Politix Update: Treasonous Repubs Find Despicable New Ways To Define Chaos

PLEASE DON’T DOMINATE THE RAP, JACK / IF YOU’VE GOT NOTHING NEW TO SAY / IF YOU PLEASE, DON’T BACK UP THE TRACK / THIS TRAIN’S GOT TO RUN TODAY ~ THE GRATEFUL DEAD

A grave question must now be asked in the wake of a Republican meltdown in the House of Representatives that in the short term threatens the fiscal stability of the U.S. and world markets, as well as the ability of government to function, and in the longer term calls into question whether the Republican Party is still capable of governing, let alone whether its prospects for the 2016 presidential election have been further damaged: Have the Gang of 40 lurched from their patented brand of despicable politics into treason? 

Why, yes they have.

The Gang of 40 is, of course, the cannibalistic Tea Party-inoculated congressfolk who, although they represent barely 3 percent of the population, have brought the Republican Party's House caucus to its knees because of a fanaticism not seen in national politics since the run up to the Civil War.  In this context, the question of whether these men (and lone woman) are traitors is not knee-jerk liberal nattering or a pushback in support of a threadbare status quo.  The definition of a traitor is someone who betrays their country, and there can be no doubt that the fevered labors of the Gang of 40, who are the spawn of years of conspiring to destroy the established order, have been traitorous. 

What, you may ask, is the established order and why is it wrong, let alone traitorous, to try to overthrow a political system that is sodden with corruption and in the thrall of big money?  Actually, that sounds like a pretty good idea, and one that is long overdue. 

The reality is, in fact, really bad.  This is because the Gang of 40 is on a mission to rebuild government in its own harshly hard-right image: Less inclusive, intolerant of the differences in a multi-cultural society, and hungry for armed conflict abroad.  The gang is committed to an integration of church and state, so long as the church is white and Christian, and believes that women are inferior, gays are aberrant, immigrants are criminals, access to health care is a privilege and not a right, and are determined to rip to shreds a social safety net that for this writer and many millions of other people is the difference between sufficiency and penury.

Beyond all the parliamentary machinations that are dominating coverage, this gang seeks replace the status quo, as screwed up as it is, with a system that is just as sodden with corruption and in the thrall of big money but infinitely worse and deeply un-American when you examine the fine print.

Some conservative moderators, including Ross Douthat of The New York Times, suggest in trying to make sense of the inchoate that the new speaker be "an ambassador from the right wing to the establishment." This is an amazingly naïve idea that willfully ignores the true intent of the gang, and something you would except to topple out of a 1950s civics class time capsule, since this gang would bring Molotov cocktails and not tea and crumpets to any party. 

BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE

As I noted the other day, if there has been a moment in contemporary American politics when its abjectly debauched state was revealed, this is it.

"How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Whatever the number is," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon, "it's infinitely larger than the number of Republicans who want to pick up John Boehner's poisoned gavel."

No matter, because we shouldn't give a rat's ass about what happens next as the Republicans scramble to mitigate the damage wrought by the withdrawal of Kevin McCarthy to replace Speaker Boehner because he suffered an outburst of honesty about the real reason for the Benghazi Select Committee witch hunt, speaking the truth being a blasphemy in the Republican temple.

It matters not if the Gang of 40 -- which ironically calls itself the Freedom Caucus -- backs Daniel Webster of Florida, who declared in sunnier times that "we would have the opportunity for turning this country around" if Republicans recaptured congressional majorities, which they did if you consider a flaming downward trajectory a positive direction.  It matters not if Paul Ryan rides to the rescue.  You'll recall Ryan's star turn as Mitt Romney's 2012 running mate, which was sullied by the inconvenient reality that his Reverse Robin Hood economic plan was a gift to the rich, but left only scraps for the poor.  It matters not if David Brat, a freshman backbencher and Gang of 40 darling, gets his way and as he indelicately puts it, the gang's non-negotiable demands "are put on paper ahead of time" to be agreed to by anyone wanting to be the new speaker.  Or they need not bother to apply for the job.  Beyond stripping the post of speaker of much of its power, which in the abstract may not be a bad idea, these demands include a laundry list of draconian funding cuts in return for agreeing to the fiscal measures that keep the engine of government fueled and running.   

(Little known fact: The preordained line of succession can and perhaps should be broken.  A House speaker, who happens to be second in line to the presidency, need not be a sitting member of Congress, so why not draft Newt Gingrich, who was taken down because of the Clinton impeachment fiasco but after 15 years now seems like a voice of reason?  Or somebody.  Anybody.  The gulf between moderates and the gang is so great that there even are whispers among a few moderates about joining with Democrats to elect a new speaker, a once unthinkable idea that is within the bounds of House rules.) 

What matters is that the darkness has to end. 

