A WILD FINISH

 In early August of this year (which feels like ten months ago!) I wrote that I was feeling cautiously optimistic about the upcoming presidential election.  And now, with only around two weeks to go before before that big day, I'm feeling a little less cautious.

The funny thing is that, with everything that has happened in the last two months, the polls have hardly budged.  Joe Biden has consistently been running a lead of around ten points nationally over President Trump, and Biden also leads in most of the important swing states.  Amazingly, this is basically the same lead that he had way back in the Democratic primaries!  Biden has even out performed the president in campaign donations, a rarity for a presidential challenger.

The televised debate between Trump and Biden back in September was a chance for Trump to dig himself out of the hole he's in, and not only did he not win, he may have dug himself in deeper.  Instead of looking presidential, Trump displayed his true character as a bragging, insulting, dishonest bully.  Only Trump himself and his loyal base thought that he did well.

And when Trump revealed that he  had tested  positive for Covid 19, he received no sympathy bounce.  If anything, his own infection seemed to personify his failure to slow down the pandemic.  And that is what has been hurting him politically more than anything else; the president may have survived  his bout with Covid 19, but it could still drag down his presidency. 

The problem for Trump is obvious: the pandemic was a serious problem that required a sober, consistent, well thought out response from him based on information from scientific researchers and other experts.  In other words, the complete opposite of the chaotic style of governance that Trump had brought to the White House from the very beginning.  The fact that he dismissed the dangers of the outbreak, and then often ridiculed masks while often contradicting the advice of his own scientific advisors shows just what a mess he has made of this crisis.

And it appears that Trump's flailing attempts to dig up some kind of October surprise (from pressuring his Attorney General William Barr to arrest Joe Biden and Barack Obama for some vague and absurd crime to his refusal to disavow Qanon)  are failing because it's hard to distract the American public when they know that the pandemic is still raging, with almost two hundred and twenty thousand Americans dead as of this writing.  It looks like, for the first time in his life, Trump has been confronted with a problem that he can't sue, ignore or insult away.  And while I'm sure that he will attempt to deny the results of the election if he loses, Biden's lead seems strong enough to dispel that denial.  Like I said before, I'm cautiously optimistic about the election, and hopefully in  few months America will have a decent and admirable leader again.

NOTHING LEARNED

 

A brush with death can change a person.  A brush with death caused by something that you've actively ignored can really change a person.  Except, that is, for our president.  Donald Trump's reaction to his recent covid scare has been a return to displaying all the negative behaviors that he had before he fell ill, all of which helped  put the country at the top of the list world wide for the highest number of covid cases and deaths.

Even before he left the hospital, Trump was downplaying his condition.  In one of the oddest moments in presidential history, he got into his official presidential vehicle and waved to supporters outside the hospital he was in.  While this was a typical display of  macho toughness from him, it also showed a complete disregard for his driver and the security agent in the vehicle with him, who were forced to be in close quarters with a known contagious person just so he could get his silly little photo op.

And the foolish behavior from the president didn't end there; one of the first things he did after being discharged from the hospital was to dramatically walk up the steps of the capitol dome and tear off his mask, acting like a septuagenarian Superman. And his tweets were absurd: "Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life." He said, ignoring the fact that over two hundred thousand Americans had died from the virus.  He also added that "We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge."  Not only is this yet another absurd boast from him, but it downplays the reality of  the nature of his medical care.  As president, Trump is, of course, given the best possible medical treatment from an army of doctors.  The vast majority of Americans could never get the same kind of treatment that he received.  For him to hold himself up as some sort of macho, coronavirus beating tough guy is an insult to those who have died, implying that they were just too weak to survive.  As always, Trump has zero compassion for anyone but himself in everything he does, even when recovering from an illness.

