America Has Lost Its Political Mind (And How To Regain It)

American politics has lost its mind. There are sane pockets, maybe even a sane majority, but that sane part of America lost control in November. White America got conned, not just by Trump but by Putin and by the third parties Putin helped promote with funding and the cynicism created by his disinformation efforts. In an election won by a sliver that sliver was decisive. And the people who were conned will be hard to un-con. People dislike being corrected. Reason and facts have limited power.

The New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert writes about the stubbornness of deception

Obama's pollster Cornell Belcher explains how this election was decided by a small sliver of the electorate

USNews on how the liberals and progressives can regain the moral high ground from the Christian Right

WIRED magazine on how Trump wins through the cognitive bias he's a master of

One of the architects of Milo's trolling playbook explains how it has fooled progressives

Hannah Arendt's discussion of how authoritarianism is achieved sounds chillingly relevant today

There’s some hope for fairer elections if we kill gerrymandering. There's this about that in SLATE

Meanwhile, postcards, phone calls, town meetings, daily letters. Michael Moore's TEN DAILY TASKS

The Triumph of Make Believe

“Lying” is such an ugly word. We are told not to say “The Republicans won by lying.” Even if it’s true (and fact checkers say it is) it’s so unpleasant.

Let’s say it another way. Republicans are very good at Magical Thinking. (Prime example: Trickle Down Economics) They won by Pretending. They have ushered in a new era of Make Believe.

The first bit of Let’s Pretend that turned this election cycle was when Chief Justice John Roberts announced that racism and prejudice was over and done with in the South where it had been so bad that (at least in some history books) white people owned black people as slaves. After slavery went away white Southerners spent another hundred years keeping their black brothers and sisters down by not letting them vote or sit at soda fountains or work at various jobs or walk on a sidewalk a white woman might want to use. An ugly time… if you believe those darn history books. But that was over and done, said John Roberts. So it was with joy and pride that he announced the Voting Rights Act no longer needed to be upheld in the South. No more protection of black and minority voters was necessary. Hurrah! He said it with such a convincing smile a lot of people applauded.

The response was immediate. Republicans quickly and gleefully reinstated exactly the kind of voter suppression laws that the Voting Rights Act’s supervision had prevented. Some even boasted about the achievement. Job done. The Chief Justice is very good at Make Believe and didn’t even notice the mockery of what he had said. Maybe someone close to him saw him wink.

PBS/Frontline reported the rapid surge in voter suppression that followed this Supreme Court ruling. As did ProPublica and McClatchy news service. The fair and reliable framework for our democracy was sent back into the kind of corruptions that existed during Jim Crow.

This voter suppression is not confined to the South, though it’s history is more outrageous there. Northern states Republicans have been emboldened by the Supreme Court to propose cynical, racist and antidemocratic laws in many states. They’re on the books in some key swing states. One of their tricks is to demand all voters purchase a special photo ID and then to make it hard to obtain them, placing the ID centers far from historically black or Democratic areas. A conservative judge skilled at Make Believe can pretend that none of this has anything to do with bigotry or Republican bias and the laws remain. In Wisconsin it’s estimated that 300,000 voters were barred from voting by not being able to produce the magic ID or having their ID challenged. Trump won Wisconsin by 27,000 votes adding to his Electoral College total.

This was reported by a Wisconsin NBC affiliate.

Did this make the difference? Several reliable sources say No, it was not the deciding factor. (VOX, who I cite very often is one of these.) That the suppressed voter was less likely to vote anyway. I point out that the surge among the rural Republican voters was also unlikely. Who would have expected devout rural people and respectable suburbanites to vote for a man who boasts of groping women, who mocks the handicapped, who encourages mob violence, a man who faces charges this month of defrauding thousands of ordinary people like themselves? It required magical thinking.

I suspect that a clear public rejection of one candidate’s lies and bigotry would help suppress his turnout even among people who believed the lies and the bigotry. That did not happen this year. For most of the year mass media broadcast hours and hours of Donald Trump’s outright lies… excuse me, Make Believe… and his downright bigotry without comment or criticism. While they were giving free air time to this ugly demagogue they were aggressively reporting the endless investigation of unsubstantiated charges against his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Those two factors gave Trump a major updraft and Hillary a major downdraft. It was not enough to explain what happened but it contributed to it, it gave it a boost.

We look to our news media for truth. When they promote Make Believe and give lengthy air time to bogus accusations they make us doubt what is real. They make us more receptive to Magical Thinking and Make Believe. (And Lies.)

Donald Trump’s entire career has been flim-flam. When he had catastrophic setbacks in real estate he turned to what’s called Reality TV. Reality TV is not reality at all. It is Make Believe. But it’s label is persuasive. The networks broadcasting it knows it is a total fabrication, a lie, but it is good for ratings and good for profits. If you promote falsehood as truth, truth is degraded and falsehood becomes part of conventional thinking. Here I could go into the teachings of Joseph Goebbels on this topic, the uses and execution of the Big Lie, but conventional thinking has barred that from any modern day discussion. Supposedly because Trump voters are not wearing brown shirts while attacking Jews and immigrants and people of color they are not the same as Hitler’s mob. Hitler is He Who Must Not Be Named. We mustn’t speak of these things. They are history and nobody cares about history anymore. Pretend those things didn’t happen. It makes it easier to pretend they won’t happen again.

But let’s get back to Make Believe.

Let’s pretend for a minute that Donald Trump is a Man of the People. That has been the media narrative, and you know how authentic that is. His followers have spent the past year believing this myth. The Man of the People is a man who lives in marble halls with gilt furniture and large oil paintings of himself in gilt frames. (Hillary’s credibility has been endlessly attacked because she sides with working class interests from an expensive home in Westchester. Trump doesn’t pretend to embrace the laboring classes at all. (He’s famously phobic about touching regular people unless they are sufficiently young, female and “hot”.) He does not embrace their interests. He only embraces their resentments and hatreds. He is an America First hero who builds his exclusive towers with imported steel and imports his flash neckties and Trump label suits from Mexico. He refuses to pay the builders and tradesmen he hires to do work on his properties. He is bogus from his ludicrous hair to the manicured fingernails on his tiny hands. He has contempt for the working classes and their mundane unglamorous lives. But he does voice their anger. He has replanted the idea that outright bigotry is OK and All American, a sad notion that many in the working classes are receptive to. The bogus reality star has legitimized our ugliest tendencies and television has turned him into a hero. We spent a century and a half since Lincoln slowly repudiating this lie of white superiority and in one election year Trump has relegitimized it, with the eager collaboration of popular media. It’s ironic that such an inferior specimen is now the show pony of white supremacy. He isn’t even white, he’s orange.

So Donald Trump is a make believe business success, a make believe Man of the People. The picture we have of him is a television fairy tale. He is a creature of the media he pretends to despise. But we are here. The package has arrived. We have opened it. No returns allowed. Does it belong to us, or do we belong to it?

I won’t spend a lot of time sorting out the empty promises he’s made. He’s already walked back some of them. The wall he promised to build was another piece of make believe. The swamp of lobbyist influence he promised to drain he is now stocking with more lobbyists, ones who owed their new status to him. He only pretended to want to end the influence of the big bankers. They are now in his posse.

