BIDEN'S DOCUMENT SCANDAL

 Just a week ago, Joe Biden seemed to riding pretty high.  Oh sure, the Republican party was retaking the House of Representatives, but it was doing so with far less members than they had hoped for, and the clown show of multiple votes that were held to appoint a Speaker of the House made the party look weak.  Also, inflation finally seems to be letting up, and Biden's approval ratings were starting to rise.

But last week a story broke about how classified documents were discovered in his old office from his days as vice president during the Obama administration.  A further search found more documents in his garage.  While the White House tried to shrug all this off by saying that the documents were "inadvertently misplaced", it was not a good look. In fact,  shortly thereafter Attorney General Merrick Garland was compelled to appoint a special counsel to investigate the matter. Not surprisingly, this was all catnip to the right wing media, who immediately called Biden a hypocrite for previously condemning Trump for his hoarding of classified documents.  Calls for his home to raided, like Trump's was, rang all over right wing media outlets.

Part of me wants to quickly point out that what Trump did was far worse; he took hundreds of classified documents to Mar-o-Lago, compared to the ten or so that Biden had.  Perhaps even worse, when Trump was told by the Justice Department that he needed to return the documents, he did not return all of them, eventually prompting the FBI raid on his home.  Unlike with Trump, there is no reason to believe that Biden intended to hold on to these documents, and he promptly returned them.  Also, in an interview with conservative commentator Sean Hannity, Trump asserted that the documents in his home were declassified, because the president has the power to declassify documents just by thinking about it.  Isn't it then reasonable to say that the documents found in Biden's possession were  declassified because then president Barack Obama thought about it?  That's only fair, right? 

But jokes aside, this is a serious matter: Biden clearly was sloppy in his handling of the documents, and while that doesn't brand him the criminal that I think it does with Trump, it looks bad.  Sadly, this could be the "Hillary's emails" scandal of the next election. Since most Americans don't follow politics that closely, many of them will just hear headlines about Biden and classified documents and assume he did the same thing as Trump.  Of course, we have no way of knowing how much this story will affect the American public's feelings about Biden, and it may turn out to be more like the "Obama's tan suit scandal" than Hillary's emails.  One thing though, the timing of this couldn't be any worse, because this could be the break Trump needs; now Merrick Garland is the tricky position of possibly prosecuting an ex president for the same crime that the current president will be widely perceived to also have done.  So, like so many other times in his life, Trump will probably walk away from doing something terrible unscathed and emboldened.  How such a horrible person can have so much luck throughout his life is the best argument against the existence of a god that I can think of.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE CRAZY 30%

 

As a progressive, I couldn't help laughing at now House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's pathetic four day bid for the speakership, in which he went down in flames 14 times before finally eking out a victory.  And to get that victory he had to make concessions to the far right Freedom Caucus, a group of house members on the extreme right.  So my amusement at McCarthy's string of losses is tempered by the fact that the house is now about to get down to business, and for many of those members that means attacking the Joe Biden regime with baseless investigations and holding up things like the debt ceiling vote, which could have catastrophic economic consequences.   While I have no sympathy for McCarthy, who condemned Donald Trump in congress after January 6th and then quickly flew out to Mar-o-Largo to kiss his ring, it will be hard to watch him trying to appease the extreme members of his party for the next two years.   

What the whole voting debacle shows is that there is a significant wing of the Republican party that see the role of government in America only as funding the military and protecting their guns.  Or, as former House Republican speaker John Boehner put in back in 2010 when he had to deal with the extreme Tea Party movement in the House, they only want “to throw sand in the gears of the hated federal government until it fails and they’ve finally proved that it’s beyond saving.”

The sad fact of the matter is that about 30% of the American electorate are on the extreme right, and because they own one party and vote faithfully, they are able to have an influence far beyond their numbers.  Just look at how the supreme court recently overturned  abortion rights despite those rights being supported by around 60% of the American public, and you can see how a determined minority can slowly but surely drive the country in their direction.  And it's not just abortion rights, the 30% are the ones who think that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, reject coronavirus vaccines, believe in Qanon, think that the earth is only 20,000 years old and marinate themselves in right wing media exclusively.  Quite simply, they hold the rest of the country back, trying to return the country to a past where white straight Christian men ran everything.

