Political issues – Page 25

It’s time for ridicule now, everyone

Any time the make-believe right-wing world is imploding, which is a lot these days, I like to go to the Drudge Report to see how they’re spinning it. Just last week, for example, everyone in the right-wing bubble just knew that Wikileaks was going to release some stuff that would absolutely destroy Hillary once and for all. Instead they got a Wikileaks infomercial trying to raise money for Wikileaks. It was hilarious.

Drudge Report flopped around all day today trying to figure out what to do with the Trump meltdown. Finally they got a headline in the Wall Street Journal that was suitable for Drudgers. I’ve reproduced it below.

Is there an equivalence? Is the Drudge view of the world equally real? Sometimes it takes months and even years for the right-wing delusions spread by the right-wing media to fly apart. It this case, it will take, at most, exactly one month. Let us count the days.

Tabloid media aside, here’s what New York Times readers are seeing. Let’s revisit these headlines on Nov. 9.

P.S. What was it you were saying about Bill and Hillary? For the last twenty years?

Why are we not investing in young people?

Jobs — but no lives and not much education

One consequence of our dumb-as-rocks political and media culture is that the pig circus intentionally distracts us from talking about things that matter. To her credit, Hillary Clinton has proposed a plan for making it possible for young people to attend public univerities debt-free. As for Donald Trump, the scam of Trump University (now defunct, of course) tells you all you need to know. To Donald Trump, young people are just a natural resource to be exploited for profit. As for the voters, the mean and ugly me-first issues of old white people are dominating the 2016 presidential election — when we even talk about reality at all.

If you asked a hundred random Americans to name in one word what young people today need most, probably “jobs” is the answered you’d get most. That’s the centrist answer. The liberal answer probably would be “educations.” And the right-wing answer probably would be “Jesus.”

If you asked me, I’d do my best to come up with a more radical answer. How about lives for what young people need? We Americans rarely think beyond earning and consumption. We train people to be cogs in the economy and to be submissive citizens (which is part of what religion is for).

Thus I was intrigued this morning, while making my daily check of the Irish Times web site, to come across a story saying that the European Union is considering giving all 18-year-olds an InterRail pass so that they can explore Europe and expand their cultural horizons. An advocate of the idea said, “But the fact is that a lot of people and especially young people do not get to travel as much and explore Europe first hand and so they go to Front National and join right wing parties.”

I live in a poor, rural county politically dominated by Republicans and culturally dominated by nasty little white churches. Our young people pay a huge price not only for the poverty, but also for the small-mindedness and the hatreds instilled by the Republican Party and by the churches. The smartest of our young people leave for college and never come back. Many leave for dead-end jobs in urban areas and never come back. Though a very few black sheep buck the process, most succumb to the various forms of impoverishment that make them pretty much just like their parents — ignorant, Republican, racist, primed for resentment, and completely unequipped for a life in the 21st Century world.

Sometimes, standing with liberal friends and observing these local young people at events such as outdoor music festivals, I notice their lack of social skill, the early onset of obesity and bad health, the total lack of vitality and style, the dying-inside looks on their faces, and I feel sorry for them. More than once I’ve said something like, “If only we could give them a passport and send them on a trip to Copenhagen. They’d never vote Republican again.” Yes. And it also would bring us some cultural rethinking and cultural renewal. And we probably should send them to France as well to learn about food.

But small-mindedness and small-heartedness, of course (preferably with a wall around us), are exactly what Republicans and white preachers want in their customers — empty, dead-end lives of work and consumption. A vote for Trump is the only outlet for anger and for the shame of failure. A Confederate flag in a trashed yard is the only source of pride, except maybe for a big pickup truck.

There are vast amounts of money in this country. It continues to flow up to the rich. The rich, of course, invest heavily in their young — tomorrow’s 1 percent. As for everyone else, forty-five percent of 25-year-olds are in debt. The net worth of 35-year-olds averages one month of expenses. Shouldn’t we be talking about this?

