The War on Science and Reason

Posted on February 28, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, February 28, 2020

Mother Nature has a way of punishing hubris. It’s happened many times throughout history, and it may happen again if we keep ignoring the advice of scientists and medical professionals.

When I lived in the Northwest I was awed by Mount Rainier and its sister volcanos. But I didn’t fully appreciate why the native Americans who lived there before Peter Puget discovered the Sound built a religion around them until I saw Mount Saint Helens explode. The Indians understood that those hypnotically beautiful mountains had the power to disrupt their lives and completely alter their landscape.

Our current leaders understand it too. It’s naïve to assume they don’t. The problem we face as a nation and an international community is that personal greed and political ambition too often come ahead of the common good. Regardless of what they say to appeal to their ignorant base, our leaders know the threat climate change poses. They know South Florida and the Mississippi basin in Louisiana will be underwater in our lifetimes, and coastal cities like Houston, New York and Boston will look like Venice later this century – but the social and economic consequences will neither occur on their watch nor affect their personal fortunes.

Thus, we have this Orwellian war against science and reason. Windmills are bad and coal is good. Immigrants are bad but Neo-Nazis are fine people. Melting polar ice caps threaten the flow of the Gulf Stream, while melting permafrost releases methane and God-knows-what-else into the atmosphere. Rising temperatures and sea levels are hoaxes. Tax cuts are good, but providing health care for Americans at a reasonable cost is bad. And while we’re at it why do we spend a fortune on the NIH and CDC, who waste tax dollars preventing things that will never happen here? We’re not one of those shithole countries. We’re building walls and withdrawing from the world community.

What could possibly stop this juggernaut of ignorance and stupidity? Maybe a microscopic, dumb little virus. Maybe it was a mistake to tell our allies to fend for themselves. Maybe it wasn’t smart to show the rest of the world they couldn’t count on us anymore. It’s possible that without America’s ability to mobilize vast amounts of resources quickly and provide the kind of international leadership no other country can, that we’ve condemned the world to a pandemic that we’ll be paying for in lives and lost prosperity for decades.

There’s no worse scenario for the outbreak of the novel coronavirus than for it to have occurred in a city of eleven million people in China. The Chinese government always suppresses information about anything that might make it look weak. Chinese physicians who understood what they were treating tried to speak out and were arrested. Thus, a dangerous virus with a fourteen day asymptomatic incubation period is spreading. Epidemiologists say it will be impossible to contain.

When only the health of average citizens was at stake, our leaders didn’t care enough to act. Responsible people at the CDC and WHO insisted that we needed qualified feet on the ground at the source of the infection if there was any hope of slowing it down. But Rush Limbaugh declared that the new coronavirus was just a bad cold, and our president couldn’t tolerate a situation that might interfere with his re-election. But he and his advisors failed to anticipate that fear of the virus might cost him his strongest asset, our booming economy.

World markets including our own crashed this week. The Dow Jones average fell by more than eleven percent, taking all those vaunted 401K’s with it. Trump must have soiled his pants, but even then he couldn’t display real leadership. Today, while he stood before television cameras pretending this would all be over soon, and people like Anthony Fauci spoke the truth into the same microphones, our stock market suffered the worst point drop in its history.

As the truth emerged that the CDC was hamstrung by its gutted budget, and we learned that only 200 coronavirus test kits had been allocated to California, where one County alone needs 8,400, Donald Trump finally acted. He put VP Mike Pence in charge of containing the outbreak in the United States. That’s the same Mike Pence who, as Governor of Indiana, when told by the CDC that the state had to begin a needle exchange program to combat the worst HIV epidemic in the country, responded, “I’ll pray on it.” Then Trump took a page from Xi Jinping’s book, announcing that all statements by qualified medical researchers would have to get Pence’s approval before they could be released to the public.

Mother nature works in mysterious ways, but she always wins in the end.

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Michael Bloomberg

Posted on February 20, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, February 20, 2020

It’s time to get serious about finding a candidate who will defeat Donald Trump. Nothing is more important than that, and the way the Democrats are going right now, it’s clear that a major values-shift is in order. The pundits, i.e., the people who are handsomely paid by the various networks to opine whether or not they have anything meaningful to say, seem to be in agreement after last night’s debate that it was a disaster for Michael Bloomberg, and that as many had predicted, Bloomberg’s debating skills were rusty.

