because of them. Actions have consequences, and it’s time those responsible were held accountable.

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Some Battles Have To Be Fought

Posted on January 9, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, January 9, 2021

The Alt-right movement and its affiliated groups of neo-Nazis and assorted hate-mongers have thrown down the gauntlet, threatening massive attacks on the U. S. Capitol and statehouses across the country on January 17th. They’re a serious threat to life and property that cannot be ignored. Many Americans are justifiably concerned about what might happen next week. These insurrectionists and traitors are well-armed and capable of causing considerable mayhem. No one wants to see our law enforcement people and symbols of government under attack, especially if someone you know and care about will be on the front lines defending against them.

We ignore protest groups like the one that invaded the Capitol at our peril; we’ve been ignoring this one far too long. Trump started this long before he decided to run for president in 2015, but it’s no longer about him. This nest of vipers that has been growing and feeding itself on the internet is awake, like a deadly virus that has lain dormant for decades. Throughout history, burying our heads in the sand and turning blind eyes toward insidious threats always ended badly.

We weren’t prepared in Washington, and much of that lack of preparedness was set up in advance by Trump, who deliberately hamstrung the ability of local leaders to activate the National Guard. That will not happen again.

Insurrection is awful to contemplate, but we need to maintain our perspective. First, there is nothing to debate. This is a fight we cannot duck. The only issue is whether we’re prepared. One in eight Americans polled by Reuters said they approved of the rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6th. One out of eight!

A small percentage of those are professional anarchists and agitators, but most are our friends, neighbors, and family members, who have sadly been drawn into Trump’s cult of lies and bigotry. Some, like the small number of Capitol Police officers who were seen abetting the rioters, have even infiltrated law enforcement. This is a cancer eating away at the heart of our democracy; if it’s not excised it could kill the patient.

That said, don’t get overly upset. We’re ready. We have thousands of highly skilled people scouring the Internet, analyzing the chatter. It’s tough to root out terrorists who hide in caves in Afghanistan, but they can’t hide online. Most of the people in the Trump cult are, frankly, stupid. As Stephen Colbert asked in his monologue after the Capitol was cleared, how smart is it to take off your mask while you’re violating federal laws in front of surveillance cameras, and then brag about it to local media? These people are drones in a movement that depends on charismatic leaders telling them what to do. Their cynical leaders use them as cannon fodder, but that only works when we’re unprepared.

That’s what the assault on the Capitol has in common with nine-eleven. The attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon succeeded because of a massive failure of Intelligence. But we learned, and since then every threat has been thwarted. In more than nineteen years nothing of the sort has happened again.

In today’s world, no movement of any size can live under the radar, and the current crop of crazies doesn’t even try. If they choose to attack, it may be ugly, and innocent people may be killed, but this is war, and war produces casualties. In this war, if it occurs, the attackers will face heavily armed, well-organized defenders. If blood is shed almost all of it will be the attackers’.

Anyone who takes up arms on January 17th will either wind up dead or spend the rest of his or her life in federal prison. The leaders will be arrested and tried for treason or insurrection, whatever the correct legal term is. The heads of the movement will be severed, and leaderless, the vipers who survive will crawl back into their holes.

The Trump cult loves to threaten civil war and pledge to give their lives to the cause, but that’s just Internet chatter. They’re lynch mobs whipped into a frenzy by crazed leaders. But the leaders are not mindless drones. They understand that having exposed themselves on social media platforms, any armed attack will result in the end of their movement and the power they wield. If they’re truly martyrs, they will go the way of all self-immolators. If they’re as smart as they think they are, they’ll back off, knowing they face certain defeat.
If they don’t, they’re dead. Every drop of blood shed in defeating them will be a tragedy, but if the leaders follow through on their threats, we really have no choice.

Despite his many blunders in office, President George W. Bush got one thing right. He told the Islamic terrorists who plotted nine eleven that if they wanted to sacrifice their lives in the cause of Jihad, he’d be happy to help them on their way. That’s the message we should send to those who plan to attack our republic.