The most dangerous promise he made remains. He said he’d end all efforts to combat Climate Change, because he says Climate Change is a Chinese hoax, and his transition and cabinet have a strong odor of oil and coal, not mine workers or oil field workers but lobbyists and PR geniuses. The authors of Big Oil’s successful campaign to discredit the science are all for Trump because they know his millions of devotees will believe whatever they say. We have come to a dangerous point in our history when the most powerful person in our nation is a con man, facing significant indictment this month for a massive fraud related to his bogus Trump University scheme, and the scientists, the people we trust to find out the essential truths about our world, are accused of fraud. And the news media collaborated with this inversion by giving his falsehoods equal credence and equal time. The fact checking sites found her statements mostly honest (are any of us completely honest?) and Trump’s mostly false, and mostly very very false. He thinks science is bunk. Millions of his followers who presumably passed their science classes in schools have now endorsed this dangerous idea. They cannot pretend they haven’t. So millions of others who didn’t really know or don’t fully understand are now convinced that science is something we vote on. That it isn’t true if we decide to not believe it.

Science doesn’t care whether we believe in it. It will happen whether we believe it or not.

We may think we are hostages to Trump now. But Trump has made us hostages to the horrible scientific consequences that are now going to unfold. We could have wished Trump away by voting more emphatically against him, by not trusting the cozy belief that Americans would reject something like this without every single person voting against it. But we cannot keep climate change from unfolding unless we enact and keep in place key policies which Trump has promised to oppose and reverse. This is an insane kind of make believe. Like a person who steps out of a 15 story window believing he can fly, or that angels will rescue him.

As delusions go this is not as much of an outlier as you might think. There are millions of devout right wing Christians who honestly believe that if we screw up this planet badly enough that Jesus will come. They long for this to happen.

This was reported recently in The Atlantic.

We pass these people on the street and they seem like other people we know, until they begin to discuss their beliefs. Stepping politely away from them is the safest social response but it is not going to keep us safe from the final ascension of their kind to power. Donald Trump is not a churchgoing religious zealot but his Vice President is. Mike Pence is an intense believer in Christian fairy tales and magical thinking. He not only believes the proven climate science is a hoax, he believes that the whole science of evolution from Darwin to the present day is a hoax and a lie. (In terms of ethics and morals, the New Testament is a very useful and humane document, but the superChristians evade the humane elements and prefer the more dubiously interpreted bits, the ones that provoked holy wars and inquisitions down through the Christian era. The Biblical fragments that seem to endorse slavery and oppression of women seem particularly popular among superChristians.) Mike Pence firmly believes the earth is exactly as old as the Bible says it is and that everything that is in the Bible happened exactly as written. He does not like to go into the hundreds of huge contradictions in the Bible any more than he likes to address Trump’s own almost daily contradictions because he is a Man of Faith. To him science is myth and the Bible is fact. If scientific evidence is worth anything at all today he is evidence that we have returned to the Middle Ages, before the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, before Galileo and Newton and Darwin and Einstein and Crick. The Nazis burned thousands of books in their era. In our era we don’t need to burn them because the vast majority of people aren’t aware that books exist, except the one they clutch on Sunday. They have made us a near twin of the Sharia Law extremist Islam they profess to despise. Anti-modern, anti-toleration, out of the reach of questions and proofs.

Kids used to play a particular game of Make Believe. “Let’s pretend Diane doesn’t exist,” they’d say, and Diane would find people she knew walking past her in the school hallway and not hearing the things she said. It was a fun game and very popular. Kids were very good at it in junior high and then outgrew it. Gay teenagers experienced this in an earlier time, as did teenagers of color. Each new wave of immigrants experienced this, Italians, Swedes, Irish, eastern Europeans included. They were treated like they didn’t exist. Pretending something doesn’t exist doesn’t make it disappear.

Recently, there was a woman in Montana interviewed by a reporter on NPR. She was opposed to the settling of Syrian and other refugees in Montana. The reporter asked her if this was racist. She replied that there couldn’t possibly be any racism in Montana because there weren’t any black people there. A GOP chairwoman in Ohio said to a reporter that there was no racism in this country until Obama became president. For millions of Americans this is absolutely true, because they believe it is true. If they never saw any other races they didn’t despise them. It was those other races coming within their range of vision that caused the racism, impinging on their lives, breathing white people’s air, walking on white people’s sidewalks and demanding to eat at their lunch counters. This uppityness is what caused racism. It wasn’t their fault. Racism was not their problem, it was the problem of the other races. The problem with this is that those other races are a majority of people on this earth and white people are a diminishing minority. This magical thinking about race is a dangerous self-deception but it is now the norm because the Trump presidency has validated it. It is very difficult to change people’s beliefs.

Mike Pence believes no one is born gay, despite the clear science on this. Mike Pence says science is bunk and his beliefs are true and he is the Vice President elect, and his frank, polite Indiana way of looking at you convinces you that he has no interest in hearing otherwise. He is firm in his bigotry. If Trump has as short an attention span as he has demonstrated up to now Mike Pence will be the acting president the way Dick Cheney was for eight years. And we know how well that went. At least Dick Cheney was able to understand the difference between science and fairy tales but he exploited this vulnerability in others. We are now led by a fake with no center and a true believer in magical thinking.

Was it our own magical thinking that allowed it to happen? At crucial moments in history the worst possible reaction is to doubt the science and the truth. The failure of the polling experts to predict the late Trump surge has undermined our trust in all experts. How did they fail to see this? They failed to see this outcome because they underestimated the likelihood that America might fall for nonsense this evident and this dangerous. They trusted us. In fact more Americans voted for science and honesty and trustworthiness than voted for fraud and deception and fairy tales. The fact that a lot of Americans were uncertain might be explained by the news media’s dangerous habit of always presenting both sides as equally true. As if it’s biased to say truth is more honest than falsehood or safety is no better than clear danger and enormous corruption is no worse than petty indiscretion. The American public was poorly served. We were delivered to this place. Magical thinkers believe we can shape things to suit our private fantasies, but the universe doesn't care about our private fantasies. We may soon reach a point where mankind cannot walk back the harm we have done. The scientists do not deal in fairy tales, and they have warned us. Covering our ears and chanting USA! USA! or Trump! Trump! Trump! will not keep the oceans from flooding our ports and shorelines. Prayer will not keep the crop growing regions we depend on for food from drying up or washing away or civilization from collapsing around us. If you believe in the teachings of the Bible, heed the part where we are instructed to be good stewards of this creation, to choose truth over lies, to oppose bullies and aid the poor in their struggles rather than falling in with the rich. Over thousands of years our wisest teachers have taught us what to do, how to make wise humane choices, and we seem poised to do the opposite.

The Forces Hoping Trump Wins and How They Are Trying To Make It Happen

These are the people voting for Trump. Are you going to let them take over the country?

Trump’s white nationalist supporters are openly planning massive voter intimidation on election day… The Trump crew includes neo-nazis, klansmen and extremist militias. Is this how America ends?

The overt suppression of the minority vote reported by Politico

Vanity Fair reports on the White Supremacist groups suppressing the black vote to elect Trump.

Right wing white militias are preparing to overthrow the government if Hillary wins on Tuesday.

Reported by Reuters News Service

Nearly every newspaper in America has endorsed Hillary Clinton because they find Trump dangerous and unfit for office. One newspaper endorsed him this week, the newspaper of the KKK. He says what they think. They want what he is promising.

Reuters reports on the KKK supporting Trump all the way

The Republican Senator from NC suggests it would be cool if someone would shoot Hillary Clinton.

