I've been a newspaper person for as long as I can remember. When I was very young, Sundays consisted of church, meals, and going through not one, not two, but three newspapers: the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. Newspapers did more to educate me about what was going on around me than school ever did, in part because newspapers were far more entertaining than school ever was (apologies to all but a handful of my teachers). When I was in school, I worked on student newspapers, even having a column in one of them. When I moved to New York, I purchased all three of the city's daily papers, and sometimes some of its more specialized publications. I continued to read at least the Times, as well as the Sun, when I moved back to Maryland, and have done so well into the Internet age.
Ah, the Internet.
It's been no friend to newspapers, certainly not as we have traditionally imagined them to be. In the Net's early days, newspapers published sites on the Web along with their hard-copy editions. The limits of technology were such that an online presence could peacefully co-exist with a businesses' bricks-and-mortar operation peacefully and profitably. But, as those limits started disappearing, the convenience of getting everything online for free (except for ads) began to outweigh the value of getting news as a physical product, just as online shopping began to wear out the personal value of going to a store to shop.
Unfortunately, while people were willing to pay for online shopping, they weren't willing to pay for online news quite so much. They got used to the idea of "free news online," and most attempts to establish paywalls for online access ended in failure. And so, slowly but surely, newspapers have largely disappeared from the landscape, or were bought by large, physically remote corporations that economize by using syndicated content and freelance writers. The few career journalists that remain are often reduced to begging in social media for their followers to buy newspapers, reminding me of the dark days of Broadway attendance when marquees frequently advertised a show called "Just for the fun of it … SEE A BROADWAY SHOW!"
Now, as a preservationist, I'm as sympathetic to appeals to tradition as anyone can be. But, likewise as a preservationist, I also know that saving the past, or the past way of doing things, often requires some degree of adaptation to changing circumstances. And there are reasons why newspapers, particularly the ones in major cities, might not be well-equipped to be adaptable.
Ever heard of the expression "freedom of the press belongs to the person that owns one"? Well, it has always been true. Freedom of the press is the only right guaranteed by the First Amendment that also is, to some degree, a property right. You can't have a newspaper without the means to print one, as well as to gather and write stories. In consequence, as the nation grew and its cities along with it, owning and publishing a newspaper became an increasingly expensive proposition. By the turn of the previous century, if not before, newspapers were for the most part published by large, well-heeled corporations--corporations that tended toward the kind of politics that protects those with money: conservatism.
And the conservative people who run these corporations don't take kindly to being accused of promoting liberalism. This, however, has been the bane of American journalism for the past half-century--to be accused of "liberal bias" by political operatives who understand that the only way conservatism can win in the United States is by "working the referees." In this case, that means accusing all of American journalism of representing a brand of politics that could only be ascribed at best to three sources of journalism: the Times, the Post, and CBS News. And, because of the endless repetition of this argument, combined with the fear of being seen as "unfair," the argument eventually achieved its desired effect. Even the three "liberal" sources of news just mentioned began chasing their tails to achieve the conservative brand of "fairness," meaning 100% favorable coverage of conservatives and 100% negative coverage of liberals. Along came Fox News in the 1990s, and that was the last nail in the coffin of liberal journalism.
Speaking of 100%, I am 100% convinced that, more than any other single factor, this neutering of the press in the performance of what should always be its real job: telling the truth, and letting the public weigh the question of "fairness" for itself, rather than having it resolved exclusively by conservatives has led American politics in a straight line of corruption, from bad to worse to totally off the scales, from Reagan to the Bush family to T****. Faced with 40 years of corrupt behavior by Trump, where the due diligence practically does itself, and endlessly exaggerating the seriousness of Hillary Clinton's use as Secretary of State of a private server for her e-mail, what does the press do? Focus on the e-mail! Which has just been established by T****'s own State Department to have been a non-story in the first place.
Nearly three years of unrelenting corruption by T**** and company, the American press has, to some degree, shaken off the fear of being tagged as "biased" by self-interested wingers who don't care in the first instance about the proper role of the press in a free society. But that hasn't done enough to reverse the downward trend in hard-copy circulation. And online advertising, while it provides a revenue stream, doesn't provide enough of one to sustain what I believe would do the most to promote journalism, offline or on: a return to publishing the unvarnished truth about events in the world and at home, without fear or favor.
