"The Wonderful Joy"

The old lie: Dulce et decorum est... Pro patria mori.
(It is good and honorable to die for one's country.)


We now know that John Kelly lied promiscuously about U.S. Representative Frederica Wilson.  But finding out that the Emperor, or in this case, the General, has no clothes or much integrity might not be very important. He is, after all, not Presidential Press Secretary but Chief of Staff, and he'll have little opportunity in the future to fabricate an event.

And it is not news that anyone with any integrity who comes into contact with Donald Trump comes out with very little. More important, however, is the point Steve M. noted that Masha Gessen made in The New Yorker as she wrote

when Kelly described his own distress after hearing the criticism of Trump’s phone call, the general said that he had gone to “walk among the finest men and women on this earth. And you can always find them because they’re in Arlington National Cemetery.” So, by “the best” Americans, Kelly had meant dead Americans—specifically, fallen soldiers.

... It is in totalitarian societies, which demand complete mobilization, that dying for one’s country becomes the ultimate badge of honor. Growing up in the Soviet Union, I learned the names of ordinary soldiers who threw their bodies onto enemy tanks, becoming literal cannon fodder. All of us children had to aspire to the feat of martyrdom....

Kelly married his celebration of martydom with the Administration's hostility toward the working press. Gessen continues with

... At the end of the briefing, [Kelly] said that he would take questions only from those members of the press who had a personal connection to a fallen soldier, followed by those who knew a Gold Star family.... he was now explicitly denying a majority of Americans—or the journalists representing them—the right to ask questions. This was a new twist on the Trump Administration’s technique of shunning and shaming unfriendly members of the news media, except this time, it was framed explicitly in terms of national loyalty. As if on cue, the first reporter allowed to speak inserted the phrase "Semper Fi"- a literal loyalty oath- into his question.

Before walking off the stage, Kelly told Americans who haven't served in the military that he pities them.  "We don't walk down upon those of you who haven't served," he said. "In fact, in a way we're a little bit sorry because you'll never have experienced the wonderful joy you get in your heart when you do the kinds of things our servicemen and women do- not for any other  reason than that they love this country."

It was all there, including the condescending "we're a little bit sorry" and the implication that those servicemen and women "love this country" while the others do not. Easily lost however- except by Gessen and a few others- was the glorification of fighting in a war, dramatically dramatized in the 1921 poem by Wilfred Owen:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, 
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, 
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, 
And towards our distant rest began to trudge. 
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, 
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; 
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots 
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind. 

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling 
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, 
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling 
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, 
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. 

In all my dreams before my helpless sight, 
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. 

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace 
Behind the wagon that we flung him in, 
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, 
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; 
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood 
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, 
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud 
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,— 
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest 
To children ardent for some desperate glory, 
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est 
Pro patria mori.










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Trump-Pence-Kelly Administration

Chris Hayes has tweeted "I still can’t quite get my head around the viciousness of Kelly telling that story about Rep. Wilson, which she says is false."

So does Cowanda-Jones Johnson, widow of La David T. Johnson, so Chief of Staff Kelly gets a pass, deservedly or not, which it is not.

Trump's Chief of Staff on Thursday remarked also

It stuns me that a member of Congress would have listened in on that conversation. Absolutely stuns me. And I thought at least that was sacred. You know, when I was a kid growing up, a lot of things were sacred in our country. Women were sacred, looked upon with great honor. That's obviously not the case anymore as we see from recent cases. Life -- the dignity of life -- is sacred. That's gone. Religion, that seems to be gone as well.

It stuns me that Kelly would be surprised that Mrs. Johnson would allow others in the car with her when she received the President's call to have listened to the call, especially because the congresswoman is a friend of the family. He should be stunned- better yet, embarrassed- because the guy he works for claimed he had "proof" that Representative Wilson's version of events was inaccurate, and has yet to produce such "proof."

