The Rhino Is Taking A Pause

At the end of last year, I told you that I might be making some changes in the publication schedule of this blog.  Well, with a mixture of resignation, satisfaction, and hope for the future, I have decided to do exactly that.

Effective with the publication of this post, THR is going on hiatus for the next six months.

And, quite possibly, for more than that.

I alluded to this in my last 2022 post, and referred to the fact that I have launched a production company, one that has optioned a new play, which in turn had a reading this past February at Theatre West in Los Angeles.  The reading was a big success, and I am now working with my playwright and director on the first steps toward mounting a full-scale production, currently planned to take place in Los Angeles as well.

As I do so, however, I have developed an increasing amount of respect for the amount of work involved in mounting a production of even a small show like this one.  And, if I'm going to do this right--in other words, if I am going to do it the way I've tried to do everything in my life--I'm going to have to find more time in which to do it.  Something has had to go.

And that something, for now, is THR.

The thought of doing this has in fact been very painful for me.  A part of me has always wanted to be a columnist, and the advent of the Internet and blogging has give me along with countless others a way to do it.  I used to feel, politically, like a voice in the wilderness during the '80s and '90s, as well as the first few years of this century.  But, in the past two decades, I have seen the explosive growth of progressive politics, as well as the ways by which the Web has made that growth possible.  I know that I leave behind a world of electronic commentary filled with views much like my own, and far often more eloquent and more informed than my own.  It feels good to have been a tiny part of that for the past 14-plus years, and, while part of me wishes I could continue to be a part of it, I know that I am, for now, making the right decision.

Might I come back?  Who knows?  Part of what will determine that is the future of my producing ambitions.  Part of it may be the shape of politics.  We live in highly uncertain times, and circumstances may lead me to drop in here from time to time and speak my mind.  My Twitter account, to which my blog is linked, is not going away in any case, no matter what Musk does to Twitter, so I can promise I will not be completely silent.  And too, in connection with my producing work, I will be launching a newsletter at some point, and as many of you who want to be on the mailing list for that will be more than welcome.  There won't, of course, be any political commentary in it, and, in fact, my only regret with THR is that it didn't always have the diversity of subjects I'd originally planned for it.  Perhaps the newsletter will help make up for it.

To anyone and everyone who has read my posts, there are truly no words that adequately express my appreciation for you.  Thanks for being part of this experience.  It has meant more to me than you can know.

Whatever else you take away from reading my words, please remember that democracy is very much of a participatory sport.  The rewards go to those who get involved and stay involved.  We live in times that demand maximum involvement, for the sake of the present and the future.  Look for ways to stay involved.  And above all, STAY INVOLVED, no matter what the present looks like.  The world belongs to those who are strong enough to take and rise above whatever it dishes out.

I hope and pray, with all my heart, that all you have and will keep that strength.

G-d bless you.

Red States Are The Ones That Need their Credit Cards Cut Up

I don't have to remind you that Washington right now is consumed by a "fight" that the barely Republican House of Representatives has decided to pick with President Biden and the Democrats over raising the legal limit for the amount of money the federal government is allowed to borrow.

I don't have to remind you, although some of you may have forgotten, that raising said limit was never a "fight" during the years that Republicans controlled both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, not even after they rammed into law a trillions-of-dollars tax cut for the 1%, a tax cut that left said trillions sitting either offshore or in corporate treasuries, and not "trickling down" to the rest of us.  (Side note:  I've always appreciated the honesty of using the word "trickle" instead of, let's say, "gush."  It's a reminder that Republican policies are engineered to give them the goldmine, and everyone else the shaft.)

I shouldn't have to remind you that the "fight" is, for all practical purposes, an attempt to weaponize for purely partisan purposes the full faith and credit of the United States, which (as of right now) is being propped up by our allies and trading partners, both of whom rely on us for their own political and financial stability, as we rely on them for ours.  Nor should I have to remind you that their purpose in doing so is to create economic chaos at a level that will propel them back into control of both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, so that they can continue to replace constitutional government with a kleptocracy.  On the other hand, it's worth making the effort to make sure that all of you have been warned.

But I think it's both fair and essential to make absolutely certain that everyone understand fully that the media some-people-say-but-others-say "debate" about the raising the federal "debt ceiling" is something of a sideshow that, by design or otherwise, distracts all of us from the real fiscal problem facing us.

And it is simply this:  far too many of the United States talk a much better game of fiscal probity than the one that they actually play.  And, like it or not, the principal offenders are red states, the ones that pay lip service to balanced budgeting while using money from people they hate to balance their budgets.

I could use the specific circumstances of almost any one of these states to make my point about this.  But, since it's been in the news recently, and because it used to be a launching pad for the national careers of Democrats, I think I'll take the case of Arkansas as my Exhibit A.

Actually, Arkansas could be used as Exhibit A for another political problem, and one that is bipartisan in nature, the rampant nepotism that pervades American politics.  It's always been there, of course, and, once in a long while, it has a chance of doing something of value, as the Cuban Missile Crisis illustrated.  But, more often than not, it changes things for the worse, and that certainly seems to be the case with Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

You may recall Sanders as the combatively dishonest "press secretary" (one of several, in fact, but perhaps the best-know one) for Donald Trump during the four years that he disgraced the Oval Office.  Sanders did her fair share of disgracing her office as well.  But that should not be completely surprising, considering the fact that she got the job solely because she is the daughter of Mike Huckabee, himself a former governor of Arkansas.  But that is the new career pathway that has been created by the GQP in the age of autocracy it has launched:  when you fail in one job for which you were not qualified, fail upward in another, and make sure your children get the exact same opportunity.  And so the voters lather, rinse, and repeat all of us into perpetual failure; it just makes it easier for Republicans to scream "The system is rotten, but our opponents are even worse!"

And so it was with Sanders; with almost breathtaking speed, she went from failing in the White House press office to the governor's mansion formerly occupied by her father, where she now threatens to continue her track record of incompetence.  If anything illustrates the reality that the old American ideal of learning the ropes by working your way up them has vanished, this surely does.

I mention all of this in part because nepotism and mooching go hand-in-hand; both are forms of corruption, and the presence of one form is enough to breed others.  And mooching is definitely what goes on in red-state government--mooching, that is, off of federal revenue produced by the more productive policies practiced in blue states.

That Democratic policies in blue states produce more tax revenue for the entire nation that the Republican policies is beyond any doubt.  Certainly that is the case when The Wall Street Journal is willing to document it.  For decades, the Journal has, in its own stoic, slightly snotty way, defended the indefensible aspects of conservative economics without any regard to reality.  That has been no less true since it was purchased by Mr. Fox News himself, Rupert Murdoch, who has done more than anyone to destroy honest journalism in our nation.  But here it is.

Well, Murdoch may be willing to admit it, but you'll never hear it from the likes of Sarah Huckabee Sanders.  What you will get instead is fatuous claptrap about so-called "small government" like this gem:  "As long as I am your governor, the meddling hand of big government creeping down from Washington DC will be stopped cold at the Mississippi River."

Maybe not, if that hand is stuff with cold, hard cash that Arkansas needs to balance its budget, hand out a tax break it couldn't otherwise afford, AND provide the state's residence disaster relief that might enable them to make use of the tax break in the first instance.

For starters, she has already promised a combination of tax cutting and spending that, without the federal money that Biden's policies are pumping into state budgets, will be utterly unsustainable.  This, by the way, would be a side effect of the utterly inhumane budget bill that Barely Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy has whipped his barely-majority into passing by a solitary vote.  In the enormously unlikely event that the bill becomes the actual federal budget, red state governors like Sanders can kiss their own cut-and-spend plans goodbye.

And it gets worse.