So, whither a free press?
Perhaps the answer can be found here, in the trend of college newspapers to pick up the slack of local coverage when the general-circulation newspapers in their towns fold. Maybe this could be the start of a new, non-profit business model for newspapers, one that would allow them to be supported by donations (with transparency about the identities of donors). Perhaps that would enable newspapers to not merely survive, but to flourish and to, above all, be completely free to publish not what some of us think we should know, but what all of us need to know.
Wednesday, October 30, 2019
Sunday, October 27, 2019
Just Where Do The Homeless Come From?
By now, you've probably read a lot about the homeless crisis in California. Calling it a crisis, in fact, may be putting it mildly. As of 2018, California had four times as many homeless people as Florida, which had the second-largest homeless population of all the states. You can look here to see the exact numbers, as well as to get a sense of where your state ranks relative to others with respect to its homeless population.
With a budget surplus of well into eight figures, to say nothing of a broad range of charities and foundations, California's state government would not seem to lack the financial resources to address the problem of homelessness. From a public policy standpoint, the biggest culprit in all of this goes all the way back to the 1970s and the decision made then to de-institutionalize the mentally ill, on the theory that they could be more effectively treated on an outpatient basis. In retrospect, the patently obvious failure of this theory seems to have been a precursor of our current, broader health care crisis, brought about in part by the for-profit age of super-pharmaceuticals that work miracles but cost the patients a small fortune to use. Man (including all genders here) does not live by drugs alone--or profits alone, for that matter--when it comes to health care needs, regardless of the nature of those needs.
Reversing this trend would seem to be one obvious solution, along with public policies that addressed the need for a higher minimum wage and more affordable housing. But it's that latter point that seems to be the real sticking point in addressing the homeless crisis.
Commentators on the right often blame California's problem with homelessness on allegedly excessive land use regulations for the purpose of preservation, whether of eco-systems or historic properties. This line of commentary, even putting aside its inherently self-serving nature, runs into two problems. The first is the afore-mentioned surplus, something that would not exist if all of those pesky regulations were as crippling as conservatives keep forcing themselves (and the rest of us) to believe. The second is the fact that California, to put it mildly, is a very big state. Finding room for all of the homeless in it, as large as the number of homeless is, should be relatively easy.
The core of California's problem, apart from its mental-health dimension, is the fact that the vast majority of its homeless population is concentrated in its largest and fourth-largest cities, Los Angeles and San Francisco. That makes it not merely highly visible; it also has reached the point at which it has come close to shutting down otherwise functional neighborhoods. And, because both cities are filled with thriving neighborhoods, relocating the homeless within city limits runs up against the NIMBY problem in a hurry.
And here is where we come to the heart of the problem: California, due to its success under Democratic government, has become the most popular place in the nation to live. Correspondingly, the value of property is sky-high, and those who own it have an incentive to sell it to people who then want to develop it in ways that will make even more money. That means luxury developments, not middle- and lower-middle-class ones. And fewer places in which to live and work for the majority of people who have come from other states to try cashing in on California's success.
Then again, are California's homeless simply a cohort of people who took Horace Greeley's famous advice about going west and struck out? In part, perhaps. Is it a case of people finding work that simply doesn't pay enough to afford housing in a superheated real estate market? Again, in part, perhaps. State and local governments have recently made increases in the minimum wage; in time, those could have an impact on the homeless numbers.
Then again, are most of these people here voluntarily? Or is this the consequence of red states deciding that the only spending their failed policies permit when it comes to the homeless is a one-way ticket out of town for each of them? Take a look.
I'm going to raise one more possibility. One that has a personal dimension.
As I've said previously on more than one occasion, I am a former evangelical Christian who is now a converted Jew During the peak of my born-again fervor, I went through a period during which I"bought into" (pun intended) the prosperity-gospel nonsense that many evangelical leaders (I hesitate to call some of them preachers) promote that the more faithfully one tithes, the more G-d rewards the the tither. Like many before me, and many more since, I learned the hard way that this is simply not the case. Indeed, if one reads the New Testament very carefully, one will discover that the so-called "prosperity gospel" is not even part of the Gospels. It is a line of "theology," however, that is very effective in lining the pockets of the false prophets with real profits provided by the spiritually bereft and easily gullible.