Kelly is entitled to use his position to rengage the culture war by lamenting a time when "women were sacred" and were second-class citizens, and when the dignity of life meant depriving women of reproductive freedom. He also is entitled to imagine that religion is "gone as well."

Claiming "religion, that seems to be gone as well," Kelly evidently has slept through Sunday mornings, unaware that tens of millions of Americans gather in their preferred house of worship at that time (or at other times if they so choose).  The plea for vague religiosity, women on a pedestal, and a woman's right to choose as an evil are straight out of Donald Trump's playbook. Kelly now should be held accountable for the Trump presidency in a way that he didn't before, when he was held above criticism as one of the presumed "adults" in the Administration.

Lawrence O'Donnell closes his program on MSNBC by giving someone "the last word." Now the last word will go to Gregg Popovich.  "The people who work with this president," Popovich told The Nation recently, "should be ashamed, because they know better than anyone just how unfit he is, and yet they choose to do nothing about it. This is their shame most of all.”










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No Soul, No Courage

Donald Trump and Mike Pence," Paul Waldman recognized in early September, "are united in the belief that strength is a performance, not a characteristic,."  For example

North Korea detonated what may have been a hydrogen bomb, a follow-up to a series of tests seeming to show that they could reach the United States mainland with a missile. They seem completely undeterred by a regular stream of taunts and threats from President Trump, who among other things promised just before taking office that they wouldn't be able to do what they've now demonstrated they probably can. It's almost as though they don't take him seriously.

Not only that, Kim Jong Un was not deterred when back in April, Vice President Mike Pence went to the DMZ and made a stern face across the border to show them we mean business. That sounds like something out of a comic satire, but it actually happened. "I thought it was important that people on the other side of the DMZ see our resolve in my face," Pence said afterward.

That look of resolve should have been replaced by a bout of laughter. It's six weeks later, threats from Pyongyang have only been ramped up and the Administration continues to mistake bluster. for resolve and not only as pertains to Korea.

The Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, Slate's Fred Kaplan explains,

requires the president to certify, every 90 days, that Iran is still in compliance. If he certifies otherwise (in other words, if he acknowledges that Iran has been caught cheating), Congress could vote within 60 days to reimpose the sanctions.

Both as candidate and as President, Donald Trump has condemned the Iran deal in the harshest of terms, most recently as "one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into." Therefore

In his speech on Friday, Trump said, “Based on the factual record I’ve put forward, we cannot and will not make this certification.” But there is no such factual record. The Iranians have terminated all the programs that the deal has required them to terminate at this point, and the “violations” that Trump cited are fiction. If anyone is in violation of this deal, it is Trump.

So what will he do about it? At this point, as he has done on many other issues, Trump abrogated his responsibility; he doesn’t want to take the heat for taking any steps that might turn out badly so he put the burden on Congress. He can’t rewrite the Iran nuclear deal, much as he’d like to; so he told Congress to rewrite the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act.

That's the Donald Trump of reality, once we get past the bluff and bluster. In July 2015 he pledged to "eliminate immediately" President Obama's "illegal executive order" on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program. Early last month, he announced that he was ending the program. He then made a deal with Senate Minority Leader Schumer and House Minority Leader Pelosi to continue it, only later to remark that he still wanted his Mexican-American wall and other concessions.

Bill Clinton once remarked that voters prefer a politician who is "wrong and strong" rather than "weak and right."  When Trump backs down from his earlier positions on Iran and on individuals brought to the USA as children, he is weak and (somewhat) right, turning Clinton's observation on its head. Trump boasts Kim Jong-un  "best not make any more threats against the United States" and sits idly by as threats are made; makes a deal on DACA, then backs out of it: and shirks his responsibility as Chief Executive on the Iranian nuclear deal by shoving the issue onto Congress.

