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Where Are the Republicans? _______________________________________________________________

3/23/2018

“When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America … America will triumph over you.”

This was John Brennan, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, speaking to Trump in response to the firing of Andrew McCabe, a scant 26 hours before McCabe reached his 50th birthday, thus becoming eligible to draw his full pension upon retiring from the FBI. I don’t know whether McCabe was, as Trump had charged, guilty of misconduct, but regardless, by all accounts he had performed admirably for 22 years, and to fire him at such a time displays a level of gratuitous cruelty and mean-spiritedness worthy of the most despicable back-alley bully.

That, after all, is what we now have in the White House: an aging version of a schoolyard thug. How else to explain the name-calling, insults, lies, and childish boasting he pours out daily to contaminate the world we all inhabit? The childish chaos and constant churn of personnel? The fringe figures he puts in crucial positions? John Bolton? Really? The hawk who suggested not long ago that we should attack North Korea before they attack us?

But here’s the larger question: Where are the Republicans? And when will they grow up, confront their own complicity in the creation of a situation which now endangers us all, and take responsibility?

Trump won’t be the only one relegated to the “dustbin of history.” The Republican party will be there with him, I believe.

Republicans, you whose priority is not the good of the nation but the greedy glee of your donors, whose major goal is to keep yourselves in office ... you will be remembered as the party of hard-hearted, self-absorbed sycophants lacking even a semblance of moral clarity. You've clearly conveyed this message: low-income, sick, needy voters be damned; we're here to take care of the guys that fill the campaign coffers.

Trump is the worst kind of dangerous because he’s the worst kind of ignorant. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. And I’m beginning to wonder, Republicans, whether the same is true of you.

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Government By Gut Check ________________________________________________________________

3/16/2018

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The Trump administration is a clown car. Not just any old clown car, mind you, not simply one that disgorges more people than it appears able to accommodate. No. It’s a jalopy convertible with no GPS, a disconnected steering wheel, unreliable breaks, four bald tires, and a horn like an air raid siren. Driven by the Clown in Chief, this junker lightens its load by careening around hairpin curves and sending hapless occupants flying.

Inexplicably, others soon tumble in to fill the empty seats.

The constant churn of personnel as Trump cycles through the central-casting types he likes to appoint to once-prestigious positions has turned the White House into a house-of-mirrors where you might show up tall and slim and looking like a million dollars, only to crawl out a few weeks later looking like the left-over merchandise from a fire sale.

Most often, it’s not your qualifications that get you there; sometimes it’s your “look.” Or something else like … Trump feels comfortable with you … or he saw you on TV … or you’re related to someone he knows ... or, better yet, related to him.

Qualifications are the least of it. Recently, Trump appointed Larry Kudlow to head the National Economic Council. Kudlow has been described by Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank as “the man who has arguably been more publicly and consistently wrong about the economy than any person alive.” If you had followed Kudlow’s advice before the crash of 2008, says Milbank, “you would have been ruined.”

It seems we’re in for a long lunacy. One of the chief supporters of the tariff plan is Peter Navarro, director of the White House National Trade Council. Here’s what he said to another Post reporter:

“‘This is the president’s vision … My function, really, as an economist is to try to provide the underlying analytics that confirm his intuition. And his intuition is always right in these matters.’” (Oh, my!!!)

The Post continues, “This, in a nutshell, is the operating philosophy of the Trump administration. What Trump says is correct and it is incumbent on those around him—even those engaged in theoretically objective analysis like economists—to reshape reality to conform. Sometimes that means making false statements. On other occasions it means making it impossible to establish what’s true and what isn’t.”

Thus, the impulsiveness of our ignorant, self-inflating “leader” has produced a government that not only makes us a laughing stock, but unsettles us, our allies and our opponents and exposes us to all manner of risks. Those tariffs meant to penalize exporting countries? The people who will really be penalized are the American consumers facing higher prices. And the idea that tariffs on imports would produce employment growth in steel and aluminum here? Not likely, the experts say.