How many members of the homeless population in this country, including the ones in California, are among the bereft and gullible? How many of those people were systemically robbed of their hard-earned money to support the criminally rich lifestyles of the pious and hypocritical? Especially by this miserable excuse for a man, who shouldn't be allowed on television anywhere, anytime (and don't you love the fact that Wikipedia describes him as a felon before it mentions his checkered career as a televangelist)? I swear, if we took all of these people, turned them upside down, and shook them until all of their money fell on the ground, we'd have more than enough money to pay for the homeless. That is, the people that Jesus told people again and again they should care about the most.
I don't have an answer to that question. But I do know that, whether due to fake political policies or fake faith, there are too many people in this country who suffer unjustly. I hope and pray that we can do something to end this state of affairs. And, due to its successes in other areas, I feel confident that California will be able to lead the way.
With a budget surplus of well into eight figures, to say nothing of a broad range of charities and foundations, California's state government would not seem to lack the financial resources to address the problem of homelessness. From a public policy standpoint, the biggest culprit in all of this goes all the way back to the 1970s and the decision made then to de-institutionalize the mentally ill, on the theory that they could be more effectively treated on an outpatient basis. In retrospect, the patently obvious failure of this theory seems to have been a precursor of our current, broader health care crisis, brought about in part by the for-profit age of super-pharmaceuticals that work miracles but cost the patients a small fortune to use. Man (including all genders here) does not live by drugs alone--or profits alone, for that matter--when it comes to health care needs, regardless of the nature of those needs.
Reversing this trend would seem to be one obvious solution, along with public policies that addressed the need for a higher minimum wage and more affordable housing. But it's that latter point that seems to be the real sticking point in addressing the homeless crisis.
Commentators on the right often blame California's problem with homelessness on allegedly excessive land use regulations for the purpose of preservation, whether of eco-systems or historic properties. This line of commentary, even putting aside its inherently self-serving nature, runs into two problems. The first is the afore-mentioned surplus, something that would not exist if all of those pesky regulations were as crippling as conservatives keep forcing themselves (and the rest of us) to believe. The second is the fact that California, to put it mildly, is a very big state. Finding room for all of the homeless in it, as large as the number of homeless is, should be relatively easy.
The core of California's problem, apart from its mental-health dimension, is the fact that the vast majority of its homeless population is concentrated in its largest and fourth-largest cities, Los Angeles and San Francisco. That makes it not merely highly visible; it also has reached the point at which it has come close to shutting down otherwise functional neighborhoods. And, because both cities are filled with thriving neighborhoods, relocating the homeless within city limits runs up against the NIMBY problem in a hurry.
And here is where we come to the heart of the problem: California, due to its success under Democratic government, has become the most popular place in the nation to live. Correspondingly, the value of property is sky-high, and those who own it have an incentive to sell it to people who then want to develop it in ways that will make even more money. That means luxury developments, not middle- and lower-middle-class ones. And fewer places in which to live and work for the majority of people who have come from other states to try cashing in on California's success.
Then again, are California's homeless simply a cohort of people who took Horace Greeley's famous advice about going west and struck out? In part, perhaps. Is it a case of people finding work that simply doesn't pay enough to afford housing in a superheated real estate market? Again, in part, perhaps. State and local governments have recently made increases in the minimum wage; in time, those could have an impact on the homeless numbers.
Then again, are most of these people here voluntarily? Or is this the consequence of red states deciding that the only spending their failed policies permit when it comes to the homeless is a one-way ticket out of town for each of them? Take a look.
I'm going to raise one more possibility. One that has a personal dimension.
As I've said previously on more than one occasion, I am a former evangelical Christian who is now a converted Jew During the peak of my born-again fervor, I went through a period during which I"bought into" (pun intended) the prosperity-gospel nonsense that many evangelical leaders (I hesitate to call some of them preachers) promote that the more faithfully one tithes, the more G-d rewards the the tither. Like many before me, and many more since, I learned the hard way that this is simply not the case. Indeed, if one reads the New Testament very carefully, one will discover that the so-called "prosperity gospel" is not even part of the Gospels. It is a line of "theology," however, that is very effective in lining the pockets of the false prophets with real profits provided by the spiritually bereft and easily gullible.
