Flaked Out

                Arizona senator, Jeff Flake, became the most recent Republican to publicly break ranks with Trump.  He gave a couple interviews followed by a cliché ridden and overly dramatic speech on the floor of the Senate saying it was time to say enough.  Then he went off and voted to cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans and corporations while raising them on the poor and middle class.  I guess decency has its limits.  The hypocrisy of Flake’s actions captures the fate of the Republican party.  Flake is a reliable vote for the Trump agenda.  He occasionally has a reflective moment that makes him criticize the way Trump and his ilk have abandoned all pretense of being interested in democracy or serving the people, but there is no daylight between them on critical issues.

                Flake, and others like him, make two things obvious.  First, they will never rein in, let alone get rid of, Trump.  Trump is the logical extension of a party that wondered off in to Rupert Murdoch’s fantasy camp and never found their way home.  Trump may not behave the way they think he should, but he’s their boy when it comes to driving the country back to the good old days of white supremacy and male dominance.  The reaction to the first indictments to come out of the Special Counsel say it all – silence.  Second, the problem facing the country isn’t just that we have a completely unstable and unqualified president, the problem is that he’s not alone in the way he looks at the world.

                The constitution assumes that if a tyrant ever became president that the congress would do its due diligence and remove him.  It assumes that there would never be a party so enamored with its own brand that it would put party before country.  Bad bet.  Not only have Republicans given up on following the constitution and performing their duty to govern, they have turned a blind eye to what amounts to treason.  It is more important to Paul Ryan to give his rich puppet masters a totally unneeded and undeserved tax break than it is to safeguard the country from an attack by an enemy.  Republicans are so far enmeshed in their own agenda that they have completely abandoned the notion that they have to protect the country, unless, of course, it involves another alleged misdeed by Hillary.  Instead of wanting to get to the bottom of what happened in the last election and prevent it from happening again, they sound like first-graders whining that “he did it, too.”

                Flake lives in the same fantasy world as the rest of the far right.  A world where there is no discrimination – except against white folks, of course – where people still mine and burn coal and the environment is run by God.  They are still believers in ‘supply side’ economics and are still saying that tax cuts will do more than just give the people at the top even more money to hoard.  They live in the conspiratorial echo chamber of Fox News and the more extreme fantasies of Steve Bannon.  They are not sane.  They make up whatever suits their purpose and never take responsibility.  If caught in a lie, they point their finger at someone on the other side and start screaming about what they did.  They are led by a pathological liar and malignant narcissist.  What could go wrong?

                So when Jeff Flake stands before the camera with every hair in place and his tie in a perfect Windsor knot, pardon me if I’m not impressed.  While he tries to summon something he imagines to be courage or decency, but is mere flatulence, the country is dissolving.  Until he and other Republicans join the real world and take real action to help ordinary people, address climate change, fund education or any number of obvious and critical needs, it doesn’t matter.  Maybe he made himself feel a little better.  He did nothing to help the country.  

Random Bits

1.       Trump on Korea:  One of the constant mantras Trump uses to justify his stance in Korea is that our policy there is a failure.  Actually, our policy in Korea has been a huge success.  There hasn’t been a war there for 64 years.  That’s pretty good.  Trump thinks we can stop the North from developing nuclear weapons, but that is unrealistic.  Any country that wants to pay the economic and political price to develop a weapons program can do so.  The technology, by today’s standards, isn’t that hard to come by.  Any claim America has to denying North Korea a nuclear program is undercut by Trump’s own actions.  Who in their right mind would agree to a deal with a guy who changes his mind about agreements already signed on a regular basis?  If there was a viable military option in Korea, it would have been used a long time ago.  There is no reason to talk so tough when the options are so limited.  The number thrown around is a million people would die in the first days of the conflict.  But if the North has the ability to hit not just the South but also Japan with a nuclear weapon, that number could be in the tens of millions.  Just shut up, please.

2.       Jimmy Bakker says it’s bad to make fun of God:  Jim Bakker is tired of people making fun of him and says that what they’re really making fun of is God.  Furthermore, God will punish those who laugh.  Well, if that’s the case, Jimmy better join the witness protection program.  It’s hard to imagine someone who has made more people laugh at God than Jimmy Bakker.  How many lives do these guys have?

3.       Trump on ‘Honoring’ the Military:  Trump likes to say that the people protesting at NFL games are dishonoring the military (and first responders and mom and the flag and ice cream).  First, they’re not protesting the flag, they’re protesting police violence against minorities.  Second, how can you dishonor the flag by taking advantage of the rights it represents?  Third, who is Trump to suddenly be so enamored of the military.  When he had a chance to fight for his country he declined.  Some of those deferments were legitimate, but at least the last one was a blatant bribe by his old man.  I don’t care that Trump didn’t serve, but please stop with hypocritical flag waving.

