Whither 2022?

It was a year that began with an organized, systematic, and violent effort, organized and encouraged by the then-president of the United States, to overthrow constitutional government in this country, an effort that came much closer to succeeding than many people may realize. It was a year that ended with a billionaire, and not those who defended constitutional government from that attack, declared as the Person of the Year. In between those events, there was a systematic effort by the leaders of one political party, and the more degenerate examples of their followers, to weaponize a deadly virus in an effort to continue that assault on constitutional government.

There is a straight line over four decades from the worship of Ronald Reagan and the exaltation of the wealthy, along with the subsequent demonization of their opponents as traitors, to that assault and that elevation of a man and his self-exaltation at the expense of the workers who put him where he is today. As we go into an election year in which constitutional government itself may very well be on the ballot, we should not lose sight of that fact.

Nor, for that matter should we lose sight of the fact that this was not only an assault on constitutional government, but on the very future of our nation itself, as illustrated not only by the continuing the spread of the pandemic, but also the fact that it is pushing our health system itself to the point that so-called socialized medicine was supposed to create.  That is to say, rationing care, and, with the explosion of pediatric cases, continuing the assault on our posterity that gun violence has already initiated.  All of this, despite the fact that posterity is supposed to be one of the things our Constitution was primarily written to protect.

It’s worth noting at this point the death of Senator Harry Reid, a man who moved from the right to the left over his career because he was fundamentally a fighter and he recognized that fighting spirit, and the shared fundamental values behind it, in the left-leaning members of his party. It may very well be that the need to fight, the willingness to fight, and the ability to fight, is what is really needed to unify everyone in this country, regardless of their political affiliation, who still cares about democracy and is willing to do whatever it takes to protect it.

We enter 2022 with the realization that it could very well be a historic year. That could be true in one of two ways. Either it can be a year in which we the people re-commit ourselves to the values that are expressed in our Constitution's Preamble. Or it can be a year in which the Constitution itself is reduced to little more than four decaying pieces of parchment in an airtight glass case, a case that may protect the parchment, but not the government or the ideals that the words on the parchment are supposed to protect.

The choice, as always, is yours. As someone who turned 65 this year, and who is deepening his appreciation, as he looks at his grandchildren, of the need to promote and protect the future, I beg you with my head and heart, and with my body and soul, to not let this opportunity to save the Republic slip away. It is easy to slip into the comfort of dropping out. It is much harder to rise to the obligation of standing up and staying in the fight. But it has never been more essential to do so.

Whatever you do, this year, honor our Constitution, and the memory of Senator Reid, by being a fighter. Do it to save all of us. And, for that matter, do it to save yourself.

And with that, I wish everyone a happy new year, in the hope and prayer that will end up being one.

One last minute coda.  Thanks, Betty White, for being a consummate professional and an unbelievably decent human being, one whose end-of-the-year exit was as graceful as the life she lived.

Stephen Sondheim, The Broadway Gift That Will Keep On Giving

The day after Thanksgiving this year is one I will never forget.

I was sitting in my law office, engaged in my work, when, suddenly, the voice of my wife broke the train of my thoughts.

"Oh, no!"

"What?"

"Stephen Sondheim died."

Those are words I never wanted to hear.  Over the years, I've mourned the death of a lot of celebrities I've admired or respected, with varying degrees of sadness.  None, however, have devastated me as much as those five words my wife uttered.  I'm sitting here more than three weeks later, and I'm still in something of a state of shock.  I feel the loss of Stephen Joshua Sondheim, the American theater's foremost composer-lyricist, as deeply as I would feel the loss of a family member, or a close friend.

I never had the pleasure of meeting him, or talking with him (although our lives did intersect once; more about that later).  Yet I can honestly say that I have felt his presence, in a variety of ways, at various points in my life.  Going all the way back to close to the beginning of it, in fact.

In writing previously about the passing of my mother, I mentioned the fact that she imbued me with a passionate love for theater.  I remember, as a young boy, sitting in the living room of our suburban Baltimore row house, where she would iron clothes and sing songs from Broadway shows.  One day, I crawled across the floor and started going through the records stacked neatly under our Magnavox stereo.  Among others, I found the original cast album for "West Side Story," read the names on the cover, and was delighted to discover that one of the authors of the show had my first name.

OK, I'll admit, a deeply narcissistic reaction.  In my defense, I was about five years old at the time.  Nevertheless, it launched me on a lifelong love of Sondheim's career and work.  That love really started to percolate in my adolescent and teenage years, as my own interest in theater translated into an interest in acting, including a high school production of "The Music Man," (ironically, the show that beat "West Side Story" for Best Musical at the Tony Awards).  It continued into my young adult years, when I got to see three of Sondheim's shows--"Pacific Overtures," "Sweeney Todd," and "Merrily We Roll Along"--prior to their official Broadway openings.  It picked up again in middle age, as I got involved in efforts to save a Broadway theater, while introducing my wife and stepchildren to my affinity to the history of theater and Sondheim's place in it.  And it has continue long after it became apparent  that Sondheim was unlikely to create new musicals, spending much of his time working on revivals of his existing works.

If you know little or nothing about him, here is a link to the obituary I knew I would have to read someday, and dreaded doing so.

The success story of his life is one that does not fit some popular measures of success.  None of his shows, in their original incarnations, ran as many as 1,000 performances.  And not all of those productions were financial successes, although they were often critical ones; many of them lost some, and in a few cases all, of their initial investments.  And his critics in the press, though they were in the minority, could be utterly brutal, even when they were forced to concede the ingenuity and insight of his lyrics.

The conventional critical rap on Sondheim is that he was the master of ambivalence, his work expressing a view of life as something without clear and painless paths or choices, with pain as an inevitability.  This perspective has been repeated to the point of cliché, albeit a cliché that obscures instead of underscoring (no pun intended) the value of his work.

Sondheim had, by all accounts (including his own), a childhood that was financially privileged yet emotionally scarred.  His parents' marriage ended when he was 10, and his childhood life thereafter was molested, emotionally if not literally, by his mother, who took all of her anger toward her ex-husband and directed it toward her son.  As he himself would admit, this fostered in him a general distrust of human relationships and their reliability.  However, it didn't diminish, and may have to some extent fostered, the analytical side of his thinking, which led in turn to a perspective on life that could honestly appraise all aspects of human experience.  This range of his appreciation for reality, its blessings and its curses, can be seen in the range of the source materials for his work.

And the range of his talent can be seen not only in his Broadway career, but also in his love of other forms of writing, especially puzzles.  Sondheim's Manhattan townhouse was decorated with antique puzzles and games, and was the inspiration for the setting of Anthony Shaffer's "Sleuth."  He enjoyed not only solving puzzles, but creating them as well, doing so for the readers of New York magazine before his work on "Company" got in the way.  As is explained in detail here, Sondheim introduced variations on the traditional crossword puzzle to New York's readers.  There's a quote of Sondheim's in the article that poignantly explains the appeal for him:  "One of the great things about crossword puzzles is, there's a solution.  And that's unfortunately not true of all the puzzles in life."

Happily, his passion for puzzles was something he shared not only with two of his creative colleagues, Leonard Bernstein and Burt Shevelove, but even earlier with the man who served as his professional mentor and surrogate father, Oscar Hammerstein.  That is appropriate, in a way, because it was his relationship with Hammerstein and Hammerstein's family, a by-product of his mother's post-divorce decision to move from New York to Pennsylvania, that began to give his life an emotional and professional grounding.

One of my favorite Sondheim stories from this period of his life is the one he told about the time, at the age of 15, when he wrote a musical and asked Hammerstein to evaluate it from the perspective of a professional producer.  Notwithstanding his personal regard for Sondheim, Hammerstein punctured his aspiring protege's dreams of being the first teenage songwriter on Broadway by telling him it was the worst thing he'd ever read--to which he quickly added "Now I didn't say it was untalented.  I merely said it was terrible.  And if you want to know why it's terrible, sit down and let me show you."

Those last seven words are perhaps the most fateful in the history of the American musical theater.  They were the beginning of a mentorship that would run through Sondheim's college days and into his work on his first Broadway hits.  And, as the quote above suggests, Hammerstein was an unsparing teacher.  A little bit of full disclosure here:  I myself, with the help of a musician friend, tried to write a musical during my high school years, without getting as far as Sondheim did.  I have no illusions that dreams of glory would have been ours had there been a Hammerstein in our lives.  But that experience, if nothing else, deepened my own appreciation for what it took to create at the level Sondheim achieved.

Despite the abuse Sondheim experienced at the hands of his mother, the younger songwriter was able to feel the love and respect his mentor showed him not only by holding him to the highest of standards but, simultaneously, ingraining in him the value of writing songs with his own voice, rather than someone else's.  Perhaps it helped to make him his own harshest critic as well, seeing in that harshness the discipline need to create art at the highest levels.

