Tag: Hillary Clinton

APES, CUNTS & TWITTER, OH MY!

What’s worse on the hierarchy of insults: calling a black person an ape or the president’s daughter a cunt? That insightful question is at the heart of our latest national conversation. Remember when our national conversations focused on substantive, compelling issues, like race, sexual harassment, gun control and income disparity? We are so through the looking glass right now, it’s hard to distinguish a Saturday Night Live sketch from the Nightly News. We have become our own parody.

Yet, for one, brief shining moment, it seemed that the hateful, racist, misogynistic depravity that has been gushing into our cultural veins since the 2016 presidential election had finally encountered a substantial abatement. A major corporation, ABC, acted against significant financial interests in an unambiguous repudiation of racism. The Disney-owned company summarily canceled the “Roseanne” show after its star, Roseanne Barr, tweeted that former Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett, an African-American, looked like the offspring of “the Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes.”

Channing Dungey, president of ABC Entertainment, called Barr’s tweet “abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values.” For at least 24 hours, hardly anyone disagreed with her. It was an amazing, almost redemptive, moment in our Trump-induced dystopia. A corporate conglomerate slaughtered its cash cow in order to take a principled stand against racism. There was no instant rebuttal from the right, no white nationalist defense of the centuries-old African-simian racist trope. You could almost make yourself believe that there was a national consensus that this kind of blatant, hateful bigotry was simply wrong and unacceptable. It was so pre-Trump.

Then comedian Samantha Bee called Ivanka Trump a cunt, and all hell broke loose. Bee, on her cable show, had shown a warm, loving picture of Ivanka and her young son, and contrasted that touching parental moment with the Trump Administration’s policy of separating children from their immigrant parents. Said the comic, “You know, Ivanka, that’s a beautiful photo of you and your child. But let me just say, one mother to another, do something about your dad’s immigration practices, you feckless cunt!”

The Twittersphere was apoplectic with demands for equal justice for foulmouthed entertainers, an insistence that if Roseanne had to be sacrificed for her racist criticism of an Obama confidant, then surely Samantha should be fired for calling Trump’s daughter a cunt. Needless to say, the illusion that ABC’s principled stand in canceling “Roseanne” was a positive turning point in our culture wars, was now dead. What had briefly looked like a constructive consensus was now a full frontal battle between ape and cunt, a bizarre false equivalency between racial hatred and the use of a crude profanity.

The ensuing dialogue had nothing to do with civility or decency. It was all about politics, in the most decadent use of that term. Presidential Press Secretary Sarah Sanders announced that “such explicit profanity about female members of this administration will not be condoned,” leaving the door open, of course, to condone use of the c-word for Hillary Clinton, as many Trump t-shirts and campaign signs did during the 2016 campaign. Trump himself weighed into the battle, insisting that Bee be fired since that was the fate his buddy Roseanne suffered. That left us with yet one more unimaginable absurdity about the times in which we live: you can be elected president after admitting that you grab women by their pussies, but calling the first daughter a cunt is a dischargeable offense for a comedian.

Then the left fired back with numerous examples of Trump having used the c-word, along with the often told story of singer Ted Nugent calling Hillary Clinton a cunt and then being invited to dinner at the Trump Whitehouse. Moving right along with this scintillating intellectual exchange, the conservative surrebuttal hit its stride with counterclaims to Barr’s dismissal, including a Bill Maher episode featuring side-by-side pictures of Trump and an orangutan. As is so often the case with political discourse these days, the parties use whataboutism the same way a drunk uses a lamppost, more for support than illumination.

There is simply no moral equivalency between a brutally racist comment and the use of the c-word, particularly in this context since it was not used to demean women on the basis of their gender. Bee offered a sincere apology, as she should have. Her sin was not so much the offensiveness of the word, but the fact that its use predictably detracted from her overall valid message about the hypocrisy of Trump family values versus the treatment of immigrant families.

This is, obviously, a powerful word that packs a seismic etymological punch. Yet, it has not always been so offensive. In Middle English, the term was a standard reference for the female genitalia. The earliest reference to it in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the name of a 13th century London red light district street, Gropecuntlane. Chaucer used a variant for the word in two of his works. Shakespeare spun puns from the word in Hamlet and Twelfth Night. By the mid-1900s, the c-word had become quite notorious, generally considered one of the vilest of obscenities. It was used mostly by men to demean women, an angry, hateful, misogynistic slur, like “bitch” squared. That began to change in the 1990s. Many prominent women entertainers, prompted by playwright Eve Ensler and her The Vagina Monologues, began using the word, in effect reclaiming it from the misogynists. That new meaning was reflected in actress Sally Field’s reaction to this week’s brouhaha. Bee, she said, was “flat wrong to call Ivanka a cunt (because) cunts are powerful, beautiful, nurturing and honest.” So sayeth the Flying Nun.

As the dust begins to settle from this latest culture wars skirmish, we seem to be in a pretty good place. Roseanne remains canceled, and an apologetic Samantha is still going strong. When it comes to evil, racism trumps obscenity. After all, cunt is just a vowel movement away from can’t. Now, there’s a bumper sticker for you!

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.

