Category: Politics

PRESIDENTIAL RELATIVITY: HOW 45 TURNED 41 INTO ONE OF THE BEST

Who would have thought we’d be waxing nostalgic over the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush? He was a one-term wonder, a Ronald Regan afterthought who eschewed the “vision thing” and really hated broccoli.  Yet, the nation mourns the passing of 41 this week out of a deep longing for those bygone days when our presidents rarely embarrassed us, no matter how mediocre or inept they may have been.

Bush had been destined to join such non-luminaries as Chester Arthur, Martin Van Buren and Millard Fillmore in the dustbin of presidential obscurity.  Then along came Donald Trump who, in a karmic twist of fate, managed to elevate Bush the Elder to near-Mount Rushmore status.  And so it is that the late president, viewed through the funhouse mirrors of Trump World, casts an idyllic image of the anti-Donald: honest, humble, caring and knowledgeable.  Those are all leadership attributes we once took for granted in our presidents, until they vanished in the 2016 election.

According to news reports, the Bush family secured a creative détente with the Trump White House well in advance of the 94-year-old former president’s death.  Trump would be invited to the funeral and the family would insist eulogists refrain from criticizing the current president.  It seems the Donald was mighty distressed over the ridicule heaped upon him at John McCain’s funeral and wanted to avoid a sequel in the Bush sendoff.  So touched by this gesture from a family he has shown nothing but contempt for, Trump, in a rare moment of lucidity, managed to utter kind words on Bush’s passing. Here’s part of what he said: “President Bush always found a way to set the bar higher.”

That kinder and gentler remark, however, got it wrong. The reality of this moment is that Trump sets the presidential bar so low that George H.W. Bush – along with nearly any Tom, Dick or Mary off the street – rises to the level of revered leaders. Virtually every word used to describe Bush since his death represents a basic human ingredient sorely missing in our current president.  Barack Obama called Bush “a humble servant”.  Bill Clinton said he was “honorable, gracious and decent”.  Jimmy Carter spoke of his “grace, civility and social conscience”. House Speaker Paul Ryan referred to his “decency and integrity”. 

Foreign Policy magazine captured the late president with these words: “modesty, integrity, decency, patience, prudence and intelligence”. It then opined: “When he left office in 1993, his qualities reflected well upon him. Today, they are incandescent.” The Washington Post’s obituary observed: “Although Mr. Bush served as president nearly three decades ago, his values and ethics seem centuries removed from today’s acrid political culture.”  

So there sat 45 at the Bush funeral on Wednesday. Trump was in the first pew of the Washington National Cathedral as the nation paid its last respects to 41. He had, for the first time as president, taken his ceremonial place next to his living predecessors, secure in the deal he cut that nobody there would dis the Donald. His body language, however, belied any notion of a comfort zone. With pursed lips, a vacant gaze and arms folded tightly across his sternum, Donald Trump looked like a gastro patient about to undergo a colonoscopy without anesthesia.  

Alas, what he got was far more painful.  Nobody talked about him.  His name was never spoken. The no-ridicule pledge meant that Donald Trump was totally ignored.  But it was far worse than that for him.  The heartfelt praise visited upon George H.W. Bush must have jabbed fiercely at Trump’s psyche and felt very much like the ridicule he so wanted to avoid.  No, the Bush-Trump ceasefire had not been violated. The problem was that 41 and 45 became reflective mirrors for each other.  Bush’s strengths seemed ordinary 30 years ago, but are now nostalgically prized and mourned because they are tragically absent in the incumbent president.

Although the eulogists were focused singularly on the late president, it was impossible to hear their words without also thinking about Trump’s flagrant inadequacies.  

For example:

Former president George W. Bush:  “In victory, he shared credit. When he lost, he shouldered the blame.”

Former senator Alan Simpson:  “He never hated anyone. Hatred corrodes the container it’s carried in.”

Bush Biographer Jon Meacham:  “His life code was: ‘Tell the truth. Don’t blame people. Forgive’.”

Former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney: “. . .when George Bush was president of the United States of America, every single head of government in the world knew that they were dealing with a gentleman, a genuine leader. . .” 

If those memories of what being presidential once meant failed to connect the dots to our current situation, the officiant, the Rev. Dr. Russell Jones Levenson Jr., Bush’s pastor from Houston, brought it all the way home:  “Some have said this an end of an era. But it doesn’t have to be. Perhaps this is an invitation to fill the void that has been left behind.”

And what a void it is.  In the morass of our deeply broken political environment, it’s hard to remember that we once took for granted that our presidents would be kind, decent people, folks not deeply invested in hatred or cruelty, leaders who told the truth most of the time.  When George Herbert Walker Bush received the Republican nomination for president in 1988, he vowed to make the country “kinder and gentler”.  He was mercilessly lampooned by late night comics and editorial cartoonists for setting the bar so low.   

The bipartisan mourning we saw and felt this week was America pleading – from far below that bar – not just for kinder and gentler governance, but for leadership laced with honesty, integrity and decency. It’s been said that we can’t fully apprehend the value of something until we lose it.  Now that it is gone, America’s first order of business is to find a way to get it back. 

TRUMP OUTSHINES RUSSIAN TROLLS AT DECEIVING AND DIVIDING

Russia’s byzantine efforts to infect American politics with chronic misinformation and rampant discord may be about to end. And we have none other than Donald J. Trump to thank. With a president so deeply skilled at dividing people and turning truth on its head, there is no need to subcontract that work to the Russians. Who needs an elaborate Russian troll farm to crank out social media posts about the evil of black protesters and invading brown immigrants, when Trump can do it himself with the flick of his Twitter finger or the roar of his bully pulpit?

Remember those 13 Russians charged with clandestinely promoting Trump’s 2016 candidacy? They were accused of stirring the social media pot with totally fabricated posts touching on racist and xenophobic fears. The February indictment says their goal was to “sow discord in the U.S. political system. . .through information warfare (designed) to spread distrust towards the other candidates and the political system in general.” Well, the Donald has shown he can do all of that on his own. He was an excellent student of his Russian mentors, so much so that he no longer needs foreign aid.