He did not believe his work, having once been produced, deserved to be preserved and admired on some sort of pedestal.  In revivals, he has frequently accepted the revisionist ideas of other, younger theater professionals, as is exemplified by the current Broadway revival of "Company."

And he repaid the debt he owed to Hammerstein handsomely, through his advice and mentorship to a large number of young theatrical professionals, most notably Jonathan Larson, the author of "Rent," and Lin-Manuel Miranda, the author of "Hamilton."  He paid them the same compliment Hammerstein paid to him, by not letting his personal regard for them get in the way of making sure that they did their best work.  In the cases of Larson and Miranda, among others, his mentorship was in-person; in the case of others, it was by way of correspondence (full disclosure, hinted at earlier:  I have one of those coveted hand-typed-and-hand-signed notes from him, in response to a letter I had sent him concerning my work in historic theater preservation).

In the process, he not only repaid his debt to Hammerstein, he perhaps illustrated Hammerstein's own point that a teacher is ultimately taught by his, her, or their students.  Perhaps he also came to understand the extent to which professional fulfillment can also be personal fulfillment as well.  I think, in this context, of Sondheim songs such as "Children Will Listen," and "No One Is Alone," from "Into The Woods."

I like to think that although our interactions were limited to that one exchange of correspondence, I'm one of his children, too.  Although my own interest in theater was nurtured by my parents, my interest in a theater career, notwithstanding my failed attempt to become a lyricist, was nurtured by Sondheim's career and by my desire to make some kind of contribution to theater--if not in his way, and at his level, then to whatever extent I could do it.

I don't think I could have helped form a movement on the Internet to save the Biltmore Theatre from becoming the lobby to a condo building if I didn't have a love for theater history that transcended the bounds of rationality.  (Ask my wife and stepchildren if you don't believe me.)  That crusade, along with my other artistic pursuits as a visual artist, an actor, and a producer, is driven as much as anything by something I think Sondheim and I shared:  a contempt for the mediocracy of modern culture.  For me, it's best summed up in the words of Madame Armfeldt, from "A Little Night Music":

Where is style?

Where is skill?

Where is forethought?

Where's discretion of the heart?

Where's passion in the art?

Where's craft?

No one can doubt that Sondheim valued art above money, a fact reflected in his working right up to the end of his lengthy life, even though he had no financial reason for doing so. It may be, in one sense, deeply premature to bring this up, but I can't help hoping that some of the material from this last incomplete show, "Square One," is performed and recorded.  As much Sondheim as we have, there can't be too much, even if satirists might think otherwise.

And, however adventurous and financially unprofitable some of Sondheim's musicals may have been, the sheer quality of his work found a way to break through and become a part of the larger culture outside not just of Broadway, but theater itself.  Nothing better illustrates that fact than the success of "Send In The Clowns" from "A Little Night Music," the very first Broadway musical that I actually saw on Broadway, during the last week of the original production's run.  Nothing I can say or write can describe the experience of listening to Glynis Johns singing it, or the ovation she received after doing so.

Perhaps, in our deeply divided times, one of Sondheim's greatest accomplishments was his appeal to people on both ends of the political spectrum.  He was not only admired by liberals (like me), but also by conservatives, including prominent media figures such as John Podhoretz and Cal Thomas.

On a related note (again, no pun intended), I think perhaps his greatest lesson to all of us lies in his willingness to adapt.  He started out at the end of the great Tin Pan Alley tradition of 32-bar, AABA melodies, and almost seamlessly transitioned the Broadway mainstream into what has become a long and still unfolding era of experimentation in musical theater.  In the process, he took an institution that was in danger of completely disappearing, and extended its life for at least decades beyond his own lifetime.

I remember what Broadway was like in the early 1970s, about the time that the Sondheim-Hal Prince collaboration emerged as a strong creative force, and my own interest in theater began to peak with my first visit to Broadway (Alan Bates in "Butley," at the now-departed Morosco Theatre) and the aforementioned appearance in my high school's production of "The Music Man."  Broadway, simply put, was dying.  Theaters were being torn down.  Fewer new authors and producers were emerging from the shows that did get on the boards.  In the fall of 1973, on my birthday, there were exactly 12 shows running on the allegedly Great White Way.  Today, even in this COVID-ravaged times, there are more than 40 active Broadway theaters, including historic houses brought back from the dead.  That would not have happened without a handful of dedicated theater professionals keeping Broadway on life support until a new generation could come along to embrace it.

Sondheim, as well as Prince and Joseph Papp, deserve enormous and undiluted credit for the fact that this happened.  And all of these individuals did it by understanding that the world around them was changing, and theater's survival depended on its ability to change with it.  Sondheim, in his relationships with Larson and Miranda, even found the ability to embrace rock and rap music, despite at one point having derided the former as being too dependent on rhythm for the range of emotional expression needed in drama. Perhaps he best expressed the need to survive by adapting here.  (Perhaps I should say "still here" instead.)

The key to the adaptation theater needed, for Sondheim as with many modern artists, lies in deconstructing reality, showing it from multiple perspectives, teaching us about its various facets by showing it from multiple perspectives and multiple points in time.  He could take fragments of one song and combine them with another, a technique he used to perfection in "Merrily We Roll Along," a show that operates with a reverse chronology.  Bits of one song at the show's beginning, or at the "end" of the story, would build to fuller versions later on, or toward the "end" of the story.  If you can find a copy of the original cast album, get it not only for its magnificent score, but also for Sondheim's liner notes, which explain in better detail than I can his thinking about how the music and lyrics are meant to work.

Perhaps its not surprising that one of his own later works, "Sunday In The Park With George," revolves around an Impressionist work of art; like Cezanne and other Impressionists, Sondheim was a master of deconstruction and reconstruction.  Yet it would be unfair to suggest that he did not develop a point of view in his work.  Despite his work's reputation for emotional ambivalence, time and again it would come back to the need for commitment as the only choice that each of us can ultimately make.  Commitment to art, to a person, to something.  The score of "Company" expresses this best for me, in songs like "Sorry-Grateful":

You're always sorry

You're always grateful

You're always wondering

What might have been

Then she walks in

Or, "Being Alive":

Somebody crowd me with love

Somebody force me to care

Somebody let me come through

I'll always be there

As frightened as you 

To help us survive

Being alive

Being alive

Being alive

We should all be not sorry, but deeply grateful, for the fact that in his career, and ultimately in his personal life, he found the ability to make that commitment, while still enjoying and exploring the complexity of life with a candor and commitment that has led some to compare him to Shakespeare.

Mandy Patinkin, who starred in the original production of "Sunday In The Park With George," made the same comparison, while hoping that Sondheim ultimately found the solace that was denied to him during his childhood, and added this:

Patinkin derives comfort from the knowledge that his friend is "the furthest thing from gone.  He left the heart and soul of his existence, his being, what he cared about, what he thought, what he wished for, wishes that he sometimes couldn't realize for himself--that will be here forever."

Perhaps Patinkin, along with the rest of us, can find solace in this evidence that Sondheim did find a measure of that peace, did in fact understand the value of what he would leave behind.  In a "60 Minutes" interview with Diane Sawyer back in the 1980s, in connection with his work on "Into The Woods," Sondheim expressed regret over not having children, but added, with a smile, that art can be a type of child.

Yes, art, as well as the people who follow your lead in creating it.  To me, this is the best way I can sum up my gratitude for the life and career of Stephen Sondheim.  He will continue to inspire creativity in others, through the legacy of his shows and the people he mentored and inspired to follow the trail he blazed.  As one small but powerful example of this, I leave you, thanking you for your indulgence if you've gotten this far in my musings, with a video based on one of my most favorite Sondheim songs from one of my most favorite of his scores, for "Merrily."  You will thank yourself for giving it a look and a listen, even if you are not as moved to the brink of tears as I was.  Among other things, it puts the lie to the accusation that his work was cold and unmelodic.  And it validates Patinkin's view that Sondheim's work gives us Sondheim forever.  It's what makes his loss, and the obituary I never wanted to read, bearable. It's what makes me, and should make all of us, deeply thankful for his life and work.

Thank you, Mr. Sondheim, indeed.  To paraphrase from another "Merrily" song, here's to you.  Who's like you?  Damn few?

Damn fewer than that.

Baruch dayan ha'emet.  And it will be.

Sorry, Charlie, The Second Amendment Is NOT The Most Important One

I write this within days, literally hours, of the jury verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial.  Given the level of publicity it has received, you don't need me to tell you why Rittenhouse was on trial in the first place.  Frankly, although it might be good journalism form to do so, I don't feel like I have the time to go through the history of Rittenhouse's time in the limelight.