Still, Trump's gift and advantage is that he appears- both to opponents and supporters- as strong and  reasonably resolute.   But he is cowardly and soulless, the latter trait most recently observed by  Cowanda-Jones Johnson and Representative Fredericka Wilson.  And so he may have been best described by the NBA's greatest active head coach, Gregg Popovich, who recently concluded "this man in the Oval Office is a soulless coward."










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A Man With A Plan

In late June, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski noted they "have known Mr. Trump for more than a decade and have some fond memories of our reltationship together. But that hasn't stopped us from criticizing his abhorrent behavior or worrying about his fitness," which they evidently believe borders on mental illness.

"I think — I think he’s crazy. I mean, I don’t say that lightly and as a kind of a goofy guy,” said Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) to Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), who clearly chooses not to disagree, in a conversation they thought private

Many psychiatrists argue that Donald Trump suffers from a sort of  mental illness.  John McCain recognizes Trump "can be impulsive in his speech and conduct," which is about as far as any senator can go in questioning a president's personal behavior.

Similarly, Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal Constitution argues the President "is not a man who picks his battles carefully or strategically. To him, conflict is not a necessary evil or a means to an end, it is his natural state of existence."  Benjamin Hart in New York magazine explained this perspective:

Almost eight months into his decidedly abnormal presidency, there remains a persistent and surprisingly widespread impulse among political journalists to transmogrify Trump into a traditional president, one who makes decisions based on long-term strategy, one not governed by pure id — a president who has something in common with men who came before him. (Perhaps there’s something comforting in that?)...

Waiting for him to transform into some semblance of a normal human being, much less a president governed by anything beyond impulse, will be a long wait indeed.

Donald Trump certainly is very impulsive and he may suffer from a mental and/or psychological disorder. But with all of that, there is a strategic element and a method to his madness. As Chris Hayes pointed out Tuesday evening, "the President has his own conceept of truth. To him the question isn't whether he's right. It's whether  many people are saying it." Hayes referred to Trump's interview in late January with ABC News' David Muir and an interaction earlier Tuesday when

President Trump was confronted by Mike Sacks of Scripps News Service, who reminded Trump that he has "repeatedly said that we are the highest tax nation in the world when that's been seen as objectively false, with the credibility you need to pass tax reform."  Then

Mr Trump responded by interrupting and claiming he was merely using it as shorthand and it might be more accurate to say the US is the most taxed nation among developed countries.

He said: “Some people say it differently, and they will say we are the highest developed nation taxed in the world.” 

“A lot of people know exactly what I am talking about, and in many cases they think I am right when I say the highest. As far as I am concerned, we are really essentially the highest. But if you’d like to add the ‘developed nation,’ you can say that, too. But a lot of people agree that the way I am saying is exactly correct.”

A lot of people know exactly what I am talking about... they think I am right... a lot of people agree with me.

The President's assumption is decidely and demonstrably false but the "everybody is saying it" tactic is a tried-and-true formula for Trump. Five days after he was inaugurated, he was interviewed by ABC's Muir. Muir told the President that Speaker Ryan had said "I have seen no evidence" that 3-5 million people had voted illegally and  that Senator Graham had observed "it's the most inappropriate thing for a president to say without proof."   However, it became clear that Trump was unconcerned with accuracy when he responded

Let me just tell you, you know what's important, millions of people agree with me when I say that if you would’ve looked on one of the other networks and all of the people that were calling in they're saying, "We agree with Mr. Trump. We agree." They're very smart people.

The people that voted for me- lots of  people are saying they saw things happen.





Millions of people agree with me... lots of people are saying they saw things happen.

Logic suggests there is a reason, somewhere, that Donald Trump thinks if he keeps repeating something, and adds that many people believe it, other voters will conclude that they also should.  This strategy did not appear to him out of  thin air for

Donald Trump reportedly owned a copy of Adolf Hitler’s speeches and kept them in his bedside cabinet.

