Not many options left to save the Party of Lincoln

 

“If fascism comes [to America] … it will probably be ‘wrapped up in the American flag and heralded as a plea for liberty and preservation of the constitution’.”  - James Waterman Wise, Jr

Following November’s presidential election, GOP voters seemed to send a mixed message.  While eager to hang on to their congressional candidates - many who supported Trumpism -  they seem to be ready to show Trump himself the exit door.  Were they hoping for a return to something that would come close to reflecting traditional conservative values and allegiance to the Constitution?

If that is indeed what many GOP voters signaled for, their Party leaders failed to get the message. The conspiracy absurdities that Trump continues to promote, without any credible facts or data to support them, now reveal a political party that has detached itself from reality.  More seriously is the appearance it gives to aligning themselves with a wannabe dictator.

Failing to gain either the popular or electoral majority, Trump sycophants fell in line with him to use this country’s legal system to overturn the legitimate election that created a Biden/Harris victory.  And to the horror of many Texans along with Texas evangelical, Beth Moore, it seems that this cuckoo choo-choo is being driven by some of our own citizens.  

With Crayolas gripped angrily in his child-like fist, Texas AG Ken Paxton - who’s currently under federal indictment for securities fraud - scrawled out an absurd, unprecedented lawsuit to support the lunacy of those who signed on to this nonsense.  

Putting their name to this coup attempt was our own Michael Burgess and eleven other Texas Republican congressmen.  Senator Ted Cruz, whose wife and father were insulted in 2016 by Donald Trump, gleefully agreed to his request to represent this joke in the nation’s Supreme Court.  

To their credit, the high court firmly rebuked the laughable lawsuit, sending these infantile whiners back to face (hopefully) most of their outraged constituents.  Adding to the crazy was Texas’ GOP Party Chairman Adam West who called for acts of secession from the states whose AGs signed on to Paxton’s document.

So what’s a traditional Republican faced with as many of their members capitulate to the incompetent and power-crazed whims of a narcissistic buffoon?  

Where moderate Republicans are vying with extremists elements in their Party, progressive Independents like me could cross over in primaries to vote for such GOP moderates.  This doesn’t bind us to that candidate in the general election.  But the loss to a sensible adult Republican in the vein of a John McCain, Mitt Romney or even Susan Collins would be preferable over those Louie Gohmert types we’re getting stuck with.

Another option for that 20-30% of GOP voters who still seem to live in the real world could be to simply start voting for the Democratic candidate in traditional Republican strongholds where Trump devotees have won the GOP nomination.  Such sacrifices would hurt in the short run but should eventually reawaken the saner aspects to Lincoln’s Party - the man who championed the cause of preserving the Union. Not to do so it seems would only further drive the once mighty GOP down that rabbit hole that will forever reflect a hopeless, pathetic shadow of its former self.

A century ago Democrats, stained for decades by the actions of many in their party for their support of slavery’s brutal suppression followed by Jim Crow racism began to turn things around from this negative image.  They would lead the way in forging legislation that created the kind of equality for all men and women that many founders had originally idealized.

Is there sufficient moral clarity within the GOP to do the same today by pulling itself away from their voter suppression tactics and the autocratic abyss that Trump has led them into?

Some still riding the Trump Crazy Train

“I believe we never become our entire and honest selves until we are dead - and not then until we have been dead for years and years.  People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier” - Mark Twain

Twain’s dark humor here seems to address how cowards dwell in their own skin as they  live among those who share their unfounded fears in order to fit in.  A sort of survival instinct if you will.  The fact that humans are never fully honest is a no brainer.  It speaks to that part of us where courage is too often missing at times when it’s needed most.  

Cowardice on a grand scale can impact entire societies, threatening the stability a people need to grow and lift us past those fears that hold us back from attaining “a more perfect union”.
Though some of Trump’s supporters have begrudgingly accepted a Biden presidency, the passenger list aboard the Cuckoo Choo-choo still remains considerable.  That list consists of Rudy “Drip Dry” Giuliani, Sidney “blow up Georgia” Powell, Lindsey “two-faced” Graham, Texas’ AG Ken Paxton and a host of FOX pundits including Sean “conspiracy king” Hannity, Lou “Unhinged” Dobbs and Tucker “elitist hound” Carlson.  