Because, even though the verdict was the one I and everyone else fully expected, I still have too much outrage over it, and the implications for the rest of us to worry about the form.  The substance of this is killing me, emotionally.  The phenomenon it represents has already killed far too many innocent Americans, literally.  And, unless it can be put to an end, it may kill democracy in the United States.  Also literally, and maybe forever.

But I want to start by going through the reasons why the verdict is outrageous.  I don't want there to be any doubt about where I am, to borrow a phrase from back in the day, "coming from."  If you're reading this, and you think that this is merely the rage of a blindly liberal snowflake who lives to hate people who disagree with them, well, keep reading anyway.  There's always that one-in-a-trillion chance you'll learn something.

Kyle Rittenhouse took, without permission, a gun that did not belong to him.  He took that gun across state lines, into a state where civil unrest was already being countered effectively by the governor of the state in question.  He wandered into the midst of the unrest, already not under color of law, and used deadly force against three people who did not use deadly force against him.  Legally, therefore, he was not acting in self-defense.  Practically, he killed two people, and seriously injured another.  In short, he is every bit as not guilty as Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan, Mark Chapman, David Hinckley, and the Son of Sam.  *Please see update below.

But not, as it turns out, in the eyes of twelve allegedly average citizens in the town of Kenosha, Wisconsin.  And so he walks free.  The only thing he has to fear is his conscience.  If he has one.  The rest of us, on the other hand, have to worry about copycat Rittenhouses.  Especially men of color.

That last link is to a New York Times column by Charles Blow, someone well worth reading in any case.  Especially since, in this column, he notes a time when Ronald Reagan and the National Rifle Association joined forces to enact a California law banning open carry of firearms.  Ah, but those were very different circumstances.  The rationale for the law in that case was the appearance of members of the Black Panthers at the California State Legislature, armed in accordance with the Panther ideology that African Americans needed to provide themselves with the protection that white police officers weren't willing to give.

That hypocrisy, and the racism behind it, has remained evergreen half a century later.  Conservatives aren't opposed to regulating the use of guns.  They are only opposed to regulations that limit their use of guns.  You have only to look at this piece of claptrap from Lois Weiss of the Murdoch-owned New York Post, one that mercilessly exploits a workplace tragedy involving a celebrity nemesis of Donald Trump, to realize that the right would be thrilled to bits by any regulation of guns by people they hate.  (Full disclosure:  as an actor, I have been on sets where guns were used in accordance with effective gun protocols, and I fully support this kind of common-sense regulation of firearms, as I support it in other settings as well.)

The hypocrisy, of course, has not emerged in a vacuum.  If anything, it illustrates the need for a full discussion of critical race theory, which is nothng more (or less) than an examination of the multiple ways in which racism has been, and continues to be, embedded in the structure of American culture, society, economy, and government.  Conservatives have responded to the emergence of CRT by decrying it as a strategy designed to make white people feel guilty.  Wrong.  It's the start of a process to remove the legacy of racism that is baked into the structure of the country.  If that makes you feel "guilty," well, that's strictly on you.

But the hypocrisy should not obscure the role that the conservative fetishization of the Second Amendment played not only in the Rittenhouse nightmare, but in similar nightmares that reoccur over and over again.  And that's why I need to digress into a discussion of Charlton Heston.

If you are of a certain age, like me, you remember Heston as the physically chiseled, emotionally stony leading man from historical epics in the 1950s like "The Ten Commandments," as well as sci-fi epics from the 1960s and 1970s such as "Planet of the Apes" and "Soylent Green."  On the other hand, if you are an adult of any age at this point, you will also remember him as a long-time member, and president of, the NRA.  It may not in fact be stretching a point to say that Heston did more that anyone else to turn the NRA into one of the most lethally powerful political forces in America.  He's probably best remembered for popularizing the slogan "I'll give up my gun when you pry it from my cold dead hands."

Catchy.  But there's a far more dangerous thought that Heston did more to promote, and embed in the minds of Americans, that that one.  It's the misbegotten notion that the Second Amendment is more important than any other part of the Constitution, because it gives citizens the power to resist tyranny from its own government.

Let's leave aside the obvious point that a government with the nuclear power to level the planet several times over really doesn't have a lot to fear from men who are spending all of their money on firearms instead of paying their back child support.  Instead, let's back up one Amendment, and talk a little about the First one.

The First Amendment (and this will be news to Amy Comey Bennett, who drew a blank on its provisions at her confirmation hearings) guarantee four basic rights:  the right to speak freely, the right to worship the religion of one's choice, the right to publish freely, and the right to peaceably assemble to protest injustice.  Four separate rights.  But all undergirded by one basic, utterly essential freedom:  freedom to think.  To perceive, to learn, to understand, and to ultimately shaped by the power of the human mind to experience reality and understand how it works.  Ultimately, to learn the truth, about oneself, and about everything else.

Without that freedom, the right to own and use a gun becomes the right to be a menace.  And, carried to an unfettered conclusion, the right not to fight tyrants, but to become one.  Or to become subject to one.

This is not a purely academic analysis.  Far from it.  This is a description of American society in the Rittenhouse moment.  We are now a country in which the right to own a book, or even to discuss its contents, is less important than Kyle Rittenhouse's apparent right to play weekend soldier at the expense of other people's right not only to protest injustice, but even to live.

This was true even before the verdict.  In death threats against a news anchor on a conservative network urging people to get vaccinated against COVID-19.  In a conservative opinion maker being publicly asked when it will be permissible to use guns.  In displays of Confederate symbols at schools.  In the unwillingness of our own national law enforcement bureau to respond to advance tips about the January 6 assault on the Capitol.  In the willingness of Republican Members of Congress to advocate violence against their political opponents.  And in the related willingness of those members to spread social media posts depicting the murders of the President and a Congresswoman.

In the short time since Rittenhouse's acquittal, has it gotten any better?  I guess, at this point, that should be purely a rhetorical question.  We've got Marjorie QAnon Green, yet another gun-loving Republican, saying she's not in favor of a civil war, but, what the hell, bring it on anyway.  We've got Madison Cawthorn, referenced above, pouring more fuel on the fire.  And we've got people arrested for writing their opinions of the judge in the Rittenhouse case on the steps of the courthouse.  Like I said, in contemporary America, guns effectively have more freedom than thoughts do.

If ever there was a trial that demands the full pushback efforts of every American who really understands what the Constitution is all about, it's this one.  We can start with the judge, whose behavior during this trial was almost a clinic on what every member of the bench should avoid doing, and who, as it turns out, has a rather checkered history.  Judges are not above the law, or the power of either the government or the people to remove them from their position when doing so, as here, is warranted.  You can take a look here at how this works in each state, including Wisconsin.  And, whether or not you live in Wisconsin, if you care about civic decency, file a complaint with the Badger State authorities.

But what we really need to to even more urgently is to reclaim the power of the First Amendment over the Second.  Without the freedom to think, and the freedoms the First Amendment guarantees relative to that freedom, we will be overwhelmed by the power of guns to destroy us all--not only those in front of them, but those behind them as well.  Without that freedom, we have anarchy, and death.  Death not just of individuals, but of a Republic built on the belief that a free people, armed first and foremost with the truth, are stronger than any tyrant, even one with all the arms in the world.  We can start with critical race theory, and we can start there by refusing to be intimidated by those who would slime it in the same way that conservatives of a different era slimed liberals as Communist sympathizers.

And we cannot--we must not--be afraid of their guns.  If the day comes when we need to arm ourselves in self-defense, we will.  They would be mistaken to think that we would not be willing to do that.  I would be willing to do that.  If we act now, and put the First Amendment back in first place, it may not come to that.  I pray that it will not come to that.

So, sorry Charlie.  The Second Amendment is NOT the most important one.

And I have this piece of food for thought for CongresswQman Marjorie.

I don't want a civil war either.

But I'm not afraid of one.  Neither are millions of people on my side of the ideological divide your side has created.

And all of the bullets in the world mean nothing to people who are not afraid of the truth.  Or of acting upon it.

*UPDATE:  November 21, 2021

I have to apologize for two errors in my description of the events that led to the Rittenhouse trial.  He did not take another person's firearm across state lines.  The truth isn't much better, however: he sent money to a friend to buy the gnn for him and store it until Rittenhouse's 18th birthday--which had not taken place at the time of the protests.  The "straw person" transaction may have been illegal, and Rittenhouse should not have possessed the gun in any case.

Also, the surviving victim did admit to pointing a gun at Rittenhouse.  But again, Rittenhouse was not present under color of law to keep the peace.  How was the survivor to know what Rittenhouse's motives were?  This is the whole problem with the theory that good guys with guns stop bad guys with guns.  How do we know who the good and bad guys are?  That's why police uniforms exist in the first place.  And, if your answer here is that the good guys are white, I'll thank you for having the decency to be honest, but that's all.

