Choose

On ABC's "This Week" without George Stephanopoulos, President Obama's Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson was asked by Martha Raddatz "What do you think it says he surrounded himself with generals and they remain, and what do you expect going forward?"

Johnson responded

Well, that it's interesting. I don't think anyone would expect -- would have expected we'd have so many retired general officers serving in civilian positions today. There's been a lot of talk this week about people resigning from the White House, whether people should resign from the White House. We saw a number of his advisers resign from advisory councils.

Frankly, if John Kelly, or my friend Jim Mattis, came to me and said I'm thinking about resigning from this White House, I'd say absolutely not. You have to stay.

You're exactly right, Mr. Johnson, so stop right here. Don't go on. However, he couldn't resist adding "As John reportedly said, it's country first. And we need people like John Kelly, Jim Mattis, H.R. McMaster to right the ship."

Oh no, we don't need Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster. Wikipedia explains that when President Trump appointed the General to replace Michael Flynn

McMaster indicated that he "intends to remain on active duty while he serves as national security adviser."

Because McMaster intended to remain on active duty, his official assumption of the National Security Advisor's duties and responsibilities required a United States Senate vote; lieutenant generals and generals require Senate confirmation of their rank and assignments. On March 6, 2017, the Senate Armed Services Committee voted 23–2 to recommend to the full Senate that McMaster be confirmed for reappointment at his lieutenant general rank during his service as the National Security Advisor.The committee recommendation was referred to the Senate on March 7, and the full Senate confirmed McMaster by a vote of 86–10 on March 15, 2017.

Those ten senators, all of them Democrats, were right. General McMaster should have been required to make a choice- the active military or civilian service. While on active duty, McMaster- unlike anyone else in the Cabinet- has a commander in chief, and that is the President of the United Statesof America. A conflict of interest prevails because he answers to Donald Trump in a manner no other cabinet head doe.

Three months ago,  The Washington Post reported that President Trump had revealed classfied information to the Russian foreign minister and Russian ambassador in a meeting in the White House.  McMaster was trotted out to take the heat for his commander-in-chief, and he delivered when he

said the president shared the information in “context of the conversation” with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, saying it was “wholly appropriate to that conversation” and “consistent with the routine sharing of information between the president and any leader with whom he’s engaged.”

McMaster would not confirm if that information was classified.

"I was in the room, the Secretary of State was in the room, as you know, the deputy adviser for national security, Dina Powell, and none of us felt in any way that conversation was inappropriate," McMaster said.





It was classified, it was not appropriate, and it was not consistent with practice. The Post's report was spot-on. But McMaster was asked to be a sycophant for his commander-in-chief, and he took orders without complaint. At the time, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin wrote "It is not unreasonable to ask whether McMaster, a lieutenant general who was previously seen as one of the few credible voices in the administration, can now serve the country and protect it from an unfit president only by resigning."

If there is such a thing as a "Deep State," it is this, with three generals in top positions in the Trump Administration. Yet, two of them are retired while one felt privileged and demanded he be allowed to retain active-duty status. He should resign which, of course, he won't do because National Security Advisor is a pretty good gig. Heck, even former government officials belonging to the opposite party, failing to recognize the conflict, can only sit there and salute.





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Bad News

On Tuesday in Durham, North Carolina activists brought down the Confederate Soldiers Monument. Demanding amnesty, one 22-year-old female participant declared

Everyone who was there—the people did the right thing.  The people will continue to keep making the right choices until every Confederate statue is gone, until white supremacy is gone. That statue is where it belongs. It needs to be in the garbage. … That statue glorifies the conditions that oppressed people live in and it had to go.

More conventionally and amicably

Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) tweeted on Wednesday night that he would introduce a bill taking down Confederate statues in the building, though he did not give a specific timeline or indicate when the bill would be brought forward....

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) joined Booker’s call to action on Thursday.

“If Republicans are serious about rejecting white supremacy, I call upon Speaker Ryan to join Democrats to remove the Confederate statues from the Capitol immediately,” Pelosi said.

Whatever their methods, all are pursuing a righteous outcome. However, they might consider that emphasis on "white supremacy."

An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll of 1,125 adults conducted by landline or mobile phone on August 14 and August 15 featured several questions related to the violence the previous weekend in Charlottesville, Va.