The Gang of 40's addiction to spite, hate, deceit and lie after lie after bloody lie, and embracing Twilight Zone crackpots like Louie Gohmert, who warned earlier this year about a possible Barack Obama-orchestrated military takeover of Texas, has resulted in cycle after cycle of brinksmanship.  It also has bequeathed us Donald Trump, Dr. Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina, who despite having not one day of government experience between them and an astounding array of bad policy ideas, are the Republican presidential frontrunners.  This is because they are saying what a disillusioned base -- betrayed by a party establishment adept only at rhetorical flourishes and empty promises -- wants to hear.  The biggest betrayal of all, lest we forget, was the promise that Mitt Romney would ride a tsunami of conservative outrage and crush Obama in 2012, which looked like a sure bet if you viewed reality from the depths of the Fox News echo chamber. 

DYSFUNCTION JUNCTION

Chaos is not a winning formula for the Republican Party to take back the White House.  If the U.S. can't have several strong political parties as do many European countries, which won't happen because of how the deck is stacked, we need two capable of governing if only because the Democrats aren't appreciably less corrupt or addicted to big money.  They merely look good by comparison. 

The fallout from the dysfunction in the House will not have much of a direct effect on the Republican presidential scrum, although the dance of the Freedom Caucus zombies will be a distraction at a time when marginal candidates like (yes) Jeb Bush are desperate for face time.

As it is, none of the Republican presidential wannabes are capable of beating Hillary Clinton at this juncture because of daunting electoral math not likely to be altered given the Freedom Caucus's geographic and demographic isolation, much of it a result of gerrymandering, and the party's drift in general, and don't expect any seismic shifts -- or for that matter any appreciable shifts at all -- after the first Democratic debate on Tuesday night.  How many disgusted Republicans will stay home on Election Day?  And does anyone really believe Ted Cruz, who is the flavor of the moment, could be elected president?

It occurs to me that not even the Republican Party likes itself these days.  The divide between the promise-breaking party establishment and the promise-making renegades is unbridgeable, and the condition of the Stuff Happens Party is so parlous that just getting through the primaries without suffering additional self-inflicted wounds seems unlikely.  This is entirely a consequence of the party discarding conservatism and embracing radicalism in the service of short-term electoral gains rather than building for a more robust, long-term future. 

Then there is the looming November 5 deadline for the debt ceiling to be raised lest the government default and risk an economic meltdown, but the gang says it will approve such a move only if deep cuts are made to social safety net standbys.  Meanwhile, the continuing resolution that passed the House prior to McCarthy's implosion only funds the government through December 11, meaning that it will be the extremists who are waging a War on Christmas, not the usual heathen liberal suspects, as federal workers' paychecks are threatened by a shutdown. 

And so the traitors march on, immune to the  imprecations of the impotent Republican Party elite as pundits struggle to find new synonyms for chaos and the whole kit and kaboodle, government and all, is dragged further and further down.

Politix Update is an irregular compendium written by veteran journalist Shaun Mullen, for whom the 2016 presidential campaign is his (gasp!) 12th since 1968.  Click here  for an index of previous Politix Updates.

IMAGE FROM DONKEYHOTEY/FLICKR.  USED WITH PERMISSION.

Cartoon du Jour

DAVID HORSEY/LOS ANGELES TIMES

Happy White Conquerer's Day: 'Hate Was Just a Legend And War Never Known'

CORTEZ THE CONQUEROR

By Neil Young

He came dancing across the water
With his galleons and guns
Looking for the new world
In that palace in the sun.

On the shore lay Montezuma
With his coca leaves and pearls
In his halls he often wondered
With the secrets of the worlds.

And his subjects gathered round him
Like the leaves around a tree
In their clothes of many colors
For the angry gods to see.
And the women all were beautiful
And the men stood straight and strong
They offered life in sacrifice
So that others could go on.

Hate was just a legend
And war was never known
The people worked together
And they lifted many stones.

They carried them to the flatlands
And they died along the way
But they built up with their bare hands
What we still can't do today.

And I know shes living there
And she loves me to this day
I still cant remember when
Or how I lost my way.

He came dancing across the water
Cortez, Cortez
What a killer.

IMAGE: "THE ARRIVAL OF CORTEZ" By DIEGO RIVERA (1951)

Larry Rosen (May 25,1940 ~ October 9, 2015)

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A Cute Pic & Heartwarming Story To Take Your Mind Off Of The World's Ills

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PHOTOGRAPH © KYLIE ELLIOTT

Politix Update: Democracy, Truth & Lives All Devalued In Benghazi Probe Fallout

Isn't it just a hoot that Representative Kevin McCarthy's bid to replace John Boehner as House speaker came under withering attack and eventually collapsed because he told the truth?  

In fact, it's hard to wring much humor out of this semi-shocker of a farce because it was an open secret that the Select Committee on Benghazi, which has spent $4.5 million of your money in conducting one of the longest congressional probes since the Pearl Harbor attack, had no intention of getting to the bottom of the September 2012 incursion by Islamic militants that took the life of J. Christopher Stevens, who was the U.S. ambassador to Libya, and three others, and was solely a witch hunt custom made to sabotage Hillary Clinton's campaign and provide Republican presidential wannabes with a steady supply of ammo.

(A little perspective with your morning coffee: Congress also investigated President Bush's handling of Hurricane Katrina, which took 1,800 American lives.  The five months of hearings cost a mere $90,000.  Then there were the congressional hearings into Bush's $2 trillion Iraq war, which cost nearly 4,500 American lives . . . Oh, wait!  There never were any hearings.)