Yale historian Timothy Snyder has written extensively about how the Russians pioneered the whole concept of “fake news” in the 1990s and 2000s. In his book, The Road to Unfreedom, Snyder explains that Vladimir Putin’s post-Cold War strategy was to make up for the regime’s lack of economic and technological power by flooding the Internet and television with misinformation and demonizing the institutions charged with uncovering facts, “and then exploit the confusion that results.” Wrote Snyder: “They cultivate enough chaos so people become cynical about public life and, eventually, about truth itself.” Then, in the 2010s, Snyder notes, Putin took that successful formula on the road in an effort to destabilize Western democracies. Low and behold, there was Donald Trump, ascending the golden escalator to launch a presidential campaign based on division and fabrication. It was a marriage made in Moscow.

One of the many examples of Russian skullduggery cited by the Mueller investigation involved an authentic photo of a Latino woman and her child holding a sign that said, “No Human Being is Illegal”. According to the indictment, the Russians digitally altered the sign to read, “GIVE ME MORE FREE SHIT” and plastered it on social media. Flash forward to the recent release by the White House of a doctored video that made it falsely appear that CNN’s Jim Acosta had aggressively grabbed the arm of a press aide. No need for foreign subterfuge when you can do it yourself.

In that same Russian indictment, a Kremlin operative was accused of circulating a fake news item under the heading of, “Hillary Clinton has Already Committed Voter Fraud during the Democrat Iowa Caucus.” As Snyder noted, the heart of the Russian game plan is not about ideology, it’s about getting people to accept that “there’s no reason to believe in anything. There is no truth. Your institutions are bogus.” But you hardly need a Russian troll farm to sow those seeds, when the president of the United States accuses the Democrats of voter fraud in Florida, Georgia and Arizona, the second he realizes his candidates might not win.

Most of the fabricated posts cited in the Russian indictment involved race, immigration and religion, obviously visceral hot-button issues that trigger deep divisions. They contained outrageous lies and threats about Black Lives Matter taking over major cities, Muslim terrorists hiding behind burkas and illegal immigrants destroying American communities. In other words, pretty much the same game plan Trump trotted out for the midterms. The only difference is that presidential pronouncements enjoy a wider circulation and carry more weight than Facebook posts. Based on Trump’s campaign rally speeches and his Twitter feed, Americans were alerted daily to the presidential fiction of a pending invasion of killer immigrants and middle east terrorists approaching the U.S. border. He totally outdid his Russian counterparts on this one by ordering the military to protect us from the fabricated attack.

For a president who celebrated his inauguration by lying about the size of the crowd, it’s hardly news that Donald Trump enjoys a perverse relationship with the truth. But he’s really outdone himself lately. He told one campaign rally that Democrats will give illegal immigrants free cars just for sneaking into the country. At another one, he berated Democrats for ignoring the health needs of veterans and boasted about how he got Congress to pass a bill allowing vets to use their own doctors if the VA wait time was too long. Only problem was that the bill he was talking about was passed in 2014 and signed by Obama. On the night that Democrats won a majority in the House, flipped seven governorships and eight state legislative chambers, Trump called the results “close to complete victory”. When his latest choice for attorney general drew fire, Trump absurdly insisted that he doesn’t even know the guy.

This behavior would be amusing if it came from a crazy oddball uncle, something to chuckle about on the way home from family gatherings. But this crazy uncle is our president, and he is using the Russian playbook to, as Snyder, the historian, calls it, “create chaos from inside” by making a mockery of truth and denigrating the instruments of democracy. For the Russians, such an outcome weakens their main adversary. For Trump, it’s just a way to get through another day. For the rest of us, it’s another reason to keep searching for an exit from this nightmare. Without truth, without faith in our democratic institutions, America’s greatness is as phony as Trump’s invasion from Central America.

AN ELECTION THAT BROUGHT MORE RELIEF THAN JOY IS A GOOD STEP IN A LONGER JOURNEY

Sometimes getting what you wished for falls far short of the anticipated euphoria. For many of us still suffering from the cataclysm of the 2016 presidential election, the midterms were our coping mechanism. They nursed us through tough times, through travel bans and “shithole countries”, through assaults on healthcare and tax cuts for the rich, through migrant children in cages and “very nice” Nazis in Charlottesville. Through all of the darkness, we looked forward to November 6 of 2018. Surely, in an election this critical, voters would send an unequivocal message repudiating Donald Trump’s racism, hatred and dishonesty. On a purely visceral level, I wanted this president to be publicly scorned, humiliated and rejected by the electorate.

Then I woke up Wednesday morning and realized how naïve I had been. A disaster as horrific as the Trump presidency, with its massive tentacles of anger and division, is not going to be cleaned up in a single election cycle. Yes, the Democrats’ seizure of the House was a genuinely feel-good moment for all of us bleeding heart liberals. Yet, it was an outcome that provoked more relief than elation. After all, in this same election we lost crucial Senate and governor races to conservatives, some of whom trotted out the most disgusting racist tropes since Jim Crow days. Hundreds of thousands of people, mostly black and brown, were denied a ballot in blatantly cynical acts of voter suppression. And, as if we needed a reminder of the times we are in, within hours of the polls closing, Trump was right back at work, shaking up the Justice Department in order to gain control over the Mueller investigation, and curtailing asylum for Central American migrants fleeing persecution.

Sometimes, in a desperate desire to vote away our anguish, we ascribe far more power to the ballot than is warranted. In a year as politically demented and tortured as this one, no single election is capable of instantly turning darkness into light. That level of change comes only through a sustained movement, one whose trajectory is anything but a straight line. Here’s how a former community organizer named Barack Obama once described a social change movement: “It’s full of frustrations and setbacks and for every step forward that you take, sometimes it feels like there will be two steps back.” Only by continuing to move, can we make a difference.

And this election, more than most, was all about maximizing those forward steps. The movement started the day after Trump was inaugurated. An estimated 4.5 million American women, in nearly every corner of this country, took to the streets to express their disdain for the policies and behavior of the new president, a man elected after boasting about forcing himself on women. Tens of thousands of them were new to politics, and many became activists, even candidates, all in search of a path out of the abyss that was the 2016 presidential election.