Finally, a word about so-called "stand your ground" laws.  As noted here, the wording of the Wisconsin statute is vague (perhaps deliberately so, especially given the nature of Wisconsin's Republican legislature) and may have been influenced by the judge's own instructions.  I've already said enough about the judge in this case.  Otherwise, whether or not you're an attorney, I think we're all free to ask whether this was truly a case of "self-defense."  Frankly, the facts here reinforce my view that "stand your ground" laws, as applied, are licenses to hunt humans.  We have no evidence of Kyle Rittenhouse's motives in going to Kenosha other than his words.  And, given the results, that's not good enough for me.

************************************

I'll be taking off until the first weekend in December.  Until then, please have a safe, healthy, and happy Thanksgiving with those you love.

The Democratic Party Is A Party Of Color (And Women)

Yes, as you might expect, this is a post about last week's elections, and the almost predictable Chicken Little response from the MSM about the future of the Democratic Party, the same sadly inaccurate response it always makes when Democrats lose any election.  The one about crafting a better message, reaching across the aisle more, and, above all, working harder at chasing "suburban" (translation:  white) voters because they're the only ones that matter, because they just so gosh darn swingy.  Spreading this message for a living would surely be a sweet, low-stress gig, if you overlook the part about selling your soul and sending the future of your country down the river.

But, once again, I digress.  Let's go back in time a little bit, say, back to the election last year that put Democrats in charge of the federal government, however tenuously.

I felt easy in my mind about the presidential race, not only because I was convinced that the majority of Americans were fed up with Donald Trump, but because Joe Biden had been smart enough to put Kamala Harris on the ticket.  He didn't fall into the trap most white male Democrats fall into of thinking that his party needed lots of while maleness to neutralize the white maleness that is the Republican reason for existing.  Rather, he looked at his party and saw it for what it has in fact been for decades:  a coalition of races, genders, occupations, faiths, and orientations generally.  He picked a running mate that reflected that reality perhaps better than anyone else could.  And, wonder of wonders, it worked.

At the risk of electronically patting myself on the back, I knew that it would.  This is why I felt a sigh of relief when Biden selected Harris.

And it is precisely why, when I learned that Terry McAuliffe had once again won the Democratic nomination to be governor of Virginia, I had a very different reaction.  Something along the lines of "uh-oh."

McAuliffe first rose to prominence in politics as a prolific fundraiser for the Clintons, and then parlayed that success into a term as Virginia's governor from 2014 to 2017, a credential he used to great effect in being nominated a second time, with the backing of the Democratic establishment in the state.  Virginia's election laws prevented him from serving consecutive terms, but not from running again.  You can read more about the primary here.

In short, McAuliffe is fundamentally a money bundler for the establishment.  He was able to make that work for him in part because, when he ran for the first time, Clinton Democrats were still firmly in charge of the party and its selection of candidates.   But it is a much different story in a post-Barack Obama, post-Trump Democratic Party.  Proof of that fact is that, this time, in the Democratic primary, McAuliffe faced no fewer than three African-American candidates, including the incumbent lieutenant governor.  None of those three candidates could cement a hold on the voters, and McAuliffe won.

So the fall races for the three top executive jobs in Virginia featured the following:  two white men running for governor and attorney general (with a Democratic incumbent), and two women of color running for lieutenant governor.  Result:  Two white male Republicans were elected, along with a female African-American Republican in the third race.  (And good luck to Winsome Sears:  as an African-American Trump supporter, she is certainly an anomaly, but one that bodes well for the future of African-American candidates in the Old Dominion State.)

And that's precisely the point.

African-American voters saw their loyalty to the Democratic Party unrewarded by the results of the primary elections, and stayed home.  And, even in spite of that, McAuliffe, as well as Mark Herring, the current attorney general, lost by razor-thin margins, as did Hala Ayala, the lieutenant gubernatorial candidate, who might very well have won with more voter support, given Sears' identification with Trump.  And, with respect to overall turnout by Virginia voters, this was the result.

And then, let's not forget this.  I am 100% convinced that this played a key role in depressing African-American turnout, and I am shocked beyond words that I am almost the only person mentioning this on the Internet or anywhere else.  That more media outlets haven't addressed this point is journalistic malpractice.

And then, there was McAuliffe's political malpractice, which manifested itself on several levels, and did not stop at failing to properly promote progressive accomplishments in Virginia. He failed to make any meaningful outreach to African-American voters, especially young ones, until his standing in the polls began to slip, thus reinforcing the view that Democrats only show up for voters of color when they're absolutely desperate.  He let his Republican opponent, Glenn Youngkin, get away with his I-can’t-tell-you-about-my-abortion-position-until-after-the-election, which offered a road to impugning Youngkin's character and bringing up Trump without bringing up Trump.  And he told parents of school-age children to go to hell when it comes to their education concerns. I'm as far away as you can be from being a book-burner, but public education would not exist without the support of parents, who do have a right to ask questions about what their children are being taught.  In typing this litany, it's almost impossible to believe that McAuliffe managed to get elected the first time; he seems to have the political instincts of a pet rock.

And, finally, there is what lazy journalists always like to go for:  the weight-of-history argument.  To repeat it, in case you somehow haven't heard it, since the election of Jimmy Carter, way back in my college days, a new President from one party is promptly followed by new Virginia and New Jersey governors from the other party.  

Except that there's a significant difference here.  In 1993 and 2009, years after which Democrats replaced Republicans in the White House, Republicans picked up the governor’s mansions in Virginia by nearly 20 points, and in New Jersey by a smaller margin. This time, they lost New Jersey, and won by a squeaker in Virginia. Hard to see how that isn’t a major shift.   Moreover, a split like this hasn't happened since Ronald Reagan's presidency.  If facts are the foundation of our opinions, doesn't this make Biden the new Reagan?

Ah, but then I shouldn't have said finally.  There is the issue of Mr. T, and I don't mean Sylvester Stallone's opponent in "Rocky III."  We are now being told, again by the MSM, that Trump is no longer a factor.  Youngkin has proved that you can win by being Trump without Trump, and that we can all sigh a deep collective breath.

Ahem.

Youngkin was shielded by Republicans who nominated him through a convention process rather than a primary system.  This cut Trump and his cronies out of the action.  I guarantee you that this will not work in all 50 states, especially once the not-too-stupid-to-be-corrupt Trumpies figure out how this can be used against them nationwide.    

And the Big Lie strategy is still moving forward; it's now being utilized by Phil Murphy's opponent in New Jersey.

And skip the media focus on Virginia and New Jersey for a moment, and take a look at what just happened in what has hitherto been a very red state, but one which Democrats were able to flip and take control of the Senate.  In fact, there's a whole slew of Democratic successes in local elections.  And socialist successes as well, for those who need a post-Hallow scare (just kidding).

Call me crazy, biased, or a snowflake if you want, but anyone who thinks this shows the Republicans as being out of the political woods is, in my opinion, very much of an optimist. It’ll be interesting to see if Youngkin can keep Trump at bay for four years (spoiler alert: he won’t).  As for Youngkin?  He may not be able to keep Trump politics out of Virginia for long.  If the Republicans end up taking control of the House of Delegates, as now seems likely, whatever "moderate" instincts he may have may not prevail for very long.  

In one sense, the implication of last week's elections is less than what you’re hearing.  I will, however, concede that, in another sense, it is more.  Despite the foregoing thoughts, I will say that there are things for Democrats to take away from recent events.

First, there is the role of moderate-to-conservative Democrats in sabotaging their own party.  Predictably, some of those folks have been out and about wringing their hands about the failure to have finalized the so-called bipartisan infrastructure before voters went to the polls.  I agree with commentators who have said that doing so may have made no difference at all.  But here's a related thought; how about having finalized the infrastructure bill AND Biden's Build Back Better social infrastructure bill?  How about Joe Manchin's and Kyrsten Sinema's middle-of-the-road colleagues pressuring them (or buying them out, even) to help get both bills over the finish line?    How about working as hard with members of your own party as you love to do with Republicans?  As it is, I think that, if we can get both bills over the finish line, it will be a rising tide that lifts the boats of both the President and congressional Democrats of both stripes.

And Democrats need to counter Republican arguments about education, by conceding the role of parents in public education but also speaking out against the violence and racism that Trump supporters have used against school officials.  Likewise, they need to counter Republican arguments about inflation and supply chains, by emphasizing the need to get everyone vaccinated, not just in the United States but all around the world as well.  That is at the heart of current economic disruptions.  And it is the only way to solve it.  I am convinced that, if Democrats and their allies in the media go out and make that argument on a regular basis, it will carry the day and people will stop talking about mandates.  They'll realize that the true mandate is to get American going by getting vaccinated.

But, other than these things, panic is the worst thing that could happen to Democrats.  Panic can be just as deadly (if not worse) than staying the course.  That worked for Reagan, why shouldn't it work for Democrats?  More importantly, for all of us?