The answers to at least one question were staggering.  Respondents were asked "Do you think statues honoring leaders of the Confederacy should...." and were given choices of "remain as a historical symbol," "be removed because they are offensive to some people," and "unsure."

I know, I know- the responses were tilted, intentionally or otherwise, in the pro-monument direction. While "honoring leaders" is almost always a positive thing, removing something because it is "offensive to some people" suggests that these individuals are reserving for themselves some special right. (And we all know who "some people" are here.) Additionally, there is an additional reason(s) to remove the monuments.

Still, it is significant and discouraging that 62% opted for for "remain" and only 27% for "remove" (with 11% unsure).  More than twice as many individuals want these shrines to slavery to remain as to be removed.

The phrasing of the question no doubt affected the outcome. Nonetheless, the conclusion is inescapable: most people support continuing to commemmorate slavery. Moreover, 44% of African-Americans came down on the majority side.

This emphasis on "white supremacy" clearly is not working. A new argument- or rather a greater emphasis on an old argument- probably would resonate with more Americans, and certainly a wider cross-section of Americans.

The Confederate generals and other of their military leaders took up arms against the United States of America.  We'll leave it up to the lawyers to determine the legal definition of the term, but we laypeople can put it simply: they were traitors (video below from June, 2015).

The modern-day hero of the statue supporters has painted for over two years a portrait of a country deeply flawed and almost beyond redemption, one that can be saved only by him and be made "great again." Many conservatives, wrapped tightly in the symbol of the flag, won't accept that their heroes of an earlier age committed treason.  But if the left and the center are to take hold of this issue, they must emphasize that the statues celebrate treason against the United States of America.

And to complement the message, we can repeat (in less profane fashion) what Penn Jillette stated on Friday night's Real Time: "if you want a statue, win the goddamn war."










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Vendetta By Flyer

Break out the champagne.

Or at least break out the champagne if you're a blogger who identifies himself as "Conover"- and if I were him, I wouldn't be using my real name.

In his piece, cross-posted at DeepStateNation and Crooks and Liars, he explains

An anti-fascist group posted 250 fliers around the Honeyoe Falls area of New York earlier this week following the white supremacist event which shook the nation to its core which left three people dead and dozens more injured.

The fliers which read "No Nazis in our neighborhood," show a picture of a group of the white supremacists carrying tiki torches on the campus of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

One man carrying a torch near the bottom right corner of the image is circled, identifying him as Jerrod Kuhn and claims that he is a "leading figure with the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website around which local groups have been organizing to promote anti-Semitism, white supremacy and violence against LGBTQ communities," according to Livingston County News.

Kuhn denied being a neo-Nazi, calling the assertion "a crazy accusation" even though the Tiki torch carrying group were seen in the Vice Video chanting, "Blood and soil" (a Nazi Germany era slogan) and "Jews will not replace us" while giving Nazi salutes.

"I'm not a neo-Nazi. I don't belong to a German workers' party from 1933," he said. "I'm a moderate Republican."

I have a soft spot for this guy. Anyone revealed as a Nazi sympathizer who labels himself a "moderate Republican" should be applauded. One almost expects him to lament that Trump's personality and the "optics" of tweeting angrily in the middle of the night obstruct the real business of "tax reform" and infrastructure development.  Conover continues

Kuhn claimed that he traveled to Charlottesville to protest the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue from one of the city's parks.

"It's a piece of history, and I thought that it should remain," he said. "It's important to me that we preserve American history no matter how ugly the past is it's associated with."

Now he's sounding like a moderate Republican, which evidently irritates others and

Peter Berkman, a volunteer with the group that distributed the fliers identifying Kuhn as a marcher, said that the fliers were circulated in an attempt to make residents in the area aware that they were living in close proximity to Kuhn.

"People have a right to know if their neighbor is a violent neo-Nazi just as much as they would if their neighbor was a violent sex offender," Berkman said. "I think it's important that people know the dangers the community faces and we think people having that information is important for them to protect themselves."

There is a slight distinction there, Charlie. Neighbors are not notified of a violent sex offender in their midst until and unless the individual is found guilty of an offense more serious than having very noxious political views.  Residents may choose to protect themselves against a sex offender by keeping their children away from that danger. How people would "protect themselves" against white supremacists is left to the imagination, but probably goes beyond the Second Amendment.  We learn

"I can't live in this community anymore. I'm in the process of figuring out what I'm going to do," Kuhn said. "I'm 21 years old and now my life is over in this area." 