In addition to the infrastructure and green initiatives signed into law by Biden, Arkansas and many other states need federal relief from the series of storms that have hit them.  In fact, Washington has been taking care of 75% of the bills for relief, a fact that Sanders has readily acknowledged.  Unfortunately, she has done so in the context of a demand that it take care of 100% of that cost.

That's right.  Go away, meddling hand.  But make absolutely certain that you leave behind you as much of that crispy cash from blue states as you possibly can.  It's a mindset that brings to mind the complaints that '60s era conservatives had about student protests against "the system," despite the fact that the student protests were financed in part by the willingness of their parents (i.e., part of "the system") to pay for tuition, room and board.

Believe it or not, back in the day, I had some sympathy for that point of view, not the least of which because I was one of those students (although I went to college in the '70s).  But that just makes me that much more comfortable about calling out the hypocrisy of red-state leaders who, in the immortal words of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, "vote no and take the dough."  Sanders is hardly alone.  Just look at the track record of Florida Governor and presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis.  And, while you're at it, pray that he never becomes President DeSantis.

In the context of the current House hypocrisy on the subject of federal spending, one often hears about the need to cut up the government credit card.  But maybe we're talking about the wrong credit card.  Maybe the card that we need to cut up are the cards that belong to red state governments, the latter-day equivalents of those '60 college students.  Maybe what we should be doing is giving them incentives to take the log out of their own eyes before the complain about splinters in the eyes of blue states.  (That New Testament reference seems appropriate, since so many red-staters aspire to the practice of Christianity.)  Maybe, just maybe, at the extreme end of those incentives, we consider the possibility that these states are essentially bankrupt, and that they require a federal takeover to get their finances straightened out.  Maybe even a demotion to territorial status, temporarily.

I'm not advocating these things.  But I think they're a useful way of illustrating a point.  We're supposed to be the United States of America.  We're all expected to pull our weight. And some states are far too comfortable with not doing their fair share, even while they point their hypocritical fingers at the states that are not only pulling their own weight, but the weight of their critics.  You want to root out immorality in American government?  Well, how about starting right there?

Like I said, corruption breeds more corruption.  And if you've bought into the bill of goods the GQP sells that government is always corrupt and Wall Street is always squeaky clean, you're part of the problem.  Corruption doesn't have to exist.  Freeloading doesn't have to exist.  Nepotism doesn't have to exist.  Because the people selling all of these poisons live in fear of democracy's antidote:  the people, rising up and demanding their birthright:  a freer and better world.

Rise up, already.  Demand more from red and blue states.  Demand more from yourselves.  Demand the better worlds that those who came before us suffered and died for.  We owe it to them.  We owe it to ourselves.

And, like the Preamble to the Constitution says, we owe it to our posterity.  Our children, and their future.  We can still give them a better world than the one we inherited.  Let's not throw that chance away.

Let's pick it up and make the most of it.  Now, tomorrow, and always.

Karma For Trump, Karma For MAGAhats?

Over three decades ago, when Donald Trump still had as much chance of becoming President of the United States as most of us have, he launched his career as a spokesperson for "law and order" with a full-page ad in The New York Times.  The ad piggybacked on a tragedy in Manhattan involving an assault on a jogger in Central Park, for which five young Black men were accused of, and ultimately convicted for, a crime they did not commit.  They were ultimately exonerated by DNA evidence, but not before serving time; when they were released, they sued for and received damages from New York City.

At the time of the attack, however, the City was going through a horrendous crime wave, one that was severe enough to raise questions not just about its safety, but also its ability to function as a unit of government.  Trump being Trump, and perhaps even at that point having some nascent idea about a career in politics, he saw an opportunity for publicity and public acclaim.

And he pounced.

With the above-referenced Times ad, headlined in doomsday type as follows:  "BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY.  BRING BACK OUR POLICE!"  It went on in even worse fashion, building up to in the verbal violence that is his stock-in-trade:  "CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS!"

In fact, that is precisely the moment when civil liberties become as precious as possible.  Civil liberties exist to ensure justice for all, because justice for some is no justice at all.  Justice for some is what makes crime "easier" to control when the victim belongs to a politically favored group, and the accused belong to an unfavored one.  Justice for some is what allows the system to run like clockwork to produce a popular outcome, but one with no connection to fairness or the truth.  

Perhaps worst of all for the "law and order" advocates, justice for some stands solely on its ability to remain in power, an accomplishment no government, no empire, no leader or leaders have ever been able to maintain indefinitely.  And when power changes hands, the new leaders, often risen from the ranks of the former oppressed, have no clear reason to stand for something other than justice for some.

Sometimes, though, we all get lucky.  Sometimes, a member of the oppressed has the character to rise above the oppression.  Sometimes, justice delayed really isn't justice denied, and the victims of systemic injustice get a second chance, one to which they respond not with revenge, but with the heart and soul of reformers.  Sometimes, when they get a second chance, we all get a chance to see justice for all.

That seems to be the case with Yusef Salaam, a member of the group of Black men who made up the accused cohort that became immortalized in tabloid print and and airwave coverage as the "Central Park Five."  Salaam, now well into middle age and running for a seat on the City Council, saw an opportunity to turn the tables on his one-time accuser when Trump was indicted by the Manhattan district attorney's office for falsifying business records in connection with his hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels.

And he did so brilliantly.

He used social media to publish an ad of his own, one that mimicked the format and some of the tone that Trump used in his ad, to publish a very different response to the the ex-President's legal jeopardy.  Instead of asking for Trump's execution, as well as a suspension of his civil liberties to speed his way toward that destination, Salaam merely asked for the system to work as the Constitution designed it to work--and that Trump, regardless of the outcome, accept the justice it produces with the same grace and resilience that Salaam and his friends accepted their unjust punishment and their exoneration.

Trump, of course, will never do that.  Even in the event that he is exonerated, he will spend the rest of his life whining about the unfairness of his having to face justice at all, that all of his conduct (even the illegal conduct) was "perfect," and that he will spend the rest of his life seeking revenge against the system he has already done so much to poison.  He will also continue to fundraise off of the experience, in a desperate attempt to salvage whatever might be left of his political career, to say nothing of whatever might be left of his debt-ridden business empire.  Worst of all, he will never lack for an army of suckers to help him fundraise, because it's easier for them to simply believe in Trump than it is to face their own shortcomings and fix their lives.

Frankly, though they would rather die than admit it, the members of that army could take a lesson  from Salaam's ad, as well as Salaam's life.

He and the other members of the "Exonerated Five" had to face far worse than many of Trump's very white, largely male supporters have had to face in their lives.  They had their reputations and then-future prospects destroyed in the most public way possible.  They had to spend time in prison.  They were force to fight for their freedom and the restoration of their reputations.  And they were forced to do all of this fighting against a system that, in so many ways, has historically been and still is wired against them because of the color of their skin.

And, as Salaam's ad illustrates, they prevailed.

Racism is a sinkhole that is easy to jump into, and difficult to get out of.  The Exonerated Five did not jump into that sinkhole.  The MAGAhats have spend most if not all of their lives wallowing in it, again, because it's easier to believe in white identity politics than it is to face the truth about one's individual circumstances and fight back

Trump and his family have lived their entire lives in that sinkhole, profiting mightily off of it.  But karma has finally caught up with them, just as it threatens to do the same for other people who would rather die that face the fact that we are, however slowly and haltingly, moving toward a world in which how we look will no longer automatically punch a ticket to how we live.

You don't like what karma is doing for Trump?  You'd better take a harder look at what you believe and why you believe it.  And then consider how much more someone like Yusef Salaam can teach you.

