What's Happened To Our National Sense Of Humor?

In our as-fast-as-the-Internet culture, it's hard to believe that it's been less than a month since people have been talking non-stop (online, at least) about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Academy Awards ceremony.  The conversation seems to have died down, at least for now, with Smith having resigned from the Academy and accepted a 10-year ban from Academy events (although not from nominations).  And I don't have much to say about the incident itself when it comes to the who's-right-and-who's wrong question.  But I have a few thoughts about what this incident says about the nature of American comedy at this point, and, beyond that, about the state of comedy reflects the state of American political culture.

First, just to be clear about the incident, which shocked me as much as it did anyone, I hold no brief for either Smith or Rock.  I do, however, feel greater disappointment regarding Smith's behavior, not only because of my up-until-then respect for him, both as a performer and a person, but also because his failure here was both as a performer and as a person.  As a person, he initially laughed at the joke Rock made at the expense of his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, and the medical condition that took her hair from her.  His opinion of the joke changed only after he saw how she reacted to the joke, and decided to get ahead of any confrontation he might otherwise have had with her about it.

But here's where he really went wrong.  He's a stand-up performer.  He doesn't need a script.  Instead of turning the Oscars into a crime scene (something the Academy did not handle well, for that matter), he could have gone up to Rock and found a way to critique what he was saying that would have put the mean-spirited nature of the joke front and center.  A rap.  A joke.  Even a short monologue.  The Will Smith I had previously come to admire over the past several decades could have done this easily.  That Will Smith, who belatedly made an appearance later in the ceremony accepting the Best Actor Oscar for "King Richard," was missing in action at a point when, for everyone's sake, having him there was absolutely essential.

And Rock?  Well, in this instance, he's the victim of a crime.  And there seems to be a consensus that he did not know that Pinkett Smith was suffering from alopecia.  On the other hand, Pinkett Smith has talked publicly about her condition, and Rock knew about the existence of the disease and what it does to hair.  Judge for yourself whether or not he should have suspected that the joke might have been over the edge of public respect, if not good taste.  Legally, it doesn't matter; verbal provocation is not a defense Smith would be able to assert in court, should this ever come to that point.  Nor should it be; society rightly expects people, especially those in the public eye, to take the occasional misspoken word. 

But over the edge of both respect and taste is where a lot of contemporary comedians live.  And, at least in my mind, Rock is a notorious example, which is why I mentally rolled my eyes when I heard him being introduced that night.  I knew something bad and potentially embarrassing (if not worse) was going to happen.  That's what Rock does.  In previous years on the Oscars, even when I agreed with the basic point he was making (e.g., referring to Elia Kazan as a "rat"), I cringed at the way he did it.  The viciousness of the style overwhelms the truth that makes the observation funny in the first place.  And, statistical probabilities in life being what they are, you can only sail over the edge so many times before the trouble you're looking for shows up and says "Hi there."

Putting aside the culpability of either man in this fracas, both of who lost something in the process, the question that jumped out at me here is this:  what's happened to our national sense of humor?   Perhaps it would be easier to answer that question with a few observations about the nature of humor itself.

Good comedy is comedy that laughs at everyone, even itself.  By which I mean, not all humor is so-called "insult" humor.  The history of comedy, especially prior to the mid-point of the last century, is filled with comedians who found ways to laugh at themselves every bit as much, if not more so, than others.  You can probably think of examples within your own experience.  For me, my personal favorite will always be Groucho Marx.  One minute in a Marx Brothers film, he will be deflating one or more of the pompous/clueless characters around him; the next minute, he will allow Chico to set him up as the butt of a joke (and, sometimes, even still comeback after that with a wisecrack).  For that matter, this is why ethnic humor is only funny when the comedian telling/performing it is a member of the relevant ethnic group.  By definition in this instance, the comedian is laughing at himself/herself/themselves.

Good comedy is about universal truths, about things we all agree upon.  People shouldn't be unfair.  Or lie. Or cheat. Or steal. Or pretend to be something they're not.  Comedy that not only works but lasts across time does so because the objects of its aim are things that are basic to the human condition, not a particular person, place, or moment.  This is demonstrated by the fact that our comedy culture, like the rest of our society, is made up of people from all other the globe.  At its best, comedy makes all of us laugh at the same things.

Good comedy, by virtue of its universality and self-deprecating nature, brings people together.  Audiences feel reassured and comfortable when they know that everyone is laughing for the same reason, and the laughter is being generated by someone who is not aiming to target a particular person or group in favor of another.

Here is where I need to allow myself the luxury of being explicitly political to make my point.  Perhaps above all, good comedy doesn't pretend to be something it isn't. Like, say news.  Just as news should not pretend it is entertainment, lest the line between fact and fiction be blurred to the point of obscurity.  I will confess that I have a nakedly political reason for mentioning this.  Fox News stays protected from defamation laws while producing patently defamatory material by classifying itself as "entertainment," while making sure that its presence in your cable subscription is ensured by calling itself a "news" network.  Fox should be forced to make a choice.  Either your cable bill will go down, or our political discourse will be polluted with fewer lies.  Either way, we win.

But it's no exaggeration to say that more than three decades of dishonest propaganda from the likes of the late Rush Limbaugh and his sordid professional progeny has done more to coarsen, polarize, and ultimately destroy the fabric of humor in our society.  Yes, there has always been satire, and sometimes pointed satire, and that is as it should be.  But, at its best, it has been produced by people who were open in their aims, and who understood that their targets had a right to fire back.  They didn't try to hide behind a lofty facade.  They could, to use a well-worn cliché, take it as well as dish it out.  And, as a result, conservative cowardice has infected, coarsened, and nearly destroyed the culture of our humor in the same way that it has destroyed the culture of our politics.

To come back to the Oscars for a moment, this is one reason why so many of the "jokes" written into the script of the show don't land.  They don't feel like jokes.  They feel like a series of punches in the nose.  The laughter in the live audience that those jokes do generate feel as nervous as they feel obligatory.  And that observation alone makes me wonder:  when was the last time any of us laughed out loud, because something was so funny you couldn't help doing it?  I can't in my case.  Can you?

Maybe Smith and Rock landed in the middle of this controversy because the rules of the road when it comes to comedy have been hijacked by people who see it as a weapon, rather than as a kind of balm.  Maybe, when the only rule of comedy is to bring your sharpest knife and assume a knife fight will break out, no one should be surprised when blood ends up on the floor.  I think neither man should have their career destroyed over this, and, as far as their relationship is concerned, I hope that they find a way to repair it.  We all would benefit if they do so.

But we would all benefit as well, if we could somehow find a way as a society back to the kind of humor that at its best is characterized by humility, by honesty, by universality, and, frankly, by inventiveness.  Yes, George Carlin and Lenny Bruce liberated our use of language, and bless them for doing it.  But their purpose in doing so was to expand the range of humor, not to make comedians slaves to pushing emotional buttons.

Our national sense of humor has traveled a long way down a bad road, and two of our most celebrated comedians have suffered as a result, along with the Academy, its audience, and movie audiences as a result.  Can we find our way back?

The answer to that question might actually say a great deal about whether our culture, and our nation, can survive.

The Midterms And The Media

In my haste to get last week's post published, I neglected to make a few additional points about the media's role in it, now and for the next several months.  In addition, there was one tragic story this past week with a media-related angle.  So I take this week's opportunity to blog to make the points, and reflect a bit on the story.

I've written more than once about the fact that the corporate media, including legacy publishers and broadcasters, exercise their freedom of the press not on behalf of their readers and viewers, nor by giving the full reign of that freedom to their employees on the front lines of the news, but solely to protect the property rights of the media's owners.  That is, not only their rights in the media itself, but the other assets they own in an age where 1% of the nation controls all aspects of our economy.  But, for the most part, they have done so on the proverbial QT, hoping that most of us won't notice.

That, however, may have changed recently.  CBS News, the former platinum standard of broadcast journalism that pursued the truth of what matters without fear or favor, announced that they were hiring a former Donald Trump henchperson, Mick Mulvaney, to provide commentary during the upcoming election season.  Why Mulvaney in particular?  Well, as it turns out, CBS is betting that the Republicans will win big, and they need to preserved their "access" to the powerful in the event that happens.  That's right:  it has nothing to do with any election expertise, or other journalism credentials, that Mulvaney might have.  It's all about making it easier to line up GQP talking heads to offer "puff pieces"--or, to be more candid, lies--in lieu of doing the job that the First Amendment supposedly protects:  the job of giving the public everything it needs to know about who is governing them.

Leaving aside the question of whether Mulvaney has the ability to do this at this point, given his own abrupt departure from the Trump administration, this brazen currying of favor with those who are only prospectively powerful would be laughable at best and a constitutional betrayal at worst if it came from a news organization with a lesser lineage.  That it comes from the network of Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and Dan Rather is a disaster that will resonate for a long time.  Assuming, that is, that it isn't surpassed by something worse.  And, as former Representative and current MSNBC host Joe Scarborough is fond of remining his viewers, it can always get worse.