Is there anything the 70% of sane people in this country can do about this?  Not much other than vote and wait; the Republican party currently has a serious problem with younger voters, who strongly disagree with them on nearly every major issue.  The party is literally dying out as their voters age.  (And the old notion that people get more conservative politically as they age has never been proven true).  Someday the Republican party will have to start tempering its beliefs or time will throw it in the dustbin.  Sadly, the 30% will go down fighting all the way.

WHEN DO YOU GIVE UP ON A CELEBRITY?

 Micheal Jackson.  Woody Allen.  Bill Cosby.  Kevin Spacey.  These are some of the celebrities that the world has turned on recently when they were reasonably accused  of criminal sexual  behavior (only Cosby was actually convicted, and even that was overturned).  I myself will admit that I once was an admirer of all them,  but I still have moved away from supporting them to different degrees (I still have Thriller on my itunes, and sometimes watch Woody Allen movies).  It's always hard to separate art and artist, especially since so many great artists over the years have done terrible things (Miles Davis, Lou Reed, James Brown and John Lennon all used to make great music, and they all physically abused their wives and girlfriends).  The decision to admire the work of any artist always raises many questions, like  is there a waiting period after their death that makes it alright to admire them?  I noticed that the recent Sight and Sound magazine list of the 100 best films ever made included no films by Allen or Roman Polanski, but did have two by Charlie Chaplin, who once impregnated a 15 year old girl when he was 32.  Obviously, these things are complicated with no easy answer.

Which brings us to a recent concert I attended with Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock.  Like many other people, I've been a fan of Chappelle ever since his sketch show blew up about 20 years ago, and I've always enjoyed his stand up specials in which his incisive bits about race combined with his likable persona and gift for imitations were great.  That is, I did admire him until his recent Netflix special in which he declared himself a "Trans-exclusionary radical feminist" or "Terf" and railed against the rights (and really, the existence) of trans people.  It was a mean spirited bit  that played into the recent conservative demonization of trans people that has lead to hatred and even violence against them all around the country.  Chappelle has described himself as a Democrat, but here he was playing right into the Republican playbook of division and hatred against a small group of Americans who just want to lead their best lives.

So when a friend of mine asked me if I wanted to go see Chappelle performing with  Chris Rock here in San Francisco, I reluctantly agreed since I'm also a fan of Rock and I knew that he would be going first and I could always leave early if Chappelle started bashing trans people.  Thankfully, except for one brief reference, Chappelle didn't touch the issue, mostly sticking to crude sex jokes that didn't much for me (an entire bit built around the infamous Chuck Berry sex tape was not one I needed to hear).  Still, his set wasn't bad, even though I think Rock was better.

As the show wrapped up, it looked like controversy had been avoided.  But then Chappelle impulsively invited Elon Musk to come up and share the stage without considering how Musk's recent chaotic takeover of Twitter had made him unpopular in San Francisco.  It was an awkward moment in that Musk clearly didn't know what to do on stage, made even more awkward when many people in the audience started to boo him loudly.  At first Chapelle made a pretty good joke about how some of the people in the audience were the ones that Musk had just fired from Twitter.  But then he later added that all the booing seemed to be coming from the cheap seats in the back row, which didn't exactly help the situation.  (When Chapelle,  who's paid tens of millions of dollars for his comedy specials, introduces one of the richest men in the world to the stage and then ridicules the poorer members of the audience for booing him, he inadvertently laid bare the unfair class issues in this country).  At that point, Musk tried to say something, but then a serious fight broke out in the crowd (between a Musk supporter and a Musk hater?  Who knows).  Chapelle then tried to calm things by saying how much he wished well for the whole audience, and then quite lamely got Musk to shout out one of Chapelle's old catch phrases from his show ("I'm rich, bitch!") before drawing this odd spectacle to a close.

