Category: Politics

TRUMP’S EDUCATION PLAN: TEACHERS WITH GUNS

Until last week, Donald Trump had been the first president in modern history not to have an education policy. But no longer are America’s public schools a blank slate in the White House’s policy shop. The Donald has a plan, and he’s mighty pumped about it. He wants to give teachers guns and train them to shoot. Welcome to the 2018 edition of education reform: No Glock Left Behind.

As a nation mourned the shooting deaths of 17 students and faculty at a Florida high school, our self-absorbed reality star president maneuvered himself into the spotlight. Survivors of the massacre, along with some of the victim’s family members, were summoned to the White House for a “listening session”. There, with the cameras rolling, Trump clung to a note card reminding him to offer an empathetic “I hear you” after his guests laid bare their raw emotions of profound loss.

And when it was all over, our leader of the free world had been majestically infused with the wisdom that would forever stop school shootings: a well-armed faculty. He had not sounded so bubbly and manic since he described his mating rituals on that “Access Hollywood” tape. “We have to harden these schools, not soften them,” Trump said. He then constructed a truly original simile: “A gun-free zone to a killer. . . that’s like going for the ice cream. These people are cowards. They’re not going to walk into a school if 20 percent of the teachers have guns – it may be 10 percent or may be 40 percent. And what I’d recommend doing is the people that carry, we give them a bonus. We give them a little bit of a bonus.”

There you have it: Trumpian education policy. At long last, underpaid and under-appreciated public school teachers would no longer have to worry about teaching to the test in order to capture merit pay. They just have to pack heat and pick up their loaded gun bonus.

Many astute political observers have dismissed this call to arms for teachers as just another crazy flight of fancy from a president totally void of serious policy chops. Others have gone so far as to suggest it’s an intentional diversion designed to deflect a renewed push for gun control, to buy time until the anti-gun fervor cools. Maybe. Yet, it’s not hard to see the arming of educators as the absurd-but-understandable result of a decades’ long practice of expecting our public schools to somehow magically solve every societal ill. It’s an American obsession that has never worked, and has, in fact, repeatedly impaired the delivery of quality education.

Take race, for example. The tumultuous civil rights struggles of the 1960s eventually, through judicial and congressional actions, created a more just society, at least on paper. Yet, the rigidity of segregation was not about to go quietly into that good night. So we moved kids from one neighborhood school to another. Public schools became the national laboratory for the dismantling of segregation and the racism that created it. Black students were bused into white neighborhood schools, and vice versa, albeit more vice than versa. Learning was trumped by transportation. The result? The enormous achievement gap between black and white students of the 1960s has narrowed only slightly over 50 years. It was wrong, noted the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell in 1973, to turn the attention of communities “from the paramount goal of quality education to a perennially divisive debate over who is to be transported where.” A North Carolina NAACP official at the time put it even more succinctly: “My daughter does not need to sit beside a white person to learn.”

Unfortunately, we didn’t learn our lesson back then. There has not been a major social problem that we haven’t schlepped to the front door of the public school house. Take poverty for example. More than half of public school students come from low-income families. Here’s what a New Mexico Kindergarten teacher told the Washington Post her day was like: “When they come in my door in the morning, the first thing I do is an inventory of immediate needs: Did you eat? Are you clean?” She cleans them up with bathroom wipes and toothbrushes. At her own expense, she stocks a drawer with clean socks, underwear, pants and shoes. She is the face of anti-poverty policy to those children, but is left with precious little time to teach.

Once upon a very long time ago, teachers had control over their teaching. They used their skills and experience to map out a learning strategy for their students. Not anymore. As Stanford University Education Professor Larry Cuban noted, “policy elites” at the local, state and federal level have taken over by mandating schools to solve an array of social, economic and political problems. Policy makers, Cuban says, have not hesitated to foist upon classroom teachers such issues as: alcoholism and drug addiction, tobacco use, teenage pregnancy, AIDS prevention, automobile accident reduction, environmental protection and test-driven accountability for producing graduates who can help companies make even more money in the global market place.

A recent study of 30,000 classroom teachers reported that 89 percent said they were “strongly enthusiastic” when they began teaching, but just 15 percent felt the same way today. No wonder many areas of the country are experiencing a teacher shortage. There has been a huge exodus from the profession in recent years. With all the mandates and expectations thrust upon them, teachers have precious little time to do that one thing that drew them into this line of work: teach.

And now the president of the United States wants to turn them into gunslingers. It’s a fitting parody on this society’s long degrading march to dismantle the essence of what it means to be a teacher. Unfortunately, Donald Trump is no satirist. To borrow his phrasing, he’s a “sicko” with “demented” thoughts.

MENTAL ILLNESS IS DRIVING OUR GUN CULTURE

Donald Trump is right: Our country’s epidemic of gun violence is, first and foremost, a mental health problem. The president and his Republican sycophants are nuts. They are in an ideologically-induced fugue state, so far removed from reality that sacrificing the lives of children is but a mere normal and necessary function of gun idolatry.

The nation’s latest fuselage of assault rifle bullets had just terrorized a Parkland, Florida school, leaving 17 dead. As the bodies were being cleared from the locker-laced hallways of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the NRA’s hypnotized Republican automatons were right on script. The word “gun” stricken from their vocabulary, suddenly the party of just-say-no to health care couldn’t stop talking about the need to treat mental illness.

“So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed,” said Trump.

“This individual appears to have significant issues with mental illness,” said Senator Ted Cruz.

Florida’s Republican Gov. Rick Scott talked about the need to care for the “mentally ill”.

Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar II promised that the administration will be “laser-focused on getting Americans with mental illness the help they need.”

Gentlemen, heal yourselves!

The real insanity facing this country is the lethal delusion of elected leaders that we can go right on making guns more accessible than drinking water without, on a daily basis, having to bury school children, concert-goers and other innocents. The Florida massacre was the 30th mass shooting in a year not even two months old. There were 345 such shootings in 2017. While many countries have a mental illness rate far in excess of that for the United States, no other nation comes close to us in terms of the number of guns or mass shootings.

“Insanity,” goes the old quote of disputed origin, “is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” In this case, It’s a cliché that speaks truth to power. Republicans mourn and grieve over the victims of the latest shooting spree, mumble their mantra about not blaming the guns, and keep doing nothing to restrict their availability. And then wait a day or so for the next mass killing, rinse and repeat. Think that’s insane? It’s just the tip of the GOP’s mental disturbance iceberg when it comes to this issue.

For example:

MISSOURI state Rep. Mike Leara introduced a bill last month that would make it a felony for any of his fellow lawmakers to propose legislation that would restrict an individual’s right to buy, carry and shoot guns.

FEDERAL law prohibits the sale of a handgun to people under 21, but it allows 18-year-olds – like the Parkland shooter – to buy semiautomatic assault rifles.

VIRGINIA Republican legislators recently killed a bill that would have required a minor to get parental permission before keeping guns in their home. They also buried a measure that would have required licensed child-care facilities to keep guns locked up while children were being cared for.

FLORIDA passed a law, later struck down in federal court, prohibiting physicians from talking to their patients about guns.

GEORGIA is home to numerous local ordinances requiring every home to be armed with at least one gun.

MONTANA voters approved a referendum giving local police authority to arrest any FBI agent who attempted to enforce one of the few meager federal gun regulations.

SOUTH DAKOTA allows all teachers, Kindergarten through grad school, to carry loaded guns in the classroom.

This is the real story of mental health and guns. Somewhere along the way, sanity was totally eliminated from what once was a healthy give-and-take on gun issues. Assault rifles have become more sacred than the lives of our children. It doesn’t get much crazier than that. The president’s sudden interest in reducing gun violence through mental health and school safety initiatives is a sad, cynical, transparent deflection from dealing with the only public policy issue that matters here: gun control. Just a year ago, Trump signed a bill that repealed an Obama era initiative that made it more difficult for people receiving Social Security disability for serious mental illness to buy guns. As he told the NRA last fall, “You came through for me, and I am going to come through for you.”

Two days before the Florida shooting, Trump submitted a budget request to Congress that called for a $25 million reduction in funds for national school safety programs, and for elimination of a $400 million grant program designed to help schools prevent bullying or provide mental health assistance.

The president routinely decries our “open borders” as a source of the “. . .loss of many innocent lives.” “This American carnage,” he said at his inauguration, “stops right here and stops right now.” Of course, it didn’t. Murders committed by illegal immigrants are a drop in the bucket compared to those carried out by American white men using semiautomatic assault weapons. The president doesn’t lift a finger to stop that kind of carnage. That’s not what coming through for the NRA is all about.

The noxious absolutism of Second Amendment gun worship is pathologically insane. Our Bill of Rights is a masterful document, but unlike Moses’ Commandments, the protections are not absolute. Speech is free, as they say, but you can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater. Why should the right to bear arms mean carte blanche access to rapid-fire military assault weapons? As every other industrialized country has recognized, there is a need to balance the rights of gun enthusiasts with legitimate concerns for public safety. A society that puts a gun collector’s right to stockpile AR-15 rifles above the lives of school children is, well, mentally ill.

ENDING THE SHUTDOWN MAY HAVE AVERTED A DREAMER NIGHTMARE

Senate Democrats didn’t mess up by ending an embryonic government shutdown. Their mistake was using the tactic in the first place. Quickly retreating from a bad decision, a foreign concept to the current president and his Republican sycophants, is smart and effective leadership.

Linking immigration rights for the Dreamers with the GOP spending bill made sense earlier this month – an eternity ago in this bizarre political climate. Senate Republicans needed Democratic votes to pass a resolution keeping the government open. Democrats needed to find a way to keep undocumented young people brought into the country as children from being deported. Donald Trump told the world that he wanted to save the Dreamers through a “bill of love” and would sign any bipartisan immigration measure the Senate came up with.

The Capitol was hardly ensconced in a spirit of peace and love, but – for one brief, shining moment – there was real anticipation of at least a little give-and-take, the likes of which have not been seen here in more than a generation. Then Trump offered his “shithole countries” soliloquy, and Kumbaya morphed into a war chant.

The Donald’s boasts about his stellar negotiating skills have all the credibility of his claim to the be the world’s least racist person. There isn’t a rule of effective negotiating that he doesn’t regularly violate, including the one about not going back on your word. Days after telling a bipartisan Senate delegation that he would accept whatever immigration plan they came up with, and two hours after signaling his agreement with their proposal, Trump did a complete reversal and embraced the entire draconian screed of the anti-immigration hawks.

Although the rug had been pulled out from under them, Democrats stayed the tactical course of making immigration the quid-pro-quo for producing the needed votes to avoid a shutdown. The narrative quickly changed. It was no longer about Democrats helping Republicans pass a budget bill in exchange for protecting the Dreamers. It had become, through optics pushed by right wing messaging, a matter of Democrats forcing a shutdown to protect illegal immigrants. Besides, the leverage had no juice. The Trumpian gang got where they are by promising to drain the swamp. They abhor government. It’s the Democrats who believe in government and what it can do to make people’s lives better. Although the Dreamers have had strong public support, most polls showed substantial public anxiety over a prolonged government shutdown on their behalf.

