Why Trump is even close

 

I'd title this: Biden honors D-Day; Trump not invited

The mainstream media - the Washington Post in this example - is completely bending over backward to normalize the neo-fascist Trump. They did this in 2016, too, when it was all Trump outrages all the time. If Trump wins in November, the press will be bending over in a different direction.

There was a time that America bloodied up fascists, instead of coddling them. That day is gone. There are only a scant few 100-year-old D-Day veterans left to witness the horror that American politics has become.

The 27%

I was watching the History Channel the other night and learned that the Nazis only won 37% of the vote in the 1932 election. From that beachhead in the electorate, they used violence, suppression, and mass media to completely co-opt and dominate what had previously been a civilized nation.

American has its 27-percenters. My point is not that they're Nazis - they aren't - but that leverage on power, even in a democracy, frequently does not require a majority. Look at the Teapublican willingness to drive Congressional agendas, without regard for compromise, by abusing the filibuster. It was intended as a rare power; the GOP uses is now as a minimum required supermajority.

On this day 67 years ago, Adolf Hitler killed himself rather than face an accounting at Nuremberg for his brutal crimes against humanity. Coward.

But Hitler's death is still cause for celebration, even if I wish an American dogface had double-tapped him.

Good to have allies

From Mother Jones:

Income inequality has grown dramatically since the mid-'70s—far more in the US than in most advanced countries—and the gap is only partly related to college grads outperforming high-school grads. Rather, the bulk of our growing inequality has been a product of skyrocketing incomes among the richest 1 percent and—even more dramatically—among the top 0.1 percent. It has, in other words, been CEOs and Wall Street traders at the very tippy-top who are hoovering up vast sums of money from everyone, even those who by ordinary standards are pretty well off.

Kevin Drum asks the key question, "How did we get here?"  It's a question near and dear to my heart, one I first wrote about here in 2007 under that exact title.

Drum and I agree that the Democrats' surrender of social class has led to rampant plutocracy and to government policy that encourages huge growth in income disparities. We even agree in part about why.  Drum says:

Parties need money. And parties need organizational muscle. The Republican Party gets the former from corporate sponsors and the latter from highly organized church-based groups. The Democratic Party, conversely, relied heavily on organized labor for both in the postwar era. So as unions increasingly withered beginning in the '70s, the Democratic Party turned to the only other source of money and influence available in large-enough quantities to replace big labor: the business community.

I say:

Democrats gave up their unity voluntarily as a result of the marketplace, not of ideas, but of campaign contributions. They passed post-Watergate reforms in reaction to the financial abuses of Nixon's Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), but they ran afoul of unintended consequences.

Democrats could no longer raise large chunks of money from wealthy ideological sources; they now had to spread their fundraising to wealthy business interests who were much more likely to play the access game.

Obviously, we find different causes.  Drum emphasizes the decline of organized labor.  I point to an unintended consequence of post-Watergate reforms in campaign finance.

One reason I doubt the union decline as the main cause - though any big change in society is bound to have many causes - is that unions remain to this day influential in Democratic Party politics, at least in states where unions have influence at all.  Their members are less reliable (ask Martha Coakley), but their leadership is not, and it's true that the disaffection of membership began during the social upheavals of the 1960s and 70s, exactly the right timing to help explain America's political degeneration.  So I'd have to concede that the union decline does figure in the decline of America as a liberal and forward-looking country.

Another cause I hadn't thought enough about is the retirement of the World War II generation.  Men and women who had been 30 years old at the end of the war were leaving the work force in 1980, just in time for the Reagan retrenchment.  It didn't hurt that he, as one of them, could co-opt them with his neo-1920s economic ideology and his sunny disposition.

Reagan said that government was the problem.  But he smiled.  And his age cohort, who had seen muscular government succeed at many things, could stop thinking about complicated problems and let go of the responsibilities that they had borne so well.

In any case, it's good to have Drum working this beat - strength in numbers and all.  Of course, that has been the promise of unions, a promise now forgotten along with the history of dire worker exploitation by the mercenary corporations of a century ago.

Pro-torture and not decent enough to be ashamed

One clear revelation of the Bushist embrace of torture to further military and foreign policy is that a substantial number of Americans are openly pro-torture (be sure to read at least the first fifteen comments). When I was growing up playing WWII in the back yard twenty years after the world nearly burned down, it was unthinkable that Americans would ever become the torturers.

