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.