As to the latter, I’d put that in the category of a self-fulfilling prophesy, and with respect to the former, I say, “Nonsense!” Bloomberg may have been surprised by the vehemence of Elizabeth Warren’s verbal attacks, but his answers weren’t particularly unreasonable. I like Warren, and I understand her anger after a lifetime of fighting for equality for women. But I also understand that her campaign was in desperate straits after Iowa and New Hampshire, to a large degree because of Bloomberg polling second nationally, well ahead of her. And give Bloomberg credit for maintaining his cool and not responding with the same fury she directed at him.

His rivals look at the Nondisclosure Agreements he cosigned with some unknown number of female employees and associates and say, “You’re as bad as Donald Trump.” Really? Has anyone accused Bloomberg of consorting with prostitutes and then conspiring with a tabloid mogul to buy them off? Has anyone accused him of any form of sexual assault?

While Stop and Frisk is viewed by many as a racist approach to law enforcement, Bloomberg has humbled himself, apologizing and admitting that he made serious mistakes in judgment while attempting to curb the horrific murder rate he inherited when he became Mayor of New York. How does that compare with Donald Trump’s pandering to KKK’ers and neo-Nazi groups? How does it compare with the president’s patently racist approach to immigrants, refugees, and Dreamers? And how does it compare to a president who is incapable of acknowledging that he is anything but perfect?

How does Bloomberg, who made his fortune entirely on his own, compare with Trump, who constantly exaggerates his wealth, lies about getting close to half a billion dollars from daddy, and whose favorite sport is fighting in bankruptcy court? And we needn’t compare him only with Trump. As Mayor of New York, he was head and shoulders above Rudy Giuliani who preceded him. Facing the same issues Bloomberg did, Giuliani had a far more overtly racist approach to crime in New York. While Bloomberg has been free of scandal throughout his political career, Giuliani twice paraded mistresses before the media while he was still married.

I do not have a predilection for Bloomberg in the primaries, except from the standpoint of who is best positioned to defeat Trump in November. My preferences are Joe Biden and Amy Klobuchar, but I will eagerly support Bloomberg if it’s clear that he has the best chance to win.

If I’m Michael Bloomberg, and I get the same questions I got last night in the next debate, my first response is, “How many of you on this stage never made an inappropriate remark you wish you could take back in the last thirty years? Are we better off investing our campaign funds and energy digging up  dirt on each other or finding ways to work together to save our country from Trump?” I would remind them that all of us are committed to science and mitigating the effects of climate change. All of us believe health care for every American is an inalienable right, and we all believe it’s essential to achieve and maintain a majority in the Senate. But who else has spent millions of his own money supporting Congressional candidates who want to get those things done?

I know it’s a big ask, but it’s time for each candidate to put a lid on his ego and demonstrate that he or she places the good of the country ahead of personal success. Pete Buttigieg, for example, has had his time in the limelight, and garnered many accolades that he can build on for decades. But it’s time for him to accept that 2020 is not the year America is ready to elect a gay man as president and graciously throw his support to someone who has a chance to win.

We mustn’t get bogged down in the kind of character assassination Trump practices. If the polls show that Americans are losing their infatuation with Mike Bloomberg so be it. But continuing to trash someone who might turn out to be best suited to end the Trump nightmare is wrong and irresponsible.

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Anyone But …

Posted on February 19, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, February 19, 2020

The moment Donald Trump came down the escalator in Trump Tower in 2015, I became a charter member of the Anyone But Trump Club. Despite all the admonishments to wait and see, four-and-a-half years later, everything Trump has done has proved he had no intention of either growing into the job of president or honoring his sworn oath to uphold the rule of law and the Constitution.

A few things that were up in the air when Trump was elected are now clear. The most significant of them is that the short-term self-interest of every Republican Senator with the possible exception of Mitt Romney is to maintain their Senate majority next year. (Twenty-three of the current fifty-three Republican seats in the Senate are up for re-election in November.) Trump’s ability to weaponize his base against anyone who steps out of line has made party unity their first and only priority. Trump would literally have to test his assertion that he could murder someone in broad daylight with impunity before we’re likely to see any breaks in their ranks.

To defeat Trump in November, the Democrats need the same kind of unity we see among Republicans. I hate the idea of party over country, but 2020 may be an exception. If, as a majority of Americans believe, Trump represents an existential threat to the American experiment in democracy, the Democratic candidates each need to pledge publicly, perhaps on tonight’s debate stage, that when they leave their convention in Milwaukee next July, they will each work tirelessly to support their party’s candidate.

That did not happen in 2016. Amid allegations that the Democratic National Committee had rigged the primary process in Hillary Clinton’s favor, many of Bernie Sanders’ supporters decided to sit out the election, and despite his protestations, Sanders himself did very little to assist Clinton’s campaign. That’s in contrast to Elizabeth Warren, who was out there every day stumping for Clinton and calling out Trump’s divisiveness and hate-filled rhetoric.