That left Democrats in a weakened strategic position. Closing the government was hardly an effective club to use on a party that dislikes government. Yes, the talking point here was that Republicans would suffer from a shutdown since they control Congress and the White House. But the reality was that government closed because Democrats insisted to impasse on an immigration deal in exchange for the spending measure. That had the potential, particularly for the long haul, of weakening public support for the Dreamers.

I get the angst and disappointment of my friends on the left, and particularly on the part of those young people who grew up as Americans and see the clock ticking on possible deportation to countries they view as foreign. The pre-shutdown rhetoric of Democratic leaders about there being no spending bill without taking care of the Dreamers was powerful, passionate and hopeful. But, despite the message of many self-help books, a determination to win doesn’t guaranty victory. A prolonged government shutdown was simply not the instrument to induce surrender by a majority party that cares nothing about the fate of young immigrants, government workers or the people they serve. It would be like kidnapping Hillary Clinton and asking Donald Trump to pay the ransom.

By agreeing to fund government for another three weeks, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer not only bought time, he also brought the narrative back where it belonged, namely on how to keep the Dreamers from being deported. No longer is Trump’s campaign machine cranking out ads about Democrats shutting down government in order to help “illegal aliens.” Instead, late this week, the president put the White House on record for the first time in support of a bill that would not only give work permits to about 1.8 million young immigrants but would also grant them a path to citizenship.

Yes, Trump’s blink on the Dreamers, was in the context of an overall immigration proposal that would also include $25 billion in funding for his wall, along with severe reductions in the number of immigrants allowed into the country. It now seems more likely than ever that a bipartisan group in the Senate will produce a bill that follows the president’s position on the Dreamers but pushes back in some other areas.

To be sure, we are not yet at the end of the road on all of this. It remains very much an uphill battle for Democrats. They are, after all, Washington’s minority party right now. But hard, fruitful negotiations are still ongoing. And that would not be happening if the government remained shut down. The chatter would never have risen above the finger pointing.

Instead, the endgame offers two broad scenarios . One is a deal that overcomes the worst of right wing ideology and paves the way for nearly two million young people to become citizens. The other is, at the hands of Republicans, a defeat for any Dreamer protection legislation. That would be one more clarion call for a congressional realignment in this fall’s midterm elections. Either outcome is better than a protracted government shutdown with both sides accusing the other of causing it.

TRUMP’S SECOND YEAR IS ALREADY IN THE SHITTER

As dawn breaks on a second year of Republican control, our federal government dangles from this binary precipice of indelicate nuance: shitholes or shithouses? Which term did the president of the United States use to characterize third world countries of black and brown people? If this were a movie, now would be a good time to locate the nearest exit and use it. Who wants to watch such garbage? Alas, this is no celluloid fiction. It’s our life, our new reality, a bizarre sideshow of existence that isn’t likely to change anytime soon.

For those fortunate enough to have spent the past few days in a deep coma, here’s a quick recap: Donald Trump met with a few senators in an attempt to reach a bipartisan agreement on immigration. The meeting went badly. According to some participants, Trump kept complaining about having to take immigrants from Haiti and impoverished African countries he called “shitholes.” Instead of opening our borders to, say, “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”, Trump pushed for a “merit-based” system in which we would take only good, lutefisk-eating white folks from places like Norway.

Well, the shithole hit the fan, causing a cascade of impassioned statements of repudiation from leaders throughout the world, Norway included. Initially, there was no denial from the White House. That’s because Trump surveyed his friends who told him not to worry since his base will love the comment. After a few days of constant heat, however, Trump and a couple Republican senators who were at the meeting said the president’s exact words were not “shithole countries.” That created a narrative that Trump had been misquoted, that he never uttered the word “shithole”. It turns out, according to the Washington Post, that what the Republican senators heard Trump say was that he didn’t want to take in people from “shithouse countries.” A quick review of etymological research shows no measurable differences between “shithole” and “shithouse”.

Yet, this unique linguistic dialectic, together with Trump’s incendiary message that non-whites from troubled countries should be kept out of the U.S., is now threating to shut down the federal government. Congress needs to pass a spending bill by Friday to avoid such closure, and part of that package was supposed to include immigration reform. Some sort of deal may yet emerge, but for the moment the shithole/shithouse conundrum seems to have brought what’s left of governance to a standstill.

Despite headlines decrying the president’s “vulgarity,” his use of a four-letter word for excrement – “s***”, as many news outlets coded it – was not the offense here. What really offended, stung and hurt was his raw, brazen racism and xenophobia driving his position that our borders should be closed to dark-skinned people from poor countries.

No, this is nothing new. Donald Trump kicked off his campaign by calling Mexicans racists. He suggested fighting terrorism by executing Muslims with bullets dipped in pig blood. He has called black people “lazy” and insisted that all Haitian immigrants have AIDS. His complete list of racist credentials takes up far more real estate than is available here. The most astute and best researched analyses of the 2016 election points to racism as the most important factor driving the Trump victory (here, here and here). So why all the shock over Trump calling impoverished black countries shitholes?

Because Trumpism, in all of its vile and despicable manifestations, remains a relatively new phenomena. We still remember and cling to the real spirit and essence of the American ideal: equality, justice, liberty and opportunity for all. There is precious little on the national scene to feel good about today. But, for now at least, we have this: wide spread disgust with a president who vulgarizes those core values that make it possible for America to be great. Let us hope we never reach the point of NOT being shocked, outraged and saddened by the racist words, actions and policies of this president. Trumpism must never be normalized.