TRUMP’S ONLY SUCCESS: LOWERING THE BAR FOR PRESIDENTIAL BEHAVIOR

If there is a twelve-step program for superlative dependency, someone should throw Donald Trump an intervention. Can you imagine his first support group meeting? “Hi, my name is Donald, and I’m a hyperbole abuser. In fact, I am the most marvelous, magnificent, outstanding hyperbole abuser who was ever born.” Needless to say, his road to linguistic recovery will be long and winding.

According to the Donald, every person he has hired or appointed is absolutely fantastic, even those he later fired or forced to resign. He claims (incorrectly) to have signed more legislation in his first six months than any other president. He once gave an unremarkable, but relatively gaffe-free, speech to a joint session of Congress. He claims it was the best oration ever uttered in the House chamber.

The same is true on the flip side. Trump never experiences run-of-the-mill adversity. It’s always horrendously horrible, beyond all compare. In what had to have been the absolute least uplifting commencement address on record, Trump told Coast Guard Academy graduates in May that he is the world’s most mistreated pol. Here’s how he characterized his allegedly unparalleled plight: “No politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly.” Never mind that other politicians – at home and abroad – have been assassinated, kidnapped and imprisoned. Donald has to endure CNN and Saturday Night Live. Cue the violin section. Boo hoo. Boo hoo.

Actually, Trump, in many ways, is the most Teflon president in modern history, a rare superlative he’s likely to reject. Throughout the campaign, and during the first six months of his presidency, he got by with more atrocities, flubs and mistakes than any of his predecessors. Who else could have mocked John McCain’s war record, belittled a Gold Star mother and revealed a proclivity for sexual assault, only to go on and become president? Trump entered the office with an expectations bar set so low a Trinidad limbo dancer couldn’t shimmy under it.

Let’s take a close look at just one class of White House transgressions, and compare the repercussions for Trump with those of his predecessors. Numerous presidential tongues have taken bad slips when it comes to declaring a person’s guilt or innocence. This can be quite problematic since the government’s prosecutorial arm – the U.S. Justice Department – serves under the president’s command. Legal experts, including Harvard’s Noah Feldman, say it is an impeachable “abuse of authority” for a president to accuse someone of committing a crime without evidence. It has happened not infrequently over the years. And, in every instance prior to January 20, 2016, the gaffe provoked an immediate dustup of criticism, usually followed by some sort of presidential mea culpa.

In 1970, President Nixon said Charles Manson was “guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders.” Since Manson’s trial had just gotten underway, the president’s declaration of guilt caused considerable pandemonium. Nixon apologized and walked his premature verdict back. In 1980, President Carter accused former attorney general Ramsey Clark and nine other Americans of a crime for defying his order to stay out of Iran. Carter’s declaration of guilt triggered a huge political blow up. Harvard’s Laurence Tribe called his remarks “a terrible blunder.” In 1988, President Reagan stunned his staff when he declared that Oliver North was not guilty in the Iran-Contra scandal, days after a grand jury indicted North on 23 charges. In 1998, President Clinton drew heavy criticism for saying that he didn’t think there should be a plea bargain in the Unabomber case because the defendant, Theodore J. Kaczynski, “if he’s guilty, killed a lot of people deliberately.” In 2009, President Obama opened a week-long media frenzy when he said the Cambridge, Massachusetts police department acted “stupidly” in the arrest of a black Harvard professor who was trying to get into his own home. Obama also took flack for implying that the alleged architect of the September 11 terrorist attacks would be found guilty and executed, should he be tried in U.S. Courts.

Trump, of course, soars far above the separation of powers concept, moonlighting as a wannabe Judge Judy. He pronounces someone’s criminal guilt on a near daily basis. Using Twitter as his gavel, the Donald dispenses his verdicts with terms like: “guilty as hell”, “totally illegal” and “so illegal”. The president has dispersed imaginary convictions for Hillary Clinton, her former campaign manager, John Podesta and his brother Tony; Obama and his former national security advisor, Susan Rice, and his former attorney general, Loretta Lynch; and recently fired FBI director James Comey. Just this morning, he accused his own attorney general and the acting FBI director of ignoring Hillary Clinton’s unspecified and unproven “crimes”. Unlike his predecessors, Trump has managed to issue these totally bogus claims of criminality against his political opponents with total impunity. In fact, they have become a staple of his presidency, akin to an innocuous proclamation for, say, National Condiment Appreciation Week.

Aside from a couple of obscure blogs, like the one you’re reading, there has been no public clamor about Trump bludgeoning his opponents with presidential criminal convictions. Yet, a single similar transgression by previous presidents kept the chattering class in a constant scold for days. This is just one of many ways in which this president has been held to a far lower standard than those who preceded him. There is an abundance of deficiencies that would invite rapt attention to any other president, but where Trump gets a pass. Like his speeches with the prosaic quality of a telephone book, his five-word sentence fragments that are utterly without meaning, his inability to know just what it is he doesn’t know, and his innate lack of intellectual curiosity.

Unfortunately, there is a lesson here for future presidents: If you want to deflect attention from your inherent inadequacies, be sure to collude with a foreign adversary, obstruct justice and tell lots of lies. Nobody will notice the other foibles.