4.         Harvey:  The fallout from the Weinstein scandal continues to escalate.  Recriminations about who knew what when and revelations about other people in the industry are bound to continue.  The real story here is the women who came forward and how it might be a pivotal moment in how we see these issues.  A tangential concern for me is how these few powerful men with their abhorrent attitudes about women dominate our cultural production.  If you follow the money, only a few studios and a few powerful men control most of the entertainment industry.  That industry produces almost all our images of love, desire, sex and romance.  If men like Weinstein control those choices, the art they produce replicates their tastes.  In their hands, everything is reduced to a misogynistic and adolescent male fantasy or fetish.  Rather than exploring desire or sex in a diverse and human scale, we have the same images shoved in front of us over and over, creating a simulacrum of human desire.  Removing them not only protects the women who work in the industry, it may lead to a more diverse and fully human treatment of love and desire.

5.       Meanwhile:  We’re still talking about Trump too much and not focusing on what we might do to improve the world.  One of the regrettable by-products of some versions of American Protestantism is that the chosen can do no wrong.  Once you’re a good guy, you’re always a good guy.  The people who still support him will never change their minds.  It leaves the rest of us frustrated and tired.  Winter’s coming – it’s no time to let our guard down or stop the resistance.  Make some soup and gather your friends around the table and tell some stories or sing some songs to make it through the days ahead.

The Bully in the Pulpit 

                It’s common place to talk about presidents using the “Bully Pulpit” to drive their agenda or promote their ideology.  Now we have a president that really doesn’t have an agenda or ideology.  Now we have a president who is a common bully.  Like all bullies, he sucks all of the air out of the room and wants all attention focused on him and what terrible thing he might do next.  If you cross him, he attacks, throwing tantrums and signing more ‘executive orders’ to let us all know that he’s in charge.

                We’ve reached the point in this presidency where any hint of responsible governance is gone.  He’s like a toddler sent to his room for behaving badly who decides to tear the room apart as revenge.  The ACA or DACA, it doesn’t matter.  As long as Obama did it, he wants to destroy it.  It doesn’t matter that he is hurting real Americans with these tantrums, he just wants to lash out in anger.  It doesn’t matter to him that the states he carried and the people that voted for him will be the ones suffering the most because of his actions.  He just wants to show he’s tough.  While the people of Puerto Rico face months of danger from disease and famine, he threatens to cut off aid.  It’s an open question whether or not he even knows they are citizens.  He lies about (you really could put just about anything in this space) his tax plan helping middle class or working families while orchestrating a huge give away to himself.  None of it matters to the bully as long as the cameras roll and the attention continues.

                The cowards and traitors who run what’s left of the Republican party are afraid of the bully, too.  They pander to his whims in the hopes that he might sign some God forsaken piece of legislation they haven’t even read yet, some small trophy they can waive in front of the Koch brothers claiming to have done what daddy wanted.  They don’t care that the bully is edging us toward a conflict on the Korean peninsula that, if it turns nuclear, could kill at least 40 million people.  All they want is one last tax break for the petro- barons and a way to persecute people they don’t like.  They are willing to ignore the damage the bully does to the constitution every day.  They will do nothing to stop the bully.

                No matter how bad any of us thought it would be, it’s worse.  The magnitude of the bully’s depravity is overwhelming and all-encompassing.  Normally, we would proceed a policy or an issue at a time, but the bully doesn’t know anything about policy or issues, all he knows about is power and destruction.  He puts his own staff in the position of denying what he says because it’s so crazy.  He’s only in it for the attention he gets – and, of course, the money.  He has tapped a dark, sick spot of the American psyche and the pain is only just beginning.  He couldn’t have done this by himself, he’s to venial and stupid to have thought it through this far.  This won’t be fixed by voting for Democrats (although I encourage you to do so).  This probably won’t be fixed by politics. 

                I think we’ve come to the point where this can no longer just be patched back together with laws and policy.  I think we’ve come to the point that in order to move forward we have to reconnect with the people around us, even the ones we disagree with, even the ones we don’t like and who probably don’t like us, even the ones who voted for the bully. The bully needs to divide us.  He needs us to hate people who exercise their right of free speech to protest.  But he also benefits when we hate the people who hate the protesters.  Giving in to the anger is helping the bully win.  It is, as Springsteen sang, “gonna be a long walk home.”  We can protest and resist, but we also have to figure out just what it is we stand for.  What is the bigger narrative that makes us brothers and sisters even if we don’t agree about everything.  Purity is the enemy of solidarity.  Maybe, it’s as simple as the old line from a Dylan song, “I’ll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours.”