There is another reason why many are shocked by what we’ve come to expect and anticipate from our president. It is difficult to process a constant stream of horror in daily White House utterances and tweets. While we struggle to wrap our heads around Trump’s taunt that he has a bigger nuclear button than North Korea’s, we are hit with the news that the President believes himself to be a “stable genius.” Before we can figure that one out, the shithole story breaks. We are so busy processing all this really weird shit, as George W. Bush might call it, we all have different a-ha moments.

Except, that is, for the Republican establishment. It appears that nothing, not even self-preservation, will dislodge the GOP’s shameful and embarrassing enablement of a pathetic, solipsistic, racist president who continues to degrade the party’s brand on a daily basis. Congressional Republican leaders have had a year of way too many opportunities to cut their losses and distance themselves from a maniacal autocrat who never cared a whit about them or their party. Playing word games, and ignoring the broader racist message, won’t save them now. He’s their president. They own him. Let them all be buried in the same shithole.

SAVOR THE MOMENT: ROY MOORE ISN’T A SENATOR

Sometimes it takes a really good day for us to grasp just how bad things are. For liberals, yesterday was that kind of day. Those of us on the left end of spectrum went into a euphoric frenzy at 9:24 p.m. CST Tuesday. That’s when the AP called the special Alabama Senate election for the Democrat. We tossed exclamation points at social media posts like drunken sailors, and wondered when it was that we last felt this good. The consensus was either Woodstock or Obama’s first inauguration.

Then we woke up the next morning. It still felt good, except for those of us in the geezerhood who should know better than to over-pump our arthritic arms into the wee hours of a new day. Yet, there in the dawn’s new light, we slowly grasped the perspective and parameters of our jubilation. The source of our abiding joy was the surprising realization that a disgusting, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, accused child molester of a troll named Roy Moore was not going to become a United States Senator from Alabama. Against all odds, he was defeated by a margin of 1.5 percent by a seemingly decent, if unknown, guy named Doug Jones, the first Democrat in more than 25 years to win a state-wide election in Alabama.

Hubert H. Humphrey, an architect of modern liberalism, once said that the moral test of government is how it treats “those who are in the dawn of life; . . . those who are in the twilight of life; . . . and those who are in the shadows of life . . .” This was the great moral fiber that paved the way for Head Start, Social Security, Medicare, the Civil Rights Act and anti-poverty programs. Those were the kind of victories that liberals once cheered in a bygone era.

Now we get excited when the U.S. Senate is spared a despicable worm like Moore, twice removed from his state judgeship for a complete disregard for the rule of law. That’s how bad things are in this country. Keeping one more malignant goiter from attaching itself to our body politic is as good as it gets for liberals right now. We have every right to savor the electoral demise of Roy Moore and, with it, the stinging loss it represents for his fellow traveler in bigotry and sexual misconduct, Donald J. Trump. After all, Humphrey also taught us this about navigating a successful progressive movement: “Never give in and never give up.” Small victories have a way of multiplying into bigger ones.

That’s not to deny the core reality that these are painfully dark, grim times in these United States. We have a moronic, megalomaniac of a president who, according to Washington Post fact checkers, lied 1,628 times during his first 298 days in office. He has taken incivility to new heights and has emboldened and licensed an army of freelance bigots to bully, castigate and demean people on the basis of their race, religion, sexual orientation and national origin. Meanwhile, Congressional Republicans are on the verge of passing a tax bill that will redistribute even more wealth to corporations and the rich, at the expense of middle class families struggling to maintain a decent standard of living.

Does the Alabama Senate election change any part of this bleak equation? No, at least not immediately. But it gives us something that is essential to our movement for transformational change. It gives us hope. At a time of intense cynicism and hyper-partisanship, one of the most Republican states in the country said values, decency and dignity matter more than party and Trump’s ego-driven agenda. Granted, Alabama voters didn’t deliver that message by a large margin. But they said it in a way that counted. Given what we’ve been through this year, that’s worth a few moments of euphoria.

IT’S TIME TO ATONE FOR BILL CLINTON’S SEXUAL HARASSMENT

If our come-to-Jesus moment on sexual harassment is going to amount to anything other than a passing blip, we need to accept the painfully awkward truth that Bill Clinton should have resigned the presidency for carrying on a sexual relationship with an intern.

For 20 years, we have fooled ourselves into a false state of moral ambivalence over Clinton. We gave a pass to a popular president whose uncanny ability to compartmentalize turned him into a role model for every would-be sexual harasser. This is not a time to let old wounds fade away. There can be no healing for what ails us until they are reopened and appropriately treated.

The only prominent Democrat who has had the courage to speak this truth is Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. In an interview with the New York Times podcast, “The New Washington,” Gillibrand was asked if, based on what we now know about inappropriate sexual behavior, Clinton should have resigned when his relationship with the intern, Monica Lewinsky, came to light. In a rare move for a member of Congress, the senator sat in silence while formulating her answer, which was: “Yes, I think that is the appropriate response.” Within hours, the Democratic establishment pounced. Philippe Reines, a long-time political operative for the Clintons, sent this tweet to Gillibrand: “Over 20 yrs you took the Clinton’s endorsements, money and seat. Hypocrite. Interesting strategy for 2020 primaries. Best of luck.”