A Few Words For Tucker Carlson

As few as possible, considering the fact that Tucker Carlson is the object of them.  But it also applies to all of his partners in journalistic crime at Fox, and otherwise in the employ of Rupert Murdoch.  All of the mouthpieces dedicated to lying and spewing hate at the expense of the Constitution that protects everyone's freedom of speech.  Even theirs.

Shut up.

SHUT.  THE.  F***.  UP.

At least when it comes to incendiary garbage like this.

We are now in political and legal waters that are alternately bracing and terrifying.  We all need to take a deep breath, and resist the temptation to trouble those waters for the sake of short-term self-gain.

Because what is now going on with Donald Trump and the State of New York is bigger than all of us.  If it becomes an opportunity for those who live for violence to act out their worst fantasies, it may bring us, our nation, and our heritage crashing down around all of us.  Never to be recovered or repaired.

Let the process play out.  Criticize who and what you will.  But don't encourage protests that end at the barrel of a gun.

You have enough blood on your hands already.

In Praise Of Women

That title, as all Sondheim fans know, comes from the title of a song in "A Little Night Music," in which the song's lyrics offer praise undermined with wry commentary on the reasons for offering it.  But that's not my purpose today.  I write this to offer genuine praise for women, and specifically for three women, two of whom have had a profound effect in my life, and one who had a profound effect on the lives of all of us.

That may not, in and of itself, sound overly political.  But THR has never been strictly about politics, and especially not when it's appropriate for me to comment on the passing of someone who has had a major, special impact on my life, whether a public figure like Sondheim, or a private one like my mother.  Besides, historically, and up through the moments in which I'm typing this, to be a woman has been to be the relentless focus of all forms of politics.  And, right now, after more than sixty years in which women thought that they were making progress on leveling the gender playing field, they are finding themselves the subject and the object of political oppression.  Which makes it all the more important to tell the stories of women, and the impact that they have had in our lives.  And this burden should fall all the more heavily on men, who have for far too long had an interest in suppressing those stories.

And I'm happy to do my part.  So here we go.

The first woman is Melissa Borgerding, a new playwright with whom I'm working to produce a wonderful play she wrote, "Someone Close To You."  As I mentioned in closing out my blog for last year, I've formed a production company dedicated to producing the work of those whose voices are not heard often enough, culturally and otherwise.  I've selected Melissa's play as my first project and, last month, we had two readings of the play at Theatre West in Los Angeles, and both audiences responded enthusiastically to it.  As a result, we are now in the process of planning for a limited run of SCTY at a theater in Los Angeles, which will (if it happens) take place sometime this fall.

Like a lot of American dramas, Melissa's play is a family drama, one that depicts a couple in the middle of two challenges:  a pregnancy, and caring for a parent in declining health.  How they meet those challenges is something that I believe will challenge audiences.  In fact, when I first read the script, I found the ending to be at least a little bit challenging.  But, far more importantly, I found it to be real, poignant, and thought-provoking.  In other words, exactly the sort of theater that matters the most to me.  That's why I was not surprised by the success of our readings.  Not completely, anyway.  

I told Melissa that, no matter how well a script reads, you never know whether a script can become a play until it's up on its feet on stage.  But I had a good feeling about this one, based on decades of reading, seeing, and acting in plays, and our experience at Theater West validated that feeling.  In addition to being a talented writer, Melissa is a terrific collaborator, who has responded very well to feedback from our director, James A. Goins, and me.  Both of us look forward to working with her on the next stage (no pun intended) for this project.

Now, unfortunately, for a far sadder tribute.

In a former life, I worked for three years in New York City as a claims representative for the Social Security Administration, taking and approving or disapproving claims for Social Security benefits.  I tremendously enjoyed living in New York, and enjoyed (for the most part) the people I interviewed as well as the people I worked with.  But the system itself was and probably still is the most complicated system of legislation and regulation in our Federal system.  Even worse, in fact, than the laws and regulations of the Internal Revenue Service, with which I've also worked in my legal career.  

And, when I say I got along with my colleagues, that was not always the case when it came with the ones in management.  In fact, when the Republicans came into national power, those latter relationships got worse, as all of us came under greater pressure to deny claims and otherwise find ways to cut benefits.  This was my first career-type of position, and I was not prepared to deal with any of the stresses my job created, especially the Reagan-related stresses.

Fortunately, throughout all of this, I had one person I could turn to.

Her name was Julia Brandner.  

Like me, she was a claims representative, although she had been working long enough (unlike me) to no longer have conditional status, as my employment did.  Accordingly, she had a considerable amount of experience with both the technical knowledge of the work, as well as the politics of the office.  More importantly, we shared an affinity for the arts and show business, although her tastes ran more to television, and "Peter Gunn" in particular, than to Broadway (or, even worse for her, science fiction).  But, more importantly than anything else for me at that point, she was a kind and generous person, one who always organized office lunches at restaurants near our office, and who was always willing to listen when I had problems either with cases, or my immediate supervisor for most of my time there.  The less said about him, the better, except I understand that, when he left SSA, he worked for a bill collector, and one could not possibly imagine a better match between employer and employee than that one.

What astonished me about her friendship was the fact that it extended for so very long a time after I left New York in 1982.  Up until September of 2020, each year without fail, I would get both a birthday and Christmas greeting from her.  Thanks in no small part of this faithfulness on her part, I was able to keep up to date on what was going on with many of my former colleagues, and to be invited to her retirement party in 1999, which gave me the opportunity to see her and my colleagues one last time.  Her kindness and generosity at every step of the past four decades has meant more than I can say, both personally and professionally.

Julia, no one has a greater right to be called my friend than you did, and always will.  Baruch dayan ha'emess.

Finally, one more sad tribute for someone who added immeasurably to all of our lives.  If you are an American, and regardless of your sexual identification, you owe her gratitude, although she has not been a household name for decades.

Her name was Patricia Schroeder.  She was a congresswoman from Colorado, at a time when the House of Representatives was an almost entirely white, male political preserve.  That is has moved some distance away from that status, albeit not completely, is due in no small measure to the rare combination of perseverance and progressivism that she brought every day to her career in the House.

I have taken the liberty here of reprinting the following, from Daily Kos.  It is well worth your time to read it.

Former Colorado Rep. Pat Schroeder, a Democrat who was one of the most prominent voices for women’s rights in Congress during her service from 1973 to 1997, died Monday at the age of 82. Schroeder, who was just one of just 14 women in the House when she first arrived, was instrumental in passing legislation like the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act and Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. However, she acknowledged how much work still needed to be done in the title of her 1998 memoir, “24 Years of House Work … and the Place Is Still a Mess.”

Schroeder, who got her piloting license as a teenager, was one of only 15 women in her 1964 class of more than 500 at Harvard Law School. She recounted that, after the dean had told the small group, “Do you realize you have taken this position from a man?” another woman responded, “Well, I am only here because I could not get in at Yale.” Schroeder and her husband relocated to Denver after they both graduated, and at first it looked like Jim Schroeder would be the one who would have a political career.

In 1970 he campaigned for a seat in the state House and lost the general election by fewer than 50 votes. Pat Schroeder would recount decades later that legislators responded to that close call by drawing up a gerrymander that specifically placed their home in a new seat, boundaries that “didn't make any sense, except that's where Schroeder lived.” The future congresswoman, though, wrote in 1998, “But the law of unintended consequences bit the gerrymanderers―they kept Jim from running but they launched my political career!”

It was another 1970 election that would set in motion a chain of events that would help propel her to Congress two years later. Democratic Rep. Byron Rogers narrowly lost renomination after 10 terms to Craig Barnes, who emphasized his own opposition to the Vietnam War, but angry Rogers backers refused to support Barnes in the general election. That left an opening for Denver District Attorney Mike McKevitt, a Republican who had made headlines for shutting down screenings of the erotic film “I Am Curious (Yellow)” and who crusaded against restaurants with large hippie clienteles. McKevitt ended up winning the 1st Congressional District 52-45, which made him Denver’s first Republican House member in a quarter century.