NIXON’S GHOST TO TRUMP: I WAS BETTER THAN YOU!

The nation’s toxic presidency just hit a new low. And I’m not talking about the firing of FBI Director James Comey. The administration’s rock bottom moment of the past 24 hours came when the Nixon Library told the news media to stop comparing Donald Trump to Richard Nixon.

Less than an hour after Comey’s discharge was announced, major news outlets posted sidebars recalling the “Saturday Night Massacre” of 1973. For those not yet on Social Security – and those recipients with memory loss – here’s a quick scorecard from that October Saturday of 44 years ago: Slowly sinking from the Watergate break-in scandal, Nixon ordered his attorney general, Elliot Richardson, to fire Archibald Cox, who was then leading the independent Watergate investigation. Richardson refused the president’s order and resigned. Nixon then passed the order to the deputy attorney general, William Ruckelshaus, who also refused to fire Cox and resigned. That put Robert Bork, then solicitor general, in charge of the justice department. Bork carried out Nixon’s discharge order. Two days later the bumper stickers were out: “Impeach the Cox Sacker.” Ten months later, with impeachment proceedings underway, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency.

So, as the inevitable comparisons between Trump’s and Nixon’s motives to fire their investigators surfaced last night, this tweet, with the hashtag “notNixonian”, was sent out by the Richard Nixon Library: “President Nixon never fired the Director of the FBI.” You know you are in trouble when the ghost of Richard Nixon distances himself from you. In fairness to both sides of this intense Worst President Ever competition, it should be noted that Nixon didn’t have to fire his FBI director. J. Edgar Hoover died in sleep in May of 1972.

Although an obvious and inviting comparison, the 1973 “massacre” was not the first Nixonian image that jumped into my head as the Comey story broke. Instead, it was Nixon’s dogged insistence, expressed in a five word sentence at a November 17, 1973 news conference.

Here’s what Nixon said: “I am not a crook.”

Here’s what Trump wrote to Comey: “While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.”

In Nixon’s case, when a president is compelled to say he is not a crook, you can be pretty sure he is a crook. In Trump’s case, when a president is compelled to say he is not under FBI investigation, you know darn well he is under FBI investigation.

The most amazing aspect of this latest piece of Trump theater, is the president’s innate inability to follow his own script. Here’s how it was supposed to go: They get a nonpartisan, career deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, two weeks into the job, to write a memo recommending Comey’s discharge based on the handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. Trump sycophant, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, concurs with his deputy’s recommendation, setting the stage for the Donald to fire Comey on the basis of a Clinton investigation that Clinton believes put Trump in the White House.

Get it? The key storyline of this script is that the discharge is wholly apolitical; it’s all about integrity and good government. That’s why he’s firing the guy who messed up his opponent’s investigation. Okay, so it’s not the most believable scenario in the world; it was still their script, crafted in an inexperienced writers room, where everyone figured that Democrats would welcome Comey’s Clinton-linked firing because they blame him for her election loss. Of course, days earlier, according to the New York Times, Comey asked the Justice Department for additional funds for the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and a possible link to the Trump campaign. But that would be omitted from the script. This was about how badly the FBI guy bungled the Clinton matter. Just stick to that storyline and the public will be none the wiser. Then the star had to go and improvise. Badly. He had to throw in that seemingly non sequitur of a phrase, “While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation. . .” before telling the guy he is fired.

Early in my journalism career, I covered small town and village governments. There wasn’t a staff member in any of them who would have allowed a script like this to be performed. And there certainly wasn’t a mayoral aide who would have allowed their boss to allude to the very subject you are trying to avoid in discharging a department head. In a city of 20,000 people, political pros knew about optics, audience reaction and how to manage both. Those basics are either totally missing in this White House or are being ignored by a president who seems perpetually wired to deliver messages that go against his own interest.

Trump was madly tweeting this morning about Democrats who couldn’t stand Comey expressing outrage over his discharge. It was as if he really anticipated a Palm Sunday reception from the opposition for firing the point guy on the Russian interference investigation. The unanticipated blowback was so bad for the administration that Kellyanne Conway was released from the Witness Protection Program to run interference. She insisted to reporters last night that Comey was fired because Trump had “lost confidence in him,” not because of the Russian investigation. Think about that for a while. Based on what we know about this president, God help us all if we end up with a director of the FBI who has Trump’s confidence.

WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE OVER RUSSIA’S THEFT OF OUR ELECTION?

The biggest guessing game in Washington right now is what it will take for the Democrats to throw a major league temper tantrum over the antics of the incoming administration. How about a conclusion by the CIA and FBI that Russian espionage helped elect Donald Trump? Wait, that actually happened, didn’t it? It was easy to miss because the reaction from the loyal opposition was more of a whimper than a wail.

House Democratic leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., normally no shrinking violet when it comes to pitched rhetoric, responded to the bombshell with these uncharacteristically modulated sentences: “This is not (about) overturning this election. This is about making sure it doesn’t happen again.”