That is precisely the kind of party line, patriarchal , protect-the-good-old-boys thinking that has allowed sexual harassment to run rampant in most of our male-dominated institutions, which is to say 98 percent of them. Look, Bill Clinton was guilty of classic, textbook sexual harassment. It was not a close case. Lewinsky was a 22-year-old intern. Clinton was the president of the United States. It’s hard to imagine a greater power disparity. When White House aides grew suspicious of the relationship, Lewinsky was forced to move from the White House to the Pentagon. When she complained, Clinton promised to bring her back after he won reelection. Her employment conditions were based on a sexual relationship with the leader of the free world.

Incredibly, there was no serious push to remove Clinton from office for this gross abuse of power. Yes, he was impeached by the House and acquitted in the Senate, but the charge was lying about the sex, not engaging in it with an intern. Once framed as a fidelity issue, as in a married man lying about having sex outside the marriage, Clinton’s defense garnered empathy in Washington political circles, even among conservative Republicans. The only problem was that it shouldn’t have been about lying; it should have been about a boss having sex with an intern.

So, does any of this really matter now? Yes, it matters mightily because the Clinton-Lewinsky episode is the original sin supporting a perverse double standard when it comes to sexual harassment and misconduct by elected leaders. In just the past few weeks, this amazing reckoning over sexual behavior has banished all sorts of private sector A-listers to the has-been junk heap of fallen careers: Matt Lauer, Garrison Keillor, Charlie Rose, Kevin Spacey, Harvey Weinstein, etc. Yet, Roy Moore, accused of stalking and fondling teenage girls as young as 14 when he was in his 30s, may well be elected to the Senate from Alabama later this month. Many Alabama voters say they don’t approve of Moore’s conduct but they like his politics. Sound familiar? That’s what a lot of presidential voters said last year when they elected Donald Trump after more than a dozen women accused him of sexual misconduct, and he was heard on tape boasting of such behavior. And, of course, that’s what many of us said back in the 1990s about Bill Clinton: he might be a cad, but he was a good president who led us through two terms of peace and prosperity.

Of course, there is more than Monica Lewinsky in this story. Clinton’s accusers of sexual misconduct have told stories ranging from rape to groping. Sadly, these women became pawns of anti-Clinton conservatives because nobody else would hear them out. The Clinton team attacked them relentlessly, not unlike what the right is doing now to Roy Moore’s accusers. Remember this line from former Clinton staffer James Carville?: “If you drag a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find.”

People ask why women wait so long to report sexual misconduct. Knowing that they would be called trailer park trash probably had a lot to do with it. Now is the time to the bury that repulsive form of advocacy. Here’s what else needs to go: the notion that a leader’s politics should mitigate against serious and proven transgressions of sexual misconduct and harassment. There is no other way to assure that our workplaces and our governments are free from the toxicity of sexual harassment. There can be no more passes for voting the right way.

If we are really ready to move beyond ruthless victim bashing, and deal head-on with the insidious forces of sexual misconduct, we have to own up to the fact that Bill Clinton didn’t deserve, and shouldn’t have been given, a pass. His choice to have sex with an intern was as disqualifying for retaining his office as it would have been for a corporate executive who engaged in the same behavior.

At some point in this fast-moving morality play on sexual misbehavior, there is apt to be more focus on those still-pending accusations against Donald Trump. If Democrats want to engage in that dialogue with any respect and credibility, they need to follow Sen. Gillibrand’s lead and acknowledge the obvious: Clinton should have resigned. That’s the only way the terrain moving forward is going to be changed.

THE REAL CESSPOOL OF POLITICS: CREEPY GUYS WHO GROPE

Another day, another cringe-worthy tale of men who grope. Following the news hasn’t been this depressing since the body count days of the Vietnam War. Tongues jammed into mouths, breasts fondled, hands up skirts, all unilaterally executed by men because nothing stopped them, not their sense of decency, not their warped notion of consent, and certainly not the power imbalance that gave rise to these encounters.

It has been said – to the point of becoming a cliché – that we are now engaged in a “national conversation” about sexual harassment and assault. If this little chat is going to take on any real heft, we desperately need a change of venue to someplace – anyplace – outside of Washington. The nation’s capital is an unholy shrine to the very worst of male privilege and the notion that sex on demand is a perquisite of power, one that rises to sexual misconduct only in the opposition party. Letting these folks revamp the moral hierarchy of sexual interaction would be like turning a conversation on pedophilia over to the College of Cardinals.

Only in Washington would a “national conversation” on sexual propriety devolve into partisan chatter over the comparative sins (alleged of course), of Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama, and Democratic Senator Al Franken of Minnesota. What’s worse, a 32-year-old Republican stalking and fondling teenage girls as young as 14, or a 55-year-old Democrat forcing his tongue into the mouth of a fellow USO performer and then placing his hands on or near her breasts while she slept? As an exercise in moral relativism, the allegations against Moore are far more serious than those against Franken. Yet, if this moment of reckoning is to be truly transformative, our “national conversation” has to be about more than predation parsing. It also has to go beyond the political leanings of the accusers, as was the case in both the Moore and Franken stories.

Most of the key players in Washington are currently incapable of looking at sexual misconduct accusations through anything other than the lens of their own political interests. So you have GOP congressional leaders urging Moore to drop out of the race because they believe his accusers. Of course they never wanted the albatross of Roy Moore in the Senate in the first place, and are worried about the adverse consequences a pederast senator might have on the 2018 elections. Yet, this same crew of Republican leaders remains perpetually silent on the sexual misconduct accusations made by 16 women against Donald Trump. Meanwhile, the Donald is rooting for Moore to win the December 12 election because “we don’t need another liberal person in there.”