The Democratic Party, its leaders, and its elected officials, need to stop being afraid of power, and to start using it.  Right now.  If they do that, we'll all be fine.  If not, next year, the election outcome will be many more Virginias.

Most of all, they need to stop being nostalgic for a white past.  Today's Democratic Party is a party that transcends color and gender.  Get over it, and get going.

A Modest Proposal For How You Can Help Stop The REAL Steal

In my last post, I exhorted everyone to vote in every election, whether the outlook was good or not.  Simply put, it's the only way to build any political muscle.  And, given that the right to vote in this country is now hanging by a fraying thread, there is literally no time like 2022 to start.  Except in Virginia and New Jersey, where next week would be an excellent place to start, if you live in either state and you have not done so already.  There are also a handful of special elections between now and the midterms as well.

But I would like all of you to do more than vote.  I'd like to to get as actively involved as possible, as much as your time and treasure will permit you.  I feel strongly enough about this that, for the first time, I just got involved with an organization that I highly recommend, and with which I have no connection other than as a volunteer.  If you want to be able to encourage voters in swing states, and don't live in one, or you aren't able to get out and about, or you're just people-shy, which is no disgrace (or confrontation-shy, which, in this day and age, I absolutely understand), and you don't mind getting a small case of writer's cramp, this may be just the thing for you.

The Progressive Turnout Project operates a program called Postcards to Swing States.  If you volunteer to participate, it mails you a supply of postcards, a list of names and addresses of swing-state voters, and instructions on how to fill out the postcards with a message encouraging each recipient to vote.  As a volunteer, you supply the postage and the labor in filling out and mailing the postcards.  My wife and I recently sent 500 postcards to first-time voters in Colorado.  That's a lot of postcards.  On the other hand, you can make a social event, or a series of social events, and get your friends involved in filling out the postcards and sharing the cost of the postage.  And, in the process, generate some positive election energy that may spill over into other activities.

You can learn more about it here.

So, what are you waiting for?

Unpacking A Solution To The Supreme Court

In the whole 36-year arc of my legal career, first as a paralegal, then a law student, then a law clerk, and finally as an attorney for nearly three decades, I have always tried to have, and always wanted to have, tremendous respect for judges, and especially for appellate court justices.  In our system of justice, the law that governs all of us, both its content and enforcement, is very much in their hands.  In the bedrock case on American judicial review, the Supreme Court's ruling in Marbury v. Madison, John Marshall, the Supreme Court's first Chief Justice, prefaced his ruling by citing the principle that "[i]t is emphatically the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is."  

Unfortunately, those nearly three decades of experience on my part has seen an erosion in the quality of the personnel on the benches of our justice system, as political considerations have increasingly factored into the selection and approval process.  This is not to say that their are not many fine jurists serving the interests of those who appear before them, and the nation as a whole.  One need look no further than the ruling by Robert L. Pitman, a federal district court judge in Texas, pausing the recent and utterly cruel Texas law establishing vigilante rights against abortion seekers, to see an example of this.  This, however did not stop a federal appeals court from promptly undoing his work.  Nor does it forestall the likelihood that the current Supreme Court will use this case to partially or even completely undo the constitutional right to request an abortion prior to fetal viability that the Court recognized in Roe v. Wade, and has subsequently upheld several times over the past five decades.

The current Supreme Court.  As packed by George W. Bush, Donald Trump, and especially Mitch McCONnell.  With a significant amount of aid, of course, from dozens of pathetically supple Republicans in Congress, in turn supported by the wealth of the 1% and the votes of religious fanatics.  Sadly, but perhaps appropriately, there is no clearer and more powerful symbol of the systemic politicization of our nation's judicial system than its highest court.  

Its current supermajority of six Republican appointees includes two men likely to have committed sexual abuse, a political legacy from a Reagan appointee, and a former law professor who, at her express-checkout-speed confirmation hearing, could not identify the contents of the First Amendment.  To say nothing of a Chief Justice who promised he would only call balls and strikes, and has instead put considerable effort into re-writing the rule book on the fly.  You need only look at his masterpieces of constitutional perfidy, the Citizens United and Shelby County cases, in which money became speech, corporations become people, and African-Americans lost the right to vote. to know the extent to which that statement is true.

And, like a fish that rots from the head down, the entire federal bench has felt the effects of the poisonous extent to which our entire system of government has been bought out by the wealthy.  It shouldn't shock anyone that legislators with inside-the-market dealings are more than happy to approve federal judges with exactly the same problem.

Nor should it shock anyone that the Supreme Court's corrupt composition has finally caught the attention of the public, and the public has weighed in.  And the public is giving the Court a big thumbs-down.  Even the business press is doing so.  Hell, even high-ranking Republicans are doing so.

Indeed, Joe Biden was elected President in no small part because he promised to be responsive to the demands of progressives to clean up the mess the Republicans have made of our judiciary.  Among other things, those demands included expanding the number of justices on the Court so that Biden could then create a supermajority of liberal court justices.  Biden, whose political plate was fairly full when he came to office, decided to do what many politicians before him have done:  refer the matter to a committee, empowered to make recommendations (preferably, politically palatable ones).

In this case, however, it's looking like Biden's kick-the-can solution to this crisis isn't going to give progressives their preferred solution.  Early reports indicate that the commission he appointed is not going to green-light the court-packing option, preferring instead to consider a range of possibilities that might attract broader support, such as limiting the terms of justices.  That latter option, however, almost certainly would require an amendment to the Constitution, which, I'll remind you, requires for its approval a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress AND three-fourths of the state legislatures.  Yeah.  Good luck with that happening.

And, progressive as I am, I have never been a big fan of the whole court-packing concept.  The historical precedent on this subject is not encouraging.  And, even if that was not the case, the potential for political retaliation is all too obvious.  We could eventually have a Supreme Court bench that would require an entire state to house it.  And, otherwise, perhaps be no better off than we are now.  There is, of course, the possibility of legislation to control the court's docket, taking off of it cases relating to fundamental rights, such as abortion and voting.  But, there again, the potential for political retaliation exists.  And, even if it didn't, have we really considered the downside of doing something like that?  Is it really that difficult to imagine a situation in which we might need the availability of the Court to rule in such a case?

You can, I think, considering all of this, scarcely blame Biden's committee for punting, if in fact that's what it has chosen to do.  So what should we do?

Before we discuss the answer to that question, it's time for progressives to take a hard look at what many of them didn't do when it absolutely, positively, could have made a gargantuan difference.

Vote.

I'm thinking in particular about two elections in which many progressives didn't do that.  Or worse, cast a vote for a third-party candidate that was destined to do no more than salve the softer side of their conscience.

2000.  And 2016.

A combination of Al Gore and Hillary Clinton presidencies would have given us a liberal Court that would have been impervious to the worst attempts of the right wing to destroy our democracy.  And even one of them might have been enough to do that.

Fellow progressives, do you want to know why the right wing is, frankly, beating the living daylights out of us?  It's very simple.  They play the long game.  They're willing to take the thousands of steps they need over decades to get where they want to go.  They understand the value of taking a path that lessens the obviousness of their intentions, and increases the probability of reaching their destination.  They are people who believe, rather than think, which makes it easier to follow orders and march.  They are not people who want to solve problems; they see themselves and their beliefs as the solutions to all problems.  All they want to do is obey.  And, unfortunately, there are nefarious, well-resourced individuals who are willing to take advantage of that kind of faith.

So they organize.  And donate.  And knock on doors.  Year in, and year out.  And you know something else they do year in and year out?  Vote.

This is why the Court's building on Maryland Avenue in D.C. is now the High Temple of Gilead.  This is why the Court is slowly but surely turning the First Amendment's freedom of religion protects into freedom for only one, clearly preferred religion--and, especially, the freedom for that religion to stomp all others out of the marketplace of ideas and the American way of life.  This is perhaps the most significant reason behind the transformation of the United States government into one that is run of, by, and for the multinational corporations that have been declared to be people, at the expense of the needs and concerns of actual people.

Sit at home in 2022, nurse your bothsiderisms with respect to our political choices, and watch the power of choice disappear.  By then, it will be too late to reflect on the fact that even a compromised choice is better than none at all.  And we are perilously close to none at all. And the only option after that is civil war.

As Walt Kelly once put it, we have met the enemy, and he is us.

"But it's too late," you might say.  "The Court is packed and it would take years to unpack it."  It might.  Clarence Thomas has been on the Court for nearly 30 years.  He's unlikely to be around much longer.  And, in any case, Stephen Breyer will probably be ready to retire in a few years.  Do we want to see a six-Justice conservative majority turn into a seven-Justice majority?