This time around, Sanders seems to have adopted part of Trump’s playbook. Trump never appears to pay a political price for lies and hyperbole, so why not play the same game? I believe universal health care should have been one of the inalienable rights asserted by Thomas Jefferson, but Sanders’ Medicare For All proposal is as disingenuous with the truth as most of what Trump says.

Think about it – if you hired a contractor to build a twenty-story office building and realized a few years after it was built that it should have been thirty, would you tear the whole thing down and rebuild it? Of course not. The cost and dislocation of doing that would probably destroy you. In the end, you’d rue your initial oversight and find a practical solution whose cost could be accurately predicted without blowing up the entire block.

That’s what Sanders wants to do. His idealized view of every American covered by Medicare is a fantasy, at least in the near term. Whether you love or hate the health insurance industry, big pharma, and the hospital and nursing home industries, they are massively powerful entities that have been buying seats in Congress and influencing presidential elections for decades. If Sanders declares war on them as a group, they’ll pulverize him. Money may not be able to buy elections outright, but I wouldn’t bet on Bernie going against their unified bank accounts.

Because defeating Trump is the most important priority facing the Democratic Party and the nation, I’ve also signed up for the Anyone But Bernie Club. It’s not that I dislike him. As a human being, he is better than Trump in every way I can think of. The problem is that Sanders is very unlikely to defeat the massed resources Trump can activate.

So where does that leave us? We have to stop finding weaknesses and vulnerabilities in the Democratic candidates and remind ourselves that politics often makes for strange bedfellows. The candidates all say that any of them would be a great improvement over Trump, but their actions are more important than their words. We have to be cold-blooded about this, there’s too much at stake. Should we penalize Michael Bloomberg for being willing to spend his fortune putting his face in front of voters if the polls say he’s the only one who can restore sanity to our government?

I hope Joe Biden and Amy Klobuchar do well in Nevada and South Carolina, but all of us need to keep our eyes on the ball. We need a home run in November, so we have to put up our best hitter, even if he or she isn’t our sentimental favorite.

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Amy Klobuchar

Posted on February 12, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, February 12, 2020

I waited with bated breath for Joe Biden to announce his candidacy. Surely, he was the one who could send Trump home after one term, something more than half of all Americans desperately want. It almost seems unfair that when a moment made for Joe finally came along, he might not be up to the task. I hope he is, I still think the guy who offered to settle things with Trump the way he took on bullies in high school can re-unite the country and restore the moral compass our government has lacked since Trump was elected. For me and a lot of people my age, Trump’s immorality and lack of respect for law are his most overriding flaws.

One reason it feels unfair is because Biden, who stuttered terribly as a child, is still prone to tripping over words when he speaks too fast, and to many voters, that makes him look old and feeble. He’s not, but that’s politics. There was a flash of the real Joe Biden in last Friday’s CNN Town Hall, when a minister asked him what he would say to a parent of a child who stutters. Biden was clearly surprised by the question, but it transported him to a place where he shone. Speaking in passionate but measured tones, he was eloquent, empathetic, and caring – the absolute antithesis to the president he’s trying to unseat. It’s too bad we don’t see that Joe Biden, the one who could hand Trump his lunch in a heartbeat more often. Where has he been?

In this morning’s Washington Post, Megan McArdle asked the same question about Amy Klobuchar, though as Biden’s star may be fading (I’m not ready to give up on him yet) hers is rising. McArdle’s tag line this morning was, “This Amy Klobuchar could beat Trump. Where has she been all year?”

Senator Klobuchar caught my eye from the beginning. She’s centered, both personally and politically, she has law enforcement credentials, she’s tough enough to take on Trump without flinching, and she’s popular in Michigan and Wisconsin, two states that could well decide a close election. Initially, given her poor standing in the early polls, I viewed her as the perfect running mate for Biden rather than the standard bearer, though I always hoped she’d finally catch on with voters.

Among the women running for president, she outlasted Kristin Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, and Tulsi Gabbard by doggedly sticking to her message and avoiding food fights. Today, following the New Hampshire primary, she appears poised to do the same to Elizabeth Warren. As disappointing as it was to see Biden crash and burn in New Hampshire, it was inspirational to see Klobuchar catch fire there.

The more I see and hear Senator Klobuchar, the more I like her, the more easily I can imagine her in the White House. If she can build on her momentum from New Hampshire, where she came in third but won more than twice as many votes as the polls predicted, she will be my first choice to run against Trump. She wouldn’t be the first candidate to start slowly and steadily pick up steam. Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama did it, and so can she.