This issue was easier to deal with six weeks ago when the only culprit was Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. There was such moral clarity then. The evidence was as overwhelming as it was sickening. The guy made a career out of forcing himself on hundreds of women. Police in multiple jurisdictions are pursing possible rape charges (here, here and here). For those inclined to view morality through a binary lens of black and white, good and evil, Harvey was pure black and evil.

Then, thanks in large part to the #MeToo movement, things started to get a bit more complicated. Women – and some men – who had been silently churning with the pain of sexual abuse for years, if not decades, started to rise up and name their predators. The list has been growing daily, even hourly. In addition to Moore and Franken, here is a small sampling of the accused: Democratic Rep. John Conyers, television host Charlie Rose, New York Times White House reporter Glenn Thrush, comedian Louis C.K., NPR executive Michael Oreskes, New Republic president and publisher Hamilton Fish, actor Kevin Spacey, political reporter and author Mark Halperin, former president George H.W. Bush and 40 state legislators from 20 states. The allegations run the gamut from rape to fanny pinching. The accused share two common denominators. They all achieved outstanding success in their given fields, and they all stand accused of forcing sexual contact on multiple unwilling partners.

What needs to be part of our “national conversation” is that sexual misconduct is not a behavioral aberration limited to Neanderthal thugs. Men we have come to respect and admire, whether for their art, intellect or leadership, are just as capable – and culpable – as the more stereotypical villains when it comes to sexually harassing and abusing women. We need to grapple with a deeply embedded and toxic cognitive dissonance that separates the virtually universal notion that all sexual contact must be consensual, and the behavior of an alarmingly large number of men whose actions blatantly defy that principle.

This isn’t going to be easy. The daily deluge of #MeToo stories has revealed a gaping hole in our social fabric, one that tears into the basic constructs of human interaction. Sadly, it’s something we should have dealt with long ago. Instead, it comes now, right smack in the middle of one of the most hyper partisan battles ever waged. We have all picked our sides and suited up. The most natural inclination in combat is to rush to the aid of a fallen comrade. Yet, that approach is totally inconsistent with a meaningful national conversation about sexual misconduct.

On a personal level, the Al Franken accusations really hurt. As both a liberal and a native Minnesotan, I put him on the same elevated tier as my other home state political heroes: Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale and Paul Wellstone. I understand that the accusations against Franken are significantly less severe than most of the others. I’ve also read the stories suggesting that Republicans set him up. It still hurts. A good man made bad choices. He is not alone. And that is precisely why this eternal plague of sexual misconduct is so insidious and pervasive. It’s not just the serial predators like Weinstein, Moore and Trump, it’s also all those good guys who made some bad choices and added to the #MeToo Chorus.

Our challenge now is to learn from this. Most guys know the rules. What they have trouble with is the boneheaded notion that there is a waiver for frat parties, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. It might help to read the #MeToo statements and absorb the deep, lasting, tormenting pain of those who have been abused. This has to stop. Now.

DONALD TRUMP: AMERICA’S MOST UNPATRIOTIC PRESIDENT

When it comes to demonstrating patriotic respect for this country and all that it stands for, Donald J. Trump takes a knee. To be sure, it is a metaphorical knee, totally lacking the focused purpose and quiet grace of a Colin Kaepernick or Eric Reid. For the first time in American history, we have a deeply unpatriotic president who repeatedly spews disdain and disgust on the very foundations of government he was elected to lead.

Hours after an alleged terrorist killed eight people in Lower Manhattan last week, Trump went on a rant about the need to quickly execute the suspect. Here’s what he said: “We need quick justice and we need strong justice – much quicker and much stronger than we have right now. Because what we have right now is a joke, and it’s a laughingstock. And no wonder so much of this stuff takes place.”

Now, there was probably a guy on a barstool in every American tavern who said the same thing last week. But none of them were elected president of the United States. It is easy, and sometimes therapeutic for coping purposes, to tune out the daily stream of inanities from our 45th president. But this one is too stunningly deplorable to ignore. Read that quote again. The leader of our “home of the free” called our system of justice a “joke” and a “laughingstock”. It’s one thing for a citizen, or even a political candidate, to besmirch the integrity of our government. Dissent is as American as apple pie. But when you occupy the Oval Office, when you are this country’s chief representative to the world, those words reverberate with an unpatriotic fervor that no kneeling NFL player has ever approached or contemplated.

But the Donald was just getting warmed up. Later in the week, the president had some choice words for the non-imprisonment sentence handed down in one of the country’s most prominent desertion cases. In 2009, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl walked away from his military base in Afghanistan, was captured by the Taliban and spent five years in captivity. He pled guilty to desertion and was sentenced to a dishonorable discharge but no prison time. Within minutes, Trump’s Twitter fingers pronounced the judge’s decision “a complete disgrace to our country and to our military.”

As commander in chief, Trump outranks the military judge who conducted a lengthy hearing on Bergdahl’s sentencing. Nevertheless, that judge, Army Col. Jeffrey Nance, had to consider a key defense argument that the president had stomped on Bergdahl’s due process rights. As a candidate, Trump repeatedly called Bergdahl a “dirty rotten traitor” and said he should be executed or returned to the Taliban. As president, he recently referred back to those remarks, indicating they still applied. Judge Nance said Trump’s comments concerned him and warranted mitigation in sentencing.

So, in the course of three days, this president managed to denigrate the country’s justice system by calling it a “joke”, and pull the rug out from under military jurisprudence by labeling a judge’s decision as a “complete disgrace”. But he wasn’t quite done. Just as the special prosecutor in the Russia investigation released two indictments and a guilty plea against former Trump campaign aides, the president renewed his call for an investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails, insisting once again that she belongs in jail. Like a responsive reading in church, Trump automatically responds to adversity with the call for Clinton’s incarceration. After all, he promised in a 2016 debate that he would put her in jail if he won, a pledge that seems to have gone the way of the Mexican wall and Obamacare repeal.