From those steps – and they went both forward and backward, just as Obama described – these women, together with other social justice seekers, led the way Tuesday to begin our climb from that abyss. Wresting control of the House from the Republicans was a giant step, and essential to empowering the resistance to Trump’s authoritarianism. And based on post-election demographics, women – as voters, campaign workers and candidates – led the march to make it happen.

As a result, there will be at least 100 women in the House for the first time in this country’s history. Of the those elected to Congress this week, 42 are women of color. Two are Muslim. Two are Native American. At least three are LGBTQ. Together, they are far more representative of America than the hateful white nationalism espoused by our president.

There were other encouraging results Tuesday. A huge segment of suburban women who voted for Trump two years ago, passionately abandoned that camp and went blue this week. More Latinos voted than ever before, the vast majority for Democrats. The millennial vote was way up, and also largely Democratic. That outcome is something to feel good about, a moment to savor and build upon.

And build we must, for Trump’s movement – in the opposite direction – shows no sign of slowing. His hard core base will be with him until the end. The sole source of gratification fueling this president has nothing to do with accomplishments and everything to do with garnering love and affection from those who long for the days of white privilege. Trump will keep them in the palm of his hand by spinning one fictional crisis after another, nonexistent problems that can be solved only by the Donald. Like sending the military to stop an “invasion of violent criminals and gang members,” which has zero basis in reality.

Although his base of true believers is, according to conservative pollsters, less than 25 percent of the electorate, Trump’s complete disregard for truth and decency has spread into the mainstream of Republican politicians. If the president says it, they will repeat it. They jumped on the “invasion” bandwagon, and even kept a straight face while lying about their deep desire to maintain health insurance for people with pre-existing conditions. Their new ethical standard is that if abandoning truth works for Trump then it should work for them.

In other words, to paraphrase Obama, we should anticipate that the ugliness will get worse before it gets better. We also need to remember that the movement born on January 21, 2016, is alive and well, with many steps to go before we sleep.

IF TRUMP HAD A SOUL, HE’D SELL IT FOR A MIDTERM WIN

In the interest of good mental health, we should prepare emotionally for a really bad election night. Yes, Democrats are favored to win a majority of House seats. That prediction has been our nirvana, our beacon of light in the darkness of the past 21 months. But we’ve been hurt before, and know only too well the cruel unreliability of conventional political wisdom. We need to brace ourselves for a GOP sweep that would hand Donald Trump a nauseatingly historic win and tighten his stranglehold on our deeply wounded country.

But I don’t have the slightest idea how to prepare for a cataclysm of that magnitude. A category four hurricane? Evacuate. A tornado? Head to the basement. A more powerful, unchecked Trump trampling America’s core values for the next two years? Not even FEMA has a preparatory template for a disaster of that scale.

I haven’t missed an election in the 48 years I’ve been voting. I’ve had far more losses than wins, and the sun always came up the next day. This time is different. Just contemplating a Republican upset that would bolster Trump’s position churns more raw emotional angst than I’ve ever encountered from a matter that is political, rather than personal. For a relatively laid back kind of guy, this level of reaction – to a midterm election, of all things – was startling and confusing. Until I figured it out.

The outcome of this election is not just political. It is deeply personal. Sure, I would hate to see an electorally emboldened Trump get by with shutting down the Mueller investigation, politicizing the Justice Department, enacting more tax cuts for the rich, and building a wall at the border. But none of those things are waking me up at night. What’s eating away at me is the enormity of the pain that will result from two years of supercharged Trumpism, from turning loose on the American people – particularly those at the margins – an unrestrained, unhinged president who has no soul.

There was no hyperbole in that last sentence. The man is truly without a soul, and that’s what makes this election so different from the others. That’s what makes it personal. Donald Trump isn’t evil because of his political beliefs. He is evil because he believes in absolutely nothing outside of himself. He is evil because he will trample anybody or anything that stands in the way of making himself look like a winner.

He recently captured the entirety of his essence in five words. Asked about his mocking and demeaning of Brett Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford, the Donald said: “It doesn’t matter. We won.” Nothing beyond the perpetual feeding of his pathologically engorged ego matters to this president. Not decency. Not respect. Not justice. Certainly not truth.

For 242 years, this country has been striving to form a more perfect union, to become a society of equal opportunity, to offer a beacon to those struggling to be free. Despite rampant imperfections and setbacks, we eventually reached the stature of power and moral authority that endowed our presidency with the distinction of being the leader of the free world. Hark, the trumpets now sound! And what words of wisdom sayeth Forty-five? Nothing matters but winning.

A caravan of frightened, desperate refugees ambles through Central America, finding protection in their numbers against the violence they are fleeing. Trump seizes their plight as stagecraft. In an attempt to pull his base to the polls, he insists Democrats organized this illegal march to our borders and that the migrants are gang members, criminals, even Mid-Easterners, hell bent on terrorism, rape and pillage. None of it is true. But if it helps Trump win, it doesn’t matter.

Nor does it matter to the president how much harm he inflicts on 1.5 million transgender Americans with his edict to, in effect, delegitimize their status and degrade their humanity. If that’s what helps to get the Evangelicals to the polls, so be it. It’s all about winning, so it doesn’t matter.

After days of rhetorically contorting himself over the alleged murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Trump’s Saudi Arabian buddies, the president takes to a campaign rally stage and raves about a Republican congressman who body slammed a reporter and pled guilty to assault. Bad timing? Sure. But he has an election to win. Nothing else matters.

It’s not Donald Trump’s evil alone that has me in a pre-election panic. It is this: Unchecked and unrestrained, this evil will metastasize far more quickly throughout the body politic, spreading its venom through hateful, hurtful bullying, racism, misogyny and xenophobia.

It’s already happening. A man groped a woman on a Southwest flight the other day and told authorities that “the President of the United States says it’s ok to grab women by their private parts.” Hateful, racist attacks by Trump’s merry band of white nationalists are an everyday occurrence. Hundreds of GOP congressional candidates have taken the president’s lead and campaigned on his lies of savage, ruthless, Latino killers storming our borders at the behest of Democrats. That’s all happening now. Imagine if Trump ends up owning one more election night. How do you prepare for the consequences of a disaster like that?