When it comes to Benghazi, there are no more revelations to be revelated.  The well is dry.  Several other congressional committees and a panel of outside experts commissioned by the State Department investigated the attack and  government’s response.  They all concluded that the tragedy was preventable, condemned systemic failures at senior levels of the State Department, but found no evidence that Clinton, then secretary of state, was specifically to blame. 

"Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?" McCarthy boasted on (where else?) Fox News. "But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee, what are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping, why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened." 

McCarthy came under attack from even some of his closest allies not because he lied.  After all, politicians of all stripes lie with numbing regularity. It's hard to top the whopper told by Clinton's husband when he was president that "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky," while Carly Fiorina has unashamedly made lying a hallmark of her presidential campaign (and how about her weird assertion that the undergraduate degree in medieval history she got at Stanford 40 years ago qualifies her to lead the fight against ISIS?). 

But to utilize that rarest of political commodities -- the truth -- is a blasphemy in the Republican temple, and the last thing the GOP needs is a House speaker who isn't capable of lying through his teeth on cue.  If there has been a moment in contemporary American politics when its abjectly corrupt state was revealed, this is it. 

McCarthy's attempts to walk back his remarks were  feeble: "It was never my intention to ever imply that this committee was political," he said in a grammatically-challenged statement earlier this week. "Because we all know it is not. And it has one sole purpose, let's find the truth wherever the truth takes us.  And you know what? Sometimes truth comes out, and other manners, and let's not let politics hold that back." 

FLIGHT OF THE CANDOR

Alas, the fallout from McCarthy's attack of truthiness will be transitory.  Hillary Clinton will get to run TV ads decrying the Benghazi committee charade, which she already is doing ("The Republicans have spent millions attacking Hillary because she’s fighting for everything they oppose!"), her poll numbers will not change appreciably, and we'll be treated to a retro revival version of The Bickersons, the 1940s radio comedy show in which the protagonists engaged in an endless verbal war. 

The protagonists are played this time by a House Republican caucus now in a rudderless uproar over its many self-inflicted wounds (many administered by a cabal of congressfolk representing barely 3 percent of the population) and a political party unraveling at the seams not because of blowback from Democrats, let alone the public at large, but because of its own calculated agenda of spite, hate, deceit and lie after lie after bloody lie.  The party that boasted it could govern is now a party in disarray, and it is a beautiful thing. 

Less attractive is the double-barreled shotgun that House Republicans have put to their heads  -- and the entire nation's, as well.

The Treasury Department will exhaust its authority to borrow money to fund the government on November 5 if Congress does not raise or suspend the government's statutory borrowing limit, meaning the government would default on its debt and risk economic chaos.  Then, on December 11, a stopgap spending bill expires, and without congressional action, much of the government will shut down.

The last even vaguely comparable unraveling came in 1998 as the GOP-dominated House was voting to impeach President Clinton when another Republican speaker-in-waiting, Representative Robert Livingston of Louisiana, was forced to withdraw after he acknowledged he was cheating on his wife.

"Even then we knew we could resolve it ourselves,” said Representative Peter King of New York. "But now you have a situation where there are 30 or 40 people in their own party who say they are not going to vote for anyone no matter who it is. We have to end this. We look absolutely crazy."

MEET THE BAD ACID BEARS

McCarthy fell short of the votes he needed to replace Boehner even though he promised the candy store to the cannibals in the so-called Freedom Caucus.  With him out of the picture, two of the leading bone picker-uppers are Jason Chaffetz and Harold Watson "Trey" Gowdy.  Better examples of the caliber of House Republicans in the Age of Limbaugh and Coulter are not to be found, and the suspicion lingers that both did bad acid in college, and we're all paying for it years later.

Chaffetz has been a representative from Utah since 2009.  He is the son of a man once married to Kitty Dukakis, wife of 1988 Democratic presidential nominee. He was a Jewish Democrat, then converted to Mormonism during his last year of college in Utah and joined the GOP when former President Reagan was hired as a motivational speaker for Nu Skin, an Amway-esque marketing company where Chaffetz worked before he entered politics.

A latter-day insurrectionist and Tea Partier who brings new meaning to the term ethically challenged, Chaffetz famously remarked that "politics is way too important to leave to the boors," and has lived up to that as he has lurched further and further to the right, advocating a ban on gay marriage, slashing Social Security and that old right-wing standby, impeaching President Obama. He recently was in the news for being called out by the president of Planned Parenthood for knowingly presenting a falsified chart during a rigged committee hearing and was chastized for shutting down State Department officials at a rigged Benghazi committee hearing when they dared speak the truth. 

Gowdy has been a representative from South Carolina since 2011.  He has a startling resemblance to Draco Malfoy from the Harry Potter series (and is likewise a bully), is chair of the Benghazi committee and made his name as part of the  permanent scandal infrastructure team led by nutcase extraordinaire Darrell "Grand Theft Auto" Issa when he took over the House Government Oversight Committee after the 2010 election and vowed to conduct "seven hearings a week, times 40 weeks" to thwart Obama.