How many members of the homeless population in this country, including the ones in California, are among the bereft and gullible? How many of those people were systemically robbed of their hard-earned money to support the criminally rich lifestyles of the pious and hypocritical? Especially by this miserable excuse for a man, who shouldn't be allowed on television anywhere, anytime (and don't you love the fact that Wikipedia describes him as a felon before it mentions his checkered career as a televangelist)? I swear, if we took all of these people, turned them upside down, and shook them until all of their money fell on the ground, we'd have more than enough money to pay for the homeless. That is, the people that Jesus told people again and again they should care about the most.
I don't have an answer to that question. But I do know that, whether due to fake political policies or fake faith, there are too many people in this country who suffer unjustly. I hope and pray that we can do something to end this state of affairs. And, due to its successes in other areas, I feel confident that California will be able to lead the way.
Thursday, October 24, 2019
A Follow-Up RE: The Republican Party Is No Longer A Party
This morning, I was thinking about two things regarding yesterday's post.
First, I meant to (and forgot to) say something about the fact that the GOP Animal House stunt took place on a day when Pelosi was in Baltimore, at the funeral of her brother, Thomas D'Alesandro III, a former Mayor of the city. It was also the day before the body of Elijah Cummings was to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda. Cummings was, among many other things, the late chair of the House Oversight Committee, which happens to be one of the committees taking part in the impeachment investigation.
There's no need for me here to recite the life history and accomplishments of Cummings. They have been more than adequately chronicled elsewhere, as they should be, and we should all mourn his passing and look to him as a role model for our own conduct going forward. Indeed, coming at a time when his leadership skills and moral authority were perhaps more sorely needed than they ever were before, one is forced to wonder what G-d, fate, kismet, or whatever prime mover you believe has in mind for the Republic at this point. Personally, I'm inclined to think that G-d loved Cummings so much that he took him ahead of the Biblical allotment of threescore and ten, and is now demanding that the rest of us step up to fill the void he leaves for all of us.
In any case, the fact that the Gaetz Gang would pull their "prank" at a time like this only underscores the inherently cowardly nature of their actions. That's something to keep in mind as well, especially if events in the near future are going to follow a similar pattern, as I expect they will. What's left of the Republican Party is little more than a rump gang of bullies--and bullies are cowards at heart.
I don't think that the Speaker wanted to address the attack of the Gaetz Gang on federal statutory law, congressional oversight, and due process in general during a 48-hour period during which she was observing a personal and civic day of mourning, especially for two men to whom she was close. I respect her for that.
But, come tomorrow, if she does not recommend formal charges against the gang's members, including the confiscation of their cell phones to determine whether they have been compromised by their actions, I will be worse than deeply disappointed. However much one prizes civility in government, one must always remember that civility is a two-way street. All the more so when one is the person in charge of maintaining that civility. There is, in the last analysis, such a thing as going too far. And that's exactly what the Gaetz Gang did.
Second, there's the alleged pretext for the Animal House action: the alleged violation of House rules regarding the investigations.
The investigations are being conducted under rules adopted by the House when the Gaetz Gang and its party were in control. Had Pelosi and the Democrats attempted to change them, the GOP would have found a way to have a juvenile snit over that. Rather than giving them a chance to do so, they went forward with the status quo, which ought to be credited to them as a form of "bipartisanship."
And, once more time: under those rules, Republican members, including members of the Gaetz Gang, have been present and able to participate in the investigations all along.
Enough said. For now.
First, I meant to (and forgot to) say something about the fact that the GOP Animal House stunt took place on a day when Pelosi was in Baltimore, at the funeral of her brother, Thomas D'Alesandro III, a former Mayor of the city. It was also the day before the body of Elijah Cummings was to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda. Cummings was, among many other things, the late chair of the House Oversight Committee, which happens to be one of the committees taking part in the impeachment investigation.