If you had any doubt that the media is not as "liberal" as conservatives are constantly screaming, the Mulvaney hiring should end them once and for all.  This brazen move by CBS was made openly, without any concerns about public backlash.  It's now up to all of us to ensure that there is one.

And all of us, as it turns out, includes at least some conservatives, such as the former contributors to the late "The Weekly Standard" who now publish thebulwark.com, a Web site devoted to salvaging our democracy and, in the process, beginning a saner political dialogue.  For that reason, they are in what is for them the uncomfortable position of rooting for, and providing guidance to, Democrats for the sake of bringing an end to Trumpism.  Here is an example of a post from that site by Mona Charen, a syndicated conservative columnist whose pieces have, in the past, provoked several letters to the editor on my part that, in hindsight, were far harsher than they should have been.  In her own way, by emphasizing the need for Democrats to stop dithering amongst themselves and focus on selling their accomplishments to date, she is reinforcing the point that the press is not going to do the Democrats' heavy lifting for them.  And Democrats absolutely need to have that point reinforced.  My thanks to her for doing so.

I will add one observation, regarding her post.  She notes the disapproval rates of both parties in the polls, and correctly points out that Democrats fare worse than Republicans in these polls.  I would just note that the difference between the two is exactly 4 percent--essentially a statistical tie.  This is consistent with what I have observed previously about generic congressional polls.  That hardly guarantees a Democratic victory in November, but it does make it clear that, no matter what CBS may think, the game is far from over.

Finally, and sadly, I note the untimely and devastating passing this past week of Eric Boehlert, a well-known media critic who, for decades, decimated the legacy media's coverage of Democratic presidential campaigns, exposing not only their falsehoods but also the craven and frankly unpatriotic motives behind spreading those falsehoods.  I can do no better, for his memory, for providing a measure of comfort to all those who were fortunate to know or work with him, and for reminding all of you that today's American press is not a friend to either you or democracy, than to provide this link to one of the many, many deserved tributes to him, his work, and his memory.

May we all honor all three of those by applying a line from the Terminator movies to what we do from now until Election Day:  no fate but what we make.  Everything good about this country is on the line this time; all of us need to act like it.

Let's prove them wrong.  Let's prove to ourselves that the people truly run this country.

Is It Too Late For Democrats In The Midterms?

Well, as everyone knows, the midterm elections are seven months away, which means that everyone interested in politics is either doing a lot of polling or poll-watching,  I'm no exception, except that I've already been at it for seven months.  I can't say that I'm surprised by the across-the-board expectation that the odds of victory in November favor Republicans over Democrats, both in congressional and state races.  But, while I'm not surprised by it, I'm not buying into it.  At least not just yet.

In the predictions game here, leading the charge in the legacy media is, of course, Chuck Todd of NBC's "Meet the Press."  Unlike the days of his predecessor, the late Tim Russert, Todd's hosting of the show has had a transparently obvious GQP to it, both in guest selection and interpretation of poll results.  Not surprisingly, his views on 2022 follow this bias, as he demonstrated in a recent MTP program.  He cited two reasons for believing that there will be a red blowout at the polls this fall:  Joe Biden's low standings in the polls, and what pollsters like to describe as the "enthusiasm gap"; that is, the net difference between respondents of each party, as self-reported, regarding their enthusiasm about the election.

Ever since the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, Biden's previously-high poll numbers have been crashing to earth.  There was a brief period after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Biden's subsequent State of the Union message, where the favorability-unfavourability narrowed in Biden's favor.  But that period seems to be over, and, as of now, the President is doing well to climb a few percentage points above 40%.

But polling is, as much as anything, about analyzing trends as well as moments.  And, in this context, it's worth using as a starting point for discussion, the fact that Biden has had thus far, by many conventional standards, a successful Presidency.  Employment is up, the pandemic is winding down, infrastructure is being rebuilt, and our standing as an international leader has been restored to a significant degree, as witnessed by the unity of NATO in standing strong against Vladimir Putin's destruction of Ukraine.  And, yet, Biden--and, for that matter, the Democrats--seemingly get absolutely no credit for any of it.

But all of this begs a rather obvious question.

If Biden's low standing in the polls, combined with the "enthusiasm gap" those polls claim to measure, are real harbingers of Democratic disaster, then why do polls that measure a party preference for control--the so-called "generic congressional ballot"--consistently show a dead heat between Democrats and Republicans.  Because they do.  There's no "enthusiasm gap" to be found their, nor any evidence that whatever animates voters' current dislike for Biden moves them to reject his party.

And this is consistent with what happened during Barack Obama's first term, and the fight over enacting health care reform.  The longer that fight went on, the more compromised the legislation became, the more political and personal energy was sucked out of Obama's supporters, the more those supporters despaired of his ability to fight for the causes that had moved them to vote for him in the first place.  And so, when health care reform was finally enacted, it did not poll well at all.  Overwhelming majorities disapproved of what Obama's opponents derisively referred to as Obamacare.

But drilling down into those poll results shows something more complicated.  Many of the people who disapproved of the bill did so not because they thought if was a government takeover of health care, but because they thought that it didn't go far enough in getting the federal government to ensure health care for all.  And today, unsurprisingly, Obamacare polls well, as those who opposed it from the right begin to see its long-term benefits, while those who opposed it from the left correctly see it, as Obama did, as a base from which coverage can be expanded even further.

Is the real enthusiasm gap for Biden coming from the left, as those voters perceive him as operating has he has traditionally, as a moderate Democrat?  Does that lead them to view him as playing Charlie Brown to the GQP's Lucy, as they Obama did?  Is this based on the failure to enact the progressive infrastructure bill, the so-called "Build Back Better" bill, now unlikely to be enacted in any form prior to the midterms, even though that failure is based entirely on two self-dealing members of the Democratic Senate caucus?   I'm comfortable thinking, based on the Obamacare experience, that the answer to that is "yes."

Which means that it's important not to learn the wrong lesson from current polls, as Democrats and their supporters did in the 2010 midterms.  They need to reject the fantasy of tacking to some imaginary, non-existent "center" and understand that the pathway to success lies in reassuring their core supporters that neither they nor their goals are going to be abandoned.  They need to be not merely in the media, but in their states and communities, preaching that message and listening with respect to the frustrations of those supporters.  And when they come back to Washington afterwards, they need to fight in every non-violent way for the goals that got them sent there in the first place.

What is the likelihood of all that happening?  Well, I wish I could say it was great.  But, when I read think pieces like this one, I have a very hard time doing so.

The problem with the reasoning in this article, as is the case with so many like it, is that it treats progressive voters, who tend to be young voters, as disposable, as though it's possible for Democrats to win elections without them.  It also overlooks the fact that many progressive concerns are not merely concerns shared by a broader coalition of voters, but are also, in the case for example of climate change and voting rights, existential in nature, whether with respect to democracy, or life itself.  

Young voters are not simply the heart of the Democratic core now, but the leading edge of its not-too-distant future core.  They aren't motivated by caution, any more than their counterparts in earlier generations were.  They want what those counterparts wanted:  a better world for everyone, and not just for themselves.  They don't want to be told that the future is being held hostage by two Democratic Senators with a talent for presenting their self-interests as the interests of their constituents.  They want, and expect, Biden and the members of his party to work visibly night and day to find a way forward.  They don't want to be told that they need to get along with a party that wakes up every morning and finds new and more exciting ways to terrorize them, shoot them, call them perverts and take away their right to vote.  They need to feel that Biden and Democrats care because, right now, they see Democrats as looking for excuses for failure, and all that makes them do is want to stay home on Election Day.

And young voters understand much more clearly than the rest of us that the coming midterms are not a routine election, one where expectations can be measured against the past, or in the context of a nation where "normalcy" is the rule of the day.  Nothing is normal about this election, anymore than anything is normal about this nation right now.  One of our two major parties is at best operating as a criminal conspiracy, and at worst like a cabal of agents for a hostile foreign power.

What Biden is doing for the center is in fact what he should be doing to rally his base.  Start with termination of the so-called Title 42 expulsion program, to allow refugees to go forward with their asylum petitions here in the U.S.  It's hypocritical to talk about being "over COVID" and then use COVID to indulge in the great passion of the American right:  bigotry.  All the more so given the current news on the employment front.  Clearly, we need more workers than we have.  What have we done to address situations like this one in the past?  Hint:  It rhymes with "immigration."

There are any number of executive actions Biden could take.  Cancel student debt.  Declare climate an emergency under the National Emergency Act.  Offer temporary protected status to all undocumented non-criminally charged immigrants, and use that as leverage to force Congress to pass CIR.  Boost workers' rights.  Lower drug costs.  The Progressive Caucus in the House of Representatives has put together an entire list of possibilities, as has the progressive magazine The American Prospect. 

Why not do at least some of these things?  Because of fear that they may backfire?  Then, as FDR famously said, try something else.  Fear is a terrible governing strategy:  people may not understand the intracacies of legislation or regulations, but they can smell fear, and they will turn away from leaders who exude it.  Besides, surrendering to fear is worse than bad politics; it is a derogation of duty and one's oath of office.  Leaders are elected to lead, not shiver.