Berkman, however, looked at the situation differently.

"These folks don't just get to be weekend neo-Nazis and then come home and live comfortably without having people around them knowing who they are," he said. "It's important that people know who he is and that this person is in their community and to proceed with caution."

Well, yes, they do get to be neo-Nazis if they don't break the law. There is, further, something between a gag order and outing an individual to their neighborhood and potentially their friends, relatives, and employer. More Conover:

Alex Gay on Facebook says he went to high school with Kuhn. "If you're proud of your beliefs, deal with the ramifications you sack of human shit,' he wrote.

I'm guessing Mr. Gay was not president of that high school debate club. He added '"Me having human compassion and the ability to look at every race equally doesn't make me a snowflake, a dirty liberal, or whatever else. It means that I have compassion, morality, and the ability to think as a kind and loving person."

I noticed that compassion and loving nature in that "sack of human s_ _ _" comment.  And he is in fact a "snowflake" if someone of represhensible political views, who is not accused of committing a violent act, has so infuriated him.

This is still less a travesty than if tragically the shoe were on the other foot. Consider, for instance, if fliers were passed around a neighborhood identifying someone as a member of Black Lives Matter, or of the Socialist Party, gay, or having had an abortion. Conover or Peter Berkman might have a different reaction, as well he should.

Or perhaps Conover, at least, would approve of an individual losing a custodial or secretarial position at an evangelical church- or anywhere- if she were revealed as being gay or having procured an abortion. Conover concludes

John Ramondetta, known as Johnny Monoxide on white supremacist and neo-Nazi social media sites, was a union electrician working in the Bay Area on a project for Rosendin Electric, but on Wednesday, a company spokeswoman said he was "no longer employed" at the job site, according to SFGate. He is the second individual in the area to lose his job over participating in the hate-rally.

They should consider this a learning experience.

How nice it is that we now have progressives gloating about a person ostracized in his hometown or losing  a job because of his political views.  We await the next post about workers' rights or the uplifting experience of constructive dialogue.










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Not Our Commander-In-Chief. Not A Journalist.

The Daily Beast's Matt Wilstein asks "What’s a Fox & Friends host to do when they desperately want to push President Donald Trump’s narrative that “both sides” are to blame for Charlottesville, but their guests want to talk about what’s really going on in America right now?"

Rephrased: What is a daughter of a former governor, U.S.ambassador to China, and (proposed) future US ambassador to Russia, who got a position at Good Morning America at age 16, to do when she is a host on the most-watched cable news network in America and is frightfully ignorant?

Abby Huntsman was leading a discussion of President Trump's response to the events in Charlottesville, Virginia and expecting disagreement between Wendy Osefo and Gianno Caldwell, the latter a card-carry Republican, when

“This has become very troubling for anyone to come on any network and defend what President Trump did and said at that press conference yesterday,” he said. “It’s completely lost and [has] the potential to be morally bankrupt.”

“No,” Huntsman could be heard pushing back off screen.

“I’m sorry, no I believe that and I’m being very honest as someone who has been talking about these issues for a very long time, I’m sorry that this is where we are right now. I hope the president learns a lesson from his press conference yesterday. It’s disturbing.”

Acknowledging the “sensitive” nature of the conversation, Huntsman once again tried to get Caldwell to talk about statues, something he had no interest in doing.

By the end of the segment, Caldwell was openly weeping, wiping tears from his eyes as Osefo nodded along in support and started to tear up herself. Hunstman had no idea what she had walked into and no concept of how to handle it.

Save no sympathy for Huntsman, who early in the segment had stated

There are good people on both sides of this debate. We talk about keeping these statues up. People that I've talked to say this is about history. How do we move forward now- do we learn from our mistakes if we ust tear everything down?

Nice touch there, Abby, maintaining "people that I've talked to" rather than "I believe" or simply "isn't this about history?" This way, when she eventually parts ways voluntarily or involuntarily with Fox News, she can go back to MSNBC or to CNN.  Additionally, one might ask: if it is a mistake- as she suggests it may be- why would we want to perpetuate it?

But it got worse when she claimed "He is the President of the United States. He is the Commander-in-Chief of- for all of us. Last (indistinguishable), Wendy, what would  you like to hear more of from the President on this?"