I can clearly recall the debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton in October of 2016, mere weeks before the election, when he stalked her around the stage while she spoke. He was like a hungry predator, unable to control himself, and it clearly threw Clinton off her game. I’d love to see him try to intimidate Amy Klobuchar that way. Good luck, Donald. Country-rock star Jim Croce told us never to pull on Superman’s cape or spit into the wind. I wouldn’t mess with Amy either, on a public stage with the entire world watching. He’ll get it right back in his face and she’ll do it without insults or profanity.

We already know that strong, confident women unsettle Mr. Trump. None of his boorish tactics will work on her. McCardle reminded us of the exchange between Klobuchar and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during the latter’s rigged confirmation hearing. She asked him directly if he ever blacked out after drinking heavily, and he angrily retorted, “Have you?” McCardle recalls that, “Klobuchar responded, not with the scenery-chewing histrionics her colleagues had resorted to when challenged, but with a gimlet eye and a chilly smile.”

Klobuchar caught fire in New Hampshire. If she can keep that flame alive in South Carolina and Nevada, she may be exactly what we need to get America back on track and put Trumpism to rest.

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American Elections Need a Face Lift

Posted on February 5, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, February 5, 2020

Anyone who has ever worked as a consultant advising businesses about how to handle data and information could explain what’s wrong with our electoral process in a matter of minutes. It would only take a few additional minutes to outline how to fix it. Here are four ways it can be improved.

Presidential Campaigns are Much Too Long – If I have to explain this, either you haven’t been paying attention or you’re too young to remember when presidential campaigns lasted less than a year. John F. Kennedy didn’t announce his candidacy until January 2, 1960, a mere ten months before the election. Election seasons have gotten longer every cycle, until incumbents today seem to be always running for re-election. Donald Trump filed for re-election the day he was inaugurated and treats virtually every photo op and speech as a campaign event.

Overlong campaigns turn most Americans off and never having a respite from campaigns exacerbates divisiveness, partisanship, and lack of transparency in government. We can’t stop people from announcing their candidacy and spending money on campaign ads two years in advance, but we can decide as a nation to discourage formal campaigning until it’s appropriate. How do we do that?

One way is to define the length of an election season by statute, as many other countries do. Candidates and incumbents would be prohibited from filing for election or re-election before the official start date and fundraising entities like PAC’s would not be allowed to function before then either. Other nations that elect their leaders democratically get it done in weeks or months. Canadian national elections are limited by law to no less than thirty-six days and no more than fifty, and UK elections are required to occur within twenty-five working days, roughly five weeks after the dissolution of Parliament.

Caucuses Should Be Abolished – Except for a lucrative media blitz every four years, caucuses make no sense. They’re not elections – they’re really their own kind of animal. If we weren’t convinced before now, Monday’s disaster in Iowa ought to be the final nail in the caucuses’ coffin. Caucuses require voters to be physically present in large groups, regardless of weather conditions and individual mobility. Caucuses do not permit voting by absentee ballot and they are the polar opposite of secret ballots.

Worse, as caucus rules become more complicated and arcane, vote counting becomes unnecessarily complicated, as we saw in Iowa.  Caucuses make interesting if confusing spectacles on national television, (how many people outside of Iowa understood how or why they work?) but is there any aspect in which they are as effective as elections?

End Scattered Election Schedules – Scheduling primary elections and caucuses has evolved into a states’ rights issue. States like Iowa and New Hampshire vote early in the process simply to attract national attention, and the revenue that accompanies it. There is no rational reason to hold primaries of any type in two states that are relatively insignificant in the overall election process ahead of every other state. Neither state is representative of either party’s national profile, and the effect is to skew the primary process for reasons that have nothing to do with finding the best candidates.

The solution is obvious. General election dates are specified by federal law, while primary election dates are set entirely at the discretion of the political parties and states. That makes no sense, unless we truly want to turn our presidential elections into permanently airing soap operas. The best way to regulate the length of the election season while simultaneously creating a rational process for picking candidates is to establish a national primary election date, just as we define the dates for general elections.

Electoral College – Last but certainly not least is the Electoral College, an artificial eighteenth century construct that has no place in the twenty-first. It worked in a pre-electricity, pre-telegraph, pre-radio era. It does not work in an era that includes high speed transportation and broadband internet. It worked when the only people allowed to vote were white, male land owners. It’s simply absurd when more than 100 million votes are cast throughout the country. No other nation in the world counts its votes in such a ridiculous manner that can be skewed by gerrymandering local legislatures.

Our Two Party System is in extreme peril. Our government is in danger of strangling in terminal, partisan gridlock. It’s not clear how the two party system can be fixed, or whether it can survive the current climate of divisiveness and lack of cooperation, but making our elections fairer and more representative of the will of the people surely won’t hurt.