Is it time for Biden to declare war on the GQP, the way he has (up to a point) with Putin?  Don't take it from me, take it from AOC.

Is there the likelihood that it's too late for that to happen?

Biden and the Democrats hold the answer to that question in their hands.  But, to the extent that progressives can make them feel America's pain before November, so do we all.

What Does Interracial Marriage Teach Us About Us?

In my postings here, I have always strived to be honest about potential conflicts of interests between the contents of my posts and those of my personal life.  Where I might have an interest in something I say online, I have done my best to disclose that interest for the record and my readers.  I am about to do so again here, because I will be delving into a subject that had a significant--and painful--impact in my personal life, one that has also surfaced in several recent news stories that will subsequently be the focus of today's post.  

In my mid-20s, a painful period in my professional life, the pain was brightened for a time by a romantic relationship I had for several months with an African-American woman I had met at Oberlin.  I was forced to end the relationship due to circumstances beyond my control and hers, involving racism directed at us from a quarter I did not expect.  It was my decision, but one that I felt at the time was in the best interests of both of us.  Nevertheless, it has always remained a painful memory, and in any case not a proud one.  At the same time, whenever I meet an interracial couple, or see one in the news, I find a measure of solace in knowing that my own failure to do the right thing did nothing to dent the arc of history in this area to bend toward justice.

So, then, is interracial romance the subject of my post?  Well, yes and no.  I intend to use interracial relationships that are, in one way or another, a part of current events to underscore not only the hypocrisy of the modern/contemporary Republican Party, but its sole, unchanging purpose.  Without further ado, then.

Although it did not receive as much coverage as the other two stories I will be discussing, I was nevertheless fascinated by the recent decision, which you can read about here, by U.S. Senator Mike Braun of Indiana, a Republican, to say the quite part out loud when it comes to his stance on the constitutionality of interracial marriage.  True, like all politicians who let their mouths wander into trouble, Braun hastily issued a "correction" of his previous statement on the subject.  On the other hand, as with all cases of "corrections" that are issued only in the wake of substantial public blowback, the rest of us are free to evaluate its sincerity.

And this one fails that test on two accounts.  One, Braun was offered a chance to make a clarification during the interview in which he decided to torch any reputation he had for tolerance, and failed to take advantage of it.  Second, Braun is a member of a Senate caucus led by Mitch McCONnell, whose leadership is distinguished by a level of message and voting discipline that might make even a Prussian blush.  McCONnell doesn't gladly suffer any member of his caucus doing or saying anything that might stub a toe in his effect to regain his iron grip on the upper chamber of Congress.  So I think it's fair to apply the Maya Angelou test here and conclude that, when Senator Braun told the American people that he and his party are racist, the American people should believe them.

But what about Clarence and Ginni Thomas, then?  The current Supreme Court Associate Justice and his politically active spouse are an interracial couple.  If this is a rule, why are they the exception?

Because Republicans are willing to allow for exception of this sort if they are politically useful.  And, when it comes to political usefulness, for Republicans, Thomas has been the gift that keeps on giving.  First, there was his confirmation hearing, where he managed to turn a sordid episode in his professional life into a moment of unjudicial rage in which he got to accuse Democratic Senators of performing a "high-tech lynching" of him for being "uppity."  They were, in fact, investigating an allegation against him of sexual harassment, but that didn't stop the Senators in question, led by the now-President Biden, from dropping the investigation.  That was 31 years ago, and since then, Thomas' voting record has helped paved the way for a dramatic reversal of the Court's role in championing and advancing social justice.

And second, there was Mrs. Thomas, who has used the political connections forged by way of her marriage to create a power center of her own, in concert with various right-wing political organizations.  In fact, so powerful has she become in the process that it has opened up the question of conflicts of interest between causes she has advanced and their connection with cases before the Court.  This question, which has been previously explored in the press, exploded in news outlets this past week when it was learned that the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol has records of texts between Mrs. Thomas and then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in which she urged him to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.  Perhaps this explains why her husband was the lone dissenting vote in the Court's decision requiring the White House to hand over to the committee its records relating to the attack.

Both Thomases have denied the existence of any conflicts of interest, insisting that their personal and professional lives are completely separate.  These assertions, which should by themselves strain the credulity of virtually every married person in contemporary America (me included), are as phony as the Justice's attack on his Senate interlocutors.  You need look no further that this tweet from a former Heritage Foundation intern, whose recollection makes it clear that the Justice and his activist spouse are "a team."

And a mighty useful team they are.  This is why Republicans, in spite of the white nationalism that is their only institutional glue, are willing to tolerate them.  Republicans don't really care about people having abortions, as long as they're the only one who can afford them.  They don't really care about what kids are reading in schools, so long as their kids are the only one who can afford a decent education.  They don't even care about high taxes, so long as they're the only ones not paying them.  And they absolutely, positively, do not care about limited government in the roles of Americans.  After all, government can be a great way of controlling the people who don't support you.  This is why we have a criminal justice system that marches African-Americans to the electric chair, and lets white Wall Street thieves go back to their the thievery.  This is why we have a religious climate in this country that allows one religion to dictate what religion means for everyone else.  And this is why we choose to spend our public resources on making war rather than making wealth for all.  And by war, I'm not just talking about overseas conflict; I'm talking about violence against our fellow citizens, and disgusting attempts to joke about it.

Goodies for we, but not for thee.  That's the Republican philosophy, past, present, and future, reduced to the size of a bumper sticker in the hope that a majority of the American people can digest it.  And if the GQP can get away with hiding it by manipulating the racism of poor undereducated whites, then shame on all of us.  So why should they care about Clarence and Ginni Thomas' interracial marriage?  So long as they don't have to see them too often, and they're otherwise spectacularly useful, it's all good.

Contrast this with this past week's third story in which interracial marriage was a factor:  the confirmation hearings of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for a seat on the very Supreme Court where Clarence Thomas would be one of her colleagues.  The Republicans questioning Judge Jackson made every attempt to not merely question her patriotism, but to sexualize her public image by profiling her rulings in cases involving child pornography.  She did not rise to the bait even once, which merely underscored the demeaning behavior to which she, her white husband, and her biracial daughter were subjected, as well as the naked racism on which that behavior is based.

This, along with her other qualifications, is why she will make this country proud as the first African-American woman to sit on the highest Court in the land.  And it is one more reason why I am grateful for all of the multiracial families in America.  More than anyone else, you demonstrate our ability to become one out of many.  More than anyone else, you are the proof that this country and its people will not succumb to the base instincts of one political party, but will continue rising to the heights promoted by the Constitution, and those who not only advocate its ideals, but live them as well

Take Advantage of Biden's Sincerity

Is it too early to say "What a difference a State of the Union address makes?"

Well, perhaps.  There are still many intractable problems that Joe Biden, the Democrats, and the U.S. face:  inflation, lingering concerns about COVID, civil unrest of both sides of the political divide.  Plus Ukraine, which, even in a political climate without any other major problems to face, would be enough to absorb a President's attention and tip the balance of a party's political fortunes.

But no one outside of the right-wing echo chamber has any doubt that last week's SOTU was a major plus for Biden's standing with the American people.  According to an NPR poll, Biden received an "unusual bounce" in his standing with voters as a consequence of his speech.  Perhaps one perverse illustration of that point is that this time, unlike SOTU disruptions by Republicans in the past, the performance art of Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene was Biden's rubber to their glue.  If it's any consolation from me to the two of them, they can rest assured that no one could possibly have worked harder to earn that lack of respect more.

But it's worth taking some time to ask:  why did this happen?  There has not been much improvement with regard to the issues that have bedeviled Biden and the Democrats up to this point.  And the Ukraine-Russia conflict may continue for months without any path toward resolution, and nightly footage of horrors being inflicted on the Ukrainians, without palatable options for Biden to make a difference.

I think this is a question with a relatively simple answer.

Joe Biden, for all of his past (and probably future) verbal gaffes, is as sincere a person as you are ever likely to find in politics.  That comes in part from his religious faith, and also from being tested in his personal life in ways that would be devastating for many of us.  I think that latter point is one aspect of his makeup that his political opponents fail to take into account.  When you've had to bury a wife and two children, it's going to take a lot more than imbeciles chanting "Let's go Brandon" to get under your skin.

But I think that his sincerity is demonstrated mainly by one aspect of his personal and political style that no honest person, Democratic or Republican, would deny he possesses.  Biden genuinely believes that politics in a democracy and and should be a win-win process.  Some of us (you can recognize me here, if you wish) are frustrated by the fact that he often acts on that basic impulse even in the face of a mountain of evidence that his opposite numbers are utterly unwilling to return the favor.  But that fact simply affirms that his doing so is not an act of calculation.  It is, for him, a statement of principle.  To share a video I've shared before, can you imagine Lindsay Graham saying this about any other Democrat?