Schroeder recounted that the original favorite for the Democratic nomination for 1972 was state Sen. Arch Decker, but her husband was one of many who wanted an alternative to someone they saw as “an elephant in donkey's clothing.” That proved to be a tough task, though, as few wanted to campaign in a year where they expected presidential nominee George McGovern to tank their chances. Schroeder, who taught law and had worked for the National Labor Relations Board, was therefore taken aback when Jim Schroeder relayed the news that local Democrats had mentioned her as a candidate.

She described her first reaction as, “Don't tease me, I'm tired. Why should I be the designated kamikaze?” Jim Schroeder agreed that she stood no chance of beating McKevitt and likely wouldn’t even be the nominee, but she wrote that he continued, “But if you don't get in the race and articulate the issues, they will not be discussed. You think the government's policies about Vietnam and the environment are wrongheaded, and you're always urging your students to get involved.”  

While Schroeder, who was still left “wonder[ing] what they served at this meeting,” still needed persuasion, she agreed to be “Dona Quixote” in a hopeless race: She’d remember, to her frustration, a newspaper summing up her announcement with the headline “Denver housewife runs for Congress.”

Schroeder had to quickly organize a campaign to beat Decker, who remained the favorite of the party establishment. She remembered that at the important state party convention she was granted only 30 seconds to speak by leaders who wanted to “muzzle me with their fast clock.” She used her limited time to declare her support for Cesar Chavez’s lettuce boycott, an issue that resounded “with the “large Chicano population of the city” and helped her win the convention.

Schroeder went on to beat Decker 55-45, and he did not respond well to that shock defeat. “He went into a massive pout,” Schroeder wrote in her 1998 book, “literally pulling down the blinds in his house and refusing to speak to the press.” But despite that upset win, she had an even tougher six-week battle ahead of her against McKevitt, “who thought he was going to waltz through a non-campaign to victory.”

The incumbent wasn’t the only one: Schroeder in a 2015 oral history interview with the House’s Office of the Historian said that the DCCC told her, “Well, we really have nothing to say to you; we can’t waste our money.” The Democrat, who ran on the slogan, “She wins, we win,” decided to wage an anti-war campaign that also emphasized her support for the children of migrant families and opposition to Denver hosting the 1976 Winter Olympics. (Colorado voters that fall would decisively back a referendum to withhold funding for the event, which ended up relocating to Austria.)  

Schroeder believed that, because establishment leaders didn’t help her, she benefited from running a nontraditional campaign that “seemed to penetrate the normal clutter and noise of politics.” She also said that Barnes, two years after his loss, transferred his “energized grassroots group to me.”

McKevitt, who demeaned his opponent as “Little Patsy,” continued to ignore Schroeder’s campaign, but the FBI didn’t. Schroeder said that her home was broken into “a couple of times” without anything obviously being stolen, but she didn’t think much of it at the time. She would learn a few years later, though, that the FBI suspected her slogan meant she was a communist, and that her husband’s barber was one of their informants. (“In hindsight it did seem rather odd how often he would show up in the middle of dinner,” she’d write.)

Schroeder ended up shocking everyone, including herself, by unseating McKevitt 52-47, a victory that made her the first woman to represent Colorado in Congress. That win came at the same time that, according to analyst Kiernan Park-Egan, President Richard Nixon was beating McGovern 55-45 in the district.

Schroeder soon found herself in the “guy gulag” that was D.C., and she immediately faced a hostile reception from a prominent Democrat after she became the first woman to ever serve on the House Armed Services Committee. Chairman Edward Hébert, a longtime supporter of segregation, made Schroeder share a seat with Black colleague Ron Dellums, with her remembering him saying, “The two of you are only worth half the normal member.” (It’s disputed whether he actually uttered those words.)

Schroeder, though, went on to become an influential member, and she quickly became entrenched at home. The congresswoman turned back state Rep. Frank Southworth 58-41 during the Democratic landslide of 1974, and she went on to beat another state representative, Don Friedman, 53-46 as Jimmy Carter was pulling off a tiny win in her constituency. This would be the last time Schroeder would fall below 59%: In 1982 she even fended off her old foe Decker, who had joined the GOP, 60-37. During the Reagan era, Schroeder also became known for dubbing the commander in chief the “Teflon president,” a label that ironically stuck.

Schroeder briefly formed a presidential exploratory committee in 1987 after former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart dropped out, but she failed to raise enough money. The congresswoman announced her decision to stay out of the race in a press conference where she fought back tears, something that drew scorn from several feminist leaders who argued she’d badly damaged the presidential hopes of future women. Schroeder later said, “I think it’s amazing that no one ever said that Joe Biden had ruined the future of men forever because people would think that they all plagiarized or that Gary Hart ruined the future of men forever because they all played around.”

Schroeder decided to retire the cycle after the 1994 Republican wave left her in the minority for the first time, and she went on to spend 11 years leading the Association of American Publishers. During her final month in the House she responded to a Los Angeles Times’ question about what advice she’d give women arriving in Congress, “I think women still should never kid themselves that they’re going to come here and be part of the team. And you ought to come here with a very clear definition of what it is you want to do, and that you will not be deterred.”

What an amazing combination of courage and cleverness she possessed!  The Democratic Party could use candidates with that same combination now more than ever!  Truly, all that I can add to the above is that now, more than ever, today's Democratic Party needs to run everywhere across the county, to find ways to communicate its progressive message in places where it may not be easy to do so.  It will entail risks.  

But, with a nation on the edge of civil war, it has never been more necessary.  My generation is particular has been able to grow up in an age of leisure, one that kindled indolence at the same time it inspired idealism.  We have generations ready to come after us, eager to build on the progress that has been made, and yet we have allowed our indolence to squander our idealism.  Shaking off the former to embrace the latter will entail facing risks greater than the ones Congresswoman Schroeder faced.  But, if she were still here with us, no one would insist harder that we face those risks without fear, without favor, without pause, and without pity for those who would be happy to reduce the words "freedom" and "democracy" to labels to be slapped on the face of their proposed tyranny.  Her example will always live with us.  Let us embrace it, build on it, and find true American greatest in the place where it has always lain.  In each other.

Three stories of three remarkable women.  All of whom deserve our praise and respect.  Let their stories be told again and again.  And let many other similar ones be added to them.

The Power And The Glory, Threatened By The Young And The Restless

One of the things about writing a blog, as is the case with any regularly scheduled program of writing:  some days you can't wait to sit down and start typing, and other days, you sit in front of your screen and think, "OK, now what?"  And then, there are the weeks, like the past few, where a political writer has all sorts of options.  Fox News. The Georgia grand jury.  Jimmy Carter, speaking about Georgia.  East Palestine.  Ukraine.  The SOTU address, speaking about Biden.  MTG's plan for red and blue states to divorce, speaking of Congress.

I'd like to write about all of that.  I will, in fact, write about at lease some of it next month.  But I've been moved by two events to return to a subject I've written about a number of times, and yet it never gets old for me.  Even though I may not have much in the way of new information to share about it.

I'm talking about evangelical Christianity, with which I had a long, difficult, and ultimately traumatic relationship in my young adulthood.  For me, part of the trauma was the feeling that being "born again" had been actually a kind of "failure to launch" into an adulthood, one that I carried within my family as a kind of source of shame, even though there was a profound benefit to that failure:  my marriage, my new family, and career choices that I could only have dreamed about when I was younger.  It's why I don't regret at all the trajectory of my life.  On the other hand, having had my development "sidetracked" the way it was made me feel like I was unique, and not in a particularly good way.

