SOME COMPARISONS

In the past few days, President Donald Trump has doubled down on his crackdown on Black Lives Matter protests in the city of Portland and threatened to send federal troops to other cities in a similar fashion.  Although he claims that his actions are being made to keep the peace and prevent "anarchists" from doing damage to federal buildings, it's obvious that his real motivation is to use troops to shut down protestors that he doesn't agree with while provoking violence that he can then use to fire up his political base.  The fact that his campaign has already used such images in their advertising reveals this to be true.

The most chilling aspect of this crackdown has been the sight of police in full combat gear grabbing protestors seemingly at random and then dragging them off into unmarked vans like the private army of a fascist dictator instead of peace officers in a democracy. 

To the conservatives who defend Trump's actions as necessary to prevent riots I would ask how they would feel if a Democratic leader like Barack Obama had used the same tactics against anti-abortion protestors?  After all, if you really want to look at a movement in this country that has often resorted to violence, the anti abortionists really fit the  bill.   According to the National Abortion Federation, since nineteen ninety three there have been eleven murders and twenty six attempted murders made by anti abortionists, not to mention dozens of bombings and arson attacks made against abortion clinics.  Clearly this is a movement that uses killing and violent intimidation as a means to its ends at a much higher level than the Black Lives Matter movement.  Despite that, I still believe that the anti abortionists have every right to engage in peaceful protest, and the idea that any of them could be beaten or dragged off by federal troops just for marching sickens me, even as much as I may disagree with them.

The issue of whether or not the Black Lives Matter protests are violent or not  gets even more complicated when reports of white supremacists purposely trying to hurt the whole movement by stirring up anger and violence start to roll in .  And then there's the tricky question as to whether or not the actions of the troops are preventing violence or provoking it, with both sides of the argument rolling videos to prove their point.  The important thing to remember is that the Black Lives Matter movement is pushing for a reevaluation of how the police in this country interact with the African American communities that they are supposed to be serving and protecting, and it's long overdue.  It's a worthy goal, even if some members of the movement take it too far.  Remember that in the early twentieth century suffragettes in Britain often resorted to acts of violence including arson, to try and win the right to vote.  Was it right for them to burn down buildings?  Obviously not.  But were they fighting for a just cause?  Again, of course they were.  Hopefully, the worthy goals of the Black Lives Matter movement will not be dismissed because of some overzealous members. 

LIVING IN A BUBBLE

Way back in the in the later years of the presidency of George W Bush, moderate conservative columnist David Brooks and several other right wing media figures went to visit the  president in the White House.  Everytime they broached the difficult subject of the war in Iraq, he fell back on the same talking points about how everything there was going great, without mentioning any kind of specifics.  Brooks said that even these men who were some of his biggest defenders clearly couldn't believe what they were hearing.  Was the president delusional about what was shaping up to be one of the worst foreign policy mistakes in history?  The answer is even worse: Bush's own advisors later admitted that he told them that he wanted to hear no more negative news about the war, behaving more like an ostrich with its head in the ground than the leader of the free world.  Amazingly,  the average American citizen probably knew more about how poorly the war was going than the president himself did.
Is that really a surprise?  Bush was raised in family of enormous wealth and privilege, and had spent the first forty of his life drinking heavily and avoiding work.  Someone that spoiled could not stand to hear that the voluntary invasion of a foreign country that he had pushed so hard for was turning into a disaster.   In interviews he started to defend the war by saying that history would say that he was right, and to this day he maintains that the biggest regret of his presidency was not passing Social Security reform (!).
I tell this story about our former president to draw an obvious parallel to our current one.  Now, naturally, a war and a pandemic are very different things, and Bush more clearly brought the disaster of the Iraq war upon himself than Trump did the coronavirus.  But the similarities are striking; from the beginning, Trump has downplayed the deadliness of the virus and completely botched the national government's reaction to it.  From saying it would disappear when the weather got warmer to putting his absurdly unqualified son in law in charge of medical supply distribution, Trump has stumbled from one terrible decision to another, just like Bush did during the Iraq war.  And just as Bush's premature declaration of mission accomplished turned out to be a tragic mistake, so has Trump's assertion that the worst of pandemic is behind us and that his administration handled it well, even as the number of Americans infected is actually increasing.  Trump has even started asserting that history will judge him well, no matter how unpopular he is now.  Sound familiar?
The fact that Joe Biden is now the favorite to defeat Trump in November (although I won't stop holding my breath until the inauguration) seems to show a clear pattern in this century: Democrats win the White House by pledging to clean up the mess that the Republicans leave behind.  Just as Obama won by saying he would end the Iraq war and fix the broken economy, Biden is winning by saying that he will handle the pandemic better than Trump has been.
In America, it often seems like  the Republican party is more like a stern father figure (supporting defense spending, tax cuts and law and order).  While  the Democratic party is more like a caring mother (supporting expanded health care, education and protecting the environment).  Right now,  the situation we have  is the wacky sitcom dad that accidentally floods the basement while trying to fix the pipes, and then leaves his wife to clean it up while he drinks beer with his friends!
Now am I saying that rich people should be excluded from politics?  Of course not, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is one of my favorite presidents.  But I do feel that the kind of family that you're raised in can impact not only your life, but the lives of other people around you, and that goes double for politics.  And of course what I really hope is that middle class white voters in this country will stop supporting politicians who pass huge tax cuts for the rich.  And that maybe they could support raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for national health care and daycare.  But I'm not holding my breath for that either.