In a field that is dominated by insincerity like no other, Biden's candor, however much it makes him trip over his verbal shoelaces, is a quality that has made a huge difference in his political fortunes.  I have no doubt that, for a lot of voters, it made the difference in making a choice between Biden and the most insincere excuse for a human being ever to run for the presidency.  People may have disagreed with many of Biden's stands on issues, but they felt certain that he at least knew where he stood, and was willing to compromise.  That may well have been a big part of the reason why Biden did better at the polls than congressional Democrats did.

But, if all of this is true, why have Biden's poll numbers been a dumpster fire for the past several months?  The Afghanistan withdrawl turned those numbers against him, and that is understandable.  On the other hand, I suspect that people have largely moved on from Afghanistan as an issue, in part because, however chaotically it was done, it was essentially popular with most Americans.

I suspect this answer is relatively simple as well.

Biden has been largely invisible for those several months, except for brief snippets in mainstream media outlets of White House availabilities and stump speeches.  This effectively puts his messaging in the hands of people who have no interest in helping him or his party; if anything, their only real interest is profits for their corporate masters, which in the digital age boils down to clicks.  And this, sadly, is par for the proverbial course with Democrats, who imagine that the media is dominated by truth-tellers fearlessly taking advantage of their First Amendment rights.  In fact, it is dominated by property owners fearlessly protecting the property rights of their fellow investors.  The wry observation that freedom of the press belongs to the person that owns one exists for a reason.

In fact, this goes a long way toward explaining why public opinion has not only run against Biden and the Democrats, but frankly run against the truth.

Inflation the result of excessive public spending?  Wrong.

Republicans the defenders against thought control in schools?  Wrong.

Republicans the advocates of tax relief?  Wrong.

For that matter, Republicans the advocates of individual liberty?  Wrong.

In fact, Republicans working tirelessly on behalf of the American people?  Wrong.  (This, in particular, should be a campaign ad all by itself).

Or Republicans as good stewards of public money?  Wrong.  (She was the last person who should have been allowed to do a rebuttal to Biden.)

And, finally, USCIS failing to stop and deport people at the border:  Wrong and wrong again.

Fortunately, for Biden, Democrats, and their supporters (again, you can recognize me), the solution to all of this is relatively simple as well.

What Biden, his communications team, and their counterparts in the national and state Democratic parties need to do, with FDR and Reagan as their bipartisan role models, is to stop talking about the so-called "bully pulpit" of the presidency and start to actually use it.  Develop and implement a comprehensive communications strategy to get the truth to the American people, the truth that the press has been too intimidated to tell by decades of lies about "liberal bias."  They need a corrective, and you can supply it.

Such as strategy could have all or some of the following components:

Monthly town halls in different parts of the country;

Fireside chats by social media;

Weekly speeches in front of key Democratic constituencies;

Call-in or link-in events;

Fewer press conferences, more one-on-one interviews.

I'm sure that there are many more possibilities.  The main thing is to have the President of the United States come out of hiding and into the light of day, to shine the light about the truth between America's two major political parties:  one is a party of debating ideas, while the other is about advancing white nationalism through dishonest and violence.  Let the voters ponder those choices.  I'm still confident enough in them to think that most of them will make the right choice--indeed, what should be the only choice.

It's America's future, Mr. President.  Your future, as well.  Take advantage of the personal profile you've been gifted with, and use it to make a difference.  Before it's too late.

A Tale of Two Manchurian Candidates

In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, there were numerous reports that Vladimir Putin was interfering in the process on behalf of his preferred candidate, Donald Trump, because Putin perceived that Trump would be far more useful than Hillary Clinton in advancing Putin's geopolitical goals, both for the former Soviet republics, and Europe beyond, especially the former Warsaw Pact nations.  At the time, their was evidence that this was in fact happening, which is separate from the issue of whether or not this interference ultimately cost Clinton the election.  The mere fact that it was happening should have terrified people enough to take it seriously, and take steps to blunt its impact on both the campaigning and the voting.  We did not do that and, as a result, we may never know for certain if the election outcome was an honest one.

We do, however, know that it was a disastrous one.  Honestly or not, Trump was elected, and wasted little if any time in playing the interests of the U.S. and our NATO allies right into Putin's hands.  His vociferous and venomous attacks on our allies, combined with comments about Putin that suggested he viewed him as a potential date rather than a head of state, gave Putin all the cover he needed to begun advancing his plans to re-establish the pre-1989 status quo.  And, just as we may never know the extent to which Putin helped Trump to become President, there is still much we do not and may never know (as I recently wrote) about the extent to which, as President, Trump enabled Putin to advance the planning for the current fighting between Russia and Ukraine.

Well, perhaps not completely.  But now, we have a bit of an inkling from an unlikely source who can, perhaps, in this instance (although not generally) be trusted to be telling the truth.

John Bolton, my fellow Baltimorean, and a war hawk's war hawk back in the days when the second Bush Administration needed a national-security pretext to invade Iraq and secure oil profits for Republican donors, stated a few days ago, unequivocally, that Trump's actions made it "that much easier" for Putin to invade Ukraine.  Bolton also bolstered that revelation with specific details, describing how Trump complained about the harshness of actions taken by his foreign policy staff against Putin, and noting that Trump's praise of Putin for being "very savvy" was "embarrassing" for the U.S..  (No kidding, John.)  Anyway, you can read about this and a bit more right here.

Not the whole story, to be sure, but enough of it from someone who was in a position to know what was and wasn't going on.  Still begs the question, of course, of what we don't know, perhaps all the more so.  For example, in the conversations between Putin for which, contrary to standard security processes, their is absolutely no third-party verification whatsoever.  We will probably never know what was disclosed by Trump to Putin during those conversations.  Or, for that matter, what Putin instructed Trump to do.  And in exchange for unknown favors.

Back in 1962, at the peak of Cold War tensions, when the world came to the brink of a nuclear conflict during the Cuban Missile Crisis, "The Manchurian Candidate" was playing in American movie theaters.  It told the then-inconceivable story (or so it seemed) about an American POW being brainwashed by Communists to serve their interests as an assassin.  The movie was based on a book by Richard Condon, a novelist who is credited for a principle known as "Condon's Law":  "When you don't know the whole truth, the worst you can imagine is bound to be close."

It's a principle that the movie does a powerful job of illustrating.  But whatever consolation audiences could have taken in 1962 that the movie was just fiction can provide no comfort to Americans who now have to face the probability that the 45th President of the United States was, in fact, a Manchurian Candidate.

You think that's bad enough?  Well, it may even be worse than that.  We may, in the current state of national and international crisis, have other Manchurian Candidates to deal with.

Here is one example.

Marco Rubio, who will be running this fall for a third term as a U.S. Senator from Florida, was positioned for a long time by mainstream media as the next big thing in American politics.  A Cuban refugee from a theoretically "purple" state (and the third-largest state by population, in any case), with an initial reputation as a "moderate" Republican, he seemed to fit the profile of what legacy newspapers and broadcasters look for as the ideal presidential candidate.  And, to be fair, during the early part of his career, his actions lent some weight to that image.  Most notably, he was part of the so-called "Gang of Eight" that almost got comprehensive immigration reform across the finish line, before House Republicans decided that they didn't want to do Democrats any favors in an election year.  How many refugees, from Ukraine and elsewhere, might be better off today if the CIR bill hadn't been blocked?

Whatever the answer to that rhetorical question may be, Rubio apparently got the message from it.  He has spent much of his time since then flipping and flopping on issue after issue, and he did it well enough to make it to a second Senate term.  But, along the way, he decided to take a detour into presidential politics in 2016, which led to a verbal sparring match between Rubio and Trump that was conducted at roughly an eighth-grade level.  Trump won the nomination and the election, Rubio managed to return to the Senate despite his humiliation at the "little hands" (as Rubio called them) of the man who had described him as "Little Marco," and guess what happened after that?  Rubio became subservient enough to Trump to earn Trump's "Complete and Total Endorsement" for his current re-election bid.

And there seems to be no boundaries to that subservience, as Rubio has begun to act as though, like Trump, he too is a Putin "sleeper cell."  Today, I learned on Twitter that he posted a tweet in which he revealed an image from an Internet video conference between Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, and a bipartisan congressional delegation.  This conference, understandably, was supposed to be confidential; unfortunately, that consideration did not stop Rubio from attempting to leverage an image from it for political advantage.  Or, maybe, that didn't matter.  If, like Trump, he is now working on behalf of another country, maybe he saw it as a win-win proposition.

Well, I don't.  This only makes me wonder how many other members of the Republican Party, in and out of office, are "sleeper cells."  Or Manchurian Candidates.  How many of those "Candidates" will be candidates for office on the ballots this fall.  How many of them have been working in state legislatures this past year to "reform" voting laws in such a way as to put more "Candidates" into office at all levels of government?  And, as a consequence of all this, how close are we to becoming a client state of Putin?  How long will it be before we share what may at this point be the fate of Ukraine?

I don't have the answers to those questions.  But the answers matter.  To you, to me, to all of us.  And we'd better start getting the answers right now.  Just to make sure this election isn't our last one.

Ukraine

Right now, that's all that's need to be said, when it comes to describing the political agenda.

