Management Styles

Posted on December 28, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, December 28, 2020

Imagine that you work for a large corporation that serves millions of customers. Despite having a resume that has no relationship to the job, you have responsibility for an enormously costly project that will require the best cooperative efforts you can muster. The well-being of millions of people  and the morale and careers of the hundreds of employees who contribute to the project depend on your success.

It’s critical that the person in charge be free of personality traits that might sabotage the outcomes of projects like this one – things like an enormous ego, serious anger management issues, and a complete lack of empathy for the people who rely on you. Yet, your management style has often been criticized as being based on intimidation and inciting infighting among your staff, and sending mixed messages that frequently leave your key people in a quandary.

Worst of all, your tendency to be unpredictable and erratic, and your long history of troubled relationships with peers and subordinates too often leaves the people you most depend on stuck between doing a job properly and catering to your whims and idiosyncrasies. They’re all tops in their fields, people who know how to get results, except when goals and objectives are obscured by misdirection and contradictions. Those closest to you wonder aloud how someone like you could ever have been given responsibility for something so essential.

Somehow, you have avoided catastrophic failures for decades because of your loyal army of thugs and sycophants. But you know that can’t last forever, and when that moment comes and it is readily apparent to everyone, particularly those people who are hurt by your failure, how long would it take your Board to unceremoniously terminate you?

If that happened in business, you’d be immediately escorted off the premises by security, and your access to everything connected with the company would be terminated – ID badges, computer passwords, banks accounts – in case you’re a vindictive sort who might create great havoc if allowed to. But if you happened to be the President of the United States, even after you’ve been clearly dismissed by your constituents, (the voters,) you’d still have unfettered access to enormous power for seventy-eight days. Think of all the harm you could do if you were unscrupulous and driven only by the need to avenge every perceived wrong…

…which brings us to the debacle over the $2.3 trillion bill that provides relief to tens of millions of people suffering because of the pandemic and keeps the government functioning, and Trump’s veto of the Defense Appropriations Act because his racist supporters object to removing the names of Confederate generals from our military bases. Failure to move such vital undertakings across the finish line would end the career of most corporate CEOs. Scuttling the DAA is equivalent to firing corporate security and shutting down the computers that protect a company’s information and employees.

The almost unimaginable stress and hardship caused by Trump’s pique over losing the election and countless other grievances, including his wife being snubbed by fashion magazines that failed to honor her with a cover, was a predictable but unforgiveable epilog to his administration. We survived, this time, but there are twenty-three days left in Trump’s lame duck tenure, which in his mind, is a free pass to do anything he pleases. If I thought it would do any good, I’d pray every day for a miracle that would transform him into a decent human being. Since that’s not going to happen, I can only think about how to prevent this from happening again. This is not about politics or ideology. The question is how to avoid allowing someone as unfit as Trump to ever have so much power in the future.

Many industries require rigorous psychological evaluations for anyone who might have critical responsibilities. Commercial airlines, for example, continuously evaluate flight crews for drug and alcohol use and psychological issues that might endanger passengers. They have no choice; the cost of catastrophic failure is too great to risk. Ask yourself if it makes sense to apply the standards for the person flying your jetliner to the person in whom we invest the power of the presidency.

What if we had a psychological screening program for presidential candidates? I don’t know who would develop and administer it or how it would work, but wouldn’t we all rest easier knowing we could trust the emotional stability of our president? More than half the country believed Donald Trump was unfit to lead, but because of our outdated Electoral College system, that didn’t prevent us from having to endure four years of him.

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Presidential Christmas Messages

Posted on December 25, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, December 25, 2020

It wasn’t too long ago that the worst thing we had to bear on Christmas was a presidential address filled with empty platitudes. One of the more heartfelt was Harry Truman’s first such address in 1945. “This is the Christmas that a war-weary world has prayed for through long and awful years. With peace comes joy and gladness. The gloom of the war years fades…” Lovely sentiments, except that the Cold War was already underway, the nuclear arms race was beginning to spiral out of control, and the gloom of war had been quickly replaced by paranoia over Communism.

Eight years later we had already emerged from another war, this one in Korea. The first major confrontations of the Cold War, the three-year-long Greek Civil War and the Berlin Airlift were behind us, but hydrogen bombs were being tested in the Soviet Union and the South Pacific. President Eisenhower remarked that “this Christmas is truly a season of good will—and our first peaceful one since 1949.” A literally true statement, but one that ignored the anxious undercurrent in the country. We were entering the fourth year of the Communist conspiracy-driven McCarthy hearings, starring Roy Cohn, who later became a Mafia consigliere and mentor in sleaze training to Donald Trump.