Then of course there are the tens of thousands of QAnon freaks who allege “that a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles is running a global child sex-trafficking ring and plotting against” the Donald, who they divine is fighting the cabal.

Though these people can be viewed as delusional they are not necessarily cowards.  The true cowards are those who know better and yet remain silent in light of these
absurdities.  Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and most of his Republican majority lead this assault on sanity including our own John Cornyn and Ted Cruz.  They hide behind the crowds claiming Biden’s victory was illegitimate and in essence demur to the unfounded notion virulently expressed by one misguided Trump die-hard that it was the man-child who won the election by a landslide

The fraud that Trump and his lick-spittle legal team claim about debunked voter fraud conspiracies threatens our electoral process, now and in future elections, to the delight of our global adversaries, especially China and Russia.  With their operative in the White House they have to exercise little influence of their own to achieve the chaos they so desperately desire for our democratic republic.

This attack on our constitutional staples has been used previously by such brutal dictators as Spain’s Franco, Italy’s Mussolini and Germany’s Adolph Hitler who clawed power away from established democratic institutions through mob violence.  With their weakened economies and an appeal to nationalism these despots felt free to authorize monstrous behavior that resulted in millions of innocent men, women and children perishing.

Along the same lines, as this lame duck president huddles in his White House bunker, clamoring for his followers to over throw the election, his mismanagement of the pandemic crisis will contribute to as many as 400,000 plus deaths sometime this January, aided and abetted by the cowardice of GOP elected officials who stand idly by as he behaves in this unforgivable fashion.

Lincoln’s divided nation pitted pro-slavey advocates and abolitionists against each other. Today it’s those who support Trump’s autocratic maneuvers versus those of us who wish to sustain our constitutional institutions and norms.   Though the voter mail fraud conspiracy will likely become just another silly contrivance by those people who also lost touch with reality in their day, it will remain a source of division among us for years.

Edmund Burke warned civilization that “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

It’s time for courage, not fear, to grip the reins of leadership in this country and lead us out of this political morass.  To those unwilling or unable to confront the ignoble, petulant loser that Trump has become I say, “grow a pair” and help move this nation forward lest what integrity you claim for yourself is massively overshadowed by your total absence of nerve.

Healing our national wounds will not be easy

 “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”   - Abraham Lincoln

In his second inaugural address, Lincoln attempted to assuage the heated emotions of a nation that had just been ripped apart by a Civil War, fought mainly over ending our national shame with slavery.  Inspiring as it was he still forfeited his life a little over a month later at the hands of a bitter opponent.  Since then, the desires for the South to rise again have echoed among white supremacists groups, emboldened early on with the release of the 1915 racist silent film, “Birth of a Nation”

The founders’ attempt at creating a united nation never really materialized fully following the ratification of our Constitution.  Race was and has been the unsettling issue that keeps us divided.  It was felt that following Obama’s election to the presidency that it would no longer be a contentious problem.  But systemic racism is perhaps as strong now as it has ever been over the last century and a half.  And there is little doubt that many of those Trump supporters chanting “make America great again” were simply anxious to remove a president they saw as an unnatural American of African-Muslim dissent.

I was recently reminded that the virtue of grace is given, not earned.  It was this attempt at promoting grace however that seemed to fall short for Lincoln.  Nonetheless, I believe grace should always be the guiding light be which we confront our adversaries.  This however doesn’t entail ignoring those people with deep-seated hates and who are bent on violence.  The specter of extremist behavior threatens stability in any society and opens the door to repressive authoritarianism.

In his recent article “A Large Portion of the Electorate Chose the Sociopath” conservative author and former Republican Tom Nichols cogently articulates what most of us have become aware of over the last four years.

“America is now a different country. Nearly half of the voters have seen Trump in all of his splendor—his infantile tirades, his disastrous and lethal policies, his contempt for democracy in all its forms—and they decided that they wanted more of it. His voters can no longer hide behind excuses about the corruption of Hillary Clinton or their willingness to take a chance on an unproven political novice. They cannot feign ignorance about how Trump would rule. They know, and they have embraced him.”

It’s not clear exactly how Trump will behave between now and January 20th when Joe Biden takes over that office but with Trump’s incompetence in handling the pandemic he claimed would disappear after the election, we’ll see it become more widespread and more detrimental to our economy.