Richard Burr (R/NC) urges assassination of a Democratic president

The Trump ethos is one of hatred, abuse, threats, bigotry, bullying and violence. Do we have the courage to stop him?

In an ironic turn, Melania Trump says she would fight online bullying as First Lady, when her husband is an online bully of colossal proportions. Via Creators Syndicate

The cop killer in Des Moines was a white Trump supporter who was angry that the police wouldn’t arrest black fans at a high school football game who failed to stand for the national anthem or let him wave his Confederate flag in their faces.

The Independent newspaper in Britain reports on how this incident in Iowa.

In Mississippi Trump supporters deface and torch a black church. Reported by the LATimes

Another report here

The energy and enthusiasm behind Trump is called Alt Right, which means racist, white, male and heavily armed

Mother Jones reports on how the alt right is led by folks with high incomes, like Trump himself

Mother Jones reports on the nexus of Trumpism, the Alt Right and white supremacists

Does the FBI want Trump to be elected because they’d like to have the police state Trump promises them?

Reported by Vanity Fair

Reported by Daily Beast

How many of the FBI rank and file belong to Oath Keepers, the extremist group that seeks to nullify lawful government if they disagree with it?

The SPLC reports on the phantom law enforcement group that may (in my thinking) be behind the corruption of the FBI and other law enforcement.

There has been a powerful effort to block the will of the American voter by nullifying one president, the first black president, blocking everything he proposed even if the proposal was something they had supported previously when a white Republican proposed it. It's a throwback to darker days in our history.

The nullification strategy dates back to the slave states before the Civil War who refused to obey laws infringing on their “god given right” to own human beings as property.

The End Of Science May Signal The End of Civilization––and Trump's In Favor Of It

Millions of trees suddenly dying. Storms of unprecedented violence. Once in a millennium floods occurring once a month. This sort of thing ought to mobilize world leaders to action.

This scary die off of forests was reported this morning in The Guardian.

There have been many articles recently about ocean levels already rising. Scientists predicted this and many Americans chose to demonize them.

Rising ocean levels reported by National Geographic.

Rising oceans is not as worrying as rising ocean acidity, which may compound the climate change dynamic and also degrade the earth’s ability to create oxygen. Think about that.

Rising acidity of the oceans reported by Scientific American.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party is in control of Congress and on the verge of winning the White House. The Republican leadership has accepted millions of dollars in exchange for denying climate change and blocking scientific research into climate change. They think that believing something isn’t happening will prevent it from happening. So they close their eyes and wish and pray and they punish and condemn anyone who is paying attention. Being rational and responsible is a punishable offense, according to the Republican Party.

The ignorant and dangerous anti-science leadership in this Republican Congress, reported in the New Yorker.

Half of our country is in thrall to a delusion. The right half of the country believes if they vote for Donald Trump all the things he denies are true will automatically be untrue. One man’s mental illness has become contagious and it may become the law of the land. Bigotry may become policy. Ugly rumor will be our guide to what is true, the uglier the truer. Superstition and corporate PR will replace science. One man’s angry impulses will replace careful and rational planning. Policies that should benefit the whole country will be retooled to suit one man, his whims (and boy has he got whims), his prejudices, his hates, his lusts, his greed, his narcissism, his frequent urges to do violent harm to people who have displeased him.

The New Yorker gives us a picture of what Trump will be able to do immediately when he reaches office.

If Trump is elected all of our nation’s decision-making institutions will pass to him. He will cancel climate change accords and devote America to full use of fossil fuels. And 99% of our scientists will be silenced if not criminalized. Let’s set aside his endorsement of more nuclear weapons in trouble spots and a looser policy about using them. Let’s forget about his expressed willingness to kill people he “has a feeling” are criminals. Let’s forget about his ugly bigotry toward all non-white people living on earth. Let’s forget about his long history of fraud and violation of contracts and reneging on promises and lies big and small. Let’s forget about his scary admiration for the worst dictators on the planet, and his many millions in debt owed to one of them.

Let’s just focus on one thing, the greatest danger to human civilization in the history of human civilization: global climate change.

It won’t stop happening just because one poorly informed individual refuses to believe it is happening. Half of America’s voters seem excited to go on this carnival ride with him, to trust his shallow beliefs, to place their lives and their loved ones’ lives in his hands. It’s like a hostage situation, where the male head of a household barricades himself and his family in his house with his arsenal, only this arsenal is nuclear. It seldom ends well. Usually it ends with the family dead and the deranged man dead by his own hand. It’s like Jonestown where many hundreds were willing to drink the poisoned kool-aid because their leader instructed them to. His beliefs were translated into orders and they obeyed.

A few years ago we laughed as a creepy and hilarious congresswoman left the political stage. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) said science was evil and the End Times were here. She seemed downright pleased that the world was coming to and end. It was all falling apart according to her prayers. People like Bachmann believe that if they can screw up the world badly enough by provoking wars and poisoning the environment and making economies collapse, then Jesus will come and rescue them. Like a fire starter who believes the fire department will give them a medal. Her loopy beliefs got a lot of mileage and endorsement from FoxNews, the leading cable news channel, and from talk radio. (On talk radio 9/11 is believed to have been a plot run by the U.S. government.)

Well, folks, half of American voters, or nearly half, seem to fit this description. America’s future, and the world’s, may be in the hands of ignorant, hateful, deranged, heavily armed lunatics.

Your Daily Trump––Sympathy For The Devil

This election is being shaped by something I call The General Theory of "Murder She Wrote”.

That program was widely popular across middle America. It was also very influential on that subliminal level where Americans make judgments of good and evil, safe and dangerous. It taught millions of Americans that the person who appears least likely to be a monster is the actual monster, and the most monstrous person is actually completely good and decent. Our judgment has been clouded ever since.

Which might explain why the whole news media is now behaving like the right wing nut jobs at Breitbart News.

Te Nehisi Coates explains at the Atlantic.

The Canadians believe we are insane and wonder what has happened to American news reporting.

The Canadian newsmagazine Maclean's examines the bizarre double standard of coverage.

New York magazine reports that more than half of Trump supporters believe Obama wasn’t born in the U.S.

Mic.com reports that almost half of Trump supporters in Iowa think it was a good idea to put Japanese Americans into camps during WW2.

Meanwhile the pro-Trump governor of Kentucky said that if Hillary is elected that patriots will have to murder the tyrant. Reported by VOX.

Martin Shkreli, the wealthy hedge fund wizard who got rich by jacking up the cost of medications is acting as a guerrilla Trump surrogate. The reliably right wing NYPost has this story.

Trump Trolls may not constitute half of Trump voters but there are plenty of nasty Trumpsters out there eager to slur a columnist who has a Hispanic last name. Reported from Cleveland.

Speaking of double standards, remember when W lost 20 million emails and nobody investigated it. Reported at Newsweek.

This Election Is Beginning To Feel Like A Horror Movie

The New York Times has had to walk back its article describing a kinder gentler Trump.

What is the problem with the Gray Lady? Are they writing their political coverage in advance? Are they trying to make this an even race?

They are covering this election as if we have two equal evils to choose from. This is the perverse and extreme result of their gymnastic adjustments to make every story fully balanced.

If science is given thirty seconds, superstition must be given equal time.

If tolerance and decency is given a column on the front page, then bigotry and violent hate must be given a full column alongside.

Honesty and competence must not be weighted more favorably than dishonesty and incompetence.

If a journalist believes consensus scientific findings then he is unfairly biased. If a reporter believes the truth and rejects a lie she is biased and prejudiced against liars.