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Accountability

Posted on January 8, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, January 8, 2021

After what has been done to it, the United States needs a complete accounting and reckoning if it is to recover its economic and social health and its standing in the world. There are a lot of angry people still willing to do further harm. Some of them are criminals, anarchists, and right-wing agitators, but the great majority are victims of the lies and misinformation they’ve been fed by our president. It’s been five years and eight months since he rode the elevator in Trump Tower spewing lies and hate about immigrants. It’s time we looked at the fruits of all that sickness for what they are.

Now that his enablers have allowed Donald Trump to play out his end game, now that we have seen that the ever more dire predictions about his mental incapacity and incompetence, his immorality and greed, were all on point, now that our eyes are wide open, we need to dissect the Trump horror show and put it to rest. This president has been a one-man criminal enterprise from the day he took office. He must be held accountable.

We’ve had enough hypocrisy to last a lifetime since Trump entered the political scene. Going through the motions of pretending to hold powerful people accountable, as in the foolish and ill-fated attempt to impeach him a year ago represents a massive copout. Applying salves to infections with directly attacking them only allows them to fester.

I dislike empty gestures and show trials, but it’s time to act to remove Trump from office even if the clock on this administration runs out before the legal maneuvers required by invoking the 25th amendment or a second impeachment trial can be completed. Vice President Mike Pence, the Cabinet, and the Congress, all of whom have cowered in fear of Trump’s base must now accept their own roles in this catastrophe and do what is necessary. The nation and the world need to see America admit its failure if we ever expect to regain the moral authority we had both at home and internationally.

I could spend thousands of words recounting Trump’s crimes, but we only need to focus on 2020. His cynicism and blind lust for power which resulted in a pandemic death spiral that epidemiologists now predict could result in more than a million lives lost represent a level of criminal neglect and reckless endangerment, if not outright manslaughter, that we have never seen in a president before. The events of the last two months, which could only have culminated in the coup attempt at the Capitol represent treason, plain and simple.

Until recently, I believed that while viscerally pleasing to his victims, those they left behind, and those of us who have been counting the days until he departed, prosecuting and punishing Trump, was a mistake. We might feel good and righteous the way vigilante films make our hearts race with false pride, but I thought unifying the country was more important. I’d have welcomed pardons for him at every level if he went away and never returned.

But not anymore. Whether it’s Mike Pence or the Congress who acts, a clear message must be sent to every American and every foreign government that the rule of law prevails here. Removing Trump from the White House might seem like a pyrrhic victory, but at this critical time, the symbolic value of the act outweighs everything else. Only strong people and strong nations can admit they were wrong and demonstrate the will to make things right again, and that’s an all or nothing process. Half measures and logic-defying defenses of the indefensible only make things worse.

It’s not only Donald Trump who needs to be accountable. This is America’s Nuremburg moent. Far too late resignations by Cabinet officers, beginning with Attorney General Bill Barr, are acts of cowardice and self-interest. There is nothing noble in Betsy Devos and Elaine Chow pretending to fall on their swords. They’re just fleeing the burning building before it collapse on them, and ducking responsibility. If they stayed another day, they might have to stand up for the 25th Amendment.

As to people in Congress who continued to spread the lies of a rigged election even after Trump’s act of sedition, Senators like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley – a pox on them. Hawley, who thought protesting the election would cement his standing with Trump’s base in his quest to lead the post-Trump Republican Party has already seen his political fortunes crash and burn. His mentor and sponsor, John Danforth said helping Hawley win his Senate seat was the worst mistake he ever made, and Simon and Schuster canceled publication of Hawley’s book. There are calls for his recall, but that will be up to Missouri voters, as Cruz’s fate will be determined by Texans.

Rudy Giuliani, who incited Wednesday’s mob to “trial by combat,” must be indicted for treason by a federal grand jury. And Trump’s chief enablers, Kellyanne Conway, Lindsay Graham, Stephen Miller, Mark Meadows, Mitch McConnell, and dozens of others, must be held up to public scrutiny. Their craven commitment to self-interest over their oaths to protect the Constitution cannot be swept under the rug. These people were addicted to their own power and influence. If only there was a twelve-step program for corrupt politicians and government officials.