Not only are these presidential rants against our justice system anti-American, they are also counterproductive to the Donald’s own cause. Bergdahl, for example, would probably have been given prison time if Trump hadn’t called for his execution. In the case of the recent New York terrorist attack, prosecutors anticipate difficulties in jury selection because of the president’s prejudicial remarks. And if any career Justice Department attorneys ever entertained an idea of going after Clinton, Trump’s repeated calls for that prosecution would undoubtedly hold them back just to avoid the aura of political persecution.

“But you know the saddest thing,” Trump said in a radio interview last week, “because I’m the president of the United States I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department. I’m not supposed to be involved with the FBI. I’m not supposed to be doing the things that I would love to be doing. And I’m very frustrated by it.” Poor guy. If he had known he couldn’t obstruct justice by tossing his enemies in jail like they do in a banana republic, he would have never taken the job.

Despite the flags he uses as props, despite his National Anthem militancy, despite his “America first” rhetoric, Donald Trump does not love this country. The core of this nation’s democracy is predicated on an independent judiciary, one that dispenses justice through the rule of law, not by political fiat or authoritarian dictate. It’s a system based on a presumption of innocence and a fair trial, not an “off with their heads” order from a strongman dictator. It’s not perfect, this system of ours, and it needs periodic care and maintenance by lawmakers. But for 241 years this has been the essence of American justice. Far from being a joke or a laughing stock, it’s who we are as a county. It’s what America is all about. To reject that, Mr. President, is to reject America. It doesn’t get more unpatriotic than that.

TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES? TRUMP DODGES BOTH

Washington is once again awash with talk of presidential falsehoods. One Republican senator decried Donald Trump’s “flagrant disregard for the truth.” Another said the president is “utterly untruthful”. A neutral fact-checking service says close to 70 percent of Trump’s statements it examined were false.

Trump calls his tax plan a “middle class miracle” that will be “fantastic” for workers and make the rich pay more, when it actually does just the opposite. He says former president Obama never phoned families of fallen soldiers, when the record is replete with such calls. Major media organizations have kept a running catalog of the president’s false statements, now deep into four figures (here, here, here and here). Evidence of the president’s estrangement from the truth is so overwhelming, that a substantial majority of Republicans think he is a prolific liar, but still support him.

Yet, the Donald’s problem is not that he lies a lot. It’s that truth is utterly without value or meaning to him. The president is simply agnostic on the subject. Truth and falsity are equally irrelevant in his world. The words that flow from his mouth and Twitter app, are visceral, not factual. They are servants to his limited, binary emotional wiring: they either heap grandiose praise on himself or viciously attack others. It matters not one iota to him whether those words are true or false.

In fact, many of Trump’s falsehoods are not lies. Lying is a conscious act of deception. That means a liar must know the truth in order to deceive an audience with the lie. Think about some of the president’s classic claims: Mexico will pay for it; the New York Times is failing; Obamacare is dead. This is not a guy who methodically determines the truth and then disguises it with a lie. He simply goes with whatever jumps into his head, with whatever sounds good to him, with zero regard for the truth of the matter.

When, in 1972, Richard Nixon said he had no knowledge of the Watergate burglary, he was lying. When, in 1986, Ronald Reagan said he did not trade arms for hostages, he was lying. When, in 1998, Bill Clinton said he did not have sexual relations with that woman, Monica Lewinsky, he was lying. These men knew the truth and strategically replaced it with a lie. They were not the only presidents to have done so. But Trump is in a league of his own. Truth does not matter to him. He doesn’t know what it is, and has no desire to learn. This makes him, as noted philosopher Harry Frankfurt observed, a “greater enemy of truth” than a mere liar.

Trump’s former butler, Anthony Senecal, read a published claim by his boss that some of the tiles in the Mar-a-Largo beach club had been personally designed by Walt Disney. Surprised by that revelation, Senecal asked Trump if that was really true. His response: “Who cares?” That pretty much captures this post-truth presidency. The leader of the free world, our commander in chief, the keeper of the nuclear codes, cares not one whit about truth.

Let me introduce you to someone who does care. Her name is Shannon Mulcahy. She is a 43-year-old single mother trying to support herself, two kids, a disabled grandchild, and two dogs in a small town near Indianapolis. Until a few months ago, Shannon worked at the Rexnord factory in Indy helping produce the Cadillac of steel bearings. She’d been there for 18 years. In an interview with the New York Times and the newspaper’s Daily podcast, Shannon said she loved the work as much as she did the good pay and benefits provided by her union contract. Last October, Rexnord announced that it was closing the plant, laying off its 300 employees and moving the work to Mexico. Shannon rushed to her car in the employee lot and started crying. Just like that, her middle class life began to crumble and she had no idea how she was going to support her family. Then came the tweets from candidate Trump, blasting Rexnord by name for “viciously firing all of its workers” and moving to Mexico. “No more,” tweeted the candidate.

Shannon never paid much attention to politics but had voted for Obama. Donald Trump and his tweets captured her attention like no politician ever had. He gave her and her coworkers hope at a time they needed it the most. “All of us were hopeful,” she told the Daily. “A lot of us there at Rexnord was thinking that he could actually step in and stop what was going on there. (If) he’s the president, he can do whatever he wants, right? I mean he’s kind of like a cowboy. He says things that a lot of past presidents wouldn’t say. The way he talked about American jobs and all that, I was thinking this could be the opportunity where . . . you know, a lot of our jobs come back from overseas. That would be awesome.”