I’ve been commenting that most of the media are behaving like the foolish teenage girl in the horror movie who’s having a trivial spat with her best friend on the phone while the homicidal monster is climbing in her bedroom window. Who should she be confronting? Hillary, the best friend she's occasionally annoyed with, or Trump, the monster climbing in the window. I think she should be unfriending the monster, but that’s just me, and I’m biased.

What’s disturbing is how half of America seems to be rooting for the homicidal monster.

I guess we tend to do that while we’re watching a horror movie. Americans love horror movies.

Americans are losing the ability to distinguish between reality and horror fiction. What kind of future does that foretell?

The Contrarian Blogger thinks Americans are exactly that stupid.

What we are facing is a choice between the familiar, which may frustrate and annoy us but is fundamentally OK and might actually be much better than OK, and an ugly dystopia of jackboots and deportation camps and race war and inequality-on-speed.

Kurt Eichenwald on the real threat to America, (It isn't HRC, it's DJT and the GOP.)

SALON explains this new extreme right surge called the Alt-Right

Mother Jones sits down with blue collar Trump supporters.

Mother Jones reports on the hard-right, racist, anti-semitic, woman-haters now in charge of the Trump campaign.

Climate Change May End Civilization But The GOP Has Decided They Don't Care

VOX posted a disturbing video history of how the climate change consensus devolved into a partisan football game pitting the stupid people who distrust science against the rational people who trust science.

There was scientific consensus early on, then there was political consensus. Then people who disliked the consensus decided to sabotage it and destroy it. Why? For reasons of profit.

But the main visible reason that consensus seems to have broken down is because Americans elected a black man president. Republicans didn’t like having a black president and decided that everything he proposed needed to be blocked.

Of course it’s more complicated than that. Fossil fuel billionaires poured billions into the PR campaign to derail the rational response to the climate change threat. Their profits drove the whole propaganda machine. But the unifying principle behind the opposition and its absolute team unity was racism.

FoxNews enforced this opposition with dangerously misleading and prejudicial reporting and the Republican Party turned the future of civilization into a team sport. They decided they were on the team that didn’t believe the scientists. A Republican senator said on the floor of the Senate that climate change was a hoax because he had a snowball in his hand.

We know what the problem is. We know which companies are causing the problem. (You'll find a list here at Science Magazine.) We know our behavior is making the problem worse and we have the ability to choose. But the most powerful media force available to Americans, the most watched news network, FoxNews, is dead set against a rational response. Why? Because they are the network of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party is dedicated to the rational scientific response, so they are opposed to it. It’s a binary response. Whatever the other side is proposing, they’re against it.

For eight years this obstruction remained unified because the leader of the Democrats was black. They hated being told by a black man that something needed to be done. Following the leadership of a black man was against 500 years of tradition.

The new obstruction that will begin in 2017 will dictate that all Republicans must oppose everything President Hillary Clinton proposes because they dislike having a woman president. This opposition will be built on thousands of years of male dominant tradition.

Deep racism and sexism and the sacred profits of oil and coal companies have energized half of America into an irrational mob. They refuse to believe anything except what they are told by their masters. This has turned a danger into an existential threat to civilization.

This seems attractive to some on the right who believe if they screw up the world badly enough Jesus will come.

What people need to understand is simple enough. Civilization is built upon a predictable and reliable climate––reliable rainfall and reliable growing seasons. Climate change will end that. It took thousands of years of reliable rain and growing seasons to lay down the soil that grows the crops we live on. We built our infrastructure around these reliable growing regions. People need to understand what will happen when our farming infrastructure and our fertile soil is located where crops will no longer grow. When the oceans rise we will have difficulty shipping food because our port infrastructure will be flooded.

A recent president who was faced with his failure said he didn’t mind how history judged him because he’d be dead. This appears to be the reasoning of the wealthy and stupid forces organized to oppose responsible action to slow and halt climate change. By the time the world knows the Koch Brothers helped doom our civilization they will be dead.

At some point people with enormous wealth stopped behaving responsibly as people, as citizens, and began playing wealth as a game in which nothing mattered but the score they could rack up before they died, at which point the game was over.

One Lawman's Idea of Due Process

The head of the FBI was on television the other day and he accomplished a remarkable thing. He made both political parties angry. He announced the FBI was not recommending the DOJ file criminal charges against Hillary Clinton because there was no evidence of a crime. But he expanded into a long dissertation on what he, as a lawman, saw as Hillary Clinton's misdeeds. Law officers are not supposed to announce that a person is not being prosecuted and then explain why they wish they could go ahead and hang the accused. How, if this were a properly run country, they'd be able to do just that.

The Washington Post published a pretty fair explanation of how FBI Director Comey's performance was unprofessional.

The FBI Director's press conference did not unfold in this way. But the message was a bit like this.

“We are not pressing charges,” the lawman said. “But that doesn’t mean this person isn’t a lowdown, dirty skunk who should be strung up by the nearest lamppost. We found no evidence of wrongdoing, but we’re pretty sure there was plenty. Just by looking at her we figure that she’s guilty as sin. She’s just lucky we didn’t find anything. This time. What I mean to say is she’s probably a serious criminal, or at the very least recklessly incompetent while being simultaneously devilishly cunning in the way she covers up her wrongdoing, which must be why we didn’t find any evidence of any crime. Still, since I still have a microphone, we’re pretty sure there was some sort of crime committed here and we wouldn’t be doing our job if we ignored Congressman Issa’s and Congressman Malfoy’s hunches and admitted there wasn’t. Just because we didn’t find any crime doesn’t mean there wasn’t one, and probably lots of ‘em. I suspect the defendant would probably have gone on a terrific crime spree if thousands of lawmen with reliably conservative hunches hadn’t spent the past 30 years investigating every part of her public and private life."

“Sometimes you got to be a little cute, a little smarter than they are, to catch these folks, especially when it’s a criminal thing other people do all the time without being arrested or “nailed” as we lawmen like to say. What we have to do in these gray areas,” said the lawman, “is to say it’s OK to talk about stuff, and then after certain people have talked about it to then go in and make it Top Secret at this point. Then we got ‘em. We've got them red handed for committing a crime but only because it wasn’t actually a crime when they did it. Again, I am a lawman and know how this works: it doesn’t matter that it happened before it was a crime. For all we know they were plotting to wait until it was criminal and then commit the crime. We kind of know which people are criminals, that’s why we’re professionals. But we have to be quick enough to catch them, which means jumping in before the thing is actually a crime. We did this by having the crime in our pocket, ready made, to fix them up with. For instance, that’s how we catch traitors. Because traitors are especially cunning about this, pretending to be just as patriotic as you or me. Sometimes if we can’t do it this way, it can work just as well to go in and stamp random shit Top Secret. The folks we want to nail are bound to say something or other and then we can tie them in to the stuff that’s been made Top Secret Ex Post Facto.”

Reporter: “Wouldn’t that make a lot of innocent people into criminals?”