At first, I mostly shrugged off this show's crazy conclusion as just a strange way for things to end.  But then I wondered about why Chapelle thought that bringing Musk out on the stage was a good idea.  Did he really think that the crowd would cheer for Musk just because he's rich?  Has he no idea how terrible Musk's takeover of Twitter has been, with a resurgence of hate speech on the social media site?  When I combine his comments about trans people with his open ridiculing of the poor at this show, I've decided that I can't support his career anymore.  I hope that other fans of his will join me.

THE CONSERVATIVE WAR ON PUBLIC EDUCATION

 

During the pandemic, harsh tensions arose between school teachers and parents concerning school lockdowns.  Parents were stressed about their school age children being home all day, and having to use a remote learning system that clearly wasn't the same as a classroom.  Teachers were stressed about a reopening of schools exposing them and their families to covid.  It was a difficult situation in which there were no easy answers, and it lead to school board meetings that turned into shouting matches.

Not surprisingly, even with the pandemic mostly over, teachers still feel undervalued, underpaid and overworked, and many of them have responded by leaving the profession, making those who choose to remain work even harder to cover for those missing positions.  Currently, polls show that over half of teachers are considering quitting.  You would think that this situation would result in a reevaluation of how our country treats the teaching profession, with higher salaries provided for their essential work.  Instead what we have mostly seen is right wing politicians sensing a weakness in public education and pouncing.

Since 2020, Republican politicians have seized on the issue of so called "Critical Race Theory", implying that "woke" public school teachers are teaching white students how to hate themselves when they teach American history.  Ignoring the fact that there was no such specific curriculum in out public schools, the right wing media whipped up  fear of white children being "brainwashed".  Then, quickly moving onto another school issue, conservatives dusted off the old chestnut of children being exposed to "pornographic" books, and started pushing for concerned parents to start searching and purging school libraries.  As with the whole CRT controversy, this was all absurdly overblown, with one conservative politician running an ad in which her young son appeared and  said he once got nightmares from a book he read in school, without mentioning that he read that book when he was 17 and in an AP literature class, and that the book in question was Toni Morrison's Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.  Things got even worse earlier this year when Florida Governor RonDe Santis passed  the so called "Don't say Gay" bill that limited what teachers and students could talk about in classrooms concerning sexual orientation.  After passing the bill, he claimed that anyone opposing it supported  sexually grooming children, which now has become another conservative talking point.  As the New York Times pointed out, in the last two years a dozen states have passed laws limiting what teachers can teach, and even say, in their classrooms.

Personally, I do't think that any of those attacks on public schools would have happened if the pandemic hadn't primed already angry parents to vent at school board meetings.  With teachers already pushed to the breaking point, the time was ripe for conservatives to strike.  Conservatives  have been angry at public schools for decades; part of it is from the Christian fundamentalist wing of the party, that miss the days when creationism was taught as fact.  Another part is the fact that public school teachers are one of the few remaining union jobs in the country, and unions have favored Democrats ever since President Ronald Reagan fired members of the Air Traffic Control union way back in 1981.  

And there's an even deeper movement at play here: the conservative school voucher movement, which has been used  already in some states, and which would allow parents to take the government funds that were to be used on their children's schooling and use them to pay for tuition to private schools.  Conservatives know that the more public schools are thrown in disarray, the more popular the school voucher movement becomes.  And the real danger of the voucher movement is that it provides an end around over that pesky separation between church and state.  Putting it bluntly, if conservatives have their way, government tax dollars could be used to pay for children to attend schools that teach them dinosaurs were too big to fit on the ark!  For conservatives, this is a no brainer, as it's a simultaneous attack on unions and a way to try and turn our nation's children into good little right wing voters.

Sadly, the days of school vouchers could become a reality soon (I can't imagine that the current Supreme Court would oppose them).  The only recourse we have for now is Americans to start appreciating the difficult job that our public school teachers have and support them as much as we can.

MITCH MCCONNELL HAS NO ONE TO BLAME BUT HIMSELF

 

Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell has been the Republican leader of the Senate for the past 15 years.  Recently, Florida Senator Rick Scott has decided to challenge him for that position given the poor showing that the Republican party just had in the midterms; normally, the party not in the White House makes gains in the midterms, and the Republicans were expecting a so called red wave this time.  But it never came and while the party will in all likelihood take the House, they made no gains in the Senate, and may even lose a seat depending on how the run off in Georgia goes.