A Tea Partier and neo-Confederate with a Napoleon complex, Gowdy has made his mark by using his subpoena powers like a cattle prod and obstruction as a substitute for lawmaking.  But his forte has been sponsoring bizarre legislation, including a 2014 bill that would allow the House to sue the president if it did not like the way he was enforcing the law.  Gowdy, who has sponsored some 58 bills in all, has the distinction of not one ever being voted out of a House committee despite the overwhelming Republican majority.

A FINAL WORD

Calls for the Benghazi committee to disband will go unheeded because Democratic committee members don't have the votes and Hillary Clinton herself is scheduled to appear before it on October 22. The clash between the witch hunters and their very own witch might be something to relish were it not for the inconvenient reality that the hearings long ago became an insult to the memory of Ambassador Stevens and his three slain colleagues, just as the lack of hearings into the Iraq war insulted the memories of those nearly 5,000 Americans who died in vain.  We can thank cowardly Democrats for that one, and the reliably hapless news media for preferring to become lapdogs to the Benghazi committee than blowing the whistle on it. 

In fact, it seems as if the value of life in this country has become somewhat less than the cost of a bikini waxing.  (What? Another school shooting? How many dead?  Pass the ketchup.) 

I sometimes forget that as I merrily do my own caffeinated shooting in Politix Update, typically Republican fish in the barrel known as Washington, and that is a shame.  I apologize even if no one else in the barrel will.  

Politix Update is an irregular compendium written by veteran journalist Shaun Mullen, for whom the 2016 presidential campaign is his (gasp!) 12th since 1968.  Click here  for an index of previous Politix Updates.

IMAGE FROM DONKEYHOTEY/FLICKR.  USED WITH PERMISSION.

When Opus The Reporter 'Fermented' In Jail For Protecting A Source

I've always loved this vintage Opus strip as a longtime fan of Bloom County (recently revived by Berkely Breathed, thank dog) and being a career joinalist myself who faced "fermenting" in jail a couple of times for protecting his sources.

COPYRIGHT © BERKELEY BREATHED

Politix Update: Bush v. Gore & The Tarnished Legacy Of Sandra Day O'Connor

Should Yogi Berra's long baseball career be judged by his error in a crucial 1951 game that deprived the New York Yankees' Allie Reynolds of a no-hitter against the Boston Red Sox?  Or Dustin Hoffman's long film career judged by the 1987 cinematic bomb known as Ishtar?  Of course not.  But what about judging the long judicial career of Sandra Day O'Connor based on her casting the deciding Supreme Court vote throwing the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush?  Absolutely. 

This question rears its ugly head yet again as the high court -- without question the most political in history and perhaps nowhere more so as with the infamous Bush v. Gore decision -- begins a new term this week.  That decision was not the court's first to be tainted by the opprobrium of politics, which have influenced too many of its decisions over the last 226 years.  But that decision was so wrongheaded, so devious, so devoid of logic and genuine constitutional underpinnings, and its consequences so far reaching, that it obscures if not altogether erases O'Connor's good works, most notably holding the dike against the campaigns to reverse Roe v. Wade and leave women's reproductive fate to the states. 

The process of undoing the moderate aspects of O'Connor's legacy, which beyond abortion extended to affirmative action and race-based legislative redistricting, has been ongoing since she retired in 2006.  So has the deepening politicization of the court, and abortion may loom large in the new term, specifically a draconian Texas law which has led to the closure of about half of the state's abortion facilities.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, who superseded O'Connor as the court's swing vote, has not struck down a restriction on abortion since 1992, and all bets are off despite his key votes upholding the constitutionality of the Affirmative Care Act and same-sex marriage in the court's two liberal lurches earlier this year.  Other important cases to be heard this term include whether California and other states can compel government employees to pay union dues, revisiting the constitutionality of the University of Texas's affirmative action program, yet another Texas case concerning whether state legislative districts can be apportioned using a count of eligible voters rather than a count of all residents, and whether religious institutions can opt out of providing contraception under Obamacare.

So unless you are a fan of conservative judicial activism as practiced by O'Connor's successor, Justice Samuel Alito, and his reactionary partners in black bathrobes, it's time to stock up on Pepcid, because the new term could be stomach churning.   

SIDESHOWS & CHICANERY

"Sandra Day O'Connor is no Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Ginsburg gave us the legal architecture of women's place in America. O'Connor, the first woman on the U.S. Supreme Court, gave us George W. Bush," is how the New York Law Review put it recently.  Vicious?  Absolutely.  Accurate?  Sadly, yes.

On December 12, 2000, the high court acted on an appeal by Bush of a unanimous Florida Supreme Court ruling that ballots cast but not counted by voting machine in the November 7 presidential election must be manually recounted.  (I wrote a succession of six versions of the main Philadelphia Daily News election story as the Florida polls closed and the lead seesawed back and forth through the night and into the morning, and the paper took the extraordinary step of printing two Extra editions, the final one declaring Bush the winner by a hair.  Lost in the uproar was the victory of Hillary Rodham Clinton over Rick Lazio for the New York Senate seat of the retiring Daniel Patrick Moynihan.)