Now, there's a vocal segment of the conservative movement for whom the us-against-them values of tribalism far outweigh the dispassionate rule of law upon which our nation was founded. Their fear, a central characteristic of their worldview, drives them. Why they are not more stalwart in the face of danger - when that is one of the few national virtues they and I cherish in common - is a puzzle to me.

This day in 1918

... my grandfather, age 21 and a lieutenant in training at Ft. Benning, Georgia, wept. Not for joy. Not for the false promise of missed glory.

The war for Europe was not finished, he feared, and further events of the twentieth century proved him right, even if those events could not prove any hypothetical remedy he might have had in mind.

My other grandfather fought in WWII. Instead of being late, he came home early with a Bronze Star to compensate for shrapnel, some of which is now buried with him.

He told me many years later that there were two people, both Americans, he would still kill - the jeep driver who took one look at him bloody and wounded and left him to die by the side of the road in France, and the 4F back home who laughed at him in 1945 when he instinctively rolled out of his car as a light plane flew over.

Today, we honor men and now women like this. Every one of them has a story as important as my grandfathers. We honor them for the sacrifices they make in our name. We do this whether or not we honor the political leaders who put them in harm's way.

And the volunteers in today's military who are not yet lucky enough to be veterans? They too are making tremendous and inadequately appreciated sacrifices.

While you're on this topic, go and read Tom Levenson's thoughts.

Not news, but still an outrage

Dick Cheney lies about torture:

"No nation in the world takes human rights more seriously than the United States," Cheney said at the American Legion's annual convention.

Ya, we take rights so seriously that we write tissues of lies and call them legal memos. We redefine words and then do things to prisoners that were war crimes when the Nazis and the Japanese did them in WWII. We punish underlings for crimes but not their bosses.

Yeah, we take rights seriously.

And what's with the American Legion giving Darth a platform? Do they agree with him?

Telescoping history

Another Confederate widow has died - but not the last. Key dates in the story:

• 1848 - birth of William Cantrell
• 1864 - enlistment of Cantrell in the Confederate Army
  
• 1915 - birth of Maudie White Hopkins
  
• 1934 - financial marriage, husband 86, wife 19
• 1937 - death of Cantrell
• 2008 - death of Hopkins

This is interesting because it shows how huge a span of history the relationships of one person can encompass. Cantrell could have known someone born before the Revolution.

I started to think about time spans when I realized that my daughter had been born longer after the Vietnam War than I had been born after World War II. It was shocking to me that she must think, as I had about my parents' childhood war, that her parents' war was safely settled.

Of course, with John McCain gaining ground and after 2004's vast cultural divide, it's obvious that Vietnam is not settled.

Update: Almost forgot - she married him in part for his Confederate pension. Who paid these pensions to a treasonous army? The former CSA states [--Peggy Harris]. Yet 40 acres and a mule never materialized.

Upside of peer pressure

We humans are social animals. We get fat together, we quit smoking together, we influence each other's choices. This really shouldn't be a surprise. It's why advertising works. It's why grassroots campaigning works better and why water cooler conversation works even better.

Massachusetts isn't more liberal than Texas just because its citizens are better educated. There's a self-sustaining consensus in each place about what's right. In Massachusetts, there's a long tradition of progress toward liberty. In Texas, as in much of the South, there's still a mildly feudal acceptance that the rich people have proven by their wealth that they should run things.

Karl Rove thought he could bring Texas's Southern white anti-government evangelical consensus to America as a whole in the form of a permanent Republican majority. He looked on a transformational conflict with radical Islam as an opportunity to do for his coalition of wealthies, bullies, and fundies what WWII had done for urbanites, farmers, union workers, and eventually minorities.

Too bad for him that his low-judgement neocon buddies and his dipshit boss fucked it up so badly.

Stopped clock

Proverbially right twice a day, but Richard Cohen is an idiot even when he's right.

He doesn't reckon with any of the bullshit use of WWII in support of the misadventure into Iraq; he simply repeats it without assigning any blame for the conscious use of the example of the 1930s as lies to sell shallow thinkers like Cohen on the war.

Hardly anyone in mainstream American politics took a pacifist view after Sept. 11. I can't think of anyone in Congress who opposed going into Afghanistan, though there may have been one or two. Yet a pacifist is Cohen's straw man, and the popularity of his book is supposed to prove that.

Cohen has no idea what to think or write about the world. He just muddles a bunch of talking points together and calls it a column. And his editors help out by attaching a photo of Ann Frank.

Image used under CCA ShareAlike 2.5 as licensed here.

In 1945, Duhbya's policy a war crime

Read it and weep for what has been done in our name.