In his 1962 Christmas address, President Kennedy said, “…we greet each other at Christmas with some special sense of the blessings of peace.” Unfortunately, that special sense was the sigh of relief that came from just having dodged a huge bullet, the Cuban missile crisis, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. It omitted that we were charging headlong into yet another foreign war in Vietnam which would tear the country apart. Finally, that special sense ignored internal conflicts which released the bullet Kennedy couldn’t dodge, making 1962 his last Christmas.

At his first National Christmas Tree Lighting in 1969, President Nixon promised more television sets, more automobiles, clean air and water, and an end to hunger, concluding that the decade of the seventies would be one “in which we could celebrate our Christmases at peace with all the world.” I can only wonder which delusional alternate reality he inhabited. Far more real and genuine was President Ford’s 1975 Christmas message. At a time when the nation still reeled from Vietnam and the corruption of Watergate, Ford recalled Christmases when “the only thing we had to offer each other … was the love we shared, and the faith that together we could see things through to a better future.” That year, he said, Americans could finally “honor the Prince of Peace in a nation at peace.” And for a while, that they could.

President Clinton’s final Christmas message addressed his hope for America in the twenty-first century. “We must embrace boldly and resolutely that duty to lead—to stand with our allies in word and deed … America cannot lead in the world unless we … treat all our people with fairness and dignity, regardless of their race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation, and regardless of when they arrived in our country.” He convinced me that day.

President George W. Bush, attempting to emulate the inspirational Christmas messages of Ronald Reagan, offered a message of hope in his 2001 address, three months after nine-eleven. “The year now ending saw a few acts of terrible evil. It also saw many more acts of courage and kindness and love. And these reflect the great hope of Christmas: A light shines in the darkness, and the darkness shall not overcome it.” Alas, that hope shortly evaporated amid the lies that began our eighteen-year war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Christmas messages from the Obamas, much like those of the Great Communicator, Ronald Reagan, were always uplifting, stressing American values, diversity, and inclusion. No matter what was happening in the world, any anger they both expressed was directed outward, at nations who failed to respect rights of all their citizens or the sovereignty of their neighbors. For Americans, we heard only love and the hope that the nation would continue to move forward and overcome its internal divisions. Despite having been savaged repeatedly during the 2016 election campaign by his successor, Obama wouldn’t tarnish the dignity of his office. Foreshadowing the negativity and chaos that was to follow, Obama’s final message spoke of “treat[ing] others as we would want to be treated…car[ing] for the sick…feed[ing] the hungry…and welcom[ing] the stranger…no matter where they come from, or how they practice their faith.”

After what we have endured in 2020, it would be wonderful to have a president capable of expressing genuine empathy for the havoc Americans are experiencing this Christmas. But perhaps it’s best if President Trump just plays golf and keeps his mouth shut.

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The White Whale

Posted on December 22, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, December 22, 2020

No, the title is not a disparaging reference to Donald Trump, though many of his detractors and most stand-up comedians have described him that way. It’s a metaphor for his obsession with power and himself, but you probably guessed that already. There may be no better example of obsession-driven self-destructive madness than Herman Melville’s classic novel, Moby Dick. Captain Ahab was a whaling sea-captain whose first encounter with the giant white whale resulted in the loss of one of his legs. From that day forward, Ahab was obsessed with avenging his loss. Nothing would stand in his way, not the safety of his crew or the risk of losing his ship. If you don’t remember your high school literature class, Ahab eventually became completely irrational, and his madness cost him his life. The whale survived.

The idea of Captain Ahab as allegory for Trump has two bases in Moby Dick. Melville compared Ahab to the Greek God Narcissus, who was possessed of a handsome image that could not be matched by mortals. Narcissus’ self-love caused him to be mesmerized by his own reflection in a fountain, into which he ultimately plunged and drowned. Ahab’s obsessive drive for revenge on the whale, which he once viewed as a noble creature of great beauty, but later perceived as an evil enemy out to kill him, represents the psychological need to project his own obsessive characteristics onto his adversary, the whale.

Looked at from this point of view, Ahab’s descent into madness which resulted in his own destruction may well be seen as a parallel for Trump’s recent behavior. Ahab’s blind obsession risked his ship and his crew. Trump’s overriding compulsion to make everyone else pay for his loss risks the ship of state and all the Americans who populate it.

Everyone around him walked on eggshells whenever they had to interact with him. And like Ahab’s crew, they all became Trump enablers, whether willingly or out of fear. As his administration unravels into complete chaos, they are desperately trying to abandon the ship before it drags them down with it, the clearest example being Attorney General Bill Barr.

If we had any doubt that Donald Trump suffers from an extreme Narcissistic Personality Disorder, it was dispelled by the commentary of his niece, Mary Trump, a practicing PhD psychologist. The issue never was whether his mental illness (yes, that’s what it is) was real. The debate was whether it was simply an annoying quirk or something to be feared. I have always believed Trump was a danger to the country, his illness a ticking time bomb. I believe most of the people in his orbit sensed that too, but human nature rarely assumes the worst about someone until the evidence is incontrovertible.