There's no need for me here to recite the life history and accomplishments of Cummings. They have been more than adequately chronicled elsewhere, as they should be, and we should all mourn his passing and look to him as a role model for our own conduct going forward. Indeed, coming at a time when his leadership skills and moral authority were perhaps more sorely needed than they ever were before, one is forced to wonder what G-d, fate, kismet, or whatever prime mover you believe has in mind for the Republic at this point. Personally, I'm inclined to think that G-d loved Cummings so much that he took him ahead of the Biblical allotment of threescore and ten, and is now demanding that the rest of us step up to fill the void he leaves for all of us.
In any case, the fact that the Gaetz Gang would pull their "prank" at a time like this only underscores the inherently cowardly nature of their actions. That's something to keep in mind as well, especially if events in the near future are going to follow a similar pattern, as I expect they will. What's left of the Republican Party is little more than a rump gang of bullies--and bullies are cowards at heart.
I don't think that the Speaker wanted to address the attack of the Gaetz Gang on federal statutory law, congressional oversight, and due process in general during a 48-hour period during which she was observing a personal and civic day of mourning, especially for two men to whom she was close. I respect her for that.
But, come tomorrow, if she does not recommend formal charges against the gang's members, including the confiscation of their cell phones to determine whether they have been compromised by their actions, I will be worse than deeply disappointed. However much one prizes civility in government, one must always remember that civility is a two-way street. All the more so when one is the person in charge of maintaining that civility. There is, in the last analysis, such a thing as going too far. And that's exactly what the Gaetz Gang did.
Second, there's the alleged pretext for the Animal House action: the alleged violation of House rules regarding the investigations.
The investigations are being conducted under rules adopted by the House when the Gaetz Gang and its party were in control. Had Pelosi and the Democrats attempted to change them, the GOP would have found a way to have a juvenile snit over that. Rather than giving them a chance to do so, they went forward with the status quo, which ought to be credited to them as a form of "bipartisanship."
And, once more time: under those rules, Republican members, including members of the Gaetz Gang, have been present and able to participate in the investigations all along.
Enough said. For now.
Wednesday, October 23, 2019
The Republican Party Is No Longer A Party
"See you in October." Those were my last words last month. And here we are.
My sports-style sign-off was based on the fact that, not long before my last post, Nancy Pelosi finally announced that the House of Representatives was going to begin a formal impeachment process against T****. Since then, quite a bit has happened to fuel the media and political frenzy surrounding the process, much of it related to the now-infamous Ukrainian quid pro quo and the evidence that establishes its existence beyond any doubt, reasonable or otherwise. On top of that, and worse in so many ways, there was the systematic slaughter of our erstwhile but highly effective allies, the Syrian Kurds, green-lighted by the Criminal-in-Chief himself.
Like much of what has happened in this country over the past almost-three years, I find myself thinking that these events, like so many similar ones before them are shocking/not shocking. That is, they would be shocking coming from any of the other 43 individuals to have held the office. But not from this one.
The only given with T**** is that he has absolutely no ability to separate any aspect of his life--his family, his businesses, and now the country he's supposed to lead--from his individual interests. He thinks that being responsive to the needs of others is for wussies, even though the Constitution and history ought to bind him to doing exactly that. Whatever can be said about his mistreatment of the Ukrainians and the Kurds, there is only one clear winner as a consequence of it--and it's not the United States.
It's Russia. And Vladimir Putin. Putin's Nos. 1 and 2 foreign policy objectives, as part of his overall plan to restore Soviet-level hegemony, are to push westward against NATO and southward against American interests in the Middle East (i.e., Israel and oil). And T**** has spent the whole of his presidential term serving both interests, culminating in the revelations (in the case of Ukraine) and the events (in the case of the Kurds) of the past several weeks.
All of this has made the impeachment work of Pelosi's House committees much harder in one sense. There's now more to investigate, which may delay the completion of their work well past the original informal Thanksgiving deadline. At the same time, it may make it easier. In fact, I have believed for some time (and continue to do so) that all of the T**** shenanigans boil down to one basic and highly criminal issue: rather than viewing his office as a public trust, one that requires some level of personal sacrifice for the good of the nation as a whole, he simply sees it as just another property among many property that he "owns," something to be used and abused for personal gain.