Nothing else has changed.  All of the other problems we face, and I've discussed, are still with us.  I would still describe some of them, like voting rights, as existential in nature, because they are to at least some degree.  But now there is one that, in its immediacy and lethality, and its impact not just on the U.S. but the world, pushes everything on our agency to the side.  Not forever, but for now and probably for the near future.

Why?

To begin with, Ukraine is about American security in the truest sense

Despite efforts to portray the Ukraine crisis as a territorial dispute between two countries, and nothing more, it is much more than that.  Vladimir Putin's long-term goal has been to reconstruct the Soviet Union, functionally if not formally, by taking control of all the former Soviet republics through either direct annexation of territory, or the establishment of "friendly" (translation:  puppet) governments in them.  It's not particularly far-fetched to think that he wants to revive the Soviet era of glory to an even greater extent, by invading the former Warsaw Pact nations and installing puppet governments in each of them.  It may not even be very far-fetched to think that his ultimate goal is to shatter NATO, leave Western Europe under the shadow of his revived Iron Curtain, and extend that shadow all of the way to the shores of the U.S., forcing us to ramp up our military at the expense of our nation's domestic needs.

If this sounds like Cold War "domino-theory" thinking to you, I can't say I blame you.  Putin's militarism and appetite for yesterday's Soviet glory, combined with his unprovoked and reckless attack on Ukraine has put Europe and NATO (and, therefore, us) back on a Cold War tactical footing.  Only now, for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, it has the potential to become a hot one.  

Even worse, Putin is now not only an active external threat to us, but an internal one as well, thanks to his alliance with Donald Trump.  Trump has been able to convince his followers that, despite ample evidence that he was Putin's puppet as President, Putin is somehow on our side, which means that Putin's opponents are inevitably "our" opponents.  This is why, even as Europe and the rest of the world have come together in opposition to Putin, Americans are bitterly divided over whether to support Russia or Ukraine.

This internal division plays right into the hands of both men.  As Rachel Maddow has pointed out, Putin's standing among the Russian people has depended in no small part on having the surrounding nations look even more dysfunctional than Russia, thereby discouraging Russians from thinking they can improve their lives by rising up against his dystopian regime.  It is precisely because of the progress Ukraine has made toward becoming a functional democracy that Putin needed to invade it once he lost Trump as an ally in the White House.

Just as Putin needed chaos among Russia's neighbors to look strong at home, he also needed chaos in the one county with the greatest ability to stand up to him--ours.  This is why he wanted Trump as president from the very beginning, and why he would be happy to see Trump win a second term:  so that Trump could continue and expand upon his previous work to divide Americans to the point of total dysfunctionality.  In Putin's decrepit mind, so long as the nations opposing him are flailing, they can do nothing against him.  And, more so than with regard to any other nation, Putin fears what a strong, united America can do, and his only hope to prevent us from shutting him down is to turn us against each other.  

So successful has he been in doing so that he's even got Rupert Murdoch talking out of both sides of his mouth when it comes to Putin:  having Tucker Carlson worship him while the New York Post blasts him.  And so ludicrous has this two-faced, treasonous approach to Putin become that at least one other conservative news outlet has noticed and condemned it.  That doesn't matter to Murdoch, and other well-heeled right-wingnuts:  the only unifying organizational principal among American conservatives is hating people who disagree with them.  

This is a perfect recipe for political chaos, and Putin, with the help of Trump, has made and continues to make the most of it.  That's why it's past time for us to ask, and act upon the answers to, two questions:

1.  Does the behavior of Murdoch's News Corporation sink to the level of treason enough that action could be taken against its broadcast licenses?

2.  To what extent did Trump, during his time in office (and perhaps since then, given his theft of classified documents) actively aid and abet Putin's planning for his invasion of Ukraine (and who knows what else)?

We need answers to these questions, and fast.  But the need for the answers is all the more reason that we absolutely need to give the Ukrainians all of the humanitarian and military help we can.  They've proven that they are willing to fight to win, if they have the tools to do it.  We have those tools; in fact, we have a surplus of them.  Here's an opportunity to make the most of sunk tax dollars while giving Ukraine the firepower needed to knock Putin back off his feet.  In the short run, it appears that, whatever we have in firepower to help Ukraine, it looks like sharing it is going to happen.

Like Kuwait, Putin's invasion of Ukraine this is a clear violation of international law that demands U.S. leadership of the UN and our allies; for that matter, the leadership that the larger international community can provide.  And, like the end of the Cold War, this is a defense of the liberation of Europe, an achievement wrought at no small cost, and one that has yielded enormous political and economic gains.  Those gains have been threatened by authoritarian backsliding in India, Brazil, Poland, Hungary, and, sadly, here at home.  This could be a moment to turn that tide back in the right direction.

And we cannot possibly afford to fail.

The Fault Of Rising Prices Is Not In The Stars, But In Ourselves

"Inflation, huh?"  You might be asking yourself that as you read the above title.  "Why is he writing about that again?  Didn't he just do that about a month or so ago?  Why is he coming back to this?  I don't need him to tell me that prices are going up."

Well, no you don't.  None of us do.  And you're quite right in thinking that I wrote about it a month or so ago; that's because I did, in a more far-ranging blog post.  And I'm not writing about it now to change anything I wrote before.

Then again, inflation continues to be a topic not only at the gas pump and the grocery store, but in the media, and political media in particular.  That's a reflection of what happens when political journalism becomes identical to its cousins in sports and journalism.  Who's up, what's down (or vice versa) is all that matters.  It's all frosting, and no cake.

And inflation shows no signs of abating anytime soon.  A new year and a healthier Christmas shopping season than expected hasn't taken anything out of the steam of the price jumps, or the relentless focus on their potential political impact in this fall's elections.  You have only to look at this article to appreciate both points.

There's a great deal of irony in all of this.  From the relentless focus on prices, you would not know the fact that, overall, the economy, especially as measured by overall growth and unemployment, is in phenomenal shape, even allowing for what will hopefully be a short-term stock market hit due to the Ukraine crisis.  Not even the seemingly endless series of Covid variants has been able to hurt what Democrats have been attempting to promote as a "Biden boom," with little evident impact on Biden's approval ratings.

In short, and again except for the Ukraine crisis and the lingering pandemic, inflation is topic A, and likely to remain so as long as prices continue to rise.  And the Republicans have been doing everything they can to exploit this for their own purposes, pointing fingers at Biden's successful spending bills and attempting to lay the blame at the White House doorstep (and the steps of congressional Democrats).

What they haven't been terribly good at explaining is what they would do about it.  In fact, they've made no attempt whatsoever to explain what they would do about it.  They've gone so far as to run away from efforts to make them explain what they would do about it.  Mitch McCONnell was asked what the Senate Republican agenda would be if his party regained control of that chamber, and his answer was, effectively, "vote for us and find out."  The agenda, in other words, would be maintaining Republican control of power for the benefit of the party's donors, and no one else.  Inflation?  So long as that can be blamed on someone else, they don't care.  At all.

But what about us?

We, the people, once upon a time, had the willingness to make choices and, more importantly, make sacrifices that were need to end fascism and ensure freedom around the world.  In the last century, we did it twice.  We rationed, we did without, we gathered scrap, we took on jobs that would never have seemed like choices in peacetime.  We sent family members into harm's way, many of whom suffered much worse than harm.  And all of us paid taxes, or bought bonds, to support the most powerful war machine in history in its successful effort to save Western civilization.  We proved that freedom truly isn't free.  And not just with our lips.

That's not what America is anymore, and I'm a serious skeptic as to the question of whether it can become that nation again.  Ever since the 1980 presidential election, it has been painfully clear that we as a society is not willing to do without.  The dominant domestic political ideology hasn't been liberalism, or conservativism.  It has been, and remains, consumerism.  Woe to the President and party who fails to see that and religiously abide by that reality.  It brought down Jimmy Carter, both of the Bushes, and it absolutely has the potential to do the same to the Democrats in this year's midterms.  "Sure, Joe, you saved democracy, pushed back against the virus, and got people back to work.  But I'm made about filling up at the pump, and it would never occur to me to find a way to save money on gas."  That would take real effort.  That would raise the specter of doing without.  

The America of the 21st century is not willing to do without. In fact the dirty little secret of the last four decades is that we will have been willing to accept wage is well below the cost of living simply because of the short-term gratification of low prices. One could come in fact, call this the Walmart syndrome.  I had somehow, after that, that as a society we would wise up and do better and, so far, we have not done that.  And, at this relatively late stage of my life, I despair of our society’s ability to do what we absolutely needed to do during both World Wars and what we need to do again right now.

However, please understand that, in writing this, I'm not making the case for throwing up our progressive, Democratic hands and calling it a day for the American experiment.  What I want to make the case for here is to start by taking a realistic look at what we've become.  And then, think realistically about the steps we need to take to have any chance of getting out of this mess.

As is the case with most aspects of economics, inflation is a phenomenon with various causes.  And most of them, with the exception of interest rates, are beyond the control of politicians.  Worker shortages?  Workers, like the people who employ them, will get back into the workplace when it suits their interests to do so, and not a second sooner.  Supply chains?  Basically at the mercy of the virus in other nations and a globalized economy.  Biden can and should be visibly engaged in making a difference with these, but the harsh reality is that there's only so much he can do.  As is also the case with mitigating the impact of the pandemic.