P.S. Eventually, as older generations die off, all wealth, of course, is transferred to the young. A study in 2000 for the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland found that 92 percent of Americans will receive no inheritance at all. Of the 8 percent who inherit something, half of them will inherit less that $25,000. Only 1.7 percent of the population stand to inherit more than $50,000. This is how oligarchies and aristocracies are built and sustained. The Republican Party wants to make this much worse by eliminating inheritance taxes on the super-rich. It has been two years now since Thomas Piketty told us pretty much everything we need to know about inequality. But what are we talking about? Overweight beauty queens and Bill Clinton’s infidelities. And our low-investment young people, like older white failures, can’t really follow a conversation that’s more complicated than that.

October reading

I’m afraid that this book may make some pretty scary reading in the weeks before this election. But many other Americans will be reading this book right now, and we might as well band together for mutual support and discussion.

The photograph, by the way, was taken in the rubble of a textile mill in Madison-Mayodan, North Carolina, shortly after I picked up the book at the post office.

From the introduction:

“We Germans were liberated from Hitler, but we’ll never shake him off,” Eberhard Jäckel concluded in a lecture in 1979, adding: “Hitler will always be with us, with those who survived, those who came afterwards and even those yet to be born. He is present — not as a living figure, but as an eternal cautionary monument to what human beings are capable of.”

The debate

Blurry losers from a lost world watching Fox News and sagely repeating Republican talking points, the morning after the debate

Y’all knew that a rant was coming today, didn’t you?

First, here’s my prediction for the debate, from an email to a friend a couple of hours before the debate started:

Two things that give me hope about tonight…

1. Hillary will be totally in her element. She is a total wonk. She’s been in congressional hearings so many times that she’s accustomed to right-wing goons trying to entrap her and throwing sound bites at her. She’s a lawyer. Whereas Trump is totally out of his element. He doesn’t know shit. He’s not a lawyer. He’s accustomed to speaking only to the ignorati. His canned statements (what else does he have, since he knows nothing?) will sound canned, and his ad libs will be perilous for him.

2. Hillary has been defined by other people for 25 years. Many goon-rods know her only through what the right-wing media say about her. An audience of 100 million people, many of whom normally would not see Hillary herself, will see Hillary herself tonight, unspun by right-wing media. She came off extremely well at the Democratic convention. She can do it again, but this time for a larger audience that includes far more non-Democrats.

Unless something totally unexpected happens, she’ll rip him to shreds, while smiling and keeping her cool. He will lose his cool and show his anger, smugness, nastiness, and self-love. The only catch is that a certain percentage of the electorate despise competence and love his nastiness. But I suspect that they’re only about 30-some percent. The rest should get it.

Ailes will have prepped Trump to appeal to the 30 percent. Everyone else will be disgusted.

This debate — like the impressively intelligent Hillary Clinton — went right over the heads of a large portion of the American public. Hillary talked about important and urgent issues that are never mentioned in the right-wing media, which panders to people who have no idea what government is for or what government does in the 21st Century and wouldn’t be able to understand if you told them. There was a funny story in the New York Times about words that were used during the debate that sent many debate-watchers to online dictionaries, including stamina, temperament, cyber, “stop and frisk,” and braggadocio.

Trump supporters, in short, can’t even follow a conversation about what’s involved in being president of the United States, let alone have a useful opinion on the subject. And yet they can vote. Much worse, there are so many of them that a large and highly profitable segment of the media industry arose to feed and flatter their stupidity and to manipulate their votes for the Republican Party.

I was truly touched when Hillary Clinton spoke to those people outside the United States who have a very hard time understanding how Americans can be so ignorant and so vile, and how an orange clown like Donald Trump could be within a few percentage points of being president of the United States.

To all the readers of this blog in Europe and other civilized places, I apologize for us Americans. Those of us with two or more neurons to rub together are doing everything we can not only to stop Donald Trump’s election but also to hasten the burial of the rotting corpse of the Republican Party. And if you happen to see Rupert Murdoch’s sons at a party in London or Melbourne, please plead with them to clean up Fox News with a water cannon and to start all over again, in reality this time.