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Repudiation and Validation

Posted on January 7, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, January 7, 2021

Almost lost in the furor following the invasion of the U. S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters angry over Biden’s defeat of Trump was the significance of the runoff Senate elections in Georgia. As horrifying as yesterday’s invasion of the Capitol was, the impact of the Georgia elections on American political life will prove far more significant and enduring. It was a total repudiation of Donald Trump, and like the insurrection he incited, it was an inevitable conclusion to his hateful, irrational style of governing.

After two months of listening to Trump’s army of incompetent lawyers accuse Georgia and three other states of rigging the presidential election, the same voters who gave Georgia to President-Elect Biden, threw out its two incumbent Republican Senators. Victorious, in this very red right-leaning state were Raphael Warnock, a black minister whose margin a victory was seven times Biden’s, and Jon Ossoff, a young Jewish activist whose margin of victory was four times Biden’s. Those results show that the behavior of Trump and the incumbents, Kelly Loeffler and David Purdue, in the weeks since the election pushed Georgia from purple to blue.

The Georgia Senate results flipped the majority in the U.S. Senate to the Democrats, completely changing the landscape for the incoming Biden administration. Biden will not have to endure weeks of obstructive wrangling to obtain Senate approval for his Cabinet nominations, and he will not be facing a Senate majority leader whose entire agenda was preventing progress. Recall that Mitch McConnell’s first words following the inauguration of Barack Obama was that his sole mission was to ensure the failure of Obama’s presidency.

With McConnell now nothing more than a gadfly, Biden has an opportunity to quickly pass landmark legislation. He will stabilize Obamacare by filling in the critical building block of the public option; he should have little trouble passing campaign finance and election reforms, limiting gerrymandering and closing loopholes that allow massive anonymous donations; and he should be able to pass immigration reforms like permanently legitimizing the status of dreamers.

The results in Georgia validate Stacy Abrams’ brilliance and skill at organizing and getting out the vote. Abrams still has not conceded defeat to Governor Brian Kemp, who she accused of suppressing hundreds of thousands of Democratic votes in his role has Secretary of State. She proved her point three times: restoring the voting rights she believes were stolen, flipping Georgia from Trump to Biden, and being the driving force that elected Warnock and Ossoff. In the eight weeks since the November election, she increased the Democratic turnout in the runoff election by more than 100,000.

Georgia’s Supervisor of Elections, Republican Gabriel Sterling, attributed the Democrats’ double win to Stacy Abrams and Donald Trump. He congratulated Abrams on a job well done, contrasting her positive impact on the election with the chaos created by Trump. Sterling said the president “pissed off Georgia voters” and undermined Loeffler and Perdue.

Former Republican Senator Jeff Flake today said the result in Georgia is a fitting coda to the Trump administration. He’s right. The complete victory of facts over lies, of decency over immorality, of unification over divisiveness is almost spiritual. If this were a novel readers might reject it as being too fantastic to be believable. And yet, it happened. The American people’s resiliency stood firm in the face of organized attacks by dozens of fringe right wing groups.

Trumpism was a necessary stress test on the strength of our Constitution and our republic. Stress tests are painful and nerve-wracking, but they’re supposed to be. The only way to assure the soundness of our political system is to stress it to its breaking point, which Trump did in spades. Future historians may thank him for the misery he caused. Today, we can celebrate that it was all worth it. The forces of reason and decency won.

But don’t celebrate too long. Present day historian Heather Cox Richardson reminded her followers yesterday that “democracy is not a spectator sport.” We cannot disengage from the war against COVID, climate change, and the forces of greed and corruption. We cannot sit back and watch. Democrats have to prove that they can do better, or everything they just achieved will be reversed in the 2022 midterms.

To achieve long-term change, we must all remain involved. The only way to counter the lies circulating on the internet is to answer them with truth. The forces of divisiveness won’t rest, and neither can we. I’ll continue to do my part. I started this blog because Donald Trump horrified me four years ago. I’ll keep writing it until we’ve righted the ship of state.