This is the most important midterm election of our lives. Sadly, for us liberals, there is little to be gained but much to be lost. If the bluest wave of our wildest dreams washes ashore November 6, Trump and his veto pen will still occupy the White House. Single payer health insurance, wealth redistribution and saving the environment will continue to occupy the cheap seats in our theater of great expectations The fault lines right now are not about legislation. They are about the cancer careening through the veins of a government led by a morally bankrupt, psychologically impaired and utterly incompetent president.

We are engulfed in a spiraling dystopia. There are databases tracking the president’s lies, sexual assault accusations and his insulting and degrading remarks. When we think he can’t get any worse, he does. In the simplistic zero-sum bubble he has drawn us into, there is only one exit strategy. Donald Trump – and all that he represents – must lose. A Democratic midterm victory will not create an end to our nightmare, but it could be a much-needed beginning of the end. This much is certain: We will not get our country back until Donald Trump loses. Right now, nothing else matters.

NOT REPORTING TRUMP’S LIES IS ONE MORE ASSAULT ON TRUTH

Donald Trump’s daily diatribes about “fake news” are drawing support from an unlikely source: academicians and others on the left who insist that the news is, indeed, fake because it distributes the president’s lies. They want journalists to stop reporting Trump’s false statements, arguing that merely labeling them as incorrect fails to mitigate their propaganda value.

Renowned linguist George Lakoff says the news media has “become complicit with Trump by allowing itself to be used as an amplifier for his falsehoods and frames.” New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen claims journalists “haven’t been able to assimilate the fact that. . .the president of the United States is a troll”. For that reason, the professor believes reporters should ignore Trump’s inaccurate tweets.

Another journalism professor, Arizona State University’s Dan Gillmor wrote an “open letter to newsrooms everywhere” with the salutation of “Dear Journalists, Stop Being Loudspeakers for Liars.” He begged reporters and editors to “stop publishing their lies”, referring to Trump and members of his administration. He also insisted that White House briefings not be given air time, and that Trump never be allowed on live television because he lies. Instead, Gillmor suggested that the president be “put on a short delay” so his statements could be fact-checked and not aired if found to be incorrect.

With all due respect to these learned thinkers, I say hogwash. When the president of the United States lies, even at the current rate of 8.3 times a day, that’s news we need to know. I’m not unsympathetic with the concerns of Lakoff and others that reporting Trump’s falsehoods and correcting them may keep the lie alive with some news consumers. Lakoff compares that cognitive process to the outcome of telling someone not to think about an elephant. Call me old fashioned, but good journalism is not about trying to get people to think a certain way. It’s about giving them the information they need to make decisions. Besides, in a world where most Trump supporters get their news from Fox and a handful of conservative websites – not to mention @realDonaldTrump and his 53 million followers – it is hard to imagine the efficacy of withholding information in order to combat presidential lies.

The one thing in this angry, bitter, tribalized moment that we all agree on is that we have never had a president like Donald J. Trump. Yes, every president bent the truth a bit, and some told downright whoppers. But the news media and the nation could handle the situation in the normal course of business. Journalists simply told the public what a president said. If subsequent fact-checking or other events cast doubt on his veracity, then that became a new story.

In 1986, every news outlet in the country quoted President Ronald Reagan’s firm and absolute denial that the government had covertly sold weapons to Iran in order to secure the release of American hostages. It later turned out that was exactly what happened. After those facts were reported, Reagan had these words: “A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”

Sadly, the current occupant of the White House indulges in neither facts nor evidence, choosing instead to make it up as he goes, with the flight of fancy of a five-year-old. So, yes, it took news reporters and editors a while to adjust to this wild aberration in presidential coverage. While the result is a work in progress, it represents a profound – and needed – change in presidential coverage.

Some recent examples:

CNN: “Trump falsely claims nearly 3,000 Americans in Puerto Rico ‘did not die.’”

Wall Street Journal: “Trump wrongly blames California’s worsening wildfires on water diversions.”

The Hill: “Trump denies offering $1 million for Warren DNA test, even though he did.”

Seattle Times: “Trump says crime in Germany is ‘way up’. German statistics show the opposite.”

The Washington Post ran a front page story this week by its fact checker, Glenn Kessler, detailing how Trump “bobb(ed) and weav(ed) through a litany of false claims, misleading assertions and exaggerated facts” on his Sunday night 60 Minutes appearance.

The trend, although not universal, is clearly one of labeling Trump’s statements as false in a first-day story, with later follow-up on the specifics of his misrepresentation. Indeed, it is difficult to find a news story quoting Trump that does not identify at least a portion of his utterances as false. There are exceptions. USA Today recently ran a Trump op-ed that was filled with blatantly false statements. Although the publication later noted the inaccuracies – and included some fact-checking links in the online version – allowing the piece to run with those falsehoods was a gross breach of basic journalistic ethics.

The gold standard for good reporting is truth. Donald Trump announced a few months ago that U.S. Steel was opening six new mills in the U.S. It was completely untrue. The company is not opening any new domestic steel plants, as media reports explained. But here’s the rub: If the edict of those imploring journalists not to report Trump’s false statements had been followed, then the truth that the president lied about the new steel plants would never have been told.

These are depressing and deeply frustrating times for those of us consumed with the nightmare that is our out-of-control and unhinged president. He continues to commit more atrocities in a single day than any of his predecessors did in an entire term. Yet, he is wildly popular with his fanbase, and resoundingly supported by the Republican Party. Those urging the news media to ignore Trump’s deceitful tweets and comments see the strategy as a way of toppling, or at least weakening, the president’s propaganda machine. I believe they are wrong. Truth is a powerful force and it has crushed many authoritarian regimes. The truth right now is that our president lies, every day, in every way. That’s a story no reporter should ever sit on.

WE INTERRUPT THIS RECKONING TO BRING YOU IN-JUSTICE KAVANAUGH

Not even a week-long retreat to the abundant beauty and tranquility of a Rhode Island seashore was sufficient to tune out the wailing cries of a wounded nation. Oh, the sunsets were spectacular, and the serenity of the waves rhythmically meshing with each other cast a rare, momentary spell of harmonic convergence. But the peaceful stillness of the moment quickly yielded to people and their electronic devices, all digitally connected to a world neither serene nor harmonious.