These are not new ideas. In 2017, Yale University Professor of Psychiatry Bandy Lee published The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a collection of essays by concerned psychotherapists. It became an instant bestseller, and ultimately, thirty-seven psychiatrists contributed their assessments describing the “clear and present danger” that US President Donald Trump’s mental health poses to the “nation and individual well-being.”

A year ago, in December 2019, Professor Lee was joined by 350 mental health professionals in drafting a letter to Congress, claiming “Trump’s mental health [was] deteriorating dangerously amid impeachment proceedings.” Last month, seventeen days after Trump lost the election, psychiatrist Kenneth Rosenberg and political scientist Norman Ornstein published: Trump history and behavior suggest destructive mental processes that put America at risk. And two days ago, Peter Wehner, Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, wrote Trump is Losing His Mind in The Atlantic.

Trump’s senior advisors and military leaders leak their fears daily to the media. In the West Wing, the Congress and the Pentagon, the people responsible for the stability of our nation continually express concern about what Trump’s deteriorating mental health might cause him to do in the month before President Elect Biden’s inauguration. The election, all Democrats, and every Republican who has been willing to speak out against him have combined to become Trump’s White Whale. All that matters to him now is killing it.

The only way to assure that the ship will not sink along with Trump is for Vice President Pence to step up and activate the 25th amendment. Our safety may depend on ridding ourselves of him before he blows everything up.

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An Out of Control President

Posted on December 19, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, December 19, 2020

During the past few weeks, America and indeed the entire world have seen a spectacle evolve in the White House that we used to associate with tin horn dictatorships in Third World countries. The only way to describe what Trump and some of his people are doing is attempting to stage a coup. That it never had a chance of succeeding is beside the point. The president’s use of Twitter has aired our nation’s filthy laundry for anyone who can stomach looking at it, and Trump’s lawyers have turned his threats of litigation into a standup comedy routine, if you don’t mind sick humor.

All this is just an extension of how Trump has behaved from the moment he announced his intention to run in 2015. He has been in constant attack mode, insulting and picking fights with everyone that didn’t take a knee in obeisance to him. No matter that most of his loyal opposition displayed incredible restraint in dealing with a president who has no use for courtesy, grace, or political norms, and has been completely unbound and often disgusting in his constant attacks.

With a month to go before Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ inauguration, Trump’s behavior is a fitting coda to the worst presidency I have ever witnessed. Our angry, spiteful president has shown us that much like a spoiled child who can’t have his way, he’d rather smash everything than accept his fate. He hasn’t been shy about his motive, one of them, anyway. He wants payback for the way he was treated as president, chief among which were the Mueller probe and being impeached by the House of Representatives.

If Trump’s latest antics are in fact an attempt at payback, I have to ask against whom. The Democrats? He seems to be doing more harm to the Republican Party. It’s really not clear who his intended victim is. Why would he want payback against Biden? The President Elect had no role in either the Russia probe or the impeachment. His only sin from Trump’s point of view, is being a decent moral counterpart to Trump himself. If Trump failed that taste test he has only himself to blame.

The most important issue at this moment is how far Trump will go in his attempts to further divide the country. He pardoned Michael Flynn, who immediately appointed himself the leader of the attempted coup. Flynn has been pushing idea of Trump declaring martial law and holding a new election supervised by the military, which military leaders have flatly said will never happen. Despite that, Trump gave the idea legs again this weekend in an Oval Office meeting that horrified even some of his own advisers.

Trump has been focused entirely on attempting to overturn the election. For almost seven weeks he has ignored the pandemic, which is now claiming three thousand American lives every day, and infecting one-and-a-half million more of us every week. He is also ignoring the fight in Congress over a stimulus bill, despite tens of millions of Americans being out of work, facing eviction from their homes, and unable to feed their families. And in the face of reports this week by dozens of credible sources that Russia is engaged in a massive cyber attack against our government, many of our major corporations, and our power and transportation infrastructures, Trump claimed it was all Fake News. Otherwise, he might have to face up to Vladimir Putin, something he has never been willing to do. Is he holding out for an extradition-free haven from prosecution after January 20th?

Republicans have been in a quandary because of the upcoming Senate elections in Georgia. Fear of losing control of the Senate to Democrats has made them unwilling to speak out against the president’s actions until a few days ago, when the Electoral College declared Biden the winner. Yet, even now, after Mitch McConnell and a number of other Republican leaders have acknowledged Biden’s victory, Trump is again interfering with the transition by shutting Biden’s team out of Defense Department discussions.