“No, sir. Not everybody. Not people we like. Just the ones we got our eyes on. Regular folks don’t need to worry. That is unless they do something we don’t like, in which case they have only themselves to blame. What this method allows us to do is keep a huge log of crimes in our inventory that we can pull off the rack, so to speak, and fix on people if and when the need arises. So those of you out there who feel worried about being caught. Well, that’s good. You should be worried. Everybody should watch their step at all times because we’re always hunting for people to lock up. That’s called doing our job. How do we know someone is guilty? Here’s how you tell. You accuse them of a crime and if they look guilty they definitely are. We could probably lock up two thirds of the U.S. population if we wanted to. Actually we’d like to but we’re undermanned and underfunded, mostly because of Democrats who criminally refuse to raise our budgets the way we ask. Fortunately lawmen and prosecutors are given a great deal of discretion about who to go after and who to let alone. All you got to do is look at which political party they belong to.”

Which is apparently what goes on in some law enforcement circles. It was more egregious during the Bush years, when the Bush White House fired a number of federal prosecutors for not being team players, for being insufficiently zealous in going after Democrats.

Remember: FBI Director Comey is a Republican. He was appointed by a Democratic president to show that law enforcement in this administration would be impartial, would keep out of partisan witch hunting. (And in the grim aftermath of a disastrous Republican eight years there were a lot of witches to be hunted.) Comey's performance rubbishing Clinton must have been done to save his Republican reputation for team play, which, on that side of the aisle, means his highest priority is scoring points for the Republican team. Justice is a low priority. Due process is not a priority at all, more of an inconvenience, an embarrassment.

Various political analysts have done their work and explained why this firestorm about Hillary Clinton's emails is bullshit because the guidelines she followed were the guidelines followed by her Republican predecessors.

Most notably in Newsweek.

And the New York Times.

It's also been pointed out that the Bush administration deleted many thousands of emails. No uproar over that. Deleting emails only became a sin on the inauguration of Barack Obama.

And isn't it ironic: the thousands of Bush White House emails were deleted during their coverup of the political firings of U.S. Attorneys...

Also, there's evidence that the classified labels stamped on Secretary Clinton's cellphone and email utterances were done so in error.

The lawman finished up his candid off-the-record remarks by saying it’s been a very tough eight years. He came close to tears enumerating the difficulties law officers have had to deal with. "Having to follow the letter of the law has caused law officers a great deal of unnecessary stress. They’ve felt inhibited in the exercise of their duties. Having to always be worrying about this guy’s rights and that guy’s rights has taken their eye off the ball and tied their hands. That will change, hopefully, after this year’s election, if we get a president who’s serious about good old fashioned law and order. A guy who'll let the police and the FBI off the leash so they can do their jobs. So they can bust heads the way they like to. So they can shoot first and ask questions later. So they can cook up good persuasive evidence when they really want a conviction. So they can fit people up and jail them and throw away the key, without the Bill of Rights getting in their way. We’d like a president who restores our God-given right to use thumbscrews and water torture and old fashioned beatings when guilty parties lie and tell us they’re innocent. We’d like a president who’ll give us back the death penalty, because the only thing that makes our convictions safe is when a convicted man is dead and gone. Then you’d start seeing a 100% conviction rate like you used to see in the former East Germany and Iraq, and you still see in well-run countries like Russia and Kazakstan and North Korea and Syria.”

The lawman's wish list for Dear Leader of this country has one name on it right now. Donald Trump.

Of course when the lawman assumes the role of judge and prosecutor, this happens.

And America becomes a police state. It already feels like a police state to some people.

The GOP Discovers Fascism...And Likes It

The Republican leaders who a few months ago were calling Trump dangerous and extremist and bigoted and irrational are now lining up to support him. Maybe what this tells us is the Republican Party has been an authoritarian party for a long time. Fascist in all but name.

They are an obedient party. A shameless party. A party that ignores corruption and worships wealth and arrogance. When Deep Throat instructed Woodward and Bernstein to “follow the money” this is where it was leading. The Republican Party has gotten there at last.

The news media is doing its careful balancing job, where they refuse to report the insanity, bigotry and extremism of one candidate until they can invent something that makes the other candidate look just as bad.

The media message is “All politicians are dangerous, extremist, bigoted and irrational” so watch and laugh but get ready for the worst to happen.

They don’t report the policy differences (BORING!) they report the bickering, the tweets, the gossip, the bogus allegations. Trump is a master of the game of bogus allegations: he makes them ten at a time and is never called out for lying, and his lies quickly become the main story, turning the news cycle into a trash fiction contest.

Here are a few top national political observers bluntly admitting the F-word is the proper label for Donald Trump. He is a fascist.

This Is How Fascism Comes To America by neoconservative Robert Kagan in the Washington Post.

America Has Never Been So Ripe For Tyranny by conservative Andrew Sullivan in New York Magazine.

The Dangerous Acceptance Of Donald Trump by liberal Adam Gopnick in the New Yorker.

There is still time for America to regain its sanity, but the 24-hour news cycle will be pushing insanity and unreason from now till November. FoxNews has gotten into the tank with Trump. The major networks report his excesses as if they are perfectly normal and reasonable and emphasize the continuing debate in the Democratic Party as if it an embarrassing failure to get in line and follow the leader. As if politics demanded an obedient public.

Those of us who remember Nixon might try to think Trump is no worse than that, and we survived that episode.

We survived it because it was not this extreme.

Nixon had a political resumé and was part of a fairly reasonable right-of-center political party of country clubbers and members of the chamber of commerce. Trump's resumé is a circus of bankruptcies, tax evasions and cynical corruption. There is no set of values in Trump's history, except property values, which he routinely inflates or hides or lies about to fool investors and avoid taxes and evade creditors. His business life has been one long confidence trick, or a series of confidence tricks. His personal life has been a series of confidence tricks too. His vulgarity is shocking––mocking a man with disabilities––in front of a national audience; making suggestive sexual comments about his own daughter and bragging about his penis size––in front of a national audience; slurring women, veterans and one minority group after another––in front of a national audience. How vulgar can a national figure get?

It's hard to imagine anyone more uncouth than Trump. And yet conservative church leaders are saying God demands that His followers vote for Trump. Trump who shows no familiarity with Christian values, and only contempt for all other religions. But it would be "unseemly" for the national news media to criticize one party's candidate without condemning the other equally. Their "standards" require "balance" but balance is a lie. There is no equivalence here. The Republican Party has disgraced itself but as long as its leaders and the news media refuse to notice this disgrace all will be well. And they may win the election by pretending all is well.

The leaders (can we call them leaders?) of the Republican Party think they can control this goon. Their only hope may be that their long campaign to degrade government, to make it weak and dysfunctional, has worked well enough that Trump will be installed at the head of a government that has no power at all. Our country has been a long, interesting experiment in democracy, but the founders never anticipated an experiment this deranged or cynical.

Place Blame Where It Belongs

The recent arguments over the GOP's determination to block President Obama's constitutional obligation to appoint a new justice to the Supreme Court have tended to return to the old canard that "both parties do this." Both parties are not equally extreme or rigid or prejudiced or hypocritical. One party is causing most of the dysfunction, even if, sadly and unfairly, most Americans have a habit of blaming everyone in elected office.

Which makes it worth re-reading an op-ed from a few years ago by two of the more clear-eyed political observers, Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann.

Saying both parties are to blame for the dysfunction we’ve seen in recent years is the result of public laziness. Or perhaps it's exhaustion. Either way it flows from a bad habit in our journalism and the news media who are supposed to moderate and referee our public discourse. I’m referring to the bad habit of false equivalency or false balancing.

“Both sides do it” was Nixon’s defense when a bit of political spying exposed the massive corruption in his presidency. It's also the defense given by five year olds who want to misbehave like the friends their parents don't want them to hang around with.