A 1990 Vanity Fair article about billionaire businessman stated that Mr Trump’s then wife Ivana, said her husband owned a copy of “My New Order” – a printed collection of the Nazi leader’s speeches.

Marie Brenner, the article’s author, wrote: “Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler's collected speeches, 'My New Order', which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. 

Call him remarkably, even unbelievably, impulsive and mentally ill or emotionally twisted. Whatever he is, however, he has a strategy and one which has kept him extremely popular with a sizeable minority of American voters.




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Some For It, Some Against It

Roger Ailes was brilliant when he invented the catchphrase "Fair and Balanced" for GOP TV. The network recently dropped it after it had served its purpose, both in promoting the network and in convincing much of the media that presenting a "fair and balanced" story eliminates the need to be accurate and thorough.

Politico reports

Nearly half of voters, 46 percent, believe the news media fabricate news stories about President Donald Trump and his administration, according to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll.

Just 37 percent of voters think the media do not fabricate stories, the poll shows, while the remaining 17 percent are undecided.

More than three-quarters of Republican voters, 76 percent, think the news media invent stories about Trump and his administration, compared with only 11 percent who don’t think so. Among Democrats, one-in-five think the media make up stories, but a 65 percent majority think they do not. Forty-four percent of independent voters think the media make up stories about Trump, and 31 percent think they do not.

Wait, ye denizens of planet Earth, before accusing three-quarters of Republican voters of being "crazy" or "idiots" or "ignorant." Wait, because it arguably gets worse.  Shepard continues

But voters diverge from the president on whether the federal government should be able to punish news organizations that he believes make up stories about him. Trump last week suggested the government could revoke NBC’s broadcast licenses.

Only 28 percent think the government should have the power to revoke broadcast licenses of major news organizations that it says are fabricating news stories about a president or the administration, while 51 percent think the government should not be able to do that. Another 21 percent are undecided.

Voters are split along party lines on this question, too. More than two-thirds of Democrats, 68 percent, think the federal government should not have the power to revoke broadcast licenses of those organizations. But more Republicans, 46 percent, think the government should have that power than the third of GOP voters who don’t think so.

Shepard gently notes "only 28 percent think the government should have the power to revoke broadcast licenses of major news organizations that it says are fabricating news stories abut a president or the administration."

Only 28 percent? The journalist's diplomacy and kindness are impressive- but not admirable- as he wrote "only 28 percent," including 46 percent of Republicans "think the government should have that power."

That certainly is balanced, and it's arguably fair. But it's missing the larger picture.

The framers made as the first of the two parts of the First Amendment to the Constitution "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."

More than one-quarter of voters- and nearly half of Republicans- believe Congress should consider a law abridging freedom of the press. And only a bare majority- 51 percent of the electorate- believes Congress should not have the power to render null and void First Amendment protections of freedom of the press.

Shepard did not explain that.  He did not observe that Americans are uneasy with the idea that there is a right to criticize this President. He did not notice that voters appear uncomfortable with the First Amendment.  He did not even mention the amendment, which in the minds of roughly half (46%) of Republicans should be in serious jeopardy.

These are remarkable numbers, or should be so considered. And they are especially dangerous numbers when pertaining to the party which controls the federal and most state governments and whose elected officials pander to voters in primaries rather than in general elections. Such journalism may be "fair and balanced," but is dedicated to avoid revealing the hard, discomfiting truth about our fellow citizens.








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"Joking About Murdering People" Is The Least Of It

Of Vice President Mike Pence, George Takei has tweeted "Not sure what's more disturbing, that Donald would joke about such a thing or that he would pick a man with these views as his number 2."

Takei can be sure, but he is at least closer to the answer than so many supporters of the gay rights movement. We read in Huffington Post

A growing number of celebrities, activists and tweeting voters expressed astonishment Monday over a report that President Donald Trump appeared to joke about Vice President Mike Pence’s stance on gays, saying he wanted to “hang them all.”

