THE CHARADE ENDS

The impeachment trial of President Donald Trump is about to end in the Senate with the result that we all knew from the beginning: no vote to remove him from office.   While I supported the impeachment proceedings, the process has been a mess: the Republican party has so completely become the cult of Trump that there was no chance that there would ever be enough votes in the Senate.  Not even when the independent, non partisan Government Accountability Office stated that Trump broke the law when he withheld congressionally allocated funds from Ukraine.  Not even when former Trump advisor John Bolton has a new book coming out stating that Trump openly told him that he was withholding that aid until the Ukraine announced the investigation that he wanted.  Simply put, there is nothing that Trump can do as president that would cause his party to turn on him.  If multiple bankruptcies, sexual assault charges, illegal payoffs to porn stars and centerforlds  and near constant violations of the emoluments clause couldn't do it, neither will this.  Not only will they not turn on him, but they also won't even allow witnesses of his impeachable behavior to be heard in the Senate.  Why start pretending that this trial was anything other than a farce now?  To make the whole thing even more insane, Trump's defense team has made unprecedented claims of presidential power, with Alan Dershowitz asserting that basically anything the president does to win reelection is legal, because he thinks he is working in the nation's best interests.
The sad fact of the matter is that Trump, despite becoming only the third president in history to be impeached by the House of Representatives, will see the Senate vote as a vindication and a victory.  Which means we are going to suffer through months of his loud mouthed bragging about it at his horrific speeches.  But that's just the tip of the iceberg: by supporting this president the Republican party has stained the entire office of the presidency, and the country itself.  From now on,  presidents will be given almost unlimited rights to violate any law or rule of protocol (or decency for that matter).  The bar has now been set so low,  that Trump can basically move any instrument of government or say anything to help him win reelection without any kind of restriction.  Which means that the upcoming election will be even uglier and more horrible than the last one.
I hate to sound melodramatic, but this is how a democracy can die: sometimes it takes just one demagogic, messianic leader with a sizable, fanatical following to tilt a country towards open dictatorship.   The fact that Trump has repeatedly shown admiration for dictators like Kim Jong Un and Rodrigo Duterte while often calling our UN allies weak shows where his mind is.  And just look at his public statements such as  "Then I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president."  or  "I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad." shows that we now have a president that sees himself as an absolute leader that should command complete loyalty from every American. Given that his own party seems to openly agree with this assessment makes me often wonder if this country can really survive this president intact. And what will happen if we don't.

ARE WE AT WAR WITH IRAN?

"Anyone who tells you they know where it’s going is probably overconfident about their own powers of prediction."Suzanne Maloney, deputy director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution.




Just two days ago, the president who ran on the platform of ending endless wars in the Middle East may have started another one.  President Donald Trump ordered the bombing of a motorcade in Iraq that had Iranian military leader General Qassem Soleimani in it, killing him.  This strike was partly done out of revenge against a recent attack by an Iranian backed group in Iraq that left an American contractor dead, and partly because of the notion that Soleimani was planning an attack against US forces.  In fairness to the Trump administration, Soleimani was commander of Iran’s Quds Force, which is the overseas or foreign expeditionary arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the most significant and important branch of the Iranian military forces. He was also designated a terrorist by the US government, and is directly responsible for the death of American forces.  On the other hand, this was an openly provocative act by Trump that essentially stands as a declaration of war on the country of Iran.  While Iran certainly does not want an all out war with the US, some kind of retaliation is almost inevitable, which would lead to more attacks by the US in a deadly game of tit for tat  with no foreseeable outcome.
The real tragedy of this is that the whole thing could have been avoided if Trump had just not thrown out the Iran Nuclear deal that had been negotiated by the Obama administration in 2015, which, it should be pointed out, was forged with several American allies who all opposed Trump's ending it.  Although that deal had not tamed Iran's desire to dominate the Middle East, they had been living up to their end of the bargain to not make nuclear weapons.  By killing the deal in 2018 and then instilling crippling economic sanctions against Iran, Trump  made America an unreliable partner willing to throw out a treaty, and also hurt the Iranian people while giving their repressive government an easy scapegoat to blame for the people's suffering. It's possible that, even with his terrible policies on immigration and climate change,  killing the Iran deal may turn out to be the worst decision made by this administration, especially because  the main reason for it is Trump's childish desire to reverse every decision made by Obama and essentially erase him from the history books.

There is another thing at play here: Trump has been impeached by the House of Representatives and is about to face a vote to remove  in the Senate.  He is also facing a tough reelection fight this year, and his approval ratings have never gotten over 50% in his first term.  By looking tough and taking out a Middle Eastern leader with a record of violence against the US, he may see a bump in the polls.  He's already seen complete (and predictable) support from the right wing media, which will fire up his base, even though he ran as an isolationist.   Also, calling for a headline grabbing military strike is the perfect way to distract the public from the pile of damning evidence against him in his impeachment (for instance, the administration is refusing to  release  multiple emails between White House aides about the withheld  monetary aid to Ukraine at the heart of the investigation,  which hardly appears to be the actions of a president with nothing to hide).   This cynical view of a military action can, ironically enough, be traced back to Trump himself: back in 2011, when Trump was just another right wing conspiracy monger, he tweeted out twice that Barack Obama was going to start a war with Iran in order to win reelection. A year later he tweeted this absurd theory two more times!  Although this obviously never came to pass, the fact that he would blurt out such ideas shows where his head is at when it comes to using a military action to win an election.  The fact of the matter is that Donald Trump is a massive egotist who is terrified at the possibility of being a one term president, and if he sees starting a potentially disastrous war as a path to victory, he'll take it, with no regard to the lives lost on the way.