This all gets even more appalling when one considers that it isn't just the president himself that has been infected, but also many of the people around him: so far fourteen people, including First Lady Melania Trump,  Senior Advisor Stephen Miller, and Aide to the President Hope Hicks, along with three Republican Senators.  And yet he still steams ahead with downplaying the virus, like a pandemic hitting the White House and Congress is somehow nothing to worry about.  (And really, is there any greater indicator of what a psychopath our president is than the fact that his own wife's infection seems to have stirred no sense of compassion in him?).  Yes, sadly, Trump will always be Trump, never admitting to any mistake or course correcting in any way.  From day one he has downplayed the danger of this pandemic, and months later, with millions of Americans infected and hundreds of thousands dead, he still chooses to do so.  All we can do as a country is vote him out in such large numbers that he and his party won't be able to steal the election.  Expecting him to ever do the right thing regarding this pandemic is fruitless.

THE PRESIDENT TESTS POSITIVE

“the end of the pandemic is in sight....”

The above words are a direct quote from Donald Trump from remarks he gave on Thursday October First.  He said them even after his close advisor Hope Hicks was showing signs of the virus herself.  And then he and his wife Melania tested positive themselves.

Although the irony of a president who has bungled the pandemic response so thoroughly getting the virus himself is not lost on me, I take no pleasure is his condition.  Sure, I've used words like "fascist", "bigot" and "psychopath" to describe him,  but I'm also a progressive who has argued against the death penalty.  I truly hope that Trump recovers, loses the election next month, and eventually winds up in the jail cell I think he deserves to be in.

But I can't feel any real sympathy for his sickness.  I just can't.  My reaction is much like how I felt when Rush Limbaugh recently came down with lung cancer after years of  publicly denying the risks of tobacco usage on his show and constantly smoking cigars.  He should have seen it coming.

A list of all the times that Trump downplayed the coronavirus threat could fill an encyclopedia: from the beginning he said it was nothing to worry about, that it would disappear when the weather got warmer, that the country needed to reopen, that masks were unnecessary.  He often has contradicted his own administration's advice, and insulted  his own advisors when they disagreed with him.  And perhaps worst of all, he has held indoor rallies without mandatory mask wearing.  Even after one of his supporters, Herman Cain, attended one of those rallies and died from the virus shortly afterwards, he didn't stop.  Given all of this, I can't say that I feel sorry for our president.

If there is one good thing that could come out of this, it's that it may push his supporters into realizing just how serious this pandemic is.  Hopefully, people will start wearing masks without complaint and listen to scientists instead of getting caught up in the crazy conspiracy theories running around the virus.   And who knows how this will affect the already unreal upcoming election.  Assuming Trump recovers, will this prove to voters just how disastrous his pandemic response has been?  Or will it garner him a sympathy vote?  How much will Mike Pence have to step in, and will that help or hurt Trump's campaign?  The only thing we know for sure is that twenty twenty is continuing to be the craziest year in  modern history, and the results of that craziness can't be seen right now.

"STAND BACK AND STAND BY"

 Well, the first presidential debate of the twenty twenty election just took place, and while what happened should have been no surprise to anyone who's been paying attention to politics for the past four years, it was still a complete national disgrace.  I have never in my life time been more ashamed and embarrassed to be an American; not even during the Iraq war of the George W  Bush presidency.  Other countries must have looked  on in wonder and fear.  How could a country that claimed to be a beacon of democracy elect such a person? It was, to put it simply, the most disgraceful behavior that any president has ever displayed publicly.   Or as commentator Dana Bash put it, it was a "shit show."

Yes, Donald Trump, behind in the polls, came out angry and fuming.  Truly we saw who really was, a bullying, dishonest, egotistical psychopath.  Determined not to let Joe Biden even finish a single thought, Trump interrupted his opponent one hundred and twenty eight times in ninety minutes!  Host moderator Chris Wallace, continually tried to stop him and make him follow the agreed upon rules of the debate to no avail.   It's been stated before but it bears repeating, Trump's behavior in the debates would get him disqualified from a high school debate.  (It's really sad to think that  many children may have watched this and thought that his behavior was acceptable.)  When Biden snapped and told Trump to shut up, and also added that Trump was "the worst president ever", it seemed like a reasonable reaction.  Bullies have to be confronted, and if Biden hadn't fought back, he never would have gotten a word in edgewise.