It’s government by gut-check. Hold on to your hats.

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Guns, Anyone? ________________________________________________________________

3/11/2018

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I write on an iMac, a MacBook, an iPad or an iPhone. In other words, I'm all Apple all the time--and all because in the mid-eighties Apple offered sweet deals for educators on their newly launched line of computers for the computer illiterate. Suddenly hordes of liberal arts types, who thought we'd never go near anything as mysterious and intimidating as a computer, were carpooling to the Ed Center to purchase our very own high-tech gadgets. As they say, the rest is history. I can't tell you, because I've lost count, how many subsequent iterations of these devices I've purchased.

The point is ... Apple made a smart move. Not only did they get the jump on the educator market, but those educators (as Apple well knew) had a captive sphere of influence with the students in their classrooms, and Apple got a good head start on that market as well.

Now, we learn that the National Rifle Association is pushing its agenda by providing grants to high schools to promote "shooting sports," thus apparently stoking the supply of future customers for the gun manufacturers the NRA represents. This is nothing new. Started in 1992, the program is funded by local Friends of NRA chapters. Half the proceeds go to local grants and the other half, to the national organization.

From 2010 through 2016, about 500 schools received more than $7.3 million under the program. Broward County, Florida, the home of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where the latest school massacre occurred, has announced that it will no longer accept NRA money. The alleged shooter had been on a school rifle team that received NRA funding.

Other schools are poised to follow suit. Be proactive. Does your local school district still accept NRA money? Are you okay with that?

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Homeland Security, Human Grief _______________________________________________________________

3/5/2018

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We have ample evidence that Donald Trump has about as much empathy as a rotten tomato, but now it seems his brand of brutality is trickling down and spreading through his cabinet and the departments those cabinet members run. A particularly egregious example is the separation of children from their parents after they cross into the U.S. from Mexico and into the grasp of Homeland Security.

I’ve never liked that name, Homeland Security, with its haunting echo of “the Fatherland” the Nazi term for their home country during World War II. Now it seems the name has morphed into more than an echo.

In times past, standard practice had been to house women and children together in one facility and men in another. Now, however, children are being taken from their mothers (or from their fathers, if they arrive with only their male parent) and housed apart from the adult who loves them, sometimes in facilities hundreds of miles distant. The administration’s rationale is this: If potential immigrants know this will be their family’s fate, the practice will discourage them from coming.

Fleeing violence and death threats at home, immigrants now face the additional trauma of total separation upon arriving here. The Washington Post describes the case of a Congolese mother and her 7-year-old daughter:

“A U.S. asylum officer interviewed Ms. L, as the mother is called in a lawsuit filed on her behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union, determined that she had a credible fear of harm if she were returned to Congo and stood a decent chance of ultimately being granted asylum. Despite that preliminary finding, officials decided that the right thing to do was to wrench S.S. [her daughter] from her mother, whereupon the mother ‘could hear her daughter in the next room frantically screaming that she wanted to remain with her mother,’ the lawsuit states.” (See the complete article here.)

The two of them could have been housed together in a family detention center, but instead the daughter has been placed in a facility in Chicago while her mother remains in a San Diego detention center.

This is heartlessness unleashed. And in today’s Trumpian universe, one wonders …Would this have happened if S.S. had been a blond, blue-eyed Norwegian child?

We need a word that expresses crushing sadness combine with flaming rage. That’s what I felt as I read about S.S. and her mother and thought of my own (yes, blond, blue-eyed) 7-year-old granddaughter. I know how devastated she would be. Little S.S. felt the same. No child—and no parent—deserves to be treated this way. What kind of country have we become?

Note: For an account of the experiences of fathers who have had children taken from them, click here.

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Where Are the Republicans? _______________________________________________________________

Government By Gut Check ________________________________________________________________

Guns, Anyone? ________________________________________________________________

Homeland Security, Human Grief _______________________________________________________________

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