Waves pounding the shoreline were drowned out by the anxious mutterings of those monitoring the week’s top story. Try as you might to ignore them, select, key words kept bouncing along the shore, like seagulls stalking an incoming fishing boat. Kavanaugh. Ford. Trump. Grassley. Flake. FBI.

A woman deep into her eighties and seated in a wheelchair consulted her smartphone and then yelled, “Crap,” to her friends, explaining that Flake had just announced he would vote yes on confirmation. “What’s this world coming to?” she asked, without an answer.

Two locals stumbled out of a tavern one night and, adhering to the Rhode Island prohibition on pronouncing the “r” sound, demonstrated how everyone had their own takeaway on the Kavanaugh story. Said one to the other: “The mutha fucka couldn’t even get laid in high school.”

By week’s end, we – Melissa, my wife and Rhode Island guide, and I – bade a sad farewell to our Newport escape, and an even sadder adieu to the illusion that the United States Senate would do the right thing and keep a deeply flawed man off our highest court. Instead, we returned home to grieve over this maddening disorientation: Senators who found Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault accusations credible had rushed, in a surreal whirlwind of male anger, to make her alleged attacker an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Now indelible in our collective hippocampus is the laughter and cheering of a Mississippi political rally as the president of the United States mocked and belittled Blasey Ford’s compelling testimony about an attempted rape. I will leave it to more knowledgeable moral philosophers to determine which is worse: a Supreme Court justice accused of youthful sexual abuse who lied under oath and displayed a demeanor of raging anger and partisan indignation, or a president who ridicules and makes fun of a sexual assault victim, and who has, himself, been accused of sexual misconduct by at least 16 women. Either way, we have them both, a disgustingly shameful package.

As we enter the second year of our #MeToo reckoning, it is painfully obvious that we have a split-screen approach to dealing with sexual harassment and assault. Outside the Washington beltway, accusations are now taken seriously, investigated thoroughly and the perpetrators are knocked off the highest of pedestals and shunned. Inside the beltway, not so much. In the most cynical of Machiavellian politics, ideology trumps sexual misconduct, provided you have the votes.

Stephen Wynn was a casino magnate. Charles Dutoit was the conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Peter Martins was the leader of the New York City Ballet. Shervin Pishevar was the founder of a venture capital firm. Matt Lauer was co-host of NBC’s Today Show. Russell Simmons was the founder of Def Jam Records. Leslie Moonves was the CEO of CBS. All of these men, and scores of others, were accused of sexual misconduct. They vehemently denied the allegations. There was no proof beyond reasonable doubt. But based solely on the credibility of the accusations, these men were forced out of their privileged positions. Indeed, there should be a high burden of proof to deny a man his liberty. But privilege can and should be denied on the basis of believable accusations

Sadly, that is not the way the political world works. If it did, Brett Kavanaugh would not be on the Supreme Court. Republican Senators, and even President Trump, found Blasey Ford’s accusations credible. (For example: Senators Charles Grassley, John Coryn and Richard Shelby.) But they all voted to confirm their guy because his ideological bonafides as a conservative judge outweighed the credible possibility that he is a sex offender.

This toxicity of placing politics above morality and decency has been decaying our republic for some time. Trump is Exhibit A of this phenomenon. He boasted about grabbing women by their genitals. He is a serial liar. He has had extramarital relationships with a porn star and a playboy centerfold. Yet, Trump is embraced by evangelical Christians only too eager to give the sinner-in-chief a pass because they like his policies.

We encountered the same perverted moral reasoning 20 years ago with Bill Clinton. Liberal and feminist leaders not only gave Clinton a pass on Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick, they mocked and ridiculed his accusers, insisting it was all a “vast right wing conspiracy”. The accusations, however, were every bit as credible as those offered by Blasey Ford. Jones said Clinton exposed himself to her and asked for oral sex. Willey said he grabbed her breast and placed her hand on his crotch. Broaddrick said he raped her. In each case, there was corroboration from friends the women had confided in immediately after the alleged incidents. Gloria Steinem, one of the giants of the women’s movement, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in 1998, defending feminists for standing with Clinton. She insisted – in the case of Jones and Willey – that he was guilty only of having made some “gross, dumb, clumsy sexual passes”, but that feminists stood with him because his policies were strongly supportive of women’s rights.

It is way past time that we remove the asterisk from all positions of political power when it comes to sexual misconduct. The #MeToo movement should not be gerrymandered to apply only to Hollywood moguls, business executives and media celebrities. The reckoning needs to encompass presidents, supreme court justices and others wielding political power. If we really want to heal our culture, and no longer tolerate sexual misconduct anytime, anywhere, then there can be no more passes for sexual predators on the basis of their political policy portfolios. #MeToo can be fully transformative only if it also applies to #ThemToo, powerful men at the highest levels of government.

A SCRIPT FOR THE KAVANAUGH FINALE

Here’s a modest proposal for ending the Brett Kavanaugh melodrama: Strap down the judge with polygraph equipment and ask him about Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault accusations. If he fails the lie detector test – the same one Blasey Ford has already passed – his nomination is off the table. If he passes? Then he joins Clarence Thomas as the shamed-but-confirmed male caucus of the United States Supreme Court. Put the whole thing on pay-per-view and give the proceeds to a #MeToo organization, just like CBS is doing with Les Moonves’ severance pay.

Okay, as Jonathan Swift did with his Modest Proposal, I jest. Still, there is more poetic justice in that scenario than we are apt to see from Chairperson Charles Grassley and his 10 fellow white male Republican elves who control the Senate Judiciary Committee. Oh, to see the gnashing of all those pearly white conservative teeth over the sight of an originalist judge wired to a lie detector machine! Would the American Civil Liberties Union come to his rescue? The ACLU has long led the legal battle against polygraph testing in employment situations. On the other side? You got it: the conservative, originalist bar, including Kavanaugh and his Federalist Society buddies.

The far right has long adored lie detectors. Just ask Vice President Mike Pence. Only days ago, he offered to be polygraphed in order to prove that he did not write the anonymous New York Times op-ed that labeled Donald Trump amoral and unhinged. (Do we live in interesting times, or what?) Kavanaugh himself has waxed eloquently on the usefulness of lie detectors “to screen applicants for critical law enforcement, defense and intelligence collection roles”. Writing the decision in a 2016 D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals case, Kavanaugh called polygraph testing “an important tool” to keep undesirables out of significant jobs.