And then, I read this.

I have always been an admirer of Kirsten Powers' work.  I believe that, among political commentators, that she is truly and consistently fair and balanced.  I think that she comes as close as it is possible to being a "centrist" in a world where centrism has been hard to find and therefore harder than ever to define.  Which is why I appreciated her humility and candor in sharing by way of Substack her experience with born-again Christianity, and her difficult separation from it.

For me, it was especially bracing to read her description of her struggle to regain her sense of personal agency after she left the evangelical world.  As I told her in my comment on her post, this was the breaking point for me with that world, twelve years into it.  I finally realized, during what was for me one very bleak December, when I was in danger of becoming unemployed, with no immediate career prospects, very little in the bank, and two very frustrated parents who were wondering when I was going to put life together, what the problem was.

And that was the point when I figured out what the problem was.

Evangelical Christianity, boiled down to its functional essence, has something in common with the political world to which, in the U.S., it is now joined at the hip.  Unlike the Gospel it supposedly preaches, it is not a world in which the greatest virtue is humility and the worst sin is pride.  Indeed, on a brass-tacks basis, it is 180 degrees away from that Gospel.  Evangelical Christianity is about power.  Not in any democratic sense.  Not even in the sense of power for all evangelicals.  It is about power for a few wealthy, well-connected members of the clergy, over their congregants, their congregations, and the Constitution they pretend to defend.

And to get there, they play mind-control games with their followers, by teaching them to doubt their simplest impulses and inclinations, and to see any form of failure in their personal lives as a reflection of some sort of secret "sin" that must be flushed out.  And, of course, that flushing out must be done under the supervision of some supposedly more mature, more "enlightened" person or program, in return for your providing a hefty portion of your disposable income to the "enlightened."

Ultimately, this leads the poor suckers who fall under the spell of the "enlightened" to question all of life's decisions.  Even the most basic ones, like taking a specific job, moving to a certain city, dating a certain person.  And I was absolutely there, with a sense of self-esteem so low I would have to reach a thousand miles down to touch the top of it.

I had, in short, completely lost my sense of self-agency.  And that December, I finally realized it.  What G-d has really given each of us, in the form of a soul, and a body with various abilities, is a kind of ship.  We are, in some sense, limited by the ship's limitations.  But it's otherwise up to us to be the captain of it.

That's what Kirsten Powers had to re-learn, and that is also what I had to re-learn as well.

But here's the larger point:  I stated a moment ago that evangelical Christianity and politics are joined at the hip.  I should have been more specific.  Evangelical Christianity and conservative politics, with which it shares an obsession with control, are joined at the hip.  That has been true for decades.  But it has never been more dangerous than now, when political conservatism has shifted from being a philosophy to being a fifth column.

At the same time, conservatives of both the secular and spiritual variety are recognizing that, having won victories with the Greatest Generation and Boomers, they are losing the battle with the generations that follow.  Take, for example, the "He Gets Us" Super Bowl ads that provided the jumping-off point for Ms. Powers' post.  As you can read about here, these ads, which are framed to make Jesus sound like some sort of latter-day hippie (gee, haven't we tried this before, too?), are in fact bought and paid for by some of the most powerful conservatives infecting our politics.

I say "infected," because these people, far from doing G-d's will, work actively to subvert that will in a variety of ways, whether it involved crippling the IRS to ensure it won't look too closely into the finances of megachurches, or preventing those who have suffered from abuse by priests (which probably included at least one member of my family) from coming forward to seek justice.  As the latter point indicates, the problem is by no means limited to Christianity of the evangelical variety.

But the "He Gets Us" campaign exists for a reason:  it is addressing the uprising by young people against the authoritarian theocracy that all of us have allowed to spring up in our midst.  You need look no further than this to see what I'm talking about.*

If we all heed the words of Jinger Duggar, and many others like her, we may all yet find ourselves freed from the power and the glory of evangelical conservatism by the young and the restless who have learned to see through its false promises and its greater lust for a secular kingdom rather than a spiritual one.  Democracy can only survive if each citizen reclaims the helm of his, her, or their personal ship.  Ms. Powers and I have reclaimed ours.  I hope and pray that you reclaim yours.

*Full disclosure:  the Times article to which I have linked here references both Bill Gothard and Brian McLaren.  I went to one of Mr. Gothard's seminars, an experience that contributed mightily to my loss of self-agency.  As for Mr. McLaren, I had the good fortune to meet him later on, an experience that helped me to regain it.

Good Riddance To Larry Hogan

I've waited eight years to write that headline.  Sometimes, it felt like I would never get a chance to do it, even though I knew it would happen.  In an election season where it seemed like that the political tide would flow toward the GQP, I was able to console myself, as a native and nearly lifelong resident of Maryland, with one powerful and incontrovertible fact.

Come January of 2023, Larry Hogan would be out of the Governor's Mansion, and out of Maryland politics.  He would be free to pursue the fantasy shared by him and an incredibly supple corporate press:  using his reputation as a "moderate" Republican to tame the Trump-transformed national party, sweep through the 2024 primary season toward nomination for the presidency, and Make America Safe Again from both the Orange Iguana and the leftist hordes of the "Democrat" Party.

Well, you be the judge of how likely this fantasy is to come true.  I know that polls are increasingly unreliable as the thermometers of political reality, but I read their results at any rate, and I have yet to see a single one concerning the 2024 Republican presidential nomination showing Hogan with anything other than single-digit support.  To be precise, low single-digit support.  To put an even finer point on it, think of the numeral 1.  But not as in "number one choice."

Consider this fact as well:  Hogan's would-be Republican successor in Annapolis, Dan Cox, made absolutely no effort to appear "moderate" next to anyone, except possibly Attila the Hun.  He ran an unabashedly Trumpian campaign, and the voters handed him his political head as a result, preferring the moderate-in-tone, progressive-in-substance Wes Moore.  But why?  Why, if Hogan's brand of so-called moderation was so impressive, was no Republican able to capitalize on it?  Why, by electing Moore, did Maryland effectively return (thankfully) to its prior default position as a state that preferred a slow but steady policy course to the left?

Because, politically speaking, Larry Hogan is a complete fake.  And, when it comes to Larry Hogan, that's the good news.  Because Larry Hogan, deep down inside, is little more than a kinder, gentler version of Trump.

I take no pleasure in making this assessment.  Like an all-too-growing cohort in conservative politics, Hogan is a legacy politician.  His father, with whom he shares his first and last name, was a true moderate back in the days when such creatures actually existed in office.  Of special importance is the fact that he served on the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate period, and broke with his party's official line at the time to support the impeachment of Richard Nixon.  The subsequent release of Nixon's Oval Office tape recordings revealed how farsighted, as well as courageous, that break was for our democracy.

Hogan rode his father's reputation into office in 2015, running against an inept Democratic candidate (good luck to him as our new attorney general, by the way) as well as voter frustration with Martin O'Malley's pursuit of national office at the expense of his local obligations.  Then, early in his first term, when he and we learned that he was facing a battle against cancer, he was able to rally Marylanders across party lines to route for his recovery, including me.  However, when Hogan noticed that this had the effect of softening and even reducing political criticism of him generally, he did not do what most public figures do when they disclose a health-care battle:  treat it as a personal matter, and ask for privacy.  Instead, he used it as the center of a full-court-press reshaping of his image, wiping out most if not all discussion of his more controversial moves and transforming his image from that of a politician to that of a heroic survivor.