In a bombshell decision, a narrow Supreme Court majority decided in an historic 5-4 per curiam decision that the Florida court's ruling was unconstitutional because it granted more protection to some ballots than others.  It is statistically possible -- if not likely -- that counties that went heavily for Gore would have yielded extra votes for him had a recount been allowed, but O'Connor and the other four majority justices would hear none of that despite the fact they had previously given great deference to state court decisions in close elections. (It should be noted that all of the majority justices were Republican appointees, while the Florida judges were all Democrats.)

There has been conjecture that since it takes only four votes to hear a case, O'Connor demurred but then joined in a profoundly imperious decision because she was a Bush family sycophant.

The Bush v. Gore decision followed an epic cavalcade of sideshows and chicanery, and of course opposing armies of lawyers.  There were the infamous "hanging" chads and extralegal antics by Katherine Harris, Florida's Republican secretary of state and one-woman horror show, who foot dragged through one crucial deadline after another in refusing to certify manual vote recounts. December 12 was the biggest deadline of all -- the day on which Florida was required to select electors to formally submit its choice for president to Congress. Thus, with no time left to recount votes, Bush became the de facto winner, or President Select, as a wag noted at the time, edging out Gore in Florida by a mere 543 votes and nationally in electoral but not popular votes. 

Incidentally, per curiam means that no specific judge is identified as writing an opinion, or in this instance, no member of the cowardly majority dared write an opinion with their name on it.  But Justice John Paul Stevens did not hesitate to speak out, proclaiming in a powerful dissent that "one thing . . . is certain.  Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law."

JUSTICE O'CONNOR REGRETS

Having revisited Bush v. Gore in headache-inducing detail in researching this column, I concede that under alternative scenarios, the best the Supreme Court could have done was pick a different side to feel that it had been robbed.  That obscures but does not change a very big reality: A vote recount unfettered by deadlines possibly -- if not likely -- would have resulted in a Gore presidency. 

Although it is a bit like playing a version of the What If Hitler Invaded England? game, a Gore presidency would have had its own burdens and problems, probably including the 9/11 attacks and a war in Afghanistan, although not a war in Iraq and the enormous consequences it wrought at home and globally.  Oh, and John Roberts would not have replaced Chief Justice William Rehnquist nor Alito have replaced O'Connor.  Nor would we have had the Harriet Miers debacle because Gore, despite his own moments of hubris, would not have nominated a staggering lightweight whose only claim to fame was that she kept Bush supplied with red, white and blue M&M candies.

In the years since Bush v. Gore, O'Connor has sounded less like a conservative with moderate tendencies than a moderate with liberal tendencies.

"Gosh, I step away for a couple of years and there's no telling what's going to happen," she said in one public appearance.  What has soured her is the hard-right course her beloved Supreme Court has taken.  She also has been privately critical of the Bush presidency, notably the pandering surrounding the case of brain-damaged Terri Schiavo and the attempts to overrule her husband's wishes at a time when O'Connor's own husband was succumbing to Alzheimer's disease. 

O'Connor has continued to defend her pivotal role in handing the presidency to Bush at events ranging from law-school convocations to private gatherings, while noting that Bush v. Gore gave the court "a less than perfect reputation.  And she has been outspoken in her opposition to the Citizens United ruling because of its corrosive effect on politics, specifically how unlimited campaign contributions further corrupt the process of electing judges. 

It is not difficult to imagine that O'Connor, as someone who packed so much gravitas and integrity (okay, Bush v. Gore excepted) into her legal career, and in the end who I cannot help but admiring, has been tormented by the consequences of her deciding vote and retiring prematurely, let alone squandering what legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin calls "the most precious gift" any justice can proffer to their successor.  That is bequeathing their seat to a worthy successor, which David Souter and John Paul Stevens did in forestalling their retirements until the election of Barack Obama.  The result was Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, two fine justices, becoming the second and third women to join the court. 

Then in 2013, O'Connor ripped open the long festering Bush v. Gore wound, noting in an interview with the Chicago Tribune editorial board that the court "took the case and decided it at a time when it was still a big election issue.  It turned out the election authorities in Florida hadn’t done a real good job there and kind of messed it up. And probably the Supreme Court added to the problem at the end of the day." 

Incredibly, O'Connor then added:

"Maybe the court should have said, 'We're not going to take it, goodbye.' " 

Maybe, just maybe.  But it is way too late for what-ifs.

Politix Update is an irregular compendium written by veteran journalist Shaun Mullen, for whom the 2016 presidential campaign is his (gasp!) 12th since 1968.  Click here  for an index of previous Politix Updates.

Grace Lee Boggs (June 27, 1915 ~ October 7, 2015)

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PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBIN HOLLAND

Patti Smith Takes The 'M Train'

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PHOTOGRAPH BY PHILIP MONTGOMERY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Politix Update: When It Comes To Race, It's All About Power & Condescension

There may be no better example of the pitfalls of race for a presidential candidate than Bernie Sanders, and we haven't even gotten to those "free stuff" Republicans yet. 