It may be an important tool to Judge Kavanaugh in the abstract, but now that it affects him personally, don’t expect to see him in a blood pressure cuff and skin sensors anytime soon. The polygraph is not going to resolve this issue. The question before the Senate is not about truth. It’s about votes. As long as the Republicans hold together, they can push the nominee over the finish line, and lock in a conservative majority on the court for a generation or more. As soon as two Republican senators jump ship, however, Kavanaugh is finished and Trump pulls out his Federalist Society list of reasonable facsimiles.

Meanwhile, this Capitol Hill political crisis has brought out hardball tactics eerily reminiscent of the ugliness that surrounded the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill fiasco 27 years ago. The focus inside the beltway is much more about counting votes than addressing the meta issue of what happens to women who accuse powerful men of sexual assault.

The Republican boys club in the Senate has attacked Blasey Ford’s veracity and “suspicious” timing every day since the California research psychologist went public with her accusation. Overcome with their hunger to get their man on the court, this aging Senate fraternity of old white guys wants to know why these women wait so long to make their accusations. How many television appearances, books and op-eds by sexual assault survivors will it take for us to learn that women who speak up subject themselves to a whole new round of abuse that, in many cases, is worse than the original assault?

Last week at this time, Christine Blasey Ford was in the middle of her life: doing research, teaching classes, raising children. Following a torrent of death threats after her name was revealed, she and her family had to flee their home. She is unable to work. She and her husband are in an undisclosed location and the children are being cared for elsewhere. Why, indeed, don’t women speak up more often about this stuff?

Meanwhile, Grassley and his crew are busy planning the stagecraft of a Senate hearing, should Blasey Ford decide to appear. Mindful of the horrendous optics from the Anita Hill hearing, where the young law school professor was grilled by a gaggle of old white men, Grassley suddenly noticed that all of the Republicans on his committee are men. He said earlier this week that they may bring in a woman to interrogate Blasey Ford. Borrowing from their own rhetoric, the Republicans have had 27 years to put women on that committee. Why wait until the last minute?

Over at the White House, Kavanaugh is being thoroughly prepped for his testimony. I get the importantance of preparing a judicial candidate for testifying about various legal nuances, like saying, “Roe v Wade” is “settled law”, but declining to call it “correct law” so he can vote later to unsettle it. But how many more ways are there to say that he did not, in a moment of drunken abandon at the age of 17, throw himself on Blasey Ford, grope her, cover her mouth to stifle her screams and try to undress her?

It’s important to remember that this moment in time is not just about the political composition of the Supreme Court. It’s also about how we view sexual assault and harassment, and how we treat the perpetrators and the accusers. We are, after all, in the middle of a reckoning on that subject. Giving Christine Blasey Ford, in 2018, the Anita Hill Bum’s Rush Treatment of 1991 is a perverse reversal of moral thought in this post-Harvey Weinstein world.

Here’s how this story should end: Without making a factual determination on the sexual assault allegation, the Senate should reject Kavanaugh’s nomination. Such a decision does not “convict” the judge of anything. But it acknowledges the reality that Blasey Ford could be right. Why take the risk of putting a man who attempted to rape her – and then lied about it – on the country’s highest court? It’s not as if he is facing jail time. He remains on the country’s second highest court. He can commiserate with fellow Judge Merrick Garland, who was denied a Supreme Court seat by Senate Republicans without so much as a whisper of bad behavior.

Such an endgame doesn’t alter Republican dreams of a conservative Supreme Court. The bull pen is packed with like-minded ideologues just waiting to take a seat on the bench. What it does do, however, is send a clear message that we have entered a new era, a time when we take accusations of sexual assault seriously, a time when one brave woman coming forward can change the face of history, and not ruin her life. Sadly, I strongly suspect we have not yet reached that time.

FOR RIGHT-WING IDEOLOGY, IT’S OUT OF THE SHADOWS AND ONTO THE BENCH

As a proud member of the Liberal Geezerhood, I have lowered my imaginary flag to half-mast in the melancholic recognition that, for the rest of my life, America’s federal judiciary will be in the hands of a right-wing cabal. The Supreme Court is on the cusp of having a rock solid conservative majority, which based on actuarial tables, will keep growing long before it dissipates. Two appellate circuits have already flipped to the right, and another two are on the verge of doing so.

Yet, as a life-long student of the political process, I can’t help being impressed with the skill, chutzpah and dogged determination behind a quiet, 36-year revolution that very few of us saw coming – until it was too late. When it comes to effective organizing principles, this amazing coup d’état could teach the left a thing or two.

We baby boomers grew up taking for granted that the role of the Supreme Court was to give life to the Constitution’s noble-but-ambiguous aspirations, core values like “equal protection”, “due process”, and “right to counsel”. Through those principles, we saw the court put an end to school desegregation, allow women to have access to contraceptives and abortion, require states to provide attorneys for low-income criminal defendants and prohibit police interrogations without advising suspects of their right to remain silent.

Meanwhile, a handful of ultra conservative lawyers and law students stewed quietly over what they saw as an overly activist judiciary and a liberal bent in most law schools. In 1982, that angst gave rise to something called the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, a name far more elegant than either its origins or mission warrant. According to most histories of what is now known simply as the Federalist Society, the germination began with small chapters of disaffected and extremely conservative law students at Yale, Harvard and the University of Chicago. They felt disenfranchised by what they saw as an overly liberal legal profession and gathered together to share in that bond. With the help of some of the right’s most well-known attorneys, including Edwin Meese and Robert Bork, the movement quietly evolved into a pipeline aimed at mainstreaming conservative legal thought and producing an army of Federalist Society judges that could turn American jurisprudence on its head.

Today, the Federalist Society has 70,000 members, chapters at more than 200 law schools and over $25 million in net assets. Their patron saint is the late Justice Anton Scalia, revered by the society for his “originalist” approach to interpreting the Constitution. Once an outlier in judicial thought, originalism endeavors to freeze the Constitution at whatever strictly constructed meaning it had back in 1787. Since the founders back then were not thinking about things like abortion, racial segregation or gay marriage, then today’s courts should stay clear of all such current controversies. Or so the Federalist Society believes.