There is no excuse for not getting out in every election, getting out every like-minded voter that you can, and together voting every single solitary person with an R after his/her/their name out of office.  You want to unpack the Court?  That's how you unpack it.

More to say about voting and the need to do it next time.  As they used to say in the heyday of broadcast TV and radio, stay tuned.

The Bullies In The Democratic Senate Caucus

I've written a great deal recently about the decline and fall of mainstream media, specifically, about how corporate media monopoly power, the drive for profits at the expense of everything else (including the truth), the relentless hectoring from right-wing hacks, and, finally, the chasing of clicks in an all-digital world have led the American political press to abandon the role that the framers of the Constitution foresaw for it, thus enabling business interests to slowly turn the United States first into a plutocracy (rule by the rich), and then into a kleptocracy (rule by the rich who have turned to theft to become richer).  

If you're reading this, and you're under the age of, let's say, 50, you may have a hard time understanding how American political discourse could have looked any different.  And, if that's the case, I can't say that I blame you a bit.  For me, it may, in fact, be one of the relatively few advantages of having just turned 65 (along with signing up for Medicare).

Let me put it another way, then.  Once upon a time, and no kidding, political media in this country had the capability of producing stories that discussed not merely personalities, but issues.  Actual challenges confronting the country as a whole, regardless of location or partisan affiliation.  They did so in a way that discussed the dimensions and the details of one or more issues in something like real depth, as well as potential solutions around which the nation and its leader could rally and enact into law--or, at least, into public policy.  By way of an example, and relevant to an issue urgently facing us in the present moment, they routinely produced articles like this.  

USA TODAY may not get a lot of respect from its media peers, but here at least is a prime example of how those peers used not only used to routinely discuss major political issues, but make connections among them that help us to understand how interrelated both the challenges we face and the available solutions are.  In this case, infrastructure and climate change.  We need to address the needs of the former not only to address the current economic needs of people and businesses, but also the challenges of adapting to a changing world, one whose changes are in fact the by-product of how we meet our economic needs.  As a partner in an immigration practice, I look forward to the day when we can go beyond the first tentative steps we've taken to publicly discuss the links among climate change, infrastructure, and immigration, i.e., how climate change is driving workers toward us who have the skills we need to address the change in the first place.  A topic for another day.

In the short run, my point is this:  where are the other similar articles that should be making these same connections?  For that matter, where are the articles discussion either issue in isolation, which would be better than nothing.  Maybe they're out there, but they certainly aren't prominent and, as a voracious consumer of political news and commentary, I'd like to think that I could see more of them.

Instead, what we get are discussions not of the issues, but of the partisan horse-racing connected to them, and the personalities that shape the races.  Everything is play-by-play, and little real analysis (and even less that would challenge the status quo) is produced

So, what we end up getting, instead of what we need, is this.  Not a discussion of the need to address climate change and infrastructure needs, but a discussion of a full-scale "panic" among Senate Democrats over the fate of a budget reconciliation bill designed to address both issues.  A full-scale "panic," mind you, that is supported by a handful of actual quotes in the article itself.  And this is from a media source that is friendly to the interests of progressives.  You can imagine what people on the other side of the ideological fence are saying.  (In fact, you don't have to:  you can just take a look here.)

And how connected is the reality?  Maybe, just maybe, not so very much.  When the content of the reconciliation bill is discussed, it polls rather well.  It certainly does so among Democrats.  And, in fact, if Joe Biden is to be believed, it's fully supported by 48 out of 50 Democrats.  More about the exceptions in a little bit.

What has been surprising about all of this is that a significant number of moderate, even corporate-allied Democrats, including Biden himself, have moved closer to the progressive perspective on the issues addressed by the reconciliation bill, even its provisions related to paying for the bill's expenses by raising taxes on the wealthy.  All by itself, that's a news story, although (again) it's not a story that has earned coverage equal to its magnitude.  For one thing, it reflects the extent to which the center of political gravity in the U.S. has gravitated to the left for the first time since before 1980.  Moderates like Biden recognize this.  It doesn't hurt, of course, that progressives have themselves finally recognized the need for flexibility and consensus-building in advancing their goals, a need that leaders like Pramila Jayapal has recognized and successfully strived to address.

As a consequence, it's the progressive size of the political debate that is on the march, and that should be reflected in news coverage that has any moral and professional integrity.

What do we get instead?

We get a focus on the fanatics.  Not just on the rumors and lies spread by the personality cult that calls itself the Republican Party, but on the two Senate Democrats that are doing everything they can to stall the reconciliation bill (among others) to death.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that.

When a legislator is asked to consider supporting a bill, he/she/they can do one of three things.  They can support it as is, supported with changes that are requested or negotiated, or refuse to support it.  To be sure, they can pretend that they are doing or not doing one of those things, but there's always the availability of the James Baldwin test to shine the light on the make believe.  To paraphrase Baldwin, don't believe what they say if it doesn't match up with what they do.

And, in the case of Manchin and Sinema, it doesn't.  True, they initially voted to authorize the drafting of the bill, along with their colleagues, at a dollar amount ($3.5 trillion) requested by Biden.  True also, they agreed, along with their colleagues, to tie a vote on the final bill to a vote on a supposedly "bipartisan" bill on physical infrastructure, as opposed to the human infrastructure and green economic provisions to be included in the reconciliation bill.  But that was literally months ago.  And, since then, both senators have been running away from their votes and their words.

In the case of Sinema, the "running away" has been quite literal.  Not only has she refused to meet with her own constituents to discuss provisions of the reconciliation bill, she has refused to engage with them even when they have attempted to do so in public places, even when they have gone so far as to follow her into a restroom (a move I would not had made; I would have let her go in by herself and then tried to engage her when she came out).  On the handful of occasions when she has specifically criticized the bill, she has reversed positions she has held in the past, such as allowing Medicare to negotiate the price of covered drugs.  If anything, she has spent more time on fundraising than she has in addressing any concerns she might have about the bill, even going so far as to teach a course on the subject.

Sinema, unlike Manchin, is a bit of a rookie politician, which may explain why some of her publicity stunts (e.g., curtseying when she voted against a minimum wage increase) have something of a Barnum quality that does nothing to enhance her political reputation.  Her inexperience, combined with her donor obsession, can only lead one to conclude that her non-stop opposition to the bill without any counter-proposals makes it clear that she will not vote for any version of the bill, and is hoping to run out the political and procedural clock on it in order to keep her corporate sponsors happy.

And Manchin?  Well, it's no secret that he has had deep corporate connection for years, especially connections with the fossil fuel industry, which is hardly surprising for a West Virginia politician.  But this simply means, as he has demonstrated amply, that he understands the need to play the game with a degree of polish and finesse that Sinema has not yet demonstrated she might possess.  The two differ on style rather than substance.   The problem with Manchin is not that he's said little or nothing about the bill, it's rather that he's been all over the place publicly with his comments on it, whether it's the dollar amount, or its potential fiscal impact, or its green economic provisions, or how many of its family-values provisions should actually be enacted.  What he hasn't done, like Sinema, is identify a version of the bill that would earn his vote.

If we apply the Baldwin test, this can only lead us to one conclusion:  neither Manchin nor Sinema, cowed by the debt they owe to their corporate donors, and unwilling to consider employment outside of the U.S. Senate, will support any version of the reconciliation bill, anytime, and are hoping that they can stall the whole process long enough to let intervening events prevent it from ever seeing the light of day on Biden's desk.  No doubt, a key part of their calculation has been the view that progressive politicians would fold, as they have in the past (as they did, in fact, during the debate over the ACA).  In making that calculation, they failed to anticipate both the superior numbers and consensus among those politicians, as well as Biden's sympathy to them concerns.  But this has not discouraged either of them, or motivated them to change course.  They are willing to sacrifice not only the interests of the nation, but specifically the interests of voters in their own state, so that they can stay in Congress a while longer and eventually join the permanent lobbyist class.

So, the bill is effectively dead, as some unnamed Senate Democrats allegedly are thinking, right?

Well, that depends on how frightened Democrats in both houses are of the media's balls-and-strikes approach to doing their job.

But, since Manchin and Sinema are hell-bent on trying to run out the clock, there seems to me to be only one logical response:  take control of the clock.

Schedule votes on the caucus' preferred version of the bill.  Every month.  Every week, if the Senate rules and calendar make that possible.  No matter how many times that it attracts only the votes of 48 Democrats in the Senate.  Keep doing this, right up to Election Day.  Make it an issue, along with the other issues the Republicans are handing them on a daily basis (abortion bans, restrictions on voting rights, the efforts of anti-vaccine imbeciles to infect us all, etc.).  And, in the run-up to Election Day, remind voters of all the good thing that are NOT happening because of the Republicans that the voters need to take out of office.

And, in the process, dare Manchin and Sinema to either come out in the open about their motives, and risk the wrath of voters, or vote to do the right thing, and risk the wrath of their donors.  Or, cut a deal to avoid the wrath of both.