Not wanting to be seen as a loser either, Trump will likely go out kicking and screaming much like the spoiled child being removed from the store by his parents because he didn’t get the toy he wanted.

In an interview conducted in 2014 by the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Michael D’Antonio, Trump was asked to contemplate the meaning of his life. “I don’t like to analyze myself”, he said “because I might not like what I see.”   

In her tell all book about her uncle, Mary L Trump reveals how this loser demon came to possess Donald at an early age by his father Fred’s insistence that they inherit his killer instincts and a take-no-prisoners attitude.  It was this fear of failing in the eyes of his father that would have a life long impact and lead him to lash out later at John McCain as a loser along with the American WWI dead buried at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris, when he visited France in 2018

Biden will restore sanity and maturity to the oval office but Trumpism is something that will persist for decades and could become more competent.  Mutating this destructive DNA in ways that resemble civil behavior will require a resolve by all of us who plucked democracy from the ashes on November 3rd.  Hopefully through acts of grace but accompanied by a “firmness in the right as God gives us to see right”, the better angels of our nature should prevail.

American aristocrats are stealing your voting privileges

 

"The right of suffrage is certainly one of the fundamental articles of republican Government, and ought not to be left to be regulated by the Legislature. “ - James Madison

The quote above is perhaps more relevant today than when Madison wrote it back in August of 1787 as he and other commonwealth officials met in Philadelphia to form our Constitution.  The colonies had recently won their independence from the British monarchy and wanted to inscribe for posterity the rights of individuals to choose their own representatives in the newly formed republic.

There was the lingering fear back then that aristocratic powers would unduly influence our elected officials to advantage them, often to the detriment of those less powerful people who even then were negated from voting simply because they didn’t own property, were not males and were essentially not descendants of white European immigrants - conditions that wouldn’t change for nearly 150 years all totaled.

It became apparent to Thomas Jefferson as early as 1816 that the “aristocracy of our monied corporations” was already challenging our government to a trial of strength, “and [bidding] defiance to the laws of our country.”  To this day this threat is more prevalent than ever as lobbyists from various corporate interests are appointed by corporate-friendly administrations to head up those agencies that are tasked to oversee and prevent excesses that hurt all Americans, especially the poorest and least powerful amongst us.  The “swamp” that Donald Trump promised to drain is alive and thriving.

In it’s most dangerous form this monied interests has won over in almost its entirety, the Republican Party, aided in large part by a predominant news source that has violated the ethics of a free and objective press.  This arrangement now presents the gravest threat to one of the last vestiges of our representative form of government - the right of free citizens to vote.

In his Rolling Stone article, “How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich”, Tim Dickinson laid out back in 2011 how “the modern GOP has undergone a radical transformation, reorganizing itself around a grotesque proposition: that the wealthy should grow wealthier still, whatever the consequences for the rest of us.” 

It’s not that Democrats haven’t been guilty of pandering to Wall Street but they haven’t even come close to the speed and scope that the modern GOP has.  With the aid of GOP legislators, judicial appointments deliberately skirted basic rules of fairness and laws have been written to circumvent the oversight of state and federal agencies, leaving most low and middle income voters in harms way of polluting industries, paying higher tax rates than the wealthiest amongst us, and rigging elections to favor these corporate-friendly Republicans.

And if the planned chaos during the Georgia Democratic primaries earlier this year is a preview of how the Republican Party intends to steal the 2020 presidential election for Donald Trump, we can anticipate even greater social disruptions from the likes of the QAnon crowd and many white supremacist groups, opening the door for Trump to introduce “presidential emergency action documents,” or PEADs, “which are orders that authorize a broad range of mortal assaults on our civil liberties.”  An act that could find the Executive branch at odds with some military leaders.

Regardless of the outcome on November 3rd, it behooves every American to push for reinstatement of the checks and balances the framers intended for our democratic republic to survive.  If not, the autocratic maneuvers by the Trump administration and the unwilling GOP congressional leadership to stand up to this power play could well put us in line to join the ranks of Russia, China, Turkey, North Korea and Saudi Arabia.

Misplaced faith

 

 

 “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they’ve been fooled” - Mark Twain


As someone who once considered himself a born-again Christian, who for years through my church ministered to Denton County jail inmates and managed a charitable effort to provide toys to financially disadvantaged families, I have yet been unable to understand Donald Trump’s appeal to evangelical Christians.