In all this, there is only one victim – the American people. Trump has made it clear that he intends to blow up everything he can as he leaves the White House. Can we afford that with thirty-two days to go? Let us remind Vice President Pence once again that he has the power to stop this if he has the will. He knows what’s best for the country, and he has the 25th Amendment in his pocket. Does he have the guts to do the right thing and use it?

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Herd Immunity and Sociopathy – A Fatal Combination

Posted on December 17, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, December 17, 2020

Several news outlets today reported that the Trump administration, with the overt approval of the president, secretly pursued a strategy of achieving herd immunity to the COVID virus by deliberately allowing it to spread among “non-vulnerable populations.” Part of that strategy was an organized attempt to discredit the views of scientists at the CDC and key members of the president’s Coronavirus Task Force, Drs. Debra Birx and Anthony Fauci.

Herd immunity occurs when a sufficiently large percentage, around two-thirds of the population is immune. When that happens, the virus essentially runs out of enough potential new hosts to allow it to spread. The concept is well known to epidemiologists.

What is radical about the approach adopted by the White House, following earlier, failed attempts in Sweden and Brazil, was to achieve herd immunity by maximizing community spread among children and healthy young adults; that is, by deliberately infecting as many people as possible who were thought to be at low risk of serious illness and death. Before the science of immunology was developed, community spread was the only way herd immunity could be achieved. But since scientists have learned to create vaccines, herd immunity has been achieved by protecting the population from infection until it can be immunized medically.

An article published in the scientific journal Nature last October, The False Promise of Herd Immunity for COVID-19, thoroughly debunked the strategy that had been secretly pursued by the Trump administration since last Spring. The article asserted that “epidemiologists have repeatedly smacked down such ideas.” It quoted Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California: “Such an approach would lead to a catastrophic loss of human lives without necessarily speeding up society’s return to normal. We have never successfully been able to do it before, and it will lead to unacceptable and unnecessary untold human death and suffering.”

To the surprise of no one except Trump’s mesmerized base of worshippers, that is exactly what happened. Epidemiological computer models developed by university researchers all over the country accurately predicted the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans if CDC guidelines were ignored. Medical professionals spent months wringing their hands, shocked by the administration’s continual undercutting of their proven advice that wearing masks and social distancing would prevent infection and save lives. For months, the scientific community seemed unable to grasp why Trump was behaving that way. Now we know.

The policy of forcing the virus to spread among safe populations while protecting the most vulnerable was always a false choice. Even where the elderly and immune compromised are sequestered in nursing homes and medical facilities, the government couldn’t (or wouldn’t) protect them. The fatality rate among those populations was staggering. Further, the deliberately mixed message coming from the White House which eschewed masks and repeatedly encouraged mass gatherings guaranteed that our most vulnerable citizens could not be protected.

Trump knew this. He always understood the consequences of pursuing herd immunity this way. It’s worth asking – if he knew he was signing the death warrants of at least a half million Americans, why did he continue down this road?

It’s not a mystery. We should have understood from the beginning. It’s often been suggested that a president needn’t be a subject matter expert to manage a crisis. He or she is expected to be surrounded by experts, listen to their competing advice, and be smart and objective enough to distill the best course of action for the nation. But in Trump, we have had a president who disdains experts, whose mental illness makes him believe he always knows better. And rather than immerse himself in the advice qualified medical professionals, he pushed them aside in favor of a bunch of quacks and fringe politicians.

That’s what he did, but it doesn’t explain why Trump couldn’t see what was plain to every other objective observer. The truth was that he did see it. He understood the consequences of his decisions, but the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans didn’t matter to him, because he is a sociopath who is incapable of caring the way normal people due. When his side show of incompetent advisors falsely claimed that he could save the economy and assure his re-election by allowing the virus to spread, that was all his narcissism allowed him to process.

There’s a valuable lesson in all this. Most politicians have large egos, but there must come a point at which voters say, “Enough is enough!” When a politician is as narcissistic as Trump, he becomes a danger to the nation. Fortunately, enough Americans figured that out by Election Day. Joe Biden didn’t rig the election. Trump rigged it against himself by not giving a damn about how many of us died.

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If I Were the President Elect…

Posted on December 16, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, December 16, 2020

President Elect Joe Biden has not called to ask my advice. Neither has anyone else for that matter. But that won’t deter me from offering some.

First, and most important, Mr. President Elect, do everything you can to stem the spread of COVID. Wear your mask whenever you’re in public. Find bigger ones, so you can make self-deprecating jokes about having the largest mask anyone has ever seen. Arrange regular public service announcements by Drs. Anthony Fauci and Michael Osterholm to repeatedly drive the message home that masks and distancing are as effective as a vaccine on a day-to-day basis. Every responsible media outlet should be happy to make daily time slots available. Make sure everyone in your administration follows the medical experts’ guidance at all times.