The truth, however, is that originalism is a cheap intellectual illusion intended to mask the brazen political goals of right-wing ideologues. After all, it was Scalia himself who, in a landmark gun rights case, found a private right to own a pistol in Second Amendment language that speaks of bearing arms in the context of a “well-regulated militia”. A credible argument perhaps, but one that stabs a dagger through the heart of originalist purism.

Here’s how fast the Federalist Society and originalism have evolved: When George W. Bush nominated now Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, the White House insisted that the nominee “was not now and never has been” a member of the Federalist Society. It was as if mere association with this group posed a threat to his confirmation. Roberts is now proudly out of the closet as a card-carrying Federalist, along with his fellow society brethren Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch.

If you are counting, that makes four Federalist Society members on the nine-member court. Number five is just a Senate vote away. Brett Kavanaugh has been a Federalist activist for more than 20 years. In fact, when he worked for Bush, he was the one who persuaded his boss to nominate the then-closeted John Roberts. That is precisely how this once obscure organization works. It jams an extensive pipeline with well-groomed right-wing thinkers and sends them through a labyrinth of channels, from clerkships to partnerships to judgeships.

How did all that happen? Enter Leonard Leo, a quiet, far right ideologue and a brilliant organizer. Leo is a member of the secretive, reactionary Knights of Malta, a Catholic order founded in the 12th Century that is to the extreme right of the Vatican. According to close associates, Leo declared 20 years ago that conservatives had lost the culture wars – abortion, gay rights, contraception and diversity. He said the only solution was to “stack the courts”. He signed on with the Federalist Society as its fulltime paid operative and the stacking was quickly underway.

Roberts and Alito – and a couple of circuit appellate judges – were big wins for Leo during the George W. Bush years. But the floodgates opened wide for him when he joined forces with one of the most ideologically impure politicians in American political history. According to the New York Times, Leo repeatedly refused to meet with candidate Donald Trump in 2015 and early 2016. Eventually, however, he was persuaded to take a meeting. To Leo’s astonishment, Trump told him to come up with a list of Supreme Court candidates, and that he would publicly promise to fill the Scalia vacancy from that list. Months later, Neil Gorsuch moved from Leo’s list to the United States Supreme Court, soon to be followed by Brett Kavanaugh. Court watchers have estimated that by the end of the year, 26 percent of the federal appellate bench will have come through the Federalist Society pipeline. How amazing. How frightening. The selection of lifetime judgeships has been subcontracted to an outfit that the last Republican administration disavowed as too dark and shadowy.

Sadly, at this moment, there is nothing for liberals to do but grit our teeth and shake our heads. We have been outmaneuvered by a skilled right-wing court stacker. As the moment passes, however, we need to learn from him. We need to build our own pipeline of brilliant young lawyers willing to don judicial robes and apply the constitutional values and principles set forth by the founders to our current lives. Yes, it’s enormously sad to see the death of the judicial thinking we grew up with. But, as the late, great Joe Hill said in a different context, “Don’t mourn, organize.”

FORGET GOOD AND BAD, WE’RE ALL PACKAGE DEALS

A week of eulogies and retrospectives on the life of John McCain gave us a long-overdue lesson on how to evaluate our leaders. What we saw, with apologies to Charles Dickens, was a Tale of Two Senators. John McCain was our best of times, and our worst of times. He represented the age of wisdom, and the age of foolishness, the epoch of belief, and the epoch of incredulity. His was the season of Light, and the season of Darkness, the spring of hope, the winter of despair.

In less Dickensian prose, the late Arizona senator was, like all of us, a package deal, a complicated amalgam of good and bad, of decency and chicanery, of success and failure. He was a man of honor and principle. He was also a man of political expediency. He had moments of greatness and moments of shame.

Death has a way of triggering a contemplative introspection in the living. It’s an opportunity to hold a mirror to our lives and thought processes, with an eye toward making necessary adjustments. An adjustment is precisely what we need right now. We are living in a pathologically polarized moment, right smack in the middle of a highly charged civil war of deeply held values. It’s us against them, and we’re playing for keeps. As many noted psychologists (here and here) have observed, that kind of tribalism gives way to rigid, binary thinking. We see people as good or bad, either with us or against us. It’s a deeply skewed and destructive perception. To build and sustain the kind of political movement that can take us to a better place, we need to look beyond what we want to see in order to know what is really there.

Minutes after McCain died, my Facebook feed was filled with reactions. He was described with words like: honorable, brave, decent, compassionate and honest. He was praised for being against discrimination and reasonable on immigration Within an hour, the rebuttals appeared. They were from those who came to bury the senator, not to praise him. Their counterpoints? McCain cheated on his first wife, was deeply involved in an influence peddling scandal, opposed to making Martin Luther King Day a federal holiday, cast a deciding vote upholding a presidential veto of the 1990 Civil Rights Act, and referred to his North Vietnamese captors as “gooks”.

What appeared as two factions fighting over an epitaph was an illusion. They were both right. John McCain was good and bad. Or, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet told Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, “. . . nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” And “thinking” can be distorted by passionately held beliefs that filter people and events so that we see what we want to see.

McCain was the posterchild of the package deal approach to evaluating people. More than any of his contemporaries, he both owned his mistakes and had no problem abandoning fealty to partisan dogma when it suited his purposes. His death – as well as our reaction to it – offers a reminder that binary, black-or-white, either-or thinking, as tempting as it might be, is not a helpful way of understanding our world. Our desire to label people as heroes and villains, although understandable, is a fool’s errand.

Take Pope Francis, for example. Until last week, even I, as a recovering Methodist, was ready to nominate him for sainthood. “Who am I to judge”, he said of the Church’s position on gays. He focused on problems like poverty, climate change and corporate wrongdoing with an abiding intensity. He advocated for women’s equality and expressed an openness to allowing priests to marry. Then came the seemingly credible accusation that Francis had covered up a cardinal’s history of sexual abuse and pedophilia, triggering calls for his resignation. Do we move him from the good column into the bad? No. The amazing gifts this pope brought to his believers – and the rest of us – coexist with his human fallibility, one that may well have succumbed to a malignancy that seems to have permeated the culture of his church’s hierarchy. It’s a package deal. It’s important to see the entire package.