This, of course, is why he can't show his tax returns; those returns almost certainly would provide a road map of how this process has worked for him in business, and how it continues to work for him as President. In particular, it would show how far he has been willing to go in the selling of his public office: to the point at which he has been actively working as an agent for a foreign power against the interests of the country whose fate has been placed in his hands by a theoretically democratic election. And now, based on recent events, we may not even need to show what the returns would show: that T**** is guilty of bribery and treason, to say nothing of other high crimes and misdemeanors.
The real problem, however, is that this is no longer just about T****. If it were, I would treat his eventual removal from office as a foregone conclusion. But I can't do that.
T**** didn't come to us out of nowhere. His presidency is the culmination of fifty years of systematic betrayal by his party of both the Constitution and the values it embodies. Richard Nixon, and his intervention in the Vietnamese peace talks as well as Watergate. Ronald Reagan, and his betrayal of the Iranian hostage negotiations as well as the Iran-Contra scandal. George W. Bush, and his "election" to the White House as well as--well, do I really need to say more than WMD in Iraq?
And now, the congressional Republicans who wanted to impeach Bill Clinton over the constitutional equivalent of double-parking his car now desperately want you, me, and everyone else to pretend that T****'s entire term in office is as pure as the driven snow. And they're so sure of this themselves that no level of bullying is too much in making the non-existent point.
Not even this.
What's instructive about this episode, I think, is twofold. First, as the article recounts in some detail, the behavior of House Republicans is far from an aberration; it's part of a part of systematic abuse of the political process, and the deceit that goes hand-in-hand with it, that party members have been honing at the state level for some time. In other words, this can't be considered "rouge" behavior. The people engaged in this egregious behavior aren't outliers. They are the mean, medium, and mode of the modern Republican Party.
Second, it should be noted that the House Republicans who "crashed" this committee hearing--and keep in mind, some of the "crashers" were committee members who had the right to be in the room without resorting to fraternity-level (or worse) behavior--brought their cell phones into a setting where full security procedures are meant to be followed, including the securing of all electronic devices in snoop-proof lockers. These clowns, however, were having none of that. In fact, they were using their phones to record what were supposed to be closed proceedings, exposing the proceedings and their phones and the contents thereof to foreign monitoring.
From this latter point, you can only conclude that the Gang of Gaetz--a House member who has his own checkered career with the law--is either stupid or corrupt, although the possibility of both can't be completely discounted. But, when you compare this incident and the potential consequences of it to the past half-century of corruption of the part of the Not-So-Grand Old Party, it doesn't seem like an isolated case.
So one is left to conclude, based on all of the evidence, that the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Eisenhower, is no longer a political party. It is more properly viewed as a criminal enterprise. Perhaps, far worse, it is little more than an agent for one or more hostile foreign interests, led by a real-life Manchurian Candidate.
If this is true--and I for one see no other conclusion that one can fairly draw from the available facts--the party and its members must be opposed by every lawful tool available to the rest of us. And, by "us," I'm including registered Republicans whose own beliefs and interests have been betrayed by the actions and inactions of their party.
In any case, the elephant's share of the party must be stopped. In the courts. And at the ballot box.
And beyond that?
Well, if they won't rule it out, perhaps the rest of us shouldn't.
My sports-style sign-off was based on the fact that, not long before my last post, Nancy Pelosi finally announced that the House of Representatives was going to begin a formal impeachment process against T****. Since then, quite a bit has happened to fuel the media and political frenzy surrounding the process, much of it related to the now-infamous Ukrainian quid pro quo and the evidence that establishes its existence beyond any doubt, reasonable or otherwise. On top of that, and worse in so many ways, there was the systematic slaughter of our erstwhile but highly effective allies, the Syrian Kurds, green-lighted by the Criminal-in-Chief himself.
Like much of what has happened in this country over the past almost-three years, I find myself thinking that these events, like so many similar ones before them are shocking/not shocking. That is, they would be shocking coming from any of the other 43 individuals to have held the office. But not from this one.
The only given with T**** is that he has absolutely no ability to separate any aspect of his life--his family, his businesses, and now the country he's supposed to lead--from his individual interests. He thinks that being responsive to the needs of others is for wussies, even though the Constitution and history ought to bind him to doing exactly that. Whatever can be said about his mistreatment of the Ukrainians and the Kurds, there is only one clear winner as a consequence of it--and it's not the United States.