In the Senate, incoming Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, said the unanimous consensus by the country’s top intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the election to help Trump win was “simultaneously stunning and not surprising.” He and Pelosi then pushed for a bipartisan congressional investigation. Watergate and 9/11 eventually had their investigations, but they were preceded by well-deserved rhetorical flourishes aimed at setting a moral tone for the country.

Obviously, such an inquiry is necessary. But from the standpoint of leveraging power and public opinion in dealing with Team Trump, particularly as a minority party, it is far from sufficient. I’ve never been an advocate of frivolously jumping into battles. Anger is not a strategy, but used sparingly and selectively, it can be an effective tactic, particularly when laced with a dose or two of righteous indignation. Given the enormity of evil associated with Russian spies pressing their fingers on the scales of our democracy, it’s hard to think of a better time to let loose with that tactic. As Rabbi Hillel so wisely and rhetorically asked, “If not now, when?”

Now is the time for Democratic leaders to fan out to the networks and cable shows, talking points in hand. Now is the time for them to scream from the rooftops about an election that was stolen from the American people. Now is the time to avoid mincing words. It’s time to call Donald Trump out as Vladimir Putin’s puppet, the candidate backed by the Kremlin’s finest chicanery. Now is the time to take to the streets, not because we don’t like Donald Trump, but because his election was rigged by the Russians and, therefore lacks legitimacy.

One of the first things I learned as a union negotiator is that if your side is suffering a power deficit, as ours always did, you have to find a way to create power. Right now, through a confluence of circumstances, Democrats, who are sorely lacking in political power, have an opportunity to gain leverage. But they have to rise above their post-election shell shock and timidity. Russian spies helped elect Donald Trump, for God’s sake. Why tiptoe around it? If nothing else, a strong offense could pull Trump off his transition game, sending him into late night Twitter defense, a play that brings a cringe to even his most ardent supporters. Better yet, it could build enough steam for the Senate to torpedo the confirmation of Putin’s buddy, Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State.

There is power in the moral high ground. It captures peoples’ hearts and minds, rallying them to a noble cause. No, it is not likely to stop a Trump presidency. But it can alter the narrative. And as we learned from this election, the right narrative delivers power. Instead of the outsider riding into Washington on his white horse to shake everything up, we can make it about Russian skullduggery producing a U.S. president who had 2.8 million fewer votes than Putin’s nemesis, Hillary Clinton. To those who say, “Get over it. Trump won; he is our president,” a reminder is in order. Barack Obama won in 2008 and 2012, by much wider electoral vote margins and without interference from a foreign adversary. Yet, the legitimacy of his presidency was challenged by Republicans from Day 1, all on the basis of utter balderdash. Every blatantly false claim imaginable – from being a Muslim to his birth in Kenya – was used to challenge the authenticity of the country’s first black president.

Although despicable, the Republican strategy was effective. It weakened his administration, particularly in the early years. Democrats may be hesitant to follow that path because it left such a stench in the political atmosphere. But there is one huge difference between then and now, namely a genuine, real life, honest-to-God basis to challenge the legitimacy of the 45th president.

FBI Director James Comey, a Republican and obviously no friend of Hillary Clinton, today joined the CIA and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper in declaring that Russia’s interference in the election was done to help Trump win. Couple those findings with Putin’s autocratic history as a dictator who has had his political opponents imprisoned and murdered, and you have a compellingly strong basis upon which to challenge the legitimacy of this president.

Unfortunately, the Democratic response has been limited to meekly calling for an investigation, as if we were dealing with some sort of bureaucratic screw up, as opposed to one of the most extraordinary events in our political history. The party’s leaders are understandably in a bit of post-election disarray right now. For the sake of the country, they need to quickly get past it. And then work up some passionate outrage over Russia’s theft of our election.

IN SEARCH OF A NEW MILLENNIAL FEMINISM

I still can’t get the image out of my head. Newspapers keep using the picture in their serialized election retrospectives: shocked and distraught young women crying their eyes out under the glass ceiling of a New York hotel ballroom, Hillary Clinton’s election night headquarters. Like Sherlock Holmes’ dog that didn’t bark, this was the glass ceiling that didn’t shatter. They had gathered there, giddy and hopeful, ready to watch up close the election of America’s first woman president. It wasn’t just a loss for them; it was a dream rudely interrupted and demolished by a larger-than-life symbol of every sexist, misogynistic pig of a white male they had ever known, heard or read about.

I want to believe that those millennial women will embrace that moment of pain and anguish, and use it as a catalyst for a new wave of feminism. Thanks to trails blazed by their mothers and grandmothers, the world is a far less foreboding place to women in their 20s and 30s. Doors once closed are now open. Rampant sexism, although far from dead and buried, is no longer baked into our social norms. This generation of women never experienced the hopeless cruelty of systemic oppression that spurred giants like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Eleanor Smeal, and countless others, to devote their lives to fighting for change. When things are just a little bad, most of us suck it up and soldier on.

It’s about to get much more than just a little bad. That’s not just because the glass ceiling didn’t break on November 8. America’s president-in-waiting is the embodiment of almost everything the baby boomer feminists fought against: degradation, sexual harassment, verbose inequality. It’s all crawling out from behind its rock in full daylight now. Progress comes through an accumulation of baby steps; regression through a gigantic leap backwards. The leap back has begun. To me, that’s what the tears streaming down the faces of those young Clinton supporters were all about. The fulcrum of change suddenly reversed course, and the ride back is going to be anything but pretty.