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A Horrifying Scene

Posted on February 3, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, February 3, 2020

Many Americans who saw these photographs shook their heads decrying the way third world countries operate, relieved that scenes like this never happen here. The pictures must have been taken in one of those shithole countries Donald Trump referred to, places like Paraguay or Somalia, where armed rebels storm the capital and occupy government offices, where military coups d’etat usurp elected authority and suspend normal rules of order.

That’s pretty frightening stuff, even more so because those scenes weren’t from Paraguay or Somalia, or Botswana or Venezuela either. They were recorded by Getty Images three days ago at the State Capital building in Frankfort, Kentucky. The men in the pictures weren’t guerrilla fighters staging a revolution. They were red-blooded Americans, right-wing extremists all, puffing out their chests and showing everyone how tough they were with their fully loaded, military grade weapons.

Apparently, the scene in Kentucky was deemed perfectly legal and appropriate, at least for that one day on January 31st. On every other day, visitors to the capital building are carefully screened, forced to walk through metal detectors and show IDs before they’re permitted to enter. But when the group We Are KY Gun Owners staged a rally to protest proposed new gun control laws being considered by the legislature, they were welcomed with open arms.

Normally, law enforcement takes security very seriously at the Kentucky capital. Civilians carrying guns, either loaded or unloaded aren’t permitted in the building. And it’s not only guns. The Louisville Courier-Journal reported that all manner of dangerous weapons, including “umbrellas and sticks holding protest signs” are routinely confiscated from perpetrators before they’re allowed to enter.

When thousands of teachers rallied at the same location a year ago to peacefully protest a bill that would have trashed their state pension system, they were treated like suspected terrorists. But when 200 Second Amendment activists showed up in full military regalia toting loaded semi-automatic weapons and wearing camo body armor, causing terrified tourists and other visitors to flee the building, security guards simply directed them around the metal detectors and invited them in.

The gun activists were protesting against Kentucky’s proposed Red Flag law that would permit police or family members to petition a state court to order the temporary removal of firearms from a person who might present a danger to others or themselves. Red Flag laws already exist in fourteen states, including Florida, which passed one in September, 2019 in response to the Marjorie Stoneman Douglass school shooting massacre.

In part, the Kentucky protest grew out of similar (but unarmed) protests in Virginia, which until now has had no gun control laws at all. Virginia is home to the National Rifle Association, which was supporting attempts to have some counties in the state declared Second Amendment sanctuary areas, which means they would be exempt from any gun control laws passed by the state. But on January 30th, reacting to the May 2019 mass shooting in Virginia Beach, the state’s House of Delegates passed seven bills that would overhaul gun policy in the Old Dominion, [and] the state Senate approved analogues to five of the measures.

Virginia Governor Ralph Northam has indicated that he will sign the new law as soon as the legislature sends it to him. In addition to universal background checks and a Red Flag law, the legislation set a one-per-month limit on handgun purchases, restoring a restriction that had been repealed by a Republican controlled legislature in 2012. It also allows courts to issue protective orders that would prohibit abusive domestic partners and other family members from owning guns.

The Virginia law seems to have been the catalyst for the gun rally in the Kentucky capital. Those heavily armed Kentucky protesters considered the actions taken in Virginia to be a threat to their own Second Amendment rights. But are they? The Second Amendment to the Constitution is a simple statement written in straightforward terms: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” That’s it in its entirety. To most people the intent of those words is clear.

Does any serious person believe that Virginia’s new gun laws are intended to abrogate that right? Do you suppose the founders foresaw a Banana Republic scene like the one pictured above in Frankfort, Kentucky? I think not.

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The Impeachment Trial Debacle

Posted on February 1, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, February 1, 2020

As the smoke clears and reality sets in, we should be clear about a number of things. Before we go off the deep end about the near-certainty that Donald Trump will be acquitted by the Senate next Wednesday, we should remember that this is the outcome everyone expected from the first moment the word “impeachment” was uttered. We may have underestimated Mitch McConnell’s ability to keep his caucus in line to the extent that it had the chutzpah to exclude witness testimony and documentation, but we always knew the Senate trial would be a sham.

Most appalling was hearing every member of that caucus swear an oath of impartiality when its leaders, people like McConnell and Lindsey Graham had repeatedly told Fox News that they wouldn’t even pretend to be objective. For those of us who watched the revolting process evolve each day, seeing them all sit like good choir boys and girls as the Senate Chaplain prayed that whichever God they subscribed to would imbue them with the need to faithfully execute their responsibility was almost enough to make us cancel our cable contracts.