I have said this many times, and will believe it until the day I die:  the only effective response to bullying is to bully back.  Manchin and Sinema are effectively acting like bullies.  Time to think outside the box, and give them the response they deserve.

Who knows?  If nothing else, it may remind our political media what their job should be.  As well as the need to start doing it. 

Mitch McCONnell Is Only As Infallible As Democrats Allow Him To Be

Mitch McCONnell has one goal--and only one--in life.  

It's not to serve the interests of the people of Kentucky.  It's not to serve the interests of the American people.  It's not even to serve the interests of the institution in which he has served as both the majority and the minority leader, the United States Senate, or his colleagues in that body, on either side of the aisle.  If, in fact, he cared at all about any of that, to even the tiniest degree, he would not have prostituted rhetoric and logic, as well as the traditions of the Senate, to ensure a Supreme Court majority that delivers everything for billionaires and precious little for the rest of us.  He would not routinely used the extra-constitutional filibuster rule, allegedly a tool to promote consensus, as a stumbling block to any legislation to improve the lives of those who cannot afford to write checks to him.  Most of all, he would not now be threatening to hold hostage the full faith and credit of the United States Government solely because the people who can afford to write those checks are offended by the idea that the voters elected a Democrat to the White House.

No, Mitch McCONnell is all about one thing.  And one thing only.  And that is proving, on a daily basis, without exception, the political infallibility of Mitch McCONnell.  And he is aided in this process by a Washington press corps that, neutered by (a) a combination of hectoring by cowards on the right about its allegedly "liberal" bias and (b) corporate ownership that has historically and currently kept its thumb on what gets published and broadcast, has been reduced to focusing on the ups and downs of parties and personalities, and not on its responsibilities to serve as a check on the powerful, the responsibilities that motivated the framers of the Constitution to protect them with the First Amendment's guarantee of press freedom.

The DC media doesn't care about how McCONnell's game-playing pollutes our air, impoverishes our children, discriminates against women and people of color, extends the power of a deadly pandemic, and allows the planet to routinely catch on fire.  Perhaps some of the reporters do, but the people who employ them care about money.  And, as long as promoting McCONnell's infallibility helps them to make money, they'll do so.  And that's fine with McCONnell, because, again, that's his only goal.

And, so far, it's worked out for him.  But could that be coming to an end?

The results of California's gubernatorial recall election, in which the voters endorsed keeping Democrat Gavin Newsom in office by nearly a 2-to-1 margin, suggest that possibility.

Newsom, in many respects, has been his own worst enemy as Governor, struggling to advance his priorities as well as to communicate with people, and struggling during the early days of the pandemic to lead, shooting himself in the foot by appearing maskless in public after endorsing the wearing of masks.  This gave his opponents the opening they needed to launch the recall effort, and, as recently as last month, polls suggested that they might succeed.

And then, a funny thing happened.  Newsom decided that it was time for Californians to stop talking about him, and start talking about Donald Trump.  He was aided in this process by the fact that, out of the 40-plus people running against him, the only one who attracted significant support was a right-wing talk show host named Larry Elder, who went out of his way to attach himself to Trump in campaigning to unseat Newsom.

It didn't work.

And that ought to concern McCONnell, who had a political bromance of convenience with Trump for four years, during which time Mr. Infallibility got to shower tax breaks on his donors and pack the federal court system with a record number of conservative sycophants.  He didn't care about whether any of this benefited Trump.  He only valued Trump for the suppleness displayed by the now thankfully former President in doing whatever McCONnell needed to do in order to demonstrate his infallibility.  

We now have tangible proof of the extent to which that was true, thanks to Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.  In their latest book, "Peril," which completes a trilogy of books by Woodward and Costa about the Trump presidency, the authors found McCONnell to be quite chatty on the subject of his former partner in political crime.  More specifically, they quote him as saying that Trump was "a fading brand," and that there was no future in "[s]ucking up" to him.  Clearly, no matter how useful Trump was to McCONnell in the short run, he understands the unique toxicity that came with the usefulness, and wants to cut his losses.

But, as the linked article above shows, Trump isn't prepared to let him do that.  And, much more importantly, Trump's followers aren't prepared to let him do that.  And therein lies the challenge that may, at long last, define the limits of McCONnell's infallibility.

The minority leader of the Senate wants very much to once again become the majority leader, so that he can continue the project of court-packing and tax-cutting that profits both him and his corporate supporters.  And he needs the votes of Trump's supporters to reach that promised land.  But Trump's supporters aren't loyal to McCONnell, or his supporters.  They're loyal to Trump.  And they reject anyone who isn't as blindly loyal to Trump as they are.

And, when they hear what McCONnell had to say to Woodward and Costa about Trump, their worst suspicions about congressional Republicans are confirmed.  And that leads them to support Trump's efforts to primary McCONnell's preferred Senators and Senate candidates.  Which makes McCONnell's project of retaking the Senate a wee bit more problematic.  Which goes a long way toward explaining why McCONnell is prepared to hold a lighted match to the ability of our government to meet its obligations, the obligations that McCONnell and his cronies ran up to record levels in order to pay for the tax-cut goodies.

At this point, the only thing standing in the way of fiscal and national catastrophe is the Democratic Party, and its members in Congress.  Will they blink?

They shouldn't.  They should follow Newsom's example.  I'm not the only one that feels that way.  Example No. 1.  Example No. 2.  Example No. 3.  And, from a Republican, Example No. 4.

Greg Sargent of the Washington Post, linked about, gets the last word here.

Heed it, Democrats.  McCONnell isn't infallible.  Trump makes that impossible.  Stand strong, and stand up for all of us.

What Afghanistan Should Have Taught Us (And Maybe It Has)

I have to confess that, two decades in, I find the 21st century to be a gargantuan let-done.  And that's putting it mildly.

Democracy on the brink.  Half of the nation hating the other half of the nation.  Elections in perpetual dispute.  Police at war with people of color.  A planet that alternates between burning to a crisp and drowning in an endless series of floods.  And, by the time either of those things actually happens, millions of people needlessly slain by a pandemic that has launched a full-scale war against the science that has been the cornerstone of our civilization to date.

And not even a flying car to console futurists like me for all that we have lost, as people and as a global society.  Not yet, anyway. 

What's wrong with us?  Why have we lost our faith in rational decision making?  Why have we come to believe that anyone who doesn't look at life the way we do is our enemy?  Why does it seem impossible to find consensus to empower a political system that's designed to run on consensus?

It's hard for me not to go back to the first year of this century, without stopping on the day that, for the whole of the last century, was and still is my father's birthday.  He's been gone for 16 years--he would have been 99 this year, had he made it--but we both lived long enough to see that day turned into a permanent landmark of horror in the annals of our history.

9/11.

My father was a very rational man, who placed a great deal of faith in the power of education (his profession, as a political science professor) to improve people's lives by giving them the tools to build futures based on applying the wisdom of the past to the challenges of the future.  As we all were, he was horrified by the terrorist attacks.  And yet, I don't think they shook his faith in the strength of our system, in the power of rational consensus, to build a better tomorrow.

Perhaps, that having been the case, it was a severe mercy for him to have passed away in 2005, before the wheels really came off of everything.  I'm not sure he could have processed it.  Hell, many days, I have a hard time processing it, and I consider myself to have a greater comfort level than my father did with confronting and dealing with the more irrational aspects of our existence.  But I will, and I must say this:  I believe that the 9/11 attacks, and the initial response to them, sowed the seeds of the divisive, discordant, self-destructive society into which we have devolved.

Ask me if I'm surprised.  My answer:  uh-uh.

I remember a great deal of the events of that day, and the weeks after it, and could do so without this weekend's extensive reminders of those events on cable TV and the Internet.  But this weekend was a landmark in my thoughts and feelings about those events, as I have known for a long time that it would be.

My one overarching thought, back in 2001, was this:  you don't measure the impact of any event of this magnitude on a nation in days, weeks, months, or even years.  You do it in decades.  So, the truth here is that I have very consciously been waiting for September 11, 2021.  I was fairly certain that, by then, we would have a better sense, for good or for ill, of what the impact of the attacks had wrought on the future of the United States.

I can't really answer the question of whether "we" do.  But I'm sure that I do.  And, like I said, I'm not surprised.

Our initial response consisted of acts of unity.  Of helping.  Of healing.  Of coming together, on the baseball field and elsewhere.  In a word, encouraging.  There was some sense that out of the horror would become a mindset of hope, a willingness to find common ground and move forward.