This is about so much more than the country’s failure to elect a woman president. Women are ridiculously outnumbered in the Congress ( only 19% are women), state legislatures (24%), governors’ offices(12%) and in the upper echelons of academia (26% of college presidents are women) and corporate America (4% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women). Those numbers not only measure an agonizingly slow march to equality, they tell an even bleaker and pervasive story.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, formerly on the faculty at both Yale and Harvard Law School, conducted extensive studies in the 1970s on the effects of the underrepresentation of women on organizational effectiveness. Kanter found that when women were the few among the many men in a work group, their participation and effectiveness were significantly diminished simply by virtue of being outnumbered. This phenomenon held, she found, in any situation where those from a demographically identifiable group were the “few among the many” from the majority group. Simply being a “token,” Kanter discovered, meant reduced participation, status and ability to shape the group’s outcome.

I did a mini-replication of Kanter’s study 35 years ago. I tracked a number of small task groups, some dominated by men, some by women and others with a relatively equal balance. I measured the amount of time each participant spoke, interrupted others, offered solutions, among other indices of participation. In the groups dominated by one gender, those in the minority greatly limited their participation and the overall effectiveness of the group process was severely limited. In the balanced groups, however, there was a more equalized level of participation along with a desire to reach consensus and, as a result, a higher level of effectiveness.

The lesson from the research is simple: the country is losing out by continuing to have decision making bodies that don’t look anything like the rest of the country. The damage from a Congress that is 81% male isn’t just the lack of opportunity for more women to serve. The real blow comes from the kind of laws that flow out of a legislative body that resembles an Elks Club.

It’s not too hard to imagine what lies ahead for us right now. Funding for women’s health, always a battle in “good times” is in for a severe blow. Mike Pence and his ilk are already salivating about defunding Planned Parenthood. Another faction would love to put the screws to what they see as the Justice Departments’ overzealous use of Title IX to combat sex discrimination on college campuses. With Jeff Sessions as attorney general, that’s an objective easily met. Donald Trump says he will see that Row v. Wade will be overturned as soon as he puts his stamp on the Supreme Court. As a frightening foreshadow of what’s to come, a Tennessee woman is now facing criminal charges for attempting to abort her pregnancy with a coat hanger.

Still, I really do believe the sun will shine again, that we will manage to reverse the backwards retreat and start moving upward and forward, toward an America that prides itself in the values of diversity, equality and justice for all. Getting there means that those millennial tears from election night must be turned into action steps. The boomer feminists were a great opening act. But it’s your time and your move now. Don’t let those tears be in vain.

TO RECOUNT, PERCHANCE TO DREAM

I admit being a wee bit intrigued by the straw-grasping prospect of a presidential election recount. Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, has raised more than $5 million to finance a re-tabulation of votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. The margins were thin in all three states, and there have been unconfirmed reports there of hacking or machine malfunction. Should this Hail Mary pass reach the end zone, reversing the outcome in those states, Hillary Clinton would take 46 electoral college votes from Donald Trump and become the 45th president of the United States.

Needless to say, in a week filled with a parade of wingnuts anointed for key cabinet and White House positions, this recount talk has been a soothing salve for us liberals. We had already fastened our Time Machine seatbelts in preparation for the flight back to the 1950s. Now we can at least squint through the aircraft window and, if we pretend hard enough, almost see a secretary of state who is neither Rudy Giuliani nor Mitt Romney. It proves the old adage that when you desperately want to give up on reality, you will happily settle for a good fantasy.

We have all used these fleeting and illusive what-if moments to breathe new life into different scenarios that seemed to have suddenly died very late on that very dark night of November 8. Some have chosen to fix their imaginary sights on a rock solid liberal Supreme Court majority. Others let themselves see possible health care fixes, instead of an end to coverage for millions of Americans. As a recovering journalist, I’ve carved out a considerably different niche, one that is totally delicious to contemplate.

My fantasy is nothing less than a complete and total reversal of all those deeply analytical, thumb-sucking, ponderous think pieces cranked out by news outlets over the past three weeks. You know, the ones that attempted to explain, in 10,000 words or less, precisely how it was that a racist, crotch grabbing buffoon, with no government experience or aptitude, became the leader of the free world. I’m talking about this kind of stuff:

“Democrats Embrace of Neoliberalism Won it for Trump.”

“Election of Trump is Stunning Repudiation of Establishment.”

“Failed Polls Question the Profession of Prognostication.”

“Clinton’s Loss is Nail in the Coffin of Center-Left Politics.”

So now comes the juicy part, the joyous fantasy: Clinton wins in the electoral college through the recount, complimenting her popular vote advantage. Now what do we want to say to the opus writers? Well, let’s cue the audio from the third debate and isolate those rich, snide Trumpian tones: “Wrong, Wrong, Wrong.”

Better yet, flash way back to SNL’s Emily Litella: “Never mind!”