But, if he wants to do something with a real impact, something that would, historically be truly bipartisan, he should find a way, perhaps with the help of historians, to find his inner Teddy Roosevelt and start doing some finger pointing of his own.  Daily.  Publicly.  And, rhetorically, in the strongest possible terms.  I am, of course, thinking about this speech. 

The malefactors of great wealth from two centuries ago have come back in full force, and are, if anything, more powerful than ever before.  That is in no small part because they function globally, and not just nationally.  And, though they contribute to both of our major political parties, the fact is that they have a preference between the two of them, and it is time for Biden and other "corporate" Democrats to stop thinking otherwise, and stop pretending that we all live in a world in which the difference can be fairly split.  The center, if it exists at all, sits all too cozily in the vest pockets of Wall Street.  It's long past due time to give it a good, swift tug to the left.

It's not like it would be all that difficult to do.  Never in our history has it been more transparent that high prices are not driven by consumer demand and the difficulties in meeting it, but entirely by the lack of political will to stop the malefactors from engaging in malefactions.  Take everybody's favorite inflation poster child:  gas prices.  Are they going up because gas companies are struggling with costs?  Uh-uh.  They are going up because they know no one will call them out from naked profiteering.  Their loyalty is neither to the consumer nor the country.  It's to their shareholders, who are not looking out for anyone but themselves.  Take a look.

And, if he wants to make it even more bipartisan, and make a pass at Trump voters, he might want to link it to globalism.  Make the case not only against profiteering, but for policies that would promote bringing jobs home.  Here's a personal favorite of mine:  loans to Rust Belt states to seed new manufacturing jobs in states that have lost thousands of those jobs over the past several decades.  This is the kind of bread-and-butter politicking that Biden was elected to engage in.  So engage in it already, Joe.  I'm not the only voice out here telling you to do this; I've got company.  As Don Draper is famous for saying, if you don’t like what people are saying, change the conversation. That’s bipartisan too; Republicans do it all the time.

And you may even already have an opening to get something done, something that could help to address profiteering AND globalism while stealing another issue from the Republicans:  the national debt.  If Joe Manchin is at all serious about what he's been saying recently, it might be possible to build back better, bring jobs home, bring the budget into balance, and bring corporations down to earth when it comes to their power, here might be the vehicle to do it.  One, in fact, that might actually allow the Democrats to not only survive the midterms, but thrive in them as well.  There's any number of reasons for being skeptical about Manchin's sincerity about this; he could have made a proposal like the current one months ago, so why now?  Doesn't matter.  Even if he's bluffing, Democrats and progressives should get to work with him on a deal and get it put together within a month, and on Biden's desk shortly after that.  It might be their last hope.  It might be everyone's last hope.

In the end, whether we get their by sacrificing, or get there by fighting the real enemy, we are the ones who have the power to determine whether we get there at all.  Power does not trickle down.  Power rises up.  We're the ones who have to rise.

I pray that we will get there in time.  I worry that we won't.  Whoever reads this, and shares this, please do everything in your power to prove me wrong.  Washington won't save us.  Only we can save ourselves.

What A Difference A Week Makes?

The Feiler faster thesis may be on the verge of getting one of its more dramatic tests, regarding the seeming shifting of Joe Biden's political fortunes.  I was all set to write about how a convergence of events this past week--progress uniting NATO against Russia's potential invasion of Ukraine, the killing of ISIS's leader by U.S. troops, and record-breaking job numbers--have suddenly made the reports of Biden's political demise look, if not greatly exaggerated, at least not definitive.  But, perhaps unsurprisingly, Jennifer Rubin beat me to it, as you can see here. 

It's an opportunity to reshape the political narrative, and one that Biden appears to be making the most of, especially by way of his visit to New York to address concerns about rising crime rates.  Will it make a difference?  Only time will tell.  My impression is that, right now, inflation is still the number one issue for undecided voters and, if it is still rising or not on the downswing by Election Day, that may be enough to swing their decision.  Not unfortunately, the prospect of handing Congress and multiple statehouses over to a party that is little more than a personality cult.

Perhaps, sadly, it's best summed up here.  I hope he's wrong.  I pray he's wrong.

And I hope and pray that (a) Biden and the Democrats pull it out, or (b) G-d will brace all of us for what comes afterward if they don't.

Is The Power Of Good Enough?

As the nation seems to inch closer and closer to moving from what could be called a "cold civil war" to a hot one, I find myself more and more cynical about the possibility of reversing the slide toward political violence as the rule rather than the exception.  I know enough about history to know that, when it becomes the rule, everyone has already lost.  Sometimes, as was the case on January 6 of last year, I wonder whether it may already be too late.  I don't want to be the last person to realize when we have reached that point, if I could otherwise prevent even a single life from being lost.  But I also don't want to be someone who comes to the wrong conclusion early enough to tip the balance in the wrong direction.  And, all too often in history, "the moment when" is something that only becomes visible in hindsight.

Which is why I find myself wondering whether the power of doing good is enough.  Is it?

It's been written that leaders of non-violent protest such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King were successful primarily because their opposition rationalized their own existence as having been created by means that at least followed the forms of democratic processes.  On the other hand, dictators like Hitler and Stalin would simply have steamrolled over any attempts to opposed them by non-violence.  And, in the case of King, he ended up meeting a violent end despite his dedication, and that of his followers, to peaceful protests.  Taken in the context of the violent history by which America was settled by whites at the expense of peoples of color, it's difficult if not impossible to have a lot of faith in democratic processes as being enough--or even reliable--to stop people who, ironically, agree with Mao Zedong that all power comes out of of the barrel of a gun.  

Then again, one should hope if not pray that it will be enough; it beats the alternative, and millions of Americans have sacrificed everything to make it possible.  And, unless we can find a way like Dr. Strange and Spider-Man to tap into the multiverse, we will never know how many lives were spared by Gandhi and King's leadership.

I found myself sorting through all this this recently while I was watching Lawrence O'Donnell's nightly program on MSNBC, "The Last Word."  O'Donnell updated a story that had been prominently discussed by Fox News about a Washington state trooper who famously (thanks to social media) resigned from his job rather than comply with a mask-wearing mandate.  Fox had prominently treated his refusal as the act of a true American hero.

Until, that is, the trooper caught the COVID-19 virus.  And passed away as a consequence, leaving a family of five behind him.  Unsurprisingly, Fox found it inconvenient to disrupt their party line by updating the story.

Some commentators might have updated it for no other reason than to billboard Fox's obvious hypocrisy, to say nothing of the callousness inherent in doing so.  But O'Donnell didn't do that.  Instead, noting the GoFundMe page set up on behalf of the trooper's family, O'Donnell pledged to make a $10,000 contribution to the page, and encouraged his viewers to make a contribution to it, to whatever extent they could,  Within a matter of minutes after he did so, viewers added an additional $3,000 to the approximately $7,600 that had already been raised.  Counting O'Donnell's contribution, and as of the time I am typing this, the page has raised over $56,000.  You can read about this in detail here.

That's a lot of practical good will demonstrated by a viewer base that, for the most part, did not see eye-to-eye with the trooper when it comes to mask mandates.  Including me.  And it stands in sharp contrast to the treatment, or lack thereof, that Fox gave to the trooper's death.  The money will go some distance toward helping the short-term needs of his family.

But does that do anything to move the country away from a violent cataclysm?  I don't know.  My fear is that it has the potential to have the opposite effect--that is, to make progressives and their political allies look "soft" and therefore ripe for downfall by a sudden, substantial surge of force.

And, quite frankly, there's nothing "soft" about a good many of us.  Myself included.  If it comes down to fighting physically for the same of the Constitution and the people it protects, I would not shy away from fighting, and even dying to do that.  The folks on the other side of the ideological divide underestimate the prevalence of that feeling on our side at their peril.  Perhaps at everyone's peril.

Look, I'm 65, overweight, have no military training, and have never picked up a loaded firearm other than a BB gun (and that was decades ago).  But if it means following in the footsteps of my uncle in World War II, and many others, I have no problem dying on behalf of the greatest experiment in freedom and democracy the world has ever know.  On the other hand, I can't say I'm super-eager to do it, either.  I'd like to make it to my grandchildren's' bat and bar mitzvahs, at the very least.  And I suspect that most people feel the same way.  On both sides of the divide.

But I'd like to think that O'Donnell is on to something here.  What if, apart from the Washington three-ring-circus, we could as private citizens find ways, on both a large and small scale, to generate good will in ways that, like the virus, don't discriminate by partisan identification.  Offhand, I'm not sure what a large scale effort would look like.  But I'm not prepared to discount the possibility that it could happen, either.  Small-scale opportunities, like the GoFundMe page, abound.