Amid Trump's usual cacophony of lies, boasts and insults, one chilling moment stood out: while making one of his standard rants about the danger of Intifa (a left wing anti fascist group with few members that Trump has inflated into domestic terrorists) Wallace challenged Trump to condemn violence coming from right wing groups.  At first Trump grudgingly seemed to go along with the idea, but when Biden suggested specifically condemning the Proud Boys, an extremist right wing group with a history of violence, Trump instead blurted out “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,”  adding "Somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left because this is not a right-wing problem. This is a left-wing problem.”  Not since he claimed that a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville had "wonderful people" in it has our president made a more disgusting statement.  And this may be worse since it carries the threat of  potential violence.

Think I'm overreacting?  Here's this morning's headline about it from the New York Times: "Trump wouldn’t categorically denounce white supremacists. Members of the far-right Proud Boys are celebrating".  While it's open to debate, Trump's words could be seen as an endorsement of the violence of the Proud Boys.  Even worse, by telling them to stand by, it raises the frightening spector of Trump calling on violent extremist groups to help him win the election through voter intimidation at the polls.or some kind of power grab after the election, which, he has repeatedly said, he will only lose if it's stolen from him.  

The implications of all of this are staggering.  I've already mentioned that I've never been more ashamed to be an American, I also have never been more afraid to be one.  The upcoming election could be the first presidential election in our nation's history to result in violence.  And some of that violence may be coming from our president himself, who could turn full fascist, claim that the election was rigged against him, use the military to cement his power and proclaim himself president for life while he's at.  (These are all things he has hinted at and joked about doing in speeches).The fear I felt four years ago when Trump won has only intensified as the election nears.  I hate to say it, but Trump may pull this country apart, or even start some kind of civil war.  The world's most powerful democracy may be in serious trouble.

JOE BIDEN'S GOOD OLD DAYS

 On Sunday September twentieth, two days after the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden gave a heartfelt declaration to the Republicans in Congress in which he implored them to “Please follow your conscience.  Don't vote to confirm anyone nominated under the circumstances President Trump and Senator McConnell have created. Don't go there. Uphold your constitutional duty, your conscience, let the people speak."  This was a perfectly reasonable request, especially because that same Senate refused to allow then President Barack Obama to fill  a similar vacancy back in twenty sixteen.  Biden even used the same argument that Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell used back then:  let the voters decide.

We all know how Biden's plea turned out.  President Donald Trump and the Republicans in the Senate moved forward on filling the nomination, without even shrugging at the brazen hypocrisy they were showing in their quest for political power.

Although I don't fault Biden for attempting to appeal to the conscience of the Republican Senators, anyone who follows politics should not have been  surprised at the Republicans completely ignoring his pleas.  When it comes to attaining raw power, the Republican party has no conscience.  That is especially true when it comes to appointing judgeships; McConnell and the rest of the party know full well that the country's growing diversity and progressive younger citizens will mostly reject the aging, almost entirely white Republican party.  Lifetime judicial appointments can slow that tide.

Joe Biden first entered the Senate way back in nineteen seventy two, and in his speeches he often waxes nostalgic about the warmer and more convivial nature of the Senate back then, which often extended even beyond party affiliation.  I think he may be right about this;  it should be remembered that it was the Republican party finally turning on the criminal behavior of Richard Nixon that forced him to resign.  Yes, once upon a time, a political party was  willing to sacrifice their own leader for the good of the country.  Imagine that.

So what happened?  Why has our country become so polarized that there appears that there is nothing that Trump can say or do that would cause his party to turn on him?  Well, there have been several big changes that have occured since the days of Watergate.

First, when Ronald Reagan moved the Republican party rightward, he forged an alliance with Christian fundamentalists who were (and still are) unrepentant in their literal demonization of their political opponents.  And  as those fundamentalists gained more and  more power in the party, they pushed harder and harder against compromising on their core issues.  

And then the late eighties saw the rise of Rush Limbaugh, who with his mixture of insults, bigotry, misogyny and conspiracy theories about the Democrats, helped push the party further to the right and away from any kind of reconciliation with the other side.  As he grew more popular, an entire right media sprung up that aped his hardline rhetoric.  