A TUMULTUOUS DECADE

Now that the 10's are officially over, looking back on the decade shows a time of conflict, chaos and wild changes in this country politically; the cliff notes version is we had six years of sanity, and four years of insanity.  It should be pointed out that the 10's were lacking in the huge changes that the 0's had: there was no 9/11 terrorist style attacks (although some smaller terrorist attacks did occur), nor was there any massive economic collapse, like what happened in 2008.  The Iraq war petered out, proving that the whole thing was a mess, while the war in Afghanistan lingered on, becoming the longest running war in American history, but drawing less and less media attention as it continued.  Even a recent document release that showed that George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump have all misled the American people on how the conflict in Afghanistan was going didn't really change the nation's attitude.  Somehow, an invasion that began as revenge against Al Qaeda for the
9/11 attacks has morphed over almost twenty years into an occupation of a foreign country that's vaguely justified as preventing terrorism in the future.   Because it involves only a small number of American troops and lacks any real exit strategy, it's entirely possible that the war will drag on for years to come with most Americans hardly acknowledging it.

For the world overall, the 10's were actually a good decade:  as New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof pointed out, extreme poverty and illiteracy rates have been going down consistently in this decade.  And as Steven Pinker wrote in his highly entertaining 2012 book "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined", the human race on the whole has never been better, with more and more people living in relatively peaceful democracies.  Although climate change has become a serious and huge challenge (and the rise in powerful hurricanes, droughts and forest fires in the past decade has made denying it much harder), the planet is still a better place to live in for the average person in 2020 than it was in 2010.
As for the US, well, it's been a crazy decade.  It kicked off in 2010 with the resurgence of the Republican party, as a backlash against the first two years of the Obama presidency resulted in the Republicans retaking the House of Representatives, picking up seats in the Senate  and winning many state wide elections.  While this handcuffed much of what Obama could do for the rest of his presidency, his winning reelection in 2012 seemed to show that the country was moving slowly leftward; it was one thing for him to win in 2008, when the Republican party was deeply unpopular due to both the Iraq war and the economic collapse, but for him to win four more years in 2012 showed that he had brought enough economic recovery and peace to win the country over.  For one brief shining moment, the Republican party even looked ready to start making compromises with the Democrats, with even some conservative commentators saying that the Republican party might never win another presidency as long as they failed to find a way to appeal to younger, non white voters.  The fact that gay marriage was ruled constitutional in 2015, and has been supported by larger and larger majorities of the American public was also another important milestone in the decade.

And then, as we all know, Trump changed everything in 2016.   Somehow, a reality TV star with no political experience won the White House.  While there are a number of factors that went into his victory, from Russian interference to the absurdity of the Electoral College, one important statistic seems to be at the root of his unlikely win: Barack Obama did not receive a majority of the white vote in either of his elections, not even in the blue state of California.  Sadly, there were millions of older white people in this country who were horrified at the sight of an African American in the White House, even if  that African American was one who had a calm and thoughtful demeanor ("no drama Obama") like Obama.  And as they seethed in anger, they found a champion in Trump, a major media figure who repeatedly said that Obama was not born in this country, may secretly be a Muslim and as his ugly campaign raged on, would make outrageous statements like saying that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are the cofounders of ISIS!
And so for the past four years the country has been at the mercy of a psychopathic, childish bigot with a downright messianic self image, who has done everything to erase the Obama presidency, reassuring his voter base that white men are back in charge where they belong.  (Not surprisingly, no president since Ronald Reagan has had a cabinet made up of so many white men).  The Paris Climate change Accord, the Iran Nuclear Deal and the Transpacific Trade Partnership were all carefully crafted agreements passed by the Obama administration that Trump just tossed into the garbage, along with any environmental protections.  He also has packed the courts with conservative judges (many of them ruled as unqualified by the American Bar Association), passed a massive tax cut for wealthy businesses and started a trade war with China that has hurt American farmers.  And while gay marriage still remains legal, members of the Trump administration recently argued in front of the Supreme Court that it  should be perfectly legal for a person to be fired from his or her job just because they are gay or lesbian.
Trump's impulsive ways has somewhat inevitably led him to openly try to get a foreign country to help him win reelection by with holding government aid until an investigation into his likely 2020 opponent Joe Biden's son is announced.  In doing so, he has   become only the third president in American history to be impeached by the House of Representatives.  While this is a good thing, there is virtually no one way that the Senate will vote to remove him, which to him will mean complete vindication and another round of bragging and lying in his speeches.  The only way to take Trump out is for him to lose in 2020.  Sadly, with strong support from his Republican base and a healthy economy, Trump may very well win four more years in the White House, meaning that this decade may be much worse for the both the country and the planet than the last one was.