This would be so much better than the classic “Dewy Defeats Truman” headline in the 1948 Chicago Tribune. That was simply the wrong outcome. Here we’re dealing with deep existential analysis about who we are as a nation, all based on facts that just turned into a bunch of hooey and are no longer in evidence. Reverse three states and, presto, neoliberalism saves the day for Clinton, Trump’s loss validates the establishment and the pollsters and Clinton breathe new life into center-left politics.

How wonderful would that be? The best part is that it might well persuade serious newsroom types not to pound out those definitive post-election what-does-it-all-mean pieces hours after the polls close. When I wrote about politics, back in the pre-digital Gutenberg days, the ritual was to work up an analysis for the Sunday paper following a Tuesday election. That gave us a few days to think things out and, more importantly, to talk with political types after they had a chance to process the election results.

Now, of course, the deep, navel gazing begins around noon on election day, as soon as the first exit poll numbers come in and are chewed up and spit out by the talking heads on cable news and other soldiers of information and misinformation in the Twittersphere, blogosphere and wherever else our clicks and eyeballs may take us. Sadly, the poor legacy media tries to keep up, rather than sticking to its brand of waiting to make sure it gets it right.

And so it was, at 3 a.m., November 9, that a group of New York Times political reporters recorded a podcast aimed at answering the question, “How Did We Get This Wrong?” One of them said the media’s inability to sense the magnitude of pro-Trump sentiment was “a failure of expertise on the order of the fall of the Soviet Union or the Vietnam War.” Another Times staffer, less than an hour after Trump appeared to have amassed more than 270 electoral votes, offered this instant analysis: “Fundamentally Clinton, as it turns out, was the worst candidate Democrats could have run. Had almost any other major Democratic candidate been the nominee, they would have beaten Donald Trump.” So many conclusions with minimal facts and so little sleep.

At this point, Clinton’s lead in the popular vote surpasses 2 million and continues to grow, giving her a margin of about 1.5% over Trump, not too far from most of the pre-election polls. If you added to that the fantasy scenario of her winning a recount in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, what would we have? I say that would really and truly be a “failure of expertise on the order of the fall of the Soviet Union or the Vietnam War.”

And, oh, what a sweet failure it would be!

THE ELECTION IS OVER BUT THE REAL FIGHT HAS JUST BEGUN

If there is any certainty in these hazy, wobbly, loopy post-election days, it is this: not only has the Campaign from Hell not ended, it has only just begun. Yes, the electoral maps have been colored adnauseam, and with far too much red. Hillary conceded. Donald accepted. Michelle went high and shared low tea with Melania. But this battle for the heart and soul of America is no more resolved than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It may never end.

Early on that post-election morning of despair, when visualizing the word “President” in front of “Trump” induced projectile vomiting and sudden support for the physician-assisted suicide movement, I frantically searched for something good about this train wreck. Whenever anything bad happened to me as a child, my mother told me to look for the good. It struck me, even when I was 10, as a dubious proposition, something they must teach in mom school. But I was desperate now and would grasp any ray of sunshine I could find. All I came up with was that those annoying daily fund raising emails and phone calls would stop now that the election was over. WRONG!

The first one came from an outfit called “Courageous Resistance,” along with a logo of a black bear and a gold star and, of course, an Armageddon-like plea for cash to stop this “hateful demagogue (who) has risen to power in the United States.” Then came Democracy for America, citing the Trump administration’s threat to our values and ideals, with a red “DONATE” button to click that would conveniently bill the same credit card I used to contribute to the Clinton campaign. They called it a “seamless transition,” clearly the only one of its kind to emerge from this fiasco. I heard from the American Civil Liberties Union, the AFL-CIO, Move On.org, Our Revolution.com, the conservationists, abortion rights advocates, gun control supporters, two LGBT groups and a guy named Marcus who asked if I would install a button on my webpage so folks could donate to a Trump impeachment fund. Clearly Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ Five Stages of Grief have expanded to include a sixth: fundraising.

Yet, once I shook off my initial cynicism over this solicitation inundation, it occurred to me that, just maybe, my mother was right: there is a silver lining in this tragedy. No, it doesn’t lie in emptying out my bank account for progressive fundraisers. Those donation requests, however, combined to offer an important and powerfully hopeful reminder that our democracy is more than one election. It’s a continual, fluid process and, as such, subject to being shaped by mass movements of agitation, resistance and, yes, sometimes revolution.

That’s not to deny the darkness of this moment. For many of us, no political moment has ever been this bad. A disgustingly divisive, hateful, hurtful, bigoted, bloviated buffoon is about to be sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. What we have to remember, once the tears dry and the self-flagellation wanes, is that this is only a moment. There are new moments coming every day and we have the ability and the power to affect their outcome. To be sure, there will be significant losses in the days ahead. We who care about those in the shadows, and yearn for more diversity and a redistribution of wealth and power, were dealt a really lousy hand last Tuesday. But that doesn’t mean we throw in the cards and call it a night. The challenge is finding the best way to play the hand we were dealt. The groups I heard from are doing just that. They are gearing up to fight in every way they can, just like the protesters who’ve taken to the streets every night since the election.