“What the fuck,” Josh Groban tweeted, getting right to the point.

According to a New Yorker profile on Pence published Monday, when an unnamed “legal scholar” began to discuss gay rights with Trump, the president gestured toward Pence and responded: “Don’t ask that guy — he wants to hang them all!” The article, “The Danger of a Pence Presidency,” addressed Pence’s religion and religion-based political positions and Trump’s frequent mockery of them. But former White House strategist Steve Bannon is also quoted as saying that “Trump thinks Pence is great.”

George Takei tweeted: “Not sure what’s more disturbing, that Donald would joke about such a thing or that he would pick a man with these views as his number 2.”

Chelsea Clinton noted that the president needs to be reminded that it’s never OK to joke about murdering people. The LGBTQ community is a particular target of hate crimes. At a Justice Department meeting on hate crimes in June, Attorney General Jeff Sessions addressed an alarming “spate of murders ... around the country of transgendered individuals.” 

The Advocate asked its readers: “Still think he’s an ally? Trump joked about gays being hanged from nooses.” The National Center for Lesbian Rights responded, over and over, in a tweet: “This is not normal.” 

Spare me the self-righteousness.  Donald Trump was speaking rhetorically, intentionally exaggerating Trump's extremism regarding homosexuals (note: the opposite of this is "heterosexuals.") He was not criticizing, ridiculing, or even stating his opinion of their place in society, though it's extremely unlikely such a remark would be coming from a guy who endorses Pence's perspective.

The answer to Takei's question is that he would pick a man with these views as his number 2. In the article ("The Danger of President Pence") in The New Yorker in which the remark was published, investigative journalist Jane Mayer writes that early in his career

Even as Pence argued for less government interference in business, he pushed for policies that intruded on people’s private lives. In the early nineties, he joined the board of the Indiana Family Institute, a far-right group that supported the criminalization of abortion and campaigned against equal rights for homosexuals.

Before he was in elective office, "while Pence ran the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, it published an essay arguing that unmarried women should be denied access to birth control." Less than a decade later

In 2000, when a Republican congressman in northern Indiana vacated his seat, Pence ran as the Party favorite, on a platform that included a promise to oppose “any effort to recognize homosexuals as a discrete and insular minority entitled to the protection of anti-discrimination laws.” He won, by a twelve-point margin.

One non-partisan Indiana political scientist stated "The conventional wisdom is that he ran for governor so he could check that box, get some executive experience, and then run for President." However

In the spring of 2015, Pence signed a bill called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which he presented as innocuous. “He said it protected religious freedom, and who’s against that?” (Republican co-founder of Angie's List Bill) Oesterle recalled. But then a photograph of the closed signing session surfaced. It showed Pence surrounded by monks and nuns, along with three of the most virulently anti-gay activists in the state. The image went viral. Indiana residents began examining the law more closely, and discovered that it essentially legalized discrimination against homosexuals by businesses in the state.





Pence later signed a less discriminatory form of the bill following condemnation of the RFRA by gay groups, the NCAA, and the business community, including several companies which "began cancelling conventions, and threatening to reverse plans to expand in the state."  Nevertheless, he is has been a staunch opponent of anything gay, as well of reproductive freedom. He places religious belief above the Constitution and as Mayer puts it, is "the inside man of the conservative money machine" and is very close to the Koch brothers.

Anyone and everyone can get exorcised about a joke or, as it was from Trump's lips, a means to demean  #2.  Of far greater importance is what it says about Trump, and what it says about the guy who may replace him before November, 2020.. Mayer notes

“Trump’s supporters like to say, ‘It’s not what he says, it’s what he does that matters.’ That’s definitely the case when it comes to issues affecting LGBT Americans,” said Jimmy LaSalvia, who started the now-defunct conservative gay rights group GOProud along with Barron. “I never thought that Donald Trump was an anti-gay homophobe. I certainly didn’t think that when I met him back in 2011. But we’ve all learned a lot about who he really is since then. With his political pandering and posturing to endear himself to the intolerant wing of the GOP over the last few years, it doesn’t surprise me that this administration will go down as the most anti-LGBT in history.”