If Congress doesn’t act quickly to assure sufficient funding to complete the distribution of the COVID vaccines, find a way to use your military appropriation to mount a full court press supporting National Guard troops and even active-duty military, if necessary, to make sure the job is done without a hitch.

Go ahead with your plans for a virtual inauguration. Issue an Executive Order, if necessary, prohibiting any large public gatherings, and brag about having the smallest inaugural crowd in the nation’s history. Declare Memorial Day a day of remembrance for everyone who died of COVID and the friends and families they left behind. If conditions permit, reschedule your inaugural celebration for the Fourth of July, and open up the capital to everyone who wishes to attend.

Immediately halt the redeployment of American troops until your Joint Chiefs can re-evaluate the situation. Don’t make any drastic moves without offering our allies who have dogs in those fights to chime in, but don’t hesitate to go your own way in the final decisions. Americans need to see you as thoughtful and decisive.

As soon as possible, schedule a series of high-level international meetings, most of which can be virtual. Publicly re-commit to NATO, the Paris Climate Accords, and the Iran Nuclear Agreement, establishing venues in which they can be tweaked and re-negotiated. Engage with our traditional allies concerning tariffs and trade policies. Put an immediate end to the nativist isolationism of the current administration, and let the world know, loud and clear, that America is back to being a leader.

With respect to Congress, do what you do best. Forge new alliances in the Senate. Even in the unlikely event that Democrats win both Senate seats in Georgia next month, you’d rather pass clearly bipartisan agreements than ram through legislation by slim majorities. I have no doubt that you can form a coalition to fix the flaws in Obamacare and assure that it thrives.

I’m sure this doesn’t need to be said, but … stay the hell off Twitter unless you’re congratulating someone on a birthday or the arrival of a new grandchild. If you have negative messages to deliver, do so privately. Continue, as you have always done, to treat everyone else in the power structure with respect. Above all, end the pattern of personal insults and slander that has characterized the current administration.

Concerning your predecessor, (I’m conditioning myself not to speak his name unless I am forced to,) ignore him and his cult of rabid supporters whenever possible. Don’t let yourself be baited. Don’t engage with them at all unless they create conditions that require intervention. If they do, announce a zero-tolerance policy on political violence and acts of insurrection. Use the power of your properly formulated Justice Department to take swift punitive action against anyone who threatens the security of Americans.

At the earliest possible date, re-engage personally with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, assuring every American that you will not tolerate hacking or any other actions that threaten to undermine or disrupt American life. Re-engage with Kim Jong Un and Hassan Rouhani at the diplomatic level. Find your own version of Henry Kissinger, perhaps adding to John Kerry’s portfolio, and let those adversaries know who their main point of contact is. Avoid “love affairs” with murderous dictators, but I’m sure that’s already near the top of your how-not-to-behave-as-President list.

Finally, just continue to be the genuine article. You are exactly who this country needs to lead it now. Be the gaffe machine you’ve always been – that’s never been a fair criticism. Keep telling us the truth and be the moral and ethical man of faith you are. At 78, you didn’t need to do this. I believe without reservation that you ran for President solely to restore America’s soul.

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Wall of Infamy

Posted on December 15, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, December 15, 2020

Today, Washington Post journalist Ruth Marcus published the list of the Republican members of the House of Representatives who signed on to the bogus Texas lawsuit that asked the U. S, Supreme Court to overturn the election in the four battleground states (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Georgia,) that decided the election in favor of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. I could struggle to find something creative to say, but the list pretty much speaks for itself, so I will simply reproduce it here, with the question: if these people aren’t guilty of sedition, can someone can explain why not?

Regardless of their political leanings, every voter should be disgusted by these shameless individuals. For no reason other than to suck up to a would-be tyrant, they were willing to disenfranchise millions of voters. Remember them when you vote in the 2022 midterm elections.

Here is the list, exactly as Ms. Marcus published it. First the Republican House leadership: Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Cal.); Whip Steve Scalise (La.); Jim Jordan (Ohio), ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee; Kevin Brady (Tex.), ranking member of the Ways and Means Committee; Rep. Gary Palmer (Ala.), head of the Republican Policy Committee; and Mike Johnson (La.), who organized this constitutional abomination.