I’m reminded of something that happened at a friend’s house when I was eight or nine. The older brother was in the rec room pounding the hell out of my friend when their mother came in. She didn’t drag the older brother off and send him to his room; she yelled at both of them and punished both of them for fighting. This is false equivalency: if one party is doing wrong, whether beating or lying or cheating, it is somehow “unfair” to punish or rebuke the one that is offending without also rebuking and punishing the other, the victim. Both were fighting. "It takes two to make a fight." If one party does wrong something in our sense of fairness requires us to say, “Well, both were probably to blame.” This is why we hear people say that the victim of a crime probably asked for it, the beaten wife probably shouldn’t have provoked her husband, the rape victim should have dressed more primly or not gone outside after dark. This kind of lazy rationalization licenses the wrongdoer.

A lot of Americans have expressed disappointment with President Obama because he "doesn’t fight hard enough" for what the Democrats want to achieve, because he doesn’t go full-on political with the Republicans who have embargoed his presidency from day one. But when Obama was elected most Americans breathed a giant sigh of relief because he promised to preside as a moderate, as someone willing to look for common ground, willing to get things done, willing to avoid the bitter partisanship which had disgusted Americans in recent years. Americans applauded his promise to keep away from the nastiness that obsesses the other party. When others got ugly, he did not. When a freshman congressman called him a liar at the State of the Union, he answered civilly and without rancor, because it was a ludicrous and ugly remark. When idiots like Donald Trump questioned his birth certificate he laughed; it was the only sane response to a stupid charge that was provably false and proven to be so.

We’ve heard it seriously suggested by Republicans that Obama has been a divisive president. And there has been no moderate voice to point out what a stupid suggestion this is. The news media has simply reported the Republicans are saying it. They have reported it endlessly without invalidating it or even questioning it. (Just as they have covered Donald Trump’s candidacy without examining his statements or positions for validity or falsehood or bigotry or contradictions.) Calling Obama divisive is a bit like blaming the black family down the street for the burned spot in their front yard. True, that cross would not have been burned there if they had not been black and had not lived in that house. But it is deeply wrong and dishonest to blame the victim for the offenses committed against him. These things are an offense to all of us; perhaps we are all to blame.

All the evidence––the comments, the obstruction, the disrespectful comments by Republican officials, the outright hatred in the comments sections in newspapers and websites––tells us that the Republican base believes Obama was divisive simply because he was elected as a black man. Having a black family living in the White House upsets and somehow “insults” the base of the Republican Party––therefore it was “divisive" of Barack Obama to win the office. And twice as "divisive" to win it twice. That this ludicrous charge isn't greeted with broad disgust shows how corrupted our public conversation has become. Other ugly ideas flow from this unrepudiated and racist sentiment in the Republican base. It now seems the Republicans feel––since the Constitution stated that black Americans were only 3/5 of a human being––that any black American president should have a similarly limited presidency, say three years instead of four. This is difficult to dispute if you believe the Constitution was perfect as written, as if it was a sacred text from God, complete with its slavery provisions, and this is what most Republicans seem to believe. Especially canvassed en masse. One member of a mob will tend to uphold the consensus of the entire body no matter how ugly it is.

This core belief among Republicans that Democrats––and especially Democrats of color––are illegitimate is a deep seated, habitual, and outright form of bigotry. And it is a core part of the Republican brand. It has been so ever since the Democratic Party embraced civil rights and the Republican Party happily invited all the racists to join the GOP. It was written into the party’s campaign strategy in the Southern Strategy that elected Nixon to the White House twice.

A good short piece on the Republicans' Southern Strategy from Bloomberg.

Because Americans prize civility we are barred from calling this racism or bigotry, and we are barred by our news media’s habit of false equivalency from calling the Republican Party racist and bigoted, even when it is, but failure to call out bigotry tends to license it. When we (or our news media) accept a political extremist’s values without opposing or rejecting them we see the political middle skewed toward that extremism.

The center shifts. The standards of validity are rewritten to accommodate what was formerly unacceptable. Just as failure to call out a lie against science and reason shifts public opinion toward the lie and away from the scientific truth. People have a habit of balancing opposing arguments, and if the false argument is not repudiated, whether out of politeness or laziness or cowardice or bad habit, it corrupts the public conversation and the public conception of what is true. Barack Obama has chosen to match political extremism and bigotry and anti-science unreason and outright dishonesty with moderation and reason and tolerance and honesty.

Reason has a disadvantage when it is confronted by unreason. Unreason is louder, it is more fanatical, it is more stubborn, it is narrow minded and will not listen to dispute. President Obama has responded reasonably and tolerantly to the unreason and bigotry of his opponents. Does answering intolerance with tolerance make him a hypocrite? No. He was only tolerant in allowing the bigots the freedom to speak. As Voltaire put it “‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Which puts truth and science and reason and tolerance at a tactical disadvantage. When the Democratic Party repudiated racism the Republicans seized that opening. Knowing that no politician would win by calling the voters bigots, the GOP decided to embrace the bigots and this tactical advantage.

Which means that reasonable people need to engage in the argument instead of relaxing in the comfortable belief that they are right and the comfortable habit of not getting angry about someone else’s offensive beliefs. We cannot relax and feel confident that falsehood will be evident to everyone hearing it. We cannot be confident that everyone will see and repudiate racism or unreason or hypocrisy or unAmerican values without our taking the trouble to point them out. We are obligated to repudiate bigotry and unreason and dysfunction and to place the blame for these things squarely on those causing them. If we do not we are making it likelier that the ugly dishonest things we deplore will become the norm.

Fascism: Can It Happen Here?

It happened before in another educated industrialized country. Books were written about it. Milton Mayer's book was one of the best. He interviewed ten ordinary Germans in depth to discover how they'd been led down that path.

An excerpt from Milton Mayer’s THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE FREE: THE GERMANS 1933-45

How did it happen then? Is it happening again now? The resemblances are disturbing: people who aren’t paying attention, people who are uninterested in the truth and more interested in what is popular, people who want a complete change from what we have and are eager to have an authoritarian government.

The German magazine Der Spiegel is calling Donald Trump the most dangerous man in the world.

How did this happen here?

Was it the well documented Deception Industry which urges people to disbelieve science and the advice of experts?

Was it FoxNews, which pumped us full of disinformation?

Are people eager for a dictator because they’ve been so skillfully confused––just so they don’t have to make decisions themselves?

George Will, who helped build this Republican Party, has finally grown alarmed by what he made.

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi describes what has happened and how it happened.

VOX explains Trump's particular brand of authoritarianism.

Hand-wringing from the conservative middle-American beacon, The Chicago Tribune.

In the 1930s Sinclair Lewis wrote a novel, IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE, about a fascist demagogue who is elected to the presidency and quickly makes of this country what Hitler made of Germany. Can it happen here?

Why Do Republicans Believe Spending Dedicated To Helping People Is Wrong?

According to new information (reported by VOX) anti-poverty spending does far more good than we’ve been told. Why do Republicans hate helping the poor? Maybe it’s their way of looking at things. If you measure everything in dollar terms, obligation is bad, therefore irresponsibility is good; spending is bad, therefore not spending is good.

Republicans, believing what corporate lobbyists tell them, assess problems in dollar terms too. If you spend a lot of money on a problem it’s a big problem. If you spend no money on a problem it’s not a problem at all. They choose the second approach. Problems which no money is spent on don’t exist. Poor and sick people die more quickly, quietly and (above all) more cheaply if you limit their access to healthcare. If you can use their health problems to extract maximum profits out of them that’s not a problem either, that’s a good thing. But obligation to heal people is expensive and therefore a problem.