It’s easy in our malaise to reject such responses as foolish and ineffective, retreating instead into a cocoon of despair. There may be some emotional comfort there, but it is a venue that offers nothing to protect the values we care about. Look, there are really only two givens for Donald Trump right now. One is that he symbolizes everything we despise. The other is, as the Washington Post’s Dan Balz wrote today, this complete uncertainty over what Trump will do as president. It is impossible to predict the future moves of a pathological narcissist, with no semblance of a genuine political philosophy. Less than 48 hours after he won, Trump started backing off some of his campaign promises. Hillary voters aren’t the only ones feeling anxiety.

This election was one of those rare occurrences that instantly guaranteed a dramatic sea change in the course of our nation’s history. In terms of its role as a change agent, It was on a par with Pearl Harbor, President Kennedy’s assassination and 9/11. As with those other seminal events, all we know immediately is that profound change is coming. Just exactly what it will be depends entirely on how everything plays out. Therein lie the moments we can affect, the ones that offer genuine opportunity to make a difference, to write the rest of the story. The immediate thinking in November of 1963 was that hopes for meaningful civil rights reform died along with Kennedy. Yet, thanks to relentless agitation, street protests and the cunning tenacity of a newly installed southern president, a landmark civil rights law was passed nine months later. Nobody in Dallas on November 22, 1963 would have predicted that outcome.

Of course, the partisan politics of that analogy doesn’t hold. Donald Trump is no Lyndon Johnson. The movement politics, however, does follow. It means building a campaign with the embers of our election loss to salvage as much as possible in the not-yet-defined skirmishes we know are coming. Remember Mitch McConnell’s election night pledge of 2008? His number one legislative objective was to deny President Obama a second term? With an effective mass movement built on the visceral passions of the voting majority, we ought to be able reach much higher than that and find effective ways to mitigate as much Trump damage as possible during the years ahead. I think I have just persuaded myself to go back to some of the fund raising emails and make a donation or two. Four years is a long time to go just being sad and angry.

THE MOURNING AFTER BLUES: WHAT NOW?

It’s mourning in America.

After the tumultuous darkness of election night gave way to the light of another day, I reluctantly awoke to a foreboding sense of loss. It wasn’t just that my candidate was defeated and the other one won. That’s what happens in elections, and I am a seasoned veteran at losing them. No, this time was different. This time it was about values, about who we are as a country. This time it was about America’s soul. This time it was about what is in our hearts. To me, the pain of this new day comes from the victory of hate over love, walls over bridges, exclusion over diversity, autocracy over working together.

At least that’s how it looked and felt to me. I readily admit, however, that people voting differently than I did were not all intentionally pulling a lever for hate, disharmony and exclusion. Many of them were voting against a rigged system they saw as beyond dysfunction, one that left them behind, one that is owned and controlled by a moneyed elite that cares nothing about their lives and what has become of them. In other words, many of those in yesterday’s “silent majority” voted out of a world view that was not that different from the one shared by those of us in the minority. We differed on the solution, not on the problem.

I’m still too stunned and broken over this election to even begin to think about how this badly battered and bruised nation can effectively come together in a meaningful way, one that reverses course and helps people build better lives with a more even distribution of opportunities. It has been said the longest journey begins with a single step. I think that step needs to start with how we treat each other. This campaign seemed to boil with an anger unlike any other. It split families, divided friends and damaged relationships. We can – and should – choose to do some repair work for at least two reasons. The obvious one is that relationships are important, regardless of the political divide. Secondly, as noted earlier, there is more common ground than there might appear between our two camps. If we really want meaningful change in how this country is governed, we need to listen to each other again.

In that spirit, and in the unlikely event that any of my Republican friends are reading this, please accept my sincere congratulations on your candidate’s victory. I do have a number of conservative Facebook friends and, to the best of my knowledge, none of them unfriended me during this campaign, nor did I let any of them go. I feel good about that. Respectful disagreement is an essential element in constructive relationships. That’s pretty easy to do in the abstract. We can disagree over tax policy or foreign relations and still have an enjoyable dinner conversation.

But as soon as Donald Trump entered the picture, things got pretty hot and heavy, and it’s been downhill ever since. Of course most candidates have their passionate followers and detractors. That was certainly true of both Hillary Clinton and President Obama. But Trump was a whole different deal, largely because of the sharply conflicting roles assigned to him by his followers and opponents. Many of us could not understand how any rational person would support someone who bragged about forcibly groping women, repeatedly made racist comments and seemed to be utterly unprepared for the presidency. His supporters, on the other hand, saw his candidacy in an entirely different light. To them, Trump’s total otherness, including his bombastic buffoonery, was just what they were looking for in order to turn the entire messed up system on its head. One of the more telling exit polls showed that a quarter of Trump voters said he was not qualified to be president. In fact, as much as they detested Clinton, these Trumpians saw her as more qualified. The point is they were not shopping for a qualified candidate to just keep on keeping on. They wanted everything shook up. While I obviously disagree with that methodology, I do understand it. As much as I came to abhor Trump as a person and a candidate, there is both rationale and precedent for their approach. It’s actually a radical leftist organizing tactic: don’t fix problems in a broken government, make it worse so that it can be replaced with a new system. The big difference, of course, is the Trump folks have no system ready for substitution; they just know that the one we have now must be blown up.