The rest, listed in order of their home state:

Alabama (Robert B. Aderholt, Mo Brooks, Bradley Byrne)

Arizona (Andy Biggs, Debbie Lesko)

Arkansas (Eric A. “Rick” Crawford, Bruce Westerman)

California (Ken Calvert, Doug LaMalfa, Tom McClintock),

Colorado (Ken Buck, Doug Lamborn),

Florida (Gus M. Bilirakis, Mario Diaz-Balart, Neal Dunn, Matt Gaetz, Bill Posey, John Rutherford, Ross Spano, Greg Steube, Michael Waltz, Daniel Webster, Ted Yoho)

Georgia (Rick Allen, Earl L. “Buddy” Carter, Douglas A. Collins, Drew Ferguson, Jody Hice, Barry Loudermilk, Austin Scott)

Idaho (Russ Fulcher, Mike Simpson)

Illinois (Mike Bost, Darin LaHood)

Indiana (Jim Baird, Jim Banks, Trey Hollingsworth, Greg Pence, Jackie Walorski)

Iowa (Steve King), Kansas (Ron Estes, Roger Marshall)

Louisiana (Ralph Abraham, Clay Higgins)

Maryland (Andy Harris)

Michigan (Jack Bergman, Bill Huizenga, John Moolenaar, Tim Walberg)

Minnesota (Tom Emmer, Jim Hagedorn, Pete Stauber)

Mississippi (Michael Guest, Trent Kelly, Steven M. Palazzo)

Missouri (Sam Graves, Billy Long, Vicky Hartzler, Blaine Luetkemeyer, Jason T. Smith, Ann Wagner)

Montana (Greg Gianforte)

Nebraska (Jeff Fortenberry, Adrian Smith)

New Jersey (Jeff Van Drew)

New York (Elise Stefanik, Lee Zeldin)

North Carolina (Dan Bishop, Ted Budd, Virginia Foxx, Richard Hudson, Greg Murphy, David Rouzer, Mark Walker)

Ohio (Bob Gibbs, Bill Johnson, Robert E. Latta, Brad Wenstrup)

Oklahoma (Kevin Hern, Markwayne Mullin)

Pennsylvania (John Joyce, Frederick B. Keller, Mike Kelly, Dan Meuser, Scott Perry, Guy Reschenthaler, Glenn Thompson)

South Carolina (Jeff Duncan, Ralph Norman, Tom Rice, William Timmons, Joe Wilson)

Tennessee (Tim Burchett, Scott DesJarlais, Charles J. “Chuck” Fleischmann, Mark Green, David Kustoff, John Rose)

Texas (Jodey Arrington, Brian Babin, Michael C. Burgess, Michael Cloud, K. Michael Conaway, Dan Crenshaw, Bill Flores, Louie Gohmert, Lance Gooden, Kenny Marchant, Randy Weber, Roger Williams, Ron Wright)

Virginia (Ben Cline, H. Morgan Griffith, Rob Wittman, Ron Wright)

Washington (Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Dan Newhouse)

West Virginia (Carol Miller, Alex Mooney)

Wisconsin (Tom Tiffany).

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Thank You, Mr. President

Posted on December 14, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, December 14, 2020

Yesterday, on CNN’s State of the Union, journalist Jake Tapper thanked President Trump for his service. He noted some real accomplishments, notably, forcing Americans to examine our place in the world and the way our armed forces are deployed in foreign war zones. He also gave him credit for pushing Operation Warp Speed, while noting that he seemed to have little interest in its implementation.

Now that at least one vaccine is approved, Trump’s entire focus is on claiming credit, warning the media not to let President-Elect Biden share it with him. Not surprising, since as usual, everything is all about Donald Trump’s ego gratification. In his pre-approval tweet rant last Friday he attacked FDA Director, Stephen Hahn, telling him to stop playing games and start saving lives. Start saving lives? Really?

Our president has shown no empathy for the 300,000 Americans who have already died from COVID, a number that NIH and the CDC both believe is seriously undercounted. He consistently undermined health professionals who have done their damnedest to help Americans survive the pandemic and continued to set exactly the wrong example of behavior. In the forty-one days since the election, Trump ignored the COVID death rate that skyrocketed to almost 3,000 per day. He has shown little interest in saving lives, other than his own.

As generous as Tapper was in complimenting him, the truth is that all Trump did was urge Congress to authorize funding for vaccine research, something even Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi would have done on their own. The Pfizer vaccine for which Trump demands full credit was largely an impressive accomplishment by BioNTech, the German biotech research firm that partnered with Pfizer. No American tax dollars were used in developing the Pfizer vaccine. If anyone deserves credit for assuring adequate funding, they are Bill and Melinda Gates, whose foundation invested over a billion dollars in it.

The most important part of Tapper’s thank you message to Trump concerned his behavior since he lost the election. Tapper hailed the outrageous, baseless lawsuits that have been angrily rejected by every court that saw them. He especially praised Trump for signing on to the absurd lawsuit penned by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and for intimidating more than half of the Republicans in Congress to sign their names to it. They included the two highest ranking Republicans in the House of Representative, Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise.