About the photo at the top of this post: I had to go to the post office and stopped for lunch, since my political commitments cut into my cooking time these days. I sat down at an empty counter, not knowing that I had invaded the place where old white Republicans meet for lunch and to watch Fox News. Suddenly I was surrounded. They coughed a lot and were full of germs. I thought about moving, not so much to not have to listen to them, but to get away from the bad health and the germs. Their Social Security and Medicare bills must be such a burden on taxpayers! (Except of course to rich people like Trump who are smart and don’t pay taxes.) But I stayed so as not to appear rude, and, believe it or not, I listened to their outpouring of horse shit and ignorance through my entire lunch without saying a word. As I told a friend yesterday in email, I sometimes wish for a magic spell that would transport Acorn Abbey from the godforsaken Republican-infested Bible Belt to a quiet little dell in the Scottish Highlands. But normally I don’t deal with these people. There are deep woods between the abbey and them, and no one gets past the owls, crows, squirrels, rabbits, raccoon, bears, and white deer that guard this place against those who don’t know the password.

What a sane voice sounds like

This morning in my news-reading routine, I came across this video made by the Raleigh News & Observer. Deborah Ross, a Democrat who is running for the United States Senate from North Carolina against Republican Richard Burr, had met with the newspaper’s editorial board and was asked to talk to the camera about her vision for North Carolina. I was delighted to see that, 20 seconds into the video, she mentions Stokes County and the rally at which it was my privilege to introduce her.

As for the voice of sanity, I hope you’ll watch the video and let Deborah Ross speak for herself. Here’s a link to the video.

The voice of sanity and reason is such a quiet voice. It doesn’t rudely swindle us of our attention the way propaganda does, with noise, threats, scapegoating, and conspiracy theories designed to deceive us.

Staying sane as insanity spreads

After the right-wing media can no longer sustain the delusion, people gradually come to their senses. But by then the damage is done.

In my lifetime, the most terrifying period in American history was early 2003, when the Bush administration was selling the Iraq war to the American people. Those of us who stayed sane during that epidemic of war fever and lust for violence learned several lessons then, all very frightening:

Lesson 1: The Republican Party has no principles. It will lie and deceive to whatever degree is necessary to get its way or to try to swing elections.

Lesson 2: The right-wing media (Fox News and right-wing media stars such as Rush Limbaugh) have made a science of whipping the lowest elements of the American population into a state of rage and delusion that teeters right on the edge of violence.

Lesson 3: When the mass delusion of right-wingers has spread to a certain percentage of the population, the mainstream media are forced to cover it. This amplifies everything.

Lesson 4: If you see 2003 support for, and opposition to, the Iraq war as a good indicator, then about 72 percent of the American population (see chart above) are susceptible to the mass delusions and psychic epidemics that the right-wing media create to gets its way. Only 22 percent of the population are fully capable of remaining sober and rational when the right-wing media pull out all the stops and force the mainstream media to follow along.

It’s 2016, and it’s happening again. The Republican Party is using its rage machine, as we knew it would, in the 2016 election. The mainstream media are following along. A year ago, smart folks on the left and right would have assumed that a ludicrous fringe character like Donald Trump could appeal to not much more than 30 percent of the population. But smart folks were wrong, because they forgot what the right-wing media machine can do. And, as in 2003, the mainstream media are forced to cover the story lines that are required in the right-wing media to get the attention of the right-wing base.

The mass insanity at present is nowhere near the 72 percent level that the right wing achieved in 2003 when Republicans were selling the Iraq war. Trump’s level of support is somewhere around 41 percent to Hillary Clinton’s 46. Still, that is terrifying. It wasn’t supposed to be possible. It’s still not over. The epidemic might weaken, but it also could continue to spread.

Each morning I cringe as I go through my daily routine of checking news sites. Trump and the media are still talking about birtherism. Trump’s agenda would add $5.3 trillion to the federal debt. Trump is under “concentrated Satanic attack,” some preacher says. No one including House Republicans cares if Trump uses foundation money to buy himself gifts or to pay bribes. Trump’s entire family proves itself to be morally deranged and psychologically cracked. And yet six more weeks of all this remains before the Nov. 8 election. One of the things that the right-wing media knows is that it must continue to top itself in order to keep attracting attention and keep the hysteria going. I am trying to brace myself for the October surprise.