Therein lies an opportunity. Our current government is pretty badly broken. The distribution of wealth and power is way out of whack. People are hurting and there is no sign of help on the way. It does not take great clairvoyant powers to foresee an eventual disillusion with Trump on the part of at least some of his supporters, particularly those waiting for “terrific jobs” and a “fantastic life.” Those goals are consistent with the progressive agenda and only a unified and organized electorate can eventually deliver the votes to make it happen. These folks should not be left behind. It will get worse before it can get better, but our focus has to be on making sure it gets better. We must look past the differences between them and us so we can see the similarities.

As the late great poet, Maya Angelou, wrote:

“I note the obvious differences
between each sort and type,
but we are more alike, my friends,
than we are unalike.”

And as that other late great poet, Joe Hill, wrote:

“Don’t mourn, organize!”

FBI, PIGS AND LIES, OH MY!

There is an old crusty political tale that I first heard more than 40 years ago while covering one of Walter Mondale’s senate campaigns in Minnesota. It may well have been apocryphal, except for the fact it was about Lyndon Johnson, whose biography is far more colorful than most fiction. Here’s Mondale’s story: “Lyndon was in a tight race for Congress and he called his staff together and told them to leak word that his opponent fucks pigs. ‘But, sir, we don’t know that to be true,’ complained a staffer. ‘Okay,’ said Johnson, ‘then, let’s get out a report that he doesn’t fuck pigs. Either way, voters will associate him with pig fucking.’”

That story immediately came to mind this morning as I grabbed the Washington Post off the front step and glanced at the banner headline: “FBI won’t pursue charges against Clinton”. In the Lyndon Johnson’s Texas School of Campaign Pragmatics, there is no difference between “FBI may pursue charges against Clinton” and “FBI won’t pursue charges against Clinton”. Forget about the choice of a modal verb – may or won’t – all that matters are the words “FBI”, “charges” and “Clinton”. Either way, it’s still pig fucking.

So can we now please place a moratorium on any more nauseating stories or op-ed pieces about how much integrity James Comey has, or how he was caught in an untenable position? None of it survives a basic smell test. Based on his own account, the head of the FBI, in a letter to Congressional leaders, publically announced 11 days before the election that the agency was going to investigate emails it had never seen that might, once they were seen, implicate Hillary Clinton in criminal activity. Then, 36 hours before the polls open, Congress’ favorite pen pal strikes again, plagiarizing by paraphrase Gertrude Stein’s declaration that “there is no there there.” Lo and behold, Director Comey announces that criminal charges will not be pursued against the Democratic presidential nominee. And so voters trot off to the polls associating Clinton with dishonesty, corruption and criminal charges.

Sadly and completely unjustifiably, that false narrative feeds Hillary Clinton’s single largest negative character trait with voters. In the major polls released this weekend, Clinton significantly topped Trump in all aspects of the presidency, save for one: trustworthiness. By sizable margins, voters prefer her over him when it comes to personality and temperament, general qualifications, moral character and someone who has an understanding of “problems of people like you.” But when asked which candidate is the most honest and trustworthy, Trump beats Clinton by 44 to 40.

Of course winning a contest where only 44 percent of the people rate you as honest is not exactly something for Trump to slap in his trophy case, perhaps where the Emmy Award he never won would have gone. It is, however, a significant measure of one of the many perception-to-reality gaps in this despicable campaign. Construing the facts in the most unfavorable light from Clinton’s perspective, she was guilty of carelessness and bad judgment in using her private email server while in the State Department and, true to form from a lifetime of right wing persecution, she was slow to own up to the mistake. But none of that even begins to rise to the level of the kind of throw-her-in-jail frenzy Trump and his disciples whip up at their rallies.

Therein lies one of the biggest paradoxes of this campaign. Hillary Clinton loses the honesty vote to Trump only on the basis that he has repeatedly, in a thoroughly dishonest manner, characterized his opponent as corrupt, even threatening to throw her in jail if he is elected. He has never once laid out a set of specific facts constituting evidence of corruption. That’s not the way this guy rolls. He simply constructs his own reality out of thin air. As Lyndon Johnson knew so well, if you say false stuff enough, people begin to believe it. One of the amazing facts of this election season has been that the candidate seen as the most honest is the one who fact checkers say tells the truth only 9 percent of the time, a record low never before seen or approached in the history of political fact checking. Unfortunately, Trump’s campaign of lies had way too many enablers and co-conspirators, including parts of the news media and, of course, James Comey.

The only mitigation in the FBI Director’s deplorable and grossly negligent conduct may come from the fact that this campaign has been conducted so deep inside Lewis Carroll’s rabbit hole that it may well make no discernable difference in the election’s outcome. So far, most polling activity has given credence to that proposition. If, on the other hand, the final results repudiate the pollsters and Clinton loses, Comey needs to be severely punished for his sins. Forcing him to serve four years in a Trump administration ought to be enough to make him deeply regret his inexcusable misdeeds and wish like hell he had become a Texas pig farmer.