Hogan's use of his cancer diagnosis to soften his media image, and the media willingness to accept the soft-news bait he was offering them by doing so, has been incredibly useful in disguising the fact that, as "moderate Republicans" go, Hogan is more Republican than moderate.  He managed to stretch the cancer-related good will through two terms, making the prediction in this article a bit off.  But, in a sense, the article also anticipated the outcome of Hogan's re-election as governor, by noting the role that positioning himself as a cancer survivor played in obscuring the substance of his governing.

And this media slight-of-hand was by no means limited to local coverage.  He even managed to parlay his diagnosis into a national reputation, of which this New York Times interview is a sad, pathetic example.  I have a very high regard for Frank Bruni, but this piece just absolutely reeks of what has been described (I think fairly) as "helicopter journalism":  well-known national reporter drops in on a local official for a day and, solely on the strength of that visit, performs a complete public diagnosis of politics in that state.  It's not an exaggeration to say that Hogan's national reputation is almost entirely built on puff pieces like Bruni's.

The worst things about those pieces are not only their contribution to the well-deserved poor reputation of journalism today, but the role they have played in obscuring the hard political facts of Hogan's governance--or, more precisely, his failure to govern and even subvert good governance.  On that subject, the facts speak for themselves, in articles that have not received the same level of attention as the cancer-related coverage.

Let's start with the giant anchor around both the GQP and the nation, the 800-pound gorilla that refuses to go away, even though he can't win a majority of the popular vote:  Donald Trump.  Since then, a significant number of Republicans have walked away from their party, clearly stating that there is no chance of their return until Trump and the lunatic brand of politics he represents goes away.  But Hogan has gone in the opposite direction, refusing, in fact, to refrain from declaring that he would not support Trump if he were once again the GQP nominee.

And why should he?  What really is the substance of Larry Hogan's politics?  The fact is that he's gone out his way to dodge taking positions on a number of issues, and many pieces of popular legislation addressing these issues, even going so far as to allow many of them to become law without his signature.  Frequently, this is what corporate media means when they describe him as a "moderate."  Apparently, if you're a public official in contemporary America, all you have to appear to be a "moderate" is to do is nothing at all.

Unfortunately, that's a trick that not even Hogan has been able to pull off.  He has done things.  Bad things, unfortunately.

When he had the opportunity to bring refugees into the state that would have helped boost its economy, especially in Baltimore, where block after block is filled with empty houses, Hogan said no.

When, early last year, it was first apparent that the Supreme Court would reverse Roe v. Wade, and the Comptroller requested that state funds be released to train abortion providers, Hogan said no.

While hate crimes and opioid deaths rose here and around the country, Hogan failed to keep a promise to treat the latter as an emergency, and ignored the pain created by the former by associating with supporters of the likes of Roy Moore and Brett Kavanaugh.

And, in a state that prides itself on having world-class public education, not only did Hogan make war on the General Assembly's implementation of a plan to make Maryland education second to none, he used funds from dark-money sources to do it.

Of course, it's not like he made it easy for you to find out about any of this, as he found and implemented a way to subvert state record-keeping laws.

Perhaps his greatest act of both hypocrisy is his handling of state transportation needs.  Despite a reputation as "Governor Asphalt," ready to pave Maryland with roads, roads, and still more roads, the fact is that Hogan grossly underfunded state transportation projects, then proposed a monstrous "public-private partnership" that would use park land to create more traffic-clogged lanes in the DC area, and stick taxpayers for the bill if the "partnership" fails to make money off of it.  

This, and many other penny-wise pound-foolish decisions in other areas of state spending, is the cost of his war on taxes and user fees.  If you're going to fight that war, and deliberately starve the needs of the public, you owe it to that public to advertise the price tag.  But that was not Hogan's style.  Never has been, and never will be, for any Republican; far easier, as well as far more deceitfully to pretend that every meal can consist of three courses of dessert.

But then, there was one transportation decision that summed up Hogan's deceit, as well as the subtextual racism of his party and his administration:  his cancellation of what he characterized as a "wasteful boondoggle," the Red Line potentially connecting eastern and western Baltimore County (in which I live) with the existing Metro and light-rail lines in Baltimore City.  Had this been allowed to become a reality, it could have led to the beginning of a true metropolitan rail system in the Baltimore area, and one that might have been able to connect with the Washington Metro system and create a regional system on the scale of New York and Chicago.  And, were that to happen, the economic benefits for the state would have truly been explosive.  You need look no further than the D.C. metropolitan area to see the dynamic effect that the Metro has had there.

A small personal digression is in order.

I worked for the State of Maryland for twelve years, the last eight of which were spent working in procurement.  During that time, I saw a transition in state government from a Democratic governor, Parris Glendening, to a Republican successor, Robert Ehrlich.  I expected, as did many of my colleagues, that fiscal belt-tightening would be the order of the day.  But one exception to that made by Governor Ehrlich had to do with federal money.  He believed the state had an obligation to capture every federal dollar that might be available to it.  This was especially important with regard to child welfare, the area in which I worked.  Despite the fact that the Governor and I were members of different parties, I appreciated the fact that he took the impact of federal spending on the state seriously.

Would that Hogan had followed his example, not only regarding the Red Line but other public priorities as well.  But Hogan's fiscal strategy was not entirely designed to address fiscal purposes.  In truth, it was part of a larger strategy was part of a larger strategy to keep Baltimore segregated, and poor.  In other words, to fulfill the goals of his political base in Western Maryland, the people who believe that public money should only be spent according to the wishes of the people who provide it.  In practice, that means more for white people, and less for people of color.  And you may be sure that, for Western Marylanders and Hogan, their political patron, that was the real point.

This is why Hogan not only cancelled the Red Line, but spent eight years making war on Baltimore's economic development and education funding.  He did his best to hide this, and the cancer diagnosis helped him do that.  But, every so often, something would seep out into public attention.  Here is one example:  some of Hogan's Anne Arundel County supporters wanted to close light-rail stops in their county, for specious reasons.

But then, all you really have to do is take the word of the man himself.

I will give him this much credit.  Larry Hogan did a brilliant job for two terms as the Governor of Western Maryland.  But he did it at the expense of the short-term and long-term needs of the rest of the state.  And he has left behind a residue of racial animus that reminds those of us with a long memory for Maryland politics, and not in a good way, of this man.

Do you get it now?

This is the man who wants to now run off to Iowa, and other presidential primary states, along with his corporate media press clippings, and sell himself as some kind of middle-of-the-road alternative to Donald Trump, as well as Ron DeSantis.

Larry Hogan is not an alternative to them.  He may be slightly softer in style, but in substance he is a carbon copy of Trump.

And I think that voters on the ground know it.  Which goes a long way toward explaining the 1%.  Why buy a steak with no sizzle, when you can buy one that ignites itself to become as well-done as the customers want?

That's Trump.  And that's what DeSantis wants to be, although, when it comes to presence, he's still quite a ways behind Trump, no matter how many times he says "woke."

But that's the national battle, to be fought nationally over the next two years.  For now, I am grateful that the local political scene has reverted back to sanity, to inclusion, to public service over self-service.  With our first governor and lieutenant governor of color, and a state legislature solidly in Democratic hands, the future of the Free State looks bright.  Maryland can be Maryland again.  Maybe, just maybe, with a little bit of luck and hard work, America can be America again.  Meanwhile, Marylanders can look forward to projects like this, which one day could become a major hub of a truly regional rail system.

Good riddance to Larry Hogan.  G-d grant that, soon, we may say good riddance to Trump, and to MAGA politics.

Two Points Regarding Classified Documents

A planet on fire, an economy riddled with debt run up by the millionaires that control it, the vast majority of people struggling daily to make ends meet, authoritarianism on the rise, and what is the corporate press (left and right) wringing its digital hands about?