Tapper noted that without Trump’s total commitment to undermining the election and disenfrachising millions of Americans, without his sociopathic indifference to the fundamental values of American democracy, we would not now have a list of 126 House Republicans who let their fear of President Trump’s base cause them to support a clownish (Tapper’s word) lawsuit over the Constitution. David Knowles of Yahoo News posed the question of whether signing on to Paxton’s suit would be a scarlet letter or a badge of honor in the future. My money is on the former. It had better be if we expect our republic to survive intact.

In the same vein, Tapper might have, but chose not to thank Trump for raising the horrifying specter of Civil War. Trump never asked far right fascist militias to march, fully armed, on state houses and American cities. He didn’t explicitly encourage those traitorous lunatics to threaten Civil War, either. That’s not his way. As his disgraced attorney, Michael Cohen told Congress, Trump never issues criminal orders overtly, but he understands the cues and winks his audience responds to.

I’ll say it for all of us. Thank you, Mr. Trump for demonstrating how far you are willing to go to gratify your ego. Thank you for showing the country that the rumors and stories about armed whackos waiting to rise up in sedition, like the Confederacy did in 1860, aren’t just conspiracy theories. Those people are real, and there are a lot of them. Not enough for a full-fledged civil war, and surely not enough to overcome the law enforcement entities sworn to defend the Constitution, but easily enough to disrupt normal business and cause Americans great distress on top of what they’ve already suffered.

So far, overt acts of violence have been limited, but these people are like a powder keg. If Trump doesn’t desist from stoking the flames of division, there may yet be blood flowing in American streets. We owe Donald Trump a profound debt of thanks for opening our eyes to a threat most of us didn’t realize existed. This morning, conservative Representative Paul Mitchell (R, MI) announced that he is leaving the Republican Party in protest, saying, “If we can’t conduct an election without threats of violence, we become a third world country. Who are we, Venezuela?”

And lest we forget, the winners when things like this happen can be counted on one hand: Putin, Xi, Kim, Rouhani, none of them friends of America.

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Stress Tests

Posted on December 12, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, December 12, 2020

Stress tests have been used ever since people have been building and manufacturing things to assure their safety and soundness. Would you get on an airplane if you didn’t know that every piece of the fuselage, engines, and hydraulic systems that keep the plane airborne and stable had been thoroughly tested and inspected? Stress tests evaluate the performance of every part of an aircraft down to the bolts that hold it together under forces that greatly exceed what they have to bear in normal use. That’s why planes don’t come apart seven miles above the ground.

The same is true for our cars and trucks, our phones and computers, our kids’ toys, the containers in which our food is stored and cooked. The point of stress tests is to determine how much abuse a thing can withstand before it breaks or spoils or catches fire. Our doctors administer stress tests to our hearts, our athletic trainers to our muscles and tendons. Without them we would have no confidence that the things we depend on were safe and durable.

We normally don’t think of our political systems in those terms. Designing and performing stress tests on a national or global scale is neither feasible nor practical. Yet, like every other system we depend on, they occasionally get out of whack if we don’t occasionally adjust and correct them. Planners and strategists use computers to simulate reality, but those models can only estimate how things might turn out. No simulation can accurately evaluate the strength of our systems.

Instead, human nature, competing ideologies, economic challenges, and forces beyond our control, like natural disasters and climate change impose the stresses that test our systems’ viability. Our Constitution did not prohibit slavery or define democracy the way we think of it today. It did not distinguish between an oligarchy and a republic directly responsive to the majority of citizens. It did not address the ongoing struggle for racial, economic, and gender equality.

Thus, we endured five years of civil war, a decades-long fight to assure that all Americans could vote and prosper, and a centuries-long debate over human rights and entitlements. All of those things represented ongoing stress tests to our great experiment in democracy, but hyperpartisanship and all-encompassing lust for power turned out to be the greatest threats to our nation. Not since 1860 has our republic been under the potentially back-breaking stress it has under Trumpism.

For many Americans, the struggle between the norms we’ve become accustomed to and the radical populism led by a charismatic, unprincipled leader like Trump has been a terrifying experience. We knew it would end this way from the first day of his administration. What a shock after we naively believed that the election of Barack Obama twelve years ago represented a kind of national maturation, a clear shift toward inclusion and a kinder, gentler future.

Trump, abetted by Roger Ailes and Fox News, revealed that our society was still fragmented by chasms. A shocking number of Americans were angry and mistrustful, feeling abandoned and left out by establishment politics. Trump’s deliberate strategy of divisiveness widened those differences, and the unregulated flow of misinformation and lies through the internet and social media, combined with our national epidemic of intellectual laziness brought us to the breaking point.

It’s happened before. The Civil War, the labor riots of the 1890s and 1920s, the Great Depression, Vietnam and Watergate, nine-eleven, all tested us, but for Americans not old enough to remember or who forgot their history lessons, five years of Trumpism have felt like we were careening toward the edge of a cliff without brakes. It was terrifying, and it was inevitable.