It's Russia. And Vladimir Putin. Putin's Nos. 1 and 2 foreign policy objectives, as part of his overall plan to restore Soviet-level hegemony, are to push westward against NATO and southward against American interests in the Middle East (i.e., Israel and oil). And T**** has spent the whole of his presidential term serving both interests, culminating in the revelations (in the case of Ukraine) and the events (in the case of the Kurds) of the past several weeks.
All of this has made the impeachment work of Pelosi's House committees much harder in one sense. There's now more to investigate, which may delay the completion of their work well past the original informal Thanksgiving deadline. At the same time, it may make it easier. In fact, I have believed for some time (and continue to do so) that all of the T**** shenanigans boil down to one basic and highly criminal issue: rather than viewing his office as a public trust, one that requires some level of personal sacrifice for the good of the nation as a whole, he simply sees it as just another property among many property that he "owns," something to be used and abused for personal gain.
This, of course, is why he can't show his tax returns; those returns almost certainly would provide a road map of how this process has worked for him in business, and how it continues to work for him as President. In particular, it would show how far he has been willing to go in the selling of his public office: to the point at which he has been actively working as an agent for a foreign power against the interests of the country whose fate has been placed in his hands by a theoretically democratic election. And now, based on recent events, we may not even need to show what the returns would show: that T**** is guilty of bribery and treason, to say nothing of other high crimes and misdemeanors.
The real problem, however, is that this is no longer just about T****. If it were, I would treat his eventual removal from office as a foregone conclusion. But I can't do that.
T**** didn't come to us out of nowhere. His presidency is the culmination of fifty years of systematic betrayal by his party of both the Constitution and the values it embodies. Richard Nixon, and his intervention in the Vietnamese peace talks as well as Watergate. Ronald Reagan, and his betrayal of the Iranian hostage negotiations as well as the Iran-Contra scandal. George W. Bush, and his "election" to the White House as well as--well, do I really need to say more than WMD in Iraq?
And now, the congressional Republicans who wanted to impeach Bill Clinton over the constitutional equivalent of double-parking his car now desperately want you, me, and everyone else to pretend that T****'s entire term in office is as pure as the driven snow. And they're so sure of this themselves that no level of bullying is too much in making the non-existent point.
Not even this.
What's instructive about this episode, I think, is twofold. First, as the article recounts in some detail, the behavior of House Republicans is far from an aberration; it's part of a part of systematic abuse of the political process, and the deceit that goes hand-in-hand with it, that party members have been honing at the state level for some time. In other words, this can't be considered "rouge" behavior. The people engaged in this egregious behavior aren't outliers. They are the mean, medium, and mode of the modern Republican Party.
Second, it should be noted that the House Republicans who "crashed" this committee hearing--and keep in mind, some of the "crashers" were committee members who had the right to be in the room without resorting to fraternity-level (or worse) behavior--brought their cell phones into a setting where full security procedures are meant to be followed, including the securing of all electronic devices in snoop-proof lockers. These clowns, however, were having none of that. In fact, they were using their phones to record what were supposed to be closed proceedings, exposing the proceedings and their phones and the contents thereof to foreign monitoring.
From this latter point, you can only conclude that the Gang of Gaetz--a House member who has his own checkered career with the law--is either stupid or corrupt, although the possibility of both can't be completely discounted. But, when you compare this incident and the potential consequences of it to the past half-century of corruption of the part of the Not-So-Grand Old Party, it doesn't seem like an isolated case.
So one is left to conclude, based on all of the evidence, that the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Eisenhower, is no longer a political party. It is more properly viewed as a criminal enterprise. Perhaps, far worse, it is little more than an agent for one or more hostile foreign interests, led by a real-life Manchurian Candidate.
If this is true--and I for one see no other conclusion that one can fairly draw from the available facts--the party and its members must be opposed by every lawful tool available to the rest of us. And, by "us," I'm including registered Republicans whose own beliefs and interests have been betrayed by the actions and inactions of their party.
In any case, the elephant's share of the party must be stopped. In the courts. And at the ballot box.
And beyond that?
Well, if they won't rule it out, perhaps the rest of us shouldn't.
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