Another sea change came in nineteen ninety four, when the Republican party retook the House of Representatives for the first time since the nineteen fifties, led by House Speaker Newt Gingrich who had a brutal, cut throat approach to politics.  Now it wasn't just people like Limbaugh calling the Democrats "corrupt" or "fascist", it was an elected official, third in line to the President, no less.  Under Gingrich the House would shutdown the government twice and push for then President Bill Clinton's impeachment even as most of the country opposed it.  Although Gingrich's leadership would have mixed results, his take no prisoners style of politics still influences the Republican party to this day.

And with the right wing media (and social network) still screaming while people like Gingrich still run the Republican party, it seems like there will never be a time like the one that Biden entered into back in the seventies.  So while I sorta admire Biden's stated belief that after Trump is gone, the sane members of the Republican party will see how terrible it was to support him and be ready to move forward in a bipartisan way, I also think it's extremely naive.  Trump is just the ultimate extension of the modern Republican party; they won't improve once he's gone.  For proof of that, Biden shouldn't have to look any  further than the bitter way that the party dealt with President Obama for eight years: they gave him nothing and refused to sacrifice an inch.

What I think Biden needs to do if he wins is to ignore the Republicans as much as possible.  If the Democrats emerge from the upcoming election with not only the White House but also but houses of congress, they need to push their advantage as much as they can.  That means that they should pack the Supreme Court with progressive judges, abolish the filibuster in the Senate and grant statehood to the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.  If the Republicans can only play hardball, then it's time for the Democrats to respond in kind.  Compromise and bipartisanship are nice ideas, but  these days they are just relics of a bygone time.

RUTH BADER GINSBURG AND THE 2020 ELECTION

 

On September eighteenth, eightyseven year old Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a feminist icon and Supreme Court Justice, died of cancer.  Like a lot of progressives,  I was a big fan of her not only as a justice, but as a wise and strong person who was one of only a handful of women to attend Harvard Law School in the nineteen fifties.  While her death was far from surprising (she had been in ill health for years), the timing of her passing has sent shockwaves through the already tumultuous upcoming presidential contest,  coming as it did less than two months before election day.  

President Trump immediately pounced on the opportunity to appoint another conservative to the court, giving him three such appointments in the past four years.  And, of course, most of the Republican party has fallen behind him.  Which shows just how cynical and hypocritical the Republican party has become.  Back in February of twenty sixteen, months before the election, with Barack Obama in the last year of his presidency, conservative Justice Antonin Scalia died, and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell refused to allow Obama to appoint another justice, blocking the appointment in the Senate and justifying it by saying that it was too close to the election to allow Obama to carry out his constitutional duty and  choose another justice.  It should be understood that this was a completely unprecedented move by McConnell, a shameless power grab against a popular president that McConnell delighted in carrying out.  And now, naturally, he has completely changed his tune, gleefully preparing to affirm another Trump pick less than sixty days before the election.

Another conservative on the court could push it to the right for decades to come.  Abortion rights, gay marriage, voter rights laws, and environmental regulations could all be put on the chopping block.  If it happens, it will be just another way that the Republican  party has managed to shove  through minority rule in this century:  consider that Democratic presidential nominees have won the popular vote in four out of the last five elections, and yet the Republican party has held the White House for twelve of the past twenty years.  That means that if Trump gets another pick, four out of the nine justices will have been chosen by presidents who did not get a majority of the vote.  And it's likely that those justices will make decisions banning gay marriage and abortion rights even as majorities of the American public now support those rights.

So what can the Democrats do?  Well, it's possible that a handful of Republican Senators in close upcoming elections just might refuse to go along with Trump and McConnell and put the brakes on another juridical pick until after the election. Senator Lisa Murkowski has already said she would prefer that, and others may follow.  

But, if that falls through, what can the Democrats do to stop another conservative justice from being appointed?  Not a lot.  After all, expecting the Republican Party to be consistent with their past actions is madness in the era of Trump, a president who often can't be consistent in the same speech!  