Every historical figure we’ve ever placed on a pedestal is a mere Google search removed from their warts. Mother Teresa, who became a saint last year, was accused of gross mismanagement and providing negligent medical care. Martin Luther King was found to have plagiarized portions of his doctoral dissertation. Mohandas Gandhi is said to have been openly racist toward blacks in South Africa and frequently shared a bed with his 17-year-old great-niece. The great emancipator himself, Abe Lincoln, was responsible for the country’s largest mass execution. In 1862, he ordered the hanging of 38 Dakota Sioux tribal members in Minnesota. Package deals, all of them.

The moral of this story is that we need to look at the whole package, and see all of its parts, in order to have anything close to an accurate understanding. The alternative is what organizational communication experts call a “frozen evaluation”. That means we lock in our assessment of someone – or something – and see only that which is consistent with our frozen evaluation. To ignore the fact that we are all complicated works-in-progress is to miss opportunities for meaningful, constructive connection.

Our current toxic environment of dark, deeply divided and angry discourse will not last forever. The McCain memorials laid bare our longing for harmony, or at least decency, in our politics. Our behavior can take us there. We can begin that journey by not writing everybody off who disagrees with us. As the late senator said in his farewell letter, “We weaken (America’s greatness) when we hide behind walls rather than tear them down. . .” There are many kinds of walls, including the ones we build around others who don’t share our views. To escape our current quagmire, we need to replace those walls with bridges. We will not reach everyone, but somewhere in all those package deals out there lies an opportunity to connect. Real change will not happen until we seize that opportunity.

TRUMPIAN JUSTICE: OUR CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER

Like a drunk progressing from slurred speech to crashing the family car, the presidency this week continued its rapid descent toward rock bottom. Regardless of your politics, is there anyone out there who wasn’t jarred – at least a little bit – to hear our president praise a convicted felon for refusing to cooperate with the federal government he defrauded? Sure, Paul Manafort was Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, but historically presidents have paid fealty to the law, not to the lawbreakers.

The president, after all, is the chief executive of that federal government, including its Department of Justice, which, a few days ago, Trump called a “joke”. This is totally contrary to those civics textbooks now welcoming students back to school. No president has ever repudiated his justice department. We inch ever closer to a constitutional crisis.

Here’s how fast we’ve fallen: In April of 2017, legal scholars expressed outrage when Trump accused a former Obama aide of having committed a crime. Since the justice department reports to the president, such a declaration of guilt without due process was seen by numerous observers as a flagrant abuse of presidential power and possible grounds for impeachment. They noted, as summarized in this space back then, that many similar slips of the presidential tongue over the years were immediately walked back. Prime example: Richard Nixon declared cult leader Charles Manson guilty before his trial began. He immediately withdrew his comment, saying, “the last thing I would do is prejudice the legal rights of any person, in any circumstance.” Trump, however, walks nothing back and has no qualms about prejudicing anyone’s legal rights.

What happened this week makes the president’s earlier comments look like jay walking. While Manafort’s unsequestered jury was deliberating, Trump repeatedly fired off messages claiming – in full Twitter shot of the jurors – that the trial itself was a “sad day for our country” and that Manafort was “a very good person”. The presidential attempt at verdict influencing, however, did not stop the jury from convicting Manafort on multiple counts of tax and bank fraud.

Hours later, Trump took to the stage of a political rally in one of those theater of the mind moments that flow from the bizarre politics of separate realities. With his former campaign chairman tucked neatly into a jail cell, and his personal attorney having just pled guilty to a felony charge that implicated the president, the Donald led the crowd in the ritualistic chant of “lock her up,” a vintage reference, of course, to Hillary Clinton, who has not been charged with a crime.

If you think that Trump was simply having a bad day and reverted to the Hillary ditty out of a pathetic combination of inertia and nostalgia, you would be wrong. Every day since that rally, Trump has eviscerated his justice department, along with his attorney general, Jeff Sessions. Never a strict constructionist on punctuation matters, the president said he now puts quote marks around “justice” when referring to the department because he sees no real justice there. He called Manafort “brave” for refusing to flip on him, like his attorney, Michael Cohen, did.

One of the federal prosecutors who helped convict mob boss John Gotti told Washington Post reporters that Trump’s recent statements about the criminal justice system struck him as “the modern-day version of a particularly inarticulate mobster.” That pretty well captures the moment we are living in.

Every day, the president lists names of more Democrats he thinks should be prosecuted by his “Justice” Department (here, here, here and here). Clearly, he has turned the notion of justice on its head. To him, it has nothing to do with the rule of law. It’s about using political power to protect himself and punish his enemies. Trump hasn’t merely hinted at that notion, he’s said it. He told Fox News this week, “the only reason” for appointing Sessions as attorney general was because he “felt loyalty” and expected his guy to protect him in the Russia investigation and then go after Democrats. Trump has never forgiven Sessions for recusing himself from the special prosecutor’s investigation.

The Washington Post has reported that the chief White House counsel and other top aides have repeatedly told Trump that he can’t call Justice and give orders, but the president refuses to embrace that concept. Here’s what a former senior administration official told the Post yesterday: “The president has not a whit of respect for institutions, whether it’s the DOJ or the Fed or the FBI. If you are a threat to him, he is going to try to kill you.”

Most of the news analysis and commentary produced by this historically tumultuous week has been focused on the future. Will Manafort flip for a reduced sentence? Will Trump pardon him? How much additional dirt does Cohen have on the president? What about impeachment? Will Mueller subpoena Trump? How will all of this play in the midterms? So many questions, and so little time to fully absorb the depth of depravity our country faces right now, in this moment, regardless of what happens later.

We have a president who has rejected the rule of law, who calls the Justice Department a “joke”, who thinks nothing of tampering with a jury, and who will do whatever it takes to subvert the processes of government in order to protect his own hide and punish his enemies. This is no longer an esoteric debate on the efficacy of a president opining on a person’s guilt or innocence. This is – right now, in this moment – a full scale assault on this country’s very concept of justice, with or without quote marks. Whatever may lie ahead, let us never accept a mobster’s notion of justice as our new normal.