While I doubt that Scott will defeat McConnell, the fact that he is being challenged after building a reputation as a conservative hardliner while leading his party in the Senate is surprising, and if he were pushed out it would be quite a come down for a man that even Democrats have admitted was an effective leader.  

Even if Scott doesn't depose him, McConnell will still have to spend the next two years as a minority leader with little power.  He saw all of this coming: as far back as August, when he  openly complained that his party's chances of winning the Senate were being undermined, saying that "candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome.”  This was, of course, his diplomatic way of saying that former President Donald Trump was endorsing a poor crop of Senate candidates (like Dr Oz) who were running extremist campaigns that alienated swing voters.  And, as it turned out,  he was right. But what he won't mention is that this is all his own fault.

Why?  Because after the January 6th riot of 2021, McConnell did little to hide his disgust with Trump's actions, saying on the Senate floor that the former president's actions before the riot were "a disgraceful dereliction of duty."  Clearly he thought that Trump was guilty of inciting a riot.  And yet, he still couldn't bring himself to vote to remove Trump from office, and, without his support, the vote failed to reach the 67 vote majority that was needed in the Senate by 10 votes.  (While we don't know for sure, it's pretty safe to say that if McConnell, as Republican leader in the Senate,  had voted to remove Trump, it would have paved the way for other Republican Senators to follow).  Trump, in typical fashion, still insulted McConnell after the vote, calling him a "stupid person" and nicknaming him "Old crow".

While it appears that McConnell and other Senators thought it wasn't necessary to vote to remove Trump given that he was almost about to leave the White House anyway, they miscalculated something.  Removing him from office would have crucially prevented him from ever running again.  Which meant that Trump's hold over the Republican party would have been broken, and with no chance of ever running again, he would have retreated to Mar-a-Lago to lick his wounds.  And with him out of the picture, the midterms could have just been about Joe Biden and the economy with normal Republican candidates instead of Trump forcing his hand picked candidates to constantly say that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and the Republicans would almost surely have taken the Senate. 

Instead, as we all now know, Trump has decided to run again in 2024, and the Republican party is stuck with the choice of supporting him despite his losing streak of three straight election losses, or trying to find another candidate and alienating his cult like followers in the Republican Party.  Either way, McConnell looks like a fool for missing the opportunity to expunge Trump from his party, and there may be more losses coming soon.  I hope.

TRUMP LOSES AGAIN

 

The midterms elections yesterday looked like a sure thing for the Republican party: with inflation stubbornly persistent, violent crime increasing and Joe Biden's approval rating in the low 40's, a red wave looked inevitable.  And yet, with vote totals still coming in,  it really hasn't happened.  While the GOP is still favored to win the House, it will be by a much smaller margin than predicted, and the Democrats may hold  the Senate.  Putting it bluntly, this will be the weakest midterm election for a party out of power in the White House in decades.  While there are a number of reasons for this (the abortion issue is one of them), I think the main one is Donald Trump and his continuing influence over the Republican party.

Consider everything that has happened since Trump's unlikely victory in 2016: his party lost seats in the 2018 midterm, lost the presidency and both houses of congress in 2020, and have now underperformed in the 2022 midterms.  (And, because the former president seems obsessed with bragging about the size of his rallies, it should be pointed out that anger at his election inspired the 2017 Women's March, the largest single day protest in American history).  Add to that the fact that the former president has spent the last two years purging his party of anyone who doesn't publicly contest the 2020 election and pushing forward terrible, unqualified candidates like Dr Mehmet Oz, making this midterm election as much about him as his party,  and it's clear to see that Trump has little ability to reach beyond the rabid base of the Republican party that still worships him.