I’m sure it had a lot to do with Jerry Falwell Jr.’s 2015 surprise endorsement of Trump over what most thought would go to Ted Cruz.  The Liberty University president’s influence over American evangelicals carries a lot of weight among orthodox Christians.

But we have recently learned what possibly led to Falwell’s endorsement then and his further encouragement in 2019 to give Trump an extra two years “as pay back for time stolen” by the Mueller investigation.

Back in May, 2019 news broke about “racy ‘personal’ photographs” of Falwell, his wife and a Florida pool boy - “the sort that would typically be kept ‘between husband and wife’,” according to Trump fixer Michael Cohen, who says he aided in helping those photos to disappear.  That original story was released in early May, 2019 giving little details as to the nature of what those “racy” photos revealed.

Thankfully we have now learned that “a business partner of Jerry Falwell Jr has come forward to say he had a years-long sexual relationship involving Falwell’s wife and the evangelical leader.

Giancarlo Granda says he was 20 when he met Jerry and Becki Falwell while working as a pool attendant at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach hotel in March 2012. Starting that month and continuing into 2018, Granda told Reuters that the relationship involved him having sex with Becki Falwell while Jerry Falwell looked on.”

What consenting adults do behind closed doors is their own business.  It’s the hypocrisy of Falwell’s that needs being called out.  Liberty University’s own code of ethics states: “Sexual relations outside of a biblically-ordained marriage between a natural-born man and a natural-born woman are not permissible at Liberty University”

But even more seriously is how credible then and now is Falwell’s endorsement of Trump who he’s indebted to for aiding in concealing the evangelical leader’s shame?  Why would any Christian today still be willing to throw their support behind someone whose own sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, says he has “no principles.  None.”

Trump has cheated on all three of his wives, lied about his wealth, cheated people out of their money, exploited Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, has an alarming affinity for hateful white supremacists, and bald-face lied to his campaign crowds about how Democrats will bring about the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse

I am simply confounded when I see dear friends of mine who are professed Christian evangelicals plant Trump/Pence signs in their yard.  I have to wonder, what part of Trump’s nature still entices them to align themselves with a person who has no moral compass.  Surly the fact alone that he’s willing to appoint anti-abortion judges to the bench cannot be the sole reason to keep someone in office who lies prolifically and has clearly failed to serve his oath of office.

The gospels warn Christians about those who would be “ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding”.  El presidente has been deluging his Twitter followers and Republican convention audiences with baseless claims about mail-in ballot fraud and ludicrous conspiracies, especially from the QAnon crowd.

If evangelicals don’t start shaking that tree now to find out how many nuts fall, they will have allowed themselves to become duped - again - into a campaign that offers little relief from what ails our nation.  It’s the law of propaganda used by autocrats that affirms if you “repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth”.  That in a nut shell is Trump’s 2020 campaign strategy.

Before voting this year I would implore my evangelical friends to consider Mark Galli’s words in his farewell op-ed as Christianity Today’s outgoing editor-in-chief, who encouraged evangelicals to, “Remember who you are and whom you serve. Consider how your justification of Mr. Trump influences your witness to your Lord and Savior.”

One man-child’s inhumanity to mankind

When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may “ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.” ― Alexander Hamilton


For all the skeptics that refuse to wear face masks and still believed the COVID-19 virus is no worse than annual death rates from other sources, the data is beginning to debunk that notion.

New research “suggest the new coronavirus is deadlier than the seasonal flu, though not as lethal as Ebola and other infectious diseases that have emerged in recent years. The coronavirus is killing more people than the deadlier diseases, however, in part because it is more infectious.”  -

Current COVID-19 deaths are just over 140,000  with that number expected to be around 180 ,000 by Oct 1st.   with 3 months in the year remaining.   Some 32,000 lives could be saved before then  if more people wore face masks


For the doubters and skeptics who claim that more people die from auto deaths, the latest annual data (2018) shows that to be totally false. And even gun related deaths of all kinds, including suicides, pales in comparison to the mortality rates we are now seeing for the coronavirus pandemic in the States.