There will always be movements and demagogues who threaten our futures. Our democracy must undergo the stress tests they pose to keep from going off the rails. Without them, we cannot be confident our republic will survive.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court reminded us of the basic wisdom of our founders and reassured us that the integrity of our judicial system, the principal bulwark against the kind of chaos and anarchy fostered by Trump, is alive and well. A Court that many feared might have been polarized and corrupted by Trump proved what John Roberts wrote – there are no Clinton judges, Bush judges, Obama judges, or Trump judges. There are only very talented people of principle who believe in the rule of law, whose loyalty is to the Constitution.

When you step on the treadmill in your doctor’s office, you don’t know if your heart will survive the stress. But without testing it, you can’t have confidence in its strength and durability. When the test is over, you apply the results to lead a healthier life. Now that the Supreme Court has righted the ship of state, temporarily, it’s up to all of us to diagnose and treat the disease that has been eating through our society like a cancer.

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Three Invasions

Posted on December 10, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, December 10, 2020

Three times in its history, the United States has been the victim of unprovoked attacks on its Homeland that killed and injured thousands of Americans. The first was the Day of Infamy at Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, Hawaii that killed 2,403 Americans, mostly military personnel, and decimated our Pacific Fleet. That attack triggered the most robust and powerful response in history, as we rebuilt our military almost from scratch, prevented any further incursion within our borders, and provided the impetus to turn the tide and defeat the Axis Powers in World War II. We succeeded in mobilizing both our armed forces and our production capacity because of strong leadership and a suspension of political differences.

The second was the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 that killed 2,997 people, mostly innocent civilians. Ten months after the most contentious presidential election in our history, the nation was once again able to put politics on hold for the common good, at least initially. But once the panic caused by that attack subsided, and those of us who lived near New York or Washington stopped hearing fighter planes scrambling overhead every day, politics reared its ugly head again.

The result was a tsunami of lies and misinformation about weapons of mass destruction, which ensnared us in a war in Iraq and Afghanistan that is still going on today. The longest war in our history, it is now eighteen years old and counting, and by most accounts has been misguided and accomplished little of value, while completely ignoring the real culprits among the Saudi Arabian elite who funded the nine-eleven attack. The lesson we should have learned was that ineffective leadership, partisan politics, foreign bad actors, and misinformation are the enemies we should be most concerned about.

Had we heeded that lesson, the invisible invasion of the COVID-19 virus would not have killed 290,000 Americans and be on track to achieve a death toll of more than 500,000 by Spring. Yesterday alone, the COVID invasion accounted for 3,124 American deaths, more than both Pearl Harbor Day and Nine-eleven. Unlike the latter two invasions, this one affected every country in the world, and the United States owns the worst response of any nation with the technology to count its casualties.

Had a foreign power caused that much death and destruction, they would probably have been met with a swarm of nuclear missiles. Such is the state of divisiveness and malfeasant, incompetent leadership in our country that we have suffered more loss than in any of our wars. And on the day when we saw more deaths than any since the pandemic began, our president was once more asleep at the switch of government. He has not addressed the pain and suffering caused by the virus in weeks.

Rather, he has spent all his time denying the results of the November election and handicapping the new administration before it even begins. As in every other decision he made as president, Donald Trump has ignored everything but his own self-interest and golf. Allowing so much death and so much economic devastation, much of which will never be repaired, cannot simply written off as “Trump being Trump.” Step back and look at all this the way the rest of the world sees it. Have the Castros in Cuba, Maduro in Venezuela, or Kim in North Korea done greater harm to their people than Trump?

Trump is willing to destroy the basis of our democracy to stay in power. He is being driven by his sociopathic narcissism, but an even stronger motivator may be the line of prosecutors who are waiting for him to leave office. They’ve been investigating him for tax evasion, bank fraud, money laundering, and racketeering for years. And now he has added the willful enabling of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans to the list. He hasn’t shot anyone on Fifth Avenue yet, but there is no doubt that he is responsible for 90% of the deaths we suffered from COVID.

On October 16, 1946, ten high-ranking members of the Nazi leadership in Germany were executed for war crimes after being found guilty by the international tribunal at Nuremberg. Try as I might, I cannot see any essential difference between their crimes and the willful neglect still being shown by Donald Trump. None of those Nazi leaders pulled the triggers that murdered innocent civilians, and none of them physically turned the valves that activated the gas chambers. Trump didn’t kill anyone directly, but choosing not to save the lives of a half million Americans was as serious a crime as the acts those Nazis were convicted of. All he needed to do to avert their deaths was heed the advice of his medical experts and wear a f*****g mask.

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