Sander is an empathetic white liberal who has dedicated his political career to social justice and trying to make things better for everyone.  Yet he is tanking with blacks.  There are several explanations for this.  Not least is the symbiotic relationship between blacks and Bill Clinton, a time-tested bond that has accrued to his wife, Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, and pretty much deservedly so.  But there also is the view that Sanders' rural Vermont background makes him ill equipped to understand urban blacks, let alone accept that problems like institutionalized racism and poverty can't necessarily be addressed with one-size-fits-all solutions. 

Is it possible that some blacks believe that Sander is being condescending to them?  Perhaps.  But when it comes to even so-called moderate Republicans like Jeb Bush, you can cut their condescension with a knife.  This is what Michael Gerson, George W. Bush's former speechwriter, called "the soft bigotry of low expectations," a subtle yet powerful turn of phrase that is more apt today than when Dubya read it off a Teleprompter in 2004.

Jeb Bush, asked at a campaign event how he planned to get blacks to vote for him, responded,  "Our message is one of hope and aspiration. It isn't one of division and get in line and we'll take care of you with free stuff. Our message is one that is uplifting — that says you can achieve earned success."

Even assuming that Bush, like Sanders, means well, reading those words is painful for this white liberal, and for a black person looking beyond Hillary Clinton for someone to earn their vote next year, it must be deeply insulting.  But the stereotypes of black people wanting "free stuff" and Ronald Reagan's "welfare queens" die hard.  Although blacks still rely disproportionately on some assistance programs, the vast majority are wage earners and those who are not have difficulty finding work that pays a living wage.  Oh, and most federal food stamp recipients are white, some of whom must surely be Republicans.  

Not surprisingly, "free stuff" also did not work for Mitt Romney in 2012, a meme that he first uttered after being booed at an NAACP convention and, tone deaf to social realities as he as, repeated often thereafter.

This is a reason why presidential wannabe Dr. Ben Carson is so dangerous.  He believes that blacks who support Democrats are stupid and emotionally incapable of thinking for themselves, and shares the delusional view with his fellow candidates that racism can only be changed through individual acts, not government involvement.  This is one of the things that makes him "safe" to conservative white Republicans who cling to a Gone With the Wind view of blacks and believe Barack Obama is uppity and far too outspoken about racial issues. 

And isn't Carson a stitch as he propounds racial stereotypes while playing to lily white audiences?  He recently joked that he used to run from the police when he was younger, "back in the day before they would shoot you."

Ha, ha, ha.

SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE, YOU KNOW . . .

I came of age in the 1960s, the son of civil rights activist parents who participated in the big protest marches of the era.  My father, who endured a repressive Roman Catholic childhood, exclaimed after the 1963 March on Washington, "I've never experienced anything like that. It was like being in church." 

He was the campaign manager for the first black school board candidate in our district. (The guy won.)  And our neighborhood playmates were pretty much nonexistent because their parents forbade them to associate with us because we invited blacks to swim in our backyard pool.  Yet even with this background, I would never presume to know what it is like to be a black or other minority and the weight of the baggage of racism they still are forced to carry, let alone tell them what was good for them.

This brings us to the phenomenon of Bill Clinton being considered, in some quarters, the "first black president."

As black novelist Toni Morrison explained in coining that term in 1998:

"After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas. And when virtually all the African-American Clinton appointees began, one by one, to disappear, when the President’s body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and body-searched, who could gainsay these black men who knew whereof they spoke?

"The message was clear: 'No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how much coin you earn for us, we will put you in your place or put you out of the place you have somehow, albeit with our permission, achieved. You will be fired from your job, sent away in disgrace, and -- who knows? -- maybe sentenced and jailed to boot. In short, unless you do as we say (i.e., assimilate at once), your expletives belong to us.'"

But was Bubba soulful?  Oh, never mind.

I believed at the time that Morrison was a little too concerned with power and not enough about the indelibility of race, but in hindsight she was more correct than I gave her credit for.  This is because politics is nothing if not about power, and in the cases of Bush and Romney, rich Republicans who have known nothing but privilege, it means lecturing blacks instead of offering solutions to poverty, poor schools, a skewed criminal justice system, mass incarceration, not enough jobs and decrying voter suppression efforts. 

Do I even have to mention that Republicans have no problem giving "free stuff" to corporations in the form of tens of billions of dollars in tax breaks, loopholes and a look-the-other-way attitude toward regulation, while exporting jobs abroad and parking their profits off shore are no problem.  No, I didn't think so.

'JOHN BROWN MAY BE AT PEACE, BUT NOT US'

Hillary Clinton, of course, took a New York Minute to jump on Jeb Bush for his "free stuff" remark and his not-so-subtle implication that is how she and other Democratic candidates appeal to blacks. 

"I think people are seeing this for what it is: Republicans lecturing people of color instead of offering real solutions to help people get ahead, including facing up to hard truths about race and justice in America," Clinton said. "Republicans have no problem promising tax breaks and sweetheart deals to their corporate friends, but when Democrats fight to make sure all Americans have access to quality, affordable health care, early childhood education and job training, that’s giving away 'free stuff'?! Talk about backwards."