Rolling coal?

Though I had seen pickup trucks with smokestacks blowing black smoke, I did not know about “rolling coal” until the New York Times wrote about it a week ago.

Here is a new way for useless white guys to strut their hatred, as they are constantly encouraged to do by the right-wing media. Google for “rolling coal,” if you’re not aware of this phenomenon. Don’t miss the article in the right-wing web site Daily Caller: “Here at The Daily Caller, we are going to give you the basics on how to modify your pickup, so every hybrid driven by some guy in a pink Argyle sweater will know exactly where you stand.”

Here’s my question. How did so many Americans get to be this way? Until I know of a better answer, I’d have to say that it’s a combination of appalling ignorance combined with yet another way that the right-wing media teach hatred, aggression, and reckless, unproductive consumption.

I have encountered right-wingers who see it as a kind of moral duty not to recycle and to use incandescent light bulbs.

Months ago, as the rest of America gradually woke up to the fact that Donald Trump actually was going to get the Republican nomination, many articles were written on the disaffected white underclass who were enthusiastically backing Trump. Many of these articles called for sympathy and outreach. Some of the articles shamed both political parties for leaving these people behind. These useless articles have tapered off. Outreach? It’s clear that the angry white underclass cannot be reached except by the right-wing media, which is more than willing to flatter their ignorance and inflame their hatred for political purposes.

A couple of days ago I was having lunch in a fast-food place because I was so busy with my liberal political commitments that I didn’t have time to cook at home. I listened to a white guy at a nearby table explaining to another white guy why Trump was the only hope. “Things are gonna get really bad if Hillary gets in,” he said. It was clear that this guy thought of himself as well informed, as a kind of intellectual, a redneck wonk. He recited a long stream of right-wing talking points, including a list of places that we should bomb. Some of his talking points were deceptive half truths, the rest were pure horse-wash. Putting that stuff into his head is a billion-dollar corporate profit center. I don’t have the slightest idea what can ever be done about it.

I do know this. I’ve got to work my tail off between now and the election to throw Republicans out of office at every level of government. Disempowering the politicians who cater to these deplorables — and they are deplorable — is the necessary first step.

Old-fashioned grass-roots politics

With an election coming up, it’s almost a full-time job to handle my duties as chairman of the Democratic Party in my county. But the job has its rewards, including meeting the candidates during their campaign travels.

Even our oldest active Democrats can’t recall a candidate for the United States Senate ever visiting our little county. But, last Sunday, Deborah Ross, who is running for the United States Senate from North Carolina, was here. It was my honor to introduce Ross both at the little black church she attended on Sunday and for the rally and luncheon that followed at our campaign headquarters.

I found it remarkable that neither Deborah Ross nor any of her campaign team ever mentioned raising money. She spoke twice — first at the church, and then to the more than 100 people who stood in the rather hot sunshine for the rally. She never told a single lie and didn’t distort any issues. She was well aware of local issues that are particularly important to us, including coal ash and fracking. She mentioned that she had voted against fracking when she was in the North Carolina General Assembly. She was positive, polite, and gracious with everyone she met. After she left our rally, she had campaign stops in at least two nearby rural counties — Yadkin and Davie. She is running an old-fashioned campaign based on traveling and meeting people, rather than raising and spending money.

Ross was a civil rights lawyer. To the other party, justice is mostly about prosecution and prisons, which they like to call “law and order.” To us Democrats, justice is about something else entirely. If you asked me to name the most important thing that Democrats have in common, I would say that it’s a passion for justice. I’ve looked at a lot of definitions of justice, but I think I like Cornel West’s definition best: “Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.”

After the election, then what?

While forty-some percent of the American population — right-wingers, all — are now completely detached from reality and are having a dangerous and terrifying psychotic episode right out in public, those of us with a grip on reality are doing what we always do: We are trying to understand what the devil is going on.