That is, of course, until and unless there is a Pence administration, which would be far more offensive than some off-hand remark by Donald Trump.





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The Man Behind The Curtain

As convention calls for, we call him "Mr. President."  His victory in the presidential race was impressive and despite a questionable performance as Chief Executive, he is due the respect his office commends.

I am talking of course about President Barack Obama. Someone should.

Appointed to the Democratic National Committee's Unity Commission as one of Bernie Sanders' representatives, activist Nomiki Konst tweets "Imagine a world where fall-in-love Dems hated former Dem VP nominee @Joe Lieberman as much as they hate progressive caucus members @SenSanders."

Senator Lieberman became unpopular among Democratic voters in Connecticut for continually and steadfastly supporting the Iraq War, and lost the Democratic primary for Senator in 2006. He then ran as an Independent, was supported by national Republicans and such conservatives as Rush Limbaugh, and easily won re-election.

Lieberman, who endorsed McCain-Palin in 2006 and was an opponent of the public option for health care, retired after that term.  However, he later appeared on the short list of the incoming Trump administration as a candidate for director of the FBI.

There was an uproar among congressional Democrats, and Lieberman obviously never was nominated. Understandably, then, Charlie Pierce had a point when in response to Konst's remark he snarked "Memer of Unity Commission Apparently Not Conscious For 15 years."

However, he missed another point, which may or may not have been in Konst's head. So did the individual who tweeted "Yeah, Dems 'loved' him for killing the Medicare buy in for ACA, oh man was he praised for that." One wonders how he was allowed to kill the Medicare buy-in.  The Guardian understood when it explained in 2009 that then-Senator Lieberman was

plumbing new depths of betrayal by using his deciding vote as an independent member of the Senate to hold hostage Barack Obama's reform of America's dysfunctional healthcare system.

Obama, desperate to ensure that the reform bid does not fail, has told congressional leaders to rewrite the legislation to keep Lieberman happy by removing any real competition to private insurance companies in an effort to get it passed by Christmas.

Lieberman's tactics have upset Democratic party members of Congress who are asking why a popular president's agenda is being stalled by a senator who has repeatedly turned his back on his old party. "I have no idea what Senator Lieberman's agenda is," said a Connecticut member of Congress, Chris Murphy. "I have stopped trying to be Sherlock Holmes."

Another member of Congress from Lieberman's home state, Rosa DeLauro, told Politico website: "No individual should hold healthcare hostage, including Joe Lieberman, and I'll say it flat out: I think he ought to be recalled."

Lieberman, 67, used his deciding vote in Congress to help strip out a provision for government-run medical insurance, intended to set up competition to the abuses of private companies, by threatening to filibuster the legislation.

One tweeter tried to rebut Konst by remarking "she seems totally ignorant of the fact that Joe Lieberman killed single payer, was supported by drug companies and is reviled by most D's. But Lieberman had an influential accomplice (video below from 1/12) in killing single payer and supporting drug companies. The Guardian continues

Senate leaders agreed to drop the public option for all in favour of allowing people over 55 to buy into an existing government-run scheme for the elderly. In September, Lieberman supported the measure, as he had when he was Al Gore's running mate. But just as it seemed that a deal was done, Lieberman scuppered it by announcing that he had changed his mind and would block any bill that expanded government insurance coverage. Obama gave way.





At least Konst realizes there is somewhere too little tolerance for progressive Democrats and a little too much for Lieberman. But like her critics, she does not recognize (or won't acknowledge) that Donald Trump was elected as a rejection of everything Obama, the most powerful Democrat of the last decade, who was ultimately responsible for killing the public option and most responsible for putting the Party where it is today.

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