Right.  Who is the greater sinner when it comes to unauthorized possession of classified documents--Trump or Biden?

I'm going to start here with the larger point that everyone seems to be missing about this:  how is it apparently so easy to obtain and hold onto classified documents long after the apparent need to possess them is finished?  On the strength of both the Trump and Biden stories, it appears to be far easier than any of us might have previously thought.  Which, in turn, ought to raise another question:  how many more people, in and no longer in government service, are in possession of such documents?  For what purpose?  And is the National Archives aware of any such documents?  Does it not have some sort of tracking system in place to ensure who has what, and what needs to come back to the Archives when the professed need for the documents has ended?

This, I think, is the larger scandal that's evidenced here.  At some point, there has to be a congressional investigation of what happened, not only with regard to the Trump and Biden cases, but also to identify any other cases that might exist.  At a guess, it's probably safe to assume that there are many more cases out there than anyone might have imagined.  And, given the potential damage to American interests that might result from those cases, the sooner a bipartisan commission gets to the bottom of what's going on, the better.  Of course, good luck with that in the House, given its current <ahem> configuration.  Perhaps something can happen on the Senate side; if so, it should with all deliberate speed.

My second point:  conceding that both Biden and Trump are on the wrong side of the law here, has the press coverage of this story descended into false equivalency territory?

I'm almost tempted to ask:  what do you think (and, as always, you're more than welcome to leave comments).

Of course they have, and that is to be expected, because the corporate press lives to protect its profits rather than the public interest that the First Amendment is meant to help them protect.  The differences between the way Trump and Biden have responded to their respective situations could not, in any case, be more different.  Biden has extended the maximum amount of cooperation to the Justice Department.  He has not pretended that the documents are his property, nor have any of his lawyers, staff members, or allies pretended that he has a right to them.  There has been no need for a warrant, or an FBI raid.  And, finally, the difference in the respective numbers of documents in each case differs, as of this point, by a factor of 30.  A factor that weighs against Trump.

It's not surprising that Biden's political enemies have weighed in against him on this.  It's marginally more surprising that some of his allies have gone so far as to suggest that he should step aside in 2024 as a result of it.

For whom?

Here's an example.  Read it carefully.  One thing you should notice:  the absence of an alternative.

That's not accidental.  The fact is that there is no viable political alternative.  None.  Zero.  No one that has the same level of political recognition and support that Biden has.  Even with this anchor tied around his neck.  And his opponents on the left know that.  All they have is a handful of future possibilities and a ton of wishful thinking.

My advice to my friends on the left:  reframe the issue, along the lines of the points I've made here.  Advocate for a bipartisan Senate committee for reforming not just the Archives, but the entire classification process, which is long overdue in any case.  That's how you take charge of the narrative.  And I would bet real money that, if such a committed is convened and launches an investigation, more sinners on both sides of the aisle will be identified.

Which means that the issue will lose its partisan punch, And Trump's far greater sins on this issue will fold back into the larger image of him as the most corrupt President in the history of the Republic.  I can assure you that the process of this happening will be aided by the larger swirl of scandal surrounding him.  That, and the indictments that I believe will finally be announced this year.

Stop letting the media wring your hands, folks, and don't lose sight of the real enemy.  It isn't Biden, who is far from perfect.  But you don't even want to begin to think about the potential reality of what GQP authoritarian might replace him.

McCarthy's Mess, Or How To Get Started On The Wrong Foot

Happy New Year to you and everyone!

And where to begin?  Well, the most logical place to begin is with the convening of the new House of Representatives.  After all, if it's possible for most of us to agree on anything when it comes to politics, it's that none of us have ever witnessed the opening of a new Congress that looked like the spectacle that has unfolded over the past two weeks.  And we should be thankful for that fact.  When I use the word "spectacle," it's because I try to spare my readers the experience of my using more colorful language.

I witnessed most of the first week, or as much as I could stand of it, because I knew going in that the events that unfolded were going to do even more damage to our politics and governance than we've already witnessed in the Trump era (a label I use reluctantly, since I'm acquainted with Trump's love of plastering his name on everything he touches).  I found myself reacting to what I saw with a wider range of emotions than I expected.  

On the one hand, not everything I witnessed upset me.  Some of it even made me proud.  On the other hand, that which I fully expected to be revolting revolted me even more than I expected.  Just when you think contemporary Republicans have reached the sub-cellar for bad behavior, they suddenly seem to find another level underneath it.  Maybe Trump's background in real estate helps them with that.  Maybe, more likely, it simply encourages the cynicism, ambition, and deceit that was always there.

At any rate, the following are my random thoughts and reactions to what unfolded in the People's House.

The professionalism of the congressional staff.

I don't think enough can be said about this.  Technically, the new House does not exist until a Speaker is elected, which, in this case, took the better part of a week.  As a result, for that span of time, the Clerk of the House, Cheryl Johnson, and her staff were in charge of the proceedings.  They are part of that permanent army of government employees that we routinely, and often unthinkingly, refer to with disdain as "bureaucrats."  And yet, without that army, the routine functioning of the government, the functioning that we take for granted, the functioning that is based as much on loyalty to our country and dedication to serving its interests, as well as a deep well of institutional experience and professional training, simply would not take place.

I might as well put my personal cards on the table here:  I have spent fifteen years of my life as a bureaucrat, in federal and state agencies.  During that time, I had the privilege of working with people from both parties, and am happy to assure you that the same level of loyalty, dedication, experience and training that you saw from the Clerk and the members of her staff is typical of most, if not all, of the people working in those agencies--both the career civil servants, and the political appointees.  It is, however, the former that particularly carry the burden of day-to-day business.  I am proud to be one of them, and I am proud of my bureaucratic brothers and sisters for the work they did in holding the House proceedings together for the week without a Speaker.  

Don't take it from me. If there was one thing on which everyone was agreed, it was, based on several of the statements from the House floor, it was on the quality of the work done by the Clerk and her staff.  But I want everyone, and I mean everyone, to think about that very carefully, the next time they hear anyone use "bureaucrats" as a scapegoat for what's wrong in Washington, and elsewhere.

The unity and boldness of Democrats

The Democratic caucus, now in the House minority, made it clear that that the three D's the media love to place on their party--depressed, divided, and in disarray--do not define their willingness to do the people's business, or their appreciation of the challenges that exist for them in doing so.

In talking about that, let's start with this.

The entire caucus assembled on the steps of the Capitol, to commemorate the second anniversary of an attempt by a  right-wing thugocracy to destroy the honest counting of presidential electoral votes and the legislative process more generally.  They were their to commemorate the failure of that effort, and the sacrifices made by law enforcement officials to ensure that failure.

And they were joined by a single Republican.  Single, as in one of of the 222-member majority.  None of them could be bothered to show up and back the blue with their colleagues.

That may have been the most subtle breach of constitutional behavior by the new majority.  But, as other events demonstrated, it was far from the only one.

More about that presently.  Back, for now, to Democratic unity.

Perhaps it's because the size of the Republican majority is so small, as well as unstable.  Perhaps it's because even the older, less diverse members of the Democratic caucus have seen the future in the increasing number of younger, more diverse members, and understand that it's a future that works (apologies, Lincoln Steffens).  Perhaps, more than anything else, it's because every one of those members, young or old, understands the exact nature and power of the threat from across the aisle.

Nevertheless, over the course of all fifteen ballots in the speakership vote, they unanimously stood behind their new leader Hakeem Jeffries, resisting the pleas of corporate media to "reach across the aisle" and vote for a man who couldn't even muster a strong showing from within his own party.  They openly mocked, in ways subtle and not-so subtle, the disarray and associated lunacy that they and the people they represent were being subjected to.  And, when Jeffries took the podium after the voting for the formal transfer of power from one party to another, they cheered him with one voice as he used the alphabet to mock the new regime.