The media — at least the responsible media, the media tethered to, you know, facts and reality — turn out articles on a daily basis, each article a possible piece of the puzzle. As we put the pieces of the puzzle together and try to understand the picture that is emerging, some things are becoming clearer. For one, though it appears that Donald Trump will go down in flames on or before election day and that Hillary Clinton will be the next president of the United States, it also appears clear that we’re going to have to deal with the flaming shrapnel of the disintegrated Republican Party and other delusional right-wing radicals for years to come. The term for the crazies that seems to be emerging is “the alt-right.” Who are they, and how are we going to deal with them?

Here are links to a few recent articles:

At Vox.com, Dylan Matthews traces the roots and branches of the alt-right. The rank and file of the know-nothings, of course, have no intellect and are capable of little more than picking up talking points from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, or web sites such as the Drudge Report or Breitbart. But the intellectuals of the alt-right are much more scary. As Matthews points out, they are overtly anti-democracy. They’re authoritarians, and they dream of an authoritarian, corporatized government with a billionaire such as Elon Musk as king. The article is The alt-right is more than warmed-over white supremacy. It’s that, but way way weirder.

The Washington Post, as usual years behind the curve, has an article today on the prepper movement and the preppers who are moving to the “American redoubt” in the Pacific Northwest. This is old news. The preppers, and Survival.com, go back for years. Still, it’s an important piece of the puzzle, and you’ll find right-wing preppers pretty much everywhere. The article is A Fortress Against Fear: In the Rural Pacific Northwest, Prepping for the Day It Hits the Fan.

At Salon, Andrew O’Hehir sees the televised self-destruction of Karl Rove on election night in 2012 as the moment the last hinge broke (O’Hehir’s hinge metaphor, not mine) on the right wing’s grip on reality, unleashing the barbarians who now support Donald Trump (and who work in his campaign). O’Hehir writes, “Karl Rove kicked open a conceptual window with his micro-rebellion of 2012, a window that had been hanging from one rusty hinge. It took others, more courageous than he, to burst through it into the brave new world of post-reality Trumpian politics on the other side.” The article is: The Year of Dark Magical Thinking: How Karl Rove’s 2012 Fox News humiliation unleashed Trump, Breitbart and the demons of the alt-right.

A big part of what drove the anger of right-wingers during the past eight years, because they are pretty much all racists, was the fact that we had a black President. But for 25 years, they have demonized Hillary Clinton, so it’s clear that right-wing anger is not going to subside just because Hillary Clinton is white. One of the few questions remaining, as far as I can tell, about what right-wingers will do during the next few years is who will win the battle for control of the Republican Party. Will it be establishment Republicans or scorched-earth radicals? If I had to bet, I’d bet on the scorched-earth radicals.

Looking ahead, then, I increasingly believe that Hillary Clinton is uniquely qualified to deal with what is to come. She knows the enemy better than anyone. For 25 years, they have tried to defeat her, and they have failed. President Obama deceived himself into thinking that he could find common ground with scorched earthers, and Obama betrayed many people in his own party to suck up to Republicans. Instead, the scorched earthers ate him alive. Though Hillary Clinton no longer talks about “the vast right-wing conspiracy,” she’s had its number since the day she and Bill first arrived at the White House. The vast right-wing conspiracy has demonized her and tried to get something on her ever since Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992. She has survived them and outsmarted them. The industry that demonized her could never get anything significant to stick to her, but they did damage her favorability ratings. Supporters of Bernie Sanders bought into all that, to their eternal shame. Already, establishment voices are calling on Hillary Clinton to suck up to Republicans and move to the right. But Clinton already is a centrist. I only hope that she is not stupid enough to betray ten hard-working liberal supporters for every fickle right-winger she’d gain. Instead, Hillary Clinton should not flinch in driving a stake through the heart of the Republican Party, the party that deserves oblivion for having brought this country to the state it is in. Unless or until the radical, anti-government right wing comes to its senses, the Republican Party is its only political vehicle for gaining power the old-fashioned democratic way, through elections. As it is, the Republican Party is dangerous, and rather than coddling it, we must assist its suicide.