Food benefits to poor people are a relatively small part of government spending but if you don’t know any poor people it seems like an easy item to cut when you’re trying to maximize tax benefits to your wealthy contributors and the people you golf with. From where the average Republican lives you hardly notice children going hungry. If it causes them to do poorly in school you can tell yourself it’s their moral failure. If they have to work three minimum wage jobs to feed their kids you can say that is a measure of high morality. By refusing to give them a food subsidy you are doing them a favor by making them better people. They're setting a better example for the children they are never home to see or interact with.

The effectiveness of anti-poverty spending isn’t measured in the same way on the Republican side. It’s not effective if it helps poor people because the good done by spending is not measured by the Republican accountant unless that money is spent in an upward direction. Money spent on people down the income scale is measured as a negative, the way accountants measure employee pay and benefits. The good we do in life almost always subtracts from profits.


Meanwhile, in Kansas, the capitalist utopia, where corporate tax cuts bloom like sunflowers and there are no public needs because there is no money to spend on public needs… a governor is hurting. Poor pitiful him. (The whole sad story is in the Kansas City Star.)

Brownback isn't the only example of Republican nuttiness. There's Dan Burton, former Republican senator from Indiana, now a lobbyist for bogus science and cult worship. (Reported in Forbes.)


The Republican Right seems to be certifiably insane. It believes the best way to fiscal responsibility is to cut taxes. The best way to make a fair society is to make sure all tax liability falls on people who work 9-5 jobs. And the best way to handle healthcare is to make sure it’s unaffordable for sick people and poor people so they die more quickly, cheaply and quietly.

And the best medicine apparently isn’t the kind pioneered by Pasteur and Salk and the other lifesaving scientists who delivered us from mass epidemics. Republicans used to be a practical and sensible lot. A bit stodgy and stingy but sound. Now they are represented by fruitcakes and sociopaths and hypocrites. A sad end to the once progressive party of Lincoln and T.R.

The Politics of Unreason

H&RBlock lobbied to make our tax preparations more complicated so the poor would be unable to file their own taxes and H&RBlock would get more customers.

MotherJones reports

Rudy Giuliani looked at homeless people as vermin to be eliminated. This approach was tried once in Germany.

From the New York Times

The NRA used to be a responsible organization favoring the strict regulation of killing machines. That changed.

From VOX

One gun maker actually admitted America has a problem with gun violence. They were severely punished for this moment of reason.

Reported by Frontline/PBS

Americans usually equate Republican and Christian values. How did Christianity go from being on the side of the poor and less fortunate to being against them, working on the side of the rich and powerful?

I guess Jesus preferred rich people, loved war, opposed healing the sick and favored universal gun ownership. I must reread my New Testament. Maybe it’s in the Revised Standard Version.

From Salon, an article on the unChristianity of Christians today

The Republican half of our politics has become unhinged––but not like an eccentric neighbor we can tolerate and find amusing. (I’m one of those.) They’ve become the insane neighbor with the vicious dogs and the arsenal of weapons. He sics his dogs on kids who set foot on his grass. It’s the house where we hear shouting and crying late at night. Do we call the police? Now they want to build a ten foot spite wall along the property line. What do you do when your neighbor is insane?

Their actions affect all of us...

Andy Borowitz reports in this insanity

In 1936 only two states voted against FDR. Vermont and Maine. Two years later the Republican governor of Vermont had had it with the Republican Party and said so. The GOP was moderate then compared to now…

Bill Moyers takes a look back

More Observations On America's Nuttier Half

The only Republican presidential hopeful who isn’t a man has a strange opinion of working Americans. (Raw Story reports Carly Fiorina thinks working Americans watch porn all day.)

Conspiracy Theories shape the way the Right looks at the world. (Vox reports on the GOP rumor that Harry Reid got on the wrong side of the mob.)

(I wonder what Republicans would say if Scalia showed up with a black eye?)

Is this more or less bizarre than the rumor I told you about last week––that Obama tried to drop a nuclear bomb on Charleston? (Bloomberg reported on that GOP rumor.)

How’s the Supreme Court looking after a few decades of libertarian rule? (Salon's take on where SCOTUS is headed.)

Don’t worry. Scalia is so perfect he can just wing it. What does it matter if a few more innocent people are executed? Tony doesn’t know any of them. (Slate reports on Scalia's casual approach to death penalty appeals.)

Meanwhile, how’s our brilliant and always perfect private sector doing?

Private for-profit prisons find it’s more profitable to feed inmates garbage… actual garbage. Food that’s been thrown in the garbage. Brilliant. (Think Progress reports on the for-profit prison diet plan.)

Republicans believe every task that involves repairing society’s ills or dealing with pain and fear of death is a wonderful profit opportunity.

What happens when the task is less important than the profit? The Republican half of the U.S. doesn’t believe we have any obligation to treat other Americans with respect. Other Americans are just a profit opportunity. America’s problems are only a business model, nothing more.

Republican Nuttiness

New Arizona law passed by Republican legislature requires doctors to tell women that abortions can be reversed and to urge them to do so. (Reported in SLATE)

Arizona legislator (Republican) proposes law that would require all Arizonans to go to church. (Reported in the Arizona Republican)

In Oklahoma (in case you missed it) a Republican has proposed a law that would require persons wanting to get married to get permission from a clergyman. (Reported by the religion site PATHEOS)

Wisconsin billionaires appear able to pay governor money and have their taxes disappear. They get unions to disappear too. (in the Milwaukee Journal-Star)

(You save big money for the Menards, in Milwaukee Magazine)

Republicans believe bizarre rumor that Obama tried to nuke Charleston SC. (Reported in Bloomberg, which has obviously decided weird stories about a weird political party have to be reported)

The Terrible Horrible No-Good Very Bad Party

I can’t decide how to characterize the GOP these days.

Are they the stupid party?

The New York Times, not prone to such language, called them idiots after their letter to Iran.

Alternet reports on the author of that letter, Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), telling an uninsured constituent not to use Obamacare because Russian mobsters would steal her identity...

Stupid?

Or are they the incredibly insanely horrible party?

Raw Story reports on a GOP candidate in Indiana expressing frustration that nobody has the guts to let people just wither and die. (Death panels, anyone?)

Vox is reporting that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) promised if he were president he would send troops into Congress. (Would he wear knee pants and lace like Oliver Cromwell?)

From DailyKos: A state senator in Missouri has raised a few eyebrows for subjecting two abused girls with severe emotional problems to exorcisms. When the exorcisms failed to work as expected he gave one of the girls to a friend who raped her. He insists that he is the victim.

Raw Story: Former Republican presidential candidate Pat Robertson recently advised a caller to his television program to quit her job because working alongside Buddhists might infect her with Buddhism. Buddhism being a kind of disease.

It hasn’t always been this way. A new book reviewed in the Washington Post describes how the Republican Party used to be the practical party, the party that got things done, the progressive, problem-solving party. It’s been downhill since Eisenhower.

Are they Nixonians or Confederates?

47 Republican senators sent a letter to Iranian leaders warning them not to sign any nuclear agreement with President Obama, saying they would not honor such an agreement after Obama left office. This sort of thing is not supposed to occur. Party politics are supposed to end at the water’s edge. But this sort of thing has happened before.