WASTED TIME

He finally wore a mask.  President Donald Trump, the man who has repeatedly downplayed the dangers of the coronavirus pandemic, the man who has even said that some people wearing masks in this country were doing so only to spite him.  Even he finally decided to wear a mask publicly yesterday while visiting a veteran's hospital.  Although on the one hand this may seem like no big deal, it clearly shows that our president, despite his innate belief that he has never made a mistake in his life, must admit that the country's fight against the pandemic has been an abject failure under his leadership.
There are two big issues that have dominated the media in the past few months: the pandemic and the protests over police brutality and the conversation about racial reckoning that those protests have brought.  It's obvious where Trump stands in the latter: he has threatened to veto a defense bill that includes changing the names of military bases that bear the names of Confederate generals, while calling the Black Lives Matter movement "hateful."  Clearly there's no way that he will stop stoking the flames of racial hatred before the election.  He knows that his base loves it. 
But the pandemic is a much trickier problem for him.  No matter how much Trump lies and tries to convince the world that his distorted version of reality is the truth, the facts about the pandemic cannot be avoided.  Our attempt to shutdown the country to lower the spread of the virus has not worked; in fact,, things are actually worse now than they were at the beginning of the shutdown, with record numbers of new infections rocking the country.  Today Florida reported fifteen thousand new cases, a number that tops even the infection rate that the state of New York had at the beginning of the pandemic.
The really tragic thing is that this could have been avoided.  Although there are a  number of factors, the main reason that our country has failed so poorly has been the chaotic response of the Trump administration and the echoing response of conservative  governors in states like Florida, Texas and Arizona.  During the shut down, states like those demanded that they be allowed to reopen their businesses and gathering places, even though they did not meet the guidelines set by the federal Center for Disease Control. “When you look at some of the most draconian orders that have been issued in some of these states and compare Florida,” Florida Governor  Ron DeSantis said back in April, "Florida has done better."  Sadly, that is no longer true.
Really, this conservative movement to reopen businesses and public gatherings  has been in complete defiance of common sense; anyone could see months ago that while the virus was hitting the coastal state of New York the hardest, that it would inevitably spread around the country and that reopening beaches and bars was a recipe for disaster.  But they did it anyway, acting out of a combination of blind hope and worry about the economic losses that the shutdown was causing.
And so here we are, with perhaps the worst part of the epidemic in front of us instead of behind us.  Facing another possible shutdown even as  other, better run countries start to reopen (and bar our citizens from entering!).  It is only in the shadow of things getting this bad that Trump has finally decided to publicly put on a mask, which is the equivalent of putting a band aid on a bloody stump.  And while it's good to see him actually modeling positive behavior for other Americans, he deserves no credit.  Last Wednesday, Tulsa Oklahoma health director Dr. Bruce Dart freely admitted that a surge of coronavirus cases in his city was “more than likely” linked to the June Twentieth rally that Trump held in that city.  So our president has not only been incompetent in dealing with the pandemic, he has actually made it worse just to hold one of his ego boosting rallies.  No mere face mask can cover up his pathetic indifference in the face of so much pain and suffering.