I appreciate the fact that Democrats stood together and publicly treated the nonsense as nonsense.  Which is why I think not having C-SPAN in the House is a bad idea.  After all, the current state of disrepair in the House began back in the 1990s, when Newt Gingrich used C-SPAN to turn voters away from the long-standing Democratic majority.  Turnabout may not be pretty, but it can and should certainly be fair play.

The violence on the floor

In life, as someone once said, there are leaders and followers.  And in politics, there are people who have the label of a leader and the behavior of a follower.  And, in our current crisis, Kevin McCarthy is Exhibit A for the latter proposition.

Despite being repeated touted in the legacy corporate press as a "moderate," McCarthy is a man without any political compass, or even a moral one.  No greater illustration of this exists than his backtracking from his fiery denunciation of Trump and the Capitol attack Trump instigated to his trip to Mar-A-Lago weeks latter to get down on his knees to the Orange Iguana and beg for forgiveness.  This show of sniveling was, as the night would show, the shape of things to come.  In more ways than one.

The chaos and extremism of the January 6 attack had its analog in the first week of the new Congress, in both the multiple ballots for the speakership and the outrageous demands of a fraction of the GQP caucus for the sake of awarding it to McCarthy.  As is the case after every election, the new majority had nearly two months to get its act together, to hash out their differences and show on Day One that they were ready to serve the interests of the nation.  In our lifetimes, this sort of orderly transition is so orderly it barely rates five minutes on the evening news.  

In this case, it seems that those two months could not have been devoted to anything except the level of disorder and disruption to which the American people were treated to for a week on their screens.  And all for the sake of appeasing people who are, basically, unappeasable.  They have absolutely no goals other than being in charge.  And that much they plainly accomplished.  But, in the process, they accomplished something else:  demonstrating that the insurrection has moved from outside of the Capitol building to inside the House chamber.

And, however much the House Democrats may have enjoyed watching the party-in-disarray narrative flip to characterizing their opponents, they can't be content with laughing at what is on one level laughable.  The chaos inside of the House is likely to lead, perhaps is already beginning to lead, to violence on a par with the attack two years years ago.  The near-fist-fight toward the end of the balloting could be a small taste of what is to come.

And not only on the floors of Congress. but here.  And abroad.  Perhaps nearly everywhere.

You don't want to be in a position of having to oppose force with force?  Fine.  The sooner one draws a line, the less likely it becomes that one has to openly defend it.  We are, frankly, in that position because Democrats in the past haven't heeded that lesson.  For all of our sakes, they'd better start heeding it now.  That show of unity can't run for a day or a week.  It has to be nonstop from here on out.

The transparent weakness of McCarthy 

From the partisan standpoint of the GQP, the spectacle of McCarthy sacrificing every perogative he needs to keep the House in order to the claque of fanatics who want to watch everthing burn, and even begging on camera for the votes he needed to stick his nose across the finish line, could not possibly have been worse.  Gutting the House ethics office, even as the fanatics scheme to impeach the entire Biden administration.  Given them a chance to systemically defund entire federal offices should anyone in them make a peep against the interests of the fanatics' donors.  Enabling them to put McCarthy's job in jeopardy by a single vote if he doesn't say "How high?" every them one of them says "Jump!"

McCarthy has given away so much of the power of the office he just barely obtained that it might be a compliment to even call him a follower.  He is certainly no one's idea of a leader.  He may very well be little more at this point than a hood ornament on the authoritarian jalopy of his caucus.

The transparently bad GQP spin on the process

Spin, spin, spin.  Yes, both parties do it, and I'm guilty of it from time to time myself.  But the Republicans do it with more shamelessness and less fidelity to the facts than do Democrats.  That's primarily because Republicans, like the majority of Americans, evaluate everything, even matters of significant substance, by way of style points.  That, sadly, is evidence of a society that is in decay because of the distance between its founding principles and its present state.

And without question, the House GQP caucus was doing its best (or worst) to spin-doctor the nightmare unfolding before the viewing public.  Oh, its members said, this is just the sort of deliberation every party needs to go through when it re-takes power.  Once this sorts itself out, they assured us, we'll be astonished by how ready they are to lead the nation, by way of investigating every Biden they can get their hands on.

I'll say this much for them:  they are astonishing, although not in the way they might want us to think that they are.  But I repeat:  they had nearly TWO MONTHS to sort everything out and spare us the week-long debacle.  I find myself remembering the public clichés of previous Republican conquests.  "Hit the ground running."  "Ready on Day One."  This was more like hitting the ground stumbling, and needing all the luck in the world to be ready by Labor Day.

Perhaps the best way to sum up both the cravenness of McCarthy's grasping climb to power and the Orwellian confidence the GQP has in its ability to memory-hole anything is this. I tend to doubt that this can or will actually happen. Expungement is a legal procedure by which an individual convicted of a crime can have all records related to that conviction purged. How do you do that with a historic event that has been recorded all over the world? For that matter, how do you convince the other house of Congress to purge its records of the trials it conducted, neither of which resulted in a conviction?

And one more thing, relating to my earlier observation about C-SPAN. Whether or not you think that open monitoring of Congress is or is not a good idea, you're about to lose the opportunity to gain more evidence for making a decision on that point. That's because Kevin and company are, at least for now, making that choice for you.

The bad news is that the only thing this House will ever be ready for is chaos. The even worse news is that it is likely to drag all of us into that chaos.

Leaving one last point to make here:

The education for the rest of us:  is it even possible to reach across the aisle if all you’re going to get is a fist fight?

Very unlikely. There are only going to be two things that will take their focus off of shooting themselves and the rest of us in the foot.

The first is going to be the need to protect themselves. Gutting the House ethics office is only the first step. After that, they're going to need to spend time on putting out the fires that will erupt in the press whenever one or more members stumble and have their corruption exposed for all to see. Freshman GQP Congressman George Santos (or whatever his name is) remains the most immediate example for the moment. But be assured: there will be others.

Speaking of Santos, note that his Republican defenders are describing what he has done as having "embellished" his resume. Wrong. I speak as someone who has, in a former life, been paid to write resumes professionally. Using a word like "manage" to describe making multiple coffee deliveries is embellishment. Saying you graduated from a college you never attended is a bald-face, unabashed lie. And Santos' resume is chock-full of them. If Gym Jordan is right in saying that every Republican does this, that's all you need to know to never vote for a Republican again.

Later, they will branch out from protecting themselves to protecting their donors, by making sure, for example, that those donors never have to worry about committing tax fraud at the expense of the rest of us.

Finally, they will use the need to raise the debt ceiling as an excuse to blow up the economy and attempt to seek even greater, and far more unconstitutional, power in the ensuing catastrophe.  This is Donald Trump 101:  create a disaster, point fingers at everyone but yourself, and manipulate the circumstances for your benefit.  Anyone who thinks we're living in some kind of wonderful post-Trump age is kidding themselves.  Donald Trump hasn't gone away.  If anything, he's more of a Speaker of the House than McCarthy is.

Which is why Biden and Senate Democrats are wise to refuse McCarthy's invitation to "discuss" the threat that he and his caucus are deliberately manufacturing.  One does not negotiate with someone pointing a gun at you.  You make it clear that they will either have to pull the trigger, deal with the possibility that you may be able to protect yourself, and wait until they understand that you've called their bluff.

This is how you deal with bullies.  I speak from experience.  I hope that the Democrats retain and practice this wisdom.  The embarrassing opening of the new House of Representatives shows that our future depends on it.