"Stuff" seems to be Bush's go-to word in the absence of being able to be more articulate when the subject is complicated and he'd rather avoid it.  "Look, stuff happens," he declared after the Oregon community college shooting massacre. 

Clinton has campaigned tirelessly, if sometimes stiffly, about race.  So have Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Whatshisname. And it is sadly ironic that the people who would benefit most from Sanders' policy proposals support him the least. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren, the Democrat with the most outspoken views on race -- which is to say the views most in sync with the Black Lives Matter movement  -- is not a candidate.

In Clinton's first major policy speech after announcing her candidacy in April, she issued a plea for Americans to come to terms with "hard truths" about race and justice.  The speech followed by a week the death of  25-year-old Freddie Gray after sustaining severe injuries while in Baltimore police custody, yet another instance of police snuffing out the life of a young man simply because he was black.

Dick Gregory says a lot when he defines racism as the ability to control somebody else's fate and destiny, and while I would stop well short of calling Bush and Romney racists, any honest musing on the subject inevitably comes around to power.  As in I have it and you don't.  This sometimes can be subtle: While most Americans want equality under the law, that does not necessarily mean they want integration.

(Voting in my first election, I wrote in the name of the legendary black comedian and political activist for president in 1968 rather than vote for Hubert Humphrey, let alone Richard Nixon.  My mother never forgave me.)

"I can hate white folks all I want," Gregory says. "I [still] won't have the power to take their job or see to it their kids go to a bad school. . . . When a black person teaches their child: 'Be careful if this white racist cop pulls you over, don't talk too fast, don't move too fast, cause he might kill you.' Any time you tell a child to respect and fear, to behave, for a murderer -- children don't hear what you mean, they hear what you say. So they think there's something wrong with them. Why else would my mother and father tell me to be afraid of a cop, unless I’m doing something wrong?"

The so-called post-racial era that some people naïvely heralded with the election of Barack Obama was a fiction.  Will a Clinton presidency change that?  Don't be silly.  Will Southern states remove the Confederate battle flag from their statehouses and license plates?  Nope.  Will Toni Morrison, Dick Gregory and I live to see the fall of bigotry and white supremacy?  Of course not.

Gregory likes to tell the story of the hanging of white abolitionist John Brown in 1859:

"They tied up the rope, and he said, 'Oh, by the way. I talked to God last night, and God told me to tell you, that you’ve lost the last chance to free the Negro slaves with no blood. And he told me to tell you, when the Negroes gonna be free, it's gonna be the biggest bloodbath in the history of the planet.

"It took me a long time before I realized, it wasn't just the Civil War he meant.  John Brown, may he be at peace. But not us."

Politix Update is an irregular compendium written by veteran journalist Shaun Mullen, for whom the 2016 presidential campaign is his (gasp!) 12th since 1968.  Click here  for an index of previous Politix Updates.

Don Edwards (January 15, 1915 ~ October 1, 2015)

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Turn, Baby, Turn!

Politix Update: Why A Delusional GOP House Thinks It's Reached Political Nirvana

“The reality-based view of the world is obsolete. That’s not the way the world really works anymore. When we act, we create our own reality.” ~ BUSH ADMINISTRATION INSIDER (2004)

The long journey of the elephant was by turns arduous, dangerous and thrilling, but after many advances and many setbacks, it finally has reached what its followers believe to be political nirvana.

The elephant set out on this journey through the darkest depths of the jungle after a movie star turned conservative god had ascended to the throne, and the elephant's might would be undisputed for a decade.  But then the elephant lost its way, a victim of changing political winds and a slick upstart who ascended to the throne and often outplayed the elephant at its own game.  

This eventually passed, and the elephant soon lumbered into an oasis where it was able to forage to its heart's content while waging a bloody war against its foes abroad and a cultural war against its foes at home.  Flush with success, it rewarded the jungle's oligarchs and turned a (very big) deaf ear to the pleas of less fortunate natives.  The elephant even stacked the jungle's highest tribunal to do its bidding.  

But the natives became restless and a young newcomer with a funny name took the throne.  Not to be deterred, the elephant stood in the newcomer's way and threatened to crush him.  Although the newcomer survived, the elephant still got its revenge by packing the jungle assembly with its own followers, but there still was a problem -- an irritating thorn in its foot in the form of one the assembly's biggest leaders, who cried a lot and was insufficiently loyal. 

The leader was thrown over the tallest falls in the jungle, leaving the elephant's followers to revel that they finally had reached political nirvana.  And who would dare dispute such a boast once they saw the welcoming sign over the gilded, vine-entwined gate at journey's end.  It read:

FANTASYLAND

It is obvious that the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party -- which is to say the young, hair-on-fire congressmen that the party welcomed with open arms as the elephant in our fable neared the end of its trek -- has fooled no one but themselves as they frolic in the gardens of Fantasyland and celebrate John Boehner's trip over the falls. 

If the lunatic fringe's long-term goal is to hang on to the House of Representatives, the vagaries of geography and the party's often underhanded redistricting schemes may make that so for the foreseeable future.  But because there is little overlap in what happens in House races and in the House itself with the quadrennial slugfest known as selecting a Republican presidential nominee, the fringers may well keep the House but most definitely won't have the final say in choosing who that nominee is.