That mindset began to dissolve the minute the powers behind the barely-"elected" President, George W. Bush decided that the terrorists had handed them the opportunity they had dreamed of for years.  An America on a perpetual war footing, building a new Roman Empire to line the coffers of their corporate supporters and keep them in seemingly perpetual power in Washington.  All they had to do is use their influence with a supple corporate media, one that was scared to death of looking "weak"--or in the language of my political youth, "Carteresque."  (More on the 39th President later.  As well as the 43rd.)

And so began what became a 20-year on-the-ground war in Afghanistan, ostensibly to look for Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the terrorist attacks, and punish the nation that had harbored him and his murderous associates.  Even after bin Laden was found (in Pakistan, by the Obama Administration), the war continued, chewing up treasure and lives to no clear-cut end.  Even though, for all truly practical purposes, our military rationale for being there had ended.  The conservatives, the students of history, blithely ignored Afghanistan's history as a "graveyard of empires," launched this misadventure on the cheap, thinking that their sheer military genius would allow them to turn the country, a collection of disconnected tribes divided by ancient feuds, into an American plaything without breaking a sweat.  

In fact, it would prove to be so easy in their minds that, while we were at it, why not clean up another country that had given us trouble in the past, Iraq?  Once again, on the cheap.  Why, that effort would pay for itself, in oil and gratitude for "planting" democracy in the ancient Cradle of Civilization.  As if a system that depends of the consent of the governed could actually be delivered at gunpoint.

You don't need me to tell you how this supreme hubris played out in real life.  Suffice it to say, Barack Obama got us out of Iraq.  And now, yet another couple of Administrations later, his Vice President, Joe Biden, now occupying the Oval Office, is doing the same with our disastrous involvement with Afghanistan.

When the evacuation began, it seemed to me to be such a logistical nightmare that I wondered whether any thought or planning went into it at all.  The "government" we had been propping up for 20 years folded like the proverbial cheap suit, in hours.  The Taliban, the Islamic extremists who had been in charge prior to the American invasion, took effective control of the country in a matter of days.  Our embassy staff, our troops, our allies, and our Afghan partners who provided so many essential services during our occupation of the country, all seemed to be at the mercy of the people they had worked tirelessly to keep at bay.  

For many observers, this all seemed to recall the fall of Saigon in 1975.  For me, given the vulnerability of our embassy staff, I wondered if the better metaphor was Tehran in 1980.  Would Ted Koppel come out of retirement, jump back on ABC and declare that America was being held hostage again?

And then, Lawrence O'Donnell, among others, put it into perspective, in part by confronting the comparison to the Saigon evacuation head-on, and reminding us that their is no orderly end to a war that's been lost.

We did not lose with regard to the original goal:  to get bin Laden.  But we lost with regard to the impossible standard that had been previously set of turning Afghanistan into a functioning democracy, as we did in Vietnam.  Because the majority of the people on the ground, as in Vietnam, wanted something else.  Something we were not prepared or able to deliver to them.

So, in that sense, Afghanistan gets chalked up not only as a military defeat, as a "lost" war, but also as a failure to learn the lesson that we all told ourselves we learned from Vietnam.  In fact, far too few of us learned those lessons.  And that fact is revealed by all of the post-withdrawal sniping aimed at the Biden Administrtation, much of which has reached ludicrous levels of hysteria.  The fact is that Biden and his team deserve credit for accomplishing as much as they did under the most horrendous of circumstances.  As I say so often in this space, don't take my word for it.  Read about it here, and here.  For that matter, take the word of our military.

I say all of this "on my knees," to a degree, because I am mindful of the fact that there are still Americans on the ground in Afghanistan, as well as Afghanis to whom we owe a moral debt when it comes to securing their futures.  Far be it from me to proclaim "Mission Accomplished."  But I believe that the Biden Administration has what it takes to see this final phase of our Afghan involvement through.

What's left, then, for the rest of us?  Plenty.  There are a bunch of things we need to recognize.

We need to recognize that an inherent weakness of a bipartisan foreign policy is the occasional need for one party to clean up the mistakes of another without acknowledging the mistake, as Obama did in Iraq (well, okay, not being too specific about acknowledging the mistake), as Biden is now doing.  This is even more true based on the fact that Biden was boxed in by a deal Donald Trump made with the Taliban, which let to the release of some of the worst Taliban members whom we had taken prisoner, a deal that was fully supported by Republican members of Congress, who have few equals in shamelessness.

Oh, and while Trump was releasing the worst of the worst, for political reasons, he was also so rabidly anti-refugee that he went out of his way to stop the best of the best from finding safety in the country they had aided at peril to themselves.   And that's not the only way Trump was shooting himself, and America, in the foot; take a look.  Trump had only one foreign policy goal:  sandbagging Democrats.  Now, all of us, Democrats, Republicans, and independents, are paying the price.

But there's more.

We need to recognize that conservative America is in fact far friendlier with Islamic terrorists than it wants to admit, and that includes Donald Trump.  We need to recognize the fact that this friendliness is not based on national security interests, but economic interests of Republicans/conservatives, and not just fossil fuels.

We need to stop pretending that asymmetric warfare, where are frontline troops support an unpopular government under attack from guerrilla warfare waged by the local population, can't work.  It didn't work in Vietnam, and it didn't work in Afghanistan, and there is no clean and safe way to end a war that you have lost.  And lost we did; thousands of lives, and trillions of dollars, for what?  For neocon hubris, at the expense of legitimate domestic and foreign goals.  Imagine taking that two trillion dollars, putting it in an interest-bearing account, and spending the interest on health care, housing, education, union jobs, reparations for African-Americans.  Is there any doubt that the money would have been better spent?  Especially if we finally got smart about how to deal with the problem of international terrorism.

Take Afghanistan, for example.  If we're going to stop it from becoming a terrorist haven again, we need to engage it with a combination of covert hard power, and economic soft power, cultivating its mineral resources as the basis for a better economic future for the country and a chance to bring it more within our sphere of influence.  Our foreign policy should, and must in order to have a chance of working, reflect our values.

And, whether conservatives like it or not, immigration is still, and hopefully will always be, one of those values.  The posturing from the usual right-wing media suspects does more to expose their unbridled hypocrisy on this issue that does anything else.

Ah, the press.  The press, and its supposedly liberal bias, whose overarching constitutional mission to expose the truth without fear or favor has been compromised for decades by those on the right with a deep-seated allergy to the truth.  The role of the MSM in promoting the "war on terror," in cheerleading the United States into the misbegotten war in Afghanistan, and the even more misbegotten one in Iraq, solely to protect itself from the liberal-bias charge and make big bucks for its corporate masters in return.  But once were were in Afghanistan, a "funny" thing happened.

The cheerleading stopped.  In fact, the coverage largely stopped.  And then, when Biden ended the war, he suddenly became an excuse for the lack of coverage, and the withdrawal found its way back to the top of the news slot heap.  Only without Bush/Cheney as the heroes, and with Biden taking the hit for cleaning up their messes.  And, to the extent that there was coverage, it was largely a parade of lies designed to prevent most of us from asking too many questions that might interrupt the ratings parade.

To be fair, not all of the conservative press condemned Biden.  Even more unexpectedly, one journalist criticized Biden by comparing him unfavorably to, of all people, Jimmy Carter.  Who knew that it was possible for Carter to become a foreign policy icon to a conservative?  Proof that success just consists of sticking around long enough.  However, the last but most important thing we need to recognize is to stay on top of the press so that they stop cheerleading us into long-term disaster for the sake of short-term profits.  Simply put, we need to absolutely, positively make sure that THIS does not happen again.  It is not unpatriotic to ask questions.  It is essential.  And no one has a monopoly on truth.  If the past twenty years have demonstrated nothing else, they have certainly demonstrated that.  The Rupert Murdock-owned media empire deserves special condemnation for sob-sister garbage like this.  (Memo to Mr. Goodwin:  it's quite possible that Biden's head was bowed in empathy, not weakness.  He contributed a son to this carnage.  What the bloody hell have you done that's even remotely equal to that?)

If we really want to plant democracy around the world, we should lead by example, not by munitions.  We should work not on propping up Potemkin "democracies" in regions with no indigenous traditions to support it, but work on building confidence in outcomes and access to ballots here in our own country.  We should be looking just as hard for threats from within our nation, as well as threats from without.  And, above all, we should stop treating debate and dissention as threats.  Debates and dissentions are what true democracies are all about.  When faced with a national tragedy, we need--all of us need--to stop pointing fingers, and start looking in the mirror.

We're twenty years down from 9/11.  Is it possible that the time for learning has begun?

Maybe.  Here's one sign.  

Here is yet another.

Here is a fairly dramatic one, given my previous comments about Bush II.  Thanks, Mr. 43rd President.

And here is something that you absolutely, positively must watch, if you have not done so already.

I truly believe that, somewhere, my father would still have reason to be proud of the power of reason.  Happy 99th, Frank.  Here's hoping your 100th is even better for our country, and for the values by which you always lived.