Just as I think we need to be prepared to fight, but only if we have to, we need to give peaceful resolution of our differences a chance to happen.  That's what the Constitution was ratified to enable in the first place.  We need to stop talking about the Constitution as a club to use against each other, and understand it once again as the framework as a process for resolving our differences.  And, as an essential prelude to that happening, we need to find the ability to believe in each other's value as human beings, regardless of our political differences.

Contributing to the GoFundMe page is one small way of doing that.

Which is why I've done it.

And why I hope you will, too.

We Have To Be Fearless And Relentless

I've written a lot about Democrats and progressives fighting back at the polls.  And nothing I'm about to say here should in any way detract from anything I've written.

But it's not enough.

Thinking inside the ballot box is not enough, essential as it is, when the other side is working as hard as possible to shred the box.  To make the act of voting functionally meaningless, because they are working to fight elections "rigged" by changing demographics, and actually rig them legally so that it becomes impossible to lose them.

It has already started.  The effort to fight it at the national level, for the moment, has failed.  It may be impossible to out-organize this effort for this year's midterms, though we must make every effort to do that.  In a worst-case scenario, we may be descending into an age of political darkness, where all elections are rigged and peaceful means to oppose the rising tide of authoritarianism are no longer available.

But, BH, we're not quite there yet.  And I pray that we never get there.  But we're going to have to do more than vote.  We have to learn or re-learn to flex our activist muscles in other ways.

Take, for example, the spate of anti-women laws passed in right-wing states that are designed to force pregnant women to carry their children to term.  Regardless of how the child was fathered.  Regardless of the impact of a given pregnancy on the health of the woman carrying it.  Regardless of the viability of the pregnancy, before or after birth.  And regardless of the circumstances into which the birth will, and does, occur, which may doom the child into a life that leads to an early death.

The effect of these laws, and a looming Supreme Court decision on one of them, will be to effectively confer legal status on the unborn, perhaps as early as fertilization.  Perhaps even worse, given that the laws in question vary in the point at which a fetus obtains personhood, we will end up with a hodgepodge of cases and controversies leaving open the question of when a human is a human.  With all of the rights of one.

Well, if the opposition leaves you a loophole, why not exploit it, as this opinion piece in the Washington Post suggests?  Here is a ready-made opportunity to take the efforts of the right in punishing women, and weaponize it against them.  Imagine an effort to take some of the ideas in the Post piece, and enact them as statutes in all of the anti-abortion states.

Imagine, for example, proposing that child-support laws be reformed so that the woman forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy receives compensation for her health and other related expenses.

Imagine leveraging the success of such an effort into a push to change immigration law to protect both a fetus conceived in this country and the mother carrying the fetus from deporation, on the grounds that a majority of states have declared the fetus to be a person from conception, and is therefore a citizen from conception.

Imagine extending the concept of due process inadvertently proposed by abortion opponents to all fetuses of women detained for law-enforcement purposes.  They are, by definition, innocent of any crime, and therefore cannot be detained.  Neither can the women who host them.  Pregnancy, wanted or not, can become a get-out-of-jail card for any mother, whether innocent or not.

Imagine, for that matter, requiring that each fetus be counted for Census purposes, on the grounds that, born or not, they are effectively citizens of the United States that need to be enumerated.  The potential impact of that on decennial redistricting, and the consequential effects of that on the partisan distribution of power, speaks for itself.

All of this has, as the author of the Post piece points out at the end, the potential to turn our Constitution into a knot no one can untangle.  But I'm inclined to think that the threat of that happening is kind of the point.

To quote myself, Democrats and progressives have a tendency to treat politics as a debating society, in which ideas triumph on their merits and mutual personal respect is the order of the day.  That's how democracy is supposed to work, so there's nothing inherently wrong with that.  Except when the meetings of a society's members are disrupted by people with no goals except power and no respect for anyone but themselves.  That's where we are, whether anyone likes it or not.  Not just on January 6 of last year, but every day for the foreseeable future.

If we can't debate, we have to fight.  But we don't, at least at this point, need any weapons but our ideas, and the willingness to act on them.  Fighting for legislation like the examples I've proposed above are one way to do that.  Along with having votes every legislative day on bills that advance our goals, regardless of their prospects for victory.  And along with taking back the streets from the bullies, so that they never get a chance to storm the government again.

We don't yet need to respond to the violence of our opponents with violence of our own.  But we need to be fearless and relentless, regardless of our prospects for immediate success.  We need to show every day that intimidation is a strategy that has no victors.  We need to remind them of the fact that millions have died, so that we can live together in peace and prosperity.  If we can rise to the challenge, we can surmount it.  We have in fact, no choice.  It's the only way to get past it.

We Need To Be The Change We Are Looking For

So it is 2022. Four weekends into it, in fact.  And all I can say for the new year thus far is that any improvement over 2021 is going to take some time. 

As I write this, one major legislative piece of the Biden Administration's agenda, a combination of bills designed to protect and expand voting rights, has just gone down to defeat, while another, the Build Back Better human infrastructure bill, totters on the brink of defeat.  Both of these setbacks are almost entirely because of the intransigence of 4% of the Democratic Senate caucus.  Predictably, this is feeding the Dems-in-disarray meme that passes for mainstream media insight into progressive politics.  

Lost in the process, unfortunately, is the fact that congressional Democrats have shown remarkable unity in supporting a wide range of proposals that, in the not-too-distant past, would have been considered wildly out of the mainstream.  No longer.  But, as I just mentioned, two out of 50 Senate Democrats systemically refuse to get the message.  At times, they appear to be working overtime in order to do so.  Are they being bribed?  Blackmailed?  Does it even matter any more?  This much is clear:  Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are working overtime for something other than the public interest.

And, as a consequence of all of the above, the media chorus predicting a red tide in this year's midterm elections is growing louder and more confident that the tide will not be modest in nature, and may sink progressive politics in the U.S. for decades to come.  And that assumes that it won't also sink the prospect of future free elections and, perhaps, the Constitution itself.

My concerns about the latter prospect, for reasons I'll shortly discuss, are far greater than the are for the former.  Whatever happens this coming November, it will not change the fact that progressives are a growing cohort among Americans, and that the policies they favor, as shown by poll after poll after poll, are popular across the country.  As it stands right now, however, most if not all of those policies are no closer to reality than they were at this time a year ago.

Why?

This much seems clear to me:  over the past four decades, as coverage of national and even local politics has become characterized by profit-driven mergers that reduce the number of outlets, enslave those that survive to the need for compounding profits, and achieve that goal by a who's-up-who's-down focus rather than pursuit of the truth, the inevitable result has been a political dialogue that focuses on personalities rather than, to borrow a phrase from ABC News, issues and answers.  Thanks to Rupert Murdoch, and those who have paid him the complement of imitation, all journalism is tabloid journalism.  

As a consequence, the focus of political journalism, like its cousins in sports and entertainment, is almost exclusively on personalities.  And that focus has the twin benefit for conservatives of simultaneously obscuring the unpopularity of their positions on issues, while driving the level of discussion down to the lowest-common-denominator level of understanding.  Put another way, it reduces much of the discussion to the level of rumor, or, at least, slanders that can not be either clearly or easily disproven.  At that point, all that is needed to win is the ability to throw muck on the wall of public opinion, and hope that enough of it sticks long enough that it can't be completely scraped off.

Unfortunately, and unfairly, this is the fate that seems to have embraced Joe Biden, a man once described by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina as being as good a man as can be found in politics.  Well, that was then, and now is a very different story.  Whether the subject is mental competency, respect for women, or even a willingness to compromise, Biden has been so badly slandered by Republicans and their media allies that he is in the unhappy position of being more unpopular than the policies he has been advocating.  And, speaking of Graham and his latter-day fealty to Donald Trump, this does not even touch the inanity that Biden was not fairly elected to the presidency.  

Moreover, in the run-up to the midterms, it allows the Republicans, whose 2020 political platform went no further than pledging complete and blind loyalty to Trump, to take the position that they will attempt to regain control of Congress with no policy or programmatic agenda whatsoever.  Don't take my word for it; take the word of Mitch McCONnell, who said so publicly in so many words without apology.  The reason for this brazenness seems pretty obvious:  why deal with what is complicated when you have a talent for going right for your opponent's gut?

Especially when you don't have to do the dirty work yourself, because you have millions of anonymous foot soldiers all across the nation more than ready, eager, and willing to do it for you, either by way of the Internet or by way of hand-to-hand combat.  January 6 of last year can no longer be considered an outlier in American behavior, but rather a template that shows how overthrowing constitutional government can be done:  stage a mix of protests and violence, make the mix look ambiguous enough on video that you can more easily lie about it, and then argue that everything was the other side's fault and no one should believe their lying eyes.  Violence, for the right, is the new normal, and what has essentially been a cold civil war for decades is rapidly turning into a hot one.

And I can tell you, from twelve regrettable years of personal experience, that fundamentalist Christianity, which puts a premium on faith over reason, has played a central and indispensable role in making all of this happen.  If you've read enough of my posts, you may be rolling your eyes, because I talk about this so much.  Frankly, I could talk about it on a weekly basis (which I have not done), and still not talk about it too much.  This goes well beyond the scope of my personal experience, the details of which I'm saving for my memoirs, if I ever retire and write them.  Consider, for example, the case of the Ohio pastor who bragged about hunting people, and may very well have done just that; he has been charged with shooting an individual to death.