So Shannon went political. Trump was her lifeline to a job that put meaning in her life and food on her family’s table. She conducted her own social media campaign on his behalf. She was thrilled when he won and then waited for him to come riding into town on his white horse to save the factory. It was like waiting for Godot. The cowboy never came. The plant closed. In a year filled with disillusion, Trump was just one more hard knock for Shannon. “After he got in there,” she said, “he done forgot about us and we don’t matter anymore.”

Sadly, Shannon, you never mattered to him. Nothing matters to this man except himself. Certainly not truth. His words have no shelf life. They exist only in the impulse of the moment. He makes us all long for the good old days when presidents only lied every once in a while.

IT’S NOT JUST TRUMP – OUR WHOLE SYSTEM IS BROKEN

Our body politic is totally messed up. If a family member was as out of control and dysfunctional as the U.S. Congress, we would have staged an intervention long ago. Could it be that we are so sidetracked by the aberrant, maniacal antics of an unhinged president that we can’t bring ourselves to focus on the much broader problem of a broken system?

It is, after all, difficult to have a serious conversation about realigning the architecture of governance over the constant din of presidential tantrums, tweeted threats of nuclear annihilation and never-ending Russia investigations. Yet, if we step back from the chaos of the moment and examine how we got there, this glaring truth emerges: Donald Trump is a symptom, not the cause, of our problem. It may be hard to remember, but our democracy was pretty out of whack before the Donald landed in the White House. In fact, that’s how he got there.

The heart of our systemic problem is a deep toxicity of tribalism that has coagulated in the veins of our politics, blocking the free flow of creative, constructive, problem-solving solutions. For most of this country’s history, elected representatives from both parties were able to tackle major issues through a rugged-but-productive give-and-take. It wasn’t always pretty, but it worked. All that slowed to a crawl, then to a virtual stop, over the past decade.

A 2014 study examined the productivity of Congress over the years by measuring the number of major issues that body failed to address. It found that the volume of gridlock had doubled since 1950, with 75% of key legislation dying by deadlock. Things have only gotten worse. Despite single-party control of the House, Senate and the presidency, not a single salient issue has been resolved this year. Small wonder that 80% of Americans disapprove of Congress. Even before last year’s election, 70% of Democratic activists said they were afraid of Republicans, while 62% of the GOP said they were afraid of Democrats. That’s a level of hyper partisanship never before recorded or experienced.

Analysts offer a multiplicity of causes for this congressional quagmire. Among them: growing income disparity, free-flow of corporate money in campaigns, racism, and an expanding right flank in the Republican Party, exacerbated by gerrymandered reapportionment and primary battles between the GOP mainstream and the right. On top of those factors, the relative parity between the two parties creates an intense competition. The result is that making the other side look bad is more important than passing productive legislation.

Although this strategic dysfunction set in well over a decade ago, it was not openly acknowledged. That all changed in 2010 when Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell came out of the closet and announced that his top legislative goal was to make sure then-president Obama did not get a second term. It’s been downhill ever since. A new breed of hardline conservatives, ranging from the Senate’s Ted Cruz to the House’s Freedom Caucus, got elected by bucking the Republican establishment. As the Wall Street Journal noted, these folks think nothing of closing the government over the debt ceiling or Planned Parenthood without the slightest expectation of success. Such “unbending opposition,” says the Journal, “is not a means. It is an end in itself.”

It was in that kind of atmosphere, that the Democrats, enjoying a rare bicameral majority in 2010, did something that had never been done in modern congressional history. It passed a major bill, the Affordable Care Act, without a single vote from the opposition party. The Republicans seized the moment, coined the term “Obamacare” and have been staging exorcisms ever since. Obama became the source of all evil for those on the right. Trump didn’t write that script. He just picked it up and went with it. Meanwhile, particularly in the last two years of his presidency, Obama gave up on an intransigent Congress and used executive orders to put as much of his program into place as possible. He sealed a deal with Iran on his own, created a legal status for the dreamers, issued numerous rules and regulations on the environment, and negotiated the Paris climate change pact.

“We have a president,” Trump said during his campaign, “that can’t get anything done so he just keeps signing executive orders all over the place.” Last week, Trump signed his 49th executive order, the most of any president (at this point of his term) in more than 50 years. He has managed to reverse the bulk of Obama’s executive actions. At this moment, Obamacare continues to breathe only through the ineptitude of its would-be executioners.

This schizophrenic approach to governance is not what the founders had in mind. Yes, power needs to change hands at the direction of the electorate, but the entirety of our domestic programs and commitments to other countries has never been discarded en masse. Until 2010, every major legislative package (Social Security, Medicare, Civil Rights, Voting Rights, etc.) was passed with votes from both parties. None of those laws were repealed when control of Congress changed.

Partisanship is an inherent component of our democratic process, but partisanship on steroids, divorced from cooperation and constructive engagement, is a lethal anathema to good governance.

An amazingly prophetic George Washington, in his final address as president, warned that extreme partisanship would lead not just to a revenge-seeking loop between the parties, but ultimately to authoritarianism. Said our first president: “The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to see security and repose in the absolute power of an individual (who) . . .turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.” As if he had the vision of 2017 in front of him, Washington then suggested that this evil of hyper-partisanship will open “the door to foreign influence and corruption.”

Before it’s too late, we need to return to a political system where the needs of the people outweigh the needs of the politicians.