The false sources of information or lack of real scientific data that emanates from the White House and Trump News (formerly known as FOX News) have convinced enough people to ignore the CDC warnings that could stop the spread of this deadly virus.  A week doesn’t go by that I find myself in some businesses, especially small convenience stores, where Mr. or Mrs Bubba is mask-less, exhaling the aerosols from their lungs that may or may not include the COVID-19 bug.

Their failure to understand that that aerosol mist they’ve emitted can stay airborne for several hours and that the next poor mask-less fool that walks into it may likely become yet another COVID-19 case.

It's demoralizing to watch how this pandemic has been politicized by those whose primary goal is to preserve a failing campaign of the incompetent blowhard in the Oval office.   And now our children, teachers and medical first responders will be put at even greater risks as the new school year approaches and the Denier-in-Chief demands that we reopen schools.

How people continue to defend a man who has never demonstrated any empathy in this tragic situation leads me to conclude that what moral compass which once guided most political leaders over the last two and half centuries has been replaced by a materialistic, self-serving, power-grabbing model, setting humanity on a course that will have autocrats sacrificing their least powerful and most populous constituents to serve egomaniacal agendas. 

Recovering from this will not happen anytime soon, if at all, depending on what happens November 3rd, especially if previously complacent voters fail to show up at the polls.

Bolton’s book deserves our attention, not our money

If you haven’t already bought former National Security advisor John Bolton’s book that reveals a President caught up in his self-serving actions that jeopardizes our national security - don’t.  Save your money for necessities or at least to help fund Biden’s campaign to oust what’s likely the most incompetent person to head the Executive branch of our government.

Though the details Bolton shares show a president who calculates his every action on enhancing his own re-election outcome or improving his personal wealth, it comes as no surprise to most of us who have watched this Trump train wreck for the last three and half years.  Not because we have some special insight or personal intelligence but simply from viewing and listening to the president’s own distortion of reality via news sources and his own Twitter account.

Bolton doesn’t deserve any financial reward from holding back this pertinent information that could have served the Democrat’s impeachment hearings earlier this year.  He made everyone aware then that he had damning evidence that would have made people of conscience demand Trump’s ouster.  But as we are all aware, such conscience doesn’t exist within the souls Congressional Republicans. 

Though Bolton’s testimony during those hearings might have persuaded two or three more Senate Republicans to do the right thing, we’ll never know because Bolton chose to hold back for a more lucrative outcome with his book’s expose’.

Bolton is part of the Republican microcosm that puts monetary interests above social responsibility and dare I say, patriotism.  He is instead a profiteer of the worst kind because what he hopes to benefit from is something that comes at a cost to the American public and our democratic principles.  He may be a wacko as Trump has referred to him but that makes him dangerous, not necessarily a liar. 

Many of the Trump’s chickens like Bolton have started to come home to roost but none can be considered heroes or patriots for their procrastination.  Their willingness to save their own positions of power and economic opportunities instead of acting in a more timly manner in serving the Constitution portrays them as weak and even cowardly. 

 It the very essence of selfishness when such people choose to withhold that which can benefit society before they attempt to profit from it.

Outside of Mitt Romney's stance with Democrtas to remove Trump, the one glowing exception to this has thus far been Mary Elizabeth Taylor, the “senior State Department official who has served in the Trump administration since its first day [who resigned] over President Donald Trump's recent handling of racial tensions across the county - saying that the president's actions "cut sharply against my core values and convictions." 

It’s conceivable that no number of people exposing Trump’s threat to democracy would have prevented his election or resulted in his dismissal from office following the impeachment trial  Many did in 2016, including some of his current avid supporters like Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio.  So did former Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and Trump's former Russia expert, Fiona Hill, during the impeachment hearings

But the deniers and misinformed who make up Trump’s base turned a deaf ear then and will do so this November.  Trump won in 2016, not because he had a plurality of voters, but because  this nation still abides by the archaic electoral college system and because many who voted in 2012 for Obama simply didn’t show up at the polls in 2016.

It is the failure of procrastinators like General James Mattis and profiteers like Bolton along with those who ignore their civic duty to vote that helps put scoundrels in office and sustains them with their silence and inaction. 

We can only hope that the current outrage towards the systemic racism in this country and our awareness of this administration’s poor handling of the coronavirus pandemic will drive voters to the polls this November and effect the change in leadership that has been propped up by the Boltons and Trump sycophants over the last few years.