As jurors, Senators have the right to vote for or against acquittal as they see fit. That’s especially true of those who insisted from the start that even if he was proven guilty, Trump’s actions were not impeachable. Their issue was never getting to the truth of the matter, because to them it was irrelevant. Some, like Florida’s Marco Rubio, thought Trump deserved to be impeached, but that removing him would not be in the interest of the nation with an election nine months away. As much as I hate the idea of our immoral, self-serving president continuing in office for a single day, Rubio is right. So were all of us who cringed and urged restraint when freshman Democrats in the House screamed impeachment the day they were sworn in.

There’s no mystery here. Republican Senators had to choose between doing what they knew was right and sucking up to an out-of-control demagogue who vowed to destroy them if they were disloyal. Some of them are craven and cowardly, pandering to Trump’s base much the way he does, but it’s not entirely their fault. This was entirely predictable. Nancy Pelosi knew it, and she held out as long as she could until the whistle blower’s complaint was made public. If this was a Hollywood movie, the whistle blower would turn out to be a Trump plant who knew his actions would trigger the process we’ve been witnessing since then.

As many have said from the start, it’s up to us now. It was always up to us. We put Trump in office. We created this mess. Too many of us stayed home in 2016 thinking our vote didn’t matter or he couldn’t win or that our country could never support someone like him. We had no idea that one-third of us think the way he does. He brought out the worst in us, and now it’s our problem to fix.

If you’re a woman, an immigrant, or a person of color, why would you not walk through a raging blizzard to vote against him? I am none of those, but I believe in the rule of law and that our founders intended for all Americans to be able to compete on a level playing field, to house our families, provide decent nutrition and health care, and send our children to school knowing they won’t be shot there. That’s why I am terrified of what four more years of Trumpism will do. Nothing short of a coma will prevent me from voting this year.

The Senate acted shamefully. Knowing the fix was in from the start, the only reason for conducting the trial as they have was to prevent Americans from learning the truth. I get why they did it – if they succeeded it would be their best shot at retaining power next year. If they got it over quickly, American voters would forget by November – but they’re wrong. We’re going to learn all the sordid details. Whether out of self-interest or a sense of duty, people who know the truth will tell us. In 2020, no one will be able to claim they didn’t know what was at stake or fantasize that Trump would be any less despicable as president than he was as a private citizen.

We cannot afford the luxury of short memories or laziness this year. We’ve defended our way of life against wars and economic crises. We can’t let ennui and indolence undermine it now. No excuses this year. The Senate has thrown responsibility for our future back into our laps where it belongs.

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Impeachment and A Tale of Two Conways

Posted on January 22, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, January 22, 2020

Conservative attorney George Conway described Adam Schiff’s presentation of the House’s case to remove President Trump from office as an incredibly coherent and comprehensive narrative, something the president’s defenders don’t have. Much like the James Carville-Mary Matalin show that entertained us during the Clinton administration, Conway and his wife Kellyanne continue to ride a political see-saw in full view of the American public. It takes a while to adjust to the bizarre image of one of the president’s most loyal defenders telling us Trump has never done anything wrong, while her husband calls him a pathological liar who is incapable of telling the truth and describes the Republican Senate’s approach to the impeachment trial as an outrageous sham.

It’s tempting to wonder whether the George and Kellyanne Conway we see on television with such violently opposed opinions about this president really coexist in the same household or if their loud disagreements are merely a public relations scam aimed at post-Trump celebrity. But I’d rather focus on what George Conway has been saying today. Kellyanne has repeatedly said Trump can do no wrong.

The pundits at both political extremes aside, the general consensus is that House Manager Adam Schiff did a masterful job of laying out the case against Trump in the context of the intent of our founders. The latter feared that a future president might abuse his or her office for personal gain or refuse to abide by constitutional limitations on executive power. In short, the country had just spent eight bloody years fighting to free itself of a despotic king, and their highest priority was assuring that there would never again be one in America.

George Conway made essentially the same points today. If we didn’t know better, we might assume he was on Schiff’s team, but we do know better. Twenty years ago, Conway was one of a number of prominent Republicans who pushed for the impeachment of Bill Clinton, and his negative opinions about Trump aside, there is nothing to suggest that he has changed his political stripes. He, like a small number of Republican holdovers from before Trump hijacked and remodeled the party in his own image, remains committed to the conservative principles his party once stood for – things like integrity, respect for law, and reverence to the Constitution.