Praise the Lord because Donald Trump is not "Commander-in-Chief for all of us." Article II, Section 2 of the US Constitution states "The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States."

This is no inconsequential mistake. The President is our employee; he is not the boss of us, a different relationship than prevails between the President (the Commander-in-Chief) and commissioned officers of the armed services.  Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice reads 

Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Transportation, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Territory, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.

And that's why it's significant that the highest-ranking Navy officer commented  "The Navy will forever stand against intolerance and hatred" and the Commandant of the Marine Corps tweeted "no place for racial hatred or extremism in @USMC." while the Army Chief of Staff maintained "The Army doesn't tolerate racism, extremism, or hatred in our ranks." All the while, GOP politicians- who are free of the constraints of commissioned military officers- are loathe to utter the word "Trump" or "President."

Huntsman's was no trivial mistake, for if the President is the Commander-in-Chief of every civilian, dissent is unacceptable and Article I, Section 1 of the US Constitution is  rendered meaningless. While print journalists must hew strictly to objectivity and accuracy, a Fox News host can actually claim- in a highly consequential context- that the President is "the Commander-in-Chief of all of us" and suffer no consequence. It's a charmed life.

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Welcome, But Late

The Washington Post reported

Crews quietly removed Baltimore’s Confederate monuments early Wednesday, days after deadly unrest in Charlottesville as white nationalists rallied to defend a statue in that city.

The sudden removal of four statues, without fanfare or advance notice, marks an attempt by Baltimore leaders to avoid a long, bruising conflict that has embroiled Charlottesville and other communities rethinking how they honor figures who fought to preserve slavery.

Photos and video on social media Wednesday morning showed crews using cranes to remove statues of Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, then hauling them away on a flatbed truck. Statues honoring Confederate women and Roger B. Taney, the U.S. chief justice who authored the pro-slavery Dred Scott decision, also were removed. 

A statue honoring confederate soldiers and sailors,defaced with bright red paint over the weekend, is also gone.

To be fair: this process began after the murder of nine blacks at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015, when then-Baltimore Mayor Rawlings-Blake appointed a commission which, according to the Post, "recommended the removal of the Lee-Jackson monument, with signs adding historical context to two other statutes."  Additionally, even after the events in Charlottesville last weekend, the former President of the Maryland division of the American Daughters of the Confederacy criticized the manner of removal as "an act of lawlessness in my mind.This is a public figure. This is the leader of a city. If you expect . . . your constituents to respect the law, you have to toe the line.”

But in the phrase of Bill Maher: "new rule"-  those of us who always have wanted statues celebrating heros of the Confederacy to be removed from the public square must be spared the lecture of individuals such as Delegate Cheryl Glenn of Baltimore, chairpeson of the Legislative Black Caucus of Maryland. Glenn remarked

Baltimore is setting an example that others should follow. If this neo-Nazi movement is intent on exacting violence where we have these Confederate statues, then if you take the statues down,you reduce the potential for this kind of divisiveness.

Oh, please.  Maryland was neutral in the Civil War or, as homegrown Southerners would put it, the War Between the States; or as a few of us Yankees (most emphatically, not these Yankees) would might put it, the War Between the People of the USA and its Traitors. Wikipedia explains

Across the state, nearly 85,000 citizens signed up for the military, with most joining the Union Army. Approximately one third as many enlisted to fight for the Confederacy. The most prominent Maryland leaders and officers during the Civil War included Governor Thomas H. Hicks who, despite his early sympathies for the South, helped prevent the state from seceding, and Confederate General George H. Steuart, who was a noted brigade commander under Robert E. Lee.

Some 150+ years later, 63.2% of the population of the city is black, the fifth highest concentration in the nation.  Baltimore has some 400,000 residents who have a legitimate right to resent veneration of powerful individuals who wanted to keep their descendants enslaved. And it took until 2017- under the cover of darkness- to remove the monuments.

It's not entirely the city's fault, for the standard procedure (bypassed by the mayor) may have required her to gain approval from a state agency, the Maryland Historical Trust.

But it has taken too long. Too long for the city to remove, whether with or without state approval, endorsement of the Confederate States of America, which turned against the United States of America in order to continue enslavement of human beings.








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GOP: We Don't Want Any Bigots, Unless You're 71 And Orange

@CNN Politics Wednesday morning tweeted "Source- Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is upset with Trump over his latest Charlotesville comments."