So what can the Republican party do, chained to an unpopular, wildly egotistical leader who's poised to announce his candidacy for 2024 any day now?  The answer may lie in Florida, where governor Ron DeSantis cruised  to an easy reecletion victory last night with one eye clearly on the White House.  Trump already clearly appears worried about a DeSantis run: not only did he not campaign for DeSantis in Florida, he held a competing rally there, and tried out a childish new nickname for the governor ("Ron DeSanctimonious").  While DeSantis is currently running behind Trump in primary polls, his victory in Florida and the party's poor showing nationally may push other Republicans to rally around DeSantis.  It will be interesting to see how it all plays out: DeSantis would probably have a much better chance at winning in 2024 than Trump, who is so divisive outside of his own party.  But will primary Republican voters choose him?  Watching the two men share a debate stage while agreeing on the issues and attacking each other personally will probably make for a low point in American politics, but then, that's where we've been stuck at ever since Trump first announced his candidacy in 2016.

Personally, while I think DeSantis is a terrible politician who recently used Venezuelan refugees as political chess pieces, I don't think he poses the deep, existential threat to democracy that another Trump presidential run does.  While I obviously hope neither of them wins in 2024, at least DeSantis doesn't make me think that the country could fall into outright fascism under him. 

WILL INFLATION RUIN DEMOCRACY?

 

Last summer, there was brief time period in which polls showed that the Democratic party might actually do well in the upcoming midterms.  President Joe Biden had just signed his Deficit Reduction Act into law, and the overturning of Roe Vs Wade was sparking anger against the Republican party.  But now, it seems, the pendulum has swung back in the Republicans favor, as Americans have accepted the overturning of Roe as not that a big a deal (even if a majority of them don't agree with it), and the economy has become the number one issue for voters.  And by the economy, they mean inflation and high gas prices, which, unfortunately for the Democrats. has remained stubbornly high in the past few months even as the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates more than once. (Gas prices have gone down, but are still higher than they were when Biden took office). While the Republican party has claimed that they will somehow "fix" inflation, they have no real concrete plan to do so, because they don't need one.  Voters tend to blame a poor economy on the party in power, even though much of the economy is beyond the control of the president and congress.  (If Joe Biden had a "stop inflation" button on his desk, he would have pushed it by now).    While it is possible that the Democrats will hold onto the Senate, they are likely to lose the House of Representatives, which would lead to two years of the kind of gridlock that both Obama and Trump often faced during their tenures in the White House.

None of this is unusual: the party of the President in power almost always loses seats in congress in the first midterm election, from the public turning against Bill Clinton in 1994 to the rise of the anti Barack Obama tea party movement in 2010.  And, Biden can take solace in the fact a poor showing in the midterms doesn't mean that a President won't win reecletion, as we found out with both Clinton in 1996 and Obama in 2012.

But there is a bigger problem with possible upcoming Republican victories, and, once again, that problem is linked to former President Donald Trump.  Trump's continued unfounded assertions that he won the 2020 election is still embraced by a majority of Republican voters.  And that has lead to a stunning almost 300 different Republican candidates across the nation running for office who agree with his assertions (heck, 10 of those candidates actually attended the January 6th Rally!).  These candidates winning, especially in swing states, could lead to a truly frightening possibility: Trump could steal the 2024 election.  Remember that it was Republicans standing up to him (like former Pennsylvania Secretary of State Brett Raffensperger) that finally pushed Trump into leaving the White House.  With Trump election loyalists ensconced in offices like Secretary of State or the Governorship, there are any number of ways that our system of voting could be corrupted in swing states with close vote counts, with certain votes being rejected and Trump being named the winner, democracy be damned.

What can Democrats (and really, anyone who cares about American democracy) do?  Unfortunately, not a lot, with the Republican victory in a few days looking more and more assured.  If the Republicans do win, the best thing that can happen in the country before 2024 is that Trump may not feel up to another campaign run (he will be 80 in 2024 after all) or even that one of the several investigations into his possible criminal behavior will turn up an actual conviction (although several cynics have pointed out that there's nothing in the Constitution that says that you can't run from a jail cell).  But we can't bet on those things happening, and, as unbelievable as it may seem, a man who lied about losing an election and then set off a violent riot over it, could find himself back in power in 2024.