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Are You Surprised?

Posted on January 6, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, January 6, 2021

If you are surprised by Wednesday’s insurrection in Washington, you shouldn’t be. If, even now, you’re waiting to see if Trump will finally step up and act responsibly, I’ll make it easy for you. He won’t. Not ever. He can’t, because the presidency is about doing the people’s work, not placing self-interest above everything else, and he is literally incapable of caring about anything but himself.

Are you surprised that the same president who rushed to send unidentified federal enforcers to Portland, Oregon to forcibly dispense a crowd of legal protesters who were peacefully demonstrating against police brutality sat on his hands for hours watching mobs in MAGA hats invade the Capitol? Are you surprised that although his justification for using storm troopers in Portland was the need to protect federal property, he didn’t consider the U. S. Capitol and the House and Senate Office buildings under siege worth defending? Are you surprised that our president who claims to be a champion of law enforcement remained silent while Capitol Police were being attacked by his supporters and called traitors? You shouldn’t be.

Are you surprised that when Trump finally, grudgingly released a recorded message to the mob suggesting that they go home so that they can have peace, most of his statement was a continuation of the lies and conspiracy theories he had used to incite the insurrection in the first place? Were you surprised that he told the out-of-control mob he loved them and they were special people?

Were you surprised when Rudy Giuliani rallied the mob to engage in armed combat and Donald Trump Jr. encouraged them to enjoy the havoc and destruction they caused? Did you ever think Donald Trump was capable of accepting defeat allowing a peaceful transfer of power? Did you really not believe today was inevitable, even necessary, the final act in his stress test of our democracy, so that even doubters would understand why someone like Trump can never be allowed to hold the power of the presidency again?

Here’s why you shouldn’t be surprised by any of this. It was the natural consequence of Mitch McConnell’s calculated decision to coddle and enable this president, because not doing so threatened McConnell’s agenda, and possibly even his re-election on the same 2020 ballot as Trump. Trump’s belief that he was untouchable, in which he was entirely correct, removed what limited boundaries he may have possessed when he took office.

After Trump’s refusal to condemn the neo-Nazi march through Charlottesville was cheered by his supporters and Fox News; after Robert Mueller, shackled by an Justice Department opinion that has never been tested in court, failed to recommend criminal charges against the president despite citing a dozen acts which violated the law; after Democrats foolishly impeached him knowing there was no chance McConnell’s caucus would convict him; after spreading ever more outrageous lies and dangerous claims about election fraud and receiving no pushback from even one of his supporters in the Senate, no other outcome was possible. Appeasing wannabe dictators who abuse their power instead of standing up to them always results in bad endings, sometimes including acts of war and genocide.

Trump has escalated his attacks on the fundamental institutions of our republic since he took office. There was never any reason to believe he would relent, never any reason to think enough would ever be enough. Nothing less than absolute control would ever satisfy our severely mentally ill president. As his term approached its end and Trump expected to lose the election, and therefore the legal protection of the presidency, he faced the prospect of dealing with massive debts and multiple jurisdictions gathering the evidence they needed to prosecute him for past crimes. He feels out of control and that makes him extremely dangerous.

The deliberate way the law enforcement agencies that protect D. C. handled the mob was impressive, despite the fact that their actions were described as an insurrection by former President George W. Bush. They reserved the use of force that could turn deadly as a last resort. But it was embarrassing for the world to see the Capitol Police Force so easily overwhelmed and the Capitol itself invaded and occupied by the raging, treasonous mob, and the tragedy of a woman being shot and killed.

The restraint demonstrated by law enforcement won’t last, and it shouldn’t. If the mob returns, especially if some of it is armed (carrying loaded firearms is a felony in the District) they will be met with a well-organized and prepared response. If further blood is shed, it will be on the head of Donald Trump. Added to the hundreds of thousands of deaths he caused by refusing to take COVID seriously, what’s a few more deaths? Does anyone think Trump cares?

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