Of course he is. It exposes the base of  the Republican Party for what it. That harms the GOP's brand, and Majority Leader McConnell doesn't want to become Minority Leader McConnell.

We've seen and heard this play before, as both supposedly well-connected pundits and Democratic members of Congress assure the left, center, and mainstream media that GOP Representatives and Senators are oh, so annoyed by Donald Trump and are losing patience with him.

Let's check in with a Repub leader, one with a famous uncle, who has disembodied the comments made by the golf afficionado of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue from its source. Speaking to ABC's David Muir hours after the President's clarification of the clarification of his original remarks about the Charlottesville protest

White supremacists, neo-Nazis and other hate groups have “no place in the Republican party,” its chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel said Wednesday morning hours after President Donald Trump insisted that those groups did not deserve 100 percent of the blame for their violent rally over the weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia.

McDaniel defended Trump, who reiterated in a Tuesday press conference inside his Manhattan skyscraper that “there’s blame on both sides” for the deadly clashes last Saturday, telling ABC’s “Good Morning America” that the president had condemned the hate groups.

That condemnation, delivered Monday, came under great political pressure and was quickly undone Tuesday when the president repeated what had been his initial reaction, that the white supremacist groups and the protesters gathered to oppose them should share the blame for the violence that erupted.

R. Romney McDaniel continued "we have no place in our party at all for KKK, anti-Semitism, race- racism, bigotry, it has no place in the Republican Party, There is no home here. We don't want your vote. We don't support you. We'll speak out against you." Then she went down the rathole with "The president has said so."





Not so, when he puts "blame on both sides" and equates Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

John Kasich and a few individuals aside, most Republicans see it as McDaniel does- condemn racism and bigotry and continue to support the racist and the bigot. And by no means call for removing from public land statues of Confederate leaders, who made war on the United States and its flag. Keep it safe and cozy, and don't offend the bigot and chief, the nation's chief defenders of the traitors inits past.






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Outgunning Police

Everyone knows you "cannot shout fire in a crowded movie theatre."  The statement by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in US vs. Schenck in 1893 actually was "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic." However, a few years ago Trevor Timm in The Atlantic wrote

Brandenburg v. Ohio effectively overturned Schenck and any authority the case still carried. There, the Court held that inflammatory speech--and even speech advocating violence by members of the Ku Klux Klan--is protected under the First Amendment, unless the speech "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action" (emphasis mine).

Well, obviously, because in Charlottesville, The Washington Post notes,

At one point, police appeared to retreat and then watch the beatings before eventually moving in to end the free-for-all, make arrests and tend to the injured. Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) declared a state of emergency about 11 a.m. and activated the Virginia National Guard.

“The whole point is to have overwhelming force so that people don’t get the idea they can do these kinds of things and get away with it,” said Charles H. Ramsey, who headed both the District and Philadelphia police departments.

But overwhelming force depends not only upon the number of people but also how well armed they are compared to their adversary, those who believe "they can do these kinds of things and get away with it."

Many people have criticized the police for their passivity on Saturday in Charlottesville. The New York Times reports that one United Church of Christ minister complained "There was no police presence. We were watching people punch each other; people were bleeding all the while police were inside of barricades at the park, watching. It was essentially just brawling on the street and community members trying to protect each other.” One state legislator said the police might have been "waiting for a more effective time to get people out" of the park.

Fortunately, the Governor evidently understood as he "fiercely defended the police in an impromptu sidewalk interview, noting that many of the demonstrators were armed, and saying the officers had done 'great work' in a 'very delicate situation.'”

The problem wasn't the police. It was the Second Amendment and more specifically the right of "open carry."."

As the map below from Wikipedia displays, twenty-four states have open carry laws as permissive as does Virginia.   (Only four states and the District of Columbia effectively prohibit the practice. If you flunked geography, check out Wikipedia's chart, and be prepared to be shocked at two.) If the Charlottesville police had responded as aggressively as many individuals claim they could have, there would have been much more blood in the streets, which would not have pleased any UCC minister.

The police could have prevented most of the violence in Charlottesville. But they could not have done so without a show of force that would have left the kind of carnage Donald Trump sees in America generally.  They were facing two invisible enemies, one of them the national fetish with guns, the other the myth that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess firearms. If we don't see our way clearly through this, the next time we won't even need white supremacists to shout about the fire.

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