And no one needs to rely on me for an assessment of how evangelicals have degraded American politics.  If you have not already done so, do yourself a favor and listen to the words of Frank Schaeffer, the son of one of the 20th century's leading evangelical philosophers, who grew out of the cramped world view of the faith as I did, but who can give you an insider's perspective on its perniciousness.

A perniciousness, I would add, that is fueled by its contribution to the vaccine denialism that has thwarted the best effort of Biden's Administration to bring the COVID-19 pandemic to an end, or at least do something like bring it under control.  I never thought I would live to see a day where a deadly virus is effectively displaying a partisan bias, but there can be no doubt that the pandemic is infecting more people and claiming more lives in red states than blue ones.  Why?  Again, drawing from my own experience, evangelical beliefs are a factor here.  Death can look like a very attractive alternative when life on Earth feels miserable and Heaven feels guaranteed.  Never mind the prospect of spreading a deadly disease by refusing to take any precautions against it.  That would require a vision of God's work that reaches beyond one person or family's circumstances.  You would be surprised how rare that can be in evangelical circles.

And so Republicans do nothing to encourage their followers among the faithful to take precautions.  Why, that would make them look oh-so-secular, like those science-loving liberals evangelicals love to castigate.  Better to bet on the prospect that there will be enough surviving voters in November to make up for the losses among their ranks to the virus.  If Democrats are sufficiently discouraged in advance, especially by media coverage that downplays Democratic accomplishments, it's a bet that might very well pay off; Democratic turnout in midterm years, except when Republicans are in power, tends to fall off relative to its Republican counterpart.

To sum up, a combination of profit-driven corporate media, suicidal evangelicals and other Trump cultists, and Republican politicians who quietly allow these forces to enable their re-election and hold onto the only thing they stand for--power.  All at the expense of America, the Constitution, and the values that the nation and its government were created to uphold and advance.

What, if anything, can and should be done?

For starters, the rest of us, from Biden on down to bloggers (me included) need to do what we can to factually change the narrative.  Talk, for example, about how Biden, with the thinnest possible support in Congress, passed two landmark bills in his first year in office:  one to stem and reverse the tide of the pandemic, the other to begin rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure with a focus on attacking climate change, promoting clean energy, and increase public access to broadband.  And it's not like the economy hasn't noticed all of this.  Even an uber-capitalist like Michael Bloomberg has taken notice and called public attention to what Biden has done.  You recall the GOP-promoted narrative that Biden was going to destroy Christmas?  Didn't happen.

And the Republican critique of Biden's handling of the pandemic?  That's meant to deflect attention from their own spread of misinformation about COVID-19 and how to fight it.  And gas prices?  Well, Biden's powers over gas prices is, to put it mildly, limited at best.  Gas prices are the consequence of forces not merely outside of our control, but outside of our borders.  That reality is what led in the first place to the search for alternative sources of energy.  It's not like gas prices under Trump were any picnic.  The GOP and their allies hope you don't remember that.

The gas price attack, of course, is part of the larger critique about inflation in the past twelve months.  This is less about a legitimate concern on conservatives' part about average households, and more about finding a proxy by which to attack their real concern:  an increase in public spending that might remind those households that government isn't always the problem.  Yes, public spending has increased, as it always does in a crisis.  But allowing conservatives to lay the inflation blame at the feet of that spending would be yet another instance of conservatives obscuring the details for self-serving goals.

In our current crisis, inflation is almost entirely fueled by a series of pandemic related symptoms:  supply-chain problems caused in part by just-in-time inventory methods, a refusal of workers (particularly in service industries) to return to substandard working conditions, a goods-versus-services imbalance attributable to homebound families increasing their Internet shopping, and, most perniciously of all, corporations trying to recoup their 2020 losses at a faster rate than consumers can afford.  Margaret Thatcher famously said that socialism's weakness was running out of other people's money.  As it turns out, capitalism in the 21st century suffers from the same weakness.  This is why Wall Street should be a bit leery of bragging about its elastic power to raise prices.

Admittedly, it's a phenomenon that doesn't lend itself to a bumper-sticker sized solution.  But, despite that fact, Republicans are trying to make inflation the campaign hobby-horse that they can ride back to the seat of power.  There's just one problem.  What would they do about inflation?

Nothing.  Nothing, that is, but continue talking about it.  They don't have a plan for dealing with it.  They only have plans for exploiting it.  And that's something that can be reduced to bumper stickers, sound bites, blog posts, social media posts, and everything else we can do to point out, once again that Republicans don't care about anything except power.

So, step one:  speak out more.  This is especially important for the President.  By definition, he's the leader of this parade.  And yet, for a very long time, he hasn't been acting like it.  Even his supporters have taken notice of this, and spoken up about it.  That probably goes a long way toward explaining his marathon press conference this past week.  And, while it was good to see him going to the public and making his case, Biden being Biden, it was rhetorically a mixed bag. Not only did he suggest that a small "incursion" by Russia might somehow be acceptable, but he stated that he had no reason to think that Republicans wouldn't negotiate in good faith with him for the sake of the nation. No reason?  Here's one gargantuan one:  he was Barack Obama's Vice President for eight years, and had a bird's-eye view of how badly Obama was treated by many of the same Republicans that are now pushing him around.

Biden, as even Graham was once forced to admit, is a good man. Overall, he's probably done the best that anyone could have done with the biggest mess any President has ever inherited, and limited congressional leverage for dealing with it.  But, as those of us who have observed him for a long time know, his mouth can make him his own worst enemy.  Still, he has the proverbial bully pulpit, and he should speak out, regularly and forcefully.

But the rest of us need to do everything we can to help him.

We can no longer take it for granted that we are the world's leading democracy.  We can, in fact, no longer take it for granted that we are even a democracy.  And, as a nation, regardless of what side of the partisan divide we fall on, we are deeply depressed and fearful for the future.  Not without reason, either.  After all, the Trump syndicate is still out there, waiting for an opportunity to regain power, provided it can remain one step ahead of the law, and continue to intimidate the Republicans whose support it needs to do so.

We may yet get some help even from the media.  There are some signs that even corporate media is beginning to understand that bothsiderism isn't up to the task of taking on the existential crisis we're facing.  You can see some examples here, here, and here.  Perhaps this is the best example:  the suggestion that the press can be a partisan for democracy.  This seems entirely appropriate; after all, the press is essentially empowered by the First Amendment to do exactly that.

But it's still on our shoulders.  Yours, mine, and everyone's.  What are the next steps?

We're in uncharted territory, so making a definitive outline is not really possible at this point,  The outline may have to evolve over time.  But mainly, we have to start by refusing to play by GOP rules.  We have to stop reacting, and start pushing back.  That doesn't mean resorting to violence.  But it does mean asserting ourselves without being afraid of the type of responses we attract.  Let them worry about our responses for a change.

And, speaking of media, one place where we can all start is Fox News.  As any sane person knows, Fox is not really a "news" network; it's infotainment for true believers on the far right.  So why is the fee for Fox bundled into the basic price charged for cable, as is the case with other news networks.  This effectively amounts to liberals and progressives being charged a "Fox tax" for a network they would never watch.  Perhaps we should all petition our cable companies to have this tax revoked.  I sure don't want to help subsidize the cost of Rupert Murdoch's broadcast bilge.

We can not only stand up to the cable companies, but to the yahoos they showcase.  When they try to make fun of Biden with that "Let's Go Brandon" nonsense, let's face it and laugh it off.  Even Biden has learned how to do that.  So effectively, in fact, that the unforgivably racist Trump stooge Stephen Miller complained about it. 

We can and must openly mock the hypocrisy on the right, which manifests itself in so many ways.  Take immigration.  It's offensive and anti-freedom to try locking down the country for COVID, but not for immigrants, who are often refugees from countries being destroyed by climate change.  Ironic, since COVID and climate change are both the products of multinational corporations that have done so much to tear the planet apart while destroying the blue-collar American economy that Trump voters mourn.  Prioritizing profits while being beyond the reach of any one country, they are the culprits behind the abuse of science, who try to reap its benefits without respecting the subsequent social, physical, economic, and moral cost.

And, at the same time, we must be hard on ourselves, and on the politicians who claim our support.  We need those politicians to take and fight for tough stands on fundamental issues, like human rights.  We need to push back on Biden's withdrawal from negotiations to compensate the victims of Trump's inhumane immigration policies.  We need to stop acting afraid of core values.  That's how you address the question "What do Democrats stand for?"

We may not yet have the media our our side.  But we have ourselves.  We need to hang onto that like our democracy, and even our lives, depend on it.  In the short run, it may be what we need to do to keep the Democrats in change.  The party is far from perfect.  But the days of sitting elections out and waiting for it to get better are over.  We don't have the luxury of that kind of time.

We'd better start acting like it.  To paraphrase Obama, we need to be the change we are looking for.