Though it will be a great pleasure to see Donald Trump permanently politically destroyed on Nov. 8, and though it will be an even greater pleasure to see the Republican Party hack itself to pieces with an ax of its own making, we will not be out of danger. Forty percent of the population will still be angry, psychotic, and unhinged from reality. They have their own media, and that media will continue to feed them anger, delusion, and a never-ending stream of conspiracy theories. New demagogues will soon be stabbing each other in the back to take Donald Trump’s place.

It’s going to be a rough ride. I just hope that Hillary Clinton understands the bigger, truly perilous trends that lie beneath all this. The first is economic injustice. The second is how those who are newly on the losing end of economic injustice — white people — have resorted to destructive rage (including terrorism) and the comfort of lies and deception. They need dark-skin scapegoats for who is eating their lunch, because they can’t be allowed to know that it’s billionaires and the 1 percent who are eating their lunch. Newly lunchless, they are insatiable consumers of propaganda. They are driven by emotion and screwball religion. They’ve created their own alternate reality. Breitbart.com has seen a huge increase in traffic since Stephen Bannon went to work with Trump. The Drudge Report will continue to be the Amazon of retailing right-wing slime. Will we see changes at Fox News now that Roger Ailes is out, perhaps an alliance with the establishment fragment of the Republican Party? But there’s no money to be made in talking about reality with right-wingers, because there’s no demand for reality. There are rumors that Trump and Ailes, after the election, will start a new media business to compete with Fox News. The only business model that could work in a competitive right-wing market would be coming up with the most appealing lies and the most obnoxious shouting heads. Heaven help us.

It’s almost enough to make you want to go hide in the woods somewhere.

Update, August 31, 2016: The Guardian has a nice piece on the possibility of a Trump TV: “Fox was this amazing unifier of all the strands of conservatism together … [Now] it’s kind of a Lord of the Flies situation where everyone’s trying to kill each other.”

Political insanity and religious insanity

Televangelist Kenneth Copeland

While the 2016 presidential election puts on full display the political insanity of much of the American population — not to mention the insanity of the Republican Party — let’s not fail to point out another insanity that is just as prevalent: religious insanity. Let’s also note how closely the two are connected.

The quote below is attributed to televangelist Kenneth Copeland, in a recent appearance on the Trinity Broadcasting Network:

“If Christians don’t support Trump, they are risking the wrath of God. Trump has been chosen by God, and by rejecting him, they are rejecting God. They could be punished with barrenness, poverty or even having a gay child.”

And the quote below is attributed to Anne Graham Lotz, on the air with right-wing radio host Steve Deace:

“Our nation seems to be shaking its fist in God’s face and telling him to get out of our politics, get out of our schools, get out of our businesses, get out of our marketplace, get off the streets. It’s just stunning to me the way we are basically abandoning God as a culture and as a nation. … I think that’s why God allows bad things to happen. I think that’s why he would allow 9/11 to happen, or the dreadful attack in San Bernardino, or some of these other places, to show us that we need him. We’re desperate without him.”

What a nice god! Though he must be incredibly busy running the universe, he also has time to punish earthlings for not voting Republican. That god also kills people — or at least allows people to be killed — to remind us how much we need such a violent, vindictive god.

As the philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris has pointed out, this kind of religious delusion and narcissism are prevalent among plenty of people who might see Kenneth Copeland and Anne Graham Lotz as a bit extreme. Harris has beautifully pointed out the narcissism of people who think that God is intimately involved in the details of their lives. Not only does God actually tell them what he’s thinking, it’s remarkable how much these people and their god are alike: pure nasty. While your God was finding you a parking space, Harris says, or answering your prayers for enough money to pay your credit card bill, how many children did that same God allow to die in Africa while their helpless parents watched and prayed? That’s narcissism on top of the nasty.

I’m fully on board with freedom of religion and freedom of speech. But those freedoms also mean that the rest of us are free to tell these people that they’re vile and sickening, and that their god is even worse.

Anne Graham Lotz