This seems surprising and is somewhat counter intuitive considering the tail-wags-dog clout of the fringers.  But consider that while blue state Republicans (which is to say those typically more sane and more moderate) may be a distinct minority in the House, they still have the delegates and resources to decide who does get the nomination. As Nate Cohn notes in The New York Times, in 2012 there were more Mitt Romney voters in California than in Texas, and in Chicago's Cook County than in West Virginia. Overall, the states that voted for President Obama in 2012 hold half of the delegates to the Republican National Convention, which makes it all but impossible for a narcissistic oligarch like Donald Trump or an authoritarian extremist like Ted Cruz to be nominated. 

Then there are the unhappy campers known as Republican evangelicals.

George W. Bush promised them culture war victories in return for their votes, which they delivered en masse in 2000 and 2004, and then in their view reneged on his promises.  Is this a gullible group, or what?  (Perhaps an unquestioning belief in Biblical infallibility will do that to you.)  In fact, it is the view of many evangelicals that the Republican Party has betrayed them, notably the fringers, ever ready to summon cardboard cutouts of God as stage props.  And so you have the amazing sight of not a few evangelicals supporting Trump although he is profoundly hypocritical, foul-mouthed, thrice-married and nonobservant insofar as the God thing. 

Maybe they believe that God, like Trump, wants them to be rich.

    THE PRIMAL SCREAM

But all that is only the beginning of the hash the lunatic fringe -- which ironically calls itself the Freedom Caucus -- has made out of the GOP's national prospects by believing that it has reached its very own nirvana through obstructing instead of leading, scoring purity points with its followers instead of helping govern, and always overplaying its hand. 

Doing crazy stuff like repeatedly trying to repeal Obamacare (some 50-plus separate votes and counting) and attempting to blow up the government in order to deny Planned Parenthood funding not only doesn't translate into taking back the White House, it makes it substantially more difficult for the eventual nominee, who will be a party establishment moderate like Jeb Bush.  Or perhaps Jeb Bush. 

(Note that the continuing resolution that passed the House on Wednesday only funds the government through December 11, meaning that it will be the fringers themselves who will be waging a War on Christmas as federal workers' paychecks are threatened by a shutdown.)

The inability of the conservative movement -- both realists and delusionists -- to reconcile itself to modern political realities is profound. 

Forget about American exceptionalism. The sense of privilege, whininess and alienation among even movement (old school) conservatives is palpable.  Then there is the stone craziness of the fringers who still have a bad case of the ass over the New Deal some 80 years later, believe in pink ponies, threw Boehner over the falls and are now gunning for Mitch McConnell.  (As it turns out, the Senate majority leader, who has been far more "disloyal" to the fringers than the hapless Boehner ever was, is safe.  This is because McConnell and Republican senators in general see the futility of pointless brinksmanship.) 

Meanwhile, Bush and other establishment moderates will have to kowtow to the fringers and their followers through the long primary season -- something we have seen plenty of already, notably in Iowa -- and then in the run-up to the convention.  And while the eventual nominee will tack hard to the political center as did Romney in 2012 and John McCain in 2008 in the hope mainstream voters have short memories, the nominee will never be able to completely scrape the unhinged lunatic crud off his wingtips. 

And so the sorry state of a Republican Party that is obdurately stuck in the past, endlessly lurches from crisis to crisis and keeps trying to eat itself  pretty much guarantees a Democratic victory in 2016 regardless whether the House remains Republican and the Senate, as well. 

Consider this daunting obstacle, only one of several, to taking back the White House: Even if the Republican candidate wins the same 59 percent share of the white vote that Romney won in 2012, he would have to win 30 percent of the nonwhite vote to get a popular vote majority.  Romney won a mere 17 percent of that nonwhite vote, which included 8 percent of the black vote.  Given the GOP's unwillingness to reach out to minorities, something that has been amplified to a Janovian primal scream this year, the 2016 standard bearer will be fortunate to do even that well. 

Although I do no anticipate a GOP loss next year of 1964 proportions, some Republicans fear that will happen.  That was the election when Barry Goldwater, a prototype of today's Freedom Caucus lemmings, faced off against President Johnson.  "My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones," Goldwater infamously argued, and his followers actually believed that he would clean LBJ's clock.  Instead, he was drubbed in a 44-state landslide and the president promptly used his new supermajority to push through those twin fringer evils -- Medicare and Medicaid.

If there is a wildcard in all of this, it's not the fabled elephant, it's the Democrats.

Will Hillary Clinton be so weakened by her self-destructive email problems that the party's once formidable lock on the White House might be broken?  I don't think so, but that is the only plausible scenario for a Jeb Bush emerging triumphant.  Despite all the lunatic crud on his wingtips. 

Politix Update is an irregular compendium written by veteran journalist Shaun Mullen, for whom the 2016 presidential campaign is his (gasp!) 12th since 1968.  Click here  for an index of previous Politix Updates.

IMAGE FROM DONKEYHOTEY/FLICKR.  USED WITH PERMISSION.