I am heartened by this. If voices as disparate as Adam Schiff’s and George Conway’s believe Donald Trump has abused his office and committed impeachable offenses, it’s possible that the small number of Republican Senators who believe as Conway does will stand up to Mitch McConnell and demand a real trial with witnesses and evidence. It’s difficult to be entirely objective on the issue of impeachment, but it’s even more difficult to listen to Adam Schiff and not find his presentation compelling.

The Republicans cannot contest the facts in the case because the entire world has seen and heard them. President Trump himself seems to believe the facts exonerate him as he openly brags about his actions and claims they’re all perfect. And it’s virtually impossible to listen to Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney’s tirade on national TV in which he said of course there was a quid pro quo, that’s the way business is done and not take notice.

Mulvaney told us to get over it, but Schiff and George Conway believe that getting over an obvious attempt to ask a foreign government to interfere in our elections and illegally extort them to do so by withholding Congressionally mandated aid against Russian aggression is an invitation to undermine our Constitution. They ask whether if that precedent is allowed to stand and future presidents with a Senate majority aspire to be kings, what will be left to stop them?

Nothing has really changed for months, except that the impeachment trial is finally underway. 53% of Americans who had opinions other than “I don’t know” now believe Trump should be removed from office, and upwards of 75% want to hear key administration officials with direct relevant knowledge testify. Given all that, let’s focus on what really matters.

No one ever expected the Senate to convict the president, and now that we’ve entered 2020, it’s fair to say that the outcome of the impeachment trial is almost moot. What is not moot is November’s election. Trump and his supporters in the Senate fear that if Americans are allowed to see all the evidence they will punish Republicans in the ballot box. That happened in a big way in 2018, when Trump was merely facing growing disillusionment with his values and behavior.

Let the Senate vote to not remove him from office. That’s the peoples’ job, anyway. If the facts come to light for everyone to see, the voters will assure Trump’s tenure as president ends a year from now.

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The High Stakes Gambler at the Helm

Posted on January 8, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, January 8, 2020

Donald Trump has described his negotiating style as gathering all the players in a room, tossing in a hand grenade, and then swooping in to close a deal before they know what hit them. That sometimes works in business, where the grenade is a metaphor for the threat of financial ruin, but as we’ve often noted, governing the United States of America is quite different than threatening people short on resources with lawsuits.

In his speech today, announcing in effect that his advisers had restrained him from his typical bellicose rhetoric, (the immediate giveaways were the teleprompters and the strained expression on his face that means he doesn’t believe a word he’s saying,) Trump commented that having all our powerful, deadly weapons doesn’t mean we have to use them. That’s very true and we should all be thankful that our generals keep his dangerous toys locked up where he can’t unilaterally play with them.

There’s a corollary to that statement which may be more important. The fact that his latest gamble didn’t lead to all-out war with Iran doesn’t mean it was a sensible risk. Most foreign leaders and most Americans viewed it as dangerously risky and inadvisable. It’s impossible to overstate this. Trump is a gambler. He brags about it, but he’s spent most of his life gambling with other people’s money and leaving a trail of financial ruin in his wake. He’s lost millions in court-ordered settlements and relied on bankruptcy laws to assure that other people bore the brunt of his bad business decisions.

It’s important to look at why we’re not at war with Iran today. Trump and his supporters will tell us that it was his threats to unleash all that weaponry on Iran that prevented war, but I don’t believe it. Iran’s leaders, who Trump likes to characterize as irrational religious fanatics, showed themselves to be level-headed and sophisticated in choosing how to respond to the killing of General Suleimani.

Look back a couple of days and ask yourself how likely it was that we’d be where we are today. With every overpaid pundit predicting what actions Iran would take, did anyone expect them to react with the surgical precision that displayed their military capabilities without harming a single American or Iraqi? They found the only pathway that could lead to today’s outcome. The Iranian military was like a quarterback threading a desperate pass through a crowd of defenders with the game on the line, and they played it out expertly.

Fortunately for all of us, we’ve seen this movie before, but most Americans aren’t old enough to remember. On October 28, 1962, we were at the end game after two weeks of playing nuclear chicken with the Soviet Union over medium-range missiles in Cuba. Much has been written since about the Kennedy administration’s flawed diplomacy and lack of understanding of the Russian mentality. I’ve always believed it was Nikita Khrushchev who saved the world from nuclear chaos and destruction that day. When the chips were down, the world needed an adult in the room when everyone else was losing it.

The Iranian regime is hateful and determined, but what we learned this week was that they’re neither insane nor suicidal. That means they can be reasoned with. It means that chants of “Death to America” have no more substance or value than Donald Trump’s and Kim Jong Un’s threats and bluster. Trump’s belligerence has done nothing to ease the problem of North Korea, and I don’t believe it had any effect on the Iranians. They understood perfectly that in an all-out war Iran would be destroyed. The rest of the world might be too, but it’s certain that Iran wouldn’t survive it.