There is one other out, and it would be a bold move: if Joe Biden wins the presidency in November, he could pack the Supreme Court.  Although the number of justices has always been held at nine, there is no hard fast rule that says that no president cannot appoint more.  Sure, the Republican Party would froth at the mouth if that happened, but so what?  Remember that McConnell's move against Obama's choice was also unprecedented.  Biden, for his part, has downplayed the idea, but I really think he should consider it.  It's clear that when Biden first got into politics there was a sense of camaraderie between the parties, despite their disagreements.  He needs to realize that those days are over, and that, sadly, both parties have become so diametrically opposed that compromise on major issues is almost impossible.  The only way that a Democratic agenda can be achieved is without Republican help in any way.  And that means that there has to be a progressive majority on the Supreme Court.  The only way forward is to counter hardball politics with hardball politics.

THE WEST COAST IS BURNING

 The images have been stunning.  For days now fires have been ravaging the West coast of the country to devastating effect.  At least three million acres of land have been lost in California alone so far, a new record for a single year.  Oregon and Washington have suffered seriously also, with Portland facing unprecedented damage.  And even places not directly harmed by the fires have suffered seriously unclean air quality conditions, all in the middle of an airborne pandemic.  The most frightening aspect of this may be that this kind of natural disaster may become the new normal, or, as  Philip  B. Duffy, a climate scientist and the president of the Woodwell Climate Research Center, put it,"People are always asking, ‘Is this the new normal?’ I always say no. It’s going to get worse.”

It's a stunning thought that California, the most populous state in the country, the home of Silicon Valley, and other huge economic drivers, is becoming unlivable.  But that may be where we are.  For the past four years, the fire conditions have become more and more damaging.  Part of the reason for this is that an increased population has led to more homes being built closer and closer to the edge of forests.  But nothing contributed more to these fires than the onset of climate change.  The evidence is now impossible to refute, although we know many will try to find a way.

The really frustrating thing is that all of this was predicted decades ago when climate change first starting becoming an issue.  And it wasn't exactly a difficult concept to grasp:  a warmer climate would lead to drier forests with trees more likely to catch fire and burn longer.  And yet these warnings were mostly ignored.

How did we get here?  Well, part of it is that human beings are just better at dealing with a perceived direct threat than a perceived long term one.  Just look at how many people in the world continue to smoke even though the long term health effects of smoking have been known for decades.  Put simply, a lot of people are willing to shrug off something bad that may happen years down the line.

But of course, politics plays a huge role.  Although Richard Nixon may have founded the Environmental Protection Agency, the Republican party became the party that opposed almost any environmental protections when they stood behind Ronald Reagan in nineteen eighty even as he said that trees cause pollution.  And things have only gotten worse since then, with George W Bush's administration scrubbing any mentions of climate change out of their own environmental impact reports, to our current president, who once tweeted out "The concept of Global Warming was created  by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non competitive"(!).  

Another crippling factor was when in two thousand and ten, the Supreme Court ruled in the Citizens United case and equated money spent on political campaigns as an expression of free speech.  That  opened the floodgates for corporate money to influence politics.  And no company has had a bigger influence on this issue than the Koch industries, an oil company that has dumped billions of dollars into denying climate change and opposing solar power.  As NPR reported, in twenty sixteen alone they spent eight hundred and eighty nine million dollars in aiding the Republican party.  And their hold on that party is such that now no prominent Republican elected official can admit that climate change is real.  How radical is this Republican denial?  In twenty fifteen Sondre Båtstrand at the University of Bergen in Norway did a comparative study of conservative political parties all around the world, and found that America's Republican party is the only major political party in the entire world that denies climate change outright.  In any other part of the world, their beliefs would be seen as fringe.  Here in the US they are, sadly, part of the mainstream. 

So what can we do?  Well, obviously American needs to vote Republicans out until they are willing to accept the scientific proof that is literally burning in front of them.  But in the short term there appears to be no easy solution, and the terrible environmental devastation that is happening now may be just the beginning.