Vox does a good job of summarizing here.

In 1968, the Nixon campaign worried that President Johnson’s peace negotiations would succeed in ending the Vietnam War and win Humphrey the election. So Nixon sent an envoy to South Vietnam and persuaded the South Vietnamese to scuttle the peace talks, saying Nixon would give them a better deal when he was elected. He was elected, probably because the talks failed (it was a very close election) and the war went on for several more years, costing hundreds of thousands more lives, and ripping our nation apart.

When the evidence became public years later, Politico reported it here.

In 1980 the Reagan campaign worried that President Carter might be successful in negotiating the release of the hostages held in Iran, helping his re-election effort. So Reagan sent an envoy to persuade the Iranians to hold the hostages because Reagan would give them a better deal when he was elected. He was elected. The hostages were released the day he was sworn in.

The fairly complete story of the Reagan scheme is told here.

Reagan went on to do other deals with the Iranians who took American hostages. He traded arms for hostages. Those arms were used by Mideast terrorists. The profits from the arms sales were funneled to our own terrorist death squads in Central America. When he was elected, George H. W. Bush pardoned everyone involved in this illegal activity. Some of them served in the George W. Bush administration, where they were involved in the justification of torture and other unAmerican policies.

Because the Iran Contra Affair played out in public, we can see the film footage. Reagan pled forgetfulness and was anointed a saint by the Republican Party.

Letter to George Will

(George Will gave some advice to Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker about the stupidity of science denial. Which prompted me to write this letter.)

Mr. Will,

I sympathize with your situation, having to advise a Republican frontrunner to acknowledge science and reality. It must be embarrassing.

John McCain corrected a woman in the crowd during his campaign who said Obama was a Muslim. Then it seemed the only rational thing to do.

The problem is the Republican Party has spent the years since then catering to this same ignorant prejudice. Actually they’ve been doing it longer, if you consider Lee Atwater's and Roger Ailes' and Pat Buchanan’s not so subtle dog whistle bigotry. This past week we also have Giuliani’s ugly, ignorant remarks.

Why cater to ignorance? Because it’s worked for you. It’s elected right wing Republicans, each one further right than the last, each one more out of touch with reality. Each one more cynical and dishonest and nutty.

And this has made your party the cynical dishonest nutty bigoted party. It wins elections for you.

Well (and I realize it’s totally wrong to use this analogy) this kind of nutty cynical dishonest bigotry also helped Hitler win elections.

If it works it becomes compulsory? That seems to be the rationale Republicans have imported from the business world. It’s wrong and dangerous in both places. It’s endangering the climate our food supply is based on, it’s endangering our democracy, it’s endangering our economy, it’s endangering our future.

You have a lot of work to do unwinding this.

Of course, if you think it’s more important to carry water for the Republicans in next year’s election… if that’s more important to you and the other commentators on the right, God help us.

Your Weekly Reader

Kiss Up/ Kick Down (How to remove the poor)

A child told her mother she wanted to be a libertarian when she grew up. Her mother said she can’t be both. (A funny story about Ayn Rand)

Modern Christianity (How not to convert the unbeliever)

(How Republicans are harming the Christian brand)

Adventures in Republican Misogyny (The meat market of Republican thought)

O’Reilly’s make believe war journalism (Bill O'Reilly has an amazing imagination)

Ron Paul celebrates the New Confederacy (Secession and violating the Constitution are patriotic!)

The Giuliani Story (Giuliani explains how he cannot possibly be racist)

(Guiliani's Inspiring Tale of Patriotism)

“They’re all around us” (The strange secret club of vigilantes who are the guardians of Freedom)

(They even have a secret handshake)

We went to war to stamp this evil out in Europe and Asia. (It was called WW2. What do we do when it happens here?)

Lincoln Would Be Expelled From Today's GOP

Lapham's Quarterly posted an interesting bit of historical rhetoric. Words from Stephen Douglas when he was debating Abraham Lincoln. Reading them today they seem very much like the modern Republican mindset.

I’ve been saying for a while that the modern Republican Party thinks, acts and moves like the old Confederacy. The resemblance is so remarkable it’s surprising that newspapers and commentators haven’t picked up on it. It’s probably just too insulting and awful to say out loud. It’s considered impolite. Liberals are certainly too tolerant to say such things.

Lincoln was a great president, but by modern standards he’d be called a failure. He was so unpopular when elected that half the country seceded. How would CNN play that? For most of his four and a half years in the White House he was in charge of a war that was costing hundreds of thousands of lives and going very badly. The enemy was running rings around his generals. Lincoln’s emergency security measures were draconian and widely hated. And in the middle of this horrible crisis he decided to champion the rights of millions of another race who were not even voters, not even citizens of the nation he was president of at the time. He was laughed at for his powerlessness, his coolness, his laconic nature, his unfashionable intelligence and his patience. Lincoln was widely joked about until the day he was shot. It’s only in retrospect that we realized what a hero he was.

Lincoln had one significant advantage. Most of his enemies had seceded. Obama’s equally determined and intractable enemies are in control of both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court. Today’s virtual Confederacy also has the full and energetic backing of Wall Street’s trillions. Today’s Republican Party is the old Confederacy in a more muscular and aggressive form, minus the gentility and honor, minus the honesty about its deeply racist motives and objectives.

When Lincoln’s armies defeated the Confederacy the nation bound up its wounds and forgave the treason. The South never forgave the North for recognizing the full humanity of the former slaves and the new Confederacy is itching for revenge on this old score. The current president embodies all that they once felt superior to.

What can we call this old order of things? Was it a feudal system of serfs and masters? Somewhat, but worse. The collaboration with Wall Street gives the new Republicans a more fascist character. Mussolini defined fascism as an alliance between corporations and government that is so close you cannot slip a cigarette paper between them. That is the system the modern Republican Party would like to impose.

They’ve already done so in many ways. Will a war be profitable for their client companies? Then we shall have a war. Do their client companies want a large undocumented workforce who can be forced to work at below legal wages for longer than legal hours in illegal conditions and be immune from Social Security obligations? Then they shall have that work force. Do their client companies want to launder their profits overseas to avoid taxes? They shall be allowed to do so. Would their client corporations like to engage in massive market manipulation and fraud and not be imprisoned for it? Not a problem. Would their client billionaires like to be free to manipulate the public and rig elections and control our political system without any restraint? Fine. The Republican Party and its Supreme Jurists will declare that corporations are people and their billions are protected speech and their income is immune from taxation. It is hard to tell whether the race baiting side of the Republican personality is the dominant half or if it’s just the ugly side that comes out when it’s convenient, like the brownshirts who beat up the Jews on the street but didn’t attend the official parties when polite society was invited. The climate today has more than a passing resemblance to the 1930s in Germany. Nazi Germany and the Jim Crow South had more than a family resemblance; they were twins.

But, of course, it is impolite to say this. If it offends anyone to make this comparison, then the comparison had better not be made. It would be like repeating and giving credence to the lies said about President Obama. Saying that he is a Kenyan socialist Muslim is simply code for what the Republican half of the country would like to call him, a term which broadcast codes prohibit. Race hatred is a convenient excuse for enabling fascism. It gets the mob to march for you. Ugly emotions and ancient racial loyalties become handy tools during anxious times. But to point out the way they are being deployed would be hurtful to the ones deploying them. We mustn’t be impolite to brutal people because they might decide to be brutal to us, and they are very powerful. What they say and do is law.