We got out of this whole for the time being, but we were lucky, and as Yogi Berra might have said, it ain’t over til it’s over. To the president, I say, if you want to gamble everything you own after you’re out of office, that’s your business. But when you gamble with the lives of every American, it’s OUR business. I doubt that anyone was surprised that Trump took the extreme step of assassinating a high-ranking official of another country’s government to distract from his impeachment and re-election problems. He’s as dangerous as a cornered rat.

Suleimani was a bad guy who might have suffered the same fate at the hands of the World Court, but that’s the whole point, isn’t it? It’s why we have lynch laws. Trump is only a president not a judge or an emperor.

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Every American is at Risk

Posted on January 5, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, January 5, 2020

I just filled out my absentee ballot for the Maryland 7th Congressional District’ Special Primary Election to fill the seat left vacant by the passing of long time representative Elijah Cummings. Cummings will be best remembered by Americans who are not from Maryland as the recipient of the brunt of President Trump’s vicious and inaccurate attacks on the City of Baltimore. Agree or disagree with him, Cummings was the antithesis of Trump – someone who cared more about truth and the welfare of his constituents than wealth and power. Because I believe she will carry on the fight her husband waged on behalf of his district, I cast my ballot for his widow, Dr. Maya Rockeymoore Cummings.

Elijah Cummings would have been furious to see his constituents serving in the military sent into harm’s way with no justification. He’d have vented his anger on behalf of the families and friends who will wring their hands with worry every time a shot is fired in the Middle East. Again flouting norms for no reason other than his own narcissism, President Trump cloaked his notification to Congress about the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani under a security classification. Why? To prevent Americans from learning the reasons for the drone attack in Baghdad.

That is unprecedented in our history. From Franklin Roosevelt to Harry Truman, to John Kennedy to Lyndon Johnson, and Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, presidents have explained their actions to the country whenever they initiated hostilities that put Americans at risk. Their explanations may have been partially refuted by subsequent events, but they all understood that in a republic, the government is ultimately responsible to its citizens.

Trump doesn’t think he’s responsible to anyone but himself, and that may be his most impeachable offense. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden got it right: “President Trump just tossed a stick of dynamite into a tinderbox, and he owes the American people an explanation of the strategy and plan to keep safe our troops and embassy personnel.” 

Unfortunately, it’s not only our people in uniform and those who care about them who will directly affected by Trump’s decision. Every American is at risk. It’s quite telling that one of my neighbors in Maryland quipped that he was about to head south for the winter, and he was thankful to be getting his family away from the high risk target areas near the Capital. Equally telling is the reaction of many people where I’m wintering Florida that they’re relieved to be out of the line of fire.

If you don’t feel at risk it’s because you’re not thinking it through clearly. Iran has vowed to retaliate. Believe them. The Koran is as clear as the Old Testament about the virtues of revenge. Iran’s Foreign Minister said today that retaliation would be against American military interests. That’s the kind of measured response we’d take ourselves if, say, our Joint Chiefs Chairman had been assassinated by Iranian operatives. Not a great outcome, but one in line with diplomatic conventions.

President Trump, on the other hand, while claiming his intent is to prevent war and de-escalate has done exactly the opposite. Today, he tweeted a threat to attack Iranian cultural sites. That’s not only barbaric, a threat typical of ISIS and Hezbolah, it’s a war crime. You needn’t take the word of Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif on that, Senator Chris Murphy was the first of several in Congress to say the same thing. United Nations resolution 2347 condemns “the unlawful destruction of cultural heritage, including the destruction of religious sites and artefacts [sic]…,” and the same prohibition exists in the Geneva Conventions.

Legality aside, Trump’s threat could be read by Iranian extremists as an invitation to do the same thing. If you haven’t considered the possibilities of who might be at risk, now is a good time to start. I spent weeks wrestling with this issue in writing my novel, Wednesday’s Child. Opening the door to attacking cultural sites is an irresponsible provocation to outright war. There’s no way to harden them all in a nation like ours, and it’s nearly impossible to predict where an enemy like the Quds force could strike.

How do you define a cultural site? The Statue of Liberty? The White House? The National Cathedral? What about Hard Rock Stadium in Miami, where 65,000 people will be watching the Super Bowl in a few weeks? That’s the kind of threat we face when our President’s ego gets in the way of common sense and he ignores his advisers.

This is exactly what we need to put a stop to at the ballot box next November. Trump’